I understand your name: Wailing.

They’ve misunderstood and think
*they* are meant to wail
but I know it’s you, Wall, doing the crying:

How much can you contain the anger fear devastation desperation contempt of others
before you harden to smooth,
past able to absorb
blacken
from the endless need
so many hands
…simply crumble?

Now they call you “Western”

but I hear you Wailing
and I have some advice from
My tenure as everybody’s
refuge -shadow -rock -barrier:

Quit
While you are 2000 years behind.

They will only miss you
when they can’t punch and kiss you.

- God, 2014

Our house was purchased when I was twenty-two, and there are mortgage bankers in North Tel Aviv who must rejoice about this every morning at their granite sinks. Back then, most of my friends in this fair suburbia were old: 32ish, and we were all hell bent on being super close, pathologically admirably committed to our nascent community, and pretending to hate the lack of privacy. There were sometimes other people’s small children in your bedroom when you walked out of the shower, but if you sneezed, there would be a pot of soup on your table in three hours.

This was my whole entire world for a decade and a half: building a family and a community with a dash of career, for flavor and the aforementioned mortgage. We were so young that the big questions of the universe were already answered. Even throughout some serious fertility business in my mid-twenties, I remained committed to keeping everything in place – except my sense of control, the renouncement of which was such an enlightened move that I could barely contain my spiritual achievement.

This translated into complete dedication to the greater communal good. If there was a synagogue or school committee to be on, I raised my hand. This was my way of paying back the universe for having me, and for letting me reproduce.

Our house now sits at the center of a city divided by what many call a religious war, and others, a power struggle. I call it the way things go, but worth resisting – if you still have the energy, and a mortgage.

Essentially, our paradise might just be lost, in no small measure because paradise never lasts, not even the Original. That Paradise ended because someone (yes, a woman) chose knowledge over eternity. Go, Eve.

This paradise will one day end if not because of avarice and corruption, then because our kindergartens are emptying and our careers are developing in the big city, and our kids often don’t return here as adults. And because 30,000 residents and 100,000 residents just throw a different vibe.

Older now and more invested in privacy for real, we can no longer countenance strange little kids in our room after we come out of the shower, although we do still love getting the soup. Committees, too, have lost their sexy activist sheen for many of us. God bless the next generation of committed builders and bakers.

Still, many of my friends (and husband and oldest son) are very invested in trying to save Beit Shemesh, because there might be a different future in store for this town (Hi-tech park bedroom community?), and because something you worked this hard to build is worth fighting for.

This is especially true when your city is seen as a bellwether for the national scene. The canary in the coal mine, to which Israel is often compared on the world stage, is Beit Shemesh in terms of a creeping theocracy and municipal malfeasance in Israel. If we lose here, it bodes badly for the rest of the country. That is why a whole lot of national politicians have their hands in our pants, and it’s why we kind of like them there. (How you doin’, Minister Bennett?)

Paradise lost also describes my own evolution fairly well. I’m still here in Beit Shemesh, but at least half of my heart is in the Eternal City (Jerusalem, not Rome, although…), whose evening air makes me higher than the prices of its apartments. I don’t want to forget about it; I will simply wait.

Waiting. Waiting is a skill I have recently learned. Also caring a little less.

And not knowing.

The more I live, the more I feel ready to blow the lid off the whole operation: No one knows anything “for sure.“ Not even science, certainly not religion, and not even your very own experience. Self- reliance needs to come from believing like crazy in an idea and your capacity to execute it with the full knowledge that you may just be wrong, and that the world will not spit you out if you are.

There is just no other way to survive long-term in a community, a family, a career, or you own skin but to blur a few lines (#Truthe), most notably those between ambition and acceptance. To paraphrase Ben-Gurion, you must follow your dream as if there is no alternative, and embrace alternatives as if there were no dream.

I still have a fire in my belly to be sure, but it is about breaching the walls of suburbia to contribute to the much larger world, with a broad network of people who are often not at all like me. To innovate, agitate, and create something that gives the planet something only I can give it.

So it is also a little about hunting for the “I” lost in so many, many years of “We.”

Leaning in. To hear the Universe whisper: You deserve to be here. Stop raising your freaking hand.

JREP – May 2006 Jewish Bookshelf Goes Primetime

One of the stars of that 2006 piece, Dr. Ruth Calderone, went on to make history last week in the Knesset, where she now serves as an MK for the Yesh Atid party.

I want you to read the PDF I linked to, so I won’t waste any more of your time on commentary here. Except to say that when I did the story, I was fairly certain that what I was seeing was only the beginning of an essential, growing trend, and I have never been so glad to be proven right with the years. Way to go, Dr. C.

The prospect of all sectors of Israeli society re-embracing our cultural heritage texts (I say nothing here about practice, because that’s a whole other tractate, as it were) is just as exciting as all of us sharing military and financial burdens equally.

On Wednesday, we helped children in a Jewish elementary school in Greece prepare decorations for Hanukkah, the upcoming winter holiday which celebrates the victory of light over darkness, of the miraculous over the commonplace, of Maccabees over ….Greeks . (In Greece, the children learn that the victory was won over the Assyrians. What I would call a nice save. And true-ish.)

I cut out shapes of menorahs and sivivonim (dreidels) from colorful paper, and glued them onto large poster paper with a girl named Alexandra and a boy named Niko, who both understood rudimentary Hebrew. How am I supposed to wrap my head around that?
***

My employer, The Jewish Agency for Israel, sends a few dozen shlichim (emissaries) all over Europe (plus several hundred more around the world) with the goal of connecting global Jewry to Israel, both the People and the place. Experience over the years has proven that through Jewish cultural education and engagement with Israel, both Diaspora communities and Israel emerge stronger. Thousands of young Jews find their way to long term Israel programming (and / or Aliyah) via their shaliach, and many shlichim return to Israel with a strong sense of belonging to a pluralistic, global Jewish community that they hadn’t grown up with as native Israelis.

As we all know from business, politics, and community work, everything rides on personal relationships. One hundred op-eds on Israel’s right to exist or on pride in Jewish identity will not do the work of one adorable, articulate, and energetic 18 or 25 year old Israeli telling students in London, Paris, Milano, or Brussels what day-to-day Israel is like, off the screens and pages, and simply face to face.

This past week the Shlichim serving in the EU (and a few relevant managers and staffers, like me, from the mothership in Jerusalem supporting their efforts) met for a few days of sessions on best practices and brainstorming in Thessaloniki, Greece – a community that was very nearly wiped out by Hitler in 1942. The vibe in this waterfront university town is something like Seattle meets Acre by way of the East Village. While we spent most of the time inside the Jewish community center in meetings and workshops, we took one morning to see Jewish history and life in the city, which included activities with kids in the school.

It is hard to overstate how moved the staff was to have fifty Israelis come to dance and sing with the kids. Our visit made the gym teacher – a 6-foot tall, 250 pound man in a track suit – cry.

It is also hard to overstate how crazy, and how right, it felt to be celebrating pre-Hanukah in Greece with living, breathing young Jews.

What a victory of the human spirit that we survive again and again, and splendidly. And how strangely stubborn and forgiving, that we stay to grow again in communities which would have easily let us be lost, something Thessaloniki has in common with Budapest, a city with an Israel Cultural Center and a flourishing young Jewish community. And more than one shaliach.

The question of why Jews stay in these places when there is a modern state of Israel a short plane ride away is one that vexes many people. However, the fact of a Diaspora by choice (or by economic necessity) should surprise no one, because this tension, too, is an integral part of our history. Goshen in Egypt did not empty out of the Ben Jacobs when the famine in Canaan was long over , just as Babylon did not empty out during the Second Temple period; life there continued to flourish alongside the life that flourished anew in Jerusalem.

It is clear that between the ultimate home that is Israel, and the actual home for millions of Jews that is not, is a third place: the dialectic between here and there, between the reality and the ideal, that could have destroyed us many times, and instead – miraculously – just makes us stronger. The key is how far we have always been willing to go for one another.

At the Athens airport, I bought a lighter from Greece. The better to light my menorah with, in Israel.

Obligatory disclaimer: This is my personal blog; views expressed above may or may not reflect the views of my employer.

Lets us pretend that I have not just dropped off the blogosphere for months and pick up where we left off. Old friends can do that.

It is 2 hours one hour to Passover and it has been quite a year; I’m not sure I remember breathing at any point.

The fulltime job I began last May turned out to be a calling, and also, fulltime plus…plus. My son’s bar mitzvah happened, and he was great; another son started driving; and both of my remaining grandparents died (no relevance to the driving son, in case you were wondering), which means both my parents sat shiva in the last few months. (My grandparents would have really liked that I made a joke about it. Relax.) My husband became a half-marathon addict, an obsessive hobby I like much better than his last few.

Everything else, pretty much a blur. When I wonder how long I can keep up this pace, I remember that I can rest when the world runs out of coffee in roughly 2047 (I just made that up, but about 500 fellow addicts just completed the aneurisms they’ve been working on)… and that the quiet and time I long for usually just make me feel guilty and indulgent.

Like now, minutes before we begin Passover, I can think of nothing better to do with some surprising free time than to revive my blog. In profound mode, I might wax thematic: Freedom and Responsibility; Structure and Renewal; Family and Tradition. The Four Sons as a model for the stages of child development. If you want profound, try here and here.

In embattled, progressive mode it would be Passover in Israel and the United Front for the Fall of the (divisive, hypocritical) Kitniyot Ban. I could also, in the spirit of Easter, go after the Seven Deadly Sins: The Passover hotel experience actually deserves a book. How did the holiday to celebrate exodus and peoplehood and the journey to a Homeland turn into Five Towns’ Top Model, Live from South Florida? But I can’t muster up the snark today. Maybe it’s all the bleach I inhaled?

Feeling more nostalgic, perhaps I’d write about the seders I remember in my grandmother’s house, when I was the only sentient being under 20, and therefore, the exclusive Four Question-er for many years. Or the Streitz Passover cookies and those half-moon jelly things my brother and I would demolish in the back of the Toyota on the way up to New York, and the voice of the 1010WINS news guy we’d wake up to on the Van Wyck.

But here I am, watching the light fade in a way that tells me that the holiday will start in about an hour, and listening to my testosterone-crazed children fight over imagined territory, and feeling simply grateful. For being created female. And for the freedom to *not* say any of the above. And for the time I had to not say it.

More nothing later.

Pic by Y. Ruas

Dear Extremist Haredi Zealot Neighbors,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I am cautious.

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

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

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

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

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

If we are serious about all this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not sure yet.

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shoot, ain’t nostalgia a bitch.

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

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

Amen.

photo by: Susan NYC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(But stores: Still closed.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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