Rolling home

And so another sojourn in Israel comes to an end. In 4 weeks I managed to go to 2 weddings, one funeral, 2 shiva visits, one tour of the Old City, one political lecture, one fund raising dinner, the 4th birthday of a grandson, and ...drum roll...the birth of a new granddaughter. Mazel tov, thank you, nachas. Always a lot happening here. 

And of course, Chanukah. And Thanksgivukkah! As I mentioned before, a bi-cultural Fress. 

So tonight, the last night of Chanukah, I ate my last latke followed by the last sufganiyah, thank G-d, because I think if I eat anymore they're going to have to use a shoehorn to get me into my plane seat. 

O, Israel, land of the mehadrin Magnum,  yea though I swim every morning and walk around a lot during the day, the calorie balance shifts ever against me. 

It's time to go home, laden with gifts for the folks back home, as well as with mehadrin gourmet French, Italian and Spanish cheeses (yes, I declare them and no, it's not illegal to bring cheese into Australia provided they are made in France, Spain or Italy.) 

I know it's time to go home because my nails are crying to be manicured and my feet ditto. And my eyebrows have escaped all control. I don't feel comfortable letting anyone but my usual peeps look after my aging bod. 

Now that the winter rains have finally begun, I think I have chickened out of my morning swim, I won't be able to walk around much so I guess it's off to the breakfast buffet for one more G-d Bless Israel breakfast. But definitely NO MORE DONUTS. Maybe a magnum later. We׳ll see. 

A Bi-Cultural Fress

Last night I fulfilled some of my Booba duties by making latkes. A lot of latkes.

Potato, of course, but I was also talked into making some sweet potato ones too. Ok, I can deal with that. Of course there is no comparison to a golden-brown, fragrant, crunchy potato latke, is there? None of this 'bake in the oven' rubbish, it's Chanukah, embrace the oil!

Then the question of accompaniments. Strangely, even though I was raised with savory latkes accompanied by ketchup in the context of a BBQ, I have taken to the sour cream dollop (no BBQ, obviously) but I don't get the applesauce so beloved of the Americans. I don't think it does either the latke or the applesauce any favors. Feel free to disagree. I guess it's what one is used to. 

(I wonder what we did for latkes in Europe before the 16th century, before the potato arrived from the New World? Kasha? I guess we still do eat buckwheat pancakes, why not?  But I digress.)

So tonight I went to a Thanksgiving dinner - turkey, pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, beans, the whole works- but no latkes. So much for Thanksgivukkah! Not that I could have fit any latkes in, and forget about the sufganiyot, I'm over those already. 

And I'm trying to write this while feeling as stuffed as the turkey. My brain is in a food-induced stupor. 

I'm not the first person to notice that Chanukah and Thanksgiving have a bit in common, main point being that they are both about religious freedom. The Pilgrim Fathers were escaping religious persecution by fleeing the Old World for the New. And the Maccabees beat the crap out of the Hellenist Seleucids (Syrian by geography, Greek by culture) because they were denied freedom to practice their religion and because the a Temple was defiled. Then was the miracle of the oil which we remember while eating fried food (OY, do we remember. The heartburn doesn't let us forget). The difference is in the attitude to the food: with Thanksgiving it is a Seudot Hoda'ah, literally a meal of thanks, but with Chanukah it's the classic Jewish theme; 'they tried to kill us, we won, let's eat.'

Anyway, I reckon sweet potato latkes are the once in a lifetime Thanksgivukkah treat and I won't be making them again until 2021, I believe. And as for the 'healthy' 'latkes' my daughter was reading about -and suggesting I make!- containing cabbage and kale and carrots and onions, I say, that ain't no latke. That's fritters. 

Potatoes = latkes, The End. 

Happy Chanukah!

Bad news, good news

Once more I am in Jerusalem, city of bells and yells, on a sunny Sunday, hearing the tolling and tinkling of the competing churchbell carillons and preparing to go out to meet friends for lunch. 

The news items which are still fresh, in this place of ever-generating news, include the murder of Eden Atias, 19 year old new IDF recruit, on a bus in Afula. Eden was on his way home for Shabbat and had dozed off in the bus, when he was attacked and stabbed repeatedly by a 16 year old youth from Jenin, Hussein Rawarda. The only motive for this crime was political. Hussein killed Eden, a sleeping stranger, because he was wearing an IDF uniform, and was therefore probably a Jew, and certainly an Israeli. And where does a 16 year old learn to foster such hatred? In school. At home. In the mosque. Wherever there is unfettered incitement. Where the schoolbooks deny the existence of Israel, where the legitimacy of Israel's existence is continually questioned and denied and where the Jew is despised as a descendant of 'apes and pigs'. Just as with the murder of the Fogel family, stabbed to death by two Palestinian teenagers while sleeping, the words of hatred led to actions of hatred, perpetrated in the most heinous way imaginable. How do you stab to death a sleeping youth, sleeping children, a sleeping baby? How can a person hate so much? Well, he can. And it's been taught to him. 

Meanwhile John Kerry continues to thrash around, desperately trying to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, against all logic parroting the bullshit about how this conflict is the major cause of unrest in the Middle East, against all facts in front of his face, resorting to bribing the Fatah leadership with millions of US taxpayers' dollars - talk about throwing good money after bad, considering that the money will probably buy more weapons and hate education, via UNRWA- while having his Neville Chamberlain moment in his handling of Iran. I'd feel sorry for him if I didn't think he was such a malevolent buffoon. And that the future of the world might rest on his skinny shoulders. 

And in the midst of all this shit and horror, the feel-good story of the IDF in the Phillippines, post Typhoon Haiyan. 148 IDF personnel have put up a field hospital in Bogo City, capable of treating 500 patients at a time, with facilities including X-ray, pediatric and maternity services. A baby boy born there yesterday has been named 'Israel' by his grateful mother. 

So besieged little Israel, surrounded by hostile countries, eaten from within by hostile forces, whether from the Palestinian Territories or leftist Israeli journalists - I don't equate them, g-d forbid, but I did read an article in HaAretz yesterday where the terms 'Jewish terrorists' and 'Hamas military activists' were used, so you really gotta wonder- can still provide real humanitarian aid for no reasons except humanitarian ones. Any humanitarian relief from Saudi Arabia or Qatar or any oil-rich nations? I haven't heard, have you? But I do believe there is some financing of school book printing going on. 

Rock on, Mr Kerry, just try to make sure it's not yourself that you're throwing under the bus along with Israel. 

FROM PEW TO PRAGER TO PENN TO PSEUDO-RESEARCH

 So this is how my mind works:

I wanted to write something about the Pew Report called A Portrait of Jewish Americans, which seems to be showing that American Jewry is in a flaming tailspin and that the rate of intermarriage and assimilation is at an all-time high, and that at this rate, the only American Jews who will be identifiably Jewish in a few decades will be the Orthodox. And I have been reading opinions and commentary by people who are by far smarter than I, including the always interesting Dennis Prager, who has written a piece called ‘Why Orthodoxy is Growing’. He says it has to do with ritual observance, with living among other Orthodox Jews, with sending kids to Orthodox schools, with valuing marriage and having more children (not buying into the ‘nihilistic nonsense- and the Jewish dead end- of the zero population growth movement’ that ‘many non-Orthodox have’), of believing that G-d chose the Jews and is the author of the Torah, with the centrality of Israel to most Orthodox, and with non-Orthodox accepting, in fact being ‘steeped in leftism’. And as usual, Dennis does not wave the flag for anyone, he is just stating the truth. Make of it what you wish.

So I started thinking. What other groups can I think of who would fulfill some of these criteria? And how are they doing? And, of course, I immediately thought of the Amish. You can’t get past the beards and the hats!

So I started looking up stuff about the Amish, and it seems that they are doing very well. New Amish communities are being established, in fact, 60% of existing communities have been established since 1990. There are about 500 settlements each of 40-60 families, about 251,000 people.

I don’t know that much about the Amish beyond a few books and the movie Witness, but it seems that they are fairly insular, live largely agrarian and simple lifestyles, have their own schools, speak a German dialect called Pennsylvanian Dutch as a first language and English as a second and keep largely away from technology. As there is only a limited amount of farmland, they also work as artisans, crafting furniture and selling it, and they take jobs in surrounding towns. They travel by horse and buggy but they are allowed to ride in cars and trains, and they play baseball and they like in-line skates. Some communities are more stringent than others about technology. They marry young, after their rumspringa, which means ‘running around’. After 16, the young Amish are allowed to go out into surrounding communities or wherever, and they have some time to decide if they want to return to their own community and be baptized into the faith, after which it’s for keeps. That’s the whole shtick, you see, they believe that baptism should be a decision made as an adult, not something done to a clueless infant, which is why they and the other Anabaptists had a broygess with the mainstream Protestants in der Heim, and ended up in North America.

And the interesting thing is that the vast majority of Amish kids come back from their rumspringa. And marry young, and have 6-7 kids. And there is a bit of a problem with certain genetic conditions as they are pretty inbred; most of today’s Amish descend from 100 original migrants. They do accept converts but they don’t evangelize.

So: Insularity- check. Amish schools- check. Valuing marriage, large families-check.  Quite a few parallels with Orthodox Jews, you might say, and they are doing OK.

But then my research to a left turn, because I saw an article entitled ‘Why don’t the Amish have Autistic Children?’

They don’t? thought I. So I had a look, and the second I opened it I could see that it was an anti-vaccination website and I was going to be treated to all sorts of information which, on further study, would prove to be the usual hodge-podge of facts and diatribes and dodgy ‘research’ with people commenting in the threads, saying things like ‘you have given me some intresting things to think about’ and ‘I knew there was a conspirassy’ etc.

And I was not disappointed. This site really looks persuasive though.

Anyway, according to the learned writer, of course the reason that the Amish don’t have autistic children is that they don’t vaccinate their children.

Not that they live hard-working simple lives eating simple food, not smoking or drinking, and eschewing modern farming practices of using artificial fertilizers etc, or that they don’t spend their lives breathing in car exhaust, or that they marry when they are young and not when they are 30-40, or that the pregnant women don’t drink diet Coke, or that they give birth with traditional practices with little medical intervention. Or that they don’t sit in front of screens all their lives. No, none of those things even figured in this learned analysis. I didn’t even mention that the writer’s information on the scarcity of autistic children was based on a field trip in 2005 among some of the 500 communities. Population unspecified, methods unspecified, diagnostic criteria unspecified. 3 autistic children were found! One adopted from China, who had been vaccinated, a second who had been vaccinated and ‘developed autism soon after’, and the third child- err, umm, vaccine status unknown.

Bullshit piled on bullshit. But vaccination causes autism! All the clues are there!!!

Amish also have lower cancer rates, according to a real study. Considering the inbreeding problem, one would have expected higher rates, but the opposite is true. Probably nothing to do with the clean living, probably because they don’t vaccinate, right? Whatever.

So that’s how you go from the Pew report to the Amish to another critique of stupid pseudo-medical opinion (doesn’t deserve the title of ‘research’).

Actually, I can pull it all together! Someone I knew, a secular Jew, once joked that he had had only a little bit of Jewish education, and as with a vaccine, where a tiny bit of the disease prevents getting the serious disease, the tiny bit of Judaism he was exposed to ensured that he would never catch the real thing. He married out. Not such a funny joke, really.

THE WORST NIGHTMARE

A while back I visited some friends who were sitting shiva for their son who  had committed suicide at the age of 28. There is a younger sister. He had been struggling with depression for some years and it got the better of him.

There was no attempt to hide the fact that it was a suicide and there was no sense of ostracism as might have happened in the past. He was buried in a Jewish cemetery and it is understood that he was ill; depression is an illness, not a moral failing or sin.

His parents were devastated but were trying to comfort themselves with the fact that they had had him for 28 years; that he was ‘alternate’ but not alienated from them. Throughout the visit, young people, his friends and cousins, came in and out, everyone with a story of his kindness, his generosity, his humour, his quirkiness. The atmosphere almost became festive at times, kids laughing and reminiscing. Until the parents started weeping again.

There is nothing worse than having to bury your child. No matter what the cause of death; suicide is probably worse than disease or accident. I lost my brother when I was 18 when he was killed in the Yom Kippur War at the age of 22. There is nothing that can be said to comfort bereaved parents but people were trying to say that it was somehow better because he died defending Israel. Well, maybe. But dead is dead, gone is gone. And bereaved parents can find it hard to continue to be parents to surviving children, and that’s a whole other story.

I have just heard of a suicide of another young man in the community. I can’t stop thinking about it. I want to say to any young person, or any person contemplating suicide, that the world is never a better place without them. That it may seem all horrible and insurmountable today but it might get better tomorrow. That we are not meaningless specks in an uncaring cosmos, we are here as the creations of G-d and that fact alone means that we matter, that our existence matters, perhaps in ways that we can’t see or comprehend, but still we matter.

I believe that if this young man, the one I knew, and perhaps any suicide, could have seen the pain that he would be putting his family through, he would never have done it. I believe that in the moments of awareness between the act and the loss of consciousness, the suicide truly regrets the act; but it is too late. The sense of loss is so deep, so tragic, so pathetic, there are no words. He is gone. He is never to be a husband, a father, he will never be an uncle to his sister’s children; the loss to his family and to his community is unfathomable.

I want to say to his parents, the pain will never go but it will lessen over time; that they must not forget that they have a daughter, and that she will need them more than ever now, even though it looks like she is OK, laughing with her friends. She is not OK. I want to say that, although it is dark and cold now, that one day the sun will shine on their faces again, that life goes on, not because the world is callous and uncaring, but because Life is powerful and it will always prevail. But we must choose Life. It is a choice. We must all choose Life.

WHEN CARDIGANS ATTACK

I bought this really nice knitted jacket/cardigan thing when I was in New York earlier this year. When I am in NY, I go to Bloomingdales, and I particularly like this designer, Eileen Fisher, who does a plus size range called Eileen Fisher Woman, and who really seems to understand that being plus size does not automatically mean that you want to look like an upholstered sofa, as so many of these so-called designers seem to think. The clothes are usually simple pieces in flattering shapes, mix and match, and usually of natural fibres. She uses a lot of silk and cotton, as well as linen. And wool, cashmere, mohair, sometimes with a bit of elastane for shape and metal thread for a bit of understated bling. The clothes are practical and comfortable, not cheap, but they last well. I’ve been buying Eileen Fisher for some years and hardly a dud piece.

So I was rather enjoying this cardigan jacket. It’s a great layering piece, not too warm (important for us larger ladies who are also menopausal), in a nice knit of black and white, so you get this uniform grey marle sort of appearance. I wore it to Shul during Yom Tov once, but generally I wear it as work wear or on Shabbos.

So comes the time to clean it, and I checked the laundering instructions label, only to be greeted with this information:

51% Linen

49% Wool.

AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

SHIT SHIT SHIT SHATNEZ!

I truly can’t believe this. I thought I always check clothing labels. I warn my sons when they buy suits, about the freaking LAPEL STIFFENER. I once made my daughter take off a skirt she was wearing in a hotel bathroom because I had seen that skirt in a store and I knew it had a leeetle bit of wool along with the linen and cotton blend. And she took it off willingly! And now I HAVE BEEN WEARING A PORK CHOP. TO SHUL, noch.

I have been like Lady Gaga, but the meat dress was actually BACON and SHRIMP.

This is for real, folks. This is just as bad as eating a bacon cheeseburger. After a starter of oysters. And it makes no damn sense AT ALL. Just like Red Heifers and Kids Seethed In Their Mothers’ Milk. This incomprehensible Jewy stuff that I take upon myself as part of my relationship with G-d.

I’m not complaining. I accept this stuff that is above my level of reasoning and pay grade. But DAMN, I liked that cardigan. DAMN.

So, my non-Jewish friends, anybody want a free Eileen Fisher garment, size 1X? Almost new. Very elegant and most comfortable, I can personally vouch for that.

HOOK-UP HORROR

Have a read of this. I bet you won't be able to look away.

http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/feministhookuphangup/

I read this article and felt sick and sad and angry.

I was sickened by the goings-on in this Western excuse for ‘fun’ and ‘entertainment’ called ‘clubbing’. I was saddened by the way in which this feminine/feminist quest for self-empowerment has been conflated with being sexually available (but ‘never aggressive!’). And I am angry that 100 years of feminism has led us to this: under-dressed young girls staggering around in stilettoes, under the influence of drink and drugs, being accosted and handled by random men. These questing women are full of bravado and empty of moral substance.

I put it to you that the reason the writer, an intelligent young woman and self-professed feminist, cannot reconcile the paradox of being strong and independent, yet somehow enslaved to masculine approval, is that there is no reconciliation. As long as feminine empowerment also is seen to encompass  licentiousness, there will be no satisfactory answer to this paradox.

I thought we had put that old canard to rest: the one about how, in order to be a feminist, a woman has to behave like a man. I thought that we had evolved from that. And these women are not even trying to behave like decent men; they are trying to behave like the men that they would actually not want to have anything to do with- and so it turns out. After a night of drinking and dancing, a type of dancing which resembles sexual foreplay and probably is in fact foreplay, they feel, not fulfilled and powerful, but deeply disgusted.

You can try to dress this behaviour up as female self-empowerment, but in the end it is just another free pass for men to behave like animals. And to debase themselves as much as the women they ‘hook up’ with.

I know that not all men are like this and neither are all women seeking this sort of ‘empowerment’. But this is a cultural behaviour which, as with the hippie chicks of the 70’s and the Grrrrls of the 90’s, can only lead to self-loathing nihilism; because if this is what we were placed on this Earth to do, frankly, I see no point to existence either.

A thought keeps creeping into my head: The few female Muslim converts I have spoken to and whose autobiographical accounts I have read, talk of how the hijab- and worse, the niqab- frees them. It frees them from the tyranny of the male gaze. Islam is seen, not as the stifler of  female autonomy, but as the protector of the honour of women. So, all I think about is how a Muslim woman can be beaten for insubordination, and how her children ‘belong’ to her husband, and how she can be divorced unilaterally by her husband’s recitation of a few short sentences, and how he can take other wives, and how girls are killed by their male relatives for behaving in a dishonorable way- say, by having a boyfriend, or by being raped. But the flip side which the ex-Western converts see is this cherishing of female modesty and honour. As long as she does what she is told, I guess. Furthermore, Islam, as well as other religions (including my own), or other strongly cohesive groups which have a common goal and thus give meaning to life, is something to belong to, something which is a much greater that the individual.

So I can’t help seeing that the Western obsession with the individual and her rights and entitlements, coupled with this post-feminist concept of female empowerment (which goes way, way beyond the original feminist ideals of suffrage and equal pay, and takes the ideal of freedom of choice down into the gutter), is a headlong slide into nothingness.

There are no rights without responsibilities. There is no freedom without meaning and purpose. This mindless quest for a ‘good time’ can only, will always, debase the individual, male or female; the lack of self-control, the conquering of the conscience, and the aftermath of mindless coupling will only lead to emotional numbness and self-loathing.

So, young ladies, at risk of sounding old-fashioned (such an insult!) I say that if you want to be self-empowered, you need to choose to behave in a relatively modest and self-disciplined way. Respect yourselves. Because G-d put us all here for a purpose; the challenge of life is to discover this purpose and to honour our own humanity, rather than debase it in the jungle. You don’t have to be a nun, but you have to find out where the line is, and try to stay on the right side. I’m not advocating that everyone should follow my religion and level of observance; but faith in a Divine Plan and purpose and meaning are a lot more powerful than simple youthful optimism, which quickly becomes corroded by the toxic culture of the ‘hook-up’.