Pic by Y. Ruas

Dear Extremist Haredi Zealot Neighbors,

Hello. It’s been a true pleasure making your acquaintance during the last few days outside the Orot (Hebrew: Lights) Girls’ School in my hometown of Bet Shemesh, a sleepy backwater which was frankly really nice until you got here.

Let’s tell the uninitiated reader about our little quarrel: You feel the land / building allotted to Orot is yours and have invoked your Magical Modesty Clause to (successfully) silence the Haredi street; the Education Ministry and the incredible parent leadership who built the school feel otherwise, supported by the normative citizens of Bet Shemesh who are kinda sick of your Grabby McGrabberson tendencies; and our mostly Haredi municipal leadership, led by Mayor Moshe Abutbol, as usual prefers (when confronted with offending you with femininity and other scary things) to stay quasi-neutral – by which I mean completely chickens**t. (Is that the kind you threw on us, by the way, at the rally?)

The experience of protesting alongside you has been super, though, since, really – where else would we have met? Unfortunately, I don’t really have that many friends from other religions, so it has been nice to expand my horizons. It is amazing that in your religion, all of the Torah that matters really *can* be learned on one foot, as long as that foot is covered by a stocking.

The elegance of being able to collapse your entire world into a single concept – Spread Thy Ignorance, Erase Thine Women from Everywhere but the Delivery Room, and Call it Superior – is just a little awe-inspiring in its total simplicity and apparent appeal to testosterone-based life-forms in tights (and turbans…..) Together with the all-black ensemble and the ability to travel light at a moment’s notice to whatever cause-du-jour you are called to, I daresay, you guys are pretty fabulous.

Although, it would be great if you would stop calling little 8-year-old girls nasty things as they walk home from school. It is not their fault that they were born outside the cage in which you have entrapped your own women and girls. It is time to stop punishing them for it. It’s really enough that you have tanked our real estate. (Thanks, for that, by the way.)

Those bits of tension aside, I’d love to get to know you better. I’ll start by sharing a little bit about ourselves, but since I know you are really busy not working and not learning, I’ll make it quick and reduce this “meeting” (is it too soon to call it a date?) to only one cool fact about our community:

We care about peace and quiet, are known to obsess about quality of life, are very busy with *jobs* (definitions can be found in the Talmud) and community work and army reserve duty and our own continuing (dual-curricular) education, BUT, like most parents, we are never too busy to protect and nurture our kids, in body and in spirit. Kids, male and female.

Listen to this again: We care deeply about the education, personal development, happiness, safety, success, and future of our boys, and of our girls. We expect our girls to become productive, active, educated, helpful members of the broader community, and we invest in them heavily. Even those of us, like me, without daughters of our own. These girls will be raising my grandchildren one day, and that means they’d better be really smart and headstrong; I also hope they know how to find small objects that get wedged into the couch, which chromosomally challenged people (xy) swear have dissipated into space. But I digress.

You said in several news outlets that you would carry on this fight for 20 years. In twenty years, notwithstanding your backward efforts, the first graders that you’ve been harassing will have more education, world experience, some even military experience, and certainly more vitality and promise, than any of the lot of you highly superior grown men, scions of the true something?….I dunno, I lost you at hello.

Because we believe in our girls and the women they will become, the mothers and Torah scholars and doctors and teachers and lawyers (…here’s her card for when you get indicted re: above threat…) we will stand up for their right to a great future. We sincerely hope that more of your moderate Haredi neighbors, with whom we differ on many things but can successfully share a national space, will begin to see that they will need to choose a side here, as painful a step as that may be.

In any event, my Zealot Shmoopie, I’m not sure you understood all this about us before you started this little dance of ours. But it’s been real. See you around. But hopefully (Seinfeld fans? Care to join me?) not around me.

I predict a baby boom in Israel this Spring. That’s more mouths to feed and larger apartments to rent, but the passion of protest and the warm mid-summer night air…It’s all pretty intense, in tents.

It’s an amazing amount of unity, kind of out of the ordinary for here, and, I guess, for Jews in general. Also, Joe Average, and his wife, Lily White-Citizen, seem to have awoken from some type of cable-TV-induced coma. It’s kind of cool.

As a member of the squeezed middle class – two hard working professionals (100+ hours a week of work between us, at least) buckling under mortgages, loans, taxes, groceries and general high cost of living – I want to embrace this social awakening more passionately.

But I am cautious.

I am cautious because the protest’s center is a boulevard named after, of all things, a banking magnate. No, that’s not really why, but I thought I’d point it out.

I am cautious because I don’t understand how to lower taxes and increase government spending, and not end up like Greece (or America.) I don’t understand how to demand better conditions for a large middle-class sector without making that sector shrink, thereby increasing the numbers of real poor, which are already alarmingly high. I am not an economist, but I am not entirely an optimist either.

I am cautious because operatively, I am not sure what can be done in a country with such a huge, mostly necessary, defense budget, and with such limited local consumer power given our small population.

It is also a country whose political system routinely gets hijacked by an entire sector (the Ultra-Orthodox) that only very partially joins the work force…and a system that feeds that cycle by consistently accepting and cynically perpetuating the status quo instead of trying to encourage a growing level of interest in work among the Ultra-Orthodox themselves.

I am cautious because there is a huge amount of unsettled, less expensive land in the Galilee and the Negev regions (both within the Green Line) that the government has been encouraging young people to “settle” for a decade. Homes in these peripheral areas are far less expensive, and the value of expanding into these regions goes well beyond the economic; it goes right to Ben Gurion’s pioneering dream. The populations in these outlying areas also tend to be poorer, so having young professionals move there to help build communities and economies goes to the core of social justice.

If we are serious about all this.

I am cautious because this generation watched while the Kibbutz movement more or less collapsed, even when Kibbutzim went corporate producing saleable products. Could we have saved the Kibbutz, the very model of social justice, we, who are screaming for social justice? Are we, perhaps, engaging in a form of regret? Nostalgia, maybe?

I am cautious because there is no one clear message to the protests sweeping the country; I have asked all of the above questions to supporters and gotten very different answers, all of them heartfelt and real.

I am cautious because I’m not convinced Netanyahu is at fault, or at least, no more so than anyone else who came before him. I hope this is not some cynical ploy to get rid of him for politics while crying populism. That would suck.

I am cautious because cries for social justice need to mean it, for everyone. It better not be about feeding one’s own belly. That would suck more.

Clearly, I want this movement to succeed so we can manage the grocery bills without feeling like we’ve just booked tickets to the Riviera. But even more, I want my less fortunate neighbors to be able to afford to live without the constant, crippling worry of an empty fridge and an emptier bank account.

When I hear tens of thousands of people (peacefully!) yelling for social justice, I get a shiver down my spine, in a good way. *Here* are the Jews! Finally!

It makes me hope this new found passion (about something other than land) is real, unselfish, the dawning of something solid, unified, prophetic. Is this the conscious, caring society which will bring light to humanity? The one we’ve heard about around youth movement campfires?

Is this the first movement – revolt – in a lasting people’s reform demanding accountability of government, balanced national budgets, fair allocation of resources, an end to corruption and nepotism, a reasonable amount of reward for work, and a charitable amount of aid to those in need?

And if so, does anyone have the gravitas to carry this movement from tent to “mishkan” – i.e. the Knesset? Does anyone have the clarity to know exactly what message they’d be bringing first?

Will the Taurus babies named Justice be coming into a brand new world? Or the same old one, via a sweaty tent?

I’m not sure yet.

It smells like teen spirit, but it’s still hard to see Nirvana.

This post is about 90% recycled from 2009. But it’s still true, so I figured, what the heck:

–

Every summer, right in the hot, soft belly of July/August, especially on thick, soupy nights like this one, I’m hit with it in the head, like the skillet of an angry housewife: the urge to play Alan Jackson loud with the windows of my station wagon rolled down, hang back on my porch at sundown, and go out drinking with the girls. You guessed that right, son – Redneck Fever.

I’m guessing I can’t be the only (sub)urban sophisticate, the lone overly-serious Jewish girl, with an occasional thing for white trashiness. Growing up in Baltimore / Silver Spring in the 80′s, I was buffered by a strong, warm, and nosey Orthodox community, but just beyond the breach in the bubble stretched vast redneck territory, and boy: the country radio was sweet, and so was the drive out to the pool where I guarded up in Reisterstown, and the trip out to Spa Lady in Timonium. And going Down-the-Ocean, or to school down in Montgomery County via US route 29 from B-more, you best believe we crossed paths with plenty of Earls and Randys.

I’ll tell you what: The thing I miss most about America, truth be told, is not the jumbo sized Mountain Dew, the tiny purse-sized cosmetics flavored like candy, or even Bed, Bath and Beyond. It’s the people. The space they give you, the space in them. Things are simple, basic, and on an as-need basis. Ain’t no right or wrong way to breathe, hon.

Take the relaxed way the locals speak, south of the Mason-Dixon, the reassuring gait out back to the truck to get another part, the walk of a man who ain’t quite sure (and don’t quite care) what the final result was of the Civil War. (Yes, I am aware – this has its downsides…) He’s got time, and he keeps his thoughts to himself.

They are probably straightforward thoughts and not historically complicated, mired in guilt, or otherwise needing of footnotes and subscripts and ardent, multi-nuanced opinions. (Perhaps for this reason, the Iroquois and Cherokee nations have not made too much of a fuss about their Nakba of 1776. What good would it do? Again – I am aware: This has significant downsides.)

But it gets me thinkin’. Where’s the Israeli ability to sit quietly with one’s thoughts? Or to separate sin from guilt, wrong from outright lost? We could use some self-forgiveness around here, some private 12oz. absolution. Calm contrition. Contemplative work. “Hell, was I wrong, but tomorrow is for fixin’. Now back to what needs doin’.” Can you hear that coming from a Levantine mouth? Can you imagine anyone letting it?

And excuse the non-sequitur, but what about baseball? Remember night games in August rained out in the 5th, beer and nachos floating down the aisles, sunburned women in yellow ponchos running to the car and thinking they’d be protecting their hair with the drenched paper program they were holding up over their heads?

Shoot, ain’t nostalgia a bitch.

And if you still had any doubt that Rednecks rock, I refer you to Brad Pitt’s long-ago but still oh-so-relevant debut in Thelma and Louise . Oh, Brad: Why the arthouse pieces that don’t make any sense? Please go back to shirtless in Oklahoma. Much obliged.

Ya’ll listen up: 10 months a year I LOVE that my argumentative, close-talkin’, fast-walkin’, dark, intense, complex, spiritual and spiritual-phobic, text-obsessed, content-driven, apology-addicted, sarcastic and bombastic, cell-phone shoutin’, hi-tech worshippin’, God-ambivalent family of Jews is who I live among, but LORD – if I don’t wish every summer for a wide open I-64 and a beat- up old Ford, some Virginia dreamin’, and a bottle of Mountain Dew so big I can hear my kidneys screamin’.

Amen.

photo by: Susan NYC

I first posted this 2 years ago…but I think it’s still relevant, so I am conserving time and posting it again. (Look at that. I’m an eco-blogger….)

***
Is a memory something you have or something you’ve lost? – Woody Allen (Spoken by Gena Rowlands (as Marion) in ‘Another Woman’)

Today we think of who we do not have and why, and then what that lack demands of us.

Tomorrow, about how we celebrate being alive to meet those demands.

Today is Memorial Day in Israel, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terror, observed here a day before Independence Day. The connection is essential since it is widely recognized that without the former, celebrating the latter would be impossible, while always hoping that one day, this will not be the case. That there will be no more names on next year’s list of the fallen. It is, in other words, a sacred day we wish with all our hearts we didn’t need to observe, and in fact grapple with its necessity all the time.

Here’s something I wrote about potential loss and war when my husband was commanding an APC in Lebanon II. I was essentially the least supportive war wife ever, because I didn’t believe in the war. I later learned, from the Disney franchise of all places, that Hassan Nasrallah was counting on people like me to behave exactly as I did. (What does Disney have to do with the IDF and Hezbollah? Think Mufasa / Scar / Simba / Pridelands / Hakuna Matata / Circle of Life… Or just read the essay.)

In any event, Israel is not quite Western and also has a very small population – death by war is not something distant and abstract, since everyone has either lost someone or knows someone who has. As such, there are no Memorial Day sales and no Memorial Day home games and no Memorial Day picnics. There are, instead (not in addition), countless public ceremonies, school observances, lots of sad TV documentaries (and little else on) and public moments of silence when traffic stops all along the nation’s highways. It’s not a case where some of the country mourns its fallen sons and daughters and some of the country shops or watches baseball.

Memory is pervasive around here, fraught. It is as much something as it is a lack of something.

The mood shifts dramatically sometime around 5 pm, as people get ready for Independence Day, an out and out celebration, complete with picnics, barbecues, parties, fireworks, etc. Much like the Fourth of July.

(But stores: Still closed.)

It seems that Israeli memory is about a conscious decision to always be remembering and forgetting all the time, in the same instant, a constant argument between absence and presence that sometimes results in the type of massive virtual memory overload that can causes one to freeze. Independence Day is, to continue that metaphor, like one big national reboot.

In truth, I sometimes miss the days of memory being something you celebrate at Macy’s, unless, of course, you had someone die in Vietnam or Iraq, in which case your day might look a little Israeli.

In any event, this silence and seriousness and restraint and celebration of life that nearly everyone does around here is very intense and it makes me want to hide some days.

But then I forget that I need to. Memory is like that.

The more I live, the more I see it’s true: There are no perfect choices, no life path that is completely right. More accurately, there are various costs, and various rewards, associated with certain choices.

The economics of living has been on my mind because people keep sending me interesting links. My friend W sent me this one, about two middle aged Jewish women in the LA area who earn their very significant living on dying. The Shiva Sisters provide bereaved, wealthy Jews with meals and the other million little shiva logistics which are so comforting not to have to think of when you are mourning.

The service is obviously essential in any Jewish community, but W does it in my community for free, as a Hesed (Act of Kindness), and I imagine many other communities like mine have their own shiva committees – kind ladies in Land’s End parkas who schlep low chairs and high candles, cover mirrors, organize meals, make sure everyone knows the time of the funeral and the times the families want visitors, get the rabbi to bring by the appropriate books. Etc.

That this is a paid service for our swankier, more secular American brethren makes me sad, mostly for W, who could be a millionaire by now. But never mind. That is the price that community pays for total religious freedom and absolute privacy: They have no strict communal standards of behavior short of lawn length (wear and eat what you like on whatever day you like!) and kids do not drop by unannounced at all hours of the day to play, thereby dirtying $50,000 hand-woven Chilean rugs. But they pay for shiva, and I’m guessing every play date must be repaid in a timely fashion.

In my mostly Orthodox, middle-class, suburban community in Israel, you are likely to get soup from a neighbor if you have the flu. If you have minor surgery, you’ll get a squadron of ladies cooking your family dinner for days. Major surgery or prolonged illness, and you are looking at a brigade. W’s committee swoops in at the first sign of a mortal event (I affectionately call her ‘The Angel of Death.’)

In health, too: You will never have to ask more than two people before you find someone willing to take your 6-year-old for the weekend while you go away for a Bar Mitzvah. Small kids wander freely looking for friends; play “dates” within the community are rare because playing just happens ad hoc, wherever a mother or babysitter is home to let you in. Oreos (thankfully, now Kosher, and heavily imported) ensue. Twelve-year-old boys take the local bus to get burgers, and the street is a sea of pre-teens every Friday night, socializing in the warm evening with few concerns about weirdos and cars (very few people drive on the Sabbath where we live), and too many concerns about their hair.

All of this caring and freedom for younger kids comes with a price: Very little privacy, very little personal space, very little room to declare more than minor theological or practical religious differences – best to keep those to yourself or among very close friends. Our community is Modern Orthodox – people work in very advanced sectors of the real world (engineering, medicine, law, academia) and many of the women learn religious texts on a level that exceeds that of many of the men. Still other women walk around in jeans and a bunch of the guys get together to play poker. Most people are aware of (or even actively engage in) popular culture. We read mostly everything.

And yet, discrepancies between the genders certainly exists, and it also takes very little to create a scandal, as the borders of acceptable behaviors and utterances are quite deliberate, mostly as outlined in the system of Jewish Law and Tradition. It keeps our kids safe and earnest (reward), and keeps creative, free-thinking adults somewhat less autonomously operative than they would be elsewhere (price….although some would strongly argue: another reward.)

I have a recent example, but the local Orthodox among my readers would be mad at me for talking about it, and the non-Orthodox among you wouldn’t believe me, anyway. Let us just say that even on Purim, the most permissive day of the Jewish year, it is best to remain tuned to a Disney frequency if you don’t want to get in trouble. In general, I spend a good bit of time just trying not to get in trouble. Maybe I care too much about what people think…But as words and reactions and observations are large chunks of my job, it is hard to ignore them.

Striking a balance where kids grow up with a real knowledge of and pride in their heritage; where the community is supportive; where acts of kindness are second nature and yet – individuals have total freedom, significant privacy, and ultimate independence – is fairly impossible. These costs and rewards are pretty much at odds. I must say that Modern Orthodoxy does a much better job at balancing these values than the Ultra-Orthodox; religious coercion is certainly at a bare minimum here.

But still – one must know that communal warmth comes with communal heat, just as residential cool comes with a lonely chill.

Some choices help you fulfill your job in the world, and some help you avoid doing so. A person’s central challenge is to choose a life based on an accurate assessment of whether she can afford the price for the sought after reward, and, perhaps, to identify if the reward is keeping her at her most productive, or simply keeping her quiet.

And sometimes, a person’s job is to identify that none of it is about you any longer at all. That is a conclusion that bears an enormously high price, but hopefully, an equally high reward…apparent sometimes only later. Much later.

Ask W about the things she’s seen and heard after someone is gone, and you know it’s true. I suppose it’s mostly worth it.

Burqa Babes from SarKE on Vimeo.

Muslims, Chill: This Isn’t About You

Since this story has once again reared its ugly unknowable, covered head, I thought a re-release of our 2008 video was in order. Especially just before Oscar season.

Some background, in bullets:

- The Jewish burqa cult was discovered in an arrondissement of my hometown (Bet Shemesh… as in Samson….Extreme soil??) about 3-4 years ago.

- The main premise of said cult is that tzniut, modesty, is THE paramount virtue in a Jewish woman, and this requires covering EVERYTHING.

- Note that the above has very little to do with actual Jewish Law, which seeks to keep women modest, but not invisible or dysfunctional (well….mostly not); In fact, most rabbis at the time, and most of the husbands of these women, came out strongly against the practice, and especially their oddball leader (see below).

- As such, in an ironic twist, covering themselves became an act of feminist revolt. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. (Add somethin’ strong and it may even make sense.)

- This has a similar tenor (to my ear at least) to the debates raging across Europe over the Islamic burqa / hijab practice – is it an abrogation of religious and personal freedom to ban it? Or an abrogation of women’s basic rights not to step in and prevent Muslim women from being forced to wear it by the patriarchy? It is a conundrum that has liberal thinkers like me (I didn’t say practitioners, B.R.) in knots. But back to our own scandal.

- Said leader eventually arrested for….wait for it….child molestation

- So…We didn’t hear about them for a while and assumed they had…errr….disappeared.

- Surprise! Here they are again!; Keep in mind that we are talking about only a handful of people…just they are very…um….visible.

- Back in 2008, at the height of the first sheetstorm, some friends and I could not remain silent, and made this video for Purim (Jewish festival of food, disguise, and jocularity-slash-mockery…)

- (Many thanks again to Jaely K for the concept, Deb W for the authentic Ramle burqas, and Talli R for the talented video-editing progeny. Thanks also to The Kraz for being The Eternal Keeper and Purveyor of All Things Digital.)

- We had about 12,000+ hits on YouTube, but some Muslims took it the wrong way (Yes, they went thinking it was about them. Go figure.)

- Someone told on us re: the soundtrack not being authorized bla bla bla

- This got the sound disabled. (Now YouTube has the technology to do that automatically and no longer has to wait for snitches.)

- Let’s see how long this one stays up. Vimeo, come thru for us, will ya’?

Final thought: Back in 1989, as an Orthodox teen in Silver Spring, MD., some friends and I, in our floor-dragging jeans skirts in June, were asked by a passing redneck if “y’all wuz Menn-on-ites.”

Well, sir! See how our people have evolved?

A world renowned physicist, a brilliant bio-tech founder, and a celebrated science biographer walk into a Hillel house… and raise the bar.

The recent TEDx ‘Talpiot’ event in Jerusalem (read more about the TED organization here and TEDx events here), in a word, made me feel late.

Actually, I got there on the early side, in time to watch the promising young faces file in to the Hillel house at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Participants were mostly students and graduate students, with a bunch of professionals in various fields thrown in, I believe, to make me feel less old.

By late, I mean to the Do Something Huge for Humanity Party that so few get to attend, although said party is admittedly governed largely by self-invitation. Each talk – which, in the tradition of TED events, was about 18 minutes long – drove home the point that Truly Excellent Developments (not really what TED stands for, at least not till now) are taking place all around us, mostly by people who had made up their minds to make them happen in their early twenties, if not before. The event’s hardworking and visionary organizer, Yoni Litt, is himself a graduate student, and the event’s sponsors, among them Hillel, ROI Community, and Leadel.net, are about encouraging Jewish humanitarian innovation at the grass-roots, often college-age level.

We are talking about celebrating start-up people, devouring their passion for their respective missions, and inspiring a new generation hungry to make their own ideas happen… perhaps even over coffee during the break, in the case at hand. At least half of the Jerusalem TEDx speakers use their ingenious ideas and entrepreneurial spirit to contribute to humanity in ways that can easily be defined as good ol’ good deeds.

Prof. Zvia Agur is a Brussels-trained mathematician who has pioneered the field of biomathematics and developed a virtual patient model to aid in the optimization of chemotherapy. Based on a mathematical model of an organism’s reproductive pattern in nature during crisis, Agur hypothesized that both cancer cells and healthy cells, faced with chemo, might act like those animals. She founded a bio-tech start-up, Optimata, to develop patient-personalized cancer treatments based on this model.

Dr. Maurit Be’eri, Deputy Director of the Alyn Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Hospital, is an activist for early intervention in pediatric development; Eti Katz is an artist and education pioneer, translating the world and its words and numbers into visual symbols for kids who learn differently. Both dream of a world that is more easily digested by an ever-expanding population of kids who defy conventional development, and are realizing those dreams, on the ground, every day.

Avshalom Elitzur is a quantum physics rock star, and to be honest, I understood only his jokes (most of them); if the professor ever runs out of time and space to collapse, he can move on to stand up. Joseph Dadon is a video artist / architect – he filmed Israeli actress Ronit Alkabetz as “Zion,” flitting through the various exhibit areas of the Louvre with a Bible to denote that book’s place at the epicenter of Western culture – who made me LOL with his observation that, “The French Revolution opened the chakras of Europe.” Both of these men made it clear that humanity and genius were completely compatible in advancing each.

My favorite talk, though, was the one which seemed to be exploring why we were all sitting there in the first place; noted biology historian and Bar Ilan University Science, Technology, and Society Department Chair, Dr. Oren Harman, spoke about the origins of altruism. Why do members of a species take of their own precious resources to advance causes that may not necessarily advance them individually? Isn’t that decidedly anti-evolutionary? What are we missing when we reason through altruism, and who is kindness really for?

This was not only the topic of his latest book on oddball ground-breaking biologist George Price, but perhaps the meta-topic of the entire evening, and its sponsors, and maybe even of TED, of the internet’s talks and lectures and its millions of free how-to videos, and of much of Israeli enterprise in general.

For that matter, why do so many want to attend this global Geniuses Do Something Huge for the World Party that the organizers at every international TED and TEDx event, this one included, have to turn people away? And what will people DO with that instinct?

Are we bearing witness to the final stages of the evolution of brilliance into a generous phenomenon? Are the days of the intense, reclusive genius over, paving the way for true virtuosity to require, by necessity, it being shared with humanity? Is that what technology has wrought – the popular demand that the gifted share broadly…or be rendered irrelevant?

As artistic, scientific and business entrepreneurship and human / social entrepreneurship grow ever more enmeshed, these are THE questions of our age. However old we are.

M.O.T.U. –

Hello, again.

We all return Your original favor by imagining You in *our* own image, so I’d like to think You are the easy-to-talk-to type, and not One to demand formalities. I have the utmost respect for You and Your works (especially Vermont and Jon Hamm – really – super job!) but I’m not connecting to all the chest-beating and trembling, and I’m really hoping there’s still room for a different kind of faithful.

Getting right down to it, I’ve been wondering what exactly You were up to, in the long run. Not that it’s any of my business, but a journalist / blogger will always try for the best source. Why not aim for The Source?

Last year before Rosh Hashana, I was preoccupied with how unready I personally felt for the New Year, and how artificial it felt to me, to impose our relationship with You onto specific calendar days. I want to feel the door is open to You *every* day, feel on the brink of both possible greatness and possible demise *every* day.

That challenge of living on the hairline chasm between personal, perhaps far-reaching, efficacy and ultimate powerlessness is the only thing (other than a Very Hungry 5-year-old, You know the one), that gets me out of bed. If life was a sure bet one way or another, if it were about making resolutions one month and spending the next eleven breaking them and hoping not to get caught, there would barely be a point.

The only thing that makes sense to me is total, continuous engagement on a somewhat familiar, somewhat relaxed scale.

That said, on a global level, things make less and less sense every day, nothing is familiar, and few made of flesh and blood seem to bear any real wisdom. That is what concerns me this year. It was my sincerest hope during this long, oppressive summer (And really! What was up with *that*?!) that if I read more, and wrote less, the truth about the world would begin to emerge.

But despite the many therapeutic qualities of silence and reflection, they do not create either truth or wisdom. Only You do.

So here’s what I’m hoping You can answer for me. I have a rather long list of things I do not understand, but I will focus on only two main points for now, the headliners. One:

Do You believe – given the current reality of our world rather than any idealized version You’d had in Mind – in democracy, critical prosperity for all levels of society, scientific advances, basic human rights, and broad personal freedoms for men and women alike? I ask this sincerely because it seems that many of those who don’t believe in these things (and here I refer to some of my own co-religionists, as well) are winning, at least demographically. And they say it’s all Your will.

I’d like to think that the way I have chosen, the middle road of tradition and belief alongside a modern outlook and education, is the ideal, but ultimately, I really can’t claim to know one way or another. Maybe You like the ‘fundies’ better. Or maybe I am talking to No One. I hope not.

One thing, though, that I was pretty sure about was that if, in imagining You in their own image, a particular religion, or group within a religion, chooses to be parochial, paternalistic, fundamentalist – that is their business, their own road to You. *Up and until* these groups begin insisting that everyone join them, or at least meet all of their sometimes insane, sometimes inhumane demands. Or else.

Could that really be what You want? Do You desire devotion so fierce it eclipses mutual respect, common decency, or eradicates a value system where being alive and building the world is at the center? Do you really prefer xenophobia over inclusiveness?

And if not, how do you allow so many people with this type of twisted, compartmentalized passion to invoke You, some (thankfully, not my co-religionists) screaming Your name while committing murder, of pregnant women? Surely You are aware how much damage these adherents do to Your image, how many people are afraid to approach You because You have been claimed by the malleable mob and their manipulative preachers, rabbis, imams, and news networks. Don’t You care?

Here I will change course to point two – and perhaps alienate a whole different group of readers – to ask You about another great mystery, apropos malleable mobs, one that has continued to vex me for a number of years. I wouldn’t bother You with it if any human being had ever addressed the issue adequately:

How have Islamic extremists managed to recruit the “liberal” West to their cause in the Middle East, while that same group reviles extremist Jews and extremist Christians? How can it be that the very people who largely don’t even believe in One United You are championing the fight of, or at least choosing to actively close their eyes to, the most zealous of the peoples who do, the people most intent on imposing draconic beliefs on others – - are in fact helping to undermine the more moderate elements within Islam?

How has this alliance arisen? Is it what Seinfeld would call a “bizarro miracle”? And what are actual liberals supposed to do now? Christians, Jews, and Muslims who don’t really care to sign up with or countenance ANY fanatic?

Are You having a laugh with Kafka up there, letting him write history for a few years while You do natural disaster? (And You do it so well, I must add.)

Could it be that Infinitely Merciful You are somehow perversely enjoying the irony here, like many flesh and blood pundits seem to? I hope not. There is real suffering to address.

Could it be – and again, I hope not – that most people are actually much less concerned with ideologies than they are with simply winning? That is to say, perhaps many of the theoretically noble values invoked in leftist arguments about the Middle East – most of them oddly centered around a tiny strip of (for the most part) democratically administered land which activists claim to want to “free” more than any of the huge, very un-free strips of land all around it – are for the benefit of convincing oneself of one’s morality, but in fact, it is simply the easiest path, siding with the scariest majority in the area?

Wouldn’t a truer, harder path – taking on the actual self-appointed lords of the third world instead of right wing Jews and Christians, however dogmatic and demagogic they sometimes are – help the masses of people truly in need of help so much more effectively? Wouldn’t that ultimately be a more direct road to peace?

Could it be that people just don’t want to lose? Is this also the mass attraction of our own more parochial and extreme elements? That the Ultras appear to have the numbers and growth game in the bag, making them a safer bet?

Could it also be what this disparate cooperation of groups has in common, in addition to the utter certainty in their own correctness, is that there is not such a great distance between laziness and zeal?

All and Nothing both require far less effort than integrating passion with moderation, empathy with clarity, a desire for change with responsibilities attached for everyone, optimism with measured realism. Complex integration is far more dicey, as well, because you lose all manner of friends along the way, who only buy whole packages of beliefs, not assorted.

This type of nuanced geopolitical ideology and spiritual way defies trends, and as such, will not get lists of celebrities to sign on it or tweet about it. It is hard to fundraise for. It rarely goes viral. It is not always fun, either, but I hope You do not mistake reflectiveness for lack of enthusiasm or commitment the way people do.

In any event, even a small response (like, a cool front on Yom Kippur if You plan on jumping in to deal with any of this, for example) would be most appreciated. In the meantime, rest up! Lots of prayers coming Your way very soon.

And if it gets overwhelming and You need to get away for a while, I know quite a few places You can hang out where no one would recognize You in a million years.

Even if they were looking right at You.

Patient X, the Humans, presents to clinic disoriented, unable to agree on a future, and with significant retrograde amnesia.

Patient is by turns delusional or hostile, alternately refusing to admit to significant differences of agenda and values; and insisting on imposing strong beliefs on others via verbal aggression or violence. In both states, patient is highly sadistic.

Diagnosis: Severe and deeply entrenched Addiction to both Conflict and Denial, also resulting in a host of co-morbid conditions, the most immediately lethal of which is Totalitarianism.

Past treatments (as related by patient): War, with wide-reaching and disastrous systemic side effects; Global Policy, prescribed by the clinic at Geneva, mostly ineffective or anti-therapeutic; and, most recently, a Twelve Step program referral by a facility in Washington, to which the patient could not ultimately commit (“Power greater than ourselves…God…amends…personal inventory….Forget it.”)

Suggested therapy:

Complexity™.

Complexity is a Moral, Emotional, and Intellectual- based compound with significant palliative effects in humans. It has been widely marketed under the name Democracy, a brand which is undergoing significant issues of copyright infringement and used to label several, often contraindicated, therapies. (See below.)

Complexity has several drawbacks which prevent it from being widely prescribed.

Significant therapeutic challenges:

Supplies of Complexity are close to depleted, and there has been delay in approving further, large scale manufacturing. The drug requires extensive phase 2 trials, during which patients, especially those in proximity to an epidemic of Totalitarianism, frequently die.

Compound is able to withstand boiling or freezing, but often breaks down in these states once ingested by patients.

Most saliently, Complexity is exceedingly difficult to mass distribute, as it tends to corrupt in transit; is very costly to preserve; and is experienced by many as painful to ingest.

Its effects are also slow to take effect, which most patients find discouraging.

As such, the production of Complexity is highly controversial. Its critics in the clinical community are extremely vocal.

Benefits:

With Complexity, each nation becomes capable of hearing criticism and examining its assumptions, its origins, its charters, and its actions, even as it expresses confidence in and a willingness to defend, at a cost, its core principles. The ‘catch’ is that these principles are sometimes harder to immediately define while taking Complexity. (This flaw has nearly shut down trials of the drug several times in the past.)

While Complexity does, characteristically and almost exclusively to other therapies, allow for the maintenance of a society with both one’s empathy and one’s active resolve intact, it requires extensive self-monitoring, and causes occasional shakiness.

Complexity, if taken immediately, is the best treatment for Totalitarianism, but is completely contraindicated in cases where this condition is entrenched and incurable. In those cases, there is no known cure. Due to the contagious nature of this disease, total quarantine is our recommendation, while amputation is sometimes necessary.

Notes:

Complexity has, in most populations, been shown to be correlated with lower fertility rates. Interestingly, it is also used, off label, as an aphrodisiac.

Complexity can be used while operating heavy machinery, when indicated. It does not need to be taken with food, but some liquid is necessary as most find it rather hard to swallow, and often bitter.

Complexity can be taken together with Religion and Spirituality, although these patients report significant migraines.

Complexity is actually most effective when taken with Clarity, but this drug has been out of use for some time. The makers of Complexity hope to begin trials with New Clarity next spring.

Side Effects:

Patients often experience delays in gratification; self doubt; decreased feelings of efficacy; and difficulty expressing themselves immediately, whether verbally or physically. It is known that a large percentage of patients discontinue use when experiencing these discomforts.

Dosage:

Dosage is difficult to gage, and must be adjusted and monitored throughout a patient’s lifetime.

Exclusions:

Complexity is heavily contraindicated when a patient is taking Dogma or Reaction, sometimes mislabeled Democracy. Absorption in these cases is very poor, and the combination of these palliatives has been found to occasionally cause hallucinations.

Complexity is also dangerous when taken with Vagueness of Purpose, a commonly occurring compound found in micro-doses in almost all western nutrition, with immediate analgesic benefits. It too, is often mislabeled Democracy.

Those self-medicating with large quantities of Vagueness of Purpose often report that they feel just like they have taken Complexity. While the two substances are of similar molecular ideation, the palliative effects are not even remotely similar.

(Vagueness of Purpose, for example, while fast acting, has no long term therapeutic effect whatsoever, and high doses are strongly correlated with Moral Blindness. VOP is also known to be a direct cause of a neurotic condition known as Very Highly Specified Outrage on Behalf of Others, characterized by a jerking knee.)

Important Note:

Do not dispense Complexity to Tyrants!

These individuals often demand a supply of Complexity for its well-known sedative effect on indigenous journalists, but will never ingest it themselves. Tehran, Gaza City, and Pyongyang, for example, are noted for Complexity-seeking behavior from western suppliers.

Prognosis:

Given above therapeutic history and limitations, we are not terribly hopeful.

This particular patient, however, has surprised us before.

It’s the energy, stupid.

That’s what I have to say about hi-tech startups, in 5 words or less.

In 6,000 words, I had a lot more to say. That’s the dissertation that emerged this past winter when I researched (for upwards of 60 hours) and wrote (for upwards of 25 hours) and re-edited (for an additional 5 hours) a feature article on Israel’s hi-tech start-up scene for a leading US Jewish publication. Not to mention the conferences I attended for the better part of 6 months. I spoke to founders, aspirants, service providers, VC’s, revolutionary anti-VC-VC’s, analysts, consultants, experts, and pundits in the hopes of giving readers a taste of Israel’s hi-tech here and now and tomorrow. (Which of course is by now yesterday, and mostly passé.)

100+ hours and 20+ sources for what was supposed to have been 1800 words! Had I gone mad? The short answer: Yes.

The longer answer is that I had, in a kind of Charlie Kaufman twist, become my subject. I was unwittingly re-enacting the manic trajectory of many a startup, the ones that, like my article, don’t necessarily make it.

Adrenaline aplenty at the prospect of meeting some of the industry’s luminaries, not to mention a good chunk of its aesthetic army of hipster geeks, I was besotted with my project. The fact that, after hour 15, I was largely working for free was the least of my problems. In fact, I felt rather altruistic about that, or at least entrepreneurial.

I was convinced that my enthusiasm for the subject matter, the brilliance of the ideas, and the undisputed high quality of the people I was dealing with somehow guaranteed a flawless product, even though I had totally lost focus. I think I’ve been there before. Oh, yeah. A decade ago. When I worked for an internet startup. (Still, irrationally, my favorite job ever.)

The initial assignment, and the bottom line (in both fiscal and journalistic terms), had become less important than the buzz I was getting from the work. And make no mistake: Entrepreneurial creativity is suburban crack.

I know this because as a freelance copywriter and web content consultant, I work with emerging companies all the time. With very few exceptions, either the idea will knock your socks off, or the people will. Everybody is young and brilliant, half are also personable, and maybe 10% are also profitable, at least eventually.

Generations X and Y were raised to value charisma, creativity, and celebrity almost independent of money. We’ve been told by various enlightened gurus over the years that we need to Do What We Love, and that the fortune would follow…if we were willing to learn long, work hard, and fully engage with our dreams…and (cue small print) if we had the right dreams for our skill set…and maybe knew someone with a little spare cash.

We were taught that pursuing a project is just as much about the journey – about changing ourselves, about affecting some type of awareness in the world -as it is about any tangible result. Success and glory, on this type of Homeric quest, may be defined several ways, many of them fairly subjective.

Witness Twitter, whose major success, to my mind, is creating something new and tech-y that teenagers won’t go near, but is instead perfectly engineered to the specific exhibitionism and micro-marketing needs of our generation. Witness, too, the glee of a hi-tech entrepreneur whose app appears on page one of Google after only 23 hours, for *three out of five* key words. Whoops of joy, fist of victory in the air, before he ever sees a blessed CPM penny. And said penny might really be… a penny.

The opposite is also true: Show me a person whose startup has just closed down and I will show you someone dejected – unshaven, in sweatpants or some crazy boxers, and eating leftover rice out of a takeout box for breakfast at 11 am, like after a bad breakup with a lover.

Because we ARE talking about love, not only about business. We are talking about conquering a space, outsmarting a system, navigating a netherworld. We are talking about falling hard for an idea, a vision, and a self-image that relies on our ability to make those real. We are talking about living and breathing something 25 hours a day – filling a need for people who don’t yet know they need what they will soon not be able to live without – and washing it down with little more than coffee. …And then, perhaps, losing it all because someone with some money and a Board in San Francisco or Herzliya or Boston changed her mind.

Nascent companies, then, are mostly about vision, passion, obstinacy, and optimism – of the founders, and, hopefully, of the investors. (And also a little about Attention Deficit Disorder. But that is for another post.) This is part of the reason why Israelis are so good at start ups, because more visionary, obstinate, passionate, and optimistic people are hard to come by. Also obsessive. Again, another post.

There are other, easier to quantify, reasons that Israel is one of the world’s leading hi-tech entrepreneurial clusters, most of them outlined in Senor and Singer’s best selling Start Up Nation.

I loved that book, but what it does not discuss is what happens when passion for innovation grows out of focus, and becomes an end in itself. Here’s what: You spend 100 hours on a project that sits in a little yellow folder in your directory, unsellable and yet still somehow beloved by you, even after you are aware of your own passing lovelorn insanity.

Anyway…Here’s how I ended that kill-fee destined piece:

“….In Israel, the culturally entrenched imperative to innovate – with the triple motive of being a good modern-era Zionist, an industry-changing uber-geek, and the next National Exit Hero – will continue to adapt to human needs, both basic and perceived.

In this often frenetic, uniquely cozy, and highly charged atmosphere, negativity, when it does appear, only seems to attract more positive energy. This is the simple physics of entrepreneurialism, and of Israeli moxy in particular.

Chutzpah 2.0. ”

I still believe it. Mostly.