Some Thoughts on My Birthday

Times does go by when 'you're having fun.' It's now been over a month since the party we held to celebrate my reaching the big 7-Oh; and people are still coming over to wish me a 'happy birthday.' A lot has happened since then: a trip to The States and then the preparations for Pesach. It goes without saying that I delivered a few (?) choice words to the assembled throng at my big bash. Before time inexorably passes by and I have forgotten the gist of what I said, let me do a passable re-creation of my words of wisdom – in the oft chance that you weren't available to hear it in the original.

It is customary at gatherings of this sort to include a reference to a Jewish source when you're going to say something. So let me quote you something from page 44 of a new translation of “Finding Time Again,” the last volume of Marcel Proust's À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. In an entirely different context, he wrote, “It is all a matter of chronology.” Now, I might have put it differently, something like “Timing is everything.” But, way to go, Marcel! You were reading my mind some twenty years before I had one.

One thing I want to make very clear: I am hoping to be around for a while, both for selfish reasons and because Barbara still believes that I am worth more to her alive than dead. Nonetheless, when you reach a certain age, you tend to spend some time remembering your past. That can be dangerous. If you are ever engaged in climbing the face of a cliff, the one thing you definitely do not want to do is to look down to where you started. When I look back at my own childhood, two things stands out. The obvious one is how long ago that was and how different the world seemed to be, and that's scary. But there's something else: how divorced my childhood was from what was facing the Jewish People at that time. There I was on E. 208 St. in The Bronx innocently learning how to walk. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jewish children and their parents in Europe were being marched to the Camps and their death. While the children in my class were learning to recite “I pledge allegiance to the flag....” and to sing “O say can you see...,” half way around the world a life-and-death struggle was going on to create a Jewish state. It's as if there were a document with two columns and you need to merge them into one coherent text. Maybe that's one reason why we came to Israel.

Now a skeptic might interject: “Well you took your sweet time about it, and you waited until all the hard work in building the State had been done.” And I would have to respond that we did indeed take our sweet time in getting here. But I question whether all the hard work has been done. Just as I can look out our living room windows and see the storm clouds rolling in over the Jerusalem hills, we can all see the signs of danger looming ahead. And the thing is that we have virtually no leadership, either political or religious, to guide us through the dark days ahead. That's truly scary and, yes, there's plenty more to be done.

The skeptic might continue: “All well and good. But what have you actually accomplished since you've been here?” I can answer that! Let me start with the articles I've been writing. Collected together, they would make up a volume of almost 500 pages. I've been working on a novel the last few years, and I promised a friend that by the time her eight year old son is a bar mitzvah, it will be finished. Also, I just started my sixth assignment editing the English language commentary of a Jewish text. Speaking of English, most Mondays, I'm at Hebrew U., tutoring students in – what else? – English. Thanks to my friend Ron, we've been able to slog through two hundred plus pages of Rambam's Mishne Torah, which we will finish learning in another twenty years or so. While I'm at it, let me thank Nachum for the amazing shiurim which he has been giving for I-don't-know-how-many years. What else? I started singing again, and I'm in the chorus of a second musical production. They also have me painting sets, not what you'd expect me to be doing! Of course, I keep doing my photography when I have time. It's amazing how much you can get done when you don't have to waste time making a living.

There are some more subtle things to mention. We've had the pleasure of participating in the wedding of our older daughter Tina to David right here in The Land. And Natania served in the first Jewish army since the Bar Kochba rebellion. One other thing, though. Looking around this room, there are only a handful of people here that we knew before we first came to Ma'ale Adumim a little less than four years ago. We have 'acquired' the rest of you since then. I should mention that Barbara and I will be leaving for a trip next week back to The States, one I'm dreading, basically to see her mother, who is in failing health as she approaches her 90th birthday, and to hook up with my brother, who is also not doing well. (Perhaps I should express my gratitude that I seem to be in reasonable shape for my age.) Everywhere we lived, we also made wonderful friends, some of whom I am looking forward to seeing when we go back. And everywhere we lived, I was involved with the shul. You know, the tikun olam (healing the world) bit. But while I was always glad to pitch in and make things better, I never had the sense that I was building the Future of the Jewish People.

It's different here. Everyone of you, whether you've been here for twenty weeks or twenty years, is here for a reason. We are all in our own way contributing something to the building of this country and The Future of the Jewish People. I respect and admire all of you for that, and I value your friendship more than I can say. On that note, let me resume my bar-tending responsibilities.

Moshe Pinchas and the Make Believe Ballroom

It’s Make Believe Ballroom Time,

Put all your cares away.

All the bands are here

To bring good cheer your way….

(Theme music for Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom

Written by Martin Block/Harold Green/Mickey Stoner and performed by

The Glenn Miller Orchestra and the Modernaires)

Moshe Feldenkrais, or if you want to be precise, Moshe Pinchas Feldenkrais. That’s a name that probably doesn’t come up in the course of your everyday conversation, if ever. Maybe because he led a boring life, never did anything, never went anywhere. He turned up all alone in Palestine in 1919, when he was fifteen, worked as a laborer, got some education and worked as a mapmaker; went to Paris and got degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, then his doctorate at the Sorbonne, after which he stayed in France and built a generator used for atomic fission experiments. He got to England before the Nazis arrived in Paris and conducted anti-submarine research for the British admiralty. He returned to Israel in 1951 to direct the Israeli army department of electronics. Ho-hum, just a typical day at the office. In his spare time, Feldenkrais mastered judo and jiu-jitsu, wrote books on self-defense, and started developing an eponymous method of bodily healing, which he devoted the latter years of his life teaching.

What does any of this have to do with our sheltered lives here a little bit east of Yerushalayim? It has to do with my wife and personal trainer (one and the same). Barbara has always maintained that I am worth more to her alive than dead. That’s true from a strictly financial point of view, but I have to hope her interest is deeper than that. She has noted that, over the years, my body has lost some flexibility – a natural consequence of the aging process. She had signed up for ‘Feldenkrais’ at the local Gil Hazahav and was anxious for me to join her. And so I did (although you knew that already).

Let me describe what goes on at ‘Feldenkrais.’ You and ten to twenty other people lie on the floor on a mat (not the same mat!). The teacher, Nava, goes through a long explanation about what’s going on, and then we begin a series of exercises in which all parts of the body go in different directions at the same time. Now all of this palavering is going on in Ivrit, which means that I understand precious little of what is going on. To be fair, most of the exercises are so complicated that I wouldn’t understand what she wants us to do – if she were speaking in English. As far as her explanations of the methodology are concerned, all I get out of it is that I’m supposed to remember to breathe.

The first session I attended, Nava, realizing my linguistic limitations, began explaining some of the basic points in my language of choice; whereupon a gentleman from the FSU piped up, “Let him learn Hebrew.” Thanks for your kind thoughts, Dmitri, I’ll remember you in my will. The teacher pointedly ignored him and went on about her business.

After the first few sessions, I realized what my problem was. I was so intent on translating the instructions that I was constitutionally incapable of relaxing – which is the whole basis of ‘Feldenkrais.’ So now I don’t worry about understanding anything beyond some reasonably simple directions. Whatever everyone else is doing, I do. Nava goes around and corrects everybody anyway. The first several months, Barbara was next to me back-mat driving. However, the class got switched to a different day – one which is not convenient for her – so now I am on my own. The bottom line is that if you were to ask me what the Feldenkrais method is all about, I still have no idea. I just figure that anything that gets you to relax and stretch your muscles has some value – even if you’re doing it in a ‘foreign’ language.

The moadon gil hazahav, the kind of community center that is found the length and breadth of The Land. The one here costs you 180 shekels a year to join (about a dollar a week) plus the cost of the classes (Feldenkrais is 70 shekels a month). If you understand that gil in Hebrew means ‘age,’ and zahav mean ‘gold,’ you know what the deal is. Outside the building, under a pergola, a handful of elderly guys are always sitting playing cards – in between conversation. For all I know, the game goes on around the clock, because they always seem to be there. This group is distinct from a slightly larger but similar group which is always sitting inside the mall at one of the tables near the ice cream concession or the group of Russians who crowd around one particular bench near the fountain in the older shopping area which is on our way to the center of town.

If anyone is wondering where all these guys’ wives are hanging out all this time, they’re probably the ladies hanging out inside the ‘clubhouse,’ sitting around tables in the ante-room, snacking on biscuits and instant coffee, having a grand old time in Hebrew or Russian – depending on place of birth. With some difficulty, one can wend one’s way through this mob into the large all-purpose room where ‘Feldenkrais’ goes on.

Except that today, we’re here for something different. For a while last year, Barbara had joined an additional exercise class and was anxious to rejoin and for me to go with her (but you knew that already). We had started the week before, and I quickly figured out that this class would be a piece of cake. The instructor, Chanah, led the assembled through a series of exercises, moving our arms or legs, squeezing a ball or stretching a rubber whatever-you-call-it (gumi in Ivrit). In the middle of the session, I had a flash-back: there was nothing going on that I wouldn’t be doing if we had a bunch of motivated geezers shooting the jump shots of our youth and going up for rebounds on a basketball court. But we don’t, so I persevered. Our teacher was standing, facing us, so all I had to do was duplicate what she was doing – remembering to do the mirror image, which seemed to be beyond the grasp of several of the participants.

Chana uses a musical accompaniment to get everyone relaxed and in the right frame of mind to move around. I do not remember what she played the first week, probably the kind of inane Israeli pop music that goes in one ear, travels through the brain at the speed of light, and exits out the other side, making absolutely no impression whatsoever ; but this day, all of a sudden, what was I hearing? “Love is a many splendored thing…..” It couldn’t be. Was this a tape of Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom on the radio? If you’re old enough to remember the song (music by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Paul Francis Webster) from the 1955 movie of the same name, when was the last time you heard anybody perform it? And the original? There I was, dutifully mimicking the teacher’s motions, all the while trying to remember who the group was. The Four……Who? The Four Lads, The Four Tops? This is killing me. (I checked it out later; it’s the Four Aces – for anyone who cares.)

For the rest of the forty-five minutes, Chana’s Make Believe Ballroom kept on going. And I kept whispering to Barbara, “Johnny Mathis,” “I think that’s Vic Damone,” “That’s The Platters, one of their mega-hits ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’” That’s either Joni James or Patti Page, I’m not sure which.” Finally, Cole Porter’s ‘True Love,’ in which Grace Kelly joins Bing Crosby for the final chorus. For some cruel and inexplicable reason, Chana turned down the volume for the second half of the song. Good thing I have excellent hearing. Now this music is not my area of expertise; I’m better off with material from two to three decades before. Still, I grew up with this stuff and there are impressions and memories…….

I was, all the while, trying to keep enough of my faculties focused on what Chana was doing so I wouldn’t fall on my face or otherwise look stupid. After all, all the bands were here to bring good cheer my way. Yet I couldn’t help but keep looking around the room at the assembled throng trying to keep up with Chana and her moves. As far as I could tell, there was nobody except me and the spouse from our original side of The Pond. Had anyone else ever seen the movie or heard ‘Love Is a Many Splendored Thing’ sung in any language or dialect? Did anyone else have a clue who The Platters were? If they did, they were keeping it well hidden; not a glimmer of recognition. For all it mattered, it could just as well have been Yosi and the Chevra. And why should it – matter, that is? Who amongst them had had the chance to grow up in The Bronx, watching double features at the Loew’s Paradise? Who amongst them have ever huddled in a tunnel or underpass, working on a doo-wop number like ‘Sunday Kind of Love’? Maybe they were too busy fleeing Arab monarchies or enduring Soviet tyranny to pay attention to such idyllic joys.

When people ask me what I’m doing these days, my stock answer is usually “Aging Gracefully.” So there I am in the all-purpose room at the moadon gil hazahav, bending, flexing, twisting, rotating, hoping that I can keep remembering who I am, where I’ve been, and what I know. Maybe that’s what everyone else there is hoping to do.

Nachas and Its Ramifications

Let’s begin on a happy note: “shepping nachas.” Almost all of us understand, at some level, what that’s about – even though I would be hard-pressed to define what the verb sheppen “to shep” means, or even to figure out its derivation. We generally understand that you can’t do it for yourself. Even if you created a gadget that would block out cell-phone reception within fifty feet of you in all directions so that you could get some peace and quiet on a bus; and you won some prestigious award for this invention, you personally wouldn’t be “shepping nachas.” But let your grandchild recite two lines in the school play, you are free to “shep” away to your heart’s content.

That said, is “nachas” something which is quantifiable? Could somebody create a nachometer to measure the joy one is entitled to receive for something that happens? Then, you might ask, what is the most nachas that the average family might be able to receive – short of a member winning the Nobel Prize or being elected President?

Do you want to max out, or come within a fraction of an inch of doing so, on your nachas score? Here’s all you have to do. Attend the bat mitzvah party for your great-grand-daughter and be of sufficiently sound mind to enjoy it and well enough to get there on your own two feet. That’s it. Simple. Oh, you say, that as of this moment you’re not up to that stage in life? We’re not either. But you have to admit that, if you were, you’d be in the red zone on our make-believe machine. Of course, if one were to attend the wedding of this same great-grand-daughter………..

Some people get to be in that enviable position (at least the bat mitzvah part). One of them is Bracha Habshush, the matriarch of a family which Barbara met in 1967 and I became introduced to in 1980. At that time, Mrs. Habshush, the widow of the esteemed Temeni Rabbi Ohad Shalom Habshush – who had supported his family by running a small grocery store – was still living in the small apartment in the Yemenite neighborhood adjacent to Meah Shearim in which they had raised nine children, some of whom had to be farmed out to the homes of other family members because there wasn’t enough room at home for all of them to sleep. In 1980, the family was small enough, though, to gather in the large room of the apartment for Shabbat meals, which were prepared on a neft burner in a kitchen the size of your bathroom – maybe a little smaller – and eaten on a table carried through the streets of Jerusalem by one of the sons.

Let’s fast forward to a Tuesday afternoon in February 2011, and hundreds of people – cousins, close and distant, friends of the family, classmates of the celebrant – were gathered in a large room at the Park Hotel, one of several in a row on Jerusalem’s Sderot Herzl, for the bat mitzvah party for Sheni, the daughter of Yitzchak and Tzurit, the daughter of Bracha’s daughter Zehava. Knowing all of the siblings and having been to numerous Habshush clan celebrations over the years, I recognized most of the cast of characters. As I often do at these events, I look around and consider how the generational goings-on of the Habshush family fit into the broader context of how this wonderful country has grown and prospered. The delicious food we ate (as good as Sephardic cuisine gets) did not have to be prepared by family members as it would have once upon a time, and no one had to bring extra tables with them for all the invited guests. No, this extended Yemenite family has not become wealthy, but they are prospering because the State of Israel is thriving – despite all claims to the contrary.

But the family is having its simchas at banquet halls these days not just because they can afford it; they need the room. The six Habshush children living in The Land and their spouses have spawned over thirty grandchildren, who with their spouses have already produced……… Just do the math. Bracha, who needs to know, has a notebook with the names and birthdates of all her progeny; she showed it to us one day when we visited her in her apartment in Efrat, upstairs from the large home in which Noga, Yehoshua, and their children live. But, as all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren share the same strong Habshush genes, Bracha sometimes has trouble telling them apart. That’s what makes this country so different from many western nations, the sheer number of children turning into adults in front of your very eyes.

“The sheer number of children……” Most mornings I recite my morning prayers in front of the window of our living room and I can look out to a street, parts of Ma’ale Adumim, the neighboring Arab town, and the highway to Jerusalem. Right below us is a parking lot with ten spots, parallel to each other and perpendicular to the curb (like the supermarket lots in New Jersey). Here the spots are rather narrow, and it’s almost never that ten cars manage to squeeze in. But at 8AM, there’s a constant stream of vehicles coming in and out. A mother or a father will get out of the car and get his child or children out of the back seat and bring them either to the Leumit Clinic or to the gan (day care center) which shares the building. All kinds of people and all ages of children, but for an hour or so every morning, a constant stream. And then there are other parents walking their children to one of the several schools a few blocks from our building. That’s what we have, here a little bit east of Yerushalayim, children galore: boys in kippot or with spiked hair, girls in long skirts or skin-tight clothing. There are times when there is no room to stand on the #174 Egged bus because there are forty school kids taking up all the room. Somehow they all count as part of the as-of-yet unfulfilled promise to our patriarch Avraham that his descendents would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

There are, however, people – even some living in The Land – for whom the Divine promise to Avraham is a nightmare. Consider the following headline in a recent edition of Haaretz:
“Green Movement: Israel’s high birth rate not sustainable.” The accompanying article was about the conference Israel’s ‘Green Movement’ held the previous weekend in which, to be absolutely politically correct, they selected a male and female co-chairperson and signaled “an intention to address the ignored topic of the environmental implications of Israel’s high population growth rate.” According to the male member of this dynamic duo, Prof. Alon Tal of Ben-Gurion U. of the Negev, “The current population growth rate does not allow for sustainable development in Israel.” Therefore, he proposes that child allowances and other incentives to encourage larger families should be eliminated. “We are subsidizing our own ecological suicide,” Prof. Tal opines. “If the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea reaches twenty to thirty million…there will be no nature left to preserve.” In addition, the country will be unable to provide a decent standard of living to its citizens.

Interesting. Let’s put aside the fact that the professor’s projections may include everyone who lives here: Bedouins, Druze, and the other Arabs, none of whom are particularly interested in being Green. Let’s just consider the Jewish population for a moment. I wondered, if we start with 6,000,000, which is a few hundred thousand more than what our part of the population is these days, and we factor in an annual growth rate of two percent – which is what the article says it is – how many years would it take to get to 20,000,000? Math is not my strong point, and I’m a little rusty putting together spreadsheets, but with a little bit of effort I created a simple one, which told me that we would hit that number sometime around 2070. (Imagine how many progeny Mrs. Habshush would have by then!) Of course, there are other intangibles which no one can predict: like how long it will take you guys in The Exile or your progeny to make your way over here. That would throw a monkey wrench into my spreadsheet, if I may mix a metaphor or two. On the other side of the equation, the Green Movement, being Leftist in its orientation, probably assumes that large chunks of the area “between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean” will be given away to those ‘who are not particularly interested in being Green.’ That would also alter the number of people per square kilometer ratio.

But let’s go back to the original premise, that our birthrate here is “not sustainable.” And let’s put aside what we know to be true, that falling birthrates in China and parts of Europe are creating a demographic nightmare of a different kind. Let’s just focus on the meat and potatoes of the Green Movement’s thesis, that there are now, or soon will be, too many Jewish people in The Land, and perhaps in the world. Too many Jewish people, imagine that… We are just about reaching the number of us who were around in 1938, but our birth rate is too high. Collectively, we should stop having so many children. I would turn it around and say that what is “not sustainable” is the predicament we were in seventy-three years ago and one hundred and seventy-three years ago and five hundred and seventy-three years ago when The Nations were free to mow us down, as if we were grass on a suburban lawn. I would say that it was our extinction rate was “not sustainable.”

Is it not enough that Israel needs to spend up to half its budget to defend ourselves against our neighbors, do we now have to do battle with disciples of Thomas Malthus in our own midst? Even though the newspaper article (written by Zafrir Rinat) mentioned us that “The Green Movement failed to gain Knesset seats in its first election, in 2009 and its membership has declined since then………” and that other leaders within the party disagreed with this position, should we let down our guard and not be concerned? Never underestimate the ability of bad ideas to spread in inverse relation to their merit. Never for a minute underestimate the willingness of the Nations to think badly of us: for example – and this wrinkle was new to me – that Israel committed ethnic cleansing or genocide in 1948 when we were defending ourselves against the Arabs who were doing their damndest to drive us into the sea. Never overestimate the effects of our appeal to reason: that our tiny bit of room is too small to divide further, that we are entitled to defend ourselves against our enemies, that even twenty million Jews is a pittance when there are billions of Chinese, on and on.

I therefore nominate Bracha Habshush to be our Defense Minister. She and her little notebook, along with the similar efforts of matriarchs and patriarchs throughout The Land, may well be our best weapon against our external enemies and the “Useful Idiots,” the well-meaning folks within our midst who tell us that we have too much land or too many people, that we defend ourselves too well or that we aren’t nice enough to our foes. Keep adding more names to your little book, Mrs. Habshush. May you never run out of pages and may your ink never run dry. And keep “sheppen nachas,” or whatever Yemenites do instead.

See You Around, or A Funny Way to Sip Wine

A friend of ours who is gainfully employed at the AACI (Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel) tipped us off to an event of great interest which they were co-sponsoring along with several other communal and religious groups: a wine tasting with cheese, featuring the most prominent writer on Israeli wines, Daniel Rogov. The Great Synagogue on King George St. was hosting the event, and it was billed as a fund-raiser for a group which provides support for chayelim bodedim, Lone Soldiers – some of whom are Israeli youth from broken homes, but, more often than not, idealistic Jewish youth from all over the world who decide that defending the Jewish people for real is a better option than fighting an imaginary foe in the computer game du jour.

Wine and cheese!!! One of mankind’s sublime culinary combinations. The very thought of the event quickened my step and brought a song to my heart. We alerted our friends in Har Halutz – the ones with the wine cooler and the son who gives wine tastings – who joined us, and we met up with a number of people we knew from The ‘Hood,’ all of whom are recent olim. There had to be speeches; you can’t have an event of this kind without them. First was a gentleman from The Great Synagogue (I recognized him as having moderated the debate during the last election here), who spoke about the Shabbat dinners for 200 soldiers which his shul hosts. Then two men from the Lone Soldiers organization spoke briefly about their efforts. Finally, it was Rogov’s turn.

This – along with the chance to sip some wine and nibble some cheese – was what we had come for. Surely, he would have something interesting and informative to say. After all, there aren’t many men and women who can say that they have sampled every wine produced in Israel, kosher and non-, over the last 20+ years, wrote about them, rated them, and compared them to wines grown around the world. I’ve always wondered, for example, how he or other critics figure out the ratings they give: this one gets and 87, the other gets an 85. If I do a taste test with a bottle of each, will I be able to tell the difference? When he says that a particular wine should be consumed before 2013, how does he know that? All kinds of questions, starting with the ABC’s of wine tasting to advice to the connoisseurs. What we got instead was a standard stump speech: a little bit about the how’s, why’s, and when’s of improvement in the Israeli wine industry over the last thirty years, but mostly about the life and times of Mr. Daniel Rogov, wine taster, restaurant reviewer, and fair and impartial arbiter of taste.

To prove his point, he told us that he does not travel over ‘The Green Line,’ but that he is happy to meet with vintners whose product is produced in these places – as long as they travel to those parts of Israel where Rogov will venture. And….. Rogov will sample and review their products impartially. As I said, this must be Rogov’s standard stump speech, and I imagine that there are audiences who will give him a standing ovation in support of his self-imposed travel restrictions. Just not this crowd; dead silence.

The first thing I had done when we arrived at the Great Synagogue was to purchase – at a discount – Rogov’s most recent annual volume, “Wines of Israel, 2011,” coupled with a companion volume, “Rogov’s Guide to World Kosher Wines.” Usually, if I buy a book and the author is present, I have him autograph it. When he was finished with his little speech, Rogov went over to the table in the back where his work was on display. I thought to myself that I was happy to have the book (my 2008 edition is out-of-date), but I had no interest whatsoever in having his inscription in my copy. Maybe he doesn’t want his book traveling over ‘The Green Line’ either; maybe he doesn’t even want his signature going there. Maybe I’m not amused.

I’ve been thinking about this business of boycotting other Jews. It is true that I do it to some extent myself. If a restaurant doesn’t have a kashrut certificate, I won’t go in. But there’s no malice intended; I long for the day when their teudah arrives and I can become a proud patron. As far as more global considerations go, nothing doing. Imagine if somebody were to propose that we here in The Land boycott the Exile. (True, there are some rabbis here who insist on reminding one and all that it is forbidden to leave The Land except for certain specific reasons, a position universally ignored by the multitudes.) But despite my belief that the continued existence of five million Jews in random places on the planet is dangerous to their and our continued well-being, I will keep having a pleasant word for everyone, and, to the extent that I am able to traverse the continents, I will be happy to visit you wherever you are.

If someone says that he refuses to set foot in Yehudah and Shomron (a/k/a The West Bank), one question might be, Why not? Is it to prevent some form of spiritual contamination, to maintain some sense of moral superiority over the rest of us demented ‘settlers’ and our allies, or might it be from a conviction that we have no right to be there and the sooner we are expelled the better? Like many questions, this one leads to another. How should I deal with such a person and his boycott?

Back in The States, I developed a life-long fascination with eccentrics. One of my favorite persons was Jimmy, who would call to say he didn’t have time to talk with you, and then hang up. I cheerfully hobnobbed with people with bizarre diets and idiosyncratic religious practices; conspiracy theorists of all stripes; even people (shudder) who voted for the wrong political party. So if someone told me that he wouldn’t visit the Kotel – not because he preferred hanging out on the beach in Tel Aviv – but because Jews have no right to control the area around Har Habayit, I would simply add him to my list of odd-niks and leave it at that. After all, I wasn’t any closer to the Old City than he was, so who was I to talk?

But now that we have made it to The Land, can I afford to maintain such a bemused attitude? Am I unwittingly smiling at a crocodile? Consider our Connoisseur for a moment, a man who, by his own testimony, is fair and impartial when he reviews wines from places he will not visit. What would be his reaction if the fields in The Golan and the Judean Hills – where a lot of our finest wines are produced – were handed over to our enemies, and these vineyards were trampled and ripped out? A true wine aficionado should cringe at the thought, especially if one knew about the care and devotion involved in growing the grapes and producing the wine; but if you think that the we shouldn’t have been there to plant the vines in the first place……… Maybe, if he were consistent, Rogov wouldn’t review wines that he thinks should never have been produced. But who ever accused certain people of being consistent?

My mind was already on to other things, when about a week after the wine tasting, I noticed a little piece in the Jerusalem Post, part of a weekly feature called “Grapevine,” a kind of gossip column about social events in and around the capital. The writer mentioned the wine tasting and stated that Rogov showed “courage” by showing up at the right-wing bastion, The Great Synagogue, and announcing his self-imposed travel restrictions. I sent a letter to the editor (which they printed) with my opinion that Rogov was simply showing “poor judgment” and that the assembled throng was too polite to respond to his provocative and irrelevant remarks.

This incident must have gotten my juices flowing again because all of a sudden, something fairly obvious crossed my mind. Rogov’s yearly series of book is entitled “Wines of Israel,” not “Wines of Israel and The Occupied Palestinian Territories” (although I imagine the latter title wouldn’t pass muster with his publisher!). In the great propaganda war being waged around the world to de-legitimatize us, the author is on the wrong side of his own argument; in effect, he is sipping wine out of both sides of his mouth! Is ‘The Gush’ part of Israel, or is it part of ‘Palestine,’ (to me a fictitious state populated by a non-existent national group). And if the latter, why not list the Gush Etzion Winery, or the Golan Winery for that matter, in “Rogov’s Guide to World Kosher Wines,” which lists wines from “The Americas, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.” Why not add ‘Palestine’ to the list? On the other hand, if the Gush Etzion Winery, “(l)ocated at the Gush Etzion Junction near Jerusalem,” is in Israel, what’s all the fuss?

So I’m back to the question I raised before. What’s with these guys? Should I take Daniel Rogov seriously? What about friends, relatives, or acquaintances from The States who announce that they will be visiting The Land but who won’t come to Ma’ale Adumim – not because they’re on a very tight schedule, they’re too jet-lagged, they have no easy way to get here, or, quite correctly, because the selection of quality restaurants is much greater in Jerusalem – but because they won’t set foot over ‘The Green Line’ into ‘occupied territory?’ Never mind, as our friend Steve. L reminded me, that you can’t get from airport to Jerusalem without crossing over that imaginary line – at least for a short distance. Never mind that the ‘good’ side of the GL is littered with abandoned Arab villages – one of which is at the entrance to Jerusalem – while nobody, and I mean nobody, ever inhabited any part of Ma’ale Adumim until 1983 when a construction company started dropping pre-fab concrete walls into place. Never mind our historical claims to Ir David, Hebron, Shilo, and the like. Never mind that some of these folks who won’t come here are gainfully employed by Jewish organizations that assist us, providing goods and services to communities throughout Yehuda and Shomron. If Rogov is drinking wine out of both sides of his mouth, these conflicted souls are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Should I, then, take them seriously? Their version of tikkun olam (fixing the world) seems pretty lame to me, perhaps a tad self-serving. It would be easy to say to such a person: “You know what, I can’t take you seriously; it’s not worth my time arguing with you. Let’s have a beer as far from ‘The West Bank’ as possible and talk about our children, other interests, old times, and the like.” Or should I say, “I can’t take you seriously, but others might – and do. It is definitely not worth my time to argue over something which is a pet peeve for you and a matter of life and death for me. As the old saying might have said, ‘Takes two to boycott.’ See you around.” I like the sound of that, “See you around.”

Hatless in Ra'anana. Ruddigore Act 2

I just know that this sort of situation has happened to you too. You start a project, any kind of a project, and you have sooooooooo much time to get it done. Then you wake up one day and the time has flown by and, whether you feel the urge to panic or not, D-day is almost upon you………

We started rehearsing Ruddigore the end of September; the performances were scheduled starting December 28 – enough time to fall in love, start a career, lose or gain twenty pounds, watch a full season of American football games (not counting the post-season), the list is almost endless. We started rehearsing comfortably enough, singing while sitting on our fannies, holding our scores in our laps for dear life. As December crept upon us, we were trying our best to learn Arlene Chertoff’s dance routines and trying on parts of our costumes as we got them. Every rehearsal, Rob Binder would show up with more stuff that somebody could wear and hand it out. Most of the women in the chorus had only one outfit; the younger ones were outfitted as 1920’s flappers with wigs and dresses sewn for the occasion. For the gentlemen (I use the term loosely), it was a lot more complicated because we played different roles in each act.

You have already been introduced to Cedric (Bilgie) Bilgewater, my Act I persona. It turned out that a close approximation of Bilgie’s country apparel could be found in my own aron: a not-as-well-tailored seersucker jacket, a replica of a good straw hat (which I wear to shul on a summer Shabbat morning), and a perfect pair of white trousers. Almost perfect. Bilgie, being a few decades younger than me, is a little trimmer around the mid-section. The trousers would fit him just fine, but they were a little snug on me. Could I jettison, say, five pounds in a month? Or could I exercise away a half an inch or more in the same time? The answer was, sadly, no. No matter how much Shabbat dessert I eschewed and sit-ups I performed on a morning, the white cotton trousers remained resolutely snug. A compromise would have to be effected: a pair of blues that didn’t quite catch the spirit of the occasion; but, as I reminded Rob, breathing is good. All that was missing was an appropriate cravat. Bilgie, when he was away from his haunts at the Drones Club in London, was partial to bow-ties, which he wore despite the disparaging remarks of his ‘man’ Groves. Trouble was, I didn’t have one, either the real kind that you would need assistance to put on or the pre-made fake ones so prevalent in today’s more casual world. Fortunately, Rob had a few extra ones – the real kind – which Arlene conscientiously affixed before each performance – in Groves’ absence, of course.

Act II was another matter. Like everyone else in the men’s chorus, I would be playing the specter of an ancestor to the current baronet, in my case, the late Sir Frederick Murgatroyd, the fourth Baronet of Ruddigore. Nothing I owned remotely resembled what the British minor nobility of his time would have worn. However, by one of those amazing coincidences that seem almost impossible to fathom, an outfit was located for him that seemed an exact replica of what the Pirate King had worn in ‘Penzance.’ I received it a piece at a time over a several week period: the breeches, fastened by an eye-hook and antique Velcro on the right side; a gold-colored vest, fastened with about twelve snaps; a black coat with gold trim; a white shirt and sash; a pair of leggings that would serve as boots. There was no hat; a brown wig that had seen better days would have to do – but then the character was himself dead for about four hundred years. I imagine that with Groves’ help, I could have arrived on stage after the intermission fully changed in less than fifteen minute, but unaided…………

‘A piece at a time.’ Everything about the production was coming together, one item, one piece at a time – not just the costumes. Every Friday morning when I went to help with the sets, I could see what had been accomplished. The strange things I had cut or glued began to be an integral part of the scenery, in a way I could never had imagined. The only conclusion one could draw was that the lady in charge of designing the sets, Roxanne, had an imagination and a talent to take note of. As we got closer and closer to the actual performances, more and more people made themselves available, literally backstage: people to help with the sets, with the props, with makeup. All manner of curious family and friends were showing up for our rehearsals. Even an orchestra! From the very first rehearsal, our sole source of accompaniment had been Paul Salter and his keyboard. About a week and a half before we were set to open, about fifteen musicians showed up, this year’s version of ‘The New Savoy Orchestra’: a few native-born Israelis, a few originally from the British Isles, and the rest from – where else? – somewhere near the Volga. Collectively, they were…………awful, at least in the beginning. We sat there and scratched our collective heads and wondered what would be. What was Paul going to do? Well, one thing Paul was not going to do was get nonplussed (it would take a lot to get Paul nonplussed). Somehow, he got them ready so that the N.S.O. actually sounded pretty credible by the first performance. Not only that, he did it the hard way, because he never had exactly the same group of musicians from one evening to the next. Somebody always had another gig and sent in his place a cousin who also played the viola – someone who thought that G & S stood for Alexander Glazunov and Georgy Sviridov.

A piece at a time; a day at a time. Each of my days seemed more and more to be devoted to some aspect of the show. People were needed to man a ‘hot line,’ to help out would-be customers who were, for whatever reason, unable themselves either to call the Hirsch theater box office or go on-line to the Encore website and order their own tickets. At first, it meant simply being home on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 to 3 and getting an occasional phone call. But as we got closer to ‘show-time,’ more and more very polite British voices kept getting on my phone, to the point that I couldn’t get anything else done.

And I did have other things to get done. In the middle of November, I received an e-mail from a Jewish publishing outfit in The States. I had edited the commentary for a haggadah for them a few months before, and now they wanted me to “tweak” something else. It seemed like a lot of work (180 pages of actual text), but they would be paying me and I have a healthy regard for money. No problem; I should be able to finish the job by the end of the secular year. Except now, all these very polite people were inundating my phone line in the few free hours I thought I had.

It was easy to feel that one’s life was being swallowed up in a Ruddigorian black hole. We were no longer doing one or two rehearsals a week, each ending at a civilized 10PM – so that, thanks to Sara and her ride to the bus station, I could get off the bus in Ma’ale Adumim at around 11; we were now doing run-through’s of the entire show. All of us understood that there was no other way to get the job done, but I was crawling into bed at midnight, and there were others (maybe younger and more resilient) who had farther to travel than I.

The Monday before we opened, was a day designed to tax my limited supply of energy. The crew helping with the sets was needed at ‘The Mercaz’ at about 7:30AM. Fortunately, I got a ride from Ma’ale Adumum, otherwise I would have been riding the buses at the crack of dawn – not my favorite part of the day. We had to load all the scenery onto a truck and bring it over to the Hirsch Theater, maybe a mile away, and unload everything onto a docking station right by the stage. That’s how I happened to be standing on that empty stage, looking out towards the rows of unfilled seats, each one identically upholstered in lavender. Sooner than I could imagine, most of them (we hoped) would be filled with an enthusiastic audience member looking up at the stage. Everyone around me was busy doing something, but I just stood there and looked out.

The difference between looking down from the stage at an audience and looking up at the performance from the auditorium is not a matter of 180 degrees – just as the difference between the surgeon and the patient on the operating table is more than which one is holding the scalpel. It has to do with different worlds of expectation and experience; I started to prepare myself emotionally for what it would be like, being in a real performance on a stage in front of a real audience, but the hustle and bustle around me cut short my reverie. Getting the sets for Acts I and II in place would require a lot of work, and some of the people would be there all day doing it. I had to go. The way I had it figured, if I left the theater by 9:30ish, I could get back to Ma’ale Adumim in time for a one hour nap, giving me enough time to get back on a bus to Hebrew U. in time to grab a coffee and a croissant and be ready at 1PM for the first of the three students I would be tutoring. If I finished at 4:30, that would give me plenty time to pick up a light dinner and get to the theater (near the David Citadel Hotel) by 5:30 for our one and only final run-through.

There was one bit which none of the cast had seen, and Rob was anxious that we do – for it was his baby. He had conceived a production that was updated to the 1920’s (Ruddigore was written as a spoof of Victorian melodrama). In keeping with this concept, a short film had been prepared, designed to be shown while the overture was being played: first giving a synopsis of the plot (!), and then imagining how the show would have worked as a silent film. The film clip that was inserted I had seen before and is fairly well-known in certain circles; but that leaves out most of the world. The villain, for some unexplained reason, ties the heroine (a young Gloria Swanson) to a railroad track, leaving her dog to find a way to rescue her. The pooch alerts the hero and several other people and leads them back, over a bridge, through woods and meadows, to the scene of the villainy – getting there just in time to warn the crew of the oncoming train to stop it in the nick of time. Needless to say, this canine then chases the villain up a tree where he is captured. What is so fascinating is that the overture to this 1887 operetta works perfectly with the rapid cutting of the 1920’s film. Would the audience get it? Or not?

There would be only one way to find out. It’s called opening night. That’s when the directors, the cast, and crew see if what they have been working on for months and months – the songs we memorized, the dances the men stumbled through, the gestures we spent so much time learning, the comic bits that we thought were so funny, the sets and costumes that had been so carefully wrought – would pay off or not. Some things you can’t even be sure about until you get into the theater. I know that on Tuesday, while I was placing ticket orders for very polite customers, Rob and the stage crew were working hard to revise and refine the sound system and the lighting effects because certain preconceived notions wouldn’t work. All the cast had to do was show up a few hours before show time and get into our costumes and, for the first time, get fussed over by the makeup crew. Then we would watch and wait to go on stage.

It’s a funny thing. We began rehearsing individual scenes of the play and watched as everything coalesced into a unified production, and now everything was being reduced back to the scenes we are in and the scenes immediately before – the cue to get ready. The various members of the cast would hang out back stage, talking, nibbling snacks, reading, knitting, but essentially waiting for their turn. The men’s chorus wouldn’t go on until pretty late in the first act. As soon as we heard ‘Mad Margaret’s’ entrance, that was it: assemble at the proper place off-stage, remove eyeglasses, watches, and jewelry, pick up our props (in Bilgie’s case, a croquet mallet) and wait for that magical moment to walk on stage, announcing to one and all, “When thoroughly tired of being admired……”

Sara, the woman whom I could count on for a lift to the bus station and a veteran cast member, had said that the two weeks of performances would pass by in the twinkling of an eye. But I wouldn’t say that it was a blur. Each evening, each performance had its own dynamic. In what passed for our dressing room, a corridor between the lobby and backstage, we could hear if the audience was ‘getting it’ when the silent film was being shown. We could hear the level of applause as the curtain went up and as each musical number was completed. Opening night, for example, was almost sold out, but the audience was, in a word, polite. Wednesday evening the crowd was smaller, but they were much more enthusiastic. Thursday was the real marathon: two performances, and then we had to knock down the sets and load them on the truck. Why? Because on Sunday, we were doing one performance, just one, in Ra’anana. So instead of having one more day of ‘leisure,’ we were on the bus at 2PM, the idea being to give us an extra margin of time to prepare. What it gave us, in fact, was time for most of us to go shopping on the very affluent main drag right by the theater. A good thing, too. There I was, an hour to go on, in my Act I costume, all made up, when I realized I had left my straw hat on the shelf, in the closet, in our bedroom, in our apartment, back in Ma’ale Adumim. Other members of the chorus had forgotten parts of their wardrobe, but it wasn’t any big deal to have somebody bring a pair of shoes to the theater in Jerusalem. But there I was, hatless in Ra’anana, a fate almost worse than death. The rule is, you don’t go on stage sans part of your costume. I consulted with the hevra; what to do? Sammy, who portrayed a bishop in Act II, saved my skin. He remembered passing a number of clothing stores on his earlier jaunt and would be happy to run out and find me some kind of topper to wear. And he did. An ersatz straw, more like an elderly Semitic gentleman would wear, but it would pass muster from a distance. After we finished, I would toss it into a prop box for a future production. If the Encore Company ever does a musical with ‘Miami’ in the title, the hat will be perfect.

The scoop of Ra’anana is, the theater is second rate, the audience wonderful. Finish the show, knock down the sets, get back on the bus, head back to Jerusalem. Given the anticipated late hour of our arrival, I had arranged to take advantage of Jeff and June’s kind offer of hospitality and spend the night with them in Ir Hakodesh. Back to Ma’ale Adumim the next morning; back to Hebrew U. in the afternoon for my three eager students.

Four more performances to go. Three more performances to go. Two more performances, another double header on Thursday; and then…. All our earlier worries about this and that had vanished, to be replaced by a very different anxiety. The ‘OMG, it’s almost over’ feeling, the kind you would get the last week of summer camp. The people you formed a bond with, the experiences you shared; soon to be gone with the proverbial wind, one more memory to be stored away.

Nine times the performance would come to an end. Nine times the cast would return to the stage to take a bow in the order and the manner we had rehearsed: first the village women, then the men’s chorus in our ancestors’ costumes, next the bridesmaids, then the principals: Old Adam, Zorah and Richard Dauntless, Sir Roderick and Dame Hannah, Sir Despard and Mad Margaret, finally the leads, Robin and Rose Maybud. Applause and rhythmic clapping as everyone of us walked from the wings to center stage and then, on cue from Arlene, took our bow. No matter how small your part, you get your turn and you feel grand. I have to think that W.S. Gilbert had it all wrong: the theatrical person is never tired of being admired. The secret is revealed. Consider it a RuddiLeak.