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.

When a heavy box of old junk that another has packed and stored badly *literally* falls out of the pre-fab suburban ceiling and breaks open on the ONE Day out of *hundreds* that YOU happen to be home, and THE OWNER/ PACKER / STORER happens to not be….What is the symbolism there?

At first I thought it was the boiler exploding. It snowed last night in Jerusalem, and temperatures in our town reached record lows. My contractor friends put out helpful emails to their neighbors: Leave on a hot water tap so your boiler doesn’t explode. I did.

I had just sat down to morning coffee on my first snow day in about 20 years. Earlier, my carpool texted me: The roads to Jerusalem are closed. We are not going anywhere.

I jumped up and down on my bed like an eight year old. I didn’t have to go in to the office, a rare reprieve to catch up on independent work: writing, editing, to-do lists, emails. The kids had school. The husband was running a marathon up north with a bunch of other skinny lunatics who think pneumonia can’t happen to them.

It meant that I had the house to myself for the whole day. Only about the third or fourth time it’s happened in the two years since I started working full-time on the outside, and my husband opened up his own practice from a home office. It was quiet, I was caffeinated, shit was getting done.

So when I heard the loud thud in the roof, I thought: Well. What do contractors know?! A closer investigation, however, revealed no gushing water (Glory Be!) but part of a box protruding from the hatch door leading to the attic. And the innards of that box vomiting out in a way that (of course) dared me to open the hatch, even though I was clearly about to get nailed by: 1. A lot of work *I* didn’t create and didn’t have time for but was going to have to do anyway; 2. Whatever hit me as I opened it. It was like an episode of Lost, only no sexy sweating, what with the freezing temps.

Emboldened by gratefulness that my boiler hadn’t exploded, I channeled my inner girl scout and figured out how to minimize injury and mess while facing this unwanted challenge, all before my coffee got cold. Spreading a heavy blanket on the floor, I pulled the lever to the hatch door and stepped away.

Out poured an old electric shaver (of blessed memory); an earthy green ceramic rock garden desk ornament which rained down intact due to my Be Prepared ethos; several issues of the Israel Law Review; a few much heavier, maroon-colored volumes with titles that made me feel deep sympathy for all lawyers; and the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. I fared much better than most who have been hit by Sarbanes Oxley. The avalanche ended with a flurry of certificates (never framed; my husband is a pack rat but never a show-off) and assorted papers.

Still in Amazonian mode, I climbed up to the roof to straighten out the boxes and check for anything that might have caused the fall. The diagnosis: routine shifting of elements due to extreme temperature and *too much crap*, which used to hide in the old office in Tel Aviv, and is now hidden from view of wife who generally throws everything away unless it breathes and has a respectable IQ.

I made sure the piles were stable, and I backed away without throwing out a thing. I just didn’t have the time.

As to the pile down below on the blanket: Surprise. Very little didn’t make it back into the mangled but salvageable box. Mostly because I want to see him have to hoist it back up, completely full.

It didn’t take that long, but I was ready to be extremely aggravated for having to deal with it at all. Then I found something he saved, something hilarious and brilliant that I had written in 2003 (I said my husband wasn’t a show- off, but I never said I wasn’t) and I read it and cried.

That he had saved it. That I used to write ALL THE TIME because that was all I did professionally. That I rarely do it anymore because my work is about much more than writing these days. That I had forgotten about this piece and it literally fell on my head on a day that I really needed to be reminded that I was am a writer.

I wiped my tears and put the paper on his desk.

Then I stole the rock garden for my desk at work. It is the fee for my time and it’s really more appropriate for a chick. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

When a heavy box of old junk falls out of the ceiling and breaks open and you have to deal with it and you, in the end, don’t really mind that much…What is the symbolism there?

Variation on a post from 2009:

I have always been a fan of the top ten list. I suppose it started with Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 (Look it up, Gen Millen), one of the cleverest marketing devices the pre-digital music world ever came up with. After which I graduated to Letterman, who used (uses?) the top ten list as a comedic framing device, which I enjoyed even more. Kids, this was all before Amazon’s Listmania was even an executive web dream, even before the historic Wayne’s World usage of the meme (#3: Garth’s Mom.)

Of course, the top ten format is as old as the hills, actually, one specific hill called Sinai, where, tradition has it, God’s Top Ten was revealed amidst much noisy weather, on this, the Shavuot festival. Whether He intended it as marketing or humor will depend, I suppose, on your general outlook.

Why those ten? Here’s a pretty good analysis, although it only scratches the surface of the rabbinic literature which abounds on this question.

In any event, I have my own top ten, an ethical will of sorts in case I work, shop, garden, clean, and cook till I literally drop today, which seems like a distinct possibility. It’s not at all funny, and as far as I can tell, I’m not trying to market anything, although it’s hard to tell with me. It’s mostly just all serious and mom-ish.

Here’s what I would’ve handed down if it was my mountain, even though I suck at some of them some days:

1. Take responsibility: Be active in your life, work, and community. Don’t despair… Just do something about it. No hand wringing or arm-chairing.
2. Be spiritual in a way that speaks to you; Even if you are a devout Atheist, there has to be Something Larger than yourself and your own needs and urges that brings you meaning. (I think this was also, approximately, God’s #2.)
3. Make the best of things; Perspective, circumspection, ingenuity, friendship, positive assumptions, SENSE OF HUMOR, and hope beat victimhood and anger every time. It’s your choices, stupid.
4. Expect a lot of yourself and try not to expect too much of others (unless they are your kids in which case, expect the hell out of them, as per each child’s abilities.) No one owes you anything. (Except this one guy whose book I edited in 2005….never mind.)
5. Do not lie to yourself. This is the source of nearly all of the Western world’s ills, as far as I am concerned. Honesty with yourself makes 1 – 4 possible.
6. Do not blame. (See #1.) Rider to this clause, as the traits generally co-habit: Do not be overly sensitive when criticized. Try to use it, or forget it.
7. Do not be Wasteful. Water, talent, friendship, energy, emotions, time (especially other people’s!!). All of it: Conserve.
8. Do not confuse anxiety, narcissism, or control with any of the following: love, competency, self-confidence, friendship, friendliness, help, thoroughness, creativity, parenting.
9. Help the people who can not do 1-8. They may make you crazy or angry or sad, but those are the people who need your help, so when you can, you must.
10. Do not spend time or effort on jealousy and comparing yourself to others; it leads to the abominable sin of knocking others down to build yourself up. (Actually, I think this was also God’s #10.)

(Notable good ones that didn’t make it into my cannon: Take good care of yourself; Don’t pay too much attention to what others think; Be realistic; Think before you act, every time. I figured I’d let someone who actually practices those put them in their own top ten.)

I would love for you to write about YOUR top ten in the comments section. WWYHDTM? (What Would You Hand Down The Mountain?)

Marketing, comedic, serious, or otherwise. Will be reading after weekend (since God’s #4 prevents me from doing so beforehand.)

Hag Sameach (Happy Holiday)!

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.

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.

M.O.T.U. –

Hello, again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even if they were looking right at You.

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.

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. )