Happy different anniversary to us

Just a few days ago, on the 10th of July, we celebrated our two-year aliyahversary. Two years of living in Israel, as Israelis (and just one year away from being cleared of our Nefesh b'Nefesh grant!).

Last year, we did something we've never done before; we went on a cruise. We could do it because a) the cruise was kosher(!), and b) the cruise was extremely affordable. All those years of watching the cruise liners come in and out of the port at Vancouver, and now we could be one of those on the ship instead of just watching it.

(Last year, I also wrote a blog post commemorating our first aliyahversary.)

During the cruise, Morey realized that we would be coming back just before our one-year aliyahversary. He noted that it was a nice way to celebrate; making aliyah all over again. Aliyah really means ascending; we use it to refer to people moving to Israel, because they are ascending to the Holy Land. So, really, it's relevant to anyone who is entering the Land, whether permanently or as a tourist. Morey joked about observing our aliyahversary every year, by going away and returning on or around our anniversary date.

It accidently happened again this year. All us kids went to Pennsylvania to celebrate our mother's 65th birthday. Since we didn't want to be travelling during the 9 days, it worked out that the best flight home to Israel would be leaving on the 7th of July, arriving on the 8th. So yes, we landed in Israel - made aliyah - two days before our 2nd aliyah anniversary.

Wonder where we're going to go next year?

Mishaberach L'Chayalei Zahal*

*Prayer for Israel's Defense Forces

Well, we can't visit Gilad Shalit, but this morning, we were able to visit I. & D., two of the Navy Seals injured on the Humaniterror Flotilla.

Standing Together, an organization dedicated to letting the soldiers of the IDF know how much they are appreciated by the people they protect, organized a trip this morning to visit the two soldiers. With baskets of goodies in hand, we convoyed to Tel HaShomer hospital to meet up with our Navy Seal escort.

One of these two good-looking, young soldiers was in great spirits, with his family around; the other was more quiet and seemed a bit uncomfortable with the attention, but was surrounded by friends from the Seals (male & female). Interviews weren't allowed, and of course, we couldn't take pictures of the soldiers, but we wished them well (the Hebrew speakers did. I stood around and smiled a lot).

They've received lots of posters and notes, which are up on the wall of their hospital rooms. This is just a small sample.

(And yes, they have seen "We Con The World" and thought it was funny.)

Three weeks after the attack, and these two young men are still in hospital, bandaged, in casts, on crutches, faced with still more recovery and rehab. If anyone wants to question how real this attack was, come talk to us.

Rabbit or hare, it's still a bunny

What the hell is wrong with us? I've sort of gotten used to Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, et al terrorists being referred to as "militants." It infuriates me that the rest of the world does not see people who blow up schoolchildren on a bus as terrorists, but I know I can't change that.

Today I read the following headline: "Muslim militants behead 3 Filipino loggers" Fairly benign - "muslim militants" can mean anything in this context. Open the article, however, and the very first line - in fact, the very first words - read "Al-Qaida-linked militants..."

I've moved to the other side of the world, and I'm getting older now so I forget things sometimes, so please do correct me if I'm mistaken, but wasn't Al-Qaida the ladies auxiliary group responsible for dropping four planes on our big, fat US ass, two on the World Trade Center and one on the Pentagon, killing nearly 3000 people?

"Militants"?? The FBI regularly referred to groups such as the Black Panthers and the Weathermen as terrorists, yet the damage they did was negligible compared to what modern terrorist groups have accomplished. And still, we wuss out and call them militants.

Our (and by "our" I mean all targets of Muslim extremist goups) enemies have repeatedly stated that their goal is to destroy us, to Islamicize the world. As long as we continue to consider our enemies "the misunderstood little boy next door," no matter how many times he drowns our kittens and sets our garage on fire, we will lose this battle.

You must know your enemy in order to defeat him. The idiot who throws red paint on your fur coat is a militant. The man who beheads you because you are a Jew or Christian is a terrorist. It's time we spoke the truth.

Shavuot, or that holiday that makes you go, "huh?"

Shavuot is on Wednesday. Shavuot is the holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah (old testament to some of you, but basically, the 5 Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy). Or, the Jews' receiving the Torah from G-d, depending on how you want to look at it.

Normally, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to properly observe Shavuot. There really aren't any rituals associated with this holiday, unlike Passover, with the matzah and bitter herbs and reading of the Haggadah, or Sukkot, where we sit in our little home-made booths and shake our willow branches, or Yom Kippur, where we pray and fast, or even Chanukah, where we light candles for 8 nights. There are traditions, like eating cheesecake, or (trying) to stay up all night learning Torah, but those are just traditions, not mitzvot (commandments) associated with the day.

This year, I have no problem. The Torah was given to us, the soon-to-be Jewish people, at Mt. Sinai, on our way out of Egypt to the land G-d promised us, thousands of years ago. The Torah has been our guide book, our book of laws, our instructions on how to live since then. From the Torah, we learn how to treat guests, we learn to respect our parents, we learn to think about the food we eat, how to treat our animals, even our land. We are told to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

From the story of Abraham's circumsion, when he is visited by G-d during his recuperation (Genesis 18:1), we learn of the importance of visiting the sick. This lesson became the life-raft that kept me afloat during this past month. When I found myself in the Emergency Room a month ago, followed by a two-week hospital stay, followed by surgery, not a day went by in the hospital without someone visiting me. And that's not counting Morey and my sister, who spent so much time by my side. My classmates from Nishmat, the seminary where I learn, came and made me laugh, brought me illicit treats and gave me something to look forward to day after day. My cousin and her husband walked on Shabbat and kept me from feeling sorry for myself for spending Shabbat in the hospital. Friends I barely know, and friends I know well came from around the corner and from a 40-minute bus ride away. Some took time out of their holidays to visit. The hospital rabbi employs people to check in on patients and visit with them, and at least 3 different religious men went into each and every room, to every bed to wish the occupant a "r'fuah shlema" (basically, a healing for your soul, but it's shorthand for a prayer for healing that we say in each of our 3-times-a day prayers). Someone came around with free newspapers, and a lovely, oh-so-shy young woman came around with goodie bags. My phone has never been so busy as it was during those two weeks in hospital, with calls from family, friends, acquintances, neighbours who couldn't make it into Jerusalem, even my teachers and Rabbi from Nishmat.

I have been so blessed by all the love and care that was showered on me - and Morey. We say it in our prayers every day, "bikur cholim" (visit the sick), but how many of us actually take it to heart? I know I really didn't. This year, I'm going to focus on this Torah lesson (opens a pdf), and be truly grateful for all the people who do take this mitzvah seriously, and be thankful to Hashem for giving us this commandment. It's not easy to visit someone who is sick, and hospitals are no one's idea of a fun place to hang out. But for those who accept that performing this mitzvah is bigger than their discomfort, from the bottom of my heart, bless you. Chag Sameach

One Minute

Last year, when the siren went off for one minute in the evening to mark the beginning of Yom HaZikaron יום הזכרון לחללי מערכות ישראל ולנפגעי פעולות האיבה‎ (Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror), a time when everyone stops what they are doing and stands in silence, Morey and I were home alone. The following day when the siren went off for a full two minutes (again, standing in silence), we were in Ulpan, Hebrew class. For the majority of us, this was our first Yom HaZikaron as Israelis. There was a sense of solidarity of being a people together on this day, but there was also a distinct separateness. We'd only been in the country, most of us, for a few months. We understood the loss this day memorializes, but we couldn't really feel it.

That was really driven home when we went to the ceremony at the school that hosted the Ulpan class. The students and faculty memorialized their former students and classmates, along with the brothers, fathers, uncles, sons and friends they had lost. To see these normally boisterious teenage boys crumbling into the arms of their teachers, tears shamelessly pouring down their young faces, really made us appreciate the difference between the new kids and the "real" Israelis.

This year, thank God, I'm still a new kid. But this year, because I'm in hospital (that's a different post altogether), when the siren went off in the evening, I was standing with a very mixed group of people. I knew no one, and no one knew me. We were all Israelis standing together in a moment of silence for our fallen soldiers, for those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their countrymates, and for the families who now have a gaping hole where a loved one once stood. An entirely different feeling.

The interesting part of experiencing the siren at the hospital, is that everyone is welcome at this hospital, as in every hospital within Israel. That means, standing outside with us were Arabs. Arab Israelis are exempt from serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, yet some choose to. Most are Druze or Bedouin, but some Arab Israeli do serve. For the most part, there's no way to tell if someone is Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, Druze, modernized Bedouin and there's no way to tell if that person is anti-Israel or supportive of Israel.

So here we are, all of us standing together, when the siren goes off that memorializes Israeli soldiers who have died mainly in wars and situations fighting Arab armies and terrorists. The Arabs around me kept talking and ignored the siren, but I noticed they talked quietly. Were they ignoring something they felt didn't apply to them, but being respectful at the same time? Or was it just the environment of being at a hospital? I'll never know, but as I go back to my room and say hello to my lovely Arab nurse, and think about the Arab doctor who was the one who finally figured out what was wrong with me, and the Arab man in the room next to me whose family is gathered around him, never leaving him alone, I realize it's yet another beautiful, crazy dichotomy of living in Israel.

May Hashem bless the souls of the fallen, the families who live with the loss daily, may their memories be for a blessing upon all of us and may the day come when we no longer add any names to the list of those to remember.

Just another day in The Land

One of the facts of life of living in Israel is that a lot of our neighbours want to get rid of us. Not very hospitable, I know, but there you have it. No need to recap the terrorist history; every knows about pizza places, cafes, buses and hotels being bombed, and the people who have been killed. I learn at a womens' seminary, Nishmat, in Jerusalem in a program named in honor of Alisa Flatow, a victim of one such attack.

As a result, Israelis have to live with lots of security. Everytime you go into a mall, you show your bags for inspection and go through a metal detector. If you park in a public garage, keep your trunk unlocked for security to check. Nearly every restaurant in Jerusalem has a guard you have to get by. When you go into the train or bus station, your bags will go through an x-ray machine and you will go through yet another metal detector. Just to get into the airport complex, never mind the actual building, you have to go through security. Even when you drop your child off at nursery school, you will pass and say good morning to the armed security guard standing outside his or her booth.

www.paulasays.com

We learn to live with it; we learn to accept seeing armed guards protecting us while we shop for milk and eggs.

Still, it gets our attention when, while driving to one our local shopping centres to go to lunch with Morey's visiting mother on her last day here, we get waved away from the main entrance. Idle curiousity makes us wonder why there are more-armed-than-usual police officers in the street, while we sit in the restaurant watching, speculating on what's going on. We guess that it's a חפץ חשוד - suspicious object - and we continue to watch as the police block off the road, and the Moked (I don't know how to translate that - they're city staff) arrive. It's all an interesting distraction, until the police come into the restaurant and evacuate us.

Until that point, everything was kind of casual. "Oh neat, they'll bring in the sappers. I want to see the robot." Once you get evacuated, it kind of occurs to you that there's a chance this one might be more than someone's forgotten backpack.



It's interesting to note that we all were quite lackadaisical about clearing out. We did it, but there was no panic, no rush. The people next to us took the time to pay their bill, rather than come back afterwards. Most of us went to the back of the centre and started browsing in the stores there, or made phone calls. But still, everyone who was close enough, watched. It may be a fact of life, but we still want to know for sure.

After two controlled explosions and some gunfire, we were given the all-clear. We went back to the restaurant, got our food, drank our now-cold coffee, and went on with our day as if nothing happened.

Just another day in the Land. For the reasons why we have to blow up every carelessly left-behind suitcase, backpack, cardboard box or package, and why we have to have guards at malls, grocery stores, restaurants and schools, please read this beautiful tribute by Paul Stern.

Don't Passover the details

The Seventh Plague, John Martin, 1823

There are many aspects of the Biblical record that are disturbing. But, Torah is not a simple collection of sweet children's stories and morality plays; it's a record of a people's relationship with their G-d, and as such, both good and bad are depicted. In other words, the nasty stuff could have been excised to make us look better, but morally, it made more sense to leave in abhorrent behaviour so that later generations could discuss and learn. These discussions make up the Talmud, and other texts.

The depiction of the Exodus includes a number of actions that depict both G-d and the Hebrews in a disturbing light. Why did G-d harden Pharaoh's heart so that more plagues could be unleashed? Why did the Hebrews need to liberate a fortune in silver and gold from the emotionally-broken Egyptians when they fled?

And why celebrate a festival in which multitudes of innocent Egyptians perished so that we could be free?

The answer is, we don't. During the seder, we dip wine in remembrance of the plagues and the Egyptians killed. As well, there's a significant Midrash (interpretive teaching) which is often discussed during the Passover season, in which the angels are chastised by G-d for celebrating the deaths of Egyptians:

"The Egyptians were drowning in the sea. At the same time, the angels wanted to sing before God, and the Lord, God, said to them: 'My creations are drowning and you are singing before me?'" (Sanhedrin 39a)

It would be a mistake to deny ourselves an opportunity to celebrate on the grounds that others suffered. This is generally the outcome of any conflict. We can both celebrate and memorialize at the same time; they're not mutually exclusive conditions. It would also be a mistake to whitewash history - even religious history - when we can learn from the past. Passover is not an exercise in self-congratulations; it's an annual reminder of human suffering, an opportunity for improvement on a spiritual level, and a catalyst for action in a world in which man-made adversity continues.