If I Could Tell You of My Devotion....

I remember our kitchen table, the one my parents had in our apartment – the top floor of a three family house – on E. 208 St. in the Bronx; I have never seen another table remotely like it, with its folding sides and its enamel top, yellowish and slightly chipped around the edges. which opened to the perfect size to fit into our kitchen. Not only did we eat our meals on it, but it served my brother and me as our ‘office.’ We are obviously talking before anybody had a computer in their home, but it was also before kids had desks of their own. Four nights a week, at least, after dinner, this was where we did our homework. Until we were in or early teens when my parents got their first TV, our main source of entertainment was a Bakelite radio (we went through a number of these because it was sometimes cheaper to replace than repair; any of them cleaned up would be worth a fortune today) which we listened to with one ear while we did all the tedious stuff required of us at P.S./J.H.S. 80: math problems, social studies reports replete with homemade graphics, spelling, etc.
(How Google aids and abets a reverie: Most people who will read this are too young to remember Radio – with a capital R. In those days, there were national networks and regularly scheduled programs on the air – usually half an hour or an hour – just as there are today on TV; except the radio shows were probably more literate. Many of these shows were broadcast for ten, twenty, or even thirty years. Besides the dramas (Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons) and comedy (Fibber McGee and Molly), there were soap operas, assorted variety shows, and musical programs of all kinds. Many people of a certain age remember the one hour show sponsored by the Firestone Rubber Company, whose theme music was written by a member of the Firestone family, Idabelle, with lyrics by Madeleine Marshall. There is at least one thread on the internet devoted to alter kackers like me reminiscing and trying to remember the exact lyrics to the song which goes:
"If I could tell you of my devotion, If I could pledge all my love so true, Then my confession would find expression In all the music my heart sings to you."
and trying to remember whose voice it was we heard singing this week after week.)
These skills of listening with one ear and doing something different with the remainder of my brain – not so easy for someone with A.D.D. – honed by many years of practice, served me well in recent years when I was doing data entry at the Jewish non-profit where I was working. Let’s not describe my work as ‘tedious;’ that has a certain negative connotation. Let’s just call it ‘repetitive,’ requiring one’s proper attention, but with room in one’s mental hard drive for some other activity. To the rescue came Internet radio, now not with studios either in New York or California, but anywhere in the world where one can access the world-wide web. I could listen with my headphones to music from real stations like the BBC, WFUV, WKCR or others that existed only on the Internet. For a change of pace, conservative talk radio or a host of shiurim from a number of providers. But a good deal of the time, especially after we had decided to make aliyah when I retired, was listening to Arutz-7, a station which you can’t find on a radio dial, but you can listen to anywhere in the world. If I had to sum up the station’s programming, I would describe it as “The English language voice of the Settlers,” i.e., those of us who live in Judea and Samaria – because one ‘resides’ in Tel Aviv, but one ‘settles’ in Beit-El, from whence the station broadcasts (from which we can derive that living in Tel Aviv is ‘unsettling’). More generally, it offers a nationalist Torah perspective, promoting aliyah and presenting Judaism as “A Light Unto the Nations.” Not coincidentally, that’s the title of one of one of their programs, featuring two olim, Ari Abromowitz and Jeremy Gimpel, who met while serving in a sniper division of the IDF, and have become best of friends.
The funny thing is that now that we have made The Big Move, I almost never listen to Arutz-7. For one thing, I no longer need to be told why I should make aliyah, or how to do it, or what’s happening here in The Land, because we ourselves are now part of what’s happening here in The Land. Also, I’m not sitting here doing data entry – except to keep track of our monthly expenses on a spreadsheet – forcing myself to seek out venues of entertainment while I tippy-tap the keyboard, which now contain the abc’s and the aleph-bet.
But Internet TV? Especially being in the audience when the show is being taped? That’s more interesting. These same two guys, Ari and Jeremy, now do a show part of the year: From the heart of Jerusalem, Tuesday Night Live! This can be seen on the Israel National News website and is syndicated back in The States on Time-Warner cable. We go to the tapings from time to time, and I remember writing about an earlier broadcast last year. Anyway, a week or so ago, we got a ride into town for their latest episodes. The two part program gave a lot of food for thought, which I will share with you – adding, as usual, my thoughtful condiments to spice things up.
The B’nei Menashe. Anybody out there know who or what that is? If not: we’re talking about a relatively small group, a thousand plus souls already in Israel and seven thousand plus in the northeast of India, who claim to be descendents of Menashe, one of the ten tribes that disappeared without a trace when the Northern Kingdom, Israel, was conquered by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Michael Freund, a political commentator and head of an organization called Shavei Israel, has been working to identify groups like this one who claim Jewish descent and assist them in returning to The Land. Mr. Freund was the headliner in the first segment, and he appeared with a representative of this group, all of whom, if I have my information correct, have gone through a halachic conversion process and have been recognized as Jewish by one of the Sephardic chief rabbis. After the show, when we were walking back to their car with a different friend who was driving us home, we got into a discussion about the B’nei Menashe. How would we know if these people are really descendents of one of the Lost Tribes? No way to prove it either way. Do they remotely ‘look Jewish?’ One thing you figure out pretty quick, living here and looking at the assortment of faces you see any day on an Egged bus, there is no such thing as looking Jewish. Of course, ‘the elephant in the room’ is how come the Jewish people, starting out with a similar genetic identity, have wound up looking like the world’s population – even though we still retain a distinct DNA profile? And then relate that to the question: Who is a Jew?
But what is at least as intriguing: What is this all about, a small group of seven thousand people from a relatively remote part of the world wanting to live here as Jews? And how is it that literally all over the world, people are popping out of the woodwork and reclaiming their Jewish identity: children hidden from the Nazis in the 1940’s, families that functioned as conversos for five hundred years, or groups whose connection with the rest of us was severed over two thousand years ago? How you answer that depends upon whether you are a cynic or an idealist, or even how you view our history. There are any number of references in our prophetic writings that, just as the Jewish people would be dispersed among the Nations, so too, they – and that includes the Lost Tribes – will be gathered up and return to The Land. So, if you begin from a basic premise that the formation of The State of Israel is part of the process of Jewish redemption unfolding before our eyes, then it is perfectly reasonable to view the tens of thousands of descendents of Jews all over the world rediscovering their origins as part of that process. And if you don’t accept this redemptive premise, then you don’t. And then you come up with some other explanation. That is why, on the one hand, you can have an audience of people cheering on Freund in his efforts; and you can also have a bevy of government officials who could make things happen, doing everything possible to place obstacles in the way of seven thousand people from every getting on the plane. I keep thinking of how little it would take to bring them here, and how much effort is being spent on wooing five million Jews, most of whom emphatically do not want to come here. Michael Freund was especially diplomatic in describing the situation, expressing optimism that the current government would be more forthcoming than the previous one. My personal opinion is that the Netanyahu crowd, no matter how hard it tries, cannot match the level of cynicism of Ehud Olmert and friends; so there is hope.
The second half of the show – after a short interlude by some earnest youngsters playing essentially Jewish bluegrass music and then a break to let the camera men reload – was even more gut-wrenching, highlighting the official Israeli response to the recent disaster in Haiti (who will live, and who will die; who will be buried alive in the rubble of a building…). Featured were two American born members of the rescue team, a physician and a member of Zaka, the group that goes to extraordinary lengths in tragic situations to find severed body parts so that they can be properly buried as required by Jewish law. While the main Israeli team went to Haiti on a moment’s notice, the Zaka team was almost there to begin with, having just finished a rescue mission in Mexico. Ari and Jeremy were able to show a few clips from American TV of the devastation and the efforts at saving lives, in which the newscasters expressed the general sense of amazement at the quality, speed, and efficiency of the IDF rescue mission (which incredible effort apparently escaped the attention of the current U.S. commander in-chief, causing HUGE consternation among his Jewish supporters) which was able within hours of arriving to set up a field hospital capable of treating five hundred victims a day – at a time when every other country which even bothered to do anything – including the U.S. – had its emergency personnel wandering around helplessly without supplies or direction. It was the Zaka unit which helped pull all these men, women, and children trapped in the rubble.
Given the program’s orientation, it was no surprise that Jeremy and Ari honed in on the Torah values which were being demonstrated in the Israeli response, an example of truly being ‘A Light Unto the Nations.’ The highest form of benevolent activity is when you do something without the expectation, even the possibility, that your kindness will be reciprocated (like washing a dead body before it is buried). No country, even Haiti, will stop vilifying us because of the incredible kindness we performed in rescuing and healing their citizens. You do what you can anyway. But an entirely different train of thought from that of our hosts was occupying my attention, scattered though it may be at times.
You see, I was listening to the American TV commentators expressing their consternation at the initial feeble, even pathetic, efforts of the American relief mission, and I was trying to figure out why that was so and what implications it would be reasonable to draw from it. The first thing I thought of was “They can’t blame this one on ‘W’ like they did Katrina; although if he were still in office, the Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world would be holding inflammatory news conferences in front of the White House. So now that the U.S. has this new president who everyone (well, some people) thought was so wonderful, how come this magnificent country is performing like a third-world power when it comes to emergency disaster relief – especially since the real third-world country in need is a short hop by plane from the Gold Coast of Florida? And when a tiny country half way around the world can get there better and faster? (To be fair, the American government is providing an enormous amount of financial assistance to Haiti, bu that’s not I’m discussing here.)
Good questions. Of course, Israel has unfortunately had a great deal of experience with emergency relief: wars, terrorist attacks, and the like. Plus we are a nation that thrives on improvisation. As I was thinking this through, I remembered a conversation with my friend Jeff over lunch several weeks ago. He was relating his efforts to find a few brass screws (I don’t remember anymore why he needed them, but he did). He was getting a lot of “we don’t have what you’re asking for, but we do have something else which will work as well.” “But that’s not what I want; I want brass screws!” Several days after our conversation, it dawned on me: this salesman was 99.99% certain to have served in the IDF, and there was almost certainly a situation he was involved in when something, perhaps a transport vehicle, wasn’t working; and without the proper part somebody there had to find something, cannibalize something, create something to make the blasted thing would work. It wouldn’t matter if that something was made of brass or papier maché. That in a nutshell is how this country gets by day to day, and that explains a good part of the culture here.
In the States, one is much more likely to be able to get exactly what is asked for; more likely the question would be: do you want the name brand part or the generic? Do you want it shipped or will you take it with you? For The Land of the Free has developed the most sophisticated infrastructure found anywhere in the world: communication systems, highways, medical centers, everything which countries like Haiti don’t have, and why when calamity strikes, so many people die. But America is not so good at improvising solutions in unexpected emergencies. If the Obama administration didn’t send a field hospital it was because it didn’t have one to send. Whether it was an earthquake in Haiti, or something happening out of the blue – man-made or otherwise – in The States, like Katrina, it simply isn’t prepared. That’s kind of scary.
All kinds of stuff arrives in my e-mail inbox, more than I can handle or even evaluate. I did take note of something sent to me recently by several people which quoted some Israeli expert on terrorism. His prediction was that something would be happening in the U.S. in the next year or two. Let’s hope he is wrong; and if he’s not wrong, let’s hope that whatever is supposed to happen is thwarted in media res by some alert person – as happened in the recent incident on the plane. But consider how little it would take for anybody to wreak havoc in any one of so many ways in any one of so many places. One of my standard comments is that we here in The Land have security, and you back in The States have security. Here when you enter a mall, someone checks what you’re carrying on the way in to make certain you’re not going to blow up the building. There, they check you on the way out to make sure you didn’t steal a sweater. It can certainly be aggravating, constantly opening your backpack or purse, but you tell me who’s safer where?
Anyway, there it was, the film clips and the comments from the medical and rescue staff involved, and there was a standing ovation and not a dry eye in the auditorium. Personally, I’m proud to be part of a nation that, with all its faults and shortcomings, can practice such baseless love for other people; a country to which seven thousand people, considered the descendents of Jews, now living in the middle of nowhere, are longing to return to. Maybe the common thread to both of these stories is a kind of devotion: to a people, to a land, to a set of values, to the One G-d. Maybe that’s what it’s all about.

The Golan Tour Part 2 The Road to Gamla

Shall I begin this episode with a real nes (miracle)? In the last article, I mentioned that there were exactly ten men, including the driver, in our tour group. Ezra (Rosenfeld, our fearless tour leader) scheduled shacharit (the morning prayers) for the somewhat daunting time, 6:30 in the AM. – so we could have breakfast at 7 and be on the bus by 8. By 6:33, all ten of us were present. Any of you guys who have struggled to rustle up a minyan at the break of dawn will appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment. That was the beginning of a fine day, the second half of our two day tiyul up to the Golan.
Breakfast. Definitely not the highlight of our trip, but remember we were at a guest house/youth hostel, and we were not paying top dollar for our accommodations. The previous night’s dinner had been acceptable, but maybe it was because I was ready to chew the china by the time we sat down to eat. We had gone into the dining hall, chosen our food (buffet style) and sat down to eat just before an enormous throng of Israeli school kids arrived. One of my on-going areas of interest is how children survive to adulthood – considering the rather bizarre eating patterns of the average child or teenager – especially those in The Land. From where I was seated, I couldn’t help notice the collection of girls passing by us, with heaping plates of macaroni, rice, and potatoes, with several slices of bread on the side. Now I’m world renowned for being a carbo-freak, but even I have my limits! I also have my standards. If for breakfast you’re going to serve me scrambled eggs made from what must have been a powder in its most recent incarnation, I will notice and not be overly excited.
Nonetheless, we did find enough sustenance to get us going, and we were soon back on the bus, ready to roll. Ezra had the hard part: deciding what to do and where to go. Not only was he functioning as tour leader, he also had to be our on-the-spot weatherman. The first day out, the mist was everywhere, but now, sometime, somewhere, it was going to rain; and we were certainly going to be in the middle of it. The trick was to be outdoors when it wasn’t raining, and indoors when it was. Figuring that one out is as easy as pulling the right card…….from an unmarked deck. I was set either way. I had astutely brought with me the wonderful leather and rubber rain boots that Tina had gotten for me when she was working at the J. Crew store at the Garden State Mall. I needn’t tell you that they haven’t gotten really heavy use since we arrived in The Land, but once in a while…………
As it wasn’t raining at 8AM, we headed to our first destination, the National Park at Banias. By rights, the place ought to be called something like ‘Panias,’ because it was named for the Greek god Pan, but Arabs don’t do well with the ‘p’ sound, so it winds up as ‘Banias.’ It goes without saying that there used to be a temple, an enormous one built by Agrippa II, courtyards, the whole ball of wax, near a spot where once upon a time water gushed from a rock. The temple is in ruins, the courtyards vanished, Pan and all his buddies only a distant memories. Agrippas, I or II? A street in Jerusalem, the back end of the shuk. But the water is still there, albeit in somewhat diminished quantities. It must start from somewhere in the Hermon range, and we know for a fact that it winds up first in the Dan River and then in the Upper Jordan River (there are really two Jordan Rivers: one going into the Kinneret, and the other going out of the Kinneret, heading down to the Dead Sea). There is certainly water in the spot where we began, flowing through channels which might be quite old, but if you REALLY want to see water, you have to go to the Banias waterfall. If Danny had been there leading a hiking group, we would have taken the ninety minute hike. But that’s more time than you want to spend on a tiyul, so we got back on the bus and drove part of the way. We still had a little bit of a walk down a path which began to parallel a stream of gushing water until we reached the falls. I looked over at my charming wife, and I knew what she was thinking: The Finger Lakes. Watkins Glenn. The gorges in Ithaca itself. The upper part of Robert Tremain State Park. Water moving rapidly over rocks, perhaps the most soothing sound one can imagine. You never want to leave. Just stay there and listen to the gurgling water rolling over the rocks, in a hurry to get somewhere – but you aren’t.
I’ve discussed this with friends: why aren’t we all living up in The Golan, or the Galil, where the climate is more like what we were accustomed to in the northeastern states? Perfect for people who don’t mind the rain. I’m in awe of the rugged landscape and the starkness of the midbar that surrounds us, but my soul does not require my presence among the dunes as it does by a waterfall. Everyone I’ve spoken with has the same answer. We want to be near Jerusalem, and we need to be near Civilization; i.e., jobs, art and entertainment, other people. Most of us are not going to commute two hours to work and two hours back five days a week. That sort of puts a damper on any vista, no matter how dramatic or ennobling.
Things will change. We’re too small a country to afford having our versions of Montana or Nevada, large perecentages of our real estate sparsely populated, inhabited mainly by Druse in the north and Beduins in the south. Cities like Tiberias and Beersheva will have to expand; the infrastructure: roads, bridges, railroads will have to be created and improved. That way, when sooner or later, someone from your family arrives on the Nefesh B’Nefesh flight, they will have a choice of affordable and comfortable places to live. But that’s not on the agenda for today. Now, we are enjoying the splendid wilderness in relative isolation.
If I remember correctly, our next stop was at El Rom, the world’s highest kibbutz, physically, (they don’t claim spiritually). What is the main economic activity at this kibbutz? They make all the Hebrew subtitles for movies. Beats picking olives or cleaning up after chickens – which activities Barbara and Natania engaged in on their stints at Yavneh and Be’erot Yitzchak. And what did we do at El Rom? What else. We watched a movie, one which the kibbutz had produced. All about Avigdor Kahalani and the Valley of Tears. Now, if you know what I’m talking about, raise your hand. If you don’t, be patient, and I will tell you.
The film is about an incident which took place in 1973, at a time when Israel was collectively in a state of euphoria, totally unwarranted, but real, nonetheless. This giddiness began after the Six Day War in 1967, when we whipped the tar out of a lot of Arabs. Most people here believed our army was invincible, could take on anybody, and we were absolutely The Greatest. Many people here, from what I understand, forgot Who really is The Greatest. That would have been like somebody in involved in the Exodus from Egypt getting up and proclaiming: “We sure showed Pharaoh who’s boss!”
One of the practical implications of this absurd overconfidence was that the I.D.F. didn’t see the need to keep its troops properly supplied. “Who’s going to attack us?” The Egyptians for one; the Syrians for another. How about 500 Syrian tanks, or rather 500 brand new Russian-made tanks, equipped with the latest night-vision equipment, with Syrian troops in them, rolling over the Golan, not surprisingly in the dead of night. And who was there to stop them from rumbling down to Tiberias, and from there down to Jerusalem (Ma’ale Adumim would have been in the way; but of course there was no Ma’ale Adumim in 1973)? Forty-four Israeli tanks, that’s what. Forty-four tanks without night vision, because the Israeli tanks that had this equipment were somewhere else. Forty-four tanks with precious little ammunition. Why would you need night vision and ammunition on the Syrian border??? Forty-four tanks with Avigdor Kahalani in charge and as brave a group of chayalim as you could ever find. Under normal circumstances, soldiers who have inferior equipment and who are out-numbered more than ten to one will leave the field of combat as quickly and quietly as they can. So what did our guys do? They attacked – even though they couldn’t see whom they were attacking, and they didn’t have much ammunition to do any damage if they managed to locate their targets. Because these tanks did have functioning video cameras and walkie-talkies, the footage that was shot and recorded could be incorporated into the film which we were shown. At one point, someone in one of the tanks realized that somebody else was riding around with his rear lights on; not a smart move if you are trying to avoid detection. The word was passed around from tank to tank: Hey, dummy, turn off your lights!!! But no one had his lights on. It must be a Syrian tank! Are you sure? It must be! Then blow it up! I hope we’re right! It was in fact a Syrian tank which in the absolute chaos of the battle had been mistakenly attached to an Israeli column and did not survive to see the light of dawn. And when that light did come at last, there were no more Syrians left to do combat. Tanks, yes. Several hundred of these remained, deserted, their engines still running – but not as fast as the Syrian men who simply fled on foot in the dead of night. For years thereafter, these tanks, with their insignias altered, served the I.D.F. with great distinction. And, we were told, this particular battle is studied to great effect all over the world in schools of military strategy.
Having heard that comment, I began to wonder: what could they possibly be studying? The total incompetence and overconfidence of the Israeli high command and government? There are too many other great examples of official stupidity in country after country for this episode to merit attention. The bravery of the Israeli soldier? Many examples of that; plus you can’t teach courage. The cowardice of the Syrian soldier? Many other examples of that; plus you don’t want to teach pusillanimity. Now for the real kicker. The ‘hand’ of G-d, the divine protection over The Land and its less-than-worthy occupants? Can you somehow imagine a chapter in a textbook about that? Somehow, not. Much later, when we were back on the bus, one of the guys in the group was telling a younger, more gullible fellow ‘the real story,’ which included later testimony from some of the Syrian tank brigade about how they saw a huge hand in the sky signaling them not to go on. Things like that. I am personally as skeptical about this claim as I am about the story that the matriarch Rachel appeared to our soldiers in the recent Gaza campaign and motioned to them to go to the right rather than the left, preventing them from being blown-up. Perhaps we can agree that Rachel’s spirit was and is with our fighting forces, and leave it at that. As for the Syrians, let’s put it this way: if you were going to give an explanation for why you ignominiously fled the field of battle, would you say it was because you were a lily-livered coward or because you saw a heavenly vision? Still, I am perfectly comfortable with the notion that G-d has been doing the opposite of what He did to Pharaoh, ‘softening’ the hearts of our enemies on the battlefield, causing them to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory on so many occasions.
The profoundly gripping film ended, and the various groups assembled trickled out of the theater. (The film is shown several times a day to many groups at a time.) We had arranged to use the kibbutz’s cafeteria, so we could eat our boxed lunches where it was warm and dry. Back on the bus, heading to the real Valley of Tears, the scene of the action we had just seen on celluloid. Perhaps there is something special about battlefields. Perhaps certain plots of land have been set aside since the dawn of time for this sort of heroics: Gettysburg, Agincourt, Dunkirk, Thermopylae. But when you are standing there on this field, looking out as far as the eye can see, if it weren’t for the occasional tank still standing there, the plaques with information, would you intuitively realize that it was on this spot that The Nation was saved by forty-four tanks and some very, very brave men? As we stood there, all was tranquil, lush, a place for sober reflection. But not too long, for we had to get back on the bus.
We were certainly in need of a change of pace. What could be better than a shop where they make chocolate? And so our next stop was the very small showroom, factory, and gift shop of DeKatrina, where the chocolate is as good as it gets. There is the obligatory short film which explains something about how chocolate is made and introduces the audience to Katrina, whose grandfather made chocolate in Europe, whose father made chocolate in South America, and who herself makes chocolate in The Land. And then there she is, in person, in the room where the chocolate is being made, she and one assistant together doing all the work by hand – the exact opposite of the Golan Wineries, a huge operation with not a soul in sight. I should also note that, unlike the winery, where they actually make wine from grapes, DeKatrina does not start with the cocoa beans and go from there. Wisely, they start with the finest, Callebaut chocolate from Argentina, liquefy it, add all kinds of good stuff, and pour it into molds, at the end, putting little squiggles on top of each piece when it’s cooled down. If you’re not one of those heathens who doesn’t like chocolate, or is allergic – a fate almost worse than death – and you’ve led an exemplary life, you have had a piece or two of chocolate of this quality, and you know what I’m talking about. We’re not talking about Hershey Kisses here! From watching to tasting. Ezra had already apologized profusely for taking us here after our meat lunch, most of the chocolates being dairy. We were able to sample the parve stuff, and, as a reward for our discipline, take some milk chocolate with us to have three or six hours later. From there out into the gift shop, a fraction of the size of the one in Hershey, PA, but in a different universe quality-wise. If we had already purchased wine that we could easily get in our neck-of-the-woods, we certainly were going to buy some exotic chocolate – and some for each of our daughters, and something for Channah who was looking after Mimi. On our way out, I noticed in a display case some interesting chocolate designs, including a chess set (regular chocolate vs. white chocolate), very impractical because you might eat one of the pieces en route to victory and lose the game. Because I have a strange sense of association, I thought back to a time many years ago, when Barbara was encouraging Natania to learn her addition tables by counting with M and M’s. How much is two and two? Three, because I ate one.
Sometime during the day, and I can’t remember when, our tiyul took us all the way up north to a Druse village almost at the base of Har Hermon, the top of which we couldn’t see because of the fog. Ezra explained to us who exactly are the Druse: a breakaway from mainstream Islam, relatively secular, and by tradition, as a small minority, traditionally showing allegiance to their host country. In pre-1967 Israel, these folk are reasonably loyal, serving in the army and such. However, the Druse in the Golan are in a quandary and are basically sitting on the proverbial fence. Why? Because some of the geniuses in our government keep hinting at the possibility of returning the Golan to Syria as part of some hypothetical peace treaty. Why should this minority start waving the blue and white flag today when tomorrow a red, white, and black flag with two green stars might be de riguer? For the record, the border with Syria here on the Golan has been absolutely quiet since 1973, the Syrians preferring to use their surrogates in Lebanon to do their mischief.
By now, you have probably gotten our pattern: on the bus, off the bus, on the bus, off the bus. That’s what happens on these tiyulim, trying to cram in as much as possible into the time available. That’s why everyone remembers the cartoon, or the caption from the cartoon: “If it’s Tuesday, we must be in Belgium.” At one point in the afternoon, we got off the bus, and I really wasn’t sure where I was or what the point of being there was. We were walking on a path parallel to the edge of a precipice. On the other side was another mountain with a valley in between. As we walked, we could see in between the two mountains a smaller ridge of a rather odd shape, and a number of us began to wonder what we were seeing. We finally arrived at an overlook from which point we could the valley, all the mountains around us, and most importantly, this strangely shaped formation rising from the valley. Gamla, the name derived from the Hebrew and Arabic names for a camel, because this place does look more or less like the hump of a camel – at least, I can’t think of a better way to describe it.
We have to go back to a time in 1967 (no film this time) after the Six Day War when Jews were now free, for the first time in a long while, to wander around the Golan and explore the wonders of nature and the historical sites therein. Shmarya Gutmann, described elsewhere as a “self-taught archaeologist,” (which I assume means he had no official credentials) must have been standing somewhere near where we were. He looked out and had a ‘eureka moment.’ (For real; the word means ‘I have found’ in Ancient Greek.) He knew his Josephus, and what he saw, and what we were looking at absolutely, positively, no questions asked, had to be the place that was described by in detail in The Jewish Wars. Of course, in this world where everybody is an expert, and the other guy, what does he know?, it took Gutmann four years to raise the bucks to start excavation and prove that he was right. You realize, of course, that we didn’t get the chance actually to see what has been uncovered. Even with the kind of high powered binoculars that bird fanciers use to check out the eagle nests on the nearby cliffs, we would not have seen much – that’s how far away we were. We could see groups of hikers walking across the valley (again, where’s Danny when we need him!), but my sense is that the trip down the slope and up the ridge would have taken at least three quarters of an hour each way, and there is no connecting cable car as there is at Masada.
Gamla is often characterized as the “Masada of the North,” but this epithet is misleading. In the first century, C.E., there was a community of about 9,000 souls residing on this ridge, doing quite well – selling olive oil to be used in The Temple and engaging in other agricultural endeavors – from the looks of some of the houses that have since been uncovered. That is, they were doing quite well until the Romans came a-conquering in 67. Tzipori to the west had already surrendered, lock, stock, and barrel, and there were all these enemy soldiers heading their way. The perennial question: What to do? Has anybody out there read any of Josephus’ writings? It’s like watching a great movie, knowing that the ending is going to be a disaster for the good guys. Having switched sides in the middle of the war, the historian had no use for the zealots who continued to fight; and he portrayed them in the worst possible light. We know that they were doomed to defeat; and we know what happened thereafter. So it’s hard to cheer them on, under the circumstances – even though some of us would have sided with them at the time. The difference between the “Masada of the North” and the real one to the south is that, here in the Golan, they were defending their homes and had a legitimate reason to fight. For if Gamla fell, then the Romans – just like the Syrians exactly 1900 year later – would have had an unimpeded march to Jerusalem. The residents of Gamla believed that a people called the Parthians would be coming from the east to battle the Romans, and that if they could only hold out for a little while………. No such luck. The Romans breached the retaining walls, and two women out of the 9000 inhabitants lived to tell the tale.
On the other hand, by the time the zealots were holed up at Masada, the game was up; the war was lost. The sacred vessels from the Temple were being carted off to Rome. Jewish survival would be secured by the compromisers, those who would create a Jewish life divorced from nationhood. The whole Jewish ethos would be turned upside down. The Maccabis would fall into disfavor. Rabbi Akiva would be remembered as someone who learned the alef bet when he was forty, not as the sage who encouraged the Bar Cochba rebellion a century later. There has been a mood shift again now that we have our own country once more, and several generations of Israelis have had to fight to maintain it. Whereas we could not defeat the Romans, we were able to defeat the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and the Syrians. At any rate, Masada has been burned into the collective consciousness of the Jewish Nation; Gamla not so much.
The final two stops were, in a sense, anti-climactic. We headed over to Katzrin to a village which was thriving during the second century of the Common Era when the Mishna was being compiled. Here among the excavation they have restored one residence; at least you can get a sense of the dimensions of these building, how cramped the living quarters were back then. There were a few young adults paid to walk around in period costumes, but that’s about it. All the explaining was left to Ezra’s capable hands – as was the case in our final stop, the regional museum elsewhere in Katzrin. There was a guide assigned from the museum, but his scant knowledge of what was on display there was equaled by the quality of his English. After a while he sort of faded away – mercifully – again leaving Ezra in charge. He was somewhat annoyed; he was charged admission, and he had to act as his own guide to the museum, having to explain the various artifacts on display, all of which had been discovered locally. The last event on our itinerary was to view yet another short film, this one giving an audio-visual recapitulation of the history of Gamla. The film ended with the strong baritone voice of the narrator: “And Gamla was never fall again.” The lights went back on in the small auditorium. We all got up, filed out, and returned one more time to our bus, which would now be returning to Jerusalem. Our tiyul was essentially over.
I sat on the bus as it retraced its path back to the Kinneret and from there down route 90, the rain falling the entire way – in and of itself, very unusual. I kept thinking of that prophetic statement, uttered with absolute certainty, “And Gamla will never fall again.” Suddenly, it occurred to me, ‘he said it will never fall; he didn’t say anything about being given away.’ And that’s the scary thing: it could happen. There are people here and certainly elsewhere who want Israel to abandon the entire Golan. As I am writing this, the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is here in The Land in conjunction with a loan exhibit of Da Vinci drawings on display at the Knesset (My question would be: how many M.K.’s have a clue who Leonardo Da Vinci was?) He (Berlusconi, not Da Vinci) has already offered his opinion that we would be wise to return the Golan to the Syrians. In rebuttal, I would offer, free of charge, one of my special rules of thumb. For any nation to offer another advice about its national wellbeing, the first country should have demonstrated over a period of time – say since 1900 – a track record of responsible government of its own. That would certainly reduce the amount of absurd discourse and hand-wringing that accompanies most of the discussion about what Israel ought and ought not do. “Sorry, Silvio; talk to the hand.
“You see, it’s not just the military significance of these heights, something that only a fool or a madman would ignore. From the Hermon range, from Banias flows the Upper River Jordan into the Kinneret. That’s thirty percent of our national water supply. You want us to give up control of our water? That’s nuts, Silvio; there’s no other word for it. We also grow a lot of grapes, make a lot of high quality wine up there, something you should know a little about. Are you offering to returning Tuscany to the Etruscans? We’ve invested a great deal in the Golan, and I’m not talking about money. We couldn’t stop your ancestors from pillaging our Land nineteen hundred years ago and carrying off our ancestors and our wealth (please stand under the arc of Titus when you return home); should we let you sweet-talk us into surrendering Gamla again? Should we hand over the fields which our fighting forces defended to the enemies who attacked us and ran away? (Imagine the trouble we would be in if our army were to perform as poorly as the Italians have!!!!) Should we hand over the kibbutzim, the agriculture, the national parks, everything which makes this region so special? I don’t think so Silvio; I don’t think so.”
We made our final stop at a little place on route 90 with decent food and the most depressing ambience you can imagine. We finally arrived in Jerusalem, and the bus left us off near where we started. We said goodbye to Ezra, the driver, the other seven men who made our minyan, their wives, the young ladies and Sharona from Midreshet Devora. Remembering to take our goodies, the wine and the chocolate we had purchased with us, we walked, still in the rain, to our bus stop and caught the 174 back to Ma’ale Adumim – the only place within miles where not a drop of rain had fallen.

On the Golan Pt. 1 The Mist over the Mountains

One thing I’ve noticed during the years of my being intermittently conscious is that differences between spouses can either make or break a marriage. Handled poorly, a man and a wife can wind up preventing each other from doing what each one truly wants – winding up with some lukewarm, gruel-thin kind of compromise. On the other hand, if each partner has the other’s best interests at heart, then one can encourage and push the other to greater accomplishments. In our case, Barbara is the more adventurous one. I am usually more than happy spending time at home (my philosophy is that the greater the amount of time you spend there, the quicker you amortize the cost of your rent or mortgage). If my wife had her way, she would be trekking all over the world. In that regard, she has the perfect Israeli mindset. Here, kids finish up their military or national service and start wandering off to Nepal with a sleeping bag and a backpack. Again, I figure that I have just spent X for a new mattress; why wouldn’t I want to use it?
There is no question that if Barbara hadn’t prodded me, she and I would not have gone on our wonderful eight day cruise to Greece. We’ve been on a number of walking trips and short tiyulim since then, but all of a sudden, Barbara was asking me about going on a two day trip up to the Golan. I couldn’t use my standard argument, that it would be too expensive, as it was quite reasonable. So I left it up to her to find somebody to look after Mimi. In our previous apartment, our downstairs neighbor was more than willing and able to look after our geriatric feline, even for the week we were away in June. But we are just far enough away that it would be a burden on her to drop by twice a day to feed and clean up after our cat. It turned out not to be a problem at all – this time. We found somebody nearby, plus we ultimately wound up with Gilad, our handyman being around, taking advantage of our absence to get some work done, and then Natania being home for part of the second day. So we had ample troops to make certain that Mimi’s water was fresh and her heating pad was working.
We had been on several of Ezra Rosenfeld’s Tanachtiyulim before, and they had ranged from good to very good. But now Ezra was proposing to up the ante. Hitherto, he had offered standard excursions: you get on the bus early in the morning in front of the OU Center on Keren HaYesod, and you return sometime in the late afternoon or early evening, and the trip covers whatever can be fitted into that amount of time. We all know that Israel is a small country, but, blessedly, it’s not that small. There are lots of things to see that you can’t get to and get back in one day, and that limitation was frustrating Ezra no end. We had heard him musing on some of the earlier trips about finding a way to put together a two day trip; and now he had made good on his idea: an overnight trip up to the Golan; and because we would be staying at the youth hostel/guest house at Tel Hai, the cost of the trip could be kept within reason. We knew that these would not be five star accommodations, but then, I’m not sure that there are any five star or even four star hotels up there; most of the luxury accommodations are clustered together in population centers like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. There doesn’t seem to be any great interest in putting up a Mount Hermon Hilton.
Some of you know to get to the Golan. . If you’re starting in Jerusalem, you have to go past the Hebrew University campus on Har Hatzofim (Mount Scopus), through the tunnel, keep going past the bypass to Maale Adumim, onto the winding road that leads to route 90, where you can either head south to Ein Gedi and the Dead Sea, and all the way down to Eilat, or you can go in the other direction, past Jericho, Beit Shean, Tiberias, and all points north. Because the bus was coming in our general direction anyway, and because Ezra is a nice guy, he agreed to pick us – and another couple – up right by the bus stop before Hebrew U., saving us close to forty five minutes of traveling time, which is HUGE when you’re leaving at the crack of dawn. The first thing I noticed when we got on the bus was a change in the demographics. Generally speaking, these tours are not for the very young. You don’t see couples with four kids on a bus heading, let’s say, to Herodian. Either they go by car, or they don’t go at all. So ‘young’ in this context usually starts at around forty – with an occasional son or daughter dragged along – and rises rapidly. But there were seven teenage girls on the bus, doing what teenage girls do best at 7AM – sleep. We found out in the course of the trip that Sharona – who was also with us, along with a counselor – together with her rabbi husband, had started a new program called Midreshet Devora, a one year program designed for post-high school girls who want to spend a year in Israel but do not (emphasis on the ‘not’) want to spend all day, day after day, in a class room setting (and the rest of their time hanging out with their friends and laptops in The Coffee Bean on Rehov Jaffa). So the girls go on all of Ezra’s tiyulim and learn Tanach the best way, Ezra’s way, by walking The Land and seeing where the Patriarchs and Prophets hung out, and how it all happened – which helps you make sense out of some very old narratives.
Ezra – unlike some other tour directors – has learned that groups of adults travel on two things: their stomachs and their bladders, so he doesn’t schedule lunch at 3 in the afternoon, and he plans for reasonably frequent pit stops. After an hour or so of traveling, we stopped for snacks and a bathroom. However…….unlike most such detours, this one came with a bonus: a small archaeological park. This one had a scale model of the entire Jordan valley, and next to it, the floor of an ancient synagogue, one of the many, many that are being located and uncovered throughout The Land. I’m going to hold off discussing the remains of this synagogue until we get to the next one, later on in the day. Instead, we went back on the bus and traveled the route we just looked at on the scale model.
Part of route 90 is named for ‘Gandhi,’ Rehavam Zeevi, the Israeli political leader who was assassinated in October 2001. Ironically, this road was built in order to bypass Jericho, once a popular destination for Israelis and now off-limits to us. There are any number of monuments to Israeli soldiers and civilians who lost their lives in military actions and a series of terrorist attacks from the Jordanian side – all of which occurred prior to ‘Black September’ in 1970 when King Hussein drove the PLO out of Jordan. He had apparently been told by the Israeli government something to the effect of “If it’s not going to be quiet on our side, then it won’t be quiet on your side either.” And while there is still a no-man’s land demarcated with barbed–wire on our side and the border is still patrolled, it has been quiet for many years. The other sided of the river (because the River Jordan is narrow and in a valley, one can almost never actually see it from the road) has come alive in the years since then. The entire length of the valley is populated and farmed. The Israeli farmers were willing to share their knowledge of drip-irrigation with their counterparts in the Hashemite Kingdom, and as a result, they are growing things cheaper there than here! Our side is also alive. The effect is gradual. First, you see individual irrigated plots where things are growing and then hot houses. Soon, more and more of the land is green, and then there are areas where all you see is green. Remember that the Casdens live on the edge of the midbar, where green is a luxury. Usually this word is translated as ‘desert,’ but as has been pointed out to me on countless occasions, it really means a ‘wilderness.’ What’s the difference? Rainfall. Unlike in a true desert, there has to be sufficient precipitation to support some vegetation. Here, during the late winter and early spring, there is a thin, but distinct growth of grass on the hills, and throughout the year, enough hardy vegetation to keep the sheep and goats – and there are still herds of such animals in these parts – alive and healthy.
But to keep my soul healthy, I need to see, from time to time, the quantity of vegetation that I’m accustomed to. I need to roll my eyeballs in green, real green, layers and layers of green, the kind I used to run my lawnmower through – not that I miss my lawnmower; no way!
We kept going north, into a short stretch of road which is serviced by the Jordanian cell phone company, where you’re always warned to turn off your phone, because if you make or receive a call here, you’ll be charged a proverbial arm and a leg. Through the checkpoint. Now we were in the Beit Shean valley, coming into the city of that name. This used to be one of those depressing development towns which Ben-Gurion set up to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from North Africa. One can understand his thinking. It was certainly necessary to populate the country, spread people around. Everyone can’t live within ten miles of Tel Aviv. It was just that once all these Moroccans were dumped there, no one thought to provide them with much in the way of resources. Giving people who were not farmers a cow or two doesn’t cut it. For a very long time, Beit Shean was part of the Israeli backwaters, the kind of place where a Sephardic version of a Polish joke would take place. Over the years, a weeding out process has taken place throughout the area. People left, leaving their land to others. The strong, the people suited to an agricultural life remained, and some of them began to prosper. When you pass through the town now, you see rings of newer, bigger homes and some of the same stores you see in the more prosperous part of the country. There are also some antiquities of great interest here; but that was not part of our itinerary.
We passed by Tiberias and headed north and to the east, beginning a slow climb upwards. It was at this critical topographic juncture that I chose to take a nap. When I woke up we had climbed over a thousand feet from sea level and everything looked different. We could have been in the Catskill Mountains, except the terrain was more rugged. But there were trees; not just some trees, but lots of trees. The hills were green; the valleys were green. And the mist was everywhere, something that could not have been predicted. Our first stop was an overlook from which one can normally see the entire valley below. We could see part of the way: the kibbutzim below us; but beyond that there is the Kinneret, Tiberias, and beyond. There is of course something aesthetically pleasing about this view; but well beyond the natural aspect, there is the realization that would occur to most sentient creatures that from the heights on which we were standing, how easy it would be to rain spitballs, rotten eggs, water-filled balloons, or more sophisticated weaponry down on a hapless population below. As we know, this (the use of more sophisticated weaponry, that is) is exactly what happened prior to 1967, when Israel expelled the Syrians from these positions. But for us standing there on that day, the kibbutzim below us could just as well have been the end of the world; the Kinneret and Tiberias, which I know for a fact are there, had simply disappeared from sigh, swallowed up in the haze! Ezra was, of course disappointed. The whole point of getting on a bus and traveling five hours was to SEE something; otherwise, he could have described it to us back in Jerusalem at a more civilized time of day. I didn’t mind this inconvenience; I was watching the rays of the sun filtering through the clouds, the mist over the mountains. There were several signs pointing the way to various nature paths. One of them used the expression “loop trail,” i.e., the path would wind around and you would wind up back where you started. Shades of the walks we used to take back in New Jersey with the master, Danny. If only he realized how much of The Land is hikers’ heaven. Back in The States, you can walk parts of the country, like the Appalachian Trail, which goes from Georgia to Maine. Here, the Shvil Yisrael goes from Eilat, up and across to the Mediterranean, and then up to the Lebanese border and the Upper Jordan River. Not as long as the A.T., but just as scenic.
As we couldn’t see much, we got back on the bus and headed off to Umm El Kanatir, which means in Arabic, mother of the arches, because there were a lot of arches here in this village which flourished in the fifth and sixth century C.E., and which was destroyed in an earthquake in the eighth century. Here on the side of a mountain you can see the remains of building foundations, all of which were made from basalt, the local building material. Communities like these thrived as long as, and only as long as, there was law and order and commerce was possible. Sounds like a lot of places all over the world.
We walked around a lot, but what I remember most was the excavation of the synagogue and the enormous machinery which was being used for that purpose. This was one of three such ancient structures we would visit on our tour, and one of the many, many, which are being uncovered throughout The Land, now that we are in control and we can. There is a great deal of useful information which can be derived from examining these houses of worship. One simple example, it is pretty easy to determine how successful a town or village was by noting the size of the beit knesset and how well it was built. As far as I am concerned, the single most important thing to understand about these excavations is that in sum it is causing us to reconsider some long-held beliefs about our religious practices. First was the idea that synagogues came to exist only after the Second Temple was destroyed. All you have to do is take the new bypass road south from Jerusalem, about ten minutes, to the excavations at Herodian, which Herod built more or less while he was expanding the Temple, to put that canard to rest. Then it would be reasonable to ask: if there were batei knesset which co-existed with the Beit Hamikdash, what exactly went on in them?
But go forward a few centuries. We are now in the period when the discussions in the academies were being collected, edited, and put into what we know today as the Mishna (and the other stuff, not included but preserved, called the Breitot); and then in the later period when the discussions in the academies were being compiled into the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds. One of the sections deals with Avoda Zara, idol worshiping. Now more Jewish men than one can even imagine have gone over the part which deals with the question that if somebody found a finger or a toe which had once been part of a statue, could that person use it even as a paper weight, or must it be destroyed, and if so, how? Very nice. Then somebody today starts uncovering the remains of a beit knesset from this period, and, lo and behold, there is a mosaic tile floor, not only with a depiction of the zodiac – common throughout Jewish history – but smack dab in the middle for anybody to see is Helios, the Sun God, ‘large as life.’ What is that all supposed to mean? You tell me; I have no idea. It’s comforting to know that if, perchance, I find a body part from an ancient statue that might have been worshipped in its day, I can know what to do with it. But one can spend a lifetime studying these texts and never even think about some other questions which some of us would like to know more about. When some really primitive person took the trouble to fashion a fertility idol with its, to us, grotesque features, what could he possibly have been thinking? What was this piece of wood or stone supposed to do, and how? Was he thinking the same thoughts as the more sophisticated Greeks and Romans were when they made magnificent marble statues? There is a notion that idol worship has been eliminated from our world. But what about people today who practice voodoo or other cultic practices? (How about a web site for trading these little figures: www.voodoo4u.com.) I am interested, but what are we supposed to learn?
Then there is another issue, dicey to some. Everyone who has considered the matter is aware that there was an Ezrat Nashim, a women’s section, in all the permutations of The Temple, just as there was a section for gentiles, for regular vanilla Jews, and for the Cohanim. And the existence of this section is the justification for the modern-day mehitzah with all it entails. Certainly that’s what I blurted out when someone mentioned to me that in the ancient synagogues uncovered so far in The Land, there does not appear to be a scintilla of evidence that there was a separate section for women. Considering the matter with a clear mind, the following possibilities occur to me: one) There were separate sections for men and women, just that the demarcations have not survived. Hard to envision how that would work, with stone benches and all. Two) In those days, women never showed their faces in a beit knesset. I’m told that is not the case, but I don’t know what the evidence is for that. Three) Men and women sat separately without any physical separation. Plausible. Four) There was ‘mixed seating.’ I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on that one. Please understand that I am not discussing what should or should not be done today. As I keep repeating until I’m blue in the face, “I don’t poskin sheilas,” i.e., answer questions or venture opinions relating to contemporary Jewish Law. (Well, I try to limit my opinions.) But if anybody out there is intending to opine that there was an ezrat nashim because there had to be an ezrat nashim, do both of us a favor and save your breath.
Now for some fun. After checking out this ancient agricultural village, our next stop was to examine something more contemporary, as practiced at the Golan Heights Winery. Oh joy! We used to pass by literally dozens of small wineries in our excursions up to the Finger Lakes, but there was never any reason for us to stop as, of course, none of them were kosher. What’s the point of looking if you can’t taste? Here in The Land, there are winery tours from time to time, but we haven’t been on any of these. Now was our big moment, propitiously at a big winery, where grapes from all over the region become bottles of Yarden, Gamla, and Golan wines. (They are also part owners of the Galil Mountain Winery.)
The winery tour doesn’t give you the touchy, feely part: standing amongst the vines, watching the grapes being picked and then smooshed. By the time you get to see what’s going on, the juice of the grapes is aging gracefully (just like me!), resting in enormous oak casks – each one costs $700, and there are lots and lots of casks in a very large room which you observe from a catwalk above. Down below, there was one solitary individual, dwarfed by the rows of casks, doing maintenance work. From there, our winery tour guide took us to another catwalk overlooking the bottling room. Here nobody touches and nobody feels anything because we are watching an automated conveyer belt, and there is nobody there. The guide explains the process: over on the right, all the way in the back, the empty bottles are rinsed out; then each bottle is filled with wine; step three, a cork or a synthetic stopper is inserted into each bottle; then each bottle is sealed; then labeled; twelve bottles are put into a case; finally a large machine lifts each case and sends it on its way. The bottles have marched all around the room, sometimes in single file, sometimes waiting patiently in a crowd at the equivalent of a red light for their turn to proceed. The process is mesmerizing; I at least could have stayed there for hours, watching the endless motion of the conveyer belt. Barbara was brought back to the days of her childhood when her grade school class visited a milk bottling plant somewhere near Binghamton, N.Y. But here they were going to give us wine to taste; wouldn’t miss that for the world. We were herded into a room with a conference table large enough to seat fifty or so people. Being an amiable host, the winery had placed bowls of pretzels strategically around the table for us to munch on while a nice young lady told us a little about each wine we are going to taste, plus the usual bit about sniffing the wine first and letting it roll around your tongue before you swallow it. In days of yore, the winery used to let you take the wine glass you used home with you; nowadays, your souvenir is a waiter’s corkscrew – fine for a waiter – but no way would I trust any bottle of mine to the vagaries of these antiquated devices.
Last but not least, we were shepherded into the gift shop. Ezra reminded us of something which should have been self-evident: one could find better prices for most of these wines by careful shopping on Agrippas Street, near the Mahane Yehuda shuk. Nonetheless, we were there, in a room with bottles of wine for sale. We all bought something, even Ezra.
It was now after 4PM, time for mincha. Nobody had bothered to do a head count; we realized that we were exactly ten men, including our driver, and that we all had to be in one place at one time for a minyan. One of our ten had wandered off. The rest of us walked back from the bus to the entrance and included the Jewish security guard who was standing by the gate in our minyan.
One final stop on our way to Tel Hai: the Helicopter Memorial on the grounds of Kibbutz Dafna. As you ride up route 90, on the left is the original helicopter memorial, commemorating fifty-seven soldiers who died when the transport helicopter they were on crashed. The I.D.F. thought it had the solution. From then on, no more than thirty seven soldiers at a time could be transported on one of these helicopters. And so on February 4, 1997, two of these choppers took off in, I believe inclement weather, and managed to crash into each other in mid air. Needless to say, in a matter of seconds, the wreckage of two helicopters and the remains of seventy-three of Israel’s bravest were soon strewn over a field a few kilometers from where we were. The Israeli government usually acts promptly to honor its fallen heroes, but, for some reason, it took twelve years to create the official memorial that we were visiting, although the families of deceased had held their own tribute on every anniversary of the disaster. And there is, in a small wooded area, nearby, another memorial. The official one is, to be redundant, very official. It has a circular pool, water flowing through a long channel, 73 large upright stones, and the names of each of the fallen with their rank in the I.D.F. The unofficial one, which I believe was put together by the families, has 73 small dog tag size replicas placed on the branches of a small tree and a few items recovered from the bodies: ID papers and similar items. Each one is treated with equal dignity, regardless of their rank. The official memorial is more magisterial, but I will leave it to you to decide – if you ever chance to be nearby on Ramat Golan – which is more heartfelt.
Nightfall was fast approaching, and, to be less than delicate, the winds had shifted, reminding us that we were on the property of Kibbutz Dafna and its refet (cow shed). Back on the bus, on our way to the youth/hostel/guest house at Tel Hai, where we had a buffet dinner and retired for the evening. Shacharit (morning prayers) would be at 6:30 (groan!), breakfast at 7, and we would be on our way by 8 in the morning. Well, at least, we wouldn’t need to take a bus to get to our bus, which would take us on another full day of touring – all of which you will learn about – just be patient.

The Cuboid and the Prime Minister

Here’s a good question to start off with: what is the correct term for a three dimensional rectangle, say something shaped like a shoe box? I didn’t know either, and I had to think of some way to describe something to my buddy, Ron as he, his wife Esther, and I were walking back to their house for Shabbat lunch. So I said that the object I had in mind was aquarium shaped. He thought that was kind of funny, but he admitted he couldn’t think of a better way to describe what I had in mind, even though he had one of these objects himself. And that is a glass container, which does in fact look like a five or ten gallon fish tank (for those of you who housed a collection of guppies sometime in your life) which you turn upside down and place within it your Hanukkah menorah, which you can now place outside your house and really publicize the miracle which is central to this holiday. (By the way, the correct answer is a ‘cuboid.’)
The point of my story was that exactly one week before (which was the first day of the holiday here (as it was wherever you might be in Exile) , I was doing exactly the same thing, walking this way with them – even though it is slightly out of my way; but good company is worth something – and after we parted company, I saw something lying on the sidewalk. On closer inspection, I realized that it was what remained of one of these aquariums. I can only surmise that some family had placed in on their balcony, and the heavy wind we had last Friday night blew it off. “Great,” I thought. “Someone is trying to do a mitzvah and all they wind up with is shards of glass strewn all over the sidewalk.”
Now a more pessimistic sort might have used that as a metaphor for Hanukkah this year. Things did not seem to be working out as well as I would have like them to. We had moved into our new apartment before Rosh Hashana (and I promise I will be writing more about that soon), and we ordered a few pieces of furniture and began having some work done, nothing extravagant, obvious things that most of you would have done: a fresh coat of paint, replacing sub-standard electrical wiring, making sure the roofs were water-proof, making sure everything worked the way it was supposed to, hanging pictures on the wall, being able to put out our books and our clothing. Repair and replace, as opposed to renovate. But the list kept getting longer and longer as new ‘surprises’ were uncovered, and it seemed at times that the workmen we were using (all highly recommended Jewish labor) were living in our apartment. I know that some of you know what that’s like; you can’t get anything else done when guys are banging, sawing, hammering, and always needing you to tell them what you want done. At some point, I began to adopt a strategy which I use with great frequency, very helpful in maintaining one’s equilibrium. Let’s say you’re waiting for a bus. You’re waiting a long, long time for a bus. And it’s cold. And it’s raining. And you’re getting soaking wet. And it seems that you have been waiting forever for this bus. Try the following mental exercise: “This too will pass. There will be a time when I am no longer waiting in the rain for this stupid bus. I will be in a warm, dry place. I will be………..(and you can fill in the blanks). You can annoy me by withholding your bus, but you can’t beat me.” As November rolled around, I began to say to myself,, “It seems chaotic and never-ending now, but by the time Hanukkah is here, everything will be finished, we will be enjoying our new apartment, and we should begin considering having some kind of housewarming party, a Hanukkat Habayit over Hanukkah. I could almost taste it: a week without having anybody come to fix something, or worse, waiting for someone to come and fix something.
Needless to say, Hanukkah did arrive, and…… our closet and bookcases were almost ready, and several projects were almost finished or almost started, or almost ready to be started, or…. (Can you pick out the key word here?) One area of concern is the roof in our machsan (storage area). What came with the apartment was an old, temporary roof made of corrugated plastic, demonstrably ready to leak, hence making the area unusable for storage; and forcing us to use what will be a guest room for storage. Gilad, our painter/handyman, started putting up a very elaborate tile roof on top of what we had, but he had to take it down and start again because it was too visible from the street and would bend our local building inspectors out of shape. And even if they didn’t notice it, it was the first day of THE BIG FREEZE – a much more global upset than our petty personal problems.
Some of you may be aware that our government has declared a freeze throughout Judea and Shomron/Judea and Samaria/the West Bank. So you might think that means that no one can go up to an unoccupied hilltop and put up a caravan. No, it doesn’t mean only that. OK. It must mean that you can’t begin new construction anywhere in an existing community. No, it doesn’t just mean that either. OK. Then it must mean that you can’t put on an addition to something that’s already built. No, but you’re getting warmer. What it does mean is that you can’t do anything in an existing community to an existing structure that would need a building permit. And if you’re still with me and have the stomach to ask: what would you need a building permit to do? The two favorite absurd but real examples are to put up a new pergola on your patio or balcony (very popular in this sunny climate) or to add a large air-conditioning unit (very popular in this sunny climate). Some of this is not completely clear. For example, there was a latticed wooden roof on one of our balconies which the previous owner took down because it was falling apart. The metal supporting structure is still there; If we want to replace the pergola that was there before – so we can sit out on our balcony in the summer – will we be allowed to do so? And did we actually need a permit to put up a new roof? I hope not because we did it anyway.
A sense of uncertainly and profound skepticism surrounds this dubious activity: stopping any and all construction in a significant part of our country for ten months. The economic implications alone are staggering; I don’t know if anyone has become to assess the kazillions of shekels this will cost the economy. The very left-wing Supreme Court has implied that those affected may be entitled to remuneration from a government which apparently hadn’t given the slightest thought to the matter. Reimbursement would only apply to builders who can’t construct and people paying mortgages for virtual apartments. The irony is that the people who stand the most to lose – because they won’t able to sue – are the thousands of Arab laborers who will have lost their jobs in construction and related fields.
You may be asking the same question which a lot of us are asking: what is the point to this exercise in futility? What is it supposed to accomplish? Whom is it supposed to satisfy or impress? How will it help anything or anybody? And the biggie: what is the prime minister up to, and can anybody believe anything he says – like THE BIG FREEZE will only last for ten months? Netanyahu, to his credit, put his foot down and refused to stop construction anywhere in Jerusalem, making it clear to all and sundry that our eternal capital will not be the subject of any future negotiations. Fine. But if you are willing to freeze construction in Maale Adumim – which by general consent has always been considered untouchable – what message is being sent? Does that mean that our community of almost 40,000 people will be the subject of future territorial negotiations? And if we are placed on the bargaining table, what about Efrat with its 15,000 residents? And then what about the smaller communities of 1,000 or fewer people?
If you have seen photographs or videos of confrontations, of militant residents, even school children, manning the barricades against the soldiers and the police who are being sent in to prevent construction, the action is going on in these small communities. It is obvious to these communities that today’s police action is an exercise in preparation for possible expulsion in the future, and they are not going to leave without a fight. Here in Maale Adumim, people are more sanguine, and things are quiet. There are no inspectors, no police, no barricades, no kids staging sit-downs in the streets. Our mayor, Benny Kashriel, called a meeting a week or so ago to give a full report on what was happening. The turnout was, shall we say, disappointing. Probably half of the plenty-of-seats-available audience came from the relatively small Anglo community here, including one guy who was ready to sign up people for the Likud Party – still nurturing the belief that if there were only enough right-wing party members, we could wrest control of Likud from Bibi and company. Benny had a much bigger audience two days later at a mass rally near the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem, which drew a crowd of between ten and thirty thousand people (depending on which paper you read), mostly young people who paid little attention to the speakers, a parade of well-meaning politicians vowing to continue building throughout Yehuda and Shomron. If only words were bricks and resolutions, mortar.. Our Benny said something to the effect of: “Bibi, for eighteen years you told me to build, and I did so. Now what are we supposed to do?” Boo-hoo. There were two or three Knesset members from Likud who spoke at the rally. Most of the other so-called right-wing members that Likud voters had pinned their hopes on have chosen to indicate their disapproval of THE FREEZE, but have heeded Netanyahu’s pleas for unity by doing nothing about it. In other words, keeping their party together is more important than keeping the country together.
Now there are some obvious parallels between today’s events in The Land and the so long ago struggles of the Maccabis against the Hellenists and the Syrian-Greeks, but why don’t I let you make the connections, dot the i’s and cross the t’s – if you choose to do so. Ever since I heard the bat mitzvah girl in New Jersey get up and claim that the modern-day Maccabis were the civil libertarians in America who were campaigning against the use of Hanukkah displays on public property, ever since then, I have understood the chameleon nature of this holiday and its heroes: that every Jewish group and cause today claims the Maccabis as its own. I haven’t heard of anyone yet who is saying that it’s the Israeli police who are the modern-day equivalent, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
So you can understand why I was less than my usual exuberant self as the holiday rolled around. And neither of our girls would be home to cheer me up for the start of the holiday. Barbara was suffering from muscle spasms in her back, so the latke production was at an all-time low. Last year, I came to the painful but inescapable conclusion that for the most part the local sufganiyot are not worth the caloric investment (the average Israeli gains about five pounds during these eight days).
Barbara’s back problems forced us to cancel the walking trips we had planned. But there was one excursion that I had intended to go on by myself: a field trip to photograph the Hanukkah lights in The Old City. The fellow running the event, Doug Guthrie, holds photographic workshops for the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel; these are really for beginners only, and therefore I had never met up with him. This trip sounded like fun, whether or not I ‘learned’ anything or not. It would at least get me out of the house with my camera.
We were supposed to meet by the Zion Gate at 4:30, and that was just about when I was getting off the bus by the Jaffa Gate, which is a brisk fifteen minute walk away. I figured that I was going to be too late to meet up with the group, but that there would be no harm in trying. If nothing else, I could walk around on my own. Thank G-d for Israeli time! The group was still there when I showed up, huffing and puffing from my dash through The Old City. I handed over my thirty five shekels, and we were off. The small group of attendees was comprised mostly of Doug’s students, still learning how to use their point-and-shoot digital cameras, although there were a few of us with some experience. It became obvious to me very quickly that what Doug was looking for was very different from what I was, and that I needed to do things my way. Still, he had done this tour before, and knew where to go, which I would not have on my own.
We began to wander through the streets and alleys of the Jewish Quarter, seeking out hanukkiot and the fine Jews lighting them, up streets where I’ve been before and I could find again, and down alleyways which I would need a map to locate – and maybe a trail of breadcrumbs to get out again. We stopped first along Chabad Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the Quarter, in front of a gate which opened into a courtyard shared by a number of apartments. It was now the earliest possible minute that one could light candles – six plus the shamash – and the intrepid lighters were not going to delay doing their mitzvah for even a nano-second. One after another, men and children came out. They were not lighting inside their home or even in front of it; their hanukkiot were carefully placed in front of the gate, for maximum exposure, and each one was placed inside a glass enclosure (remember the cuboid?!) to make certain that the lights wouldn’t blow out. Most of us use little candles which perch precariously in their place in our menorah. Here the preference is for wicks sitting in oil; some put the oil in yahrtzeit-size glasses. Many of us have only one menorah per family. Here they have one per person, and some of these families have lots of persons! Looking closely at these artifacts, many with inscriptions on them, you realize how old they are, how many generations have used them, in how many countries, in what troubling times when miracles were sorely in need, before this evening on Chabad Street in the Jewish Quarter in our ancient capital. I was beginning to get the sense that something special was going on. We wandered on until we came to the large plaza where the venerable Hurva synagogue is being rebuilt from the rubble which the Jordanians turned it into. A crowd was gathering, and of course we stopped to find out what was going on. On the second floor of a building, a family was getting ready to light their candles, and below there were at least hundred people waiting and watching expectantly. When the husband realized what was going on, he motioned to the crowd; several people took him up on his offer and went up to his apartment. We could see the man, his wife, their children, their friends, and now the newcomers standing by the window of this modest apartment in a ‘million dollar’ neighborhood. Finally, the man began to light, and the crowd spontaneously burst out singing: “she assah nissim l’avoteinu…” Talk about publicizing the miracle! For years I have heard learned rabbis talking about this, in Hebrew, pirsumei mitzvah, and we have always dutifully placed our menorah in a window – even though in many of the places we lived nobody could possibly see our candles. I have been present about public ceremonies: Chabad was always good for that sort of thing: a prominent rabbi and a dignitary would be lifted in a cherry picker to light a fifteen or twenty foot high oil burning flame. But for the first time, standing in the plaza next to where the Hurva is being lovingly reconstructed, I witnessed and I understood on a visceral level what publicizing our miracles was all about. I witnessed and I understood how something done by an ordinary Jew in the privacy of his home can be raised to something transcendental. Of course, it helps to have an audience, especially an enthusiastic one, and it’s even better when the audience becomes part of the act. For me, it was as if the light of these candles had banished all the darkness. Not just the physical darkness which was beginning to surround us at 5:15 in the evening. This moment of true joy is the way things are supposed to be and can be – if only people wouldn’t work so hard at mucking things up.
The Jewish Quarter was filling with people. Everywhere you turned there were tour guides leading Jews and gentiles, explaining the significance of Hanukkah. Even in the out-of-the-way alleys into which we headed next, a hanukkiah in its glass cage would be carefully placed on a chair in front of a doorway, and fifty people would pass by, and then another fifty people. Great for maximizing the effect; not so great if you are trying to take a picture! The little group of photographers kept going about its business, although at some point I had to leave, in order to get back to Maale Adumim by 7:30 for Nachum’s Wednesday night Gemarah shiur. I managed to find my way out of the Jewish Quarter onto the road which leads back to the Jaffa Gate. There is a restaurant one passes in the Armenian Quarter, and as I walked by I heard a familiar melody being played softly. A Christmas Carol! How many of these would I have heard back in the wilds of New Jersey eight days before December 25?
The following night, I was sitting, hunched over my laptop, too tired to do anything useful, but not quite ready to go to bed. Looking over my e-mail, I noticed a Zogby poll to which I had not responded. Several months ago, we had gotten a call on our New Jersey line from the Zogby organization. They were sending me stuff to an out-of-date e-mail address and were trying to locate me to re-include me in their surveys. I explained to the nice man on the phone that we are living in Israel and they probably wouldn’t want to include me. But no, they were still very much interested in my opinions, and so I gave them my Yahoo address. So now, the least I should is respond to the questionnaire they sent me. That seemed to be as much as I was capable at that moment anyway. I opened the attachment. First they asked where I live, and I checked off the box that said ‘out of the country.’ Not surprisingly, they were interested in my opinion of the incumbent American president and topics like global warming. Finally there was a long section on Holiday shopping. Was I going to spend more or less this year than last year? How to answer that? Let’s see. This year we spent eight shekels for a box of candles. Last year, I think we found a guy selling them on the street next to Mahane Yehuda for six shekels. So that would be more this year. On the other hand, we – or I should say I – spent much more last year trying to find a decent sufganiah. So that would be less this year. I wound up by ducking the question and indicating ‘the same,’ but I’m not sure my spending patterns are what Zogby had in mind. I went up to bed thinking about all the ‘holiday’ music that wouldn’t be invading my space this year and all the shopping days until you-know-when I would again be missing, tucked away as we are in The Land. I could tell you about how I fell asleep counting reindeer, but I would be making that up.
If you are concerned that we didn’t have enough to eat over Hanukkah, rest assured that we did. I finally broke down and got one filled donut for me and one glazed one for Barbara, which she ate while resting on our sofa – with Mimi, the geriatric cat, lying on her stomach. Our feline normally does not go after human food, but she took a lively interest in what Barbara was eating and received her fair share, proving that even cats are willing to participate in pirsumei mitzvah. Barbara’s back improved enough to allow her to make one enormous batch of latkes which she, I, and Natania devoured in one weight-ignoring session. Saturday night, when Shabbat and Hanukkah were over, our friend Devorah came over to make her fried delicacy, funnel cakes. I usually go shopping once a week, and try to make certain that we don’t run out of things in between. By my reckoning, we had about six ounces of canola oil, enough to last until my next shopping trip, but I hadn’t factored in filling a frying pan for Devorah. There was nothing to do but head off to MisterZol to purchase a three liter jug. When I got back, I announced that I knew for certain that Hanukkah was over. Devorah was brash (or foolish) enough to ask me how I knew. “If it were still Hanukkah, the oil we had would have been enough for eight days of funnel cakes.”

The answer is.............

It is always a good idea to start a story at the beginning – or at least to indicate when you somehow stumble over it – although sometimes it’s hard to figure out where the yarn actually started. Saves a lot of wear and tear on the grey cells of your audience if you at least try to keep them in the loop.
I began thinking about making this resolution about two months ago. What happened was this: a woman put a post on one of the aliyah-oriented e-mail lists I belong to with the following concern. She and her husband were planning on making aliyah, but “somebody” told them that a lot of kids in the dati leumi (National religious) schools here use drugs and she was concerned. Personally, I have very little patience with people whose lives are ruled by what “somebody” tells them – as if “somebody” ever knows anything or anybody. My first thought was to respond by saying that this is not a new situation, citing an obscure midrash (story) to the effect that when the twelve spies who were sent by Moshe to scout out The Land, and ten of them came back with a negative report, part of it was the claim that all of the teenagers hereabouts were smoking marihuana. That part was edited out of the Torah, but the story remains. However, I decided not to get involved in the discussion. After all, besides my extrordinary wit and the high quality of my prose, what did I have to contribute? My kids didn’t go to school here; so I have no first hand information to impart. My reticence left the field open to several women who sent in long, earnest contributions on the do’s and don’t’s of child-raising here. One of these ladies stated unequivocally that ex-pat American parents should not send their children back to The States for summer vacation. Don’t ask me how that relates to the original question about alleged drug use here in The Land, but she did write it.
It is very tempting with these e-mail groups to give advice – especially when the senders are asking for it. “What should I do? What should I bring? Where this; when that? But maybe, just maybe, telling people you’ve never met how they should live their lives is not such a good idea. Now let’s make some distinctions. In my lexicon, there is a difference between a suggestion (someone you might want to speak to on the subject is……), somewhat stronger, a recommendation ( I highly recommend X, a leading authority on the subject), information (The Ministry of Health compiles statistics on drug use amongst teenagers), and that dreaded bugaboo, advice (whatever you do, don’t………..). There is all the difference in the world between being helpful and being bossy. So I have decided that as much as possible I’m going to shut down my advice-dispensing machine, once and for all.
Having said that, I think what I’m going to do when people who are preparing to make aliyah ask, as they often do, what should they bring with them?, I am going to make the following SUGGESTION. “Here’s something I didn’t do, and therefore I am constantly forced to improvise on the topic. I wish I had a list of everything, everything, that went wrong back in The States because it is so easy to lose perspective when you’re having a difficulty here and you forget you had exactly the same problem back where you came from – whether it was the time it took you half an hour to find a disinterested sales person to assist you; or the poor quality of electrical repair in the house you just bought; or when you spent forty five minutes on line at the post office to get a package which they claimed they tried to deliver, but you had been home the entire day and the postman never came; or when some moron-who-should-be-banned-from-driving-for-life cut you off and you almost came to blows. The biggest SNAFU we have had since we arrived in The Land was getting EZ-Pass in New Jersey to remove what they charged us after we returned their transponder and were thousands of miles from their nearest bridge, tunnel, or highway. It took Barbara five months of calling, going back and forth between them and our credit card company before the matter was finally resolved. When you keep in mind that stupidity, over-zealous bureaucracy, and inertia are widespread throughout the planet it makes it somewhat easier to deal with the occasional (?) problem one faces here.
This need to create a sense of calm and equilibrium was whirling through my mind the day, several weeks ago when Barbara and I met Tina at the belly-of-the-beast, the office of The Rabbinate in Tel Aviv. Tina, as I believe I have mentioned, is planning to get married here in The Land next May, and the first official step was to get The Rabbinate to acknowledge that she is Jewish. Difficult enough for anybody, but especially for anyone who was born elsewhere, and even more especially for someone like her who was born in Odessa, part of the former Soviet Union. (The percentage of forged documents of all kinds in Russian is apparently significantly higher than any others). As I spent almost thirty years working for a similar kind of operation, the New York City government, I figured out P.D.Q. what the Rabbinate’s method of operation is: whatever documents, whatever forms, whatever papers you produce are the wrong documents, the wrong forms, the wrong papers; and, what’s more, whoever signed any of them is the wrong person. Even if it’s a rabbi, it’s the wrong rabbi, because whoever it was isn’t on their twenty year old list, which includes some who are no longer alive. Easy, once you understand the rules. As an aside, let me say this: there are many Jews in The Land who find their way back to Torah Judaism because they come to conclude that our several thousand year old religion is more sensible than the secular world they see around them (the latest example I have come across Doron Sheffer, an Israeli who played college basketball for the University of Connecticut and was an all-star in the Israeli league for many years, who now wears a skullcap as big as a basketball), and because there are many sincere, dedicated rabbis infused with the light of Torah. But none of this has anything to do with The Rabbinate here, who seem to do nothing but fight amongst themselves and turn people off.
The first time Tina showed up at their headquarters with all her documents, they told her to come back with pictures of her family. Because she lives about five minutes away, she zipped home and brought back the scads of pictures she happened to have. At this point, you may be wondering: how does having pictures of your parents, grandparents, extended family prove that you are Jewish? Don’t non-Jews also have pictures of their families? I was wondering the same thing too; I don’t have an answer for you. Then you might be thinking: supposing somebody didn’t have scads of pictures to show the Rabbinate? Would that mean that you’re not Jewish? What about the hundreds of young singles who have made aliyah from America with fewer belongings than my grandparents brought with them to America and left the photo albums behind in New Jersey? What about those people – and I include myself in this category – who would be unable to produce a copy of their parents’ ketuba – either because their parents were not married under religious auspices or whose parents did not consider this document to be important enough to save? You want to hear something really absurd: I can walk into any beit knesset in Israel (although there are some I would not choose to enter) and get up to recite the priestly blessing, and no one will question whether I am or am not a Cohen. But I probably would have a difficult time convincing The Rabbinate that I am even Jewish. I honestly have no idea who married my parents (and It’s a little too late to ask), and the truth is that while the rabbi who married us happened to know Barbara, he had no idea who I was. Plus the chances that he is on The Rabbinate’s approved list are about equal to my successfully swimming The English Channel. We do have a photo album from that event, and most of the men are wearing yarmulkes; whether that would count as evidence or not, I don’t know. There are no pictures of our – my brother’s and my – bar mitzvah (just as well: immediately after the Shabbat morning service, the invited guests walked around the corner to our apartment where the ‘reception’ took place). Somewhere in the boxes we have not unpacked there is a printed invitation to the bar mitzvah of Frank and Fred Casden on a particular date in late February in 1954 at the Young Israel of Moshulu Parkway in The Bronx. Would that count as evidence? When Natania visited Barbara’s mother in Florida earlier this year, I had her bring back a copy of her ketuba. Barbara’s mother and father were married – purely by coincidence – by a prominent Orthodox rabbi (in his office) on L’ag B’Omer when her father had a day off from the military. It is quite possible that the rabbi who married them during W.W. II is still on the official list of The Rabbinate. That might help Natania if she needs to deal with these folks down the line.
Even though I might have trouble proving that I am Jewish, I would qualify, along with Barbara, as a witness that Tina is Jewish – as we are not related by blood to our daughter. And this is the reason why were on the express bus from Maale Adumim to Tel Aviv which leaves our corner around 6:15 in the AM, arriving at the Arlazaroff station at 8 in the AM, giving us time to down a cup of coffee and some kind of pastry en route to the HQ of The Rabbinate, which we located by the following the guy n the frock coat the last block or so.
The letter Tina had received advised her to show up with her documentation and her witnesses at 8:45 and go to room X; no appointment was necessary. Of course, as the clock neared 9 in the AM, lots of other people began filling the chairs outside room X. And they all had appointments! At about five minutes before the hour, the clerk came out and posted the day’s schedule. Tina, to her credit, was in this guy’s face, trying to make certain that she would get in to see the panel of rabbis. But there was another couple, also in the clerk’s face. The two of them, we discovered, had lived in Miami for fourteen years, returning recently to Israel, and naturally spoke good English. Their problem? The list began at 9, and their appointment was for 8:50! Lucky for all of us, the man knew somebody downstairs at the reception desk, so he managed to get him and his wife taken care of, and somebody sent a message up to make sure Tina got seen. I have to say, I began to feel sorry for the clerk, who was the gatekeeper. Every time he came out of the office, everyone who was waiting converged on him, trying to get in to see the rabbis. This prompted me to coin one of my justly renowned aphorisms: Israel is the only country in the world where everybody is “next.”
As we were sitting there, I began to wonder: Why were all these people there, waiting to see a panel of rabbis? Certainly it was not to prove they were Jewish in order to get married. And then I took a look at the list posted on the wall. It looked like the kind of sheet we would find at our health clinic when we had an appointment: the list would have our ID number, our first name, and the time of our appointment (and at the Maccabi clinic, the time listed is pretty much when you get called). But the list at The Rabbinate gave your last name, and why you were there. A quick peek would tell you that the people ahead of you were getting divorced, the people after you had some issue with an inheritance, and so on. Who needs privacy anyway?!!
Tina was nervous, Barbara, whose opinion of the Orthodox establishment in Israel on a good day is lower than a grasshopper’s kneecap, was stewing; but I was maintaining my sense of equilibrium. We were, after all, on the wrong side of the desk at a welfare center in New York, one I must have worked in so many years before. And I kept thinking about my dealings with NYCERS (which, as you all know, stands for the New York City Employees Retirement System; and even if you don’t, I do, because they provide me with a hefty check every month). When we moved to our new apartment several months ago (something to be chronicled shortly), we had to change our address with a host of banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, you name it. Each one had a different procedure for notifying them of our move. Some required a phone call, some an e-mail, some a signed letter faxed to them. But the most problematic procedure came from NYCERS. In response to an e-mail, they sent me a form to fill out and have notarized. I looked at the form and did what any red-blooded ex-pat would do: I put it down and ignored it for several weeks, gathering my strength for the task ahead. For the record, my pension, as well as my social security, is deposited monthly in Citibank in New York. So NYCERS only needs my address to send me a statement for tax purposes. OK. I was finally ready to make the phone call to their customer service people. Instead of the usual “All our representatives are busy serving other customers” message I was expecting, I got an intricate explanation of the voice recognition system they were trying to establish, which meant I had to recite my ID number three times, getting into an argument with the automated voice over what I had said. Then I had to pick one from a series of questions, to which only I would know the correct answer and further establish my identity. The list was rattled off so fast that I couldn’t make sense of them. They may have included: What is the name of your uncle’s favorite dog?, and In what year did the Peloponnesian War begin? I thought I heard something about my mother’s birthday, but before I could remember that the correct answer is February 7 (a bit of information I haven’t needed to use for eight year), before I could say something, anything, I was connected to a live operator. What I was hoping to accomplish was to get them to agree to a waiver of the notarization. As I explained to the nice young man, notaries here in The Land are not everybody and his brother, and the fee is not the chump change it is back in Brooklyn where NYCERS is located. Here notaries are lawyers, and the fee is about seventy five dollars for the use of their stamp pads – which is why I hoped not to have to pay it.
The nice young man cut me off. “If you live out of the country, you have to go to the U.S. consulate where you live and have them stamp your form. We are not able to recognize foreign notaries.” My response, “Gee, it’s a good thing I called. If I had followed your instructions, I would have wasted my time and would also be out seventy five bucks. I know that talking to you about this won’t change anything, but maybe NYCERS could send the correct information for those of us who live out of the U.S.” To which he replied, “But most of our customers live in the U.S.” To which I replied, “But you sent me the form in Israel. You could have a separate instruction sheet which you send only to people out of the country.” Our conversation ended there. I didn’t see the point of vocalizing my thought, “You’re trying to create a sophisticated telephone voice recognition system, but you can’t even handle a lousy piece of paper.”
And so, Barbara dutifully went on-line to the website of the U.S. embassy and from there to the site for the consulate in Jerusalem. (You of course remember that the embassy is still in Tel Aviv.) The instructions for notarization services advise you on the top of the page that you don’t need an appointment and then in the middle of the page tells you that you absolutely do need an appointment. Better make one to be sure. This process is actually fairly easy – once you get past figuring out that the information about which days of the week you are able to make an appointment does not jibe with what’s on the click-on chart. Assuming that you remember to print out the page which contains your appointment information – you have to bring that with you – you’re good to go.
That’s where things stood with me and NYCERS – I had my appointment at the consulate the following week – as we were waiting our turn to see the esteemed rabbis at The Rabbinate. Maybe it’s the misery-loves-company syndrome, the realization and acceptance that anytime, anyplace, you have to deal with a bureaucratic organization, you have the serious possibility of being in deep doo-doo. I never wait in line if I don’t have to, and if I can, I will leave – just to make a point. If I have to stay, I’m not going to give the incompetents who are keeping me waiting the satisfaction of allowing my blood pressure to rise very far from its normal 120/80.
It turned out that Barbara and I were not needed as witnesses after all. Here’s what happened, as Tina described it to us. She had brought with her all her documents and all her photographs and all her information. What the esteemed rabbis decided to do was call Tina’s uncle and ask him some questions. Of course, if it’s 10:30 in Tel Aviv, it’s 3:30 in Brooklyn, but that has never stopped a government official hot in pursuit of The Truth. Fortunately, her uncle is a cab driver who is used to getting up early in the morning, and Tina had made him aware that his testimony might be needed. The conversation went like this: a Hebrew-speaking rabbi – he must have been the one in charge – would ask a question which the rabbi who also spoke Russian would ask her uncle: “Do you know your niece?” “Yes.” “Did you know her mother (that would be his sister)?” “Yes.” “Did you know your mother?” “Yes.” On and on. Tina could hear the questions in Russians and the translations of the answers in Hebrew. At one point, Tina was obliged to give her uncle, thousands of miles away, a virtual high-five. The question was, “What holidays do you remember celebrating?” “Pesach, he replied.” When Tina had her first interview several weeks before, she was asked the same question and she gave the same answer.
Dear esteemed rabbi who is asking these questions; There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in America who marched for Soviet Jewry those many years ago, Jews of all ages and from all over the spectrum of Jewish observance. And they all knew that there was no Pesach in Odessa in the 1980’s when Tina was a child. Perhaps a few courageous refuseniks in Moscow and the-then-Leningrad had a seder. But in Odessa? Certainly not in the home in which Tina was raised. But you asked, and she had to say something, anything she could think of. And you asked her uncle who grew up in the last days of the Stalin regime when matzoh would have been as scarce as Jack-o-Lanterns for Halloween in present day Jerusalem. You asked, and he had to say something. In all due respect, do you have a clue? I wonder.
Tina’s uncle is one of those people who, with all their merits and faults, has an uncanny memory for details about his family. When the rabbis finished their interrogation, there was nothing left to say. They turned to Tina and asked her how it was that he could answer in such depth at 3:30 in the morning. Tina told them that he was a taxi driver and he got up at 4:30 anyway. The question remains: what if he hadn’t answered the questions in such depth when the rabbis woke him up in the middle of the night? At any rate, Tina got her certificate that she is deemed to be Jewish and may marry another Jew in Israel.
We left the headquarters of The Rabbinate, Tina heading off to her job, Barbara and I returning to the bus station. We could have prowled around Tel Aviv for a while, but my spirits had been sufficiently dampened by this experience, and I just wanted to go home. We stopped at a little out-of-the-way coffee shop, Café Café (mehadrin min hamehadrin), near the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem for lunch. (Very good food.) We could see several ‘mazal tov’ balloons at a nearby table for two. Sure enough, a little while later, a young religious couple came in. They probably had been engaged for at least an hour; and they probably had known each other for at least a month. I could not help watching the interplay between the two of them. The young man took it upon himself to order lunch for the two of them, but it was obvious that he was not in his element. His very sweet bride-to-be began to make suggestions, so that in the end it was she who decided what they would eat – all without wounding the pride of her husband-to-be. Some folks have people skills, some don’t, and some will never learn.
To wrap up this saga, we have to head off to the U.S. consulate on Nablus Road in Jerusalem, a scene of many heartaches and tribulations – at least, so I am told. Our only previous experiences there had been to renew our passports – a document I would not sell for a sack of gold – and for me to change my address for Social Security when we first made aliyah. And, all things considered, it wasn’t so bad. But the stories persist. The prevailing point of view here is that the U.S. considers its embassy in Tel Aviv to be for the Jews and its consulate in Jerusalem to be for the Arabs. I have as much of a bone-to-pick with the American government as the next guy, but I do try to be fair. I arrived fifteen minutes early for my 9AM appointment, went right through the security – staffed by Israelis – and was seen right away at window five by a woman who was obviously from the Midwest. I explained what I needed, all the while waving my U.S. passport. She sent me to window one where I produced my Capitol One card to pay the thirty dollar fee (not great, but better than seventy five). Back to window five where I was met by a gentleman who felt the need to be super-helpful. He began explaining to me that the form he had just stamped was so that I could begin collecting a pension. I gently corrected him. It was just to change my address; I have actually been collecting that pension since December 1994. I could see the “This does not compute” look coming over his face. “I’m sixty eight years old, If you don’t believe me, look at my passport which you happen to be holding in your hand.” Life is good. I look just old enough to get a seat on a crowded bus most of the time, but not old enough for anyone to believe that I should be collecting a pension or be entitled to senior citizen discounts. May all of you get to experience that wonderful moment.
I was almost done. But before the super-helpful gentleman would take his hand off my stamped form and my passport, I needed to answer one question: What is your favorite flavor of ice cream? My favorite flavor of what???? “I really don’t have any one favorite flavor.” He persisted, “No, you have to name a favorite flavor.” I had to say something, anything. But nowadays there are a million flavors of ice cream. Ben and Jerry’s even has a ‘flavor graveyard’ for their discontinued items. Bovinity Divinity? Cherry Garcia? S’mores? Chunky Monkey? Dublin Mudslide? And that’s just Ben and Jerry’s. What about Haagen-Daz, Carvel, Baskin Robbins, Good Humor, and all the cheap brand we could get at Shoprite? What about the Strauss flavors we get here? Sixty years of licking ice cream cones, and this guy wants me to pick one flavor!!! The moment of decision. The man’s thumb was still on my precious documents. “Chocolate!” I blurted out. The man smiled and whipped out a chart. He had been tracking answers to this question for I don’t know how long. “Good choice,” he said showing me that good ol’ chocolate was the overwhelming favorite of American ex-pats.
I was done, in and out of the consulate in about fifteen minutes; walking over to a bus stop to get the 174 back to Maale Adumim. In life, one must be prepared at times to say something, anything.