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.)

My best childhood memories are from summer trips “down the ocean” in Maryland with my parents and brother, flying a kite on the breezy beach at sunset, full of deli sandwiches and smelling like Noxzema. (This was, at the time, the best solution for being burnt to a crisp by the afternoon sun, which kids were allowed to do in the early 80’s. And my dad is a pediatrician.)

Summer is when I learned to canoe on rapids, make hospital corners on a bed, and keep real feelings (and other secrets) from mean girls. Summer is when we went cross-country on a train and I learned that much of America was actually farmland. For miles and days. Who knew?

Summer is when I learned to file, back when patient files were made of paper, and when I also learned to save drowning people and tie them to a backboard, which I never, thankfully, had to do. I did, however, watch excellent swimmers slice through the water 100 times (exactly) in a row, my whistle ready for rope fouls, and that job most certainly beat filing.

I had all my short-lived dalliances as a teen in Summer. I could never be relied upon to stay in love for more than three months or so. (Consider this a formal apology, if any of you are reading this.) Thankfully, that’s something I outgrew by the time my lifeguard certification expired.

Not just about nostalgia for me, Summer is also when my life seems to shift in huge ways. I got married in Summer and then, a week later, moved overseas forever – EXACTLY 17 years ago today. I found (and eventually lost) my favorite job ever so far in the Summer. I lost an almost-baby in the Summer/. Strangely, none of my four kids were born in Summer – though they are represented by every single other season.

Summer is when I sent a husband off to war and very nearly didn’t get him back. Here’s a poem I wrote then:

At Swimming Lessons: A Prayer
To D in his APC in Lebanon
To me the sexiest man at the pool
as I wait here
for our (so small!) son – -
is the old guy with his trunks pulled way
up over his belly,
approaching his sagging, snowy-furry chest,
and is still not fat.
He is 75 at least and walks slowly, but straight,
and smiles at the lifeguard when he stops to chat.
To me he is a promise
that some men come home from war,
grow old,
and go swim.

Please God:
Let that be him.

—
For me, then, Summer is a strange mix of adrenaline and Zen.

I wrote this in Summer:

…Summer has no obligations. Only desire – - the low buzz of something you want to happen.
Summer takes us back to what is most basic, what we need to do to be truly whole. Summer is poetry without criticism.
So vacation isn’t what I’d call it. It’s a hovering, a plumbing of the depths. Sit in one place, but swing there…. Read More

…And also this:

…Every summer, right in the hot, soft belly of July/August, 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 minivan rolled down (ain’t got no truck, just my luck), hang back on my porch at sundown, and go out drinking with the girls. You guessed that right, son – Redneck Fever….” Read More

Now I’m too busy to even think about what Summer means to me, since this Summer, my career seems to have taken a leap into the deep end of very busy, and some of my kids are around a good deal. Suburbia might be half-empty and moving like thick liquid, but that’s not my experience inside my little home office, where longing and plans have turned into determination and action, between which I am making people lunch.

My friend Vicki wrote this excellent post about Summer.

Please use the comments to tell me what summer means to YOU.

The crazy thing is, I never wanted to be a “Jewish blogger,” or a political one for that matter. I have never been a single issue kind of girl, and I fear a “niche” as much as other, smarter, more marketing- savvy people often seek it.

I started writing that last blog post merely as a Facebook status. Blogging was not on my To Do list that day, as I had a copywriting deadline. But seeing as the history of the Jews is rather long, and maybe I was a little agitated once I wrote the first sentence, it became what it became. These are visceral times, where I guess passion, and only passion, is what makes its way into people’s consciousness.

And by the way: I am SO relieved that the written word still has power, even in the Age of Video. Every web-related conference I’ve been to in the last two years has indicated that I am rolling Paleolithic by not integrating video. (I prefer to see it as “classic”…) But anyway, I love words, and for at least this week, I’ve been vindicated.

I think the stunning, instant, viral response (views of the post are well into the 6 digits and my inbox is fuller than Carrie Bradshaw’s closet) has much less to do with the quality of the rant and more to do with global mood. It strikes me very plainly that political correctness on one hand, and a real sense of baseless shame among Westerners, especially Jews, on the other, has created a space where righteousness (He hit me first!!!), truth (…After she took my toy, spit, and called me an idiot!…), justice (…Now nobody gets a treat since you can’t get along), and kindness (…but maybe both of you want to sit with me and hug for a bit since it seems you need to remember you are siblings) are frequently confused with one another. Could the average reader (not you, of course) have easily defined the difference without the parentheses?

Of course, they are not the same at all, and the consequences of this conceptual tangle are potentially disastrous for a society. Unweaving these notions from each other and clarifying each on its own is a good project for writers, or for parents, since the political and (highly politicized) academic establishments seem to have largely forgotten how, and the mainstream media is the worst offender of all. Viva les Blogs!

Luckily, however, I learned this week how – despite all of the chasms news outlets attempts to dig, in order to fill the spaces between people with a story – humanity is essentially dying to connect. The success of the social web lies in the human need to hear and be heard, see and be seen, learn and teach…lurk and be stalked. (I wanted to see if you were still paying attention.) (Also, you know who you are.) Facebook, especially, floored me in its global reach, and in its contagion quotient.

That some of us feel that others of us are occupying too much space here or there; essentially wrong in everything we stand for; or absolutely fabulous and can do no wrong, is not as important as the fact that WE CARE TO TELL EACH OTHER ALL THESE THINGS. If nobody wanted to share – criticism, recipes, life stories, opinions, medical information, news as it happens, or details of our intimate lives – the internet would have shriveled up and died along with Ask Jeeves. (Yes. I am THAT old.)

At its core, the internet is an altruistic institution. People volunteer hours and days and years of their time posting things – like how to install memory in an HP mini or how to change a filter on a Mr. Coffee or play Sweet Child of Mine using tabs – without any agenda other than to help the next guy. Do not underestimate the power this gives us as a human race, and the wonderful thing it says about our species.

I am deeply encouraged by the fact that people today from the four corners of the earth can find each other online. I welcome all my new readers and virtual friends, and am thrilled to have you here. You are my birthday gift!! (Today!)

Just 15 years ago, most of us would never have met. I am hopeful that the open, empathic, and multi-cultural space inside our little screens provides us with the inspiration to reach out in real life, too.

Watch out for the non-connectors. They are the ones I am worried about.

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.

I am assured that this is universal, and not only a Jewish thing; Halloween brings similar travesties (no, I did not mean to add an “ns” and a “t”….) of back hair under evening gowns to suburban enclaves everywhere. It’s a gag that’s as old as the hills. (Excuse my need to be immature.)

My unofficial Facebook poll suggests that the reasons for consistently pursuing this particular costume rank thus: 1. laziness (Easily available raw materials – when you can’t think of anything else…just grab your wife’s maternity dress…); 2. antisocial thrill (AKA: shock value); 3. long tradition of low humor (Dude, it’s funny, relax…Shakespeare did it, too); 4. sanctioned forbidden boundary crossing (Men who are usually Very Vanilla get to Vary their Vistas and “get in touch with their feminine side,” as one sex therapist friend put it. Another friend noticed that the truly more nurturing, homebound men rarely put on a dress. Hmm. In any event, whether this is an emotional or sexual Validation of the Veiled inner self is unclear, but notice how much I am liking the letter “V” for this item; 5. attention seeking (This may be the same as #2…not sure); 6.possible repressed tendencies / early female-dominated home experiences (”These guys are just a little bit gay,” one friend wrote.).

My objection to the practice is not moral, but mainly aesthetic. As such, women gluing on facial hair to play men similarly gets under my skin. (One friend noted that this is probably the only way for women to look distinctively male, since wearing a suit evokes Annie Hall more than anything else, and probably wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow nowadays. What would be the point, then?) Another friend observed, apropos the facial hair and fake bald heads being sported by some of our neighbors, “Why would I want to make myself look ugly on purpose?” I agree. That’s territory for starlets seeking an Oscar, but I’ll pass.

Which brings me to this: If men tend to go for shock value, convenience, and laughs, women have a fairly predictable habit as well: They go for slutty. Slutty cowgirls, slutty rock stars, actual hookers, slutty nurses and devils and witches and barmaids. The last 3 years, I’ve been a parochial school girl, Alice Cullen, and Jackie O. Not quite slutty, but definitely picked for the ability to put on a cute skirt and interesting footwear, instead of a beard. To me, this means that women are way into #’s 4 and 5 above, but not many of the other reasons resonate on a broad scale.(Get it? Get it? A Broad scale?)

There’s a surprise (cue the irony font): When we reach out of ourselves to be someone else – men go for easy, cheap laughs and women go for complicated, cheap attention. Both of us like to cross boundaries with gusto. (I am obviously generalizing, but then again, that is the job of bloggers.)

Readers: Do you gender-bend on dress-up occasions? What makes you do it? Please: Do *not* send pix. Really.

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.

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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.

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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. )