The thing about tragedy is that, almost by definition, it completely takes us by surprise. Life has very few rules we all feel apply both personally and globally, but one of them is, or should be, that people outlive their parents. And live long enough to perhaps become parents themselves. Tragedy takes these basic assumptions, assumptions we need to make in order to thrive, and in one awful moment tells us: Don’t bet on it.

And although we all know (in theory) that life’s natural order is disrupted in catastrophic, seemingly random ways every day for someone, when the rules are broken right in front of us we are – aside from simply being bereft – also caught completely, brutally off-guard. Otherwise, were we to always anticipate tragedy, we could not live normally the rest of the time.

And really, who could have anticipated, in their most desolate nightmare, what happened to one of our families last week?

Last Wednesday morning, our close-knit community in Bet Shemesh woke up to collective wailing: We had just lost two sisters, two daughters, two friends. Racheli and Rikki Menora, 14 and 16, daughters to our friends and friends to our daughters, went on an adventure with their cousin, Sara, 17, and their grandfather, Moshe, which will never end for them, but which ended – so very suddenly – for the rest of us, when their light aircraft went down in Michigan.

I cannot tell you how many times last Wednesday and Thursday the Menoras’ friends and neighbors, trying to go about the day, stopped, grabbed their heads, and said: “What?!?!” It was news that refused, still refuses, to sink in, even for those of us who did not really know the kids.

Rikki and Racheli’s brother Yossi, who prior to his US vacation had a permanent socializing spot on the park bench on the corner of my street (which – note this, Yossi – is being saved for his return) not only survived the crash, but is a survivor, in the best and truest sense of the word. The kid seems to have started digitally corresponding with friends the minute he opened his eyes in the burn unit, so very far from home.

As I have found to be the case in these untenable situations, Yossi and his mother, Sima, an outdoorsy, athletic jewelry artist, really cool mom and friend, and unsinkable woman, have ended up bringing comfort to their community in almost equal measure to the comfort their community is providing them.

In the hospital with her son during her daughters’ double funeral, a situation still too impossible to imagine even though we were all there to witness it, Sima phoned in to say a few words about her beautiful girls, after their father, Shalom’s, heartbreaking eulogy.

She did not hide out in Ann Arbor, behind the Great Lakes of tears, somehow grateful for the shade provided by maternal duty and miles, like so many of us might have done. No. Sima attended. She sounded sad, but she sounded like Sima, and she was talking to us from her new reality, in a way we were able to understand.

Do not underestimate the stuff it takes to proceed in this manner, to feel communal responsibility – to be able to produce the defiant, hopeful light held in your very family name, Menora – in your own darkest hour.

Let it be said here that the response in Bet Shemesh has been, as is characteristic of this place, rapid, all-encompassing, awe-inspiring. Say what you want about smothering religious suburbia, but it’s where you want to be in a crisis. Within hours, the older Menora boys, Ben and Yehuda, combat soldiers in the IDF, were surrounded in their home by dozens upon dozens of their friends who showed up to sit with them during those awful in-between days, when there was nothing to do but wait and cry. And by streams of Sima’s friends, who wasted no time in trying to feed all of them.

The press also showed up, of course, and the still teenaged Yehuda dealt with their predictably inappropriate, quote- digging questions with a tremendous amount of patience and grace. And faith. Both he and Sima – and Shalom, and Shalom’s mother – when asked by interviewers over the last several days how their status as believers related to their personal devastation, responded by saying that we do not understand God’s ways or plans. Every one of them expressed this sentiment. I suspect that to a secular ear this sounds deluded, opium-of-the-masses-like.

What it sounds like to me is this: We might be of the West, but, as also espoused by the Eastern philosophy so beloved by secular society, at a certain point believers relinquish control to a Greater Power, and this is in turn empowering.

In the western world we are both handicapped by and enriched by our enduring love of life, and our proclivity to guard it; further it at any cost; fear for its loss; and mourn it. This applies to believers and non-believers both – - only believers seem, upon hitting bottom, to be comforted by their own ultimate powerlessness. From there, it is perhaps clearer to see what it is we are able to change about the world in the face of tragedy, instead of alternately escaping the pain or lingering on it too long.

So when the press persists in asking the bereaved: “Don’t you ask ‘Why?’,” I am reminded of Victor Frankl, who famously observed that this question was far less useful than this one: What now?

What now, in Bet Shemesh: Prayer meetings are still being held in several synagogues around the city daily for Yossi’s recovery; Rikki and Racheli’s friends have set up a Facebook memorial group, which already has thousands of members; The neighborhood got resources together to facilitate the trip of Sima’s closest friends to sit Shiva with her in the hospital in Michigan; Community leaders, rabbis, and mental health professionals have been organizing public meeting all week to help the bereft teen community and their parents somehow come to grips with the gaping hole in their social circle. To perhaps make some meaning of this tragedy.

Still. There are multiple problems for us limited human beings when the rules are broken. For those directly affected, the immediate problem is how to wake up in the morning to a destroyed personal world. How to relate to people who mean well, but have no clue. How to set boundaries on grief, hopefully channel pain into something more life affirming. How to flip fortune the finger and still give love to a world that has taken everything.

For those of us who are a bit more removed: How to provide comfort and support to the sufferers. And also: How to reconcile what has happened with belief in a Just God, or faith in an ordered Universe. Or perhaps: How to let one’s children out of the house and believe they will come back, despite pressing recent evidence to the contrary just up the street. What is a worried mother to do when the very worst has just happened to her friend?

For the rest, for those who glance at the headline and are momentarily unable to move their eyes from the page, the shiver is followed by questions of philosophy, on the suffering of innocents, on cruel randomness in a world where actions should determine outcome, but sadly do not.

My very smart friend Cheryl wrote a solid pop-philosophy book on suffering which sheds some light on the matter, in which she does a really effective riff on the Book of Job, and comes up with lots of questions, and fewer answers, like any good Jew and philosopher ought to.

And my friend Sherri wrote a memoir about this, too, after her son Koby, not yet 14, was viciously murdered, with his friend Yosef, by a terrorist in the Spring of 2001. They had ditched school for an impromptu picnic. I was on my way to meet Sherri that day for a lecture, and in the end met her later among weeping women in her bedroom, in the hours before her son’s funeral.

That was a day that was followed by a year which was followed by another year, and before long, Koby’s friends still showed up to his annual memorial service, only they were men. And Koby isn’t. The world is out of order.

But here’s what Koby is: A foundation, opened by Sherri and Seth Mandell, which has to date helped hundreds of children and parents cope with tragedy. Sherri and Seth are still bereaved, but they still laugh – in fact, a comedy tour is one of the organization’s main fundraisers. And Camp Koby is one of the most sought after counselor positions for teens in this country. This is the way people make sense of things, and this is the only way.

So goes the great dialectic reality we call the human condition: Live as if today is your last, while assuming you will be around to witness the ramifications of your actions for another 100 years. Love as if there’s no tomorrow, and as if you have forever. Treat tragedy as a challenge, and use it to build. Survive with style.

We see that other cultures do other things with tragedy, like stay angry forever and stew in violence, or throw all caution to the wind and party. Neither of these build the world or move us forward as a human race.

This Tisha B’Av, as if history hasn’t provided us with enough reasons to cry, and then to reflect, and then to triumph, the Menora family has our tears, in buckets, and also, our pledge to help them rebuild their lives and improve our collective world however they see fit, and whenever they are ready.

To paraphrase T.S. Elliot: This is the way the world goes on, this is the way the world goes on. Not with a whimper, but with a strut.

(This post also appears on the JPost website.)

Right. Let’s get down to business. There is a comment on my Helen Thomas response to which I’d like to devote some significant attention, even though I had wanted to leave the piece behind and move on to some other topic for a bit. No such luck.

If you will recall, my premise in that post was that the anti-Zionism expressed by Thomas was in fact very lightly veiled anti-Semitism, the kind that has been haunting Jews since the beginning of history. My response indicated that despite enormous odds – centuries’ worth of forced wandering and being weeded out one way or another – the Jews have not only survived, but have become among the most productive members of any society that has agreed to host them. And that now, with Israel, merely a new incarnation of a very old homeland, we were done wandering and being hosted.

Several readers of this blog and the many others on which the piece was re-posted – Jews and non-Jews alike – took exception to the assumption that anti-Semitism was ‘the default’. Why so divisive, they wanted to know? Why so suspicious and alarmist? Don’t you realize how insulting this piece was to the many non-Jews who most expressly do not feel this way? Why can’t we ignore the old Press Room Bat and move on, one big, happy human family?

The best of these objections follows here, from one North American David:

“…Good G_d… I can almost feel the spiteful, juvenile relish through the screen. What are you doing Sara? You excitedly take a 90 year old’s senior moment as proof of the “default antisemitism” that lurks underneath every Gentile? You take this sad woman’s shameful remarks as an excuse for a smug rant about Jewish history so incoherent and uninformed that any self respecting Rabbi would cringe to hear it?

“We, we, we, we, we”…. Sara, true grace lies beyond the “us” and “them” duality that you so ardently perpetuate as a journalist in search of conflict. Take a deep breath, and stop chaining yourself to this vicious tribal cartography that so many use as a crutch in order to avoid facing the original, timeless truth. There is a far greater “we”.

Oh, David. Where do I begin? As to your first, rather ad-hominem, paragraph: There was no spite or relish or cheer; if you detected passion, it was borne of a deep sadness, coupled with the determination not to disappear. (And *maybe* I was a little pissed off.) That the history was simplistic I will not dispute; writing for popular audiences with the goal of producing a clear message precluded anything more complicated. I agree, I could have filled in a lot more blanks, honed the words for 100% accuracy.

As to your cringing rabbis: I suppose, as the ever-sexy Bill Clinton might say, that depends on how you define ‘rabbi’. I’ve been contacted by some of them asking for permission to forward or reprint the piece for their congregations. (No, not all Orthodox rabbis. Thanks for asking, though.)

Also, by the way, a large majority of the non-Jews I’ve encountered since writing the ‘rant’ understood that I was *not* trying to insult or accuse the good citizens of the world, only call on the carpet those whose sentiments veer towards the Thomasian.

Far from being a ‘senior moment’, Thomas’s unfortunate public words followed a long career of barely restrained, barely private venom, in which she was, most regrettably, not nearly alone. Indeed, I’ve had more than a few readers agree with her sentiments on this site, and other blog pages.

I’ve also gotten private responses from Jewish readers who endured days of hostile, vocal Thomas support in offices throughout the US and Canada, and felt they could say nothing in response. Part of the viral-ity (and virility?) of the piece, I believe, stems from a widespread feeling of being un-free to speak up as an ethnically identifying Jew in a politically correct world. With all of the freedom of speech that America and the West have in Costco quantities, it seems to only extend to certain types of speech.

This brings me, brother David (for we are all brothers, are we not?), to the crux of your complaint. Why, you wonder, do we not just dissolve our salty selves into the Great Sea of Man? Imagine – no countries! No religion! Why all the – oh, please let me savor this shaved-ice phrase again – “vicious tribal cartography” that deeply identified Jews so forcefully engrave upon the enlightened, blind-to-race world? Why, you ask, the ugly, Shylockian “we, we, we, we, we”? Why not join the collective, the universal, the mythic, theTimelessOriginalSpiritofHumanity? Breaaaaaaathe. Isn’t that better?

Well, honestly…the buzz is not bad. (Pufff.) But there’s kind of a nasty edge to it, some toxicity. And I’ll tell you why: Because nearly every time I have ever heard this argument made by a liberal in more than a general, utopian sense – this need to blend and melt into the brotherhood of man – it is directed specifically at Jews, and usually by other Jews.

I have rarely encountered this ecumenism applied, say, to the over-exclusivity of the African American return to African roots, or to Spanish speakers in Florida or New York being deemed “too Latino,” or to the popular Muslim return to the veil. If you walk through New York City or Boston or Miami, you will find little pockets of China and Pakistan and Puerto Rico.

Not melting or blending, but full on ethnic – and guess what? Assuming citizens pay taxes and fall in line with the rule of law and with democratic values, I think that’s just great. This – although I’m not in general a slave to PC or even a fan, really – happens to be the politically correct thing to think. Embracing multiculturalism is a liberal value I can get behind. Until here, I’m on board your love train.

I know this embrace makes me part company with many conservatives (with whom I agree on other matters), who indeed often express the wish for all of the above groups to just finish their merge into the great highway that is America, and quit driving in multiple lanes. While I share this concern for loyalty to American interests and ideals, I am not convinced that this commitment to common Western values can’t take place even while an individual embraces his ethnicity.

The dialectic between being who you really are and remaining a good, devoted, productive, contributing citizen of the place you live is not beyond the grasp of humanity. I see it all the time. With some willingness to compromise and also to work hard (no free rides!), no one needs to get lost, and no one needs to feel threatened or taken advantage of. If no such compromise is possible with the culture or religion in question, the problem takes on another dimension altogether. This is in fact a great litmus test.

But it seems that for most liberals, when a Jew gets too Jewish, too proud of his or her roots, too involved in the often tragic Jewish narrative, too ethnically Jew-y, we hear cries, like yours, of “exceptionalism,” usually tinged with some amount of embarrassed disgust.

Does political correctness mean Jewish people, most of whom also happen to be white or whitish people, don’t get to grapple with their past or embrace their race? Do we have to fly under the culturally aesthetic radar, virtually disappearing as a nation with laws, customs, and a history, in order to be accepted by you? This, indeed, is what the Hellenists wanted two millennia ago, and what the Helen apologists seem to want today.

There’s another other fascinating and frustrating thing going on here. Very often, what makes something OK to say is that the racial entity in question is willing to say the same thing about themselves. This rule, too, stands at the cornerstone of political correctness. This means, of course, that Jews, who thrive on self-deprecation, guilt, and all manner of public introspective angst, are truly open targets.

So the same honesty, open dialogue, and striving for self improvement that I love, and that are the hallmarks of democratic and Jewish thought (and seem to be anathema, by the way, to radical Islamic and Pan-Arab thought), are turned around on us rather maliciously. We debate our own Particularism vs. Universalism rather vociferously all the time; this is in fact one of the central debates raging in Israeli society as we speak. But then we are reminded that perhaps we should pipe down, because never is there a self critique that goes un-echoed through the chambers of the world. Ooops. There I go again, me and my paranoia.

In any event, back to the melting pot and the vast inclusive WE. Personally, I prefer to see humanity not as a soup but as a puzzle, with a million different and highly individualized, multicolored pieces that fit together to make the whole picture. Each piece is of equal importance, and each maintains its integrity – its own shape and color do not change – but it also makes no sense alone. You need all of the pieces.

While I enjoy being a colorful member of the colorful world and interacting with a lot of different kinds of people, I do not want to have to dissolve – to essentially get lost or watered down as a Jew, whether de facto or de jure – in order to be considered a loving, universal human being. I want to be able to embrace our racial specialness, as everyone should be able to do, and also to speak honestly about our largely troubled past, and about our recent victories in wars we never wanted to fight, without offending or embarrassing anyone. Of course, while remaining a loyal and productive citizen of the western world.

I think this is a realistic desire, but requires the tough empirical truths about a culture’s ultimate goals to hold more water than party-line ideologies.

David, all you need is love. Tru dat. It’s a Jewish value, too, alongside justice and continuity. So I have an idea. Go bring your ‘melt into each other’ message to places like Beirut and Kabul, Damascus and Ankara, Tehran and Khartoum, where the cynical, corrupt, and largely evil leaders of oppressed millions need to hear it even more than I did.

Then, if they leave you any limbs, please don’t forget to write and tell me how it went.

****

PS – Happy Anniversary to my Main Man D! Today’s post was supposed to be about marriage, but you know how I tend to get sidetracked….

Readers – I promise, I am not a single-issue girl. Next post: Not so heavy, I hope.

Irritating enough, apparently – like the too-talented and bossy fame-hog Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) on Fox’s Glee – in our discovery of the written word, monotheism, modern physics, psychology, vaccinations, and the film industry, that every country that has ever “hosted” us has found it necessary to tell us to get the hell out, like Thomas did. (Ironically, the aforementioned Jewish character Rachel, in a particularly annoying moment in one episode, was told by classmates to move to Israel. I doubt the writers coordinated this telling joke – Jews do equal Israel in the eyes of the world, sorry J Street – with the State Department.)

Anywho. Helen, you know why we were in Germany and much of Eastern Europe in the first place? (And by the way, if I follow your advice, do you think the nice old ladies who got my grandmothers’ large houses and farms from the Nazis in what was once Czechoslovakia will kick the property back two generations? That would be cool because I’d love a vineyard and an agricultural estate.)

…We were in Germany and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Russia (where we were regularly just plain killed by Cossacks), and also, for many centuries, Poland (ditto), cuz we were told to get the hell out of England, France, and Spain. (Or, you know, just plain killed by handsome and heroic fairytale knights.)

And you know why we were in Western Europe to begin with? Cuz we were told by the Greeks and the Romans – wait for it – to get the hell out of “Palestine,” where we had been living since the beginning of recorded history.

We also ended up in Babylonia (Iraq) and other Middle Eastern and North African countries, where we stayed as second class citizens for hundreds and hundreds of years, till the Arab world finally caught up with the pagans and the Christians in their hatred of the Jews. Amazing how the student has now far surpassed the teacher. But I digress.

(By the way, I am aware that the Arab narrative has us Ashkenazi Jews as descendants of the Khazars, but the actual facts have it different. See this new DNA study linking European Jews with their Middle Eastern counterparts, all stemming from one original population of Holy Land Jews predating Roman times. Never mind our own texts that say the same thing; I know they are inadmissible in the international courts of the mind.)

In any event, there is no way around it: Jews being asked (usually not by old ladies on the White House lawn) to get the hell out of anywhere and everywhere is just the way it goes.

So it came to pass that about 200 years BCE the Macabees got sick of it and established a Jewish state in Palestine, within the Roman Empire, which lasted till about the time of Jesus (another Pesky Jew) and the destruction of the Second Temple.

And it also came to pass that Jewish settlers began arriving in Ottoman Palestine in the late 1800’s, after the Russians and the Poles made it clear that Jews were persona non grata in Eastern Europe. Palestine was as good a place as any to escape to, since it was the last place, about 2000 years before, that the Jews had a sovereign state (see above). Never mind Jewish liturgy and texts pining for Jerusalem, since I know these, too, are inadmissible in the international courts of the mind.

Anyway, nowhere else wanted European Jews any more than Russia did, not even America really, where there were very strict quotas, although the Americans, again politely, refrained from all the messy European killing, which was apparently in vogue until after Hitler. Besides, those Ottoman Turks, as now, were known around the world for their amazing human rights activism and the Jews were excited to see it first hand. (No, not really. But…they were better than the Polish peasants. Unless you were Armenian.)

It is true that there were people in Palestine before the Jews arrived en masse (for there was always a handful of Jews that remained here….), not *A People*, but rather a group of assorted regional Arabs (think Native American tribes in North America…who by the way were treated much worse by the Colonialists…) who had settled the area with not much agricultural success and had endured various rulers over the millennia.

But when the *Jews* came back, it was suddenly necessary, once again, to tell them to get the hell out. There was no living side by side, even though that was an express Jewish desire right up until 1947/8, when the Partition Plan was summarily rejected by the Arab League, who started the war that Israel won. If keeping land you win in a war others provoke (when you wanted to make peace) is called occupation, Helen, the world’s axis of furious justice has a lot bigger fish to fry than shitty little Israel.

The Arab desire to kick the Jews the hell out of Palestine did not begin in 1967, and not in 1948. It began the moment the initial groups of Jews arrived and started to make the land flower and produce crops. That’s when the attacks on Jews began, and when the Arab world decided a new Jewish presence in the land would not do, back when there were about half a million Arabs and just under 100,000 Jews in the Holy Land, in the early 1900’s. 20% was too much, apparently, to bear. (The Hebron Massacre of 1929, where marauding Arabs killed nearly 70 Jews and wounded countless others, took place long before a single house was built over the Green Line.) I can only imagine how awful it was – probably for both the Arabs and the British – when it became clear we were here to stay and grow to much further percentages. We are that annoying, what with trying to get rid of malaria and tuberculosis and everything.

At any rate, it seems that every time a Jewish minority starts to make a society too successful – so annoying!!!! – the indigenous people start to feel very uncomfortable, and tells them one way or another to get the hell out.

But now, alas, there is nowhere left for us to go, except the eternal place Ahmadinejad wants us to go, and Haniyeh and Nasralla, and Hitler before them, and Chemilniki before him, and Haman before him, and so on. And, I suspect, in her heart of hearts, perhaps Thomas and the likes of her, who, the pesky Jew Freud may have observed, seriously let her slip show.

Let me make it clear: I know that Israel has made mistakes over its 62 years, some clumsy and inept (was there no intelligence regarding the terrorists aboard the Mavi Marmara?!?), and some borderline immoral. But none worse than every other democracy on earth has also done, and most much better than the large majority of the UN rogue nations which condemn Israel daily have done…daily. There is MUCH to improve in the way we govern, I will be the first to say it. I will also be the first to say that various Jews of the Bernie Madoff and Greed-is-Good-Goldman-Sachs ilk make me want to crawl under a rock. I know that the world is only waiting for these guys to emerge in order to pin their crimes on all of us, even though everything they do is in direct contradiction of actual Jewish values.

But let’s be honest: the international community’s human rights crusades on behalf of the Palestinians are just the latest Crusades, and the ones who REALLY suffer are not the Jews or the Israelis but the poor occupants of the Third World who are ignored while the enlightened First World castigates the Jews… and yes, of course, the Palestinians, who are kept in misery *by their own leadership* in order to provide the polite Jew haters with a media club to beat them with.

So here’s the thing: We are not going anywhere this time, Helen. We totally get it: Ya’ll pretty much hate us. It’s just the way it is, like a natural law. Nothing we can do – not giving away pieces of Palestine / Israel (witness our evacuation of Gaza in 2005, and handing over the keys to army bases and greenhouses- a new economy! Food for the children! – which were summarily torched as property of the infidels); not donating billions annually to global charity, nor discovering a cure for Polio or the Theory of Relativity, or writing revered legal and religious texts, or co-founding Google, or manufacturing the microprocessor in the majority of laptops that spew Jew hatred to the Internet, or founding Christianity itself, or championing women’s rights and gay rights in the US and helping to bring about a *human rights revolution* in America in the 60’s, …None of those things will absolve us of our real sin: Existing and overcoming.

I’m really sorry they told you to get the hell out of the White House, Helen. It really wasn’t your fault that you thought you could say what you said. It’s not like it’s a secret: That’s what people think.

But this time, seriously. Getting the hell out is not in the cards. We’re just sick of moving all the time.

I know. Irritating.

Photo by: Avi Eisen

I’ve seen how maple syrup gets pure in a hot basin in a cold room, and how pure American art used to be in the days of Rockwell, and also how to make a million pints of relatively expensive premium ice cream in 3 or 4 days, while sounding like a bunch of hippies who live out of a van. I’ve tasted B&J’s ‘Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz’, which was taken off the market (a “graveyard flavor”), but can still be gotten at the Waterbury plant (making it a “zombie flavor”), and which, if I am ever famous, I would like renamed after me.

I’ve dialed through a radio with 500 channels broadcasting from space and found nothing I hadn’t heard before, except for the very funny Jeff Foxworthy and also Howard Stern settling a dispute between 2 co-workers over a baby gift, a segment so petty and appalling, I felt utterly desolate on a jammed highway.
On the other hand, I’ve seen Vermont’s mountains and trees and New Hampshire’s waterways, the only car for miles, and felt part of something much larger, wishing I could borrow just a teeny drop of lush natural treasure for the Middle East. Would *that* bring peace, some more hydration? Pliant wood instead of hot sand and hard stone?

I’ve thought, often, of the Native Americans who used to live here, before the Founding Fathers decided to Live Free or Die.

What I didn’t see: a freedom flotilla of canoes on the Merrimack River sponsored by the Iroquois-Agawam Tribal Alliance and the Free New England movement. (It is certainly worth taking back, but something tells me the Colonialists did a fairly thorough job killing off or chasing West and South the aforementioned claimants. In any event, there’s so much American history here by now, so much good that Americans have built with sweat and tears, it seems a moot point. No?)

I’ve watched my exhausted husband circle the very seat of freedom’s history, Boston, on a thick arterial beltway in the dark at the instruction of an understandably confused GPS (which he always forgave, but did change the voice and accent to restore trust.) I’ve seen Harvard’s rowing team in late afternoon on the Charles, and its students playing a game of catch in the Square. But having somehow expected most of the city to be like that – full of the future’s leaders jogging over footbridges and reading books under trees – and receiving instead a seedy urban area only surrounded by history and a harbor and a renowned university – I was reminded of Baltimore, where I grew up, home to the national anthem and a much better aquarium. A woman cleaning the bloody face and hands of a post-brawl man in the early hours at Boston Common, on the steps under the Soldiers and Sailors monument, made my 4 year old curious, but he had forgotten about it by the time we got to climbing the old cannon at the Esplanade. (Cannons were how the freedom to sleep in the park got to Boston and Baltimore.)

At any rate, I’ve seen that the birthplaces of America eventually yield to the natural and often cruel reality of raising a nation which governs itself, and sometimes leaves people behind. How do you say “Good Luck and Hard Work and Providence” in Latin? Maybe a more accurate motto than Veritas (Truth) for good old Harvard, seeing as the crybabies of history and society have been holding that noble word hostage since before I was born, and also, sometimes the truth sucks, and all that’s left to grasp at is a bit of prayer, a bit of charity, and a tremendous amount of effort.

I’ve watched my kids consume day-glow Slurpies in the sleet, quietly passing the giant tub of freezing calories back and forth in their seats, in a brothers’ pact to secure sugar through peace and quiet. This, perhaps, they learned from the indigenous peoples of the region, whose souls whisper in the magnificent trees. (Speaking of whom…Here’s what America was up to in 1838, 62 years after *its* inception.)

I’ve bought tax-free hooch in New Hampshire – more freedom – in the middle of a windstorm, and seen New York empty into Connecticut for the weekend, as the brilliant orange sun was sinking on a Friday afternoon, way too close to Shabbat.

I’ve remembered how much I actually loathe shopping, but been charmed by an Irish Clinique lady, Sweet Mary of the Palisades, who made me a reluctant member of the Macy’s family with nothing more than magic anti-aging lotion. This was just after my very intelligent husband, an attorney who researches everything in advance of consumption, witnessed a toy demonstration in Toys R Us Times Square, where a foam disc with a mini buzzing motor flew like a *real spaceship*, and immediately convinced our 6 year old that this was the purchase of a lifetime. Needless to say, it lies grounded in the playroom with a fatally flawed propeller.

Freedom is good to the sellers of impossible items, which themselves are very far from free. More Latin: Caveat Emptor. (A Nerf gun, on the other hand, is the best toy you will ever buy anyone with XY chromosomes, at any point at all during their development. There is nothing we can do about it: Men are aggressive by nature. Buy the extra foam dart pack and line up some plastic cups in a pyramid.)

I’ve seen how America asks you to gather lots of stuff, and how there is so much room to keep it and so many ways to buy it comfortably that there is no reason not to, and then to talk about the stuff and about getting more and more stuff. And when you are religious, how the religion can become about the stuff: the gifts, the parties, the religious symbols, the clothes!, the décor!, and my sweet Lord, the *food*. The corn syrup oozing through the veins of the country until, for so much sweetness, they can almost not stand up.

I’ve understood on my return home that Israel does not so much ask you to fill it with stuff, as to fill yourself with *it*, a considerably different enterprise that maybe only the “Indians” would understand. It also asks you to be comfortable being self-reliant, and isolated, and judged, and unforgiven, which I suppose many Americans feel in an individual sense in suburbia, if they are different, or in the city, where your neighbors most probably don’t know your name.

It asks you to take a long view of history, longer than 62 years back, and longer than 62 years forward. In thousands of years of the recorded saga of mankind, those who survive are those who work hardest to positively advance humankind, to build society up, physically and spiritually. That there is usually killing in the process is a very unfortunate side effect, stemming mostly from the fact that men have written history until like 10 minutes ago, and that was the quickest way to get it done before dinner, and there were no plastic guns with foam bullets instead.

Our new, process-oriented, feminized world should theoretically demand that progress doesn’t require death or disenfranchisement anymore, except that now there is a tribe of many who do not wish to move forwards but backwards, way back into the darkness to the time before Columbus also discovered he was lost not too far from Boston. Keeping the world from moving backwards will mean more killing, to be sure.

Another thing I haven’t seen: Anywhere on earth that is beyond reproach, guiltless or historically pristine, except for the 4 am snow in Vermont, which, due to the hard work and foresight of the Stowe municipality, was not allowed to pile up on the roads, only, marvelously, on the grass and trees. Completely perfect.

There was a time not too long ago when Israel was new, and the Western world *celebrated* the birth of a scrappy survivors’ nation. There was romance in the draining of the swamps, an Extreme Makeover: Nation’s Edition element to Israel’s emergence more than 60 years ago. It used to be a curious, exotic thing to be Israeli, certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

Without delving too much into politics, I believe what has changed in the interim is not Israel’s behavior or policy – - which has always been more moral than almost any other nation on earth and yet somehow less moral than the ideal; usually well-intentioned but almost always really poorly planned, and often shoddily executed, unfortunately.

What has changed is the world’s ability (or recent inability) to separate those who seek to build and augment society from those who seek to be forever devastated, forever seething with anger over some perceived injustice…and destroy it. Nations are no different from individuals in this way. We all know people who deal with similar events in productive vs. dysfunctional ways, and what those varying reactions do to those in their family / friend / work constellations.

I have an unshakeable feeling this Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day. And that is that the day we mark the Jewish status as victims is only still significant in that we no longer are.

There are those who make every day Yom HaShoah – who seek to regularly reinforce their victimhood in the (so far very successful) attempt to mire the guilt-prone Western world in so many reverse inferiority complexes that crimes become not crimes, but expressions of frustration.

The mistreatment of nearly every minority within the Third World (women, homosexuals, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, etc.) becomes excused in a kind of perverse transposed racism. “They can’t help themselves – they are only savages” is what I hear in the West’s fearful silence at every crime perpetrated in the Middle East not by Israel. Israel’s crimes, of course, are racist.

This is a strange new morality in a world that feeds on Schadenfreud – the sadistic pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. (Surprise, surprise – an old German word, and very UN-Judeo-Christian – see Proverbs 24:17.) Reality TV and Paparazzi journalism are but some of the symptoms of a renewed Gladiator culture in which watching people – often people more successful than the masses – fail or fall is somehow profoundly entertaining and soothing to the public ego.

This is destruction of the collective soul, plain and simple.

And this is a society – a world that has reversed empathy at its core and instead tries to keep the other down – that is ripe to sympathize with those who celebrate victimhood instead of those who seek to reverse it.

This is a path George Lucas warned against many years ago, and then J.K. Rowling after him. The Dark Side and the Dark Lord, fascists and nihilists and jihadists: they all have one thing in common. They prey on people’s fear of actually confronting hard things on the road to goodness and greatness, sometimes with true moral issues on the way, and instead settle for tearing down what others build, all the while crying foul and claiming the moral upper hand.

We are living in a world in which the unbelievable rising from the ashes kind of success that Israel enjoys has become a crime. It is not that Israel has never done anything wrong – it has. But if you ask most of Israel’s critics, it emerges that Israel, no matter what, can never do anything right. Plain and simple: Its crime is that it is the Victim who Lived Well and Learned to Thrive.

When we say Never Again, I don’t believe it at all from the point of view of the world. I think it could happen again in a minute, to any of several minorities in the Third World, who are actually butchered fairly regularly with zero intervention from a West obsessed with apartment buildings in Jerusalem.

I only believe Never Again as pertains to the Jews because Israel says so. And at least in the literature, Harry and Luke win. And there are no more Gladiators coming out of Rome, but there are several million people who regularly read Proverbs.

I have to believe.

Note, by the way, that I did not include Experience or Explore, obvious contenders for the fourth (and possibly fifth) E. Don’t people travel just to see the world? To swim where there are no lifeguards, to climb where there is no oxygen, to buy trinkets in foreign bazaars where they don’t take American Express? I skipped these because I feel fairly certain that while these are the What of travel memoirs, they don’t quite reach the Why, or the So What. Show me a travel book that doesn’t involve some type of revelation, metamorphosis, or eternal need to run, and I will show you Fodor’s guide to Wherever.

****

Lisa Fineberg Cook is a nice Jewish girl who has traveled. (And how!, as my grandma would say.) Though originally from Montreal, Los Angeles has been home for most of her life, which means that, like most urban / coastal, middle class, liberal Jews, Cook grew up with her needs met fairly quickly, and rarely feeling like an outsider. Hence she refers to herself as a J.A.P. in her very enjoyable ride of a memoir, Japan Took the J.A.P. Out of Me .

I suppose the term requires some redefinition for me, since I always associated the stereotype with a kind of vapid, selfish, material-centric existence which I can’t, somehow, connect to the very personable and earthy author, who I spoke to on the phone last week. I knew I was talking to the real deal – a natural high-end-Gen-X-chic-lit writer, talented and clever and insightful and empathic. Someone I definitely would want to hang out with, and think I could learn a lot from in the ‘follow your dreams’ category. But I couldn’t quite get myself to feel the J.A.P.

Maybe my definition is wrong. Or maybe because I didn’t know Cook “Before,” a decade ago, when her new husband, Peter, an educator’s educator, took a two-year job teaching English in Japan. Not in Gotham-esque, international Tokyo, mind you, but in a place – and no, she didn’t make this up – called Nagoya. (It’s where you’d probably live if your employer was the currently beleaguered Toyota.) It would be, in tribal terms, like making Aliyah to developing Dimona or Afula instead of to bustling, global Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, where you can easily manage almost everything in English.

Cook was literally thrown into cold foreign waters, where she, a tallish, manicured blonde with no knowledge of Japanese, was about as inconspicuous as George Clooney would be at a nail salon in Teaneck. And yes, the locals noticed, but there was no Bree Van de Kamp basket of muffins forthcoming.

It turns out, however, that Cook, a pro swimmer who owns and operates a swim school in LA (in addition to her steadily rising writing career), managed not only to stay afloat on the other side of the Pacific, but to do so with great style. Her approach to laundering, cooking, and bus-riding her way through Japan is much more Bryson than it is Gilbert. Rather than a pensive, searching tone, Cook opts for light and witty, like providing readers with her translation of the Japanese “Aaahhhmaaaaybeee,” which can mean “yes, no, not on your life, fuck off, or just plain maybe.”

The author notes that she was hesitant to write from a place of real depth in commenting on another society, since she’d never assume that what she had to say about another culture was that important. And so, instead of exploring Japanese mores or her own enlightenment, Lisa plays it direct and writes about the day to day of getting by. True humor, of course, especially the kind where you laugh at yourself in various contexts, is not only universal, but also doesn’t have a great shot at being politically correct.

“It was a risk to play it that way as writer,” she says, “either people love it, can relate, think it was funny, had a similar experience OR they are offended – Americans abroad can’t be at all judgmental, they’re supposed to write how they fell in love with the place. I chose to write about my first year [Cook was there for two years], as a real outsider.” How refreshing.

****

I, for one, am in the first category. Moving to Israel a week after my wedding in the days before the North American Aliyah Renaissance, I was the loneliest newlywed that there ever was, and there were days that I, like Lisa, could do nothing while my new husband was out all day in law school but seek out American food. And eat it. (And how!) Let’s just say that I knew I was adjusted to life here when I lost those 40 imported pounds.

The other challenges of early marriage – including, notably, what to do with your close female friendships once there’s a man in the mix – are dealt with in Cook’s memoir very astutely. I am not fooled by Lisa’s funny streak. The lady is profound.

Because despite her casual, comical attitude, there was expansion. Most of this enlightenment takes shape as a new appreciation and empathy for immigrants in the US, but also of the larger issue put forth in the book’s title: losing that sense of cultural entitlement that the world loves so much about Americans. (Cue the irony font.) It is indeed possible that there is another way to do things – or several – and that the Western world might need to look at its protocols and cultural quirks as a path, but not the path, to living one’s best life.

I’ve said before that I find it fascinating how journey books tend to take people from a narrower to a wider place – Cook went from slightly spoiled Cosmo-sipping American single to thoughtful married woman of the world. But rarely (actually, never, in my experience) do they go the other way. Have we ever read about someone worldly and experienced who decides to settle down into a religious life? Isn’t that, potentially, also enlightenment? This, too, is very American. To celebrate the broadest possible outlook while maintaining the narrow definition of broadening.

Now, I love America as much as the next ex-pat, but as one who has lived overseas for nearly 17 years (yikes!!!), I can say that every American should have to live somewhere else for at least a year, if for no other reason than to learn another language besides English. Incidentally, Cook says that she is thrilled that her 8-year-old (the Cooks also have a new baby) is learning Hebrew in school.

What’s next for Lisa? A sequel, chronicling her and Peter’s stint teaching at a skiers’ boarding school in Maine. Working Title? Lumber J.A.P. (lol.) Also, hopefully, more teaching travels, this time with two kids. (…and I wish her much luck with that.)

Lisa, I hope you get over this way on one of your world tours. I’ll take you out in Tel Aviv for a beer. Or, its JAPpy cousin, the Breezer.

If you are on anyone’s mass e-mail list, by now you’ve probably heard of Harold B. Estes. For those of you who delete anything not work-related before reading, Estes is a very sharp-witted, conservative WWII vet in his mid-90’s who wrote a strong letter of criticism to President Obama, virally distributed by e-mail in November.

His opening shot: “…I am amazed, angry, and determined not to see my country die before I do, but you seem hell bent not to grant me that wish. I can’t figure out what country you are the president of. You fly around the world telling our friends and enemies despicable lies…”

The full text of the letter is here.

When I read it, the letter reminded me very much of my Grandmother. She, too, is in her 90’s. She, too, is a WWII “vet” – having survived Auschwitz in her 20’s. (See more on my amazing Grandma here.)

And she, too, is an avid news junkie who can still debate the issues with the best of them… and is generally bound to tell you exactly what she thinks. Why waste time with political correctness when you’re 91? (Or 36. But that’s for another post.)

Grandma Esther is also not a great Obama fan. She feels sold out, as a rather conservative American and as a Zionist, and recently told me that she feels the world’s atmosphere towards outwardly proud Jews has returned to something akin to what it was in the early 30’s: “I had to live through it once, OK. But to live through it again? I can’t believe it.” What she does believe is that Obama’s apologetic attitude towards nations classically hostile to both America and Israel has made matters far worse, and not better, for the democratic, free world.

She is of course far from alone in this opinion. Harold B. Estes, for one, strongly agrees with her. And the fact that they are both rare living witnesses who were both THERE – that one fought for America’s freedom while the other waited for Allied forced to liberate her from the evil many across the world denied existed – gives them something so strong in common… that I got the crazy idea that they should meet.

So…I contacted Fore n’ Aft magazine, a Honolulu-based Navy vet publication, and the source quoted as verifying the Estes story as real, rather than one of those widely circulated urban legends. Within a day, I heard back from the magazine’s editor, a very open and kind person of the sort you don’t find too many of anymore, who was thrilled to help me arrange a call between Harold and Grandma Esther. (Also instrumental in making the call possible was Harold’s lawyer and confidant, a very friendly member of the tribe who was only too happy to help.)

And so…one Tuesday afternoon about a month ago, Harold and his buddies called my grandma in New York. They talked a bit about Harold’s letter to Obama (my grandma voiced her approval) and about the weather (she wished she were the one in Hawaii) and then about her experiences in the War. I think it was amazing for her to be validated by a contemporary, and I hope Harold had the same feeling.

All in all, perhaps only because of their advanced years, they did not manage to solve the world’s problems, or even just America’s. But I think these two heroes and survivors and opinion-makers got to briefly say: I was there, too, and I can’t believe what I’m seeing now, either…and I get it. I get you.

That’s the kind of empathy I wish for everyone to receive at least once in a lifetime, and for every world leader to possess and express – to his own nation – so that his or her people never feel unheard, invisible, disenfranchised, or unsafe.

It is perhaps a misplacement of empathy, spent on those who would never return it, that is Obama’s problem in the first place.

Here’s to a new decade of understanding and humanity… born of wisdom and courage and endless good energy, things we should not have to apologize for. Harold and Esther would be the first ones to tell you that it would be about time.

1. (…Dammit, I missed the Thanksgiving post. What a bum. Time is not my friend….) Which brings me to this:
2. Do I want to grow old if I will not be sound of mind / functioning with dignity? After some difficult family stuff this month (and occasional mundane confrontations with my own apparent mortality…may not be a vampire after all…damn…), I’m not sure how I feel about letting only God say when I go, even though I hope I have at least half a century before I really have to think about this. (But by then, I may not be able to think…) How wrong is it to write: “If I revert to toddlerhood, please take me back even further” in your will? I know it’s not the religious thing to do. I’m just wondering about what the options are. (Way in advance, as usual.) Which brings me to two very old people who are the very opposite of helpless….
3. Shameless plug #1: Stay tuned to this space for my post on a conversation between this man and my grandma, two nonagenarians with a lot on their minds. When I read Estes’s letter to Obama, (forwarded in an email chain to me and a million other people), it struck me as something my grandmother would have written, and I got an idea… After a few minutes of Google snooping and an e-mail, I found the guys to whom Estes dictated the letter (he’s too old to write with his own hand) and asked them to set up a call with my grandmother. These are two WWII heroes (from the opposite ends of that dreadful war) who are devastated by an America they feel has let them down. I thought they should “meet” to commiserate…and they did…Which brings me to this:
4. This Time Magazine article about the Decade from Hell really got me in the mood for New Years, and toasting to better beginnings. I think back to where I was when we rang in the new millennium – where we all were – and I can’t believe it’s only been ten years. The world looks insanely different. Which brings me to Web 2.0.
5. Seriously, to rephrase the old Twitter question: What are we doing? Some days I am on the computer for 8 long hours, working…I think. Writing, consulting on the right turn of phrase, Facebooking for fun and profit, *networking*, developing new leads, blablablah. …And finally quit way after dark, wondering what exactly I did all day and why. (Sometimes I get paid.) Are we just busy fools in our cyberofficespace? Or are we going somewhere with this? Sometimes I really want to be a farmer planting 140 stalks of corn instead. Which brings me to Dorothy Gale.
6. I just finished reading a great and entertaining memoir by Lisa Fineberg Cook, a self-aware, spoiled, very smart and funny Jewish girl from LA who marries a world-traveling educator / adventurer and spends two years in Japan, completely out of her element. The better to introspect, my dear. The new bride ends up shedding many of her J.A.P.py notions, and learning a thing or two about how being a citizen of the world (and a wife) requires one to step into another’s shoes, regularly. (And that borrowing your best friend’s Manolos doesn’t count in this regard.) I will be writing an entire column on the book, and doing a Q+A with the author, sometime in the next month (Shameless plug #2), but what I want to say now is this: I once had the privilege to edit an excellent partial manuscript for someone whose journey took him in somewhat of the opposite direction…From a Zen, secular life in the US, to a bike tour through Europe and to Lebanon, to meet his wife’s Christian Arab family, and, ultimately, to Israel, where he ended up adopting religious Judaism. (As did she.) The writing was superb and the adventure completely unique, but he could not find a publisher anywhere. I ask anyone who will answer me: Will the Manhattan book establishment not even entertain the possibility that growth can also take one from the assimilated to the culturally particular? Is it a given that to be a “journey” it not only has to end in self-awareness and spiritual expansion, but in adopting something foreign? What if there’s no place like home? Would Dorothy Gale get published in 2009, having seen the other side of the rainbow, and choosing churchy Kansas because that’s where her heart was? Which brings me to Hanukah:
7. Would I have been a Maccabee or a Hellenist? I ask this quite sincerely since I’m pretty sure Mattathias Cohen and Sons were more Judean Hilltop and less Tel Aviv Café…not even suburban Modern Orthodox. While we live (and my kids learn) in an Orthodox environment, Jewish-centered and centric, I can not claim to have taken secular culture out of our house – pretty much the opposite is true. Is it only living in Israel that allows us the luxury of consuming Hollywood and being broadly cultural, and not worrying for a minute about our identity or continuity? I’m thinking probably…yes… in the US I might have been a bit more of a protective / defensive Frumom. (Reason #687 for Aliyah!) I’m also thinking that the Hasmonean Dynasty in the Second Commonwealth didn’t do so well at the end of the day, once they grew cozier with Rome…but that I’m not canceling cable. Which brings me to:
8. Happy Hanukah… (That is the holiday message between programming on my cable channels. Just saying. )

Apparently, he’s been chewing over part of the contents of that e-mail for a long time. Here’s what I got from Earl last week (posted here with his permission):

“…I have one question about a statement you wrote:
Anyway – suburbia is no picnic either sometimes, ditto organized religion, and I am not a tremendous fan of either one. Why do you stay in Orthodox Judaism then? Do you not yearn to be free? To not be bound by laws and restrictions that at the end of the day you cannot wholly prove actually come from God, and more likely come from man? Don’t you want to just eat a cheeseburger with your hair down in public, a nice pair of hot, tight jeans and a cute, sexy shirt on and do what you want, when you want with no feelings of having to be doing things at a pre-ordained time because that’s that the rules say? Maybe feel the thrill of catching the eyes of other men who think, “Man, she’s hot”? etc., etc.
If you’re not a tremendous fan of either, why do you stay in them? You could still be a wife, a mom and a Jewish woman and not be bound by those things. I mean what would happen if you said to your husband: “This Friday night I want to get a babysitter and take you into Tel Aviv to go dancing and have a few drinks and then stay in hotel room and [suggested recreational activity removed]“? Would David say, “F— yeah. Let’s do it” or is there no way that would happen?
I am curious. I don’t want to imagine a life bound in that way. I am too much a free spirit as is [Joy]. It’s why we work so well together.
- ‘Earl’ “

Well. Earl. Where do I begin?

Thank you for your vote of confidence in my ability to look hot in tight jeans?

…And for volunteering to explain to our 15.5-year-old son why our potential drunken partying is so much more responsible and acceptable than the potential same activity of his peers?

Although: Why on earth do David and I need to go to a club and a hotel on Shabbat when we have a bedroom, a booze cabinet, a large music collection, and another 6 days of the week?

How about: I wouldn’t eat a cheeseburger if it was made by the OU and blessed by Rav Ovadia because my arteries are my friends… and there are those tight jeans to slide into…?

…However, I think all these things are somewhat beside the point.

As Rachel Menken once said to Don Draper: You didn’t think this through.

Earl, you (understandably) misunderstood: I sometimes dislike suburbia because it can be boring, conformist, and nosy, and Orthodoxy because (like most organized religion) I feel it has become stagnant and irresponsible, on the verge of losing the creative spirit that has kept it alive until now. (And going into detail here would involve a MUCH longer post, but I am happy to expand upon request.) But my lack of fandom is NOT because Orthodoxy / suburbia are both restrictive. Not because I don’t want to feel bound by anything or anyone.

My objections have to do with the contemporary wisdom of some of the rules in those structures and their method of adjudication, or their lack of compassion, but I have no doubt that some rules are in fact necessary for a functional, productive life. I have no doubt that requiring hard things of people is overall a good policy, because people tend to step up then, when they are being required of.

Surely, you have some rules for yourself, Earl, or you couldn’t have accomplished all that you have. I do not “yearn to be free”; I am, thankfully, in a relationship and in a community that allows me to be, within reason, free. I yearn to be lazy, sometimes, or asleep, or surprised by fabulousness, my own or that of others. But what’s missing for me isn’t freedom. When something is missing, that thing is novelty, or maybe, lightning-speed forward movement. But I digress.

Being part of a family and / or a community and / or a belief system (religious or otherwise) has its disadvantages, to be sure. You hit the main one: You are no longer simply your own agent. There are meetings, happenings, causes, responsibilities, loyalties, and rules. You need to bake for people at “pre-ordained times,” like after childbirth or during shiva. You need to be with people when all you want to do is be alone. You need to smile when you hate humanity; but you don’t really. Just today. Forget religion for a moment. What person anywhere wants to get out of their sweatpants on a Tuesday night and attend a fundraiser? (And Holy Crap, am I raising my hand to volunteer for the XYZ committee? Really? Again?)

Throwing God and / or His earthly agents into the mix adds an extra few levels of commitment and an extra unplugged day of the week (which, by the way, I couldn’t and wouldn’t live without – think: a no e-mail or phone Sabbatical! Divine.), but it is along the same continuum: There is Something Larger Than Yourself that you belong to and that you must answer to. That Something Larger in many cases is a tiny cross-section of the world’s people and cultures. There’s your paradox.

It seems that you view my lifestyle as a battle of the Him (God / Law) or the Them (Society / Rules) vs. the I (My Needs and Wants.) But I view it more as a choice of We (family, community, spirituality) over Me Me Me.

The perks: You are never alone; there are people looking out for you; you are part of something; you are consistently loved and asked to keep yourself open, consistently giving love; you are responsible for enriching your community; you must be disciplined and hold yourself to real, firm standards because there are eyes and ears (Divine and otherwise) everywhere. The downside: Same.

We all know there is no having it all. Stability by nature demands putting some freedoms in check. It’s a tradeoff of the collective versus the individual, pro and con alike. So back to your question: Do I feel buried and repressed? Missing out on life? No. Bored and restless? Resentful? Sameness? Sometimes. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities I’ve chosen to carry? Often. Are tight jeans and a treif burger, a hot bar and a hotter dance party, the ability to do anything I want when I want, the answers I seek to what occasionally ails me about this life?

Not by a mile. You with your big connections Earl, I’ll tell you what to do if you want to help me with my Suburbadox Malaise: Get me a meeting with Matthew Weiner. Whatever they serve for lunch, whatever I wear there, whether the hot guard checks me out when I walk in the door or not…I’ll feel much, much better about everything if I get to work on a high quality, life-changing project with a deep, brilliant writer, to the benefit of millions of culture consumers. That would be a novelty and a huge leap forward all at once.

You and Joy can take the hotel in Tel Aviv. David and I left most of the mini-bar. Help yourselves.

Photo by: Avi Eisen

Sukkot in Israel is a hiker and camper’s festival. God wasn’t kidding when he asked people to walk to Jerusalem in Temple times on this holiday. I’m not sure if He cared about the ten young bulls, two rams, and 12 lambs (well-done). But I’m pretty sure He wanted people to walk the land in what constitutes autumn here, which is this: moderation (as opposed to colorful.)

He made a damn fine Holy Land, too, and I’m guessing He wanted people to enjoy it when the moon was full and hung low in the sky like a huge piece of fruit, when the nights were cool and the sands were walkable barefoot, when the sun was strong but pleasant, when the breeze was always blowing but never hot or cold.

The National Park Service and assorted field schools make it really easy this time of year to see every corner of the country. (Note to Park Services: You rock up north and down south. Can you send more of your fine people, and garbage bins, to the Center??) (And citizens: Can you possibly help them by USING the bins?)

Our family took full advantage of the outdoors this holiday (and we all have the redneck tan to prove it.) My husband and oldest went on a sunrise bike ride through Ein Karem. Our extended family met for a picnic / Frisbee game in a great undiscovered park somewhere near Bet Shemesh. *More on undiscovered places below.*

We hiked through the mountains of Judea (I wore flip flops because I thought it was going to be a brief stroll. Can someone explain why I thought I could wear flip flops on a hike in Gush Etzion?) and enjoyed the Science by the Sea festival put on by the Kfar Ruppin Marine Biology College on Hof Mikhmoret. The little kids watched chemistry experiments and saw sea turtles, the big kids and husband went kayaking, I got a neck and shoulder massage, and we all enjoyed a concert at sunset. What could be bad?

But our favorite part was sleeping on the beach. I will not tell you what beach, because it was perfect and clean (lots of garbage cans!) and empty and quiet and has good bathrooms, a nice kiosk, a playground, and lots of parking, and I want it to stay that way.

We loved sleeping to the sound of the waves (and the guitar-playing of my oldest.) We just put our big mat down and got into our sleeping bags and were out in minutes in the perfect cool dark. The best part was waking up and being where we wanted to be. 6 a.m. and the kids were on the playground, by 7 they were building sand castles, by 8 they were swimming and playing paddle ball (we also got coffee at aforementioned kiosk), by 10 the wind picked up enough to fly a kite, and we were loading the car at 11, before the real heat.

Two great discoveries: 1. Camp on the beach! Beats the woods if you can handle sand. No bugs or small animals, very accessible, no tent really necessary. 2. Go away from lots of people and it’s much easier to handle small kids outdoors, especially near water. Drive a bit farther and reap your rewards.

And now…a word from Mother Nature:

A major personal understanding: My era of hibernation at home with toddlers is over. The littles are now big enough to come out into society, which unties me from the hearth. So Yay!

A deeply personal understanding, because the beach never fails to knock me down, drag me out, and wash me back up, cleaner: The big kids don’t know the real me at all. I’m not sure if that’s because I (or mothers in general) am not totally myself with them, or if kids will never really try to get to know their mothers as pre/teens (or if just mine won’t.) The “uptight” mother things I feel I must do and say to keep people safe (You are out too deep! No rafts in the ocean! Etc.) and moderately responsible / productive (Do have any homework over this vacation? Can you please help me with this since you have time? Etc…) take a huge toll on my ability to be (or be perceived as) rolling with things, creative, nice, cool, etc.

And maybe having kids makes you be less of those things in the first place. Demeter – Mother Nature in Greek mythology – is the prototype for organic beauty turned uptight by progeny. When her daughter went missing (kidnapped by her uncle, the God of the underworld…really, a long story…) she became enraged and insane, wandering the earth like a bag lady to find her; the seasons were thought to be a result of a joint custody arrangement Demeter ultimately worked out with Hades.

I think this fear of ultimate loss takes away a piece of yourself, even if it the loss never actually comes to pass. I am not sure if fathers experience this in quite the same way, but I’d like to hear from any of you who feel it, as well.

In any event, I think the greatest sacrifice mothers make is not the years they spend putting family before career or self. It is the years they spend not being seen, not being fully real, for what they feel to be the greater good.

Is it really the greater good? The answer is blowing in the cool evening wind.