Checklist

Maayan wanted to come home for Shabbat, but she has a big test on Sunday. She has to stay in Jerusalem and study. I understand. I know she wants to succeed, to get good marks.

Xiu says that if you don't succeed now, when you're young, you'll get left behind. She says the four words that make the blood of every student freeze, I can almost hear the panic in her voice….

"I am not ready."

What do we parents do to our kids? Does this pressure come from us? Do we have a list of things we demand of our children and simply want to check it off?

□ Career
□ Success
□ Money
□ Marriage
□ Grandchildren

Maybe we screwed up somewhere. Maybe we should have given them another list. Maybe it should be:

□ Love
□ Decency
□ Happiness
□ Contentment
□ Confidence

Maayan, Megan-Xiu, I have this to say to you. It's important to do your best, but your best is good enough. You won't get left behind if you choose the right boat.

Solomon in all his glory was never clothed like the wild flowers in spring; the sparrow doesn't plan its life or even its day, but every one is in the Father's eye. Seek Him first, and all the other things will be added unto you. He will send you the boat you need.

So here's your new checklist:

□ God

So good luck and give it all you got, but just keep in mind that you will never have these years again, no matter how high you climb.

Love, Abba

Imagine That

Mom was a girl during World War II; she was in the 3rd grade when it ended. My Grampa Dan and her uncles went off to war in the Pacific and returned only years later and uncle Sammy didn't come back at all. Mom must have imagined that war is a black hole where the men in her life disappeared, sometimes forever.

When I was a boy the war was a distant memory. In my imagination it was this great adventure with tanks and planes, like a Hollywood movie where the good guys win and with a happy end. Mom didn't like wars. She didn't care if little boys daydream about soldiers and guns and she wouldn't let us see war movies, so I watched The World at War, a documentary series on the public educational channel which was every bit as good as a war movie and the tanks and things blowing up were real.

I was about 12 years old when I saw an episode called "The Final Solution". I had never heard about the Holocaust. I was totally unprepared for what I would see the next hour. By the time it was done, I was in tears, horrified by what I had seen.

Even now I find it hard to imagine. I can't get my head around it. The deaths of the 3000 victims of 9/11 that shocked the world in 2001 was a slow day at Auschwitz.

It's hard to imagine how cheap human life was back then. How can human beings hate so much that they will kill people they don't even know. I can't imagine monsters that can kill without anger, hearts that are so frozen that they can't be moved even by the cries of babes.

I tried to imagine how big it was. I thought that if I put 6,000,000 dots on my blog, it would be possible to imagine the Holocaust. I pressed on the period button, and when I had 1000 dots I copied and pasted until I had 10,000, and then copied and pasted until I had 100,000 and so on. Finally I had 6,000,000 dots, more than 500 pages on a word document. Copying that took several minutes, and then I tried pasting on my blog.

My computer stopped functioning. The cursor wouldn't move. I couldn't close Explorer. I had to restart in order to use the computer again. I guess that six million dots are too much for a computer to imagine.

And you think about it; that each dot is a life, someone that was a whole world that loved people and was loved by people, and each one disappeared forever into a black hole.

If six million is too much for a computer, if there is a face and a name and a life for each dot, how do you imagine that?

Sunset

My parents are here in Israel for a month. It's not their first time here; I can't say exactly how many, but the number is double digit and accumulated days easily qualifies them for an application for permanent residence.

Mom has been poking a camera at everything that catches her eye ever since I can remember. It's almost a family joke. It's not just kids and birthdays like most moms. She has captured bugs and weeds and strangers on film over the years, and imprisoned their images in stacks of unmarked cartons in their basement.

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Mom's routine when she's here is taking a walk on the security road running around our moshav in the cool of the day before dark. Sometimes she takes Dad with her and she always takes her camera and takes pictures of the sun setting over the Sea of Galilee. She must have a million sunsets by now.
I used to laugh at her. It's true that we have beautiful sunsets, especially when the seasons are changing and the play of dust and cloud splash pink and orange on the sky, but as someone that sees them everyday it's not remarkable. I used to poke fun at her, as if she was taking pictures of our sink full of dirty dishes, another thing you can see at the end of most any day.

When I created My People, the name came to me right away. My People is my name in Hebrew, but also the subject my blog; me and the people in my life. I tried to think of a picture that would symbolize who I am for the background of My People's title. I wanted to say where I am, where I am in life and what I'm focused on. I came up with the idea of a sunset over the lake down the hill.

Mom didn't take this particular sunset. But it's me. The last part of my day is drawing near. I am in Israel, the land and nation that has been my home for most of my life; and looking down there on the water I can just barely make out the footprints of God.







Save for the one that I cut My People's title image, all of the sunsets here are ones that Mom has saved for me over the years. Scanning these photos doesn't do justice to the originals, and they don't do justice to the colors in the big sky. But they are important.

Mom and Dad walk the road around my moshav every day. They know how to make the most of their time here and with each other. I am learning something from them that I will have to know before long. How to make the most of a sunset.

... this will be a remembrance unto you ...

Faith and Freedom

A friend of mine lived in Bombay (Mumbai) for a few years. He was in charge of security for Israel's embassy and consulates and El Al in India, and one of the perks of the job was a luxury flat on an Indian Ocean beachfront. His neighbors in this building were Indian millionaires and billionaires that lived lifestyles extravagant even by western standards. And the ironic thing was, he said, that just a couple of blocks over are literally millions in abject poverty.




I asked him if they had security personnel to keep the poor with nothing to lose from storming the homes of the rich. No, he said. As poor as they are, the people on the street live and die on the streets they were born on because they believe that you are born into a certain caste of society and nothing you do can free you from who you are. According to their religion they cannot change their fate. The rich don't need an army to protect them, because the masses are slaves to their beliefs. .

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Slavery is a state of mind. Whips and slave drivers are never enough to keep free people in bondage. Human beings will fight for freedom so long as liberty is in their spirit, but once they believe that they are slaves, they are.

The emancipation of slaves in the South during the Civil War didn't free African Americans. Like Huckleberry Finn's Jim, they continued to act like slaves, to be slaves, when in fact they had been liberated, because their minds were in bondage. They served new masters - intimidation, terror and exploitation - for more than a hundred years until a man named Martin Luther King persuaded them to claim their freedom.

Moses didn't go down to Egypt to deal with Pharaoh. His real job was to sell freedom to the Hebrew people, but why should they buy it? Pharaoh was so convincing with his pyramids and soldiers and spears. That's what he tried to tell God at the burning bush. "Who will believe me?"

Moses wasn't in Egypt to negotiate and the ten plagues weren't meant to get permission to leave. The Israelites weren't in iron chains. They could have picked up and left at any moment. Moses' job was to inspire belief; God's wonders were object lessons, props to demonstrate a message.

Once Israel believed, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't enslave them again. It wasn't miracles, it wasn't Moses, that freed them. It was faith.

What is Passover all about? Why do we have to drag up memories of Egypt? The minute we forget, we will be slaves again. If we remember, we will believe. And so long as we believe, we are free.
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On Photos and Phonies

I ran in to Boaz the other day. He said he was just back from Thailand. Boaz is at least sixty years old and retired. I expressed my surprise that someone his age would be trekking. "I wasn't trekking." He grinned sheepishly and pulled a small album out of a pouch. I should have known. I didn't need more than one look to see that it was full of trophies; pictures of him in a cheap hotel room with whores, no, slaves in Thailand's notorious sex industry.

I can't say that I was surprised. Boaz used to own the only photo shop around. He had been a swinger in the 60's and 70's and didn't have any regrets, except perhaps that the party was over. The women he employed were typically half his age and divorced. There was an unwritten understanding, or maybe written for all I know, that part of the job description was sleeping with the boss. He was quite open about it. This way he got to exploit his employees economically and sexually (his words, not mine).

Some people judge Boaz, a lot of people don't. I suppose the one's that don't think that if they wink at Boaz's vices somehow they can get away with their own. Of course they are only fooling themselves only a little less than those who do judge, but at least they're not hypocrites.

One thing you can say about Boaz, he's no phony. Boaz lives for Boaz, and makes no bones about it. All you can ask of someone is that he live by his own code, right? And if we're honest about it, we all live for ourselves; maybe Boaz is just more candid than most.

Mankind can be divided into two camps; true believers in the cult of self; and hypocrites. Selfishness has true believers like Boaz and prophets like Hitler and Saadam Hussein - there's no virtue in being true to yourself. But if I'm not as obnoxious as Boaz, it is only that I have learned to be more socially acceptable in my selfish pursuits. Like the "true believers", I also seek to gratify myself, and the only difference between me and Benny is that usually my gratification is more positive or useful to society. I perceive good and bad according to benefits achieved.

God has another measuring stick. My "good deeds" are in his eyes are as filthy rags. As far as he's concerned, you're either with him or you're not; and anything I do for myself (which is everything), no matter how "good" it is, makes me a Boaz.

It's easy to judge. Some people believe that it is their right and even their duty to judge those that cross this or that moral red line, but in doing so they imply that they are somehow better than those they judge.

And they're not.

When Jesus rebuked hypocrites for condemning sinners, he never said he condoned sin. He didn't. He never said that sinners wouldn't be judged. They will. He merely pointed out that you can't pull a sliver out of someone's eye when you have a 2x4 stuck in your own; only he who is without sin can throw the first stone.

So I don't judge Boaz. It's not my job. I hate what he does and I wish there were laws that would protect women and punish dirty old men. Who knows, maybe there are.

But for me Boaz is like one of those photo portraits he had hanging in his shop. He had the photographer's knack for catching the real person in people on film. When I look at Boaz, I see how I must look in God's eyes. And it's not pretty.

When I look at Boaz, I see me.

Being a Boot

When my children were young, I tried to create a shell of love and safety around them, because they were fragile. I wanted to protect them. That was my job.

They grew and developed in the shell I built around them, but one by one the time came when they out grew the shell and started to peck their way out. They had to do that.
That was their job.

Everyone knows that if you prevent a chick from hatching out, you end up killing the chick. And you can't help them crack the shell either. If you do it before it's time, the chick is exposed to the world outside before it's ready and dies. They say that you shouldn't even help the chick when it's time. The very process of hatching is important to the chick.

Some parents make the mistake of trying to keep their kids in a shell to long and smother them. Others think that being a chicken is so great that they crack the shell before its time. But the most common mistake we parents make is when our chicks are breaking out. We try to help them and forget that cracking the shell is an experience that is painful, but very important. Out of the best of intentions, we rob them of one of the most valuable experiences in life.

I recall a story; I think it was about Byron, my sister-in-law's dad and my mentor that taught me everthing I've ever learned worth remembering about being a farmer. I think it was Byron, but I can't swear to it. The farmer shucked his boots by the door every day when the day was done. His kids found an egg that was about to hatch and put it by their dad's boots. When it hatched, it was a duck.

Apparently ducks think that the first thing they see when they bust out of their egg is their mother, and so this duck using duck logic decided that the farmers boots were his mother (mothers?). For the longest time, whenever the farmer put on his boots and crossed the yard or went to work, the duck would run after him. Every duck knows that well behaved ducks follow their mother.

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."Mama?"

When our kids are hatching out, they are looking around them and will end up following what ever they see; what they see first, what they see the most. I don't think our kids need us to help them hatch out. That's something natural and even if painful, it's good for them. Perhaps the best thing to do is just to be there for them, and to be the kind of people that we want them to be and to hope they will follow.

When our kids are hatching out, maybe it's our job to just be a good boot.