And this is what I said.........

At least it’s as faithful a reproduction as I can put together; I invariably speak without a script or a teleprompter (unlike certain people I won’t mention). But as best as I can remember, this is what I said.
“Let’s begin with the obvious. Welcome, and thank you for coming from several continents to share our simcha. Thank you on behalf of my wife Barbara and myself as well as Sara and Tibor Berkovitz.
“Shortly after Tina told us that she and David were going to get married, she asked me to say a few words at their wedding. No problem. It was a long way off so I would have plenty of time to prepare something. And now, it’s the twinkling of an eye later, and here we are, and here I am, and I have to stop thinking about what to say and actually say something. So I have a few thoughts I’d like to share with you.
“Invariably, when there’s a wedding, what’s the one question that people ask? How did the couple meet? So Barbara would explain that Tina and David met at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Oh!? But sometimes a story begets another story, and an answer begets another question. What do you mean they met at Rutgers? Was it that simple?
“Consider that Tina, our beautiful bride {applause} was born in Odessa and came to Brooklyn with her family when she was eight, and because of some unfortunate circumstances came to live in New Jersey with people with whom she had no previous connection four years later. And David, our handsome groom {more applause}, what about him? Well, he was born in Romania. His family came to The States from Romania? No, they went first to Israel. Oh, they went to The States from Israel? No, they left Israel and went to Paris. And then they came to The States? No, then they went off to South Africa. We’re running out of countries. Then they went to The States? Then they went to The States. Did they also go to Brooklyn first? As far as I know, they didn’t go to Brooklyn. They went right to New Jersey. Anyway, it’s not so obvious that Tina and David would meet. If you wish to consider this an act of Divine Providence, you are free to do so, and I will not dissuade you from that.
“There is something else which is not so simple. Barbara and I are of an older generation, which I define as being born before there was a State of Israel. For how long when we talked about building a bayit ne’eman b’ Yisrael, did we mean it in a general sense, creating a home among the Jewish people. It certainly did not mean ‘in Israel.’ How many generations of Jewish men and women could not get married at kibbutz Netser Sereni near Tel Aviv. The closest they came was when the groom broke the glass (which David did so well; it took me five times when I got married) which is supposed to remind us that the first Temple was destroyed, the second beit hamikdash was destroyed, and the third one has not yet been rebuilt.
“But I have a more immediate explanation. Sometimes our path seems strewn with broken glass. Jagged edges and broken glass. Not only that, sometimes we are the ones breaking the glass – at the most inopportune moments when everything is going well. Perhaps this is just a cautionary warning to newly married couples.
“There is perhaps one possible remedy for this problem. Looking around tonight – and this is true at most weddings – I see happy faces, good will, best wishes. Imagine of you could save that feeling; let’s say you could smush it all into an aerosol can. You can call it ‘Wedding Cheer.’ And any time the couple was facing the jagged edges, the broken glass, they could just do a spritz, and the room would be filled with good old ‘wedding cheer.’ Simple.
“Of course, there is no such spray can available. And maybe those are the tasks for this generation: to rebuild the Third Temple and to create the Wedding Cheer spray can. So Tina and David, you’re on your own; you’ll have to create the wedding cheer on your own. And I have full confidence that you will. Because I think you have stumbled onto the secret.
“Generally speaking, couples getting married are in love. But that first blush of love can fade faster than the flowers that are usually grace the tables at a wedding (note: David and Tina used small potted plants; a lot cheaper.) You also have to like each other. You have to be willing to invest the time and energy into caring for each other, nurturing each other, helping each other reach their potential. And I think you will do that.
“I have this vision. You see that gentleman over there taking pictures (pointing to the official photographer). Someday years from now, but it will be in the twinkling of an eye, a young person will be looking at one of the photographs from this wedding – it may be in an album or on a wall – and will say: ‘You see that couple. Those are my grandparents. Or those are my great-grandparents.’ No pressure! ‘They look much older now, but they are still the same loving couple as they were then. I hope that someday when I get married, we will be as nice as couple as they are.’
“I have one more thought. When I finally got married, and later when my brother finally got married, and we would all be together with my mother, she would look at Barbara and my brother’s wife Abby, and she would say: ‘I don’t have two daughters-in-law, I have two daughters.’ And she considered Barbara and Abby to be her daughters, and you weren’t going to convince her otherwise. So I say, if it was good enough for my mother, it’s good enough for me. So I say, we don’t have a son-in-law, we have a son. And we hope we have your permission, Sara and Tibor, to share David with you. And because I believe in fair play, you have our permission to consider Tina to be your daughter.
“With that I will conclude. But I have one question: does it get any better than this? If it does, let me know where.”

A Day in the Negev

You know what I say? If you’re in The Land, and it’s Chol HaMoed (the intermediate days of Sukkot or Pesach), and you don’t go on at least one trip to somewhere, anywhere in the country, you might as well be in Poughkeepsie. That’s what I say, and who is going to argue with me?
That said, we had nothing at all planned for this Pesach; (as is often the case, my reporting is one full holiday behind, since Shavuot is almost upon us) at least until Barbara spoke with June (the June of June and Jeff). She had found a JNF tiyul on line; they were going, and did we want to join them? Barbara started to describe the itinerary to me. I cut her off; if June and Jeff are going and you want to go, sign us up. In other words, quit while you’re ahead. Maybe if you tell me where we’re going, I won’t be that interested. This way, worst case scenario, I’ll get out of the house, spend the day with friends, and avoid the perils of a journey to Poughkeepsie. And that’s how Barbara, Natania, and I got to join our friends and a bus load of Anglo-Israelis and State-side tourists on our JNF fun-filled day in the Negev.
It turns out that I was right (no surprise there). If I knew in advance that our first stop was going to be the Israeli Air Force Museum, my level of enthusiasm would have dropped precipitously. The world is filled with museums, ranging in interest from The Louvre or The Smithsonian Institute, down to the Stalin Museum in Volgograd. It ultimately depends on what turns you on, or as the Romans of yore were wont to say, De gustibus non est disputandum. One man’s meat……….. I think you get the idea. I have the fondest memories of an afternoon spent twenty years ago eyeing a collection of antique cars in a Shaker barn in the town of Sandwich on Cape Cod. (In my idiosyncratic scale of things, there are few things as lovely as a 1954 Oldsmobile, turquoise or pastel pink.) I could spend the better part of an hour gazing at a display case of Bakelite radios like the ones that used to grace our kitchen table (c. 1950) on E. 208 in The Bronx. But airplanes as a rule don’t do much for me: something to get on and off as quickly as possible once you’ve gotten where you’re going – just grateful that you arrived in one piece. . But the Israeli Air Force Museum is more than 140 randomly discarded outmoded aircrafts spending their final days at rest on a concrete field on the outskirts of Be’er Sheva. If you walk around and take the time to read the signs, or, in our case, listen to the young lady who was the museum tour guide, you realize that each of these airplanes has an amazing story.
But before you begin the journey down aviation Memory Lane, there is the present and the future to consider (nostalgia is not a big ticket item here in The Land). There is first and foremost an indoor display which includes a mockup of the cockpit of a contemporary Israeli jet fighter, how it is equipped and the incredible protective gear which the airmen are given. We are not even going to discuss the megabucks all this stuff costs or dwell over the disparity whereby private individuals and groups are scrounging up money to provide socks and underwear to the regular combat units. No sir, we are not going to tread – not even tippy toe – over this political landmine, the allocation of never-enough resources. But that’s the raison d’etre of this museum: to make the case for the Air Force as the greatest of its size in the world and its central role in keeping Israel safe and secure, going back to Israel’s Day 1.
Speaking of which, you have to begin with an Avia S-199 (a Czech modified Messerschmitt), the only survivor of the original four planes that together were the Israeli Air Force in 1948, and which shot down two Egyptian planes that had bombed Tel Aviv. It doesn’t look like much by today’s standards, but that plane – together with the men who piloted it – was somehow part of G-d’s plan to bring us back to The Land and keep us here. It’s easy to understand that without this rudimentary defense system, there wouldn’t be much of a Tel Aviv today; the White City would be what city?
In an Aviation Museum, there has to be room for the random and the bizarre. On another row of planes there’s the one that landed itself, a large cargo prop-plane with big wings. On one of its flights, for whatever reason, the pilot was forced to bail out over northern Israel. The air force spent several days combing the area, looking for pieces of the wreckage, until a call was received from a bewildered farmer inquiring as to why there was an IAF plane sitting in the middle of his field. Somehow, this aircraft without a pilot glided down and landed itself with hardly a scratch. Now, this kind of thing can’t happen; but there is that plane, in one piece, to tell the tale.
Not all of the planes were originally Israeli. Some were trophies, enemy planes brought down in combat. There were at least two that were flown to Israel by Arab pilots defecting from their own air forces, incredible stories of derring-do in their own right. As I said, each aircraft in this outdoor museum has a reason for being there. By far the most popular plane was the Boeing 707 which people were lining up to board. Back then, that would be July 4, 1976, this very plane was used to ferry the freed hostages from Entebbe back to safety. And if that wasn’t enough, for an encore performance, this very plane then was used to ferry our brethren out of Ethiopia in one of the airlifts out of there. Close your eyes and try to imagine either one of these ventures and what it must have been like: a cabin filled with desperate people, jammed together; probably no flight attendants going around offering pillows and serving soft drinks. This plane is now used as a mini-theater, and there we were, sitting quite comfortably, watching a film to promote the IAF.
Andy why not promote the IAF? Isn’t that what this world of ours is all about: letting people know who you are and what you’re doing? That’s certainly what the JNF has in mind when it arranges these trips: to show the folks (some of whom – not us – might have the do-re-mi to contribute big time) where and how the money which is raised in The States is being spent. And a lot of it is being spent on a massive effort to get folks to live in The Negev (as well as in the Galil).
Now none of this is new. It was obvious back in the days of Ben-Gurion that it would be important to populate an area that was at least half of Israel’s land mass, and it’s been kind of a dream ever since. In the more down-to-earth world of lines and arguments in which most of us are forced – reluctantly – to reside, there is something called the National Planning and Building Council which developed a master plan to encourage the decentralization of the Israeli population precisely into areas like The Negev, and this by 2020. What I’m going to tell you next will probably shock, shock you, but I can’t help that. While cities like Petach Tikva, Rishon Letzion, and Rehovot have already reached their projected growth target for the next ten or twenty years, Be’er Sheva, as of 2007, was going backwards, losing population. Right now, less than ten percent of our population lives in this enormous – for us – land mass.
A point to remember is that this is not the 1950’s when some government official could dump planes full of Moroccans into out of the way areas like Beit Shean and then forget about them. Nowadays, it will take more than a laminated plan replete with charts and illustrations sitting on some official’s desk to get people to go somewhere. Into the breach, filling the void are established groups like the JNF and smaller organizations, including the Or Movement, a group I had never heard of before.
Our tour bus circled through an older part of Be’er Sheva, the kind of area that you can find in lots of communities, a place which, with just a little push in either direction, can either decay into a slum with vacant storefronts and poorly tended buildings, or can be revived into something really nice, cheerful bustling streets with interesting stores. In short, a perfect place for the Or Movement’s regional visitors center! If we had come a week or two later, this office, made from two adjoining buildings, would be open and ready for business. But as we stood in front, we could see guys carrying in computers, and as we toured the facility we could see the finishing touches that needed to be done. We had the opportunity to meet with Ophir Fisher (a relative of the cantor and recording star, Dudu Fisher) one of the founders of this organization, who had come to the sobering conclusion a few years back that either Jews settle the Negev or the 200,000 Jews living in Be’er Sheva could one day be surrounded by a growing Bedouin population. Ophir stood in front of the building as workmen were going in and out and he offered up his vision for the future of this city and this region, with a projected influx of several hundred thousand people over the next decade. The linchpin of his plan is this Center as an place to bring people who want to find out about the region and to provide prospective residents with services (like Nefesh B’Nefesh does), helping them get information about employment, housing, schools, and transportation.
Several weeks after our trip, I clipped out an article from the Jerusalem Post about a similar attempt at urban renewal, which was entitled “Pushing for a better tomorrow in 8,000-year-old Lod,” which reported on an event held by the Lod Community Foundation “to help showcase the city’s promise and raise support for the various initiatives taking place there” in a community best known for poverty, crime, and drug trafficking. Avishay Braverman, who is a government minister and ought to know about these things, said in his address that “If you wait for the government you will wait a long time. If you take the initiative you will carry the government on your shoulders.” I thought that remark was perfect, and it describes better and more succinctly than I could ever put it, the mindset of Fisher and his colleagues. If you have a good idea and you begin to implement it, you can push the government into providing assistance. (Much like Nefesh B’Nefesh got the Jewish Agency to improve its efforts regarding aliyah from the West.)
For several years before we took the plunge and made aliyah, I remember seeing advertisements from the American version of the JNF about Blueprint Negev, their plans to develop the region. The rest of our tour was to show off three of their projects in various stages of completion. One of them, more or less a blueprint for future endeavors, is Givot Bar (wild hills),a fledgling community, one of several under construction, now home to a few dozen families. What’s the recipe? Create a plan, get some a commitment for some land, prepare the infrastructure for a town, start building nice, affordable housing, get a few dozen families with the pioneer spirit to move in, and in a few years there will be 200 families in a well-planned community with parks, schools, and synagogues, a train-ride away from Tel Aviv. It’s not that difficult if you do it right. Repeat the formula a few times, and you have something.
It’s probably easier to create something from nothing than if you’re dealing with an existing city like Be’er Sheva, one which is seen as a ”stagnant backwater, culturally and geographically isolated from modern Israel….” (that’s from the JNF brochure). The reference to backwater is particularly apt because running through the city from east to west is Nahal Be’er Sheva, in fact a river for a few days of the year when it is filled with water from the flash floods that occur during the winter rains. The rest of the year it was, de facto, a dumping ground for unwanted stuff, a dreary place that any sensible person would try to avoid. Never mind that this area includes the ancient well route where the patriarch Avraham walked. Well, what do you do? You clean up the garbage and you start building a park. You plant thousands of trees; JNF is good at that! You build nature paths, gardens, the whole nine yards. Now people want to be there. Suddenly, the area becomes HOT. As we rode by on our bus, we could see high rise apartments, recently built or under construction. We traveled on a street with several commercial malls. All of them faced away from the river; except the new one just being built. That one will be looking towards the new park. The rest of the plan will follow by degrees: a botanical gardens, hotels, an amphitheater. You know, none of this is, using the well-worn expression, rocket science. It just takes some thought, a lot of effort and a considerable amount of money.
Speaking of ‘considerable,’ we had been on the road for quite a while, and by then most of us had worked up a considerable appetite ( you are free to admire my graceful segue to a new topic). The high point for me of any trip is of course lunch. Lots of times on these trips we all brown bag it, but who wants to bring along a bag of broken matzohs? – it was Pesach, after all. Our tiyul included lunch, and so our bus brought us to a restaurant in one of the aforementioned malls for a Kosher LePesach meal. The large establishment was crowded with families off for the holiday; our group was ushered upstairs to a private dining room where we were served a delicious meal. To be more precise, we were served half a meal. Folks, here in The Land, except for certain high-end places that cater to Western tourists, almost every restaurant open for Pesach will offer a Sephardic menu. ‘Kitniyot’ is not an issue. (I feel confident that if you went around and asked the diners heaping rice on their matzohs what the term ‘gebrochts’ meant, you would get some fantastic answers: “a dread disease?”; “a German football team?”; “part of New York City?”) Anyway, they served portions of carefully censored items to our busload of Ashkenazim. You needn’t feel sorry for us; we still had plenty to eat. And then we were back on the bus, back to the new riverfront park in downtown Be’er Sheva for a festival!!! Not just A festival, but the first annual Chol Hamoed festival.
I’ve been to these kinds of events before; they’re usually meant for kids. The usual stuff: face painting, places to jump up and down or to climb through. But that’s a good thing here in The Land, which, if nothing else, is child-friendly. We spent an hour or so wandering around through the various activities, taking time to check out the old bridge (Ottoman?) which is still standing. The young man in a Theodore Hertzl t-shirt who was taking us around told us that they expected, on this first day of the festival, about 20,000 visitors. People were obviously having a good time; they would go home and tell their friends, and there might be 40,000 people there the next day, many of them non-locals traveling to Be’er Sheva just for the festival, including the people who would come just for the evening’s concert.. The year before, there was no festival, no concert, no one there. A few years before, all there had been where we were standing were broken mattresses, tires, parts from abandoned cars, and the like. It’s not too much to hope that with all this effort by the combination of the JNF and the Or Movement– with the Israeli government limping along – there will be a renaissance here in historic Be’er Sheva and the region surrounding.
The final stop on our JNF tour would be, once again for us, Sderot. One could easily start the following train of thought: If it would take a considerable effort to start new communities in the Negev, more to revitalize Be’er Sheva, an ancient city dripping with history, the gateway to the Negev, the home of Soroka Hospital and Ben Gurion University of the Negev – in short, a place with a lot going for it – what about Sderot? What does Sderot have going for it? Not too much. OK, it is by default the largest community in the western Negev and people from the region go there to do their shopping. And it does have that wonderful hesder yeshivah which we visited a while ago. And Sapir College is nearby, and there are a few factories. But that’s about it. Sderot was always a place to dump new immigrants, who had little say in the matter. Perhaps its biggest tourist attraction is the kassam ‘museum,’ the repository for a sample of the missiles sent their way by the friendly folks in Gaza. Perhaps someday there will be a project for artists of all kinds to go there and turn each of the hundreds of public bomb shelters, one by every bus stop, into an outdoor gallery of sorts, a major tourist attraction. But not yet, sad to say.
Unlike at the festival in Be’er Sheva, or unlike on any day in Ma’ale Adumim, you do not see the children of Sderot – and there are many of them – at play on the streets or in the parks. There is a fifteen second rule, and while that might sound like a regulation in a basketball game, here it is deadly serious, with the emphasis on ‘deadly.’ From the time one hears the alert siren, there are only fifteen seconds to get into a shelter; that’s the time before the kassam which has been detected will land somewhere and, on a ‘good’ day for the Arabs, explode. One of the miseries of growing up here is that you always have to know where the nearest shelter is and calculate how long it would take to get there. So kids are usually inside and that does not mean enjoying the comforts and the recreational facilities of an American home.
The JNF just built the Sderot Indoor Recreation Center, the largest of its kind in Israel. The work was done in ten months (itself a miracle in Israel, where very little gets done on time) at a cost of five million dollars. Talk about money well-spent, money used to change people’s lives BIG TIME. Here you have it. This big blue building, planned and run by the community, is its own ‘festival’ every day. For a nominal fee (and no child is ever turned away for lack of it), kids can always go there to bounce and climb, to hang out, to use the computers (donated by local businesses); and in an emergency, everyone is a few seconds from a safe room. But this day, because it was the Pesach vacation, there was a special treat, a theater group performing for hundreds of children and their parents (You thought there wouldn’t be a stage for music and plays???!!!) There’s one thing they almost had. Someone thought to put a merry-go-round smack-dab in the middle of the largest area. But then, somebody else asked, how long would it take for this apparatus to come to a stop if there were a ‘situation’? Twenty one seconds. Scratch that idea. Maybe this is not ‘normal,’ but, as the saying goes, when you have a lemon, make lemonade. We left the big blue building, passing the concession selling kosher for Pesach pizza which looked dangerously like the real thing.
All that was left of our adventure was the ride home. Me being me, I couldn’t help but needle my friend a little bit. “Jeff, that would be the perfect job for you.” He understood what I was getting at because he was the one who had told us about the regulations here in The Land. Every official tiyul has to have a licensed tour guide, and every bus or car used for a tour likewise has to be licensed. So even though the entire narration during our trip was done by Ariel from the JNF, they had to hire an official tour guide who in total must have contributed a hundred words of his own. Easiest day’s pay he ever made! And they do these trips as often as once a week. As soon as Jeff finishes his tour guide course, he should apply to be an official guide for the JNF! In case you didn’t realize it, there is no course, official or otherwise, to be an Israeli blogger. People like me just have to wing it. Oh, there is one requirement: you can’t be an Israeli blogger unless you’re living here in The Land. Sorry about that, but a rule is a rule.





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How Two Kittens and an Oven Door Met a Wandering Aramean

“No rest for the weary!” Certainly not around Pesach time, for many of us. Certainly not for your inveterate correspondent. I had completed my last article describing the finding of abandoned kittens and the smashing of an oven door, and I was looking for a short respite after the holiday while we prepared ourselves for the wrecking crew coming to demolish our old kitchen and preparing for the installation of a new one. Suddenly there was a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping on my e-mail inbox door. Could it be Edgar Allen Poe’s raven? No, it was only XXX, one of my long-suffering readers, who wanted, needed to know, what happened to our oven door? Never mind that we were struggling to keep two week-old kittens alive. Never mind that I had promised in writing to continue my saga ASAP. My old friend could not wait an instant longer to find out the denouement. Perhaps she too had been without an oven at some critical juncture of her life and over-empathized with our plight. Perhaps she was being dragged along, kicking and screaming, by Idle Curiosity? Whatever the reason for her interest, I felt her pain and resolved to make every effort to continue the saga. So, in the midst of the pounding and the smashing, the plumbing and the wiring, the dust settling and the pigeons flapping in and out the open windows, Yom Hashoa, Yom Hazicharon, and Yom Haatzmaut coming and going, I began – with multiple interruptions and serious delays – the continuation of my saga. If nothing else, I was determined to silence the tapping, the gentle rapping on my inbox door.
We might begin with a question: what on earth does one feed a week old kitten who has no mother? Natania’s solution was to dilute regular milk, warm it up, and try to feed it with the eye-dropper which we fortunately have. OK for the short run; kittens cannot thrive on human milk, but we were hoping to keep our charges alive until the next morning, Friday, when our local veterinarian, Dr. Donny would have office hours. Natania, the good scout that she is, kept getting up every few hours whenever these wretched creatures would wake up and begin emitting their pitiful bleats of hunger. At 8:30 AM, Barbara was on the phone with the service company, who assured her that our oven door had indeed arrived and it might be ready for pick-up later that morning. By 9AM, I was at work starting to prepare our Shabbat meals. All the dishes had to be stove-top preparable, but I could certainly handle that. At 10AM, more or less, Barbara and Natania were on their way to the vet’s office in Kikar Yahalom, the old shopping center.
The kittens were pronounced basically healthy by the vet, and Barbara went off to the several pet supply stores in our community in search of powdered kitten formula. Not surprisingly, none was to be had, and my wife settled for infant formula from the supermarket – better than cow’s milk for our purpose. Before she left the vet’s office, she had asked him if by chance he knew anybody in town who had a nursing mother cat who might be willing to take on two more charges. Donny said he did not, and that seemed to be the end of the matter. We were now the official life support system for two tiny orphaned felines; just what we needed. Mimi, our resident feline, a solitary creature by habit, would not be happy. So my wife and daughter and the two unnamed specimens returned home. I was now turning out dishes left and right, hoping to get our Shabbat cooking done as early as possible. (I should also mention that the day in question was the first day of Daylight Savings Time in The Land, so we had plenty of time until the official candle lighting time.)
And then, the phone rang. It was Doctor Donny. Somebody had just come into his office with a nursing female cat with nobody to nurse. Something or somebody had attacked her and killed her kittens. He had just anesthetized her and stitched her up. Was it possible? Could there be a shidduch in the making!!!!!!!!!!! The cat’s owner agreed to take the nursing kittens on two conditions: one) they would do their best to protect them from harm, but he could offer no guarantees as to their safety; two) when they were properly weaned, we would agree to take them back. His family had another pregnant female and enough was enough. We, of course, were desperate; a life raft is a life raft. We weren’t likely to get a better offer. Natania and I hightailed it back to Kikar Yahalom with kittens in basket and arrived just as Asher’s large black cat was coming out of the anesthesia. We placed the two kittens in the box with the mother cat and offered a silent prayer. The black kitten, who had been harder to feed with the eye dropper, sized up the situation and immediately attached his mouth to Mrs. Cat’s nipple and began to feed. The white kitten, the one who had been more willing to take sustenance from the eye dropper, seemed to be clueless. He/she kept climbing over the big cat’s back going who-knows-where, no matter how many times the vet returned him to the proper place. The mother cat began to wake up and lifted her head to see what was going on. What was percolating in her mind? Did she think these two were her original kittens? Cats apparently recognize their own offspring by smell. Had these two been climbing over her long enough to absorb the mother’s odor? Or was Mrs. Cat simply too weak to object? Perhaps she was that rare philosophically inclined specimen who saw these new kittens as a cosmic reward for her travails? It is unlikely that we will ever know the truth; and I am at peace with my uncertainty. We exchanged contact information with Asher, and Natania and I bee-lined it out of there, still offering silent prayers that this would work. My daughter called them before Shabbat started; mommy cat was grooming her foster children – a good sign. Their children were fighting over what to name these new arrivals – a very good sign as far as we were concerned. We had this vision of a flock of kids crying out, “Mommy, mommy, can we keep Lancelot and Guinevere?” However, I just heard from Asher and his wife: the kittens are doing fine and will be ready for separation from foster mommy in a few weeks. Oh, and their other cat just gave birth to five, count ‘em, five kittens of her own. So it seems that we will be stuck with them. Get ready, Mimi, for some company.
There is one other piece of information which I should mention. It was raining that morning in Ma’ale Adumim, something it doesn’t often do that close to Pesach, so all of us were dodging rain drops whenever we left our apartment. We got back from the vet and shortly thereafter the phone rang. Sherut Gur. “Your oven door is ready.” (Remember the oven door????!!!!!) I looked at the clock and reckoned that I could just about make it there before they closed at 1PM, but, as I said, it was raining, and who wants to shlep an oven door in the rain? Plus how much adventure can one person handle in a day? “Can I come in Sunday morning?” “Of course.” That would certainly give Barbara enough time to bake her renowned Pesach chocolate cakes, the kind that all of you want a slice of – whether you know it or not. More time for me to keep cooking for Shabbat.
We were planning a low-key Shabbat, one without company and without the usual leftovers – a good part of our normal weekly menus; but in the end we decided to invite one of Barbara’s friends to join us. She mentioned how grateful she was; if she needed to prepare her own meals, there would have been no way she would have had time to clean her apartment for Pesach. I was suddenly reminded of our holidays back in Teaneck. One family with whom we were good friends, had spent Pesach at a hotel for many years, courtesy of her parents. As a token of gratitude, our friends would always invite a number of their friends for the meals the Shabbat before Pesach, so that these families, all of whom would be at home for the holiday, would have an easier time getting ready. I have fond memories of those meals with lots of happy, grateful people around the table, which custom, sadly, has now come to an end. The wife’s mother died this past year; the father is now living with them, and Pesach for the family will now be in Teaneck. The other families will have to fend for themselves before the holiday. Another fond Exilic memory up in smoke, just like the bread in Jeff’s huge barbecue grill to which everyone could come and burn their hametz. Jeff and June are now in Jerusalem, and it’s too far these days to their apartment off Rehov Jabotinsky to join them for Jeff’s version of Texas toast.
Sunday morning, I was up and out early, in hot pursuit of an oven door, although I did make a stop first at an out-of-the-way wine store which had been advertising a pre-Pesach sale on Israeli ‘boutique’ wine, a bargain at four bottles for 180 shekels. However, whatever small amount of money I saved buying wine, I more than made up for ransoming our oven door. Somehow, the ‘labor charge’ was five hundred shekels, meaning the total cost of rectifying my clumsiness was over a thousand shekels. At least they bubble-wrapped my door for me before sending me on my way, poorer but perhaps wiser. I needn’t tell you that I let Barbara and Natania put the door back on its hinges. Barbara was now ready to start baking her cakes and I could lick the chocolate in the bowl and relax.
I have always wondered what it would be like to spend Pesach at a hotel, meaning you can arrive early and loll around while the hotel staff busies itself with all the necessary preparations. You would certainly have time, if you were so inclined, to review the Hagaddah and some of the commentaries on it, and you would have the added bonus of arriving at the Seder table relaxed and refreshed. The down side, of course, is that you might have to make do with someone else idea of a Seder, which in a hotel, can be something of a problem. And it might set you back a month’s salary for this luxury. But now I think I have an idea of what it would be like.
This year we got lucky. Not only were we invited to the Seder with our friends Ron and Esther (for the third year in a row), but we were invited out to other friends for lunch as well. So all our meals were covered, and we had little left to do. (As you all are aware, because we live in The Land, there is only one day of the holiday at the beginning and one at the end; we get time off for good behavior.) I had only two chores to do on Monday, make some charoset for Tina to take back to Tel Aviv with her and then go through the ritual of burning the remaining chametz. Absent Jeff’s barbecue pit, I was resigned to going down to the street and trying by myself to burn what that I had kept in reserve. But there was Eliezer, an elderly Sephardic man who lives in apartment #4 below us, to the rescue. He had made his own campfire next to the garbage dump and was making Moroccan toast. I had just kept two pitas for my offering; he seemed to have an entire bakery to dispose of. Or else he had been saving up bread to burn since Purim. Why do things half way? I dropped my piddling pitas onto his fire, thanked him, and returned to my kitchen. I took out my Pesach food processor, whose main raison-d’etre is pulverizing the ingredients for our Ashkenazic charoset: apples, walnuts, cinnamon, and sweet wine. I usually make about a quart of the stuff. Again, why do things half way? Besides, it’s yummy.
That task accomplished, I had the rest of the day to relax, just as I would have at a hotel, and prepare myself for Ron’s Seder. I had been going through the Haggadah little by little for several weeks, and now I would have time to review everything one more time. There would be no pool to sit by and no deck chairs to sit on, but I could at least sit on my own balcony\\on my own folding chair and admire the view.
I had hoped that ‘my’ Haggadah would be finally be available (the English language version of Rav Shlomo Aviner’s commentary, translated by my buddy, R. Mordechai Tzion, which lists yours truly as the editor) but it’s still not out after a year and a half delay. It still might be ready before the Jerusalem Light Rail project – my benchmark of comparison – which now has an official start date in April 2011. I am not holding my breath on either account.
As a consolation prize, I had bought myself a Haggada with a commentary compiled from the study notes of the great Torah teacher, Nechama Leibowitz, whose textual approach was to point something out which needed clarification,, offer her students suggestions, and make them come up with their own solutions to the difficulties. What a novel idea! What got me going was something that has always bothered me, and my discovery that I was in good company. In the Haggadah, there is a reference to a passage in The Torah in which it says that when the Jewish people were to enter The Land, they were to offer their first fruits as a sacrifice and recite a paragraph which begins: “Arami oved avi.”
The ‘official’ translation of these three enigmatic words is, according to Rashi, the medieval commentator who seems to be the be-all and the end-all for many people for what things in The Torah or The Talmud mean, “The Aramean (that is, Lavan) sought to destroy my father.” The text continues, “and he (my father??!!) went down to Egypt and sojourned there; and he became there a nation…..” This interpreation always seemed to me to lack a critical element of coherence, but I have never been able to express my skepticism as well and with as much authority as the fifteenth century commentator, known by his nom de plume, Akeidat Yitzchak, “All of my life I was puzzled by this verse….For in truth, according to the simple meaning of the text, Lavan did not seek to destroy Yaakov…..And even if we assume that he intended to harm him, what is Lavan’s relevance to ‘And he went down to Egypt’? (Go get ‘em, A.Y.!)
Even earlier, Shmuel ben Meier, the Rashbam, the son of Rashi’s daughter, who seemed to delight in disagreeing textually with his grandfather, interpreted these three words to mean that the patriarch Avraham was a wandering Aramean – wandering and exiled from the land of Aram. One of the earliest commentators and Biblical grammarians, known to us as ‘the son of Ezra’ gave a succinct explanation why you would have to torture the syntax of these words to make it mean what Rashi says it does, adding “But it is more logical that the Arami is Yaakov, and the verse is saying that when my father was in Aram, he was poor.” (Ibn Ezra, he’s our man; if he can’t do it, no one can!!!)
Of course, I brought this issue up at the Seder, and I mention this only to preempt the skeptics who would wrongly assume that we “cheated,” skipped something, rushed through everything, in order to get done at the incredibly early hour of about 11:30. I’ve noticed an interesting activity, one which has probably been going on for longer than I’ve been alive. It’s called the ‘When did you finish?’ game; that is to say, how long did your Seder drag on until? (perhaps akin to ‘How much water did you get in your basement after the recent downpour,’ or ‘How long was your power out for?’) We know that it is a mitzvah to retell the exodus from Egypt, but I feel confident that nobody gets any ‘points’ for time wasted in the effort. We’ve all heard about or been part of Pesach horror stories when the Seder were very late in starting because the assorted teenagers present insisted on bickering on and on about who wouldn’t be caught dead sitting next to whom; and then some of the guests waltzed in an hour late; or it was the children were quarreling over whose turn it was to recite the ‘divrei Torah’ which they had spent the entire month before Pesach copying off the chalk board in their yeshivah, so that, in effect, they were running the Seders with their parents functioning as referees; or the relative who has to be invited, even though he doesn’t want to be there, whose role it is to ask the same annoying questions year after year, ignoring the fact that someone patiently has given him the same answer for the last ten years – because he’s only asking the questions to annoy you PLUS prove that the wicked son is not just as construct, but is alive and well. These are just some of the many sure fire recipes for wasting time and diminishing the joy of those assembled.
Ron and Esther are very good at avoiding these and other pitfalls. We could officially start the Seder a little after 8PM; we, in fact, started exactly at 8:15 because all of us were there on time. Ron and Esther’s daughters and a friend had made place cards for our assigned seating, so we were sitting where we were supposed to within one minute. All the stuff we needed to begin was ready ahead of time. We went around the table, each person reading a paragraph in Hebrew or English, depending on their linguistic capabilities. If anybody had a question or something brilliant to say, there was time for that. We didn’t rush, but we didn’t dawdle. We ate a leisurely meal, finished the rest of the Hagaddah, and, lo and behold, everyone at the table was still awake at the end. That’s an accomplishment worth trumpeting!
We were able to get a good night’s sleep, and I showed up the next morning at our beit Knesset, Musar Avicha, no later than a lot of other guys. As I mentioned before, we were invited out for lunch as well where we continued overeating. I remember quite clearly my train of thought as we were walking on that beautiful afternoon back to our apartment after the meal. I’M FREE! I DON’T HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN! I DON’T HAVE TO GO BACK TO MITZRAYIM FOR A SECOND SEDER!
The purpose of the Seder is to enable one somehow, some way, to recreate for oneself the experience of the Jewish people leaving Egypt. We start the Seder by holding a piece of Lehem Oni, poor man’s bread, a symbol of our affliction, and we end it by singing about our fondest dream, a rebuilt Jerusalem. Having symbolically escaped from Egypt the first night and being physically a bus ride away from Jerusalem – albeit in an ‘un-rebuilt’ state – every day of the year, why would I want to go back and repeat the harrowing experience a second time the following night? Would you want to repeat the fourth grade after you’ve finished college?
The first part of Pesach was over, but there was still something tapping, gently rapping on the cortex of my brain which I could hear even over the banging and the clanging in our kitchen, until I suddenly realized why it wouldn’t go away. It was the business of the differing interpretations of Arami oved avi. It occurred to me that, taken together, the ‘someone’s out to get us’ part and the ‘wandering Aramean’ motif, they sort of sum up much of Jewish history. Whether or not Lavan was actually seeking to destroy us, a lot of other folks have been, for real, for a very long time, up to and including the present day. And collectively we have certainly been wandering, dispersed, powerless, throughout much of our history. What is so distressing today is that even though, with G-d’s help, the historic process of our physical re-unification is going on before our very eyes, we are in many ways acting as if we were still wandering in the desert, scattered, weak, and confused. Maybe that’s why I prefer the second interpretation, because perhaps we need to focus our attention on ending the Exile – not only physically, but in the ways we think and act. And so, everyone, all together so everyone can hear, “I AM NOT, WE ARE NOT, A WANDERING ARAMEAN. And let us say Amen.

The Saga of the Oven Door and Other Matters

If I were to start off by writing that the week before Pesach we were cleaning our kitchen, you would read that information and most likely return to what you had been doing before, even if that ‘something’ was as exciting and profitable as a game of free cell on your computer. If I were to add that we were trying to get our house ready for Pesach by Thursday night (Pesach starting the following Monday evening), you might admire our enterprise, but I certainly wouldn’t be getting your full attention. But when I tell you the story about our oven door, now you are going to have to listen up.
We had no choice but to buy a new wall oven when we bought this apartment. The previous owners left us a stove top on its last legs but took their wall oven with them. So we went back to Lior’s, our local appliance place and purchased a self-cleaning Electrolux (the same company that manufactures the vacuum cleaners), ovens with this wonderful feature being a fairly rare commodity in this country. I have spent a considerable amount of time over the years koshering ovens for Pesach, and a fair amount of that time has been wrestling with the mechanisms that allow you to take the door off and put it back on. Every oven door I’ve ever seen has a double pane of glass serving as a window; and you can never get inside the glass to clean it. You can make the oven door acceptable for Pesach use, but you can never get it so the glass is clear as it was when you bought it, and that’s annoying. But our Electrolux – there is a way to open it up to clean it inside, and lo and behold, there are actually, count ‘em, three panes of glass. There I was, holding the door upright on the dining room table, spraying 409 and wiping it down with paper towels; and then I lost my grip, and the door tipped back onto the table. Not a big drop, but enough to chip off a small piece from one side of the outside pane of glass, and, even worse, to chip off a small piece of the plastic which holds the glass in place from the other side of the door. Oyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
I had already used what the manufacturer calls the pyrolytic setting, so the oven was theoretically kosher for Pesach, but kind of useless without a door. All this took place on Wednesday afternoon. Barbara called Lior’s, and they gave her the phone number for the service company, Sherut Gur in Jerusalem. Phoned them. Bring it in the next day; they’re right near the Shuk.
I had visions of getting on the bus Thursday morning holding the oven door by its handle. Here in The Land, people get on buses with all manner of items. (Barbara recently got into a conversation with a woman at a bus stop who let my wife know that she had a live fish in her shopping cart, and not to get scared if the cart started to jump.) But Barbara sort of spoiled my fun by wrapping the door in newspaper and putting it into our red Century 21 bag from The States. We got onto the bus to Jerusalem Thursday morning with our carefully camouflaged oven door. Natania was with us because she needed to see our chiropractor. Being out of the army, she had gotten back onto our health plan, seen our family doctor, and convinced him to give her a referral for chiropractic care. Now she was on her way to the Maccabi natural health center to see the gatekeeper and convince him or her to authorize the same sixteen visits per year that Barbara and I get at the reduced price of 80 shekels (about $25 at today’s exchange rate) a visit. This was going to work out just fine because everything we needed to do was within walking distance of each other. We started out on Rehov Rashi, a street we will never forget because that’s where the army recruitment office is, where Natania began her army career two years and two months ago. As promised, Sherut Gur is very close to the shuk and we found it with no trouble.
How busy do you think an appliance repair center in the center of Jerusalem would be the week before Pesach? Uh, yes. Very busy. When we walked in, the phones were ringing off the hook, much too often for the young women sitting behind the desks to keep up with. There was one woman ahead of us in the repair center. She had just, I mean just, bought a new stove and it had been delivered with the wrong pieces. I don’t even know what you call them in English: the round cast iron pieces that sit on top of the burners. But they’re called kippot in Hebrew; the same word for what guys wear on their heads (although the head gear is somewhat lighter). She was expecting to feed twenty some odd people for the seder in exactly three and a half days and was remarkably calm under the circumstances. Rafi the technician was able to locate the right ones and send her on her way with them. There was another guy who came in while we were waiting. He had a small metal rack, probably for a portable oven, also the wrong size. Rafi found one that fit better; it cost 125 shekels. Barbara and I began to get nervous. If this puny rack cost 125 shekels, how many zillions of shekels would a new oven door set us back?
Our turn. We unwrapped our door and showed it to Rafi. I assume that he had done his time in the Israeli army, and after that experience it would take a lot to upset his equilibrium – even the week before Pesach. On the phone to the supply center in Tel Aviv. Fortunately for us, we had remembered to bring our original sales receipt. We knew that dropping a door would not be covered under the warranty, but the receipt did have the model number. Fortunately they had the part in stock, and it would arrive as early as that afternoon. He gave us an estimate that was quite reasonable, although he didn’t mention that labor was extra – much extra.
We had sent Natania ahead to the health clinic to be examined by the gatekeeper and approved for the requisite sixteen visits. It turned out that our chiropractor, Dr. Breen was available that very moment, so she got an immediate appointment to begin the process of returning the vertebrae in her neck to their proper positions. And then off to the shuk for round six of our pre-Pesach shopping. Except we did stop off for lunch first because you never go food shopping on an empty stomach. Unless you want to wind up bringing home two kilo of ochre and five of fava beans.
I have only the dimmest memories of the Machane Yehuda shuk from my first visit to The Land in 1980. In fact, the only thing I remember was photographing a ritual slaughterer plying his trade on a production line of chickens – an image which I have exhibited many times since. Today mercifully, the guys killing the chickens are miles away from the people buying and selling them. The shuk today is much bigger and a sense of up-scaleness (if that’s a word) has begun to creep in around the corners – which is most interesting because the rest of the Rehov Jaffa area has been suffering from the ongoing, poorly planned construction of the Light Rail, still a year away from completion. The most conspicuous example of this trendiness in the shuk is the presence of an Aroma coffee bar on the main drag. But there are a number of smaller, less conspicuous places cropping up like mushrooms on a New Jersey lawn after a week of rain: a few fancy clothing stores, a brightly lit concession which sells only the highest quality olive oil, a cooperative gallery displaying the work of local craftsmen. In fact, the revival of the shuk was the subject of an article in the Jerusalem Post recently which described a number of small restaurants that have opened up in or around the shuk. What stopped me in my tracks was a mention of an Indian restaurant. Indian food!!!!!!!!!!!! As the only other kosher restaurant of its type in the area is a mediocre but more expensive meat restaurant in one of the hotels, you can imagine my glee at reading this wonderful news. But where was it? I had never come across it, and I do tend to get around in Mahane Yehuda. One day a few weeks ago when I was in the area, I made it a point to explore systematically all the back alleys of the shuk in search of this hidden treasure, stumbling onto it at last on one of the side streets. At least I now knew where it was, so it was a foregone conclusion that on this afternoon before Pesach we would head over there for lunch.
There are small restaurants, and then there are tiny restaurants. This vegetarian Indian restaurant can comfortably seat about a dozen people, making it smaller than the average falafel joint on King George – with a menu about as extensive. In fact, they don’t hand you a printed affair; they point to what’s written on a big blackboard on the wall. What it comes down to is that you can order a medium size plate, a big plate, a bigger plate, or a really big plate. But it’s all the same food: thin Indian bread, rice, potatoes in a sauce, lentils, a split pea type soup, a yogurt dish, and one or two other items that I cannot identify – just more of it or less of it. You can also order some side dishes as well as dessert and chai tea, served in a glass meant for cold drinks so you have the option of holding onto the glass and removing your finger prints, if you so desire. It’s just that the food is so sublime that it would be easy to shed tears of joy; not over your plate, though, it would be a pity to water down what you’re eating. In these intimate surroundings, it’s easy to get into a conversation with the woman who runs the place, a Jew who was raised in India, who came to and left Israel several times, although she thinks this time she will stay put.
Lunch being over, I suggested that Barbara and Natania head home to continue cleaning, and I would remain at the shuk to do the shopping. So the two of them headed in one direction to do one errand and then take the bus back to our island of serenity, Maale Adumim. I wandered around, bought what I needed, got on a different bus and arrived back at to our apartment thirty seconds after them. Good plan, bad execution.
Several hours later, Barbara and I were back on the bus heading to the Jerusalem Theater for another FREE concert(at least for us; I’m sure some of the audience paid full price for their tickets. And they call us freiers!); this time the forces at hand, Leon Botstein and the Jerusalem Symphony in an all Kurt Weill program: a concert suite from The Threepenny Opera, his Second Symphony, and the rarely performed but quite marvelous ‘Seven Deadly Sins,’ for orchestra, one female and four male vocalists – one of those pieces that remain underperformed because of their eccentric use of musical forces. This was another example of Botstein’s programming skills, a concert devoted to the music that Weill wrote, generally in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, before he came to America. This is a subject which particularly fascinates me: artists who fled the Nazis because they were Jewish and/or considered avant-garde, i.e.; ‘decadent,’ and their subsequent careers in America, something completely outside the scope of these articles. I should mention, however, while I have my cultural news reporter hat on, that there was a whole new series of art work on display in the lobbies, most of it not so ipsy-pipsy, as my late father might have said.
One seemingly innocent thing happened on the way to the theater, the full significance of which we only grasped later. It was a phone call from Natania. “Mommy, where is Mimi’s heating pad?” “In the closet in the middle room.” “Do you need it for yourself or for the cat?” “It’s not for me. And where’s the eye-dropper?” “Under the bathroom sink, in the right hand drawer. Why do you need an eye-dropper?” “I’ll tell you when you get home.” We should have figured something was up, as these were not the typical questions a grown child asks her parents, but we were too busy trying to make our bus connections and then too engrossed in the concert to consider. As I said, we should have know better.
The concert was over. Our friends David and Bernice had also obtained tickets, but he was much too busy with work to attend. Therefore, we were left to our own devices to get home, meaning we had to wait for a bus to arrive to take us to a second bus which would get us back to Ma’ale Adumim, by which point I was more than ready for beddy-bye. However, there was Natania, waiting for our arrival. “I have some good news and some bad news. Actually, I have some bad news and some more bad news.” “OK?” “The bad news is that I broke a bottle of wine. The worse news is that, we’re down a bottle of wine and we’re up to kitties.” “What?” Natania pointed to Mimi’s bed, which our old cat rarely uses as our bed is more comfortable. There in the bed, with the heating pad on, were two very small felines, upon inspection less than a week old – their eyes were not open yet and they could not walk. As our daughter explained it, on her way to the mall earlier in the evening, she had seen two local kids carrying this kittens, an unusual activity in and of itself. When Natania returned home, she found these two pathetic little critters abandoned in front of our building.
I know that there are billions of people on the planet who would have gone about their business, not giving the matter any thought. But Natania was raised in her mother’s home; she would be as likely to head into the wadi with a can of gasoline and start a forest fire as she would leave these kittens to die of exposure and starvation. Make no mistake about it, those kittens would have been dead within a few hours. That doesn’t mean that Barbara and I were thrilled and delighted to see these newcomers (Mimi had already come down, sniffed at them, and, determining that they were no threat to her hegemony, walked away). Barbara’s response was, “Natania, the kittens are yours. You are going to have to get up and feed them.” I took another tack, inquiring before I headed upstairs to bed, “Natania, which bottle of wine did you break?”
Yes, this saga will be continued. What did you think?

Leon and Leo

Where we last left off: We had just watched tens of thousands of common cranes take off, flock by flock, in military precision from the feeding areas in the Hula Valley bird sanctuary. Tired from a full day of standing around and squawking, they were presumably asleep. It was now getting dark, and we had two extremely important activities on our agenda before the four of us, Barbara and I, Jeff and June could rest our own weary bones: eating dinner and checking into our rooms at the tzimmer. Back in The States, if you were in the middle of nowhere, you would be in serious trouble if you needed or wanted a kosher restaurant. We were near Kiryat Shemonah, and there we had a choice of restaurants, winding up at a place where the four of us had a fine meal for about $70. Finally, we headed off to our tzimmer, really a series of cabins on Kibbutz Gonen. The place was somewhat off the beaten path; in fact, the middle of nowhere would have seem crowded by comparison. But our accommodations were fine (we even had a Jacuzzi in our room which we were much too tired to deal with). The next morning, we were up bright and early for breakfast, stopping first at the little ‘zoo’ to check out the baby lambs. Our morning repast, kibbutz style, was certainly an improvement over what we had been fed at the Tel Hai guest house on the earlier tiyul which I chronicled in these pages; at least the eggs weren’t powdered. (My financial secretary tells me that the retail prices were comparable for both these places; Gonen was definitely a better value.) It was hard not to notice the large group of developmentally disabled adults who were also staying there. I wondered to myself if any of them on their own could do what the cranes do, negotiate a journey from Europe to Africa using their innate ability to form mental maps.
Speaking of Tel Hai, that was our first stop of the morning. Not the guest house, but the national monument nearby – another place we had not yet been to. Here is the tribute to a small group of men who died in the 1920’s defending the small Jewish settlements in the northern Galil against marauding Arabs, the most famous defender being the renowned Yosef Trumpeldor – he who allegedly uttered something like “It is good to die for one’s country.” (itself a paraphrase of an old Latin quotation) with his last breathe. Those who actually knew him were convinced that, if he said anything at all, it would have been something like the Russian equivalent of “Oh ________.” There is a small statue there of a lion with his head tilted, ready to roar, probably as well known to Israelis as the MGM lion is to many of us. (Here’s a phenomenal factoid to impress your friends. What’s the name of the lion who appears in the MGM movie logo? The most recent one is named Leo [how’s that for being original], although there were four predecessors: Slats, Jackie, Tanner, and George.)
Jeff hit us with some information that may seem more relevant to our lives. The original agreement between England and France carving up this region left France in charge of Lebanon and the northern Galil. However, after the on-going fighting between our guys and the Arabs, the French washed their hands of the whole business and turned the area below Mount Hermon over to the British. If the French had not done so, a decent chunk of the Galil would probably be part of Lebanon today.
Enough of lions and semi-mythic heroes. Our last scheduled stop was the official Hula nature preserve, very close to the bird sanctuary. A very quiet, peaceful place, except when we passed the small screening room where they were showing a film about migratory birds. I wondered out loud: who can make more noise, fifty thousand cranes or thirty Israeli school children? The preserve is a place for people to wander around and get a sense of what the Hula Valley must have looked like back in 1950. There are trails, a lookout station, and a long boardwalk, some of it enclosed. Lots of different birds, water buffalos (not native), turtles, enormous catfish, maybe two foot long (also not native). We walked and walked and came back to where we started so that we too could see the film. No wonder the kids were screaming! The movie is about eighteen minutes long, and it’s in 3D with amazing effects: things shoot out at you; you get sprayed with water, the seats shake. Not only do they get your attention, you get a good sense about the trials and tribulations of the migratory bird, avoiding death by gunshot, poisoning, destruction of their resting places, and the many vicissitudes of traveling thousands of miles virtually non-stop.
Speaking of traveling, we all needed to get back, so we headed south, stopping in what passes for a mall in Beit Shean for lunch and then retracing our path (except that this time we took the road on the east side of the Kinneret instead of the west side), arriving in Maale Adumim a little before four in the afternoon. Just enough time to take a nap and get ready for the concert.
I didn’t tell you about the concert??!! OK. Shortly after we arrived in The Land in 2007, we found out about ‘Etnachta’ (nothing to do with the trope for the Torah reading), a series of chamber music concerts held at 5PM on Mondays throughout most of the year. IT’S FREE. You show up half an hour or an hour before the concert to get your tickets. Oh yes, it’s at the Jerusalem Theater, or should I say the Jerusalem theaters, because it is actually a complex of theaters, for music, for drama, for films, all in one very large building – with a book and music store, a café, and lots of room for visual artists to show their work. We don’t go all the time; it depends on our availability and what’s being performed. The only down side to the concerts is the woman announcer who comes onstage and goes on f-o-r-e-v-e-r about the composers and the piece being performed and the musicians and where they studied and where they have performed, remembering to repeat the names of the players and what they are performing at least four times before and after – all in very high Hebrew which I may or may not understand – which is just as well.
Anyway, we were there about six weeks ago only to discover our friends Bernice and David at the same concert. At the intermission, we all looked at each other with the same thought. Did you hear what I just thought I heard? Are they giving away FREE tickets to the concerts that week of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein in which they will be playing the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz and Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. That’s what it sounded like. So we went down to the lobby and, sure enough,, that’s what they were doing. So we wound up hearing a very fine orchestral concert, sitting in about the sixth row on the left, and it didn’t cost us a shekel.
The Monday of the week I am describing brought us again to the Jerusalem Theater with David and Bernice, and the nice lady again announced that there were tickets available for the concert on Wednesday and Thursday, the same performers doing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony – OK, this time it would cost us fifty shekels per, but $26 for two tickets was still one heck of a bargain. Our friends wanted to get there early to meet family members so they picked us up about 6PM, two hours after we got back from the north, which turned out all for the best because while our friends were hanging out with their family, we got to walk around and look at the art. Surprise! Of all nights to be there, we happened to arrive in time for several official openings for the art exhibitions; the artists themselves were there with lots of people, and wine was being poured as if it were water. Now I’m not proud; you offer me a glass of wine and I’ll take it. If there’s a refill in the offing, my glass is as good as anybody else’s. And as I only need one hand to hold a wine glass, that left the other hand free for the cup of coffee I went and purchased at the concession stand.
I had always wondered who gets to show their work on the walls of the Jerusalem Theater; and then Barbara told me from someone she knows who knows the situation, that it’s mostly a matter of money. If one is willing to pay the several thousand shekels fee, one can show one’s work – which might account for the wide variety and quality of art we’ve seen there. One will certainly be assured that a lot of art lovers will see the work, but still, that’s a hefty sum to shell out. Fortunately for all concerned, this night there was some excellent work for us to see. Right by the entrance was Yohanan Lakicevic, the creator of Kluv Hazahav, a play on words which works better in English “The Golden Cage,” pun definitely intended. His watercolors were inspired by the “warm relationship” he developed with his grandfather’s two armchairs, brought along when the family emigrated to Israel from then Yugoslavia in 1951. The artist created a series of pictures, many of which depict an elderly couple, perhaps married just a little too long, sitting in these armchairs and saying out loud to each other things which they shouldn’t even have been thinking. I enjoyed the framed illustrations so much that I shelled out a hundred shekels for an autographed copy of his book. How was I going to carry it?; both of my hands were already occupied. That’s what we have spouses for!
Around the corner and up the stairs was a group show of work by students of the Jerusalem Studio School, whose director, Israel Hershberg, is my kind of guy. I picked up a handout, a copy of an article entitled “The New Realism” from a year old issue of The Jerusalem Report, in which the journalist Anne Sassoon wrote: “Hershberg’s enthusiasm for the art he loves is only equaled by his disgust for the art he despises. After a few decades when art critics, curators and historians have been ruling the roost in the art world, intimidating artists and buyers alike – and only now, perhaps, being toppled by the gallerists, who are overpowering even them – Hershberg is a vehement and refreshing voice of opposition.” Oh joy! Someday, I’ll devote an article about my forays to various museums and galleries in Israel and some of what passes for art in them, and being totally stymied by the verbiage used ostensibly to explain the art but which actually creates an artificial universe of its own to keep normal people out. But not now; that’s another topic. I was more interested in the work on the walls. What Hershberg does is give his students reproductions of ancient sculptures and renaissance or baroque paintings to study and absorb. The students work on producing large (two and three feet high) charcoal drawings, black and white reproductions of the originals, not timid, stilted copies, but renderings done with brio and panache (wasn’t that a vaudeville duo?). I was truly enjoying this student work,, but……… the chimes began to ring. The concert was going to begin in a few minutes. Time to go to our seats, this time dead center, in about the sixth row. At times like this, I wonder how much two seats like this would set me back at Carnegie Hall – if I had to pay for them.
In a venue like this, it doesn’t matter where you sit as far as hearing the music is concerned. But when there are sixty to hundred musicians on stage, the closer you are, the better you can see each of them: the short redheaded woman all the way in the back who is the principal percussionist; the tall blonde woman next to the conductor’s stand who is the principal violinist and therefore the concertmaster. You can look at each and every violinist on the left side or violist on the right side, seated in pecking order; and you can think about being the last two violinists out of thirty and how good you have to be to be in the ‘backest’ row of a symphony orchestra. You can look at any one of the musicians and wonder about his life and imagine where he will go after the concert is over. You can try to match up the musicians with the list of names in the program. There is Vladimir and Olga, probably trained in the Former Soviet Union, and Rami and Sigal who were born in The Land, where classical music is less emphasized in the school system (much like the U.S.). You can look at the aggregate as they come on stage and listen as a hundred musicians proceed to tune up. And you can think about a day like this, where in the morning you were looking at twenty or so slate-grey turtles huddled together on a sunny spot on a log, and now you are seeing a hundred musicians dressed in black spread out on the stage of a large auditorium.
At that point in time, the conductor, Leon Botstein, (who is also the president of Bard College in his spare time) made his appearance, wearing his conducting jacket, replete with tails. He proceeded to give a long scholarly dissertation about Mahler and his music – in English, of course. It’s easy to spot the native-English speakers in such an audience. Just look to see who is reading the program on the English side, and who is reading it in Hebrew – like the people on my left. How much did they, or others like them in the audience, understand of Botstein’s academic presentation? That’s how I feel very often: I understand the topic (Oh, he’s talking about so and so), but somehow the nuances of the matter are lost in my mental translation. (Was the answer yes or no?) But not being fluent in Hebrew here in The Land is my problem. Should, however, the audience in the Jerusalem Theater need to know English to go to a concert? I’m assuming that everyone in the orchestra knows enough of my mother tongue to follow their Anglophonic conductor.
Leon Botstein finished his introduction, turned and signaled the orchestra that it was time to begin (everyone has had ample time to tune up by now). Mahler’s ninth symphony which lasts about an hour and a half would be performed without intermission. Plenty to listen to; plenty to consider; plenty to think about. For one thing, Mahler is much more difficult to perform than either Tchaikovsky or Berlioz, and I could detect passages which were a little ragged. Overall though, well done. At some point, I began to wonder what the musicians themselves would make of the program notes: “Gradually bits of aggressive motives start to infiltrate the lyrical intermezzo, and the descending scales in the harp signal the beginning of the end of this part and the return to the rondo. The coexistence of contrasts fighting an eternal war reaches in this movement its maximal expression……” Who would have thunk it? If I had only known……….
Poor Mahler! Overwhelmed in today’s Jerusalem by excess verbiage. Despised in Vienna while he was alive for who he was, a “Jewish dwarf,” even though he had converted out – at least on paper – for the sake of his career (no ‘imperial’ positions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire could be occupied by Jews). A man not blessed with good health who wrote symphonies in his spare time when he wasn’t conducting other people’s music. I wonder if he could have negotiated a journey from Europe to Africa using his innate ability to form mental maps.

Overnight in the Hula Valley Part 1: ISLAGIATT

Even from an exceptionally out-of-the-box person like me, this may seem a bit odd, but I remember those days so many years ago standing for an hour or more in front of a large enclosure where the deer and the antelope played, part of the African Plains exhibit at the ‘Bronx Zoo,’ and beginning to think about animal behavior and the subtlety of Divine intervention. One may wonder about the thought processes of people, but take it a step further, how and what do animals think? And how does that relate to a universal intelligence? I remembered those conversations with myself as we were watching flocks of common cranes (that’s what they’re called) in the Hula Valley last week. But how we even got up there is a story in itself.
Instead of being up north on Wednesday, we were supposed to be in the Negev from Thursday until Monday, but our friend Richard, who had planned that trip, did something nasty to his ankle, so the Sunday before we had to call off our trip. Fortunately for us, we were all able to cancel our reservations at the local tzimmer (guest house) without any penalty. It just happened that on Monday (are you following this?), Barbara called our friends Jeff and June to arrange for us to meet for lunch some day, and June mentioned that they were planning an overnight trip to the Hula Valley. When Barbara responded, “That sounds wonderful,” June invited us to come along. We were able to make a reservation for a room at the same tzimmer where they were staying, so we were good to go. Wednesday at eight in the morning, they picked us up in their rented car, and off we went.
There is a burgeoning cottage industry here in The Land to train tour guides, and part of that is to train English-speaking guides for the Anglos here, as well as those of you from abroad who visit us from time to time. Jeff decided to take the course, even though he does not expect to make his livelihood as a guide. But it’s a great way to learn about the history, geography, and archeology of the region which he can then pass on to his family, local friends, and visitors. The course is not cheap and it’s time-consuming, but you get a lot out of it. Certainly it was worth it for us to have Jeff around!
We have taken this route before: east on route 1 from Jerusalem until the road ends near Jericho, and you either go north on route 90 to Tiberias and from there up to Kiryat Shemona, or you can go south on the same road to the Dead Sea and down to Eilat. But each time we have traveled this way, we get to see different things – depending on the guide. In all the times we have been this way, nobody thought to stop at The Lido, an abandoned hotel built by the British, which is smack dab at the crossroads. However, Jeff had learned about this place in his course and was eager to show it to us. Talk about a modern archaeological site! There are quite a few abandoned buildings, in varying degrees of decay, along this road, ignored except by graffitists, but nothing quite like The Lido. This must have been a swell place in its day, with a mural going all around the ballroom. I am convinced that if one came here at the right time, say a summer evening when it was quiet and there was no one else there, and one listened very carefully, one could still hear the clink of glasses and possibly the faint conversation of British officers and their wives stationed in the area. Oh yes, and the muffled music coming from the bandstand. But when we where there it was morning, and there was a full tour group there, as well as two armored cars worth of soldiers looking out into the desert beyond. Actually, one could look at the mural and, from the gaping holes in the wall, see the countryside at the same time.
Going on, we found the gas station with the huge model of the Jordan valley which we had seen with Ezra Rosenfeld on an earlier tiyul. Jeff had heard about this place and wanted to check it out. Now if one is discussing the Jordan Valley – from a geological point of view, that is – one is talking about the Syrian-African rift (which could be, but isn’t, a metaphor for the politics of the region). Let me explain this to you graphically: find yourself a map of the Hudson Valley (or something similar for those few of you who don’t live in New York or New Jersey. Cut the map in half so that the each state is on a different piece. Reassemble the two pieces and, slowly, slowly, move one side up and the other side down, and keep doing that so that Washington Heights and Fort Lee stop being opposite each other but are now miles apart. In fact, Fort Lee is now opposite Ossining. Your new map might seem peculiar, but there are no consequences otherwise – to your two dimensional model. In real life when this happens, as it did here, shifts in the tectonic plates cause all sorts of movement, so that – I can’t say suddenly because we are dealing with huge numbers of geological years – the earth has buckled and there are now are mountains and plateaus – like the Golan Heights – where there had been flat land before. Plus we are dealing with other interesting phenomena, like most of the northern area being under water so that the Kinneret was once connected to the Mediterranean. You learn about good stuff like that in a tour guide school.
I also realized along the way that you get a different perspective sitting next to the driver in a car from what you notice on a bus. Obviously you’re closer to the ground, but you are more likely to be paying close attention to what is passing by. For one thing, you’re less likely to take a nap when you’re the one who has to make certain that the driver isn’t taking one. Anyway, we kept going, past certain landmarks that are starting to look familiar, stopping for lunch at Beit Shean (we still haven’t been given the time to explore the ancient ruins there), and for pit stops, until, sof sof (finally) we arrived at the Hula Valley and the bird sanctuary there.
Now there’s all kinds of information you need to know, both geological and zoological to appreciate what was in store for us.. First of all, there’s the matter of bird migrations because five hundred million of our feathered friends make their way back and forth from Europe to Africa every years and cross over Israel along the way (that’s part of the charm of The Land). Why? You ask. Because Israel is in a way the narrowest part of a two way funnel; it is a convenient and hospitable bit of land right in between the vast areas of these two continents, a perfect landing place for the weary avian traveler. And what would be the equivalent of The Lido for these visitors, where there are plenty of fish, insects, and plant life to eat? The Hula Valley, the low-lying area between the Galil and the Golan Heights. Much of the area was a shallow lake never more than ten feet deep which, even though the birds loved it, was considered a large malaria-rife swamp; until the early 1950’s, when the newly formed Zionist state undertook an enormous ‘reclamation’ project, draining the area to eliminate malaria, and turning a lot of land in a small country into extremely fertile fields for farming, to grow food for an ever-increasing population.
Not so fast. As the saying goes, “You can’t fool ‘Mother Nature.’” There’s also, ISLAGIATT, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ The world is filled with similar examples of ecological hubris. For example, the headlines to an article in a recent Wall Street Journal says in most succinctly, “Green Revolution in India withers as subsidies backfire.” Then “Overuse of one type of fertilizer degrades the soil, causing crop yields to fall and import levels, food prices to rise.” At first everything seems great, but slowly, year by year, ‘nature’ starts to get even. Once the Hula Valley was drained, it began year by year to lose its fertility (don’t ask me to explain the process; this is not one of my areas of expertise.) The point is that we can consider ‘Mother Nature’ as an ally or an implacable foe. After almost fifty years of essentially battling with the Hula Valley, recently the Israeli government began a strategic retreat and re-flooded a small part of what had been the lake and the swamp. With the prompting of some people or groups who knew what they were doing, an agreement was reached between the nature preserve and the neighboring farmers, so that the preserve would feed the birds and the farmers would stop using toxic chemical pesticides. The birds continue to feast on the rodent population but leave the crops alone. Everyone is happy, especially the birds.
If you have seen the Hitchcock movie, The Birds, you may think that you have seen a lot of these winged creatures, silly person, you. As Al Jolson (and if you don’t whom I’m talking about, we have a serious communications problem) was wont to say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” We arrived at the bird sanctuary in time to take a leisurely stroll around part of the premises. Then the real fun began. We joined a large group of people for the 4:30 ‘show.’ We went aboard what I can only describe as several rows of stadium seats on wheels, enclosed on several sides, pulled by a tractor, and we set out to meet and greet the birds. At this time of the year, the place is overrun with Grus Grus, known to friend and foe as the Common Crane. When I say overrun, what I mean by that is that if you assigned each of these creatures its own seat in a large stadium (and you found a way for them to take their assigned seats), you wouldn’t have many empties. There were tens of thousands of them hanging out in or near the shallow water, each flock in its own area, all making a considerable racket. And it was feeding time, which meant that another tractor, pulling a combine, was passing in their midst, scattering tons and tons of corn seeds. The birds were used to the tractors and ignored our presence, fairly close to where they were hanging out. We were fortunate enough to be on the best trip of the day because it would soon be time for the birds to abandon their day time areas and fly where they spent the nights. Sure enough, one group of cranes took off; and then another; and then another, each flock waiting its turn, not going until the sky was clear of the previous group. Soon it was dusk, and soon it began to get darker and the sky began to change colors; and the birds kept taking off, flying low to the ground, until every bird was gone and the whole area was eerily silent. In another two weeks, we were told, every last crane would leave for their summer habitats in I-don’t-know-where. If you took the time to notice and think about it, you might come to realize that you were looking at perfect flying machines. No human engineer could develop a more ergonomically sound craft than these birds.
There’s a lot to think about. Having seen a film documentary entitled “Winged Migration” several years before, I had some basic knowledge of the extraordinary flying habits of these migratory creatures, traversing a predestined route of thousands of miles twice a year, leaving from the same place and returning without fail (assuming they survived the journey) to the same place. The obvious question which any thinking person would ask is, how do they do that: how do they know just when to go, where to go, how to return, what route to take? There are some standard answers: genetic programming, for one; or the ability to detect magnetic fields; hormonal changes; the ability to recognize habitats and form mental maps. Having been told all that, have you learned anything? Seriously. When you are told that a bird with a brain the size of the top half of your thumb forms mental maps, might you want to inquire how that is possible? When you observe dozens of flocks of cranes figuring when to take off for their nighttime resting place one flock at a time – which is essentially what controllers are paid to do at airports, using sophisticated equipment – and someone tells you that birds are genetically programmed to do that, maybe, just maybe, you’d want to know how that works. Was Shakespeare genetically programmed to write plays? When we talk about something being programmed, that sort of implies the existence of a programmer, doesn’t it? I’m not writing this to prove a point, any point, because there are some things you can’t really prove. But let me quote from parts the opening paragraph of the prologue to a book entitled “The Hidden Face of God,” by the scientist and author Gerald L. Schroeder, which I believe is relevant to this discussion:
“A single consciousness, an all-encompassing wisdom, pervades the universe. The discoveries of science, those that search the quantum nature of subatomic matter, those that explore the molecular complexity of biology, and those that probe the brain/mind interface, have moved us to the brink of a startling realization: all existence is the expression of this wisdom…. Every particle, every being, from atom to human, appears to have within it a level of information, of conscious wisdom….. There is no hint of it in the laws of nature that govern the interactions among the basic particles that compose all matter. The information just appears as a given, with no causal agent evident, as if it were an intrinsic facet of nature.”
Consider that and form your own conclusions. On that tantalizing thought, I will join the birds and conclude part one of this article.

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.