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This Normal LifeThis Normal Life
This Normal Life By Brian Blum
Facing Our Fears
Saturday, July 30, 2005
(Note to This Normal Life readers: This Normal Life has moved - we now have a brand new site hosted by Bloggerce, complete with pictures, podcasts and more. I will continue to mirror articles on this site for a little while longer, but please update your bookmarks to www.ThisNormalLife.com or www.brianblum.bloggerce.com.)
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With his older brother and sister gallivanting around California presumably having a grand time on an extended summer vacation with their grandparents, we knew we had to spend some extra quality time with our seven-year-old Aviv who had been “left behind” in Israel.
This need was made abundantly clear during a phone call Aviv had with thirteen-year-old Amir shortly after they landed in Los Angeles.
"What are you doing there, Amir?" Aviv asked his big brother.
“Well, tomorrow we're going to Disneyland,” Amir said mostly matter-of-fact.
“No you’re not,” Aviv replied quickly, but there was a muted look of panic in his eyes. How could he not be included in the annual Disneyland trip, the penultimate height of summer fun?
“Yes we are going,” Amir said.
“No, you’re not!” Aviv said emphatically.
Thinking quickly, I turned to Aviv. “Tell him where you’re going tomorrow.”
A faint swipe of seven-year-old smugness settled over Aviv’s face.
“Well, we’re going to a water park…and you’re not.”
“Big deal,” Amir shot back.
But it was a big deal.
As we entered the Yamit 2000 park in Holon with our friends Debbie and Eliot and their two boys Liav and Avidan, Aviv’s water-loving eyes lit up.
Spread out in front of us were two enormous water slides that fed into what appeared to be a near-Olympic-sized swimming pool; a rambunctious children’s area with a wave pool and randomly timed fountains that erupted to spritz unsuspecting passersby in the face; and a wacky contraption called the Space Bowl that shoots the rider into what I can only describe as a giant toilet basin where you circle round the side at breakneck speed before finally “plopping” through the bottom into the pool below.
There was also plenty of grass and beach chairs to make a respectable picnic…if you can hold down your lunch after swirling through that toilet bowl thingamajig.
But the main attraction of Yamit 2000 was a new indoor section with what was billed as “extreme” water slides.
Which is, of course, exactly where we headed first.
There were three extreme slides to choose from. The “Amazonas” ride was actually pretty tame. You glide down on a big yellow inner tube. Aviv went with my wife Jody, and I went on my own. It was a leisurely, almost dreamy experience.
The other two rides were decidedly less bucolic. One had the calming name “Super Kamikaze.”
“What’s that mean?” Aviv asked innocently.
“Well, kamikazes were pilots in Japan who dive bombed their planes straight down like bombs. So I guess it’s a slide that goes very fast.”
Aviv made a face.
“What about that one?” Aviv asked, pointing to the third “extreme” slide – this one called “The Black Hole.”
I had read about this one on the Internet before we came. “It’s a slide that goes in complete darkness.”
“Oh no, I don’t want to do that one,” Aviv said immediately.
“You sure?” I asked. “It sounds fun.” The line was the longest of all, and it was the most heavily promoted. Extreme slide enthusiast that I am, I figured that ought to account for something.
“Abba, no! You know I don’t like the dark.”
“You know sometimes it’s good to face our fears,” Jody poked in.
Aviv looked perplexed.
“That’s when you do the thing you’re most afraid of,” Jody clarified.
“Well I’m not doing it, so don’t ask me again!”
And that was that. Or so we thought.
We went on the Amazonas a second and third time, and on the outdoor slides at least four. But there was something rattling around in little Aviv’s brain. He didn’t express it out loud, but clearly he was thinking about something. We just didn’t know what.
We had some lunch and rested before heading back to extreme action land.
“OK, I decided,” Aviv announced suddenly.
“Decided…what?” I asked.
“I’ll do it. The Black Hole.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’m going to face my fears.”
Jody and I gave him a high five and then, before he could change his mind, we raced to get in line. The line of course snaked much too slowly, giving our inner chickens plenty of time to cluck away. But Aviv stayed steadfast with his decision. We climbed the stairs to the top and then faced down the Black Hole.
I sat Aviv on my lap and we shot off into the enveloping darkness. They’d done a good job of painting the tube black; it was so dark that at one point I wasn’t sure we were even moving.
I kept repeating encouraging words to Aviv.
“Isn’t this great?” I said. “Not too fast. Not too scary.”
Aviv giggled nervously.
The slide sped up. Faintly lit stars appeared on the side, illuminating our faces. Aviv still looked tentative. Then the path dropped suddenly. I was thrust to my back as we sped up with a wicked start. I struggled to regain a sitting position which I knew would slow us down.
The stars faded and now arrows pointing backward zipped by, as if to say “you’re going the wrong way, turn back.” Right, like that was going to happen. We were locked into an R-rated version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I envied the big kids at Disneyland with their safety-tested family fun. Another twist, another lurching turn and then…
…we were out. Back in the normalcy of daylight. Aviv and I both caught our breath.
“That was great!” I said, not entirely sure of myself. “Wasn’t it?”
But there was no question for Aviv: he had a huge grin on his face that said loud and clear that while he may not have enjoyed every moment, he was darn proud. He had faced his fears…and come through with flying colors (or lack of color, this was after all the Black Hole”).
“So you ready for the Kamikaze now?” I asked.
Aviv looked at me like I was crazy.
“Come on then…” I said. And the three of us got back in line, fears faced, to do the Black Hole again.
This Normal Life has moved to a new open at Bloggerce. Please update your bookmarks to either ThisNormalLife.com or brianblum.bloggerce.com. I will continue to mirror articles on this site for a little while, but check out the new This Normal Life - complete with pictures and even podcasts. How cool is that!
“How did this happen?” seven-year-old Aviv asked suddenly one night.
“How did what happen, sweetie?” my wife Jody replied.
“How did it happen that Amir and Merav get to go to America and I have to stay here,” Aviv pronounced with a mix of confusion and rising consternation.
Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Amir and his eleven-year-old sister Merav were in a very different head space.
While Amir spent his last minutes before we left for the airport with his nose to the grindstone (the computer in this case), juggling several simultaneous chat and Skype sessions while doing some impromptu bug testing of my new company’s software, Merav broke out in song every few minutes and hugged me, unable to contain her excitement.
“We’re going to America!” she squealed with glee. “Alone!” she added.
Yes, our two older kids were about to become our very first, bonafide B.U.M.s.
Blum Unaccompanied Minors, that is.
It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Amir and Merav would get a chance to spend a few weeks in California with their grandparents on their own. We were sure they’d have some incredible adventures, unmitigated by prying parents, while getting to know that other half of their dual citizenship a bit better.
But as the moment of truth approached, I was a nervous Nelly.
Jody had already gone over all the rules of being a good guest.
“Remember to always say please and thank you.”
“Yes Imma.”
“Always offer to help.”
“Yes Imma.”
“And don’t leave your towel on the bathroom floor,” I added.
“Because when you left your towel on the floor when you visited your grandparents, they almost kicked you out, right Abba?” Merav said, recalling my ultimate family fashla.
“And well they should have,” I said.
The babysitter arrived and it was time to head to the airport.
“OK, let’s go through this one more time,” I said in the car as we sped down Highway One in the direction of Tel Aviv. I began my instructional narrative one final time. “Now, when you get to Newark, the escort will take you through customs…”
“Will there be TV screens on each seat?” Merav interrupted.
“Yes…then you go into the customs area where you have to identify your luggage. You don’t have to take it, but…”
“Can I have the window seat, Amir?”
“Sure, whatever, Merav. Hey Abba, do you think we’ll get a hot stewardess on the plane?” he asked, entirely serious.
“First of all, that’s not an appropriate question,” I answered. “And second, they’re called flight attendants now, not stewardesses. Now then, you’ll be walked to a waiting room in Newark until it’s time for your next flight….you got all that?”
“What? Huh? I wasn’t listening really,” Merav said.
“Me either,” said Amir.
I would have thrown my hands up in the air. But I was driving. And we were out of time.
As we parked the car and headed through security on our way towards the check-in counter, I started acting out my nervousness by telling anyone and everyone around me of our unique situation.
“It’s our first time,” I said, hoping to elicit a compassionate smile or some reassurance from the check-in agent that our kids would be well-tended. Jody rolled her eyes.
“Come back at 9:45 PM. Meet at Counter 17,” the agent said matter-of-factly after she’d processed our Unaccompanied Minor forms and taken our payment.
“That’s it?” I said.
“Is there something more you need?”
“No, not really, I guess…”
A couple of other kids were already hanging out with their parents. They had large orange ribbons on their backpacks.
As we waited, it occurred to me that this wasn’t any worse than when we sent Amir and Merav to Scout’s camp just a few weeks before. There, it was other kids running the show. Here at least it was a professional.
The agent arrived a few minutes late and immediately started marching us towards passport control. No hello or chirpy introduction:
“Good evening, my name is Mandy, and we’re so happy you’ve chosen to send your children half way around the world with just me in charge, an unsmiling bored desk clerk who was corralled into this dead end job after I spilled one too many tomato juice cocktails on a passenger’s lap...oh, well, I digress….”
“I’m going to miss you guys so much,” I said to the kids as we said our goodbyes.
“We won’t,” Merav said, then quieted when she realized that wasn’t what I wanted to hear. But she couldn’t contain herself.
“We’re going to America!”
And then they were off. Fading into a small blur as they disappeared into the bowels of Ben Gurion.
24 hours later, they called from Papa Mike’s cell phone at LAX. They’d made it fine.
Yes, the escort in Newark almost put them on a plane to San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, and they lost their kosher meals, but they made do. The things that bother us as parents, the small organizational details that make us wacko, they don’t phase our kids at all.
After all, they’re going to America. Alone. Just a couple of B.U.M.s. And we’re going to be just fine.
All of us.
posted by Brian |
2:57 AM
Fast Food, Fast Camping (Redux)
Sunday, July 17, 2005
It's been a year since we arrived at the Jerusalem Scouts' Summer Camp woefully empty handed. This summer, we went back with goodies galore...and my new digital camera. In honor of both these enhancements, I am republishing the original story - complete with photos so you can get a better feeling for the event and an audio version that you can download or subscribe to as the first in a series of "This Normal Life" podcasts.
But...you can't do it from here...
As of this post, I am migrating "This Normal Life" to a new home at Bloggerce (which also is the name of my new company). If you want to see all the pictures or listen to the audio, well...you'll just have to go to the new site. Same URL as before: www.ThisNormalLife.com. If you've got this Blogspot site bookmarked, please update your links.
I'll be "mirroring" my posts for a little while here but, really, go on and check out the new site. And while you're at Bloggerce, why not sign up for a 30-day trial blog of your own. It's very cool...and free. Enjoy!
Parents Visiting Day is a time-honored camp tradition. But what about when the camp in question is all of three days?You can imagine, then, that we were a bit skeptical when ten-year-old Merav insisted that we come up to check out her summer quickie campsite with Israel’s version of the Scouts.
Especially since the time allotted to visiting comprised little more than two hours. It was a long drive and it wasn’t like she was even going to be away from home long enough for us to start missing her (and vice versa, presumably).
But it had been awhile since we’d been out of Jerusalem, and the promise of some fresh air in the lower Galilee hills sounded promising.
And so it was on a hot Thursday afternoon that my wife Jody, twelve-year-old Amir, six-year old Aviv and I took off in the car for the Tzipori Forest where the Jerusalem Scouts were holding their annual machane kayitz (or summer camp).
As we passed a shopping mall with several restaurants not far from the campsite, Jody remarked that the place seemed quite crowded. When we arrived in the parking lot for the camp, we realized why.
Nearly every parent was carrying a large plastic bag stuffed with fast food: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, Pizza Hut. Brand names only. And kosher too!
Some parents came armed with coolers overflowing with a wide assortment of goodies entirely of the junk variety. Apart from a couple of cut up watermelons, there wasn’t a healthy snack in sight.
We, on the other hand, had a Tupperware container full of sliced red and yellow peppers, and a half eaten box of 96%-fat-free organic soy and linseed corn thins.
Guess you have to have been to a few of these Parent Days to learn the ropes.
Which was the real point of inviting us, we soon discovered. As we passed through the security post (the camp was completely fenced in and armed to the teeth with guards), we were confronted with hundreds upon hundreds of intricate wooden sculptures.
Well not exactly sculptures. But scouting projects on a truly massive scale. There must have been thousands of campers milling about in the woods (there are 60,000 campers nationwide, and this was just the Jerusalem division, remember).
Each age group had chosen a theme and constructed a large number of towering structures, makeshift buildings and other highly creative works...all out of thin logs of wood tied together with rope. Now we understood what Merav meant when she said the Scouts "build their own camp."
The counselors, we learned, had painstakingly planned everything out in meticulous detail during the preceding weeks, using skewers lifted from several local grilled meat restaurants to design tiny models of what were now mind-blowing feats of teenage engineering.
The counselors laid everything out and the campers tied the wood together using that standard of scouting worldwide – knot-making. Merav’s troop had chosen to build an entire world relating to the theme of "Monopoly.
Strewn among the sleeping bags and tents I spied a pair of floating wooden dice, a makeshift "railroad station" where presumably you could ride on the Reading Railroad, a large ship that I was told was supposed to resemble one of the game tokens, and a life-size blue and white Community Chest perched on a mound of rocks. There was even a jail which doubled as the Scout’s synagogue.
Before I could remark on the irony of that juxtaposition, Merav came bounding at us, clearly delighted that we had made the trek and eager to show off everything they had done. Despite the fact she had only been able to nod off for a couple of hours the night before ("the boys kept trying to paint our faces whenever we went to sleep," she reported), she was her usual bundle of enthusiasm and positive energy.
We walked through the campsite to enjoy the Disneyland-like ingenuity on display, passing all manner of construction and creature, from knotted wooden spaceships to giant Ninja Turtles. We passed a spirited volleyball tournament with kids drumming and cheering on their teams from the sidelines.
We also passed all those parents we had seen earlier, now sitting down with their camper children and enjoying their fast food fix. I noticed Merav checking out our belongings. Her eyes darted around my backpack, then to Jody’s purse. She was too polite to demand "What, no Big Mac?"
But still..."We didn’t know Merav," I said, not entirely apologetically. Even if I had known, I might not have partaken in this very Israeli indulgence. I remember the rules for Visiting Day at overnight camp a few summers back in California: no outside food allowed. There was even a special section in the parent’s manual warning against sewing a hidden pouch inside a stuffed animal to smuggle candy inside!
"Did you bring anything to eat?" Merav asked.
"Carrot sticks?" Jody offered.
Merav accepted this feeble token of our love. But there was no time to argue. The loudspeakers were already blaring "all parents must leave. Visiting hours are over." I thought back to the synagogue/jail.
We hugged Merav and made our way to the car. We wondered if she would sleep tonight. Was there more to build? And...who was going to take it all down?
As we headed back to Jerusalem, I spied the mall we had seen on the way up. I put on my signal and pulled in."Hey, where are we going?" Amir demanded from the back seat. Aviv looked up from his GameBoy.
But I had a plan: I figured if we couldn’t bring fast food to Merav, at least we could do the next best thing...and eat it ourselves.
“Our brand? What could be wrong with that? It’s incredibly simple, ultimately recognizable and licensed to companies around the world.”
“It’s been expropriated.”
“By who?”
“The Israelis.”
“That doesn’t sound like a problem...more visibility for us.”
“No, you don’t get it. It’s been adopted as the national identity for a particular group of Israelis...those opposing the country's upcoming disengagement-from-Gaza plan.”
“We’re not political. We’re just a cell phone operator.”
“I know that and you know that, but now anything Orange is being associated with anti-disengagement.”
“Can they do that? We’ve got a copyright on orange, don’t we?”
“Don’t go overboard here. Are you telling me that all these people are making a political statement?”
“It’s hard to tell, really. Some people might just like the color orange.”
“Right. I saw a man the other day wearing an orange t-shirt. He didn’t look like he was advertising an agenda.”
“But at the same time, there are stores now that have draped their windows in orange to pick up extra business. And I read an article about a woman who says she deliberately makes sure to wear something orange in her clothes every day. It’s getting so you don’t know if the security guard wearing an orange vest or that teenager bouncing an orange basketball is doing it intentionally or what. And don’t even get me started with the orange wristbands.”
“Like the yellow Lance Armstrong ones...that sounds nice...no, no, this is a public relations disaster!"
"They claim that Balad has been using the color orange since 1999 in its election campaigns and now their 'freedom of speech and assembly' has been limited."
"Good grief...is there an alternative color to all this orange?”
“Yes, there’s blue.”
“Blue, that’s good. Blue and white – the colors of the Israeli flag. Patriotic and neutral.”
“Unfortunately not. Blue has become the group identity of anyone in favor of the disengagement plan. There are blue ribbons on all the cars and backpacks that don’t have orange ones."
"Anything else about blue I should know about?"
"Yes. It’s also the color of our biggest competitor – Pelephone.”
“Did they see this coming? Where are they getting their information? Is this another example of that Trojan horse spyware scandal?”
“It looks like a coincidence, sir.”
“Well, has anyone started to boycott our phone service?”
“No, that’s the thing. Right now, in Israel’s summer color wars, orange is the big winner.”
“We’re winning?”
“Well, the color is. There are twice as many orange ribbons and stickers and flags and headbands as blue ones. The blue ribbon people said it was because their manufacturer couldn’t produce ribbons fast enough at the price they wanted. But that sounds kind of like a lame excuse if you ask me.”
“So maybe we can turn this to our advantage! Sign up the anti-Gaza pullout supporters to only use our phone service.”
“Hmmm...that could work. And when the demonstrators block the highways with nails and oil like they did this week, they could throw a few of our Orange phones into the mix as well...”
“Don't you think that's being just a tad cynical?”
“...we just need to make sure that the Orange warranty doesn’t cover acts of civil disobedience...so we're not liable.”
"Come on, not everyone in orange is organizing mayhem on the streets. You're giving a black eye to their cause."
"Don't you mean an orange one?"
“I think we need a different plan.”
“I'm listening...”
“We need to disengage entirely...from this whole color war. There’s nothing holy about orange. We're just going to have to rebrand ourselves.”
Queen Jeneane was sitting on the newly constructed deck to her beach house barking directions to her son who was puttering about down on the sand.
“Move it over there,” she called out. “A little to the right. No, bring it back a bit. Yes, there, that’s it”
Her son, a burly shipputznik-looking kind of guy, was lugging what looked at first to be a large red porta-potty, trying to find a suitable place to settle it into the blowing sand that stretches for miles on this mostly pristine beach.
When she saw us, Queen Jeneane immediately broke into an ear-to-ear welcoming grin. “Come, sit down please,” she beckoned.
As we approached, her appearance was incongruous to say the least. She was wearing a frumpy flowered house dress (or maybe it was a night gown). Her face was so tanned and cracked from age it looked as if chunks were doing to fall off at any moment. An aging beach bum, she was. Yet her hair was tightly bound up in the head covering of a very religious woman.
And her home...she had taken what started as an ugly stucco pre-fab, not much more than a mobile caravan plunked down within a stone’s throw of the water, and renovated it to hold its own with the best of beach houses around.
Two small bedrooms, a clean white kitchen and a living room that opened like a giant picture window onto the deck facing the beach. A lovely red pergola, the paint only recently dried, covered the comfortable lawn furniture where Queen Jeneane hastened to serve us ice tea and Mandelbrot punctuated with fruit and nuts.
As we soaked up the sun and hospitality, we could have been at any beach town in the world. But we weren’t. This was Shirat HaYam, literally “Song of the Sea” (taken from the book of Exodus), a tiny outpost in Gush Katif, the area in the Gaza Strip slated for disengagement in less than two months from now.
Shirat HaYam was established four and a half years ago following a terror attack on a school bus near Neve Dekalim in the Gush that had claimed the lives of two Israeli adults and left several children paraplegic. 16 families live in a row of converted quarters formerly used by the Egyptian army.
What was I doing in Gaza, let alone in one of the most controversial Jewish communities in the entire Strip?
It started earlier in the week when my new reporter friend from the San Francisco Chronicle invited me to join him on a day of interviews he’d arranged. We were going to meet “normal” people he said - just like me - who happened to be living in a location even more in the news these days than my humble Jerusalem. We’d be accompanied by a photographer and translator. All that sounded good to me.
There was more to it than that, though. It had long struck me as odd that for all the time I’ve spent thinking and talking about this summer’s disengagement from Gaza, trying to formulate an opinion...I had never actually been to the place.
I did a quick poll of friends in synagogue over the weekend. Not a single person I asked had ever set foot inside Gush Katif, the main settlement block of the Gaza Strip. My survey, though far from scientific, included both relatively new immigrants like myself and native born Israelis.
So when the opportunity arose for a quick apolitical visit not under the auspices of an organization with an overt agenda like SaveTheGush.com, how could I say no?
The visit itself was filled with contradictory images.
We saw lovely near-palatial homes with large lawns which sat only a few blocks from dilapidated buildings that looked like they’d been abandoned long ago...or perhaps they’d never been lived in at all.
We met adamant ideologues who were clearly going nowhere, no matter what the government said, and pragmatists who were ready to leave but with a heavy heart.
One woman told us how the boys of her community would fight the disengagement by heading into the local synagogue, donning their tallitot, and taking the Torah out of the ark to read. How could soldiers forcibly remove Jews from a synagogue holding a Torah, she asked?
We saw the famed Gush Katif hothouses that grow much of Israel’s produce, clean well-tended playgrounds, and lots and lots of sand – yes, the communities here really are built in the dunes.
Back at Shirat HaYam, Queen Jeneane was holding court. She explained how she was here alone; her husband is still manning the farm they own in the Golan Heights.
“We came to show our support,” she said and motioned for a young girl in her late teens, maybe early twenties to join us. “She arrived just last week from the Old City of Jerusalem.” There were many others like her from around the country throughout the Gush, she said cheerfully.
What about the disengagement? Why was she investing money, now of all times, into fixing up a place she knew she’d just have to leave very shortly?
Queen Jeneane motioned to the heavens and held up her palms. I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a symbol of faith...or an expression saying “don’t bother me with the details, kid, I’m busy building.”
Nor could I say definitively that this was indicative of the opinions of the rest of the community...or just one woman’s approach. Ever animated, it was hard to imagine Queen Jeneane being described as one of the “normal” residents we had ostensibly set out to meet.
Eventually it was time to go. We still had another meeting before making the two-hour trip back to Jerusalem. And I wasn’t keen on being out in Gaza after nightfall.
My reporter friend had one last question. It was one he’d repeated over the course of our long day.
“How can you justify staying here?” he asked gesturing towards the sprawling Palestinian town on the other side of the chain link fence that was built to protect Shirat HaYam. The intonation in his voice made clear that he was referring less to the issue of security than that of democracy and demographics.
Queen Jeneane chuckled. “What we need here is a kingdom. Like in the old days. A Kingdom of Israel.”
We all looked at each other. Was she cooking up a plan to become Israel’s first Empress of the Sea, I wondered?
“Oh no,” Queen Jeneane said with a twinkle in her eye. “But I know a lot of nice boys who’d love to be king!”
“What are we going to do today?” six-year-old Aviv demanded as he shoveled in his tenth spoonful of cornflakes in as many seconds.
It was shortly before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot last year and the kids were off school. Then ten-year-old Merav and twelve-year-old Amir were now looking up from their breakfasts as well, waiting for my pronouncement.
But I was ready. I had concocted the perfect plan.
Now, one of the traditions of Shavuot is to eat dairy products. So I declared in as animated a way as I could: “We’re going to a cheese farm!”
“A what?” asked Amir with more than a hint of cynicism.
“I read about it in the paper. There’s an organic goat farm that sells these incredible cheeses. It’s only a few minutes outside the city. Wouldn’t that just be perfect?
But to my surprise, the kids were into it. I should have known; they like just about anything that has to do with eating.
So later that morning, we took off for the Har HaRuach Goat Farm in the hills just outside the village of Nataf, about 20 minutes west of Jerusalem.
Har HaRuach is run by Haim and Dalia Himelfarb who studied cheese making at Israel’s Rupin Institute. The farm is an ecological project and the goats are left to graze in a natural meadow year-round. Even the milking is done in a highly goat-friendly way.
The newspaper article said that the road “is a bit rough” in spots. That was the understatement of the year. Rocks the size and shape of small fax machines were strewn all along the road.
But the payoff was worth it. There at the top of the hill was a charming dining room…and a take-out window. We had our choice. I opted for the latter, in no small part because I found the idea of a take-out window in the middle of the woods so utterly incongruous and amusing. Add a drive through window and I’d be set for life.
Dalia was manning the counter and insisted that we try a taste of all of the cheeses, plus the yoghurt made from that morning’s 4:00 AM milking and some sweet and spicy goat-cheese pesto. We nearly filled up just on the sampling.
But it was smart marketing: we wound up ordering four containers: a smoky-hard goat-cheese camembert; a semi-soft local creation called “Itla,” spreadable lebana drizzled with olive oil and zatar; and a cheese named after the nearby village of Nataf which had large chunks of raw garlic inserted throughout.
We had thought ahead and brought our own fresh pitas which fortunately didn’t bother Dalia. The bill came to NIS 73, just over $16.
Picnic benches were scattered throughout the pines just below the restaurant. Amir, who had been skeptical throughout (“I don’t really like goat cheese,” he confided quietly just before we arrived) took one bite of the garlic-infused Nataf and was in hog heaven. So to speak.
Aviv favored the lebana while Jody and Merav went for the Itla. I was the sole fan of the camembert. Their loss.
As we soaked up the cheese on a perfect spring day, our conversation turned to the upcoming holiday. Shavuot symbolically marks the day the Israelites received the Torah on Mount Sinai after leaving Egypt.
“Um…I think it had something to do with when they left Egypt, they didn’t have enough time to take any meat...” Merav ventured a guess.
“That was the matza,” Amir corrected her.
“Maybe they didn’t have meat plates?” I joked.
“They didn’t use dishes,” Amir and Merav both shot back in unison and then dipped their pita into their cheeses to drive home the point.
All the joking, however, didn’t diminish the fact that here we were, chowing down on some delectable dairy products...and we hadn’t the foggiest idea why. It was terribly embarrassing.
Before I could chastise our lameness, a faint sound of tinkling interrupted. The goats were returning from the pasture in time for their 3:00 PM milking.
Talk about saved by the bell.
We packed up our cheese and went to watch before tackling the bumpy ride home.
All the way back, though, the question of “Why Dairy?” kept eating at me. I proposed a contest. We have several computers at home. We would divide into teams and scour the Internet. Whoever came up with the best explanation would get to finish off the remains of the cheese at dinner.
Amir and I headed for the computer upstairs. Merav and Jody took control of the downstairs machine. We came back together and shared the results of our research.
From Team Merav: Shavuot was when the Jews accepted the Torah which means it’s also when we learned about separating milk and meat and the various laws governing animal slaughter. Before that, what else could we eat but dairy? OK, but that sounded a little too much like my joke about the dishes!
And: Israel is known as the land of milk and honey. But then why don’t we eat honey cake on Shavout instead of cheesecake and blintzes?
From Team Amir: The gematria (the practice where each Hebrew letter is assigned a numerical value) of chalav – the Hebrew for milk – is 40, the same number of days that Moses was up on Mount Sinai. Maybe, but a whole holiday based on what essentially comes down to an ancient magician’s card trick?
And: Receiving the Torah was a form of rebirth. So we celebrate by eating baby food. Namely: milk.
Even Amir shook his head at that one.
Finally, it was Jody who found what we all agreed was the most acceptable, if somewhat obtuse, explanation.
According to the mystical book of the Zohar, for the 49 days of the Omer period – the amount of time between Passover (leaving Egypt) and Shavuot (receiving the Torah), the Jews needed to be in as pure a state as possible. Abstaining from eating meat, which is inextricably connected with death, facilitates such purity.
“But wait a minute,” I said. “If Shavuot is supposed to be the night we got the Torah, then we should be celebrating by eating meat. The 49 days of purification are over. Time to break this flesh fast. Let the party begin!”
“Meat, meat, meat,” the two older kids began to chant and we all burst out laughing.
Except for Jody who turned to us and, with a single withering look that encapsulated exactly why it is so difficult to change 3000 years of tradition, said simply:
“So, what am I supposed to do with all that lasagna?”
--------------------------- To reach the Har HaRuach Goat Farm, drive out of Jerusalem, exit at Abu Ghosh and follow the signs to Nataf. Turn left when you see the sign for Ya’ar Polin (which memorializes Polish victims of the Holocaust) and follow the (very) bumpy dirt road uphill until you hear the goats. The cheeses have a kashrut certificate; the restaurant does not. You can eat on the picnic benches adjacent to the farm or continue further up the road to the scenic look out point which also includes a children’s playground.
Himmelfarb Farm at Har HaRuach: +972-2-534-5660. Fax +972-2-570-9312
I was recently interviewed by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. He was in town for a few months to try to get the “real story” behind the headlines. He’s been a regular reader of this column and figured I might be able to share some insights.
Besides which, he offered to take me out to lunch, his treat. We went to Olive and I ordered this chicken dish in a mango-pineapple-coconut sauce which was to die for. I can talk for hours if you give me a good meal.
“So what do you do on an ordinary day?” the reporter asked me.
“Well....I get up in the morning, help get the kids off to school, make lunches and that sort of thing,” I started. Then I usually go for a run and work out. Shower. Eat breakfast. Then I go to work.”
“OK,” the reporter said, looking a bit befuddled though, at this point in the conversation, I didn’t know why. “And what do you do at work?”
“I’m a writer, you know that, so I guess I spend most of my day in front of the computer...writing, using the Internet, sending emails. When I need to conduct an interview with someone in the States for an article, I do it via my broadband Vonage phone that gives me a phone number in New York that rings through to here. No one has a clue where I’m really located!” I laughed.
“Uh huh,” said the reporter, now looking more crestfallen than bemused.
“And then around 6:30, maybe 7:00 PM, I try to stop work,” I continued cheerfully, “have dinner with the family. Get the kids ready for bed. Maybe watch some TV. Every so often Jody and I will go out to eat with friends or catch a movie.”
The reporter stopped me. “What you’re describing sounds just like a suburban San Francisco Bay Area lifestyle,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it does.”
“So why are you here?”
I stared at him blankly. For a moment, I was speechless, despite the mango-coconut chicken.
The truth is, I didn’t have a good answer. Because if that’s all we’ve done, built a normal life, one that could exist anywhere, then why not do it in Walnut Creek or Danville? Why put up with all of the difficulties of Israel…the outrageous taxes. The rotten public services. The insane driving. The diminished job possibilities.
Is all that tsuris worth it, if all we’re getting is a normal life?
OK, that’s not fair. We have a rich Jewish life that you’d be hard put to duplicate anywhere else. But there are big cities outside of Israel where life is easier than in the Holy Land, still Jewishly-rich, and nearly as normal.
I found myself trying to fashion an answer in my mind to this reporter of what a supposedly super-normal life in Israel would look like.
If I walked to the Kotel every day for sunrise prayers, would that qualify for beyond-ordinary status?
If I demonstrated in front of the Knesset in order to influence the only Jewish State in the world on issues of social justice, would that constitute a life lived purposefully?
Maybe I should be flying one of those orange-starred anti-disengagement flags on my car window…or sporting an opposing bumper sticker in favor? Would an overtly political statement add more meaning than religiously watching 24 and Star Trek: Enterprise?
My dilemma reminded me of the time, several years ago, when we were coming back from a summer in California and I found myself not only able to imagine what it would be like to live there...but surprisingly intrigued.
But this was different. Then it was about wanting a lifestyle I didn’t have here. This time, I’ve discovered I already have the lifestyle...and am wondering what’s it all for?
Finally, I gave the reporter the only answer I could. One that seemed true enough.
I moved to Israel because I always felt like an outsider in the U.S. Because the calendar and the holidays and the passions that most captivated me didn’t match the calendar and holidays and passions that the rest of the country was operating on. In Israel, I said, I feel part of society. I’m on the inside.
“So you have a lot of Israeli friends?” the reporter asked. “You go to local theater performances and lectures?”
“Actually, no...” I said, more to my napkin than to the reporter.
What was this, an interview or a therapy session?
Later that day, as I was describing the interview to my wife Jody, it struck me that I’m just as much an outsider in this country as I was in the old one. There, the calendar was out of synch. But here, a combination of being an immigrant and suffering from perpetually poor language skills have kept me from fully engaging in all that society offers.
In the midst of what was shaping up to be a mid-life, mid-aliyah crisis, I found myself asking a not insignificant question: which is the bigger trade off? Where would I rather be an outsider?
As if to answer my unspoken question, eleven-year-old Merav announced that she had written a poem for a school assignment. She had never written a poem before. She stood up and with a dramatic flourish began to read.
I don’t know if it was just that I didn’t understand the Hebrew, but the language sounded sophisticated, mellifluous even. Putting aside my obvious bias and pride in my daughter’s first attempts at creative writing, the words were certainly well beyond the simple ones that I know from the local makolet. It even rhymed!
Whether or not we have the next Yehuda Amichai in house remains to be seen. But what was even more important to me were the insights – her poem was a first person monologue about what it’s like to be an eleven-year-old in Israel. The fact that she was able to express in writing so many of her fears and joys, concisely and with feeling, filled me with unbridled nachas.
I praised her as much as I could without sounding like a fake, which I certainly was not.
An hour later, she had written three more. And it occurred to me that she was teaching me something about the true nature of the word “insight.” Insight is the ability to communicate a personal perspective from deep within. I may be forced into the role of frustrated outsider wherever it is I seem to go, but my Israeli-raised daughter is unquestionably an insider.
Is that what it’s all about, then? The immigrant parents move to a new land and sacrifice so their children can feel they’re a part of something, that they belong?
No, that’s not it, not entirely at least. But it’s a good start.
posted by Brian |
12:10 AM
That’s a Nice Robe You Got There
Thursday, May 26, 2005
“I need help with my homework,” eleven-year-old Merav announced after dinner the other night.
Normally I run as fast as I can from these requests. As an immigrant father, it's not easy to cope with homework in Hebrew which, while it may be one of Merav’s best subjects, is certainly not mine.
“It’s geography,” she clarified.
Ah, now that I could help with.
“I need to know the capital cities. Read from the list and test me,” Merav said and she handed me a sheet with some 30 countries written down.
The list itself was a fascinating slice of local culture. The countries picked – I don’t know if it was by Merav’s teacher or was part of some state curriculum – demonstrated in a very immediate way what was important to Israel...and what was not.
There were countries I had barely heard of when I was a kid. Growing up in California in the 1960s, who even knew where Yemen was, let alone Syria or Morocco? But they were prominent on Merav’s list.
On the other hand, Central and South America – the capitals of which we had to learn by heart – were barely represented...except apparently for countries which had large Jewish populations that had immigrated to Israel.
I began the drill. Merav sailed through the first few cities with ease. She had clearly been practicing.
I was immediately transported back to my own youth when, sitting with my father, we used to make up all kinds of rhymes and alliterations to make do when memory failed.
“OK, well, I’ve got some books and I need to put them down so they can rest,” I said to Merav.
It’s been nearly a month since I last posted an update on Merav. The news, thank God, is all good.
Our eleven-year-old daughter seems to have recovered completely. No more pain, no fever, no jaundice. Whatever it was – and the doctors never were able to come up with a diagnosis – it seems to have passed and gone forever.
In celebration, we decided to go away for a few days of vacation. Friends invited us to join a camping trip and tiyul – the Hebrew word for hike – along the Jordan River just north of the Sea of Galilee.
Only two weeks earlier, Merav’s doctor had told her she wasn’t strong enough to participate in a hike sponsored by her scouting troop, but since then, she’d recovered so quickly and had been so full of energy, we figured why not. Plus we’d never seen that part of the Jordan. It sounded lush and lovely, even exotic.
The day started out promising. We left Jerusalem at 7:00 AM for the three hour drive to our starting point at the B’not Yaakov Bridge just east of Rosh Pina. Some of the group had gone ahead and parked their cars at Karkum, the hike’s end, so we wouldn’t need to double back on the hike itself.
We began by walking along the banks of the Jordan, watching groups of merrymakers in bright orange rafts and kayaks go sailing by, bumping down the mini-rapids in this stretch of the river.
Soon, however, the trail began to meander higher up the hill away from the river. Not quite as nice, but the Sea of Galilee was always in sight, its vast mass (for landlocked Jerusamelites like us, at least) shimmering in the near distance. We plowed on through the fields and enjoyed our brief respite from the pressures of work and technology.
As the path went on, though, the trees became sparser, and soon we were seemingly in the middle of nowhere, on a rocky hill entirely devoid of vegetation.
Well, not entirely devoid: thorn bushes assaulted us at every turn, tearing clothing and skin.
By now the day had turned hot and our relaxing hike had become more one of figuring out how to avoid getting pricked and how to stay to the path which was now overgrown by thick bushes, obscuring the black and white markers painted on rocks to mark the trail.
It was just about at this point, half way through the tiyul, that Merav started to poop out.
That’s also when we realized that none of us actually knew how long the trail went on. Someone had said it was a four to six hour walk. OK, was that four, six or possibly more?
Rule #1 of hiking in Israel: never go out on tiyul unless someone in the group has done it before.
“I need to rest,” Merav said, as she plopped down on a rock shaded by an especially large thorn bush.
The rest of the group continued on while my wife Jody, seven-year-old Aviv and I stayed back with a couple of other semi-stragglers.
We got up after a few minutes and continued, but it soon became clear that after nearly two months at home and a week in the hospital, Merav was not yet up to a trip of this length.
We rested again.
“Drink, sweetie,” I told Merav. She weakly grabbed the plastic tube extending from her shlucker, the water pack she wore on her back.
“Have some chocolate,” Jody offered.
“Don’t want,” Merav said. “My tummy hurts.”
And that’s when I lost it. “My tummy hurts” was her constant refrain during the height of her illness. It had stopped aching before we embarked on this journey. If it was acting up again now, did this mean she was heading towards a relapse?
I began to beat myself up with guilt. What were we thinking? Taking Merav on a tiyul so soon after she had been so sick. How irresponsible could we be? School started only a few days later, would she be out another two months?
We valiantly tried to continue but Merav wasn’t wearing her exhaustion well. At each subsequent resting point, she looked more and more like the girl I remembered from that hospital bed.
Chana, one of the members of our group of stragglers, broke with our refrain from technology and whipped out her cellphone to call our group leader.
“Where are you?” she said.
“About a half an hour ahead,” came the response.
“Are you near the end?”
“I don’t know where the end is.”
Mearv must have overhead the conversation. “I can’t do this anymore,” she whined and promptly lay down.
And then, just when things didn’t seem as though they could get any worse...
“Drink again, honey,” Jody said.
...we realized we’d run out of water.
And the sun started to go down.
So there we were, in the middle of a field of thorns, no water, our light dimming, and no idea how much farther we needed to go.
“We’ll have to call in the helicopters,” I said, no longer even trying to conceal my panic. I don’t even know what that means, “call the helicopters,” but it sounded like the kind of dramatic rescue we were going to need.
“Party of five airlifted out of perilous valley. News at 11:00.”
It was at that point when, leaping from the trail in front of us, like a superhero straight out of a Spiderman movie, came Tuvia, Chana’s son. He was on a day’s leave from the army where he serves as a medic and apparently had gone tiyuling on his own nearby. He’d been in touch somehow with our group and had arrived bearing water...and a strong back.
“Climb on,” he said to Merav.
Then he, along with his equally strong-spined father Tzvi, took turns piggy-backing Merav out until, another hour later, only a few minutes before the sun was completely down, we reached Karkum, the end point where our cars were waiting.
Merav collapsed into the soft seat of the car as we drove away from the hike area and towards the campsite where we’d planned to spend the night. The earlier members of our group had arrived before us and the hamburgers were already hot. Merav began to revive.
By the morning, she was sore, but feeling peppy and ready for more adventures.
Three days later, she went back to school for the first time since she became ill.
I still don’t think this particular tiyul was the best idea for Merav and her condition. But in a strange way, it served as the final test of her prolonged recovery. If she had crashed back into a relapse of her illness, we would have known that what she had was something chronic that we’d have to watch and wait for.
If, on the hand, she got through it with no adverse effects, there’d be no question that she’d had nothing more than a particularly inexplicable, nasty and long-lasting virus.
This may have been the most grueling exam Merav’s ever had to endure. In the end, though, she passed...even the thorniest of questions.
--------------------------------------- Today is Yom Ha'atzmaut in Israel. If you're going out for an Independence Day hike, I wish you a less gruesome tiyulsome!
Janusz Korczak was a Polish Jewish educator who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto just prior to its liquidation in 1942. His story is at once tragic and courageous. Given the chance to escape the ghetto, Korczak chose to stay with his children, ultimately perishing along with them at Treblinka.
“Korczak’s Children” is also the name of a play by Jeffrey Hatcher which has been playing across the U.S. since its Minneapolis premiere in 2003 and was recently performed in Jerusalem by JEST, the Jerusalem English Speaking Theater.
The cast, directed by JEST veteran Leah Stoller, included 19 children (representing the 171 residents in the orphanage); many of the kid actors were schoolmates of our sixth grade daughter Merav.
A couple of months back, Merav’s class was invited to a special afternoon performance at Beit Shmuel, the theater just behind Hebrew Union College. I tagged along as a chaperone.
The play tells the story of Korczak and his charges in the orphanage over a period of two days. During that time, we meet the children, watch Korczak’s innovative Children’s Court in action, and see Korczak writing in his diary.
Like Anne Frank’s, Korczak’s diary was later published, after being smuggled out of the ghetto after his death and sealed up in the walls of a Catholic orphanage that Korczak previously ran in a Warsaw suburb.
Even before his diary, however, Korczak was already a well known educator throughout Poland. He wrote 24 books and published over a thousand newspaper and magazine articles on childhood education. In the mid-1930s, he hosted his own radio program. During the course of the play, Korczak was repeatedly offered a way out of the ghetto which he always refused.
The centerpiece of the Korczak’s Children was the organization by the children in the orphanage of a makeshift play-within-a-play. The children chose “The Post Office” by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.
The Post Office serves as an allegory for life in the Jewish ghetto. In it, a little boy named Amal is dying; his doctor forbids him from going outside. Amal wishes only for the local postman to bring him a letter from the king.
The wicked village headman – symbolically representing the Jewish leadership of the ghetto which cooperated with the Nazis – tricks Amal and pretends to read a letter from the king saying he will come soon with his personal physician.
No one is more surprised than the headman when the king’s doctor does in fact arrive, ordering the windows open to let the night breeze in. Amal falls asleep to a vision of twinkling stars far beyond the confines of his room. He never awakens.
The next day, the Germans arrive and escort the children to the trains that will bring them to Treblinka. Korczak repeatedly assures the children that they are going to a better, safer place than the wretched ghetto that has been their home these past years.
As the play ends, Korczak tells a fantastic story of a Dr. Zi of the Planet Ro who has a magical telescope that can transform hate and evil into rays of peace and morality.
Merav and her classmates were well behaved during the play. Afterwards, as we headed out of the theater and towards our car, I asked Merav if she understood the ending.
“Yes,” Merav said. “He was taking them to a better place.”
“Do you know where that place was?” I asked.
“No,” Merav admitted. “But it was safe.”
And that's when I realized that Merav, who is an innately literal-minded child, had - like the children in the play - been captivated by Korczak’s words. She felt secure as long as they were still in his embrace, sure that no harm would come to them.
In a strange way, I envied Merav, her trusting innocence. Jewish history in the last century has not been so kind.
And then as we turned the corner towards the car, I looked up and was overwhelmed.
“Look,” I said to Merav. “Do you see that? It’s the Old City.”
The Bet Shmuel theater and Hebrew Union College are situated just off Jerusalem’s King David Street and have an unrivaled view of the Old City walls which are impressively lit up by colored spotlights at night.
“Yeah, OK,” Merav said. As in: seen that before, move on now.
But for me it was a moment of connection and clarity. This is not something you see stepping out of the theater in San Francisco, or even Broadway. I wondered if the play’s local producers had planned on this when choosing the location.
Here we were in Jerusalem. In the Jewish homeland, gazing up at the walls surrounding what was the center of biblical Israel over 3,000 years ago.
Neither Korczak nor his children ever got a chance to see the walls of Jerusalem. They never even saw their next birthdays.
Pesach is probably the most magical of Jewish holidays. And that really bugs the heck out of me!
Before we go any further: here’s a spoiler alert: just like in a movie review, if you don’t want to know too much about the way I really think about some of the more obscure Pesach traditions, stop reading right here.
For those of you still with me, OK, first of all, what do I mean by magical? I’m not talking about the warm fuzzy feeling you get when the family is all assembled and someone inevitably blurts out “Oh, what a magical night!”
No, I’m talking about doing things that just don’t make sense.
I was raised in a Jewish home that worshiped at the temple of science. And although much has changed for me since those days (clearly, Israel wasn’t on the agenda growing up...more about that another time), many of my core values have remained, paramount of those being: if you can’t explain it logically, then don’t do it.
And clearing out the hametz, the formerly 100% kosher pitas, rolls and bagels that become off limits once the holiday begins, can be given a nice philosophical spin. For example, the physical labor of removing hametz is like cleaning up our souls, taking stock of where we stand as Jews and human beings.
And some of the customs can be loads of fun for both kids and adults alike. In our house ,the highlight of all the preparation for Pesach is the night before Seder when we hide small pieces of bread around the house and the kids search them out with a feather and a flame. Then we reverse and the kids hide and the parents go looking under pillows and behind books.
It’s maybe the world’s first institutionalized game of hide and seek...with a nice educational bent.
The stories we retell from the Haggada are timeless and never fail to engender new insights. The Jewish people’s slow descent into slavery and eventual emergence from Egypt to freedom is just as relevant today as it was then. The commandment to see yourself as if you were actually there in Egypt is sublimely powerful.
But then there’s the magic.
Every year, I have to gather up all the silverware in the house and trudge over to the local mikve where two young men stand over an enormous cauldron of boiling water. I hand them the silverware and they dunk it in the water. And then – magic! – the silverware is suddenly kosher for Pesach. I get to pay a pretty penny for the privilege, too.
But what happened there, that’s what I want to know? Scientifically, I mean. Did the molecules of hametz embedded in our every day knives and forks and spoons somehow re-fuse into another metal with entirely different physical properties?
Is their some hidden chemical process going on that only the sages of long ago knew about but that modern research has failed to detect? Last I checked, most of us were still ordinary Muggles and alchemy is on the curriculum at Hogwarts not Harvard.
Same with the whole business regarding glassware. Apparently, if we soak our glasses in water for three days, changing the liquid every 24 hours, suddenly the glasses are no longer hametzadik but kosher for the holiday? What’s up with that?
I put the glasses in, I take them out. Same glasses, guys!
I sometimes think that if an alien from outer space were to look at Jewish customs this time of year, he’d shake his three heads in disbelief and tell his commanders that this part of space would be a fine place to build a hyperspatial expressway.
So given all my griping, you might ask: why do I still do it? I won’t lie and tell you that I’ve received some divine wisdom and now pouring scalding water over our kitchen countertops suddenly makes sense. Or that there’s a logical reason why we can’t just use the same old dishes after a couple of hot rinses in the dishwasher.
Some would say I need more faith. But I’m fine with the vast majority of Jewish tradition. For me, the real reason is much more prosaic. This is what you do in the community I live in, and I’m not ready – nor interested – in separating myself over a relatively minor matter of some occasional magic.
Hypocritical? Not really. I don’t "believe" in paying a marginal income tax rate of over 60% either but that’s what you do if you want to live in Israel. There are plenty of other things I find wacky in religion and life that alternatively amuse or annoy me. It’s part of a bigger package which I rather enjoy.
So I put up with a little magic. Because as the Pesach Seder starts, it’s often times me who blurts out “Oh, what a magical night!”
I admit it: I’m a bit obsessive compulsive. No surprise to regular readers of this column.
When I set out to make a purchase – whether it’s a new piece of computer equipment or a vacation – I more often than not spend days doing research on the Internet, talking to anyone and everyone I can find. After I make a decision, I may change my mind. After I make the purchase, I’ll probably regret at least some part of it.
So when we were invited to a bar mitzvah in the town of Efrat, just south of Jerusalem in Gush Etzion, I knew I was about to start obsessing. But it wasn’t about what to get the bar mitzvah boy? Rather it was: how were we going to get there?
We used to visit our friends in Efrat all the time. But that was before September 2000. At first, everyone freaked out. Rocks were hurled at buses on and near the Tunnel Road; shots were fired regularly.
Egged outfitted its buses on that route with bullet special reinforced windows, families stopped traveling together in the same vehicle, and many of our friends who made the commute regularly actually began wearing bullet proof vests.
Then things quieted down. In truth, there’s been nary an incident on the Jerusalem-Efrat road for most of the past four years. Bus patronage slacked off as our friends all went back to their cars, even without the bullet proof vests. But that doesn’t mean something couldn’t still happen. Tomorrow. To us.
When we first invited to the bar mitzvah, I immediately said “let’s take the bus.” That had to be the safest alternative. But it was expensive. And so inconvenient.
“What’s more inconvenient, taking the bus or being dead?” Jody asked in a not-so-flippant way.
“But something could happen to the bus too,” I countered, playing devil’s advocate and contradicting my initial position. There was at least one deadly attack where a roadside bomb detonated under the bus; when the passengers rushed out to safety, terrorists were waiting and began to gun them down.
Then there was a plot that fortunately was uncovered before anything happened where terrorists armed with bomb belts planned to hijack a bus to Bethlehem. But that couldn’t happen on this line...half the passengers are soldiers or otherwise heavily armed.
“You’re driving me crazy,” Jody said. “It’s really six of one, half dozen of the other. Let’s just make a decision and do it.”
But by Friday morning, the day we were supposed to head out, I hadn’t gotten any closer. I had already searched the Internet to see if there had been any increase in terrorist activity on that highway in the past few days. There hadn’t.
I started grilling friends.
“Car for sure,” answered one person.
“Yes, the car,” said a second. “We do it all the time.”
I called up a friend in Efrat who was notably skittish...like me. I knew she used to wear a bullet proof vest when she drove in her private car.
“Take the bus,” she said.
“But...you don’t.”
“It all depends on what you have to do. We have friends in Ofra,” she said referring to another settlement north of Ramallah, “and I wouldn’t dream of driving there. But they do all the time and don’t think twice.”
I went out for a run. Maybe that would clear my head. But all I could think about was what’s the point of staying in shape if life is so tenuous?
It’s not easy being me...
On the way back I ran into my neighbor Marc. I posed my usual question.
“What’s the problem?” he chided. “We just drove out to Efrat with the whole family last Friday.” Then he added: “But I certainly wouldn’t drive home at night.”
That was the key. That small bit of extra information was enough to tip my thinking and allow me to make the mental shift. We would drive.
Just not at night.
I called my friend in Efrat. “We’re driving!” I said with a triumphant lilt to my voice.
“I think all of the attacks in our area have actually been during the day,” she said.
“I don’t want to hear it. Children, let’s go.”
We piled into the car and headed out. Before we knew it we were on the Tunnel Road. Large concrete walls had been built to shield it from bullets and stones.
As we arrived at the army checkpoint, one of the kids asked, “Abba...have we passed the place where they throw stones?”
I paused. Then responded honestly: “No, we’re actually entering it right now.” I had told them about rocks but had kept the stories about gunfire to myself. A responsible parent practices selective disinformation.
I checked my watch. It was 4:18 PM when we passed the checkpoint. As we pulled into the entrance of Efrat, I turned to Jody. “Do you remember if I put on deodorant today after my shower?” I asked. I was all wet. We passed the settlement’s security fence.
My watch read 4:21 PM.
Three minutes! That was it. Three minutes of dangerous road. That was what all this obsessing was about? And yet, I thought again, it only takes three seconds to...
We unpacked and got ready for Shabbat. The bar mitzvah boy acquitted himself superbly and we had a very relaxing time. On Saturday night, we hung out with friends while the kids all watched a video together.
“So,” the bar mitzvah boy’s father said as we were getting ready to head back home on Sunday morning. “Do you think you’d be willing to come and visit us even if it’s not a bar mitzvah?”
“Hmm...” I thought. It was such a short trip and I felt foolish for all my procrastinations and posturing.
“You know what,” I said. “I think we just might.”
I’m not promising I won’t obsess about it all over again. But in three minutes, it seems, we’d come a long way.
posted by Brian |
11:45 AM
No News is the Best News
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Merav is out of the hospital and feeling a bit better. That should be cause for celebration. So why do I feel so confused?
These past weeks – how many has it been, six already? – have been pure hell. For us and for our extended families. Eleven-year-old Merav has probably been the least affected. She had the good sense not to dive into the endless “what’s causing it” debate that has been the organizing topic of every phone call and conversation we’ve had.
And that’s the thing: six weeks later, we still don’t know what caused Merav to get so sick she was admitted to Sha’arei Tzedek Medical Center for a week and to be out of school for much longer. She was tested for everything under the sun, and just about everything was ruled out, from hepatitis to parasites to gall stones and liver disease.
Our doctor says the jury is still out. Could be something chronic...or a rare virus that modern medicine just doesn’t know how to identify yet. Time will tell.
Or it may not.
As we’ve hovered in this seemingly perpetual limbo-land, one thing is for sure: we learned a lot about the Israeli medical system...and about how people relate to illness.
Dr. F., who took on Merav’s case as a personal challenge and at one point even convened a brainstorming session of 15 of the top pediatric specialists in Jerusalem, is notoriously non-invasive. His medical philosophy is to strive at all costs to avoid doing tests that could have complications, even if it means waiting it out for weeks with only slight day-to-day improvement.
Family and friends were less patient. Why hasn’t she had a CT scan, they asked? An Upper GI? Liver biopsy? Colonoscopy? All of these would have given us valuable data about possible chronic inflammatory disease that might be the root of Merav’s illness. But each has its risks.
CT scans involve a strong dose of radiation at a time when a young girl’s body is at a critical state of internal development. Liver biopsy can lead to infection or bleeding. Colonoscopy, well, that’s just plain nasty.
Add to that the fact that Merav does not deal well with invasive procedures in the first place. Just getting blood taken was traumatic. And it had to be done daily when she was in the hospital.
On one of her first blood taking expeditions, a particularly inept nurse must have poked her in half a dozen spots before finally having to get blood out from near her femur.
Next time out, it took a full hour of cajoling plus liberal application of Emla, a topical anesthetic, to get the job done.
Blood became our new language. One thing that just about anyone who enters the medical system can tell you is that you become intimately familiar with a wide range of information you never before knew a thing about...and will probably (hopefully) completely forget in a few month’s time.
I can recite the key indicators from Merav’s blood results by heart: Bilirubin down from 4.6 to 0.9. CRP up to 13.8, but dropping steadily to 8.9, then 3.2 and now 1.0. ALP, AST and GGT still high but falling too.
Despite her aversion to blood tests, we couldn’t help wondering: was biding our time being medically prudent...or ultimately irresponsible? Like everything having to do with parenting, it’s a fine balancing act.
Indeed, when Merav was at her sickest, Jody and I found ourselves going against our doctor’s advice, lobbying for taking a more invasive route. It’s natural, I suppose: there is probably nothing worse than seeing your child in pain, especially pain that lasts for weeks unabated. The knee-jerk response is to do something, anything.
But what if it turned out to be just a virus that needed an inordinate amount of time to pass? Or, given that we still didn’t know which haystack we were looking in - let alone which needle - we wound up ordering the wrong tests? What would be the ramifications of that misjudgment?
We tend to place our physicians on all-knowing pedestals. But as one friend said to Jody, “With all of the diseases out there, I’m amazed when they actually do know what’s going on.”
Merav still suffers from stomach cramps, though the pain is definitely down, her energy is up, and - most important - that plucky, playful attitude and presence that we missed so much around the house these past weeks is back for at least several hours a day.
Now that she’s home from the hospital and stable, we’re even starting to think about more mundane things, like getting her back to school.
“Not yet,” Dr. F. told us during an outpatient visit to his pediatric clinic as we reviewed her latest blood numbers. “She’ll let you know when she’s ready.”
Typical of his non-invasive approach. Merav liked that answer and gave him a slight smile.
And so we continue to wait and see. Because in our case, despite the constant chorus of concerned voices demanding a diagnosis, the truth is: no news really would be the best news.
After weeks of illness that had baffled pediatricians, surgeons and specialists across the city, our family doctor said, with no small amount of resignation, we had no option left other than to check eleven-year-old Merav into the hospital.
Hospitalization is a big deal, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It means that you essentially have a new place to live – however brief – with new rules, new food and new people to meet, most of them not necessarily the same individuals you’d choose as your immediate neighbors.
And although the pediatric ward at Sha’arei Tzedek Medical Center has a nicely appointed kids’ club and even a computer room, the drab hallways and pockmarked beige rooms don’t appear to have been touched since the institution moved to its current location in Bayit Vegan some 25 years ago.
With three to a room (six, including parents sleeping next to their kids), the place reminded me of being stuck on a crowded airplane. While the beds may have been fully reclining, we were decidedly stuck in coach, experiencing prolonged jet lag...without the benefit of actually getting anywhere.
With Merav’s condition such a puzzle, we became the “interesting case” on the department floor. A torrent of residents paraded by, each asking the same questions and intently studying her chart.
An IV was inserted right away and blood taken regularly. She had visits from so many heads of department, it’s hard for me to count: pediatric immunology, neurology, rheumatology.
In between visits and tests, we managed to snag the floor’s sole portable TV with DVD player. Jody and I split our time in the hospital and I made sure to pick up a couple of new movies a day that I thought Merav would like.
We checked in on a Wednesday. Our goal was to get a diagnosis as soon as possible and to get out of there. In particular before Shabbat. There was nothing I could imagine more depressing than being stuck in the hospital over the weekend.
No real tests are run on Saturday, I quickly understood, and there’s no TV to take your mind of the dreary sameness of the room (even if we wanted to watch TV, Sha’arei Tzedek Hospital – which is officially religious – wouldn’t permit it).
In charge of Merav’s case was Dr. F., the head of pediatric gastroenterology in the hospital and the most senior pediatric GI in Jerusalem. We felt in good hands with Dr. F. Until, at one point, while making conversation, he asked what I do for a living.
Explaining that I write a blog about life in Israel is always the beginning of a long story, and Dr. F. seemed in a perpetual rush. So I answered with my back-up response, something straightforward I figure most people can understand.
“I’m a journalist,” I said.
“Oh…with the media,” he said.
That appeared to be a mistake, because the next day when I tried to speculate with him about what might be going on with Merav, he cut me off. “You reporters do too much research,” he said. “I’ll tell you when I know something.”
“But...” I started.
“I’m not talking to you,” he said and walked away in a dramatic huff.
Now if you’re thinking about now “dude, it’s not about you, it’s about Merav, get over it,” you’d be right. Except that the week was quickly drawing to an end and I needed to work with this guy to get Merav out of there by Shabbat. Her condition was stable, not worsening. There was no reason for her stay through Shabbat hospital hell.
I had to figure out Dr. F.’s number...fast. I’d worry about patient rights and ongoing bedside manner later.
I tried being obsequious.
“She really seems to be doing better, don’t you think? Maybe we could treat her as an outpatient?”
“Not yet,” Dr. F. replied curtly.
I tried being direct.
“Really, what’s the point of her staying here on Shabbat? It’s not like you’re going to do anything. Just let her out.”
“We have to wait,” Dr. F. said.
A group of 20 yeshiva boys came on Friday morning and sang us Shabbat songs in the hallways. Girls doing sherut leumi – national service rather than regular army - handed out Shabbat treats: chocolate and toffees. We received similar goody bags from the Israel Electric Company and the National Lottery. Not sure about the significance of that one. A light lunch was served early in preparation for a heavier Shabbat meal.
Just when I had despaired that she would be stuck in the hospital for Shabbat, Dr. F. returned.
“She can go home,” he said. “But...”
I waited in worried anticipation for the other shoe to drop.
“...just for Shabbat. She’ll still be a patient in the hospital. Kupat Cholim cannot know about this.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. Was our doctor ordering some uniquely Israeli subterfuge of our local HMO, our kupat cholim?
“The kupah won’t pay for her unless she’s here,” he explained. “Now go. Come back Sunday morning. Same bed, same room. You can leave your stuff.”
Not wanting to tempt fate...or what I saw as Dr. F. taking a temporary liking to me, we just picked up and headed out the door, pillow in hand, hospital tag still on Merav’s wrist. We were feeling pretty blessed that we’d been granted what we were sure was a rare privilege.
That is until we saw the rest of the ward. Except for a few beds, it looked as though everyone had been sprung for Shabbat in what we surmised is apparently pretty much standard procedure in Israel, at least in Jerusalem.
Another in the many ways that life in Israel runs according to a very different clock and calendar, where Shabbat is not just another day of the week but one deserving special dispensation.
On Sunday, Merav and I made our way back into Room 37 on the sixth floor of Sha’arei Tzedek to begin another week of tests in the long search for a diagnosis. But at least we were refreshed from our weekend furlough.
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Postscript: After six days in the hospital Merav is now back at home. I’ll update you again next week.
Our daughter Merav has been sick for the last three plus weeks with an undiagnosed illness. Today's story - as well as the one I'm planning to run next week - reflect particular moments during this long process which also included a week of hospitalization.
For those of you who have been in touch, Jody and I cannot express how meaningful your concern and help has been. Merav would certainly love to hear from you. You can send messages to her at brian@ThisNormalLife.com.
Merav is still sick, but she is slowly but surely feeling better and we are hopeful that by this time next week we will have gotten to the bottom of what's been causing her all of her distress
-- Brian
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It’s been a tough three weeks. Eleven-year-old Merav came down with terrible stomach cramps...then developed a rash and proceeded to turn yellow.
A series of blood tests, ultrasounds and even a liver scan had the mostly baffled doctors ruling out appendicitis, hepatitis, and a score of other itis’s, but to date they still have no diagnosis. There seems to be something going on with her liver or gall bladder which may explain the jaundice, among other possible explanations.
In the midst of all of the poking and prodding and note-taking by diligent interns at three different hospital emergency rooms, little Aviv turned seven.
Any birthday is a big deal in our house, turning seven all the more so...particularly for the birthday boy. We had planned a party for Aviv and his school chums with games like pin-the-nose-on-the-clown, but given Merav’s suffering, we decided to put the celebration off.
Aviv seemed OK with this.
But on the morning of his birthday, just 15 minutes before school started, Aviv announced somewhat nonchalantly, “And you’ll be coming with a cake for hafsakat eser, right?” He was referring to the morning snack break.
“Cake?” Jody and I both looked at the clock and then at each other.
Picking up on our hesitation, Aviv commanded: “You have to bring a cake. That’s what you do for birthdays in my school!”
Jody had one foot out the door already; she was taking Merav back to the doctor for yet another test and it was raining, meaning traffic would be nasty.
“There’s no time,” I whined. “And I’ve got a meeting this morning…I’ll have to cancel...can’t we do it a different day, Aviv?”
Aviv looked panicky. His cancelled after-school party was finally hitting home.
“Just follow the instructions,” Jody said, thrusting a box of Pillsbury cake mix at me and measuring out some oil into a bowl. “And let Aviv crack the eggs.”
Aviv’s face lit up. As Jody and Merav ran out, I whipped up the oil and eggs and flour, then popped the pan in the oven and Aviv out the door.
At exactly 9:45 AM, I arrived at Aviv’s classroom bearing our creation. I even remembered the frosting. The 36 kids in Aviv’s class were delighted to see me. Who wouldn’t be? I was a man bearing a cake.
I sliced and Aviv distributed the pieces. He was beaming and proud, the center of attention on his big day.
As I was leaving the school, I ran into a group of Merav’s friends by chance on their way in from recess. I hadn’t intended to visit her class, but this seemed like an opportunity. In my broken Hebrew, I updated them on Merav’s condition.
“How do you say gall bladder in Hebrew?” I asked one of the kids I knew was from an English-speaking home.
“What’s a gall bladder?” she asked.
Right.
“You know,” I added, “Merav’s a bit lonely. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if some of you came to visit for a bit.
Her classmates all began talking among themselves, and I could see that the sixth grade planning wheels had been set in motion.
Jody and Merav arrived back from the doctor about the same time as I walked in from my visit to school. Merav flopped into her familiar sick position, clutching her hot water bottle on the couch and looking dour and distressed.
As I headed back out the door for my meeting, she confided to me: “You know, I thought it would be fun to stay home and watch TV all day. But now all I want to do is go back to school. I wonder if my friends even care about me?”
“Of course they do,” I said. I wanted to tell her about my conversation with the kids in her class, but I was already late.
When I returned home, something was different. Merav’s mood had brightened considerably.
A big poster was taped to the door with well wishes from her classmates and the entire Scouts troop. Someone had brought over a candy bar – white chocolate, Merav’s favorite (not that she had any appetite for it). Merav was flipping through a hand written book with pages after page of heartfelt blessings. Several board games, a video, and a pair of new socks lay stacked neatly in the corner.
“My friends,” Merav said weakly but with as big a smile as she could muster. “They really do care.”
A few minutes later, Aviv came bounding in the door, oblivious to the transformation taking place around him.
“Is there any more cake left?” he demanded.
“Absolutely,” I said. “On a day like today, it appears that there’s more than enough sweetness to go around.”
“What, no rice milk?” I asked Jody as I helped her unload the groceries after a recent trip to the supermarket. I had immediately noticed the bags seemed lighter than usual.
“They were all out,” Jody said, almost apologetically.
“Harumph,” I muttered, trying to be flip about the matter but barely concealing my disappointment.
Rice milk isn’t just a guilty pleasure in our family, you see; it’s practically a lifestyle. Our enchantment with the organic white stuff goes back 15 years now.
Still, as this wasn’t the first time our store has run out, I wasn’t entirely surprised. The supply channels from Palo Alto to Israel are a bit longer than when we lived less than an hour away from the factory.
When a second week went by and the supermarket shelves still ran bare, though, I began to get worried.
Now, when we moved to Israel in 1994, there was no such thing as rice milk here. I knew that from a pilot trip I’d made a few months before our arrival.
So when we packed up our “lift” – the containers that were sent by ship with all our furniture and pots and pans and paperwork – we included several large palettes of rice milk to “ease the transition.”
Friends thought we were wacky. I deemed it prescient. Especially when, a mere two months after we ran out of our imported supply, Israel miraculously started to stock our favorite beverage.
But since then, every time there’s a rice milk shortage, a mini-crisis erupts in my mind. What if this time it’s for good, I think.
Maybe Israelis just aren’t buying enough of the stuff?
Or maybe the manufacturer has decided to boycott Israel? It wouldn’t be the first time that politics prevented us from imbibing what we want, when we want: let’s not forget that Coke didn’t arrive on the Israeli scene until 1966 and Pepsi not until 1992 (the Snopes website has the complete history).
I did a survey of several other stores which also normally carried our rice milk. All out.
Even at the health food shop down the street from us – which charges a 20% premium for an already overpriced product (nearly $3.50 a box here vs. $1.50 in the States) – there were only three boxes left.
I bought out the store.
I can whine all I want, but truthfully, we’ve been pretty fortunate in terms of getting the foods we crave from back home. There are only a few items we still lack, nearly all of them of the junk food variety.
Tops on my list: corn chips. The Fritos brand. Just hasn’t gotten here for some reason. Whenever I bring up this particular desire, friends inevitably point me to Doritos tortilla chips, which we do get and which are even from the same Frito-Lay company. But there’s something different...the shape or texture or saltiness...that makes Frito’s brand corn chips uniquely satisfying.
Then there’s...doughnuts. Real American doughnuts. Regular readers have heard me wax rhapsodic on Krispy Kremes, and let me tell you, it was a tough break for all us expatriates when Dunkin Donuts pulled out of Israel several years ago.
So, on Jody’s recent trip to the States, when she asked if there was anything she could bring back. I said, “Some Entenmann’sglazed doughnuts, please.” Ziplocked and packed in the cold underbelly of the plane, they’d make the trip just fine I reckoned.
Instead, Jody brought back two boxes of Girl Scout Cookies. Uniquely American, yes, but not the same thing!
It’s not that we don’t have some really yummy baked goods here. You won’t find me saying no to a hot babka. But an oversized, crunchy Pepperidge Farm cookie stuffed with white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts...stop me before I get on the next plane out.
And don’t let me forget what used to be my breakfast staple once upon a time: Eggo frozen waffles. Straight from the freezer into the toaster oven, then smeared with butter and maple syrup, topped with Fritos...sorry, I got carried away (although apparently, the good folks at Eggo have some interesting, very realrecipe suggestions).
I’m telling you, though, if I was ever cast in one of those old commercials, anyone telling me to leggo my Eggo would be looking down the wrong side of a blueberry muffin.
Back at the supermarket, during our third week of rice milk deprivation, an official looking man spotted Jody scouring the empty shelves and approached her.
He explained that there had been a dock strike in Italy which, apparently, is the closest port of call to Israel for our beloved rice milk, but that it was over now. The rice milk should be back in another week’s time.
Jody came home and told me. I breathed a sigh of relief and gave the air a triumphant punch.
Not that I was worried or anything.
posted by Brian |
10:32 PM
Why Aren’t You a Winner?
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Steve, an entrepreneur friend of mine in Jerusalem, met recently with an Israeli venture capitalist concerning funding for Steve’s new company. The two discussed the market, the company’s technology and promise.
Eventually, they got down to Steve’s work history which included several startups that had trudged along but never really hit the big time.
The venture capitalist then looked Steve in the eye and asked: “So how come you’ve never been a winner?”
Steve was momentarily stunned but came up with what he felt was the right diplomatic and politically correct response. Afterwards, though, he confided in me at a bar mitzvah we both attended.
“What does that mean, not a winner?” Steve asked feeling both indignant and a bit bewildered. “And what right does he have to sum up my life on his own techno-financial terms? I’m not living on the street, am I? I’ve raised a family. In Jerusalem, no less.”
Steve had run head on into a mindset that we too often buy into.
How many times do we allow external forces – with or without our permission – to define our intrinsic value or our success in society...not on our terms but on theirs?
If you watch enough TV or go to the movies, how do walk out feeling about yourself? Are you rich enough? Thin enough? In love enough? It’s pretty hard to score when the odds are so stacked against you.
While I was having my conversation with Steve, another friend of mine, Josh, was making a pilot trip to Israel. He hadn’t visited in 20 years and it was his burning desire to be here, not in California where he’d raised a family and built a medical practice.
What had kept him?
Josh was dealing a different sort of external definition on what constituted success.
“The Rabbis in our community pretty much forbid anyone to move to Israel if they’ve got kids between the ages of five and 18,” Josh explained over zucchini and carrot pasta one night during his trip.
I was flabbergasted. “You’re kidding, right?” I said, but I could tell he wasn’t.
“They say coming here can be so traumatic that you’re kids will go off the religious path for sure,” Josh said.
Now, in Josh’s community, statements from Rabbis he relied on constituted more of a binding ruling than mere opinion. His even being here in Israel, checking out school and work options, was an act of rebellion in its own quiet way.
Whether Josh’s Rabbis were right or not – aliyah counselor Howie Kahn agrees with them in this article, although I still believe that a kid who’s going to go off the path will do that wherever he or she is in the world – Josh and Steve were both forced to contend with how other people view their lives.
I’ve been thinking about Josh and Steve a lot as I’ve been taking a meditation class for the last couple of months. I’ve dabbled with meditation for years. But it turns out I got it all wrong.
I always thought that meditation was about emptying your mind of all thoughts. Focusing on your breath and being peaceful and pure. But as one meditation practitioner quipped, “that’s just being dull.”
Meditation, rather, is about being mindful, and to a large extent paying attention to and identifying external stimuli, then simply noticing them for what they are – something outside of you.
And whether it’s a visceral sound like jack hammer drilling away while you’re trying to think, or a subtle voice like a Rabbi or a venture capitalist trying to define your life or career path on terms not your own, you always have a choice of how to respond.
The key is to separate facts from perceptions; to remember that the external event is not you.
Why aren’t you a winner, asked the VC to my friend? That’s the wrong attack. The real question is, why don’t you see that you already are?
Dr. Michael arrived at half past ten in the morning on a rainy winter day wearing a gray overcoat, a long-since fashionable paisley pullover sweater vest, and a big black case. He sat down across from me at my kitchen table and rifled through a wad of official looking papers.
Dr. Michael is a traveling insurance doctor. And his job today was to give me a physical in order to process the mortgage I wrote about last week.
What does getting a mortgage have to do with a visit from the doctor, you ask? Well, in Israel, in order to secure a home loan, you have to take out personal life insurance. I suppose it makes sense: the bank wants to know that if you die, they’ll be taken care of.
But there's also some strange rule that says if you already have a life insurance policy (which I do from a previous job), you have to get a physical in order to process the plan. Hence my visit from Dr. Michael.
Before we got started, I chatted a bit with the stranger in my kitchen. He had been in Israel for 15 years, he told me, was originally from the former Soviet Union. A fellow immigrant, he spoke Hebrew only passably better than me.
As long as he could understand “stop, that hurts!” we’d be fine I figured.
As I regarded Dr. Michael across the table, I imagined he once had grander designs for his professional life. Perhaps a research position in a major university hospital in Moscow, or a post as head of pediatrics in a private clinic.
But working for an insurance company shlepping from office to office and house to house...well, it’s certainly decent if not glamorous work. And with a broad grin permanently affixed to his roundish face, he seemed to have a great attitude.
He started by asking me questions.
Cancer? No.
Smoker? No.
Women’s problems? He snickered and answered for me, checking off the appropriate box. For some reason, the people filling out forms always seem to think that question is a real hoot.
The rest of the exam was pretty much pro forma: check the blood pressure, pee in a cup. Most of Dr. Michael’s big black bag was filled with a portable EKG device. I lay down and he strapped it on.
“You might feel a little electric shock,” he said, then winked.
I tried to think calming thoughts.
Finally it was time for my favorite part: the blood test (not...remember my encounter with needles last year?)
“You need to sign this,” Dr. Michael said, pointing at a form with lots of tiny Hebrew writing on it.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“AIDS test,” he replied.
Now wait a minute. Checking for AIDS isn't something you throw around cavalierly. I was in college when knowledge about AIDS was just starting to make the front pages, and whether or not to get tested for HIV was a big deal. I remember friends nervously waiting for a phone call that might very well determine their future.
“What if I don’t agree?” I asked Dr. Michael.
“Then you don’t get the insurance,” he said matter-of-factly, still smiling, but this time without the comforting wink.
I was momentarily stunned by the utter lack of respect the Israeli system shows for issues such as the protection of personal privacy. And the implication that someone who is HIV positive would be ineligible for a mortgage seemed blatantly discriminatory. If we had been in California, I'm sure a demand like this would be illegal. But what choice did I have?
“Fine," I said. "Go ahead.”
I had been taken aback but it wasn’t like I was particularly worried. After sixteen years of marriage and no blood transfusions of note, I’d be pretty shocked if something showed up now.
But hey, wait a minute, what about that needle he was using...had I actually seen him break the plastic seal?
Blood extracted, Dr. Michael handed me a cotton ball and told me to press down. Israeli lab technicians, apparently, don’t believe in Band-Aids.
Dr. Michael packed up his gear and shook my hand as he headed out the door. “Hey, don’t get 'stuck' in traffic,” I quipped.
He looked at me quizzically; my attempt at humor falling flat on the floor along with the little cotton ball from my arm.
Well, I passed the test: I don't have AIDS and now, at long last, we do have our mortgage. And there was a positive side to the whole experience, too: I got a chance to spend a few minutes with a fellow immigrant to Israel who I might not have otherwise met.
Perhaps that, despite my trepidation for tests and long-standing dispassion for needles, was the real point.
posted by Brian |
7:08 AM
Three Falafels and a Mortgage
Thursday, February 10, 2005
We’ve got some good news: we bought a house.
Yes, after 10 years of renting in Israel and seven before that in California, Jody and I have finally joined the ranks of the home owners. There’s only one thing still in the way:
Getting a mortgage.
Since we never had to apply for a home loan back in the old country, I can’t share any insights on transcontinental cultural and bureaucratic differences. I hear it’s pretty nasty anywhere in the world.
All I know is that, here in Israel, securing a mortgage is a tongue-twisting, nerve shattering matter of luck, timing, and sheer tenacity.
Here’s our experience.
First of all, there are a dozen or so banks offering mortgages and every one of them, it seems, proffers a slight twist, making it hard to do a straight comparison. With advice from friends, we hit the pavement (reservations not required...nor, in most cases even allowed).
We started with the bank where we have our home checking accounts: First International Bank of Israel. The mortgage department consists of two clerks (this we’d find was standard at all the banks). Of those, one was seeing a client. The other was speaking heatedly into the phone.
From the paper in her hand, though – she was waving around her car registration and driver’s license – it was clear she wasn’t conducting bank business.
OK, it happens. But this went on for a good ten minutes. She never looked up, never motioned to us to sit down or made one of those apologetic gestures indicating she was trying her best.
When she finally hung up, she glanced in our direction, cranked up a fake smile and turned on the sugar and spice.
We were not impressed.
We did, however, get a good primer into how the system works. There are three main options: loans linked to the prime index (which can be changed every month), loans linked to the dollar (which can be changed every three or six months), and fixed interest loans which, despite how it sounds, aren’t really fixed because they’re linked to increases in the cost of living index...that is inflation.
In other words, there is no way of actually locking in an interest rate and knowing what it will be for the next twenty years.
There’s also a new immigrants loan (zakaut) that has a very low interest rate, runs for a whopping 28 years and reportedly some of it even becomes a grant.
And, oh yes, you can take a mix of the different programs in any way you want.
Heads throbbing, we did what we were told to do next – get a quote in writing that we could take to another bank to get an even better deal.
“Oh, no, there’s no such thing,” Ilana the clerk told us. “You’ll just have to trust me. Don’t worry about it. I’ve been working in this bank for 25 years.”
And then she added that ever so Israeli phrase that countenances no argument: “y’hiye beseder" – it will be all right.
Next...
Our second stop was Bank Hapoalim. Our cler, Ella, was more genuine, but kept adjusting a frumpy hat that sat loosely (too loosely I thought) on a head of dirty blond hair as she mumbled her way through rates and regulations.
Ella, unlike Ilana, offered to open up a file for us right on the spot. She printed out a wad of papers and told us where to sign. Staring at 50 pages of small Hebrew text, we did as we were told, not sure whether we’d applied for a mortgage or rented out our children for slave labor...working as loan clerks in a dingy downtown bank.
As this had taken close to three hours, we treated ourselves to a falafel, Israel’s national fast food. The joint was packed and in a good location, just opposite Jerusalem’s famous outdoor market – Mahane Yehdua.
The french fries were soggy but the price was cheap. Was this a hint: that when it came to our mortgage, price trumps quality and service?
“At least we don’t have to calculate interest rates for the falafel,” I quipped. Jody didn’t laugh.
The next day, we headed downtown again. We visited two banks – Tefahot and Adanim – which both left us as cold as our falafel the day before.
Our final stop was Bank Leumi which proved to be a welcome change. Dafna wore a bright expression and presented herself as extremely professional. Everything about her – from the way she explained the process clearly – in English, I might add – to her clothes and make up were put together just right. She’d get back to us within two days with an answer to our request.
We treated ourselves to another falafel as a reward. Things seemed to be looking up. The meal from the Yemenite falafel stand on HaNevi’im street was fresh and hot with a tangy sauce that seriously burned my mouth. Just the way I like it. (Only later did I realize that this falafel stand had been blown up by a suicide bomber in July 2002.)
Dafna called a day early to say our loan had been approved and would we like to set up – what’s this – an appointment...boy, someone had trained this bank in customer service!
In we went, ready to make a deal. Our friends told us that it was at this point, when offers are on the table, that you can really negotiate. We had decided on a mix between prime and fixed. I was sure Dafna would come down a couple of points on one or both.
Dafna didn’t budge. What she’d offered was a very good rate, she said, and the bank had the most flexible early pay back terms.
We headed back to Ella. Could she beat Dafna’s offer? "Absolutely," Ella said, wiggling a different yet equally frumpy hat. "Just give me a day or two to get it approved."
Well, this went on for a week. Playing one bank against the other. Slowly squeezing the rates down .001% at a time. For what? A difference of $10 a month. Although as Jody, our family’s financial wiz pointed out, over 20 years would add up to a tidy two grand. And $10 covers a movie and maybe even a small popcorn!
Finally, perhaps out of pure exhaustion, we decided to go with Dafna. Her rate was still too high, but she was the most pleasant to sit across a desk from.
We headed downtown and began collecting the final papers. We walked out with a stack of documents for our accountant and our lawyer, two forms to get notarized, life insurance to take out (more on that next time), the phone number for an assessor.
We felt overwhelmed but satisfied with our decision...or at least that we’d made a decision.
No sooner had we left the bank when Ella called on the cellphone. We told her what we'd agreed to. "I can beat that by another 2 points on the fixed and .01 on the prime," she implored. "You haven’t signed anything yet...have you?"
I felt duped. A freier – the Israeli epithet for sucker. Taken in by a pretty face and a smattering of English. Once the loan was secured, we’d probably never see or speak to Dafna again.
I called Dafna. “OK, I know you don’t have to do anything here, but could you get us just a little bit more.” My argument didn’t even convince Jody, but Dafna said she’d try. We continued with the paperwork, our faith in Israeli bureaucracy hanging on this last test.
Dafna met us half way. And she agreed to waive the processing charges, which was worth at least $250 off the top. Maybe it wasn’t the best over the long term, but we wouldn’t have to start all over again, thank God.
On our final day, after we’d brought in all the signed papers, we treated ourselves to one last falafel. But not just any falafel.
We’d heard about a little take-away place on Shamai Street that makes “sabich” – an Iraqi version of the falafel. Instead of chickpeas, it has hot hardboiled egg and fried eggplant with spicy amba (mango sauce) in a freshly-baked pita. It was delicious. A fitting toast to our own grilling experience.
We don’t move for another year (long story...rental contracts that can’t be broken), but the mortgage part of the process is just about over.
So, if you’re ever in Jerusalem, drop us a line. We can tell you where to go for a mortgage...and for falafel.
posted by Brian |
5:55 AM
Rock and Roll Junior High School
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Who ever said that getting into junior high had to be such a production? But that’s exactly what it was – a full theatrical production – at the Jerusalem Girls’ School for Torah and the Arts.
Let’s step back a moment…
My wife Jody and I recently accompanied our eleven-year-old sixth grader Merav to two “open houses” of Jerusalem junior high schools. Elementary school in Israel only runs through sixth grade. Most grade schools feed into a particular intermediate school which covers seventh and eighth grades and usually (but not always) a four year high school after that.
All of this is scheduled to change if the Dovrat Commission implements its recommendations (which call for, among other things, the abolition of two year intermediate schools). But for now it puts an inordinate amount of pressure on the kids. Why?
Because what if your child doesn’t want to go to the junior high that’s “connected” to her school? Then she’s run through the ringer with tests and psychometric exams and waiting lists and way too much stress for one so young.
We already knew the drill – we’d been through it two years ago with now-eighth grader Amir. But most of the religious schools in Jerusalem are sex-segregated after sixth grade. So we couldn’t rely on our experience with Amir. We were starting over from scratch.
We had always assumed that Merav would go from Efrata, her elementary school, to Evelina de Rothschild (named after the wife of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild...isn’t it great how in Israel, even school names evoke history).
Now, even though Efrata does not feed automatically into Evelina, and so would entail the aforementioned tests, it always seemed the most “like us” – moderate religiously, good academics, well balanced.
But when we attended Evelina’s open house, we discovered another adjective attached to the school we didn’t expect: boring.
I hate to be rude, but there’s no getting around it: the open house was a major league snooze-fest.
The principal monotoned on and on, barely cracking a smile, while parents and prospective students alike squirmed in their seats. The PowerPoint – and by this time, I was excited to see anything potentially more dynamic up near the dais – was as flat as the rest of the evening.
Now, it’s true that Evelina has been through some tough times in the last year. Its former headmaster was suspended in what the Jerusalem Report reported as a vindictive power struggle waged against her by the outgoing administration. The new principal was clearly nervous at the open house; maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on her.
Still, it was like they weren’t even trying.
At the following evening’s open house at Omanuyot – the Emunah-run Torah and Arts school I mentioned earlier – the contrast couldn’t have been clearer. From the second we walked into the foyer, there was electricity in the air. The principal was working the crowd. Girls were dressed up in costumes, handing out stickers and sweets. Art covered every wall.
Instead of sitting for an hour and a half lecture, we were led on a guided tour of the school which as its name implies encourages – no requires – its students to “major” in the arts. And we’re not even talking about college here.
We visited the sculpture room and the animation studio. In a demonstration of the music program, four girls performed a song they’d written themselves – two vocalists, guitar and piano – that could easily have been a hit on Galgalatz (Israel’s top pop station).
In the film room, we learned that girls can specialize in cinema as we watched a student video project. Theater students acted out a dramatic reading of what they were learning.
It was only at our last stop of the night – the dance studio – that we hit a snag.
“Sorry, but the men will have to leave during the performance,” the instructor explained.
“What?” I muttered to Jody, feeling like I’d just taken a punch for God.
Merav grinned and waved goodbye as I made my way to the door. But I was feeling anything but nonchalant.
Why should men be excluded from this? I go to movies and plays and watch TV…I have long disagreed with the dictum in the ultra-orthodox world that men need special “protection” from the weakness and urges inherent in our sex.
I was coming up against the “Torah” component of this school for Torah and the Arts, and the administration’s interpretation of religiosity had been nagging at me all night..
Indeed, hadn’t the Rabbi made a point during brief opening remarks of saying that he discouraged graduates from serving in the army (though, to his credit, he did sanction sherut leumi – national service)?
And what about those rumors I’d heard that this was a school that ran spot checks on girl’s skirt and sleeve lengths. Girls, it was murmured, were forbidden from wearing pants – both in school and out. From my experience in the dance room, that didn’t seem so far off.
Moreover, I couldn’t decide if the innovation of having a school where religious girls could express themselves creatively was an impressive step forward towards equality between the sexes …or if what was really being implied was that girls couldn’t compete on the academics, so let them indulge a little in the arts.
As Merav and Jody walked out of the mini-dance recital, Merav picked up on my predicament.
“The girls were in tight leotards,” she said. “They would have been uncomfortable. It has nothing to do with you.”
Smart cookie that one.
Whether we choose Omanuyot in the end or give Evelina the benefit of the doubt, there will be compromises. There is no perfect place. But it certainly is good to have so many options.
And Evelina seemed to have learned from its mistakes by the time Merav went in for her written entrance exam – 12th graders had posted great big “welcome” signs; they were passing out cookies and practically leading cheers, Merav reported.
Omanuyot, however, does have two more things going for it that may very well tip the balance in its favor. First, it is the school connected to Merav’s elementary school – that means no tests. And second: it’s walking distance from our house.
To avoid having to deal with a carpool for the next two or maybe six years, I suspect I could probably live with having to step out of a dance recital every now and then.
When Jody’s 91-year old grandma died suddenly last week, there was no question that Jody would fly to San Diego to be with the family for the week. What was less clear was how I would fare holding down the household by myself.
While I can’t give a first-hand report on what happened in California during Jody’s week abroad (I wasn’t there), I can tell you how we fared back in Jerusalem on our own without Jody...for the first time in more than eight years.
It started as Jody hastened to pack for her last-minute flight at midnight. A teary Merav confided in her.
“What the matter, boo?” Jody asked. “Are you feeling sad that Grandma died?”
Eleven-year-old Merav nodded, then added: “I’m afraid,”
“Oh sweetie, nothing’s going to happen to me,” Jody replied, reading between the lines.
“No,” she clarified. “I’m afraid that Abba won’t know how to take care of us!
Ouch. That’s got to hurt. But it wasn’t fair. Not entirely, at least. I know how to take care of lots of things around the house. I already put the kids to bed many nights and my tuck-ins are renowned all over the Internet.
I can wash the dishes, do the laundry and carpool as good as the best of them. Darn the clichés if I’m not a regular Mr. Mom.
But there’s one area where I fully admit my proficiency is lacking:
Food preparation.
Oh, I have a few dishes I make when asked. Who could forget my famous matzomelettes at Pesach time? And remember my unique black bug cholent?
But a whole week of responsibility for menus was more than a little intimidating. Perhaps fearing a diet consisting of nothing but Bissli and Krembo (not that there’s anything wrong with that), Merav - always eager to be of assistance - picked up the gauntlet.
“It’s OK, Abba. I’ll help you.”
And help she did...along with the rest of the kids. As we took charge of of the kitchen, we knew that keeping things simple but healthy would determine whether we'd sink or swim.
For the first night’s dinner, we followed Jody’s recipe for lentils and rice. I tossed a big green salad, thirteen-year-old Amir made the salad dressing while Merav baked up some chocolate chip cookies.
Sure, the lentils were a bit crunchy and we ran out of tomatoes for the salad, but still, we were off to a good start.
Second night: it was Brian’s Everything-Leftover-from-Shabbat-in-a-Pita extravaganza. I scrambled up some eggs, mixed in what was left of Friday night’s chicken, potatoes, added some mushrooms, onions and maybe one too many heads of garlic for good luck.
The kids, remarkably, loved it!
Feeling momentarily plucky, I took the plunge.
“I’m going to make Friday night dinner,” I announced. “The whole thing, chicken, potatoes, chicken soup.”
“With matza balls?” six-year-old Aviv asked.
“Don’t push your luck, kid,” I smirked back.
“Do you even know how to make chicken?” Amir asked.
“No. But how hard could it be?”
In order to cook a chicken, first you have to buy a chicken. It was time for a trip to the supermarket anyway. I pulled out one of the computer-generated shopping lists that Jody uses and started to check off items we needed.
Cucumbers, check. Milk, check. Oreos, check.
“Imma doesn’t usually buy us Oreos,” Merav said, looking over my shoulder.
“You got a problem with that?”
She quickly retreated.
I finished the list and, before we set off, made a phone call to arrange the next day’s carpool with Reba and Dan, parents of one of Merav’s friends.
“Wow, I’m impressed,” Reba said. “I think if I ever left Dan alone with the kids, he’d just order pizza every day.”
“Seriously, what’s the point of living in Jerusalem if you can’t order kosher take out?” Dan shot back.
For me, though, it had become very important project a sense of normalcy while Jody was gone. I had something to prove by not ordering from Burger Ranch. If not to Jody and the kids, then to myself.
At the supermarket, Merav and Aviv were remarkable. Aviv pushed the basket and Merav played tour guide, translating at the cheese counter and picking out exactly the type of juices we usually buy.
Our only real fashla was that, while I had dutifully checked off everything we needed on the list, I hadn’t noted the quantity.
“How many apples do you think we need for the week?” I asked Merav.
She did a quick mental calculation – three kids times six days minus two days for oranges, plus a fruit salad one night: “Ten, I think,” Merav replied.
“Right, I’ll get 12 just to be sure.”
When we got to the check out counter, we carefully unloaded the definitely-more-than-seven-items we’d purchased (no express line for the Blum family) as we watched the register display start to climb with every item the cashier swiped. 400, 450, 550 shekels…
“Imma never goes over 750 shekels,” Merav reminded me.
“It’s OK. we’re getting near the end…I think.”
600, 685, 720...
I was starting to sweat.
“We can blame it on all the dried fruits and nuts we had to get,” I said, referring to the goodies we had bought for the Tu B’Shvat holiday.
“That and the chocolate brownie bars,” Merav winked.
“Hey, that was a necessity. I’m under a lot of stress here.”
The cashier rung up the last item. The total: a high but still respectable 811 shekels (just under $200).
We bagged our own groceries, transferred them into the trunk of the car, unloaded them again in our garage, carried them up the stairs to our third floor apartment, and packed them into the fridge.
“Man, how does Imma do this every week?” I asked to no one in particular. “Just going shopping is like a full time job.”
Merav shot me a withering look.
Friday night’s dinner, I am happy to report, was just like Imma’s. OK, so I bought twice as much chicken as we needed and used up three times as much sauce. And Jody never told me that I was supposed to add water to the soup during while it simmered during the day.
The next two days passed uneventfully in the kitchen. Amir and I made tuna melts one night, pasta another. And then Jody was back.
We all went out to the airport to meet her. After filling us in everything that had happened in California in the car on the ride home, Jody asked “So...how did it go here?”
“Great!” came the group response.
“Did you miss me?”
“A little,” Merav said.
But the truth was, we had met what seemed a week earlier to be an insurmountable challenge...and lived to tell the tale.
“Of course we missed you,” I said to Jody, “but you know what, we learned something really important. That we could actually function on our own without being totally dependent on you. That we can work together and take care of each other.
“Not that we don’t like you taking care of us,” Merav added.
“Right,” I said. “But it was a nice thing to know.”
“Abba did good,” Merav said. “I’m so proud of him.”
“And I’m so proud of you all,” Jody said, touching my hand on the steering wheel.
Eleven-year-old Merav’s counselor from Scouts called a week ago on a Sunday night. “We’re having a bible quiz on Tuesday,” she explained to Merav. “I know it’s not a lot of notice. But would you be interested in representing us?”
Merav didn’t hesitate. And for the next hour, the two of them were cramming on the phone together, reviewing material that might be on the test, practicing potential answers.
They were back on the phone together the next night. And the night after.
It was a remarkable site. A bible opened on Merav’s bed rather than the usual Harry Potter. And she was so into it.
“Abba,” Merav asked me at one point, coming up for air. “Do you know a lot about Moses?”
“Um,” I stammered. “Well, a little bit...why?”
She then proceeded to grill me on questions that were way beyond the scope of knowledge of her late-to-observance father. She stumped me every time.
I was so proud.
After all, isn’t this is one of the main reasons we'd moved to Israel. So we could be shown up by our kids. In their knowledge of the Bible. In their command of Hebrew. In their more than passing familiarity with the nooks and crannies of the land.
On the day of the quiz, we all assembled in the troupe’s club house, a mostly empty room with smelly bathrooms in one corner. From the moment we entered, the room was buzzing.
OK, more than buzzing.
Campers were cheering on their representatives, chanting, doing hand claps. Some groups had painted their faces. Merav had stripes of green on one cheek and white on the other. Her friend Michal had green arms too.
Clearly, this was not going to be some staid Bible Quiz like the ones you see on the state-run TV.
At the front of the room, eight campers were sitting at a long table. They ranged in age from Merav’s eleven all the way up to fourteen. A lanky kid in Scouts-standard khaki, not that much older than the rest, was to ask each camper his or her own unique question.
Merav was first.
“How was Jethro related to Moses?”
Ha! One of those Moses questions...no wonder Merav had asked before. But I knew this one. And so did Merav. Jethro was Moses’ father-in-law.
Right!
Her fellow campers went wild. “Merav! Merav! Merav!” they chanted.
Merav sat quietly while the other campers answered their questions. All correct, too.
A. He had blond hair;
B. He came to power after the previous king, Saul, died; or
C. He was a shepherd.
Well, everyone knows David was a red head not a blondini. And for sure he was a shepherd.. But what about the business about the king...David did come after Saul. But had Saul already passed away?
Merav gave her answer: C – he was a shepherd.
Right again.
Two girls had painted “Merav” in enormous Hebrew letters on a long banner and were now parading it just in front of the table while the chanting and cheering continued.
The campers answered their questions. One little boy missed his second question. And then another slipped up too.
Time for the third and final question. Another one about Saul and David.
“When the youth comes running to David to tell him that Saul and Jonathan had died, how did the youth know they were dead?”
This time, though, Merav was a tentative. Her answer was much more a whisper. “The boy killed Saul,” she said, then looked at the boy in charge.
Something about his face said to her that she had gotten this one wrong. She quickly changed her response. “Um...he was there when they died.”
This would prove to be her undoing. And she knew it. The color had already drained out of her face as the boy in charge informed her that her first answer had in fact been the right one. He was gracious, though. The second answer was technically correct.
“Half a point,” he said.
But it was too late. When the votes were tallied up, Merav was out. She left the stage, fighting back tears as she tried to slip unnoticed into a corner of the room, face to the wall.
The movement of her shoulders said it all.
But her fellow campers didn’t pick up on it, at least not immediately. They stormed her, bellowing enthusiastic congratulations, trying to high-five her.
Jody and I didn’t know whether to step in and comfort her, or maintain a safe distance. Jody made what I thought was an almost imperceptible move but Merav caught it and motioned her away. She knew the child’s secret creed: the second Mom comes close, you lose it.
Which is what she did on the way back home.
“We’re so proud of you, honey,” Jody said to her sobbing daughter.
“But I lost,” Merav whimpered.
“Lost? Are you kidding?” I said. “You were amazing.”
“None of your friends had the guts to do what you did,” Jody added.
“That’s true...” Merav said. “They didn't join because they were too afraid to lose.”
She reflected on this for a moment, then added: “But I did lose,” and buried her head in her hands.
“Says who?” I responded. “As far as we’re concerned, the important thing is got up there and you tried!”
“More than that, you took a risk. And you weren’t afraid."
“Yeah, I wasn’t really afraid when I was answering the questions!”
“And next year...”
“Next year?” Merav looked shocked.
“Well, yeah, next year," I said. "Now you’ll know exactly what to expect.”
A slight grin settled over Merav. I don’t think there will be any question that Merav will step up the plate again. Because in the test of true courage, our eleven-year-old was already a big winner.
-------------------
This week's story is dedicated to Jody's grandmother, Charlotte Fox, who passed away this week at the age of 91. She loved her great grand-daughter Merav and would have been very proud of her.
Have you ever wondered what a Tupperware Party is all about? I know I have...I mean, I’ve heard the term for years. But when I think about it, I always conjure up an absurd image of 1950s-era housewives in fancy party dresses drinking, laughing and flirting while fondling dumpy plastic containers with that funny name...Tupperware.
I can barely keep a straight face.
So when Jody announced that we were throwing a Tupperware Party at our house, I jumped at the chance to meet and mingle with Israel’s version of The Stepford Wives.
Plus, Jody informed me that the highlight of the event was that we would actually cook something using the Tupperware products. And as hosts, we’d get a free gift.
A party with real food and even party favors...I could get into that!
The party was called for 8:30 PM. The organizer, Rivka, arrived shortly before that and began laying out the table full of plastic bowls, salt shakers and ribbed salad crispers, all with the famous Tupperware airtight “burp” system that ensures that food stays fresh longer.
No more stale soup nuts. No more runny cucumbers (hey, maybe I should be writing Tupperware ad copy).
Even so, the stuff was remarkably hi-tech. And in pretty cool colors too.
“They make a great wedding gift,” Rivka stated brightly.
Apparently, Tupperware has come a long way from the days when inventor Earl Tupper was looking for a way to take his WWII experience with plastics into the booming post-war consumer market.
But when his products didn’t sell well at retail (the patented Tupperware seal required hands-on demonstration), Tupper made an even more successful invention: the home party. It’s been going strong now since 1951.
Even with prices known to be on the high end for plasticware, Tupperware has grown into a $1.1 billion company that now reaches over 100 markets around the world with products geared to local interests. There’s even a Tupperware “Bento Box” in Japan.
However, back in our exotic little corner of the world, it was now 9:00 PM and we were still waiting for the guests to arrive. 9:30 rolled around. Rivka was keeping her cool, but even by Israeli standards, this was pushing it.
I called the kids out of their rooms to fill in the non-existent numbers.
“What’s that?” eleven-year-old Merav asked as she scoped out the table and spied a container with a greenish liquid in it.
“Here, catch!” Rivka called and tossed the container at Merav. She caught it, fortunately, but apparently it wouldn’t have made a difference. This Tupperware olive marinater was, like many Tupper products, guaranteed to never spill...or your money back.
“Here, Amir, look sharp!” I called and threw a plastic container with what looked like flour in it at our thirteen-year-old.
“No, stop!” Rivka yelled. “Only the round ones are guaranteed spill-free.”
“Oops...” I muttered as the container thudded on the table, forgivingly staying shut.
“Maybe I should start,” Rivka said. I glanced at the clock which was now pushing 10:00 PM, and we all nodded in agreement. Rivka began her round-the-table description of all the assembled items, referring frequently to her Israeli-produced catalog.
And I thought: imagine that: Tupperware in Hebrew. If that doesn’t say something about where we’ve come as a nation, I don’t know what does.
We got to see a cereal holder that filled from the bottom. “So you never have to put new cereal in on top of the old stale stuff,” Rivka explained.
There was a long and skinny container Rivka said was perfect for half-open packages of spaghetti. A cake icing squeezer with five different nozzles. A mini-strainer for oils and sugar.
“What’s this?” Amir asked holding up a weirdly shaped red rubber contraption. “Is this plastic too?”
“This one is made of silicone,” Rivka said.
“I think it’s a bra!” I joked, pretending to try it on.
“It’s for baking in the microwave,” Rivka scolded, trying to hide the slightest disdain in her voice. Then deftly changing the subject, she chirped: “Which is what we’re going to do right now!”
“I still think it looks like a bra,” I muttered under my breath.
Meanwhile, Rivka got out her recipe for vegan egg-less brownies, took the container with the flour and poured it into a deep white bowl, added in some oil (from another definitely spill-proof container) and mixed in powdered sugar and chocolate with her special Tupperware soft spatula.
She then scooped the mixture into the red rubber bra...er, microwave baking dish.
“See, nothing stays stuck to the side of the bowl,” Rivka announced happily.
Merav surveyed the bowl and, seeing there was scant left to lick, demanded “What’s the point of that?”
The cake mix went into the microwave for eight minutes and then, voila, out it came, a perfect cake. No fuss, no muss. And pretty tasty too!
After we’d eaten our fill, the kids lost interest and I got a phone call. By the time I came back to the kitchen table, Rivka was gone, the party was over, and Jody was sitting with a pile of Tupperware in front of her.
“Can we afford this?” I asked.
“They were on sale,” Jody said sheepishly.
“Did we at least get our free gift?”
Jody held up a small, strangely-shaped spoon with a spiky edge.
Still, I have to admit, I’d been sold too. This Tupperware stuff was pretty nifty.
And even though the evening itself may have been a bit of a bust, there’s always a bright side. At least our kids won’t have to wonder their whole lives what a Tupperware party is...or what the heck that weird silicon bra-thingie does.
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Rivka throws a mean Tupperware party and they're usually standing room only. To have her bake a cake in your house, contact her by clicking here.
In Israel we are masters of casual comfort. We dress down everywhere we go, including weddings, no...in particular at weddings. You want to keep it loose so you can dance and not feel restricted by a tie and a coat.
Still, it would be rude to just ignore a dress code advisory printed in bold type on the invitation itself. And it’s not like I don’t have a suit.
This, it turned out, was only the first of an evening of surprises and confounded expectations.
For example, the invitation went on to list the wedding’s venue: The Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue, which, contrary to its name, has in my experience been anything but great.
The main sanctuary is imposing, to be sure, but the last time we’d attended a function there, the wedding hall downstairs was over-lit from too many tacky chandeliers, drafty and lacking any distinguishing Jerusalem touches other than an imposing mechitza separating the men and women during dancing.
The chicken and potatoes, as I recall, were rubbery and decidedly run-of-the-mill.
None of this sounded like the kind of wedding we’d expect from a girl who’d grown up in Berkeley, where newlyweds routinely inform their guests that “no animals were harmed at our nuptials” while standing barefoot beneath a tie-dyed chuppah in Tilden Park, to be followed by a gourmet vegan barbeque buffet.
OK, so Shaya was marrying an Israeli, but you don’t shed your Berkeley adherence to alternative rites of passage and political correctness that easily.
Just the same, the evening started out on a high note. It was wonderful to be reunited with Shaya’s family, many of whom we hadn’t seen since we left for Israel ten years ago.
And, to my further delight, the food was really quite good. There was a hot hors d’oeuvres station with a cook slicing up fresh shwarma during the reception (that wasn’t too out of place, after all, I knew Shaya had eaten meat for some time now).
The ceremony itself was dignified and emotional.
Then it was time to head downstairs for dinner and dancing. I braced myself for blandness.
The hall didn’t look anything like I remembered. The place was decked out like a disco. The chandeliers had been switched off and a sophisticated lighting system had been installed, bathing the room with alternating blasts of pastel pink, green and gold.
A mirror ball glittered the dance floor with twirling sparks. There wasn’t a mechitza anywhere in sight.
Instead, there was a video camera mounted on an enormous, hydraulically-powered TV studio-quality boom that was swinging back and forth, upwards and down across the dance floor like one of Doc Ock’s tentacles
But perhaps most surprising was the hi-tech bar just under the stage where the band was performing. Staffed by a chic and very secular staff in short black t-shirts, they served up non-alcoholic fruit shakes (well, that’s what they said at least).
And all I could think was: are we still in the Great Synagogue?
Shaya and Benny entered from the yichud room after about 30 minutes, and the 350 mostly religious guests erupted into spirited circle dancing, men in one group, women in another.
The band – Adom Atik who I’ve praised previously in these pages – played their usual eclectic mix of simcha music, Israeli rock standards and Clapton-esque guitar licks.
We were half way through the first round of dancing when a boisterous group of about 30 newcomers stormed the dance floor. The men were bare-headed in jeans and open shirts (not a tie among them); the women in the most revealing of belly shirts and tank tops. Everyone was carrying a lit cigarette.
They formed an island of their own positioned between the men’s and women’s circles. They techno-grinded like they’d stumbled into a full moon rave on Goa's Tel Aviv Beach.
Then, two of the guys stripped one of the dinner tables of its tablecloth, cutlery and linen napkins and rolled it into the center of the dance floor. A stocky man with a shaved head and a manic look in his eyes climbed on top while the others lifted the table into the air and attempted to fling him skyward.
As I watched, I found myself more confused than ever. So the wedding wasn’t anything like what I expected. But what were these...wedding crashers? Is this something that happens routinely in Israeli ceremonies I just wasn’t aware of? Maybe they were checking out the hall for some future event and had just gotten carried away by the music.
And then they mobbed Benny and Shaya, hugging Benny like a brother. Apparently, they did know each other.
As Benny’s buddies circulated into the crowd, the band rocked into a disco-fied version of the Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Running.” Any semblance of separate sex dancing was lost now.
I grabbed Jody and we danced together, like two giddy teenagers, both of us marveling at the surprises the night had brought and how such different worlds – Berkeley, Israel, religious and secular – could converge so seamlessly...and with so much fun.
As the music died down and we headed to the dessert buffet, it suddenly occurred to me that the exhortation for formal attire on Shaya and Benny’s wedding invitation wasn’t so out of place after all. It was actually quite purposeful and directed.
We recently took off for a short vacation in Eilat, Israel’s southernmost city, with a group called Shabbat B’Teva. Literally meaning “Sabbath in Nature,” the group wraps hiking and tiyulim around a Shabbat atmosphere.
The idea of getting out of the nasty cold of Jerusalem (for those of you who’ve never visited, it actually snows here in the winter) to bask for a few days in the relative warmth of the desert was too appealing to refuse.
Eilat is a five hour drive by car from Jerusalem. Thursday, on the way down, we stopped several times, first at the Dead Sea (no, we didn’t go in – remember the disaster the last time?) and then at the Flour Cave, where the walls of the surrounding canyon are so chalky, you can give yourself a natural facial...minus the lemon juice and cucumbers, of course.
The next day, we hiked through the Black Canyon just north of Eilat in a setting as close to a lunar landscape as I imagine you can get here on planet earth. The canyon shifts from bare yellow sandstone to craggy black volcanic rock.
The air was clean, the sky an unwavering blue, the temperature just right. It was truly exhilarating.
By the time we got back to the Eilat Field School where we were staying, it was late Friday afternoon and we were happily weary, ready for Shabbat.
A “field school” is a kind of Israeli version of a youth hostel run by the Society for the Protection of Nature. The family rooms are spartan, furnished with bunk beds and scratchy starched sheets that for some reason are always a tad too short.
Meals are eaten in the field school’s cafeteria-style communal dining room, together with any other groups that may be staying at the same time.
When we sat down to dinner, we had the place to ourselves. We said Kiddush and broke bread. As we were getting up to hit the entrée buffet, two Egged tour buses pulled up and began unloading their cargo: 100 or so Israeli tourists.
The Israeli group found their seats. They were a rowdy bunch, decidedly not-religious. Just then, the leader of our group announced it was time...to sing.
Now on Shabbat, it’s traditional to sing during meals. I have no problem with that; we often indulge ourselves. But I found myself vaguely uncomfortable with the prospect of doing this in front of a roomful of strangers.
Growing up, singing was something you did in private or in a place where it was sanctioned and expected: on a stage, at camp, in synagogue. You didn’t get up in the middle of a school cafeteria and start belting out your praise for God.
Well maybe you did...
There’s an expression we used to use to refer to people who were overly kiss-y in public. Remember? PDA – for public displays of affection. Well, on this night, in the Eilat Field School, I was experiencing something slightly different. We’ll just call it PDJ.
Public Displays of Judaism.
So there we were, performing for an audience who hadn’t bought a ticket. We sang Yom Ze Mechubad while the Israeli group piled potatoes and fish on their plates.
They ate their fried chicken rings while we crooned Dror Yikra.
I tried not to look, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw what I was most afraid of. Yes, the Israeli tourists were throwing idle glances our way. We were disturbing their meal. I just knew it.
The singing went on and on. Just when I thought we’d exhausted the repertoire of Shabbat zemirot, someone in our group started up with Israeli folk songs.
And then I noticed something I didn’t expect. The Israeli group was nodding. A few were, wait a minute…what was this…they were singing along. Now there was someone clapping. And another.
The song ended. And then the Israeli group did the impossible. They actually started the next one.
“U’faratzta,” they sang. “Yama, v’kedma, tzafona v’negba.”
Our group happily joined in.
My wife Jody turned to me, oblivious to my agonized internal monologue and commented “Israelis just love to sing.”
We ate our dessert, said grace after meals, and headed back to our rooms to get the kids to bed.
The next day, after morning prayers, we hiked up nearby Mt. Zefachot before returning for Shabbat lunch. The scenery didn’t disappoint. From the highest point, you could see four countries: Israel, Jordan, Egypt and even the tip of Saudi Arabia.
But my thoughts kept straying back to the night before. And I wondered: what would today’s meal bring? Would the two groups sit together and bond during Shabbat lunch? Would there be more singing?
Was this a small step towards bringing bridging the gap between immigrants and sabras– those Israelis who are prickly like cactus on the outside but sweet and communal at the core?
And most important: would I overcome my aversion to singing in public?
We may never know. When we arrived back at the Field School on Saturday afternoon, the dining room was empty, the tour buses gone from the parking lot.
We were recently invited to a bar mitzvah “weekend” at the resort hotel of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, a few kilometers from where we live at the southernmost edge of Jerusalem.
The bar mitzvah weekend is an alternative to the usual custom in our community where the bar mitzvah boy (or bat mitzvah girl) is called to the Torah in synagogue, with a festive Kiddush held afterwards followed by a lunch or party in the evening.
With the bar mitzvah weekend, though, guests are invited to stay over (often at the bar mitzvah family’s expense) at a hotel. The family gets to create exactly the environment they want in a more intimate space, and the guests get a three meal catered break from the weekly routine.
We were really looking forward to it. That was, until Amir got sick.
Our eleven-year-old, Merav, had already made her own plans to spend the Shabbat with a friend in town (it was a bar mitzvah after all...boys, ecchh).
“I guess we should cancel and stay home,” I said to my wife Jody as thirteen-year-old Amir flushed the toilet for the eleventh time that hour.
Jody had a different idea. “Why don’t I go with Aviv and you stay home with Amir?” she suggested.
I was shocked. Insulted. Hurt. Over the years we have taken great pains not to be separated as a family for Shabbat. Even when I used to fly overseas for business sometimes as often as twice a month, I’d always try to get back by Friday. And from California, let me tell you, that was one heck of a transcontinental shlep.
And now Jody was suggesting that we separate...right in the same city?
Still, she had a point. Why should we both miss out on the weekend? Six-year-old Aviv would have a great time (he loves hotels). Besides, our friends wanted us there.
“OK, how about this,” I countered. “You go to the hotel and I’ll stay home with Amir Friday night. Then if Amir’s feeling well enough in the morning, I’ll walk over for Shabbat services by myself.” It was under an hour to Ramat Rachel on foot.
“Would that be OK, Amir, if you stayed by yourself for a few hours?”
Amir just looked green.
“Right, we’ll play it by ear,” I said.
As Jody packed up her bags, though, I realized that all that togetherness meant that this weekend would be charting new territory. You see, I had never spent a Shabbat alone with one of my kids.
Which wasn’t a bad thing. It’s just...well, what would we talk about? Sure, Amir and I have never been at a loss for words. Still, I felt vaguely uncomfortable. The context was confused.
Which raised another question: what would we do, just the two of us, at the dinner table? Would we still sing Shalom Aleichem, the song welcoming the Sabbath angels to our house, without the rest of the family, I wondered? What about Kiddush? And the motzei over the challah?
There was no time to ponder. The sun was already setting. I put food on the hotplate, just like a regular Shabbat.
But Amir wasn’t hungry; all he could eat was rice and applesauce anyway. And I thought: maybe we should just skip the whole thing. Take a week off. Why go through all that bother?
And that felt even worse.
“Come to the table, Amir,” I said.
Amir was on the couch reading “New Spring,” the prequel to Robert Jordan’s wildly popular “Wheel of Time” series, his eyes still glazed from a week of nausea.
“Do I have to?” he mumbled.
“Yes,” I commanded, sounding more sure of myself than I really was.
Amir came. And we began. We sang Shalom Aleichem to our regular rousing tune. To my surprise, Amir joined in, as enthusiastically as his flu-weakened body could muster.
Then we turned to the empty chair where Jody usually sat and sang Eishet Chayil. Amir pretended to give his mother a massage. “That’s my job!” I joked.
While I wolfed down a piece of chicken and a couple of small potatoes, Amir poked at his rice and we talked. About whatever came into our heads.
We discussed the price of college and the new Nintendo DS Amir’s so crazy about. I pontificated on an article I had read recently in Wired Magazine about the economics of digital media distribution.
At the meal’s end, I even insisted that we sing the grace after meals, something about which I am habitually ambivalent. Amir didn’t complain.
And it struck me that the rituals which I thought would have less resonance without the full family gathered around...actually meant more. They provided a starting point, a common ground between father and son. In the very situation where I’d anticipated laziness, I found myself more stringent.
After dinner, we retired to the living room, both of us curling up with our books (I was a third of the way through The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s harrowing best seller about growing up in Afghanistan).
After a few pages, I put my book down, looked up and tried to put voice to the thoughts I was having.
“Amir,” I said. “Did you think that we were going to do all that?”
“All what?” he asked, lifting his eyes slightly.
“You know, the Kiddush and motzei and stuff?”
Amir’s answer was as simple as it was telling. In little more than a few quickly exhaled words, he validated thirteen years of parenting and varying adherence to tradition.
(Just in time for Hanukah, here's a special encore presentation of one of my - er - tastier columns.)
I know they’re bad for me. But I can’t resist.
I’m talking about donuts, of course. Whatever shape, size or variety, I go do-m’shuga-nut over them. And at this time of year, as Hanukah season descends upon us, Israel is overflowing with that uniquely Jewish version, the sufgania.
Sufganiot (that’s the plural) are a very simple but tasty version of the classic donut. Start with fried dough, don’t even bother digging a hole, then inject jelly or caramel (my preference) directly into the middle. Finish off by coating the creation with plenty of powdered sugar.
Sufganiot season starts earlier every year, in some cases kicking off just after Sukkot in October. By December, they are ubiquitous. At my eleven year-old daughter Merav’s class Hanukah party, I watched in awe as a large white van from a local bakery drove up to the school gates, opened its doors and revealed platter upon platter of white frosted mass-produced tempting and scrumptious sufganiot.
There are sufganiot in the kitchens at work, sufganiot at kiddush in shul, and sufganiot at the checkout counter of every supermarket from here to Haifa.
All of this reminds me of when our family was in the North America two summers ago and I became obsessed with finding the ultimate donut:
I had heard that this chain serving hot and fresh donuts had taken the region by storm and was even trading on the stock market (look it up here)!
I had also heard their donuts were to die for. And I had never had one.
So the running theme of the summer was Dad’s obsession with finding that illusive Krispy Kreme. But on highways from Toronto to Cleveland to Chicago, our holy grail eluded us. It wasn’t until I was out shopping late one night, in a forlorn suburban mall in the middle of nowhere, that I chanced upon a freestanding Krispy Kreme franchise, beckoning to me from the middle of the nearly-empty parking lot.
Apparently, the big deal about Krispy Kreme is that when the sign outside is lit, that means hot donuts are rolling off the assembly line that’s a prominent feature in every store.
The sign was lit.
I approached the store and, through the windows, I could see hundreds of just-baked lightly browned donuts rolling out of the ovens, then floating down a river of boiling oil before being tenderly flipped and arriving at the end of their journey: an earnest Krispy Kreme employee offering free samples to us, the lucky consumers who had timed our arrival just right.
I sampled. I smiled.
Maybe it was because it was hot. Or because I had waited so long for this moment. But I declared to my fellow consumers, and maybe to God herself, that these were the absolute best donuts I had ever tasted.
I proceeded to buy a couple dozen for my wife Jody and the kids.
As much as I fawned over the Krispy Kremes last summer, I still have a special spot in my heart for the Krispy's more humble Israeli cousin. I think it must be the scarcity: you just can’t run out to get a hot sufgania in the middle of July. You won’t find one. You really have to wait for Hanukah to come near.
Which gives me an idea: why not create a year-round sufgania phenomenon. We’d have to modify the formula a bit. Turn it more into a full meal. And stuff the sufgania with more than jelly
How about spinach, broccoli and zucchini? Creating something more like a quiche.
Or fill it with chopped meat or schwarma or chicken schnitzel. We could replace the tired boring pita and the no-longer-trendy baguette with the hottest new trend: the fried dough sandwich!
From Beersheva to Binyamina,, this could be all the rage. Think of the entrepreneurship. The satisfied customers. The profits.
Shuki’s Falafel, move over. Here comes Brian’s Donut Quiche!
After all the whining I did in my last column, In De-Nile, I thought it only befitting to provide an update, however embarassing it may be.
What happened was this: I was just about to throw out my old broken phone headset when I noticed a small knob that I thought I'd checked before. The knob had somehow slid into the "mute" position. I moved it out of mute and, lo and behold, the headset works perfectly.
Which makes my previous column ironic, at best; at worst, well...I won't go there. But it also leads me to a point that I've been thinking about a lot lately. That is: can writing right wrongs? Or put more simply, if something nasty or unpleasant happens, can you make it better by writing about it?
Remember when we got locked out of our house a few weeks back? I started writing the story about that long night even while I was still suffering on my neighbor's couch. And before I even knew the ending, since the events were still unfolding in real time.
Same with that less than than stellar camping trip we took earlier this year; I knew as it was happening that I could salvage the experience by crafting it into a story.
So now I have another worry: that I am using you, my dear readers, as my surrogate therapist. My thinking has been that, as long as you laugh at my trials and tribulations, I can deal with them too!
Is that OK?
Well, why not? After all, I'm just trying to make the most of a tough situation, right? Or has my own life become just more grist for the story mill...
One of the hardest things about living in Israel for Western immigrants is not having access to the vast consumer marketplace we grew up with in North America.
I know, that sounds pretty trivial and maybe even a little petty. After all, we are living in another country. We freely chose to put 5,000 miles between us and the nearest Disney Store. But sometimes it can be downright hazardous to your health.
For example, last week my phone headset broke. I use this simple audio device all the time to keep my hands free to take notes when I’m interviewing people long distance for the various newspapers I write for.
No problem, you say. Order it online. Or head on over to the nearest Fry’s or Best Buy and pick up a new headset.
Except that the superstores that make life so convenient in North America just don’t exist in Israel.
Ah...Fry’s. I like to call it conspicuous consumption on steroids, but that barely begins to describe the place.
The Fry’s I used to shop at in the “old country” is something like three football fields long and maybe as many wide. Fry’s started off years ago selling electronic gear for geeks. Now they hawk everything from music CDs to refrigerators, 42-inch plasma screen TVs to candy bars.
And, yes, telephone headsets. Racks and racks of them.
Well, while we don’t have Fry’s in Israel, we do have Office Depot. I headed on over to our local store. I still had a good 90 minutes before the 4:00 PM interview I needed to conduct by phone that afternoon. I figured it would take a couple of minutes to sort through several models.
How could that be? I was sure I’d seen them at the Office Depot before...no, wait a minute; that was in Los Angeles.
“Maybe try the Home Depot,” the clerk offered. It wasn’t far. So off I went, from depot to depot.
“Ein lanu.” No headsets there either. “Have you tried the Sakal store?”
No, I had not tried the Sakal store. But I would now.
The Sakal store was closed for repairs. Mamash ein lanu.
By now I was getting a little panicky. The clock was ticking: I had little less than an hour until my phone call at this point.
What about the electronics store down the street? I headed towards my car. It had been raining off and on all day, and now it was coming down pretty hard.
The closest spot I could find was a couple of blocks away. I stepped out and – splash – I made contact with one of Jerusalem’s infamous puddles.
I don’t know if it’s the fact that the streets aren’t paved evenly or bad drainage, but trying to stay dry while crossing a street in this city when it’s raining is like playing hopscotch on your heels. Eventually, someone falls.
I felt the water seep in through my tennis shoes. It was cold and slimy (note to self: buy those waterproof boots already).
As I sloshed unto the Lior Electric store and held up my old broken phone headset, I heard a familiar refrain – now, don’t everybody shout it all at once – ein lanu.
“Any idea where I could find one?” I asked, desperation starting to mix with the mud in my sneakers. I was down to 50 minutes.
I could go on with the story for awhile...it took another five stops, seventeen puddles and a street that flowed like a concrete swamp before I finally found a cell phone store that sold headsets. It wasn’t even what I wanted. But it would have to do. I had only 30 minutes left.
I ran back to the car and gunned it towards home. Only to find myself stuck in a long line of traffic waiting for a light that seemed to never change. But the digital clock in my dashboard sure did.
20 minutes. 10 minutes.
As we inched our way forward, fingers tapping nervously on the steering wheel, I thought to myself, would it be so much to ask for a CompUSA and a little valet parking? It's not that I'm in denial about the place in which I live; it's just that on a day like this, it felt more like wading through the Nile.
I made it home with minutes to spare before the scheduled time of my interview. I bolted up the stairs to my home office and plugged the headset into the phone. Hallelujah, it worked! I dialed the number...
...and was promptly shunted off into voicemail. I checked my email. There was a quick message. “Sorry, have to reschedule. Hope it wasn’t any kind of inconvenience.”
Inconvenience? Now why should it be an inconvenience?
I was asked by a colleague to help out on a friend’s website. Nothing fancy, just a little advice to help the guy get up and running.
And, oh yeah, could I do it for free?
As it turns out, the website happens to be for a good cause, so I took up the challenge. After several hours over a period of weeks, I got to know the website owner pretty well. One day he dropped me an email.
“My daughter is having a bat mitzvah party at our house. We would be honored if you and your wife could attend.”
Well, Jody and I are always up for a simcha. And the bar mitzvah dad is a pretty funky guy, so I figured it would be a happening event.
But as we drove out to the party, in a moshav (communal village) perched on a picturesque hill about half an hour due west from Jerusalem, Jody and I started to feel uncomfortable.
“Do you think we should have brought a gift?” Jody asked, worriedly.
“Didn’t the work I did count?” I replied.
“I don’t think so...” Jody said, quickly reviewing in her mind what she knew about Israeli bar and bat mitzvah etiquette.
“You know, we don’t even know the bat mitzvah girl’s name,” I said.
“Have you ever met her father?”
“No. I’ve only spoken to him on the telephone. But I know what he looks like.”
“We should have at least brought an envelope,” Jody said.
“Want me to turn around?”
“No...let’s try to enjoy ourselves. Maybe we’ll meet someone interesting.”
The setting for the party was low-key and laid back. The afternoon summer sun was making a slow descent. A large pergola, ensnared in vines, served as a gateway to a lawn where several musicians were playing soft jazz.
Two large barbeques set up under the pergola were churning out burgers, kebabs and chicken wings at a satisfying rate.
“You must be Brian,” the bat mitzvah dad called over to me as we sauntered into the scene. I introduced Jody. He introduced his wife and some of his nine children.
“Did you figure out that Photoshop problem we were talking about?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
“Not now,” he said. “Get some food before it’s gone. And enjoy yourself.”
We sat down and ate our meat. Sitting at the table with us was a young girl, maybe 14, with braces and long wavy hair. She was all by herself. We said hi.
A bongo player had joined the band, seamlessly transforming their sound from jazz to jam with a little bit of Guster thrown in for good measure.
I turned back to Jody. She was deep in conversation with Tmima, the 14 year old.
“So what’s it like living here?” I heard Jody asking.
“It’s very pretty. We have six dunams of land,” Tmima answered, glancing towards the stunning view which stretched all the way to the Tel Aviv beachside. “Where do you live?”
“Jerusalem,” I told her, joining in.
“That sounds nice,” Tmima said. “It’s so boring here. There’s nothing to do at night.”
“Aren’t there other kids here on the moshav? Do you have a scout troupe or anything?” I asked.
“Well, I go to Bnei Akiva. But there are only six of us. And we don’t get along very well.”
“Do you have family here?” Jody asked. “In Israel, I mean?”
“No one. Other than my parents and brothers and sisters, of course.” Tmima said.
“We had three cousins here,” I offered. “But one of them was killed two years ago.”
I have no idea why I said that. It’s not something that comes up regularly in conversation anymore. At that particular moment, enjoying the view and the food and the cooling air, thoughts of Marla, our cousin who died in the bomb at Hebrew University July 31, 2002, seemed far away.
Or maybe they weren't. Maybe on some level I thought that in a land where everybody knows somebody who’s been affected by terror, that this would be a way to bond with an Israeli teen.
We both were silent for a moment.
Then Tmima said, brightly, “So what do you like to do? When you’re not working, of course.” She had snapped back from a moment of awkwardness just about as fast as the average Israeli bounces back after an attack. I don’t know anymore if that’s a good thing or a symptom of denial. After so many years, it just is.
We talked a little longer, and eventually Tmima got up to hang with her friends – all six of them, I suppose. Jody and I settled back to listen to more music which had now taken a definite Shlomo Carlebach turn. Smoke from the barbeque occasionally drifted across the lawn.
As we said our goodbyes a few hours later, Jody grabbed my hand. “Aren’t you glad we didn’t turn around?” she asked.
“Mmmm...” I mumbled, wordlessly agreeing with her.
Because between the music and the meat, you never know just who you might meet.
