I Want You To Meet Someone

Maayan's big dream when she was a girl was to be a bride. She wasn't too keen on being a wife, but she wasn't one to let a little detail like marriage keep her from having a wedding. Her wedding would be fancy; a white wedding dress, flowers, adoring family and envious girlfriends. The groom was an unattractive but essential accessory, like a telephone pole by the Taj Mahal.

I fixed her lunch one day after school. She was in first or second grade and sat there by the kitchen table waiting for me. I told her there was someone I wanted her to meet. She didn't show any interest or objection.

"Who?"
"You know how Savta Sophie and Saba Yaakov (my wife's parents) were matched." (60 or so years ago arranged marriages were the rule in Jewish Bombay, love matches were the exception.) She knew, but didn't get the connection.

Well, a friend of mine has a son your age, I told her. I went on spinning the yarn. Now I had Maayan's attention. "My friend and I have decided that you (Maayan and the boy) are right for each other, so we (my imaginary friend and I) have arranged for you to get married when you're old enough. We think it would nice if you get to know each other."

"I don't want to marry him."
"You don't even know him."
She didn't care. "You can't make me marry him."

She had a point there. The trick in successfully fooling someone is to never deny the truth, but to twist it.

"I can't make you marry him, but only I can decide if you will have a wedding. If you won't marry him, then I won't let you get married."

I had her over a barrel. It was the prospect of missing her day more than a lifetime of loneliness that troubled her. She paused. Then her face hardened and her forehead furled.

"Okay, I'll marry him, but he'll wish he were dead."

The drop of anger in the corner of her eye told me I had gone too far, so I came clean before she started crying.

"Abba, that wasn't kidding – that was lying!" That was when we made the rule that pulling someone's leg longer than 5 minutes is lying.

In spite of being deceived regularly by her parents, Maayan grew up to be a well adjusted young woman with a healthy distrust of authority. With the exception of her first beau in high school, she's never made the mistake of bringing her boyfriends home.

Now there's a man she wants me to meet.

I don't know much about him.

The time has come, and Maayan is bringing a man into my life. I don't have much of a choice in the matter, and I will have to live with it and hope for the best, like a bride in an arranged marriage.

Maayan is the matchmaker for herself. For me. For him.

I hope it's a good match between the men in Maayan's life. Because if it isn't, one of us will wish he were dead.

Sex, Second Grade and Setting It Straight

You've made it your business to set people straight ever since second grade, when you discovered a bunch of kids more uninformed and much less behaved than you, namely the first graders. Today you are a blogger, amusing yourself with nothing more harmless than personality types and book reports, or getting in touch with your sensitive side reflecting on human suffering and social justice.
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Earlier on you posted "You May Say I Am A Dreamer", your take on the first blossoms of what has been dubbed "the Arab Spring", the Middle East fiasco that may well culminate in a nuclear winter. You made five declarations:

1. You are a Christian.

2. You are a woman.

3. You are an American.

4. You are an intellectual.

(I'll vouch for you on two of these, one is a matter of definition and we'll have to take your word for the fourth.)
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What struck me was item five of this résumé:
"I am optimistic……" and then you commenced to join the international spirit squad rooting for the 'young and determined' taking to the streets in my part of the world. While some of the western cyber spectators may have sincerely believed they were witnessing the budding of emerging democracies, most were cheering on the mob simply because it sounded good.
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It was sexy.
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And collectively, the voices from the west made a difference. It was the West's cue to cut their Middle East clients' lifeline, a green light to NATO commanders eager to try out their high-tech toys in the Saharan sandbox without censor or scolding. Muslim extremists manipulated the masses in Midan at-Tahrir , played as the trump card to win the jackpot in the decade's long struggle to turn Egypt into an Islamic theocracy on the Iranian model. Their take on democracy is the right of the (Islamic) majority to eradicate or expel everyone else, and dominate those who remain behind.
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 Spring and summer have past; it's the end of autumn. Lets see.....

Was it good for Christians?

Woman buried alive before being stoned for immorality

Is it better now for women living under Sharia Law?

Will the Middle East be peaceful and will America be safer?

Is today's bloody, burning, bigoted Middle East your dream?

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Revolutions don't always usher in freedom. In fact, they seldom do. Russian Bolshevists, Rwandan mass murderers, and the Iranian Mullah-archy all hitched a ride on popular uprisings. If you lived here, or even read up on the subject before you posted, you would have known where the winds of spring can blow.



Demonstrators protesting sectarian violence against Coptic Egyptians



 So, you are a Christian, you are a woman. So you are an American. You might even be an intellectual.
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So what?

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Did you try to paint a sexy mental picture for us of you waving the stars and stripes, leading the troops as they beat a hasty retreat from the Middle East?
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Or did you honestly and truly believe you are leading Christian soldiers onward, marching as to war, with the banner of democracy going on before?

If you appoint yourself defender of the faith, women and the American way of life, you owe it to us to know what you're talking about, to think a little. You're not in second grade anymore; before you set us straight, you have to do your homework.

jesus@yahoo.com

This summer I started chatting. Why? Maybe boredom, maybe curiosity, but for whatever reason, it opened up a whole new world for me that I never knew existed.

Apparently, serious chatting is done on MSN and Yahoo. It's free and offers chatter bugs the options of visual and audio technology. I learned very quickly that the rules and physics of nature we take for granted in real life don’t apply in the chatting world. It is inhabited by beings invisible and anonymous, and the moral forces of gravity that keep our feet on the ground in real life don't always exist. More like a séance; you can't be sure if the spirits you conjure are good or evil, male or female, old or young, or even human.

A bit of advice to the new chatter bug: not all that glitters is gold. A 'mom' more often than not can be a pedophile, 'dad' is a dirty old man, and a 'sexy young woman' is probably a gay guy preying on straight men. Be very careful about giving any personal information to contacts, and photos of your kids are off limits.

The common belief is that anything goes in Yahoo land, but it turns out that there is a code of etiquette among chatterers. Texting in capitals is shouting – not nice. Large fonts are rude, and usually used by 'bots' – computer programs designed to lure the unsuspecting chatter to sites selling porn and infected with viruses. Chatting behavior is also regional: among North Americans and Europeans using the camera is only for people that know each other well, and an invitation to 'cam' can be misconstrued as making a pass, while Asians like to see who they are talking to.

Yahoo is a dark and lonely land of shadows, but there are redeeming rays of light for the tourist. I met a young girl who described herself as a 'sad girl'. Her mom's boyfriend was abusing her with mom's knowledge and without her protection. It was the boyfriend's birthday and the sad girl was distraught because he expected to get a 'birthday present' when he came home from work. I gave her (probably unwisely) my sister-in-law's phone number and stayed online with her until her teacher came to collect her. I asked her why she was in a chat room, of all places. She said her friends told her she needed to talk to an adult, and that she would find an adult in a chat room. I think her angel was very creative that day.

Some of the stories you hear touch the heart – sometimes literally. Rebecca is a young mother of Sara, who has a heart condition that could be simply treated with a pacemaker, but their medical insurance won't take responsibility for the expenses unless she literally drops dead. Rebecca doesn’t live every day by faith – she lives it minute by minute.

Laura is recently widowed and lives in the (still undefeated) Deep South raising her only son. She has enough courage and cheer to share with others while holding down a full time job.

Lilia lives in the Philippines. She is a born again Christian in a mostly Roman Catholic nation who raised two sons singlehandedly, and now like many Filipinos she has sent her oldest to work in the oil industry in the Middle East in order to make enough money to ensure his and their family's future. Last Friday night a typhoon hit her city. She woke in the night to the sound of a flashflood tearing through her neighborhood. The power went out all over the entire city, so she and her neighbors broke out to the rooftop and then spent the night in pitch darkness drenched by torrential rains and beaten by 90 knot winds until morning. She describes it as 'the end of the world'.

I chat almost exclusively with women, but with a handle like 'Ami', I get a lot of messages from men (called 'males' in Yahoo). I have yet to meet a man that is not interested in something I cannot and will not provide. The exception to this are Arabs. Once they find out that I am from Israel they are beside themselves with hatred. These are some of my favorite casual chats. Unable to tear me limb for limb in the safe Ethernet environment of Yahoo, Jihad online is very frustrating. I return smilies for swearwords, and eventually they realize the futility of their endeavors to evoke fear or anger, and hopefully I plant a seed of doubt in the bed of misconceptions they have been raised on.

Critics will tell you that Yahoo is ruled by the devil. Speaking as one who has been traveling there of late, I would say that they are absolutely right. Chatterers hiding behind their aliases expose the darkest sides of human nature. But may I remind you that Satan is the prince of the air in the world we live in offline no less than the internet, he is just more successful at maintaining his disguise.

And at this time of the year, when the Christian world is celebrating the advent of THE cosmic surfer maybe we should remember this: He came to dwell with human beings. They were sick and poor. They were wounded and broken. They were lonely. They were slaves to the same sin, lust and greed you find in Yahoo. They were called harlots and publicans; today we call them sluts and con men. And Jesus broke bread with them. He listened to their stories and told them His. He chatted with them.

I think that if Jesus would have come in our age, you'd find Him at Yahoo.

Tatiana's Response

For 60 and some years since the truth about Hitler's 'Final Solution' was revealed, Jews and Gentiles alike have been struggling with the Holocaust. One of the latest attempts is Tatiana De Rosnay's "Sarah's Key".

"Sarah's Key" revolves around the infamous Vel d'Hiv roundup of Jews in the greater Paris area in 16 to 17 of July, 1942, so named after the local nickname for the Velodrome d'Hiver indoor stadium where over 13,000 detainees were held in appalling conditions until transferred to camps outside the city. The children were separated from their parents, who were deported to Auschwitz. The children were to follow in the weeks to come, and gassed upon arrival without even so much as a 'selection'. Perhaps the most outrageous aspect about Vel d'Hiv is that it was a totally French operation, which exceeded the expectations of the Nazi occupiers who initiated it.

De Rosnay weaves two stories together. One is 10 year old Sarah in Paris of 1942 who locks her little brother in a closet, hiding him from the French police detaining her family. The second is Julia, who's life intersects with Sarah's 60 years later. De Rosnay's plot alternates between Sarah's efforts to rescue her brother and Julia's discovery of Sarah and a secret from Paris the summer of '42.
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"Sarah's Key" is fiction but a possible, even plausible story; a gripping account of horror and tragedy .... until runs out of gas midway through the book. It’s a shame De Rosnay didn't quit while she was ahead. My advice is to open to page 175, tear it in two and toss the second half. You will end up with a shorter, but much better book. The pages in your waste bin are De Rosnay's attempt to respond vicariously through her characters. It's a guilt fest; they wallow in remorse for crimes that belong to others and to the past. The moral of the story, so she says, is despair and self flagellation. To a man, all the major players in "Sarah's Key" set a course for one sort of self destruction or another.
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It's true that some survivors couldn't pick up the pieces of shattered lives, but the overwhelming majority chose life. They established second families on the ashes of the ones that had perished.

With nowhere to go, and no one to turn to, the remnant of European Jewry created a home in the wilderness their forefathers dared only to dream of. They remembered, they documented the crimes against humanity, they tried to build a new society in which genocide is unthinkable, but the bottom line is that they moved on.

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The generation of the camps is passing from this world, and now it's vogue to stir the ashes. For some, modern 'new Jews' who have little or no connection to their homeland or faith, the Holocaust is the only 'Jewish' thing left that they can identify with.

But really, how do we respond to the Holocaust?

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Some remember.....

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some are in denial,

 

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And some, like De Rosnay, accuse.

 

The Holocaust exposed a sickness of hatred and evil that has plagued mankind since Cain slew Able. 60 years later the collective 'us' is still licking its wounds. We can we can pick at it like a sore, drown in despair and sink into guilt– or choose life, choose to heal, to learn and even to forgive.

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It's overwhelming, the Holocaust. More than half a century later, we're still groping for the right response, but unfortunately "Sarah's Key" is wrong.

A Journey Through Society

My tenth graders set off on a journey last week. It's not the first time they've been in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but this time they visited places and people that perhaps they had heard of, but could barely imagine. They traveled to the farthest corners of Israeli society; dark places most of us Middle Israelis never see.

And the first step was a question: If on one side is equality and on the other is 'survival of the fittest', where are we Israelis? Part of the answer is a rundown neighborhood in south Tel Aviv ironically named Shikunat Hatikvah ('Neighborhood of Hope'). Our guides did their best to to explain what it's like to live in an island of poverty in a party town like Tel Aviv, but they weren't nearly as convincing as the locals we met by chance. "It's not as bad as they say it is", they explained, but the subtitles read otherwise.
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A few streets over is a slum that doesn't appear on the map, but has a name – 'Crate Town' (my translation). Not recognized by the authorities and therefore free of building codes and municipal services, people build their homes out of odds and ends. Pitch dark at night, flooded in winter and ruled by criminals, the people living here probably would have been left to their own devices except that to their misfortune they are sitting on some of the most valuable real estate in the country. Rich contractors buy up the ground from under their feet turning them into squatters on land they have lived on since the nation was founded. The rich getting richer use a combination of goons and city ordinances to force the poor getting poorer out of their homes.

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Our next stop was the 'slave market' near the Central Bus Station. The street is a kaleidoscope of human beings of all colors and races, foreign laborers living on a pittance and often just one step ahead of the law. Exploitation draws exploitation – a few blocks over is the red light district (We didn't go there of course.)

A 15 minute bus ride away is Kikar Hamedina. It's Tel Aviv's Central Park, a circle of watered parks surrounded by chic boutiques that only the very wealthy can afford to shop. Again it was the passersby that underlined the message, casually mentioning how much they invest in the manicured dogs they're walking – more than what an entire family lives on in the neighborhoods we had been only minutes ago.

Walking back to the buses, I asked Odedah what she made of what we had seen that today. She's 16 years old, so learning that she was shocked didn't surprise me. She thinks that social justice has to start with people with money.

"Because people follow people with money."
"Do you have money?"
"No."
"Neither do I."

Oh well………….

We spent the night in a hostel in Jerusalem. An overnight school trip where we don't sleep in tents in the desert and have showers and teachers too tired to know or care what they're up to all night (see 'The Lowest Place on Earth'). The kids were very excited.

The next morning we invaded an ultraorthodox stronghold called Mea Shearim. I use military terminology because that is how the people living there see us creatures of modern society – the enemy. They reject modern culture, modern kids and the modern state that spawned them. They say that only the Messiah can redeem the Jewish nation in the promised land. The state of Israel is an abomination. We were asked not politely to leave.

Something odd occurred to me. Our guides were obviously not religious. That's why they wanted us to see the nasty side of religious Jews. Yet, for two days they were preaching about equality and social injustice.

There are two explanations for everything in the world. The first is called evolution. By random chance and natural selection, things are what they are. Survival of the fittest. The other, less popular, notion is creation. God created stuff for a reason.

Now if you believe in evolution, then the strong survive. There's no way around it. And if you believe in equality, then it's because we are created beings. There is a God.

So I thought it was odd a bunch of people trying to show us that God is bunk, but talk equality – and a another bunch of people that think they are better than everyone not like them, but talk God. I know there's some rational explanation, but I just thought it was odd, that's all.

Nevertheless, after two days of seeing poverty and crime and exploitation, I was wondering if those snobs in Mea Shearim aren't right. Maybe Israel is an abomination.

The plan was for my tenth graders to finish the day on Mt. Herzl, where the dreamer who wrote the blueprint for modern Israel is buried. They are 16 or almost 16 now, and the idea was to give them their identity cards in a ceremony at a place symbolic of the society they will be joining before long.

But once again, something not on the program underlined why we need Israel, warts and all. Just before loading the buses taking us to the ceremony, one ambulance siren, then a second, then dozens. In Jerusalem, that can mean only one thing. Terror. Another Palestinian that hates Jews more than he loves his own life.

Israel hasn't succeeded any more than the rest of the family of man in establishing a just society. But time and again, the world has turned on Jews, and providing a haven, not social justice, is why Israel has to exist.

On the way back home I remarked to Odedah that our journey reminded me of the Gospels. I mean, Jesus was on a journey in society. He rubbed shoulders with the poor, broke bread with the rich, was rejected by religious hypocrites.

"You know, like, not much has changed here in 2000 years."

"And it won't until He comes back", she replied.

I doubt if human beings will ever be able to create a just society. I know that Jesus didn't even try. He didn't come with a social agenda; He didn't come to change mankind. He came to save men.

So in a way, as much as I hate to admit it, they're right in Mea Shearim.
Redemption will come with Messiah.

Alaska

A bit of trivia, but not a bit trivial, is the fact that I was born in the state of Alaska. It's a wild country, but my parents weren't thrill seekers. The most adventurous thing they've ever done was to marry each other; a close second was having me. Anyway, I wasn't in Alaska very long. My parents and I left when I was a year and a day old.

I have always been a bit intrigued by the land of my birth. I grew up in Oregon, which is a beautiful place, but to be brutally honest – it's kinda boring. I heard the call of the wild at an early age. I daydreamed about adventure, imagined setting out on my own and dancing with danger.

Sean Penn's film 'Into The Wild' was a natural choice for me when I saw it on the shelf at the movie rental place. It is the true story about Christopher McCandless. Raised by well-to-do, upper middle class peppermint Americans, his story is not remarkable until he graduated from college, donated his savings to charity and set out west in a beat up Datsun. Severing his ties with his family, he chooses a new name, 'Alexander Supertramp'; and cutting society's safety net he burns the last of his spare cash.

The new self made 'Supertramp' lives on the edge. He hobos freight trains, starves with the homeless in urban America and survives dehydration in the desert. He has this amazing adventure where he paddles a kayak down the Colorado River to the Gulf of Mexico, and then with no documents and a winning personality, fast talks himself back over the border. Every time he's reached the end his rope, dumb luck and the kindness of strangers snatch him from the jaws of calamity.

But its not enough for McCandless/Supertramp. His dream is to walk into the wild back country of Alaska and live off the land like his hero Jack London.

So I'm watching Into The Wild and thinking to myself, "If I were young, if I could do it all over again, this is exactly what I'd do." And then it occurred to me that that is exactly what I did. I left everything and everyone behind for a life I invented in an exotic and dangerous place close to the edge. I even did the name change thing.

Christopher hitched his way north to the Stampede Trail in central Alaska in April of 1992. He headed into the bush with a 22 caliber rifle and 10 pounds of rice and set up a base camp in an abandoned bus. At first he holds his own, but when he realizes that he isn't hunting and gathering enough to sustain himself he decides to hike out – only to discover that he's trapped by white water currents of a river that had been frozen over when he hiked in. Trapped in the wild by his own folly, Christopher McCandless starved to death.

Unprepared by spoilers, it hit me hard. Like McCandless, lust for adventure consumed me in my youth. I set out into the wild, and in a way I'm trapped there.

It's not something uncommon. Young men and women (probably more men than women) hear the call of the wild, singing like Sirens luring sailors to peril. You want life to mean something, to experience it in the extreme. You want to taste it raw and bleeding, not boiled and seasoned like it was served at home.

Many have answered the call of the wild. Most of us live to tell about it. My journey took me to the other side of the planet. I thought I could make up a name, invent a life of my own. I lived on a kibbutz and enlisted in the Israeli army. And by the time I realized what I had done, it was too late. An ocean of reality separated me from where I had come from.

McCandless and I aren't uncommon. Many young men hear the call. I have a cousin who 'disappeared' years ago. He was just a kid when I left America, a bit rowdy but likeable enough. He got in trouble here and there, but nothing too serious. And then he took off and nobody's heard from him since save for cryptic messages every now and then. Here in Israel, trekking into the wild is almost a rite of passage for young men and women after they finish their army service. Most of them find their way back, although I've heard more than one parent comment that even though they are back here, they're still over there.

If you walk into the wild and can't find your way back, you're lost. You live a life to the Nth degree and discover yourself, but the only ones that care are back where you started from.

I'm one of those that returned. I still live in Israel, but I'm a member of my American family. It involves long distance telephone conversations and flying for hours between continents, but the bottom line is that I came back. Home is where the heart is, and so is the wild. You can be on the other side of the globe or just around the corner, but when finding yourself means cutting yourself off from the ones that love you, you're lost in a wilderness.

I hope my cousin will find his way home someday. I think that if McCandless could have made it out of Alaska, he would have returned to his family. Weak and helpless, he wrote this on a page torn from a novel in hopes that someone would find it in time.

"S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out
of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to
save me."

It was signed, "Christopher McCandless". Not Alexander Supertramp. He was ready to come home, but it was too late.

The state of Alaska is where my life began; its where Christopher McCandless's ended. The wild isn't a place as much as a state of mind. Some of the less fortunate get trapped there; most of us adventurous souls are lucky enough to find our way home.

The Little Engine That Can

I think every boy and girl, or at least every American boy and girl, grew up on the children's book "The Little Engine That Could" by Watty Piper. It's the story of a long heavy train that needs to be pulled over a high mountain. The bigger engines all refuse for this reason or that, but to everybody's surprise one little engine steps (rolls?) forward willing to take the overwhelming task on himself. Straining, pulling with only determination and faith that he can pull his charge to the top of the hill, the little engine chants under his breath "I think I can, I think I can." And, of course, in the end he does.

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. The moral of the story, that with hard work and positive thinking anyone can, everyone can, is the stuff Americans have been raised on. We weren't handed everything on a silver platter, but anything was possible. We were offered opportunity.

As incredible as this may sound, there was a time in my youth that I considered being the president of the United States of America. No kidding. It was an option, one of many directions I considered taking at the beginning of my journey. Now, after time has tainted my mind with a healthy dose of realism, I know that I was only fooling myself. Yet perhaps it says something about one of the greatest gifts America has granted its men and women, its boys and girls; optimism, a belief that opportunity is endless. No matter how wild it is, how far fetched, Americans can.

Maybe its because I have lived over here so long, far away from the land of endless opportunity, but now I have come to see that American expression "because I can" the way the rest of the world sees it. The arrogance in it, as if it somehow it is a reason for anything. Like when ex-president Clinton was asked why he had the liaison with Monika Lewinski, he replied, "Because I could."

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"I can" doesn't mean it's right or wise or good; it just means it's possible.

But Americans can. And sometimes they do.

Today I watched an American take the oath of office as president. Unlike me, he did take that the path to the White House, and he made it there with a promise to Americans. "Yes, we can."

Today was the crowning achievement of his career, greater than anything he will do in the next four years. An achievement for Americans and for America; for today all things are possible for all men and women.

In the next four years he will have to pull a long train with 300 million Americans aboard up a very high mountain. It will take a lot of determination on this young American's part, as well as that of others who are willing to jump down and step up and help him push that train up to the top.

Today I don't know if Obama can, but I certainly hope he will.

Winter

I recall growing up in Portland in the cold country of the Northwest, winter mornings waking up to see snow or black ice on the window. They closed school and we stayed inside, snug and warm out of the cold.

In the more than half of my life here in Israel winters are short and mild, temperatures usually range from warm to blistering heat. So do tempers.

This isn't my first war, most likely not my last.

Here school is cancelled more often because rockets, and not snowflakes, are falling. People stay closer to home, find snug shelter inside hopefully safe from the terror outside.

And even when you're out of range, more often than not someone you love isn't. You slow down and close down, do what you have to and no more. You find a place inside yourself and wait for the storm to pass.

I don't feel like blogging.

"Sometimes in order to live somewhere, you have to die there."

Hagit Rhein, mother of Capt. Bania Rhein who fell in Lebanon, and Eliyashiv, in combat somewhere in Gaza.

Happiness Isn't Fun

This Shabbat's Torah reading, "Ve-yishlach" - the account of how Jacob returns to Canaan and confronts his brother Esau, reminded me of an op-ed by Jonathan Rosenblum I read years ago, Happiness Ain't Fun. Below is an excerpt:

"Each of us is born incomplete. That lack of completion creates a gnawing within. Our natural tendency is to identify that which is missing with something outside of ourselves - material possessions or some physical pleasure - and to make its attainment our goal. Yet attaining the sought-after object rarely does more than stifle the gnawing for a period of time. "

"A moment's reflection would show us why our efforts to quell our inner turmoil are doomed to failure. Our problem is an internal vacuum, but we seek to cure it with things that must of necessity remain external. No physical object can be amalgamated into our being or fill our internal void. But instead of recognizing this, we convince ourselves that we erred only in our choice of objects: We needed a Rolls, not a Cadillac, or two Cadillacs, not just one."

"By focusing on that which is outside of us rather than what is wrong with us, we lose all sense of who we are, what makes us unique, what special tasks we have been created for. Like a teenager whose life revolves around the telephone and the mirror, we lose all sense of ourselves, except as we exist in the eyes of others."

"The soul, which is not of this world, cannot be satisfied with the goods of this world. Only curing our own imperfections can ultimately quiet the ache in our souls, for only such changes as we make in ourselves can be more than momentary sedatives."

"Every material object is, in a sense, borrowed. It cannot become intrinsic to us, part of our essence, and sooner or later it will no longer belong to us. But what we make of ourselves when we conquer our anger or resist the impulse to speak ill of someone else or train ourselves to reach into our pockets for every passing beggar cannot be taken away from us."

" 'Who is a rich man?' ask our Sages. And they answer, 'He who is satisfied with his portion.' They do not say that such a person is also a rich man, but that he is the only rich man. No matter how much a person possesses, he is a poor man as long as he is driven by a hunger for more."

"Upon meeting his brother Jacob for the first time in decades, Esau tells him, 'I have a great deal.'*, implying a desire for yet more. 'Keep it for yourself', Jacob replied, 'I have everything.'** "

* Hebrew: "Yesh li rav" - I have much. (Genesis 33:9)

** Hebrew: "Yesh li kol" - "I have it all. (Genesis 33:11)

Letter from America

They say that every immigrant to Israel (Hebrew: "oleh") from North America is at first euphoric. The surge of moving to an exotic country, new surroundings, and being pumped with Zionist ideology is intoxicating. Eventually the emotional high wears off and the oleh comes to his senses and sobers up with one hell of a headache. The exotic has become foreign, the new has become routine and ideology diluted by reality is weak soup. (This doesn't happen to immigrants from Russia or other places where Jews are poor and persecuted.) I don't know who "they" are, but in view of the high percentage of American olim ("oleh" – plural) that eventually return and from personal experience, I tend to believe "them".

I got my Aliyah (Hebrew: immigration to Israel) hangover relatively late. I was in uniform only a year after my feet touched holy ground, and it's against Israeli Army regulations to get homesick. It took about 3 years before it hit me – I'm here. For good.

By then I had been released and was living on a kibbutz and when I wasn't scheming how to get myself and my family back to 'God's country' (Better know as the great state of Oregon), I was working in the kibbutz's cotton and wheat fields. Modern agriculture isn't really work anymore; nowadays it amounts to sitting on your butt in an air conditioned tractor cab listening to the radio while you keep the wheels in the furrow.

Pining as I was for my homeland, I would tune in The Voice of America and when that wasn't sending, second best was the BBC. One of my favorite programs was Alistair Cooke's "Letter from America".

(Now for those of my generation that don't tune into the BBC, let me remind you that Alistair Cooke was the British guy that hosted "Masterpiece Theater" 30 years ago on the Public Broadcasting Service, which I watched regularly in my youth; not because I was such a cultured teenager, but rather because I was a normal one that thought that the PBS was the only channel on television where there was the off chance of seeing naked women.)


Every Sunday Cooke would comment on the current events, American culture (or lack of it.), the days personalities or simple personal reflections with dry humor and a sophisticated not-American accent. What I loved about "Letter from America" were the bits of America and Americans that most Americans were either too oblivious or too American to admit.

I think Alistair Cooke's authenticity was due to the fact that he was never really quite an American. He lived there almost all of his adult life, received citizenship and genuinely loved her, but in the end he was the eternal outsider. He never was really a player and from his position on the sidelines could see things that were lost on those in the heat of the game.


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I have observed in the past (see "I am a Chameleon") about myself that I have this quality of blending in, but not really belonging. I am different even if I seem to fit in. I'm an outsider. And so, perhaps this blog offers the reader a novel point of view of Israel, maybe one that is as, if not more accurate than if I were a native son. Maybe I should call this blog "Letter from Israel".

It took time and not a little strain on my marriage to pass the crisis of immigrating and integrating in Israel, but in the end I made it and I'm not sorry. I love it here and I love the people in spite of it all. But I will always be me and part of that is being an American.

The funny thing is that by now, after 27 years of my adult life living in Israel exceeding the 21 years that preceded them, I'm an outsider in American circles as well. I don't think quite like them. I see things they don't see even if they're there.

So in the next two weeks while I visit home (America will always be as much home for me as Israel.), My People will be a letter from America. Hopefully my family and friends will be kind enough to let me post from there even though they probably will end up scratching their heads when they see how they and their America looks through my eyes.


I'll try to be gentle.

Knowing the Difference

There's a woman my age here that decided to go to college. To be honest, until she told me about her decision, I had always just assumed that she had at least a B.A. in something, and I didn't rule out an M.A. as well, because she's this know-it-all type of person and comes off as being very authoritative.

A week or so after she started school, she showed me the final draft of an assignment, her first assignment, that she had completed. And not just to me; to everybody. She was like a first grader that had finally learned the ABCs, showing off and very proud of herself.

I had done the go-back-to-school thing ten years before and formal education doesn't make much of an impression on me. I read her assignment and pointed out a few things that she needed to work on. After all, she had asked me what I think. She was very insulted. After chewing me out with more than a few harsh words, she stomped off and pouted.

While her behavior was sophomoric, I was the one in the wrong. Even I know that children need encouragement more than correction. The first grader with her ABCs doesn't need to know that the 'i' and 'j' need to be dotted and that she's got the 'e' backwards. When she's finally made that breakthrough, she needs to be praised. Sooner or later she will make the corrections that need to be made. The middle aged lady/coed deserved the same consideration we naturally give to seven year olds, but I guess the fact that she isn't cute and missing her two front teeth threw me off. And I should have remembered that grown ups can sometimes behave childishly and when they do someone has to be the adult.

Sometime after this I overheard her talking about when she started school, and she mentioned that first assignment that I had 'corrected'. She voiced almost word for word the remarks that I had made before. And I'm sure that in time she will find that while higher education may require an enormous effort for old and rusty minds, objectively it's no big deal. But that is among those things that people need to learn for themselves, whether in the first grade or freshman year at age 50.

And I am learning that there are things that are true, and there are things that people need to hear, and wisdom is knowing the difference between the two.

Funny Words

to Xiu

I went to college late in life. They call it "Adult Learning" in the States nowadays. They called it strange back then, over here. We're catching up with our American cousins like everything else and there are more people my age advancing their educations at advanced ages.

I was different than my fellow students not only because I was older than most of them, but also in that I didn't have any particular reason for being there. I studied things that had no connection whatsoever to how I made my living and with no intention of using it in the future. Like a seamstress buying a welder.

Now I see that the "reason" was how I saw myself. I didn't feel as good as those guys that had done the smart thing and finished college before setting out in life. They never rubbed my nose in it and I suspected that I was every bit as intelligent as they are, but nevertheless that's how I felt.

Now days they have funny words for the reasons I had for going back to school – "self validation" and "peer recognition", but there are old fashioned words for it too. Vanity. Ego. I would knock myself out cramming my brain with stuff I didn't care about in order to impress profs that didn't care about me. After exams they'd post our scores on a board outside the administration office, and like everyone else I would search for the numbers beside my ID number to get the verdict. It was never enough for me to have done well – if it wasn't the best I walked away disappointed. Even then I knew how pathetic it was, how vain, but I couldn't help myself. And the worst part was that I didn't dare tell anyone because everyone hates the smart kid.

Donald Miller talks about the ol' lifeboat dilemma in his book "Looking For God Knows What". Imagine this lifeboat and there's a young mother and her baby, an aged WWII war hero, an escaped convict, a scientist who can find a cure for cancer – and you. Only 5 people can stay in the lifeboat, six is too many and the boat will go down with all aboard. Who do you kick out?

Nobody wants to chuck out the baby, and by default that means the mother is safe. If you keep the scientist there's the bonus of saving millions of cancer patients. It's not right to kick out the war hero (Even though some people do because he's old and besides those hero types jump out to save the others anyway.) That leaves you and the convict. Some people want to keep the convict in the boat because they want to give him a chance to redeem himself (a very noble notion). But that's what it comes down to; most of us are trying to prove that we're more worthy than the criminal and deep down we know that we're not because deep down we all know that we're all sinners.

Miller says that this lifeboat mentality is the root of all the rottenness and sickness in society. We are all competing for a place in the lifeboat, scared to death that our peers will find out what we already know – that we don't deserve a seat with mothers and scientists and heroes. We need self validation and recognition like lifesavers to save ourselves. Vanity is fear.

The funny thing is that it turns out that there's room for everyone in God's lifeboat. – even for the ones that don't deserve it. And if you realize that, there's no need to compete, no reason to validate or be recognized. You can go to college, and even excel, if you want – or not. It doesn't matter because you have a reserved seat in the lifeboat.

I kept my marks a secret all through college. Outstanding students, or rather ordinary students with outstanding GPAs, get diplomas with some funny Latin words added on. "Summa cum something". They get called up first at the graduation ceremony, and since my last name came first alphabetically, I was the first in my class called up to receive my diploma. My cover was blown. My friends were aghast. I felt a little sheepish.

I don't know Latin. I bet those funny words on my diploma mean something like "really vain" or "huge ego". I hope I got more from college than a piece of paper with funny Latin words on it. I hope I learned something.

Because now I'm at a crossroads, and it looks like I'm going to do it again, if unwillingly. I hope that if I do it again I will do it different. Maybe if I put my mind to it I will even be able to fail once or twice.

A Cross between Oregon and Israel

Until last week, I had only ventured beyond Israel's borders to visit my family in Oregon. Last week we took a trip to Croatia.

Croatia is like a cross between Israel and Oregon. Mountains plunge into the Adriatic Sea on rocky cliffs under evergreen forests like Oregon's highway 101 on the coast, but the olive groves and whitewashed houses with red tile roofs stacked around small fishing harbors are Mediterranean.

Inland the deciduous trees were in autumn colors, but the paths and streams underneath were still sunless and damp like Oregon's rainforests. My photos of the countryside could have been taken from an album of the farm country where I was raised.

But unlike secularized Oregon, Croatia is more like Israel. Religion is everywhere. Croatians are devout Roman Catholics and certainly not ashamed of it. They adorn their streets and women with crucifixes; no village is without its church and it seems like every corner, whether uninhabited islands in the sea or isolated mountaintop, is the site of an ancient monastery.

The Croatians we encountered were rather reserved, like Oregonians. In fact, in general, they were kind of grouchy. Of course, we did meet some nice ones, but most of them work in the tourist industry, and as Yael pointed out, it's their business to be friendly. But if Croatians aren't gregarious, we were impressed by their order and honesty (Not qualities Israelis are known for.)

Croatians and Israelis have one thing in common: they are not strangers to war. We met a man in Dubrovnik that immediately took to us once he discovered we are Israelis. It turns out that he is the descendant of Jews that were forced to convert to Christianity in Spain. Somehow his ancestors had made their way to Dalmatia. We asked him about his family. He smiled and said that, like us, he had two girls and a son. Then his eyes saddened and he added that the boy had been killed in the bombardment of the city during the civil war in former Yugoslavia during the 90's.

Croatians like tourists. The nice thing about tourists is that they always go back where they came from and they always leave behind money. Apparently, Croatians have issues with people that aren't tourists and aren't Croatian. During the Holocaust, even the Nazis were shocked by the brutality which their Croatian collaborators carried out the elimination of Jews, Gypsies and Serbs. (Although they no doubt agreed with the objective.) A Jew had better odds of survival in Nazi Germany than in Croatia.

While Israel receives a lot of attention for its treatment of Palestinians, the western world seems to have overlooked what has and is going on in its backyard. In the 1990's ethnic Serbs in Croatia were 'persuaded' to become tourists. On the road to Plitzvice National Park you pass by one abandoned farmstead after another, each one mute evidence of ethnic cleansing. The irony of it is that Croatians are too xenophobic to let the Serbian owners return home, but too stuck on law and order to let squatters take their property. Being as clannish as Jews and as straight-laced as Oregonians can be a weird combination. (In contrast, while much of the criticism of Israel for discrimination is justified, the fact remains that Arabs make up 20% of her citizens, an active and vocal minority in Israel society.)

Until now, we had never gone abroad as a family except to visit my family in Oregon. I rented a camper and we traveled from place to place in Dalmatia, never knowing where we would end up at the end of the day. Being observant, we brought and prepared our own food in a country famous for its cuisine. The idea wasn't to just to get away and relax. We had fun, but the idea was to present ourselves with a challenge far from home in order to bring us closer together as a family. With Maayan being an adult and Netanel only two years away from his army service, this was perhaps the last opportunity to do that.

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My family is like Croatia in a way. We are a cross between Israel and Oregon, a little bit of both. Oregonians are known to be an easy going and orderly people, but I have more than once noted that they are capable of saying and doing the meanest things in the nicest way. Israelis are outgoing and they mean well, but they are often abrasive and rough around the edges.

We have a little of Israel and Oregon in us, but that can mean any number of things. Its up to us to decide what we want to take from each.

I know its wrong to make generalizations about entire nations, but its only natural. I met a woman at Plitzvice that is from Wisconsin but has lived in Croatia for a few years. I remarked that the Croatians seem very honest, but they aren't very friendly, and that Israelis are outgoing, but they aren't always straight.

"Don't you prefer the first over the last; you know, being honest more than being nice?" she asked me.

I thought about it.
"Actually, I prefer both."

Taking the Reins

When Maayan was in 5th or 6th grade, she took riding lessons. It was, I thought at the time, the prudent thing to do. We live in one of the few rural areas in Israel where there is still open range. Its cattle country, and our kids will sooner or later end up on the back of a horse. If you live by a river, you teach your kids to swim; if you live here you make sure they can ride.

With Maayan, more so than with Netanel and Odelia, I tried to take control. Not because I like to dominate so much, but out of worry, fear. She was our only child for 9 years, she was everything, 100% of all we had. I was aware of the risks at every step, reining her back whenever I perceived danger lay ahead.

The summer between 9th and 10th grades, she took the Moshav Youth movement's leadership course. That's where she met Chen.


After that summer, she was always taking off to visit Chen, who comes from a moshav in the foothills half way between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I see now that it wasn't just the friendship taking her away on weekends, but also the need to free herself from me.








I had mixed feeling about Chen and Maayan's new friends. It wasn't anything personal, but they seemed to be more inclined to take chances. I didn't know what kind of people they were and was afraid that Maayan would prefer their values over mine. Maybe I worry too much about the ones I love, but there was something to it. Chen is fearless. My guess is that she had a lot to do with Maayan's decision to travel India and Nepal.







We want to shield and protect our children, but in the end the idea is to give them the reins and let them go. There are so many choices they have to make - dating, education, work, travel. All those things involve risk, but the only thing more dangerous than taking a chance in love and life, is being too careful to try. And if we have done our job, they will find the right path for themselves – and if they don't, they will know what to do about it.

I think Maayan will find a path that neither I nor Chen would have guessed. I have a stake in her future, but now I am only an observer.

Its a little scary knowing that now Maayan has control of 100% of all I have, because no matter how many kids you have, each and every one is everything to you. Its scary on one hand because I no longer hold the reins, but on the other hand I am proud of her. She has more than proved that she knows what she's doing.