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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know. Irritating.

Photo by: Avi Eisen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by: Avi Eisen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now…a word from Mother Nature:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today is Mother’s Day in the US. That there is no Mother’s Day in Israel – only something called “Family Day,” celebrated around when Americans mark Groundhog Day at the end of winter – is a matter for another discussion entirely: On consumerism and cultural expressions of appreciation for the role of motherhood. But seriously, I can’t get into now, so don’t make me. Let me just say that in Israel, there is no Mother’s Day, but paid maternity leave is 3 months long and you can generally get an additional 6 months unpaid, where they will hold your job for you. But I digress.

On Israeli Family Day, mothers receive cute poems from nursery school, usually adorned with a picture of the child (often taken by the teacher on the day you put him in the last shirt before laundry day), but there is none of the Hallmark Holiday feel that you have in the US…. And, sadly, no breakfast in bed, unless you happen to have just given birth and are actually IN the maternity ward. So…where I sit, today is May 10th.

This past Friday was another kind of Mother’s Day: The flip side, the dark side, the impossible side, the side that haunts every mother’s quiet moments until she chases the demons away. Friday was the “yahrzeit,” or anniversary of death, of Koby Mandell. You may remember Koby from the news, because the story is a hard one to forget. Koby was the 8th grader who, along with his friend, had cut school one beautiful day in May, 2001, as the second Intifada was heating up, to go explore the valley and caves near their home in Tekoa, a West Bank settlement not far from Efrat. They were found in the pre-dawn hours the next day, bludgeoned to death with large rocks, mangled to the point of having to be positively identified by dental records. Koby was going to turn 14 a few weeks later, in June.

The story struck the world dumb for a few minutes, before it moved on as usual. Me, it took a bit longer. The morning the boys were discovered in one of the Haritun caves, I was on the way to meet Sherri Mandell, Koby’s mother, at a lecture in Jerusalem. Sherri and I were friends from our days working as part of the content team of a promising Jerusalem startup, and, in the months after its inevitable collapse during the first market crash in the fall of 2000, used to meet for coffee along with our other ex-office mates next to the unemployment office.

I was in the car on the way to the lecture when I heard the news update: two boys had been found a few hours before murdered near Tekoa. One was from an American family. Immediately I called Sherri, to see if she knew the family, which I assumed she did: Tekoa is a tiny place. I figured our “date” was a no-go. But Sherri did not answer. A neighbor did. In a whisper. And told me the worst news I have ever heard in my life. I turned around and went home and started calling our mutual friends, and then got on my way to the funeral.

Of course, although it took a while to go on as usual, I did (other than being a little extra-neurotic, still, when it comes to my bigger kids going places on their own.) But going on as normal is a privilege Sherri didn’t, doesn’t, have. For her it is a daily nightmare, long after the news cycle spit the item out, long after many hundreds of “new” Israeli deaths – in four years of terror and eight years of rocket attacks and two wars – have come to replace it there.

But what Sherri and her husband, Seth Mandell, have done with the tragedy is astounding. Because while they can not go on as normal, they have most certainly gone on. First of all, Sherri wrote a book, The Blessings of a Broken Heart. It is a beautiful work, not just because Sherri is a writer of unblinking humor and sly depth and jolting clarity, but also because she is a human being of unparalleled morality. There is no raging for revenge, there is no extremist political fomenting.

Sherri is a mother who lost her son to terror – and she is a “settler,” as the media was quick to point out – and she does not indulge in hate or bigotry, or call for anyone’s blood. It is worth noting that at the entrance to the Shiva there was a sign: ‘We are here to mourn the death of our son. Please do not engage in political discussions.’ The Mandells have again and again redefined grace and humanity for anyone who meets them.

Second, the Mandells launched and continue to run the Koby Mandell Foundation, an organization formed to provide support to families – especially mothers and children – who have lost loved ones to terror. The foundation runs workshops and retreats and summer camps, all subsidized, to bring some joy and empathy into the lives of people who live daily with the pain of having had a loved one disappear in mid-sentence in a cloud of smoke and hatred. Despite their grief – with their grief – they seek only to help others heal. The Mandells are nothing short of an inspiration of the highest order.

In any event, every year, on the anniversary of Koby’s death, friends gather at the graveside for a memorial service. And every year, I am stunned by Koby’s friends: First they got taller. Then they grew facial hair and back muscles, while Koby was still not-yet-14. I thought to myself, in 2004, who are these teenagers and why are they here? Until I realized they were Koby’s classmates, and my heart sunk, for Sherri and Seth, and for the world, in general, that produces the kind of cruelty that makes going on and living sometimes a great blow. Then the friends got drafted and showed up in fatigues.

This past Friday, on Koby’s eighth yahrzeit, they were young men and women, 22 years old. The gathered friends of Seth and Sherri, who are from different places and stages in the Mandells’ life and often only see each other at this event, progress in time, as well. Especially the boys’ 8th grade teacher, the young rabbi who was clearly completely devastated by the event, and who is not quite so young anymore, and continues to show up every year and recite Psalms. Koby’s yahrzeit has become a measure of time for the assembled, and maybe also, as one speaker at the services this year pointed out, a measure of self: Where am I now that I wasn’t last year or the year before? Where should I be that I’m not?

This year, Sherri, in her characteristic way of being funny while she is in agony, wrote a poem – We Are Tired of Your Grave – that made me cry for a long time. Her son, Daniel, now almost 20 (He was not yet 12 at the time of the murder, and was called home from a school trip to sit Shiva) also wrote a poem, for his mother – This Is What She Does – which made me cry for even longer. Sherri and Daniel: The two of you owe me a tube of mascara.

Please do read them. I think they are the Mother’s Day poems of the ages.

At least here, where it never and always is Mother’s Day.

1. Switching closets from winter to summer, seeing as I failed to do so before Passover;
2. Work for client X, due tomorrow; DONE
3. Work for client Y, due tomorrow;
4. Several technical and networking tasks involved in getting this site more spider-worthy, way overdue.

And yet. (This beloved two-word sentence is a Nicole Krauss-ism, which I have been widely borrowing, even in my everyday speech.) There is a familiar pit in my stomach that tells me I must put something down on paper. So to speak.

It’s a pit that reminds me of other pits, that makes me 16 again, and 26, all the years joined by a common physiological sense of being carried by an idea or a feeling, literally hungry for something to write. Medical science will tell you that the pit is the work of the vagus (yes, pronounced like the city in Nevada) nerve in my abdomen, which has translated the meandering chemicals of emotion from my brain into an ache of sorts.

This is all well and good but I think it’s more about the weather.

Today in Israel is what Winnie the Pooh would call a very, very blustery day. It is hot as an oven (not like a sauna) and cloudy in an overwhelming way, as if there’s a huge fire a few miles back, blowing in, or maybe a tornado. The weather is upon us. The electricity went out for a few minutes about an hour ago, and my neighbors called me from vacation to go remove whatever was blowing against their alarm sensors, which kept becoming alarmed. (I brought the pruning shears just in case I needed to fend off an actual intruder, but ended up trimming their errant roses.)

This, in short, is a desert storm (aka sandstorm), or Khamsin (Arabic); in Hebrew it’s called a Sharav, which is my favorite term for it. It is not at all uncommon to have one of these at the beginning of May, as spring turns to summer – - and I’m guessing there’s a meteorological explanation for that.

But what I know is that later on the skies will be yellowish-orange (or bright, eerie, end-of-days white) as the sun sets, as if the world was finally imploding from the economic crisis and the swine flu (Happy Windsday, Piglet!) and the Iranian menace; as if the pit in my stomach was finally expanding to envelop all of you.

I also know that I had better keep all of the windows closed if I don’t want a fine layer of orange dust all over the beds and sinks and floors.

I know that I feel longing and upheaval although it is not clear for what. And that what happens in vagus stays in vagus.

Check out a poem I wrote back in my roaring 20′s. (Suburbia still hasn’t managed to kill it for us):

Sharav (Desert Storm)

Can you show me beauty?
Nights so thick
the air suspends
the future in its teeth
ripping fleshy suburbs
from the bones of lazy poets
lovers kissing extra,
with their noses – -
slow hands;
an urgency in it
the stars are hazy fuzzy
drunken dots of fate so far away
they bear no witness
to the rhythmic frenzy
on neighborhood streets
Just tonight:
the stodgy oaks are palm trees
and boxy sidewalks turn to sand.

- SKE, March 1998

PS -By the time my host came back up in time to load this post, written yesterday, the skies have partially cleared, the wind has calmed, and the air is cool. Such is the nature of storms, I guess.

Grandma Esther & Grandpa Al, about 2 years after her liberation from Auschwitz.

My amazing grandmother, Esther Klein, is turning 91 next month. She was in her mid-twenties when she was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross from an aimless, endless transport, after having spent several nearly lethal winter weeks in Ravensbrueck. Before that, she’d “worked” for several months in Auschwitz, after having lived for a very short time, along with her elderly parents, in a temporary tent city near her hometown of Seredna, constructed right along the railroad tracks, the better for the Jews to wait for their “ride.”

Before that, Esther Herskovitz was a bright, active young woman with bad hay fever, living near the Czech border in a small town in a big house with an orchard and a vineyard and a large, warm family, all of which have since vanished, literally, into thin air. Except the allergies… and my grandmother.

Even nearly 70 years later, it is hard for her to watch the programming for Holocaust Remembrance Day. She told me last night: “It was bad for me to watch people running. I thought I could handle it by now…”

Still, my grandmother talks about it. She tells us stories and gives interviews (like for Spielberg’s project over a decade ago) and does not keep secrets. She lost sisters, brothers (there were 11 siblings before the war, from which only three, Esther and her brothers, Shalom -who left Europe before the war – and Joseph emerged), nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins, and her parents. Those came with her into Auschwitz but not out. But she has never lost her sense of humor or her dignity or her ingenuity or her sense of morality and purpose. Those came out of the wreck just fine.

Because that is a choice. An extraordinary choice. She and the overwhelming majority of her fellow survivors moved on, brought up children the best they could, educated them (how many children of survivors do you know who are slackers? According to my father, that wasn’t an option on the menu for his generation…), and became among the more productive members of any society they joined. “I didn’t realize what remarkable people we were,” laughs my grandma, “….not just one or two… all of us. At least we didn’t waste whatever talent we had.”

They did not teach their children to hate, but, as my grandmother puts it, “to be somebody in the world. Hate doesn’t help anybody. It just spoils everything.”

Tell that to the Pilgrims of Victimhood at Durban II in Geneva. Mass suffering of nations and races is an old scourge of humanity. It is tragic and it is worth discussing, as a world community. Preferably, grand scale human rights abuses should not be a cause to be championed by people who actually abuse their own people (like, say, Ahmadinejad) while getting very upset that others, elsewhere are being mistreated.

But I digress. The politics of blame and the Free Pass for Generations of Rage granted to the underdog (again, as long as he is not your underdog) by the third world, otherwise known these days as the UN, is not helping anyone. Except the leaders of those oppressive countries, who are pulling off some pretty nifty diversionary tactics for the benefit of their abused masses.

What if they were to instead tell people to become doctors to heal each other, lawyers to fight for their causes in the world’s courts, or film directors, to bring their stories to light? Why give your sons a gun, a black mask, and a suicide belt, when you could give him, instead, a hug and a ticket to study in Dubai? Why build bombs when you could have built a university, a hospital, or a hi-tech park? Why dig smuggling tunnels when you could instead build a subway system to take you to see relatives in Cairo? Why is there no Palestinian or Somali or Pakistani version of the JNF or Hadassah? There would certainly be enough Euros in aid and Saudi oil dollars coming in to fund them, if anyone local cared to organize those efforts, instead of blaming You-Know-Jew (again!) for all of the earth’s problems.

Because you have been oppressed. Because you are poor. Because you’ve had relatives killed. Are not good reasons. Not since the 40′s. Not since ever, really.

To me, these sound like the Bad Childhood Defense that pops up like a fungus in the American legal system when the guy on trial has nothing else to explain away his depravity. As if everyone who had a funny uncle or a mother who loved Jack Daniels more than Daddy couldn’t help it if he took some liberties with the neighborhood’s kids. Where is the sense of moral responsibility that most of us carry, whatever else we went through? Isn’t this the whole point of a legal system?

And – by the way – since when is this a “conservative” idea? Isn’t rising above and making the most of one’s circumstances supposed to be a spiritual, Eastern, fundamentally liberal concept? And yet… somehow many yoga-soaked leftists have pushed away the idea of responsibility, of moral culpability – both on an individual and national level – even though responsibility for the self and for one’s own spiritual development, as well as responsibility for the other, are at the core of humanitarian philosophy. Compassion has become confused with eliminating all expectations of anyone who has suffered. Again: Isn’t this the whole point of being a nation? To rise above your challenges and own them as part of your heritage, while taking pride in how far you’ve come?

I don’t know of any Holocaust survivors who entered a café in Germany or Poland circa 1946 or 1996 or 2006 and blew themselves up to liberate their family’s land or business stolen by the Nazis. Nor do I know of any Holocaust remembrance conferences where the chief subject is hating Hitler and his SS and the German and Polish and Hungarian people who kept quiet. The subject is remembering the dead and the lost. And how we’ve moved on. Grown, beyond survival. Celebrating the fact that Hitler ultimately failed miserably, precisely because he did not manage to infect his victims with the thing that drove him: Hate.

My grandmother was poor when she arrived in the US. And oppressed. She had almost no one left in the world and hasn’t smelled a thing since the day they told her what that smoke was coming out of the chimneys back in Auschwitz. (The one who told her, a week or so into her stay, was a drunk guard, with a gruff laugh, who she struggled not to believe, until it was heinously clear he had spoken the truth.)

Obviously, however, she had read the “welcome sign” on the gate. It said, horribly: Work makes you free. So she worked… on herself. On remembering her dead but forgetting about revenge or about stewing in what she’d lost. She worked on raising a moral, productive, educated family. On “living her best life.” She worked 12 hour days alongside my grandfather to feed their kids when there was no one alive to call for a loan. (She had been fairly well-to-do back in Seredna.)

And she is free. Free of hate. And free to see her grandchildren and great-grandchildren flourish in free countries. Marinating oneself or one’s nationhood in suffering, even if it is legitimate and documented, is not the way to gain freedom. That is the way to stay oppressed forever. Encouraging growth and forward movement is – and has always been – the only way out of a national or individual hole.

I would set up a meeting for Ahmadinejad to learn something from my Grandma. But he says she doesn’t exist.