Rain, Rain, Welcome Back

Rain, Rain, Welcome Back

As everyone here knows but doesn’t like to admit—particularly when we want to wash our cars or water our lawns—Israel suffers from a perennial water shortage. That’s one of the reasons why rain is such a big deal here. On the day of the first rainfall, Israel Radio broadcasts popular songs that mention rain one after another, for hours on end. Throughout the winter there are continuous reports on the amount of rainfall and the level of the Sea of Galilee, and all year round the radio carries public-service messages about the urgent need to conserve water. Rain is also considered a sign of Divine blessing (and the lack of it the opposite), and in a tradition that goes back to Mishnaic times the rabbis declare a day of fasting and prayer if rainfall is scarce.

I didn’t know any of this years ago, though—for example, a few years out of college, when I was corresponding with an Israeli pen pal who was about my age. During the winter he began every letter with one of the following sentences: “It rained today” or “It didn’t rain today.” Back then, living as I was in upstate New York, where water is hardly an issue and rain is abundant all year round (and perhaps also because my visits to Israel up to that point had all been in the winter), I couldn’t understand why my friend began all his letters with a precipitation report. But once I moved here it became clear enough. One Israeli summer with its relentless heat and sun beating down from skies that hardly see a single cloud from May until October was all the lesson I needed.

Today was the first real rain of the season. There was a dress rehearsal last night, complete with thunder and lightning, but not much rainfall. But as they say in the theater business, a bad dress rehearsal usually means a good performance, and this morning’s show more than made up for the disappointing run last night. At work we noticed the sky getting darker and darker, and finally, wonderful to relate—a real, live, honest-to-goodness downpour.

Israeli weather changes quickly, though. The sun came out and competed with the clouds for a while, and on my way home from work I got caught in a sunshower. But when the heavy cloud-cover and downpour came back for an encore a few hours later, I was safe at home, watching the cascading sheets of rain from the comfort of my living room.

Welcome back, rain. You were missed.

Movin’ On Up

Movin’ On Up

Today was a good day. I moved two of my sites to an advertisement-free server. It took hours, as I figured it would, but it was worth every second.

So if you want to visit the International On-Line Directory of Women’s Tefilla Groups or the site of my own tefilla group, Shirat Sara, you won’t have to deal with advertisements anymore and, best of all, I won’t have to deal with them messing up the display.

A third site will be moved just as soon as one small bug is corrected. I can’t wait.

Another project that I’m involved in is also moving along nicely. I’ll write about that when it’s done, and available.

For now, it’s time for bed. (Even though it’s Friday and many Israelis no longer work on Fridays, I have work tomorrow—at six a.m.)

In Memory of Mindel

In Memory of Mindel

Recently a “moral equivalence” type from France (!) responded to what I said here about choosing evil after the massacre in Beslan and tried to justify it by saying that the Russians had done horrible things in Chechnya. He equated Israel’s acts of self-defense with Palestinian terrorism, saying that their side has homemade weapons while ours has helicopters, that our acts of self-defense are really state terrorism by a country that calls itself a democracy but is really not, and so on and so forth. I thought of how Meryl and Lair handle people who spew this swill and did my best. My only criticism would be that I was probably a bit restrained. Still, it’s so depressing sometimes. There is so much falsehood out there and so many people willing to swallow it whole with their eyes tightly shut. From this side, it feels like bailing an ocean liner with a thimble.

Two nights ago a close friend of mine took me to see a documentary film called “Menuha’s Last Scene.” Made by a young man named Layzie Shapira, this remarkable project is actually a film within a film: a documentary about Menuha, an amazing and gifted Israeli woman originally from Poland who started making films when she was more than seventy years old. Shapira follows Menuha as she makes a film depicting the most tragic scene of her life, which took place in 1935, when she was five years old, several years before Germany invaded Poland. Her father had gone to pre-state Palestine to make a place for his family but was only able to get enough immigration certificates for his wife and two of their three daughters. Her mother, faced with the horrific choice of which daughter to leave behind, left Menuha’s eleven-year-old sister, Mindel, with her grandmother, intending to send for her as soon as she could. Events—including, eventually, World War II—intervened and the family couldn’t get their remaining daughter or the grandmother out of Poland. They were murdered shortly after the German invasion.

Menuha’s film consists of only one scene: the parting at the train station in Warsaw, where Mindel is told that she will have to remain behind with her grandmother. It is a tribute to Mindel and is heartbreaking to watch.

The surrounding documentary focuses on the making of Menuha’s film: the auditions, the production work, the trip to Poland, the actual filming. The actors showed a deep emotional connection to the story, some of them weeping as they auditioned and again as they made the film. (Considering that all the actors are from Israel, it is possible that something similar may have happened in their own families.) During one scene when Menuha discusses filming at a local train station with an official of Israel Railways, I was struck by the irony of using an Israeli train station and locomotive to film the family’s traumatic parting from Mindel at that train station in Warsaw. In another scene at Yad Vashem’s documenting center, Menuha finds a photograph of Mindel which was taken four years after that terrible and final separation and which she had never seen. For the first time, Menuha has evidence that Mindel went on with her life, however briefly, after the train left without her. But her wonder and delight at seeing the photograph mix quickly with the pain and loss that have accompanied her all her life.

My friend, a filmmaker herself, cried throughout. So did I.

And this fellow from France (and who knows how many others like him) says that defending ourselves constitutes terrorism. Chalk up another one who, at best, closes his eyes and swallows all the propaganda offered to him without bothering to check facts or think for himself, and at worst ... see below.

UPDATE: Yedi’ot Aharonot’s daily magazine contains a feature about Menuha’s film. I looked for it on their site but didn’t find it. So far it appears to exist only in print, but I hope that many more people will soon write about this film. Here are items about it in English and in Hebrew.

UPDATE: Standwithus.org has preliminary reports from the Duke conference. Look carefully. For these people, there is no such thing as co-existence. They say that Israel should not exist, that the Jews should not have a state ... in other words, that Mindel and her grandmother should not have been the only ones of that family to die.

Well, at least they’re honest about it. No moral equivalence there.

Strengthen the Good

Strengthen the Good

Alan at Strengthen the Good writes:

How’s this for fighting evil by doing something good: claiming the bodies of abandoned infants ... those left in dumpsters, bathrooms, or by the side of the road ... and giving them names and dignified burials.

That’s what Debi Faris does, and her Garden of Angels effort is the latest charity profiled by Strengthen the Good.

After checking the site, I would add that Ms. Faris has carried her original initiative to even greater heights by getting a law passed that helps prevent such tragedies from happening in the first place.

Kol ha-kavod, Ms. Faris. Well done.

Strengthen the Good

Strengthen the Good

Strengthen the Good has posted about another charitable organization: The Brent Woodall Foundation for Exceptional Children.

This charity was founded by an exceptional woman, Tracy Woodall, whose husband Brent was among those murdered at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

I’m thinking now of two other charitable organizations that came out of painful, challenging situations. One is Keren Malki, which works to provide home care and equipment for severely handicapped children. Keren Malki is named for Malka Chana Roth, a teenager who was murdered in the bombing of the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001. The other is Israemploy, which works to combat the current economic crisis here in Israel by helping people find jobs. Founder Chaim runs an active e-group that lists hundreds of jobs per week.

As the Jewish New Year approaches, may we know only good. As the traditional prayer says, “Let the old year and its curses end; let the new year, with its blessings, begin.”

Excuse Me—Where Did You Say You Were From?

Excuse Me—Where Did You Say You Were From?

While looking up the statistics for my various sites this evening, I discovered that Shirat Sara’s website received a visitor recently ... from Saudi Arabia.

Shirat Sara is a women’s prayer group. A Jewish women’s prayer group. That’s already two strikes against us. Three if you count the prayer bit; though some Moslem countries have women imams, I don’t think the KSA is one of them. (Heck, even some of our fellow Jews think we’re radical. We’re not, actually, and we might even fit in a tiny drop in the KSA because some of us wear these long, tasselled veil-type garments when we pray.)

Seriously: Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow the free exercise of any religion but Islam within its borders. Betcha our site will soon find itself banned over there.

Choices

Choices

There’s something really disturbing about us Westerners. We don’t seem to be comfortable with the concept of evil. Whenever we hear about an abused spouse or child, or about dozens of innocent civilians being blown up on buses, or about thousands of people killed in one day on hijacked airplanes and in the buildings at which those airplanes were deliberately aimed, we find excuses for the perpetrators. Abusers were themselves victims of abuse, we say, so they couldn’t help themselves. And terrorists—or “freedom fighters” as they are misnamed by those who make excuses for them—were made so desperate by the oppression they suffered that they had no other choice. Since the perpetrators couldn’t possibly be evil, then surely the victims must have done something to deserve their fate.

Bull.

We always have a choice between good and evil. People who do the kinds of things mentioned above do so because, for whatever reason and for whatever length of time, they have chosen evil. And they are responsible for that choice.

By the standards of those who would justify terrorists and mass murderers, we Jews have the perfect excuse to have invented the explosive belt. We have been persecuted for centuries, enduring stunning hatred, massacres of entire communities over false accusations, laws forbidding us to own land and restricting where we could live, in what trades we could engage, how many of us could receive an education and even how many of us could marry. By the misguided standards of those who excuse terrorism and its perpetrators we have every reason to be angry, and to kill for our anger. Yet, as a people, we never have. Instead we have contributed far more to human civilization than our tiny share of the population. (Just take a look at the list of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes and think how much more we could have accomplished if we hadn’t had to cope with two thousand years’ worth of hatred, incitement, restrictions and murder.)

That’s because early in our history, we learned that no matter what happens to us, we must always take responsibility for our choices. Playing victim is never an option. God gave us an explicit choice between life and good, and death and evil, and told us clearly: Choose life.

But that’s just one example. Every human being makes the choice between good and evil every moment of every day. The scum who took over the school in Beslan, torturing and murdering hundreds of people, including more than one hundred fifty children, made their choice. And in that scene of unrelenting horror one courageous man, Yannis Kanidis, an elderly teacher of Greek extraction, made his.

Read about this extraordinary man here.

May he rest in peace.

Molekh

Molekh

At last count, according to the Associated Press, more than 330 bodies were pulled from the rubble of the school in Beslan. One hundred fifty-six of the dead were children.

All I can think of is God’s cry of horror to the Israelites in Jeremiah 32:35:

And they built the high places of the Ba’al, which are in the valley of Ben-hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molekh; which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind that they should do this abomination ...

(Emphasis mine.)

Read Imshin. Read Meryl. Read Charles at Little Green Footballs. They’re all right on target; I’d just be repeating them at this point.

The prophet Jeremiah could not have been more explicit in his denunciation of child sacrifice.

So after this I do not want to hear, ever again, how much Islam respects the prophets who came before Mohammed.

Right On Target

Right On Target

While I’m posting on blogging matters, there’s a new and different blog in town, Hitzei Yehonatan (Yehonatan’s Arrows; see 1 Samuel 20:18—23).

For the past several years, Rabbi Yehonatan Chipman has been sending out his profound and scholarly divrei Torah (essays on religious topics) to his mailing list. Now he is making them available on the Net. And may I say: Finally.

Mazal tov on the new blog, Rav Yehonatan. I hope you’ll come to the next blogger meet-up!

Bloggers, Bloggers Everywhere

Bloggers, Bloggers Everywhere

Last night was the first Israeli blogger meet-up. It was wonderful to meet the people behind the blogs and start putting faces to names. We turned out to be quite a cross-section of English-speaking Israeli society (all right, we did have a sprinkling of native Hebrew speakers here and there), and were an almost equal number of men and women. We came from several different countries including the US, the UK, Canada and Israel, though I’m sure more were represented.

We even had a journalist covering the event. Turns out she’s a blogger too and had intended to come anyway, so she had to participate and do her job at the same time. My hat’s off to her, and when her article is posted I’ll post a link to it here ... but only if she says wonderful things about me. (Just kidding! No, really!)

I finally met Allison, Imshin, Adrian of Neither Here Nor There (formerly Expat Egghead), the Rev. Huatou, Celestial Blue and many others. I also saw a friend of mine and his wife for the first time in years. Ah, the miracle of the Internet, the best part of it in my opinion: connecting people. (Sorry, cat-bloggers; Imshin didn’t bring Shoosha. Darn.)

Ra’anana is a beautiful city, the restaurant was terrific and its personnel lovely people. And it was great to have a change of scene, if only for a few hours. I’m glad I went.

I’d write more but I’m exhausted. It’s Friday afternoon, the week is catching up with me and I’ve been awake since 5:00 a.m. (Work started at 6.)

Shabbat shalom. (Finally. Thank goodness.)

The Complacency Tax

The Complacency Tax

Today the moderator of a local e-group I’m on advised us to check how much we are paying our Internet service providers and find out whether we can get a better deal. I took his advice and was astounded to find that I have been paying an outrageously high monthly rate for an Internet speed so low it isn’t even marketed anymore. But that’s going to change very soon; effective midnight tonight, I’ll be getting a rate of speed several times faster at less than half the price I’ve been paying.

I’ve heard this phenomenon referred to as the “complacency tax.” We accept the given rate and stay there for months. And although Internet companies run specials all the time, they don’t tell their existing customers about them. It’s up to us to take the initiative. Once we do, we can get a better deal with one phone call.

Like I just did. Thanks, Moderator—you know who you are.

Israel Gets a Gold

Israel Gets a Gold

Israeli Windsurfer Gal Friedman won an Olympic gold medal today—his second Olympic medal and Israel’s first gold.

(His first name means “wave,” by the way. Is that cool or what?)

Congratulations, Mr. Friedman, and thanks.

(So where’s Iran in the rankings now?)

How to Get a Kitty Hug

How to Get a Kitty Hug

If you want to know how to get a cat to hug you, just ask Lair. Good information on a topic I love.

The first challenge to hugging your cat is to find a way of picking the cat up that doesn’t frighten the cat. Most cats will telegraph how they want you to hug them when they approach you, giving subtle hints in their body position how they won’t mind how to be picked up.

And what a coincidence: today’s Word of the Day from YourDictionary.com was “ailurophile.” (Go look it up.)

Maybe tomorrow my neighbor’s cat will give me the time of day. (She usually doesn’t.) Someday I’ll blog about the Siamese Princess and my years of unrequited feline love, and also about the Lady in Red, a red tabby female with black whiskers who likes me. She also drinks out of my hand. (Take that, Siamese Princess.)

But for now, I’m going to sleep. It’s been a long day.

Strengthening the Good

Strengthening the Good

Alan at Strengthen the Good has posted about the site’s first charity, admitting that it is not a micro one as he had originally intended. But as he notes, after Hurricane Charley the need is not micro but macro. Check out his link to The Gulf Coast Community Foundation Of Venice Hurricane Charley Disaster Relief Fund ... and give whatever you can.

Strengthen the Good

Strengthen the Good

Alan of the Command Post is using the blogosphere for a good cause: making people aware of deserving local charities. Check out his new site, Strengthen the Good.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Busy, Busy, Busy

... which is why I’ve maintained blog silence over the past few days.

Let’s see: two day jobs, a sewing project (completed last night) and designing and creating a fair-sized bilingual website (not mine): yup, that’s a pretty full plate right there. No wonder I feel ready for a nice, long vacation.

I still need to redesign my own website. I worked on the others first so that I would learn lots of new techniques before I got to my own ... and now that I have the skills, I don’t have the time. I should have known.

If all goes well the bilingual website should be done in about a week. I work on it at night, after my regular job(s). (Free time? What’s that?) I confess I’m looking forward to two things: the sense of accomplishment I’ll feel once I complete this project successfully and it goes online, and getting paid—provided that the Income Tax Authority doesn’t decide that I was really doing this job for them.

So once this website is done, I’ll have to do everything but swear an oath to bring my own site up to date. I feel like I’m walking around with outdated code stuck to my shoes like week-old gum. Not pleasant.

The sewing project involved making three sets of curtains, by the way. Though they were simple ones, I hadn’t realized they take so long to make. I mean, how long can it take to make a loop for a curtain rod and finish a bunch of edges? (Stop that snickering!) I remember falling asleep years ago to the sound of the sewing machine as my mother made matching curtains and bedspreads for every room in the house. Even though I didn’t know a great deal about sewing when I was younger, I still knew that my mother is an expert needlewoman and that she put her heart and soul into those sets. (They were gorgeous, too.) But after a project like this, I can appreciate her efforts even more because I understand just how much work it is ... and that’s without making even a single ruffle.

So I tip my pincushion to you, Mom.

Actually, both my parents are expert craftspeople. I still remember the drop-leaf table they rescued from the trash years ago and the hours they spent rebuilding and refinishing it. Today that table could grace a museum, and that’s only one example of what they can do. I like to think I got my appreciation for handicrafts and love of writing from them. Now if only I had my father’s head for numbers, I’d have it made.

Time to get back to work.

And the Bus Blues Roll On

And the Bus Blues Roll On

The Jerusalem Post is running an opinion piece by a woman who seeks to defend the idea that women should have the “right” to sit in the back of the bus for reasons of modesty. If you want to read it, head over to the Opinions section of the Post and scroll down. You’ll find it if it’s still posted there; its title is unmistakable. I’m not going to excerpt it or link to it here; I see no reason to delay its swift slide into the oblivion it deserves.

The author of the article goes on about how women should have the “right” to choose to sit in a more protected area of a public bus. Yet she conveniently ignores the fact that Ms. Ragen was not given a choice. She was intimidated, bullied and ordered about by a man who expected her to obey him as a matter of course. That is not modesty. It is arrogance. If this man were truly modest, he would have remained seated and silent with his eyes averted—just as I’m sure he thinks women ought to do.

I have news for this self-appointed guardian of public morals and women’s seating choices: no one behaves in this way out of devotion to modesty. History shows that people who bully and intimidate others do not do so for the sake of a higher spiritual cause, even if that is what they would like us to think. Their real goals are to assert their power, defend their turf and frighten others into obedience. The man who attacked Ms. Ragen violated his own religious law, with its strong emphasis on decent behavior, even as he claimed to defend it.

A brief aside: I recall stories of the “kosher bus” from Monsey, New York, to Manhattan. (I do not know whether it is still in operation.) This early-morning commuter bus, which doubled as a synagogue, featured a curtain placed down the center aisle with men sitting on one side and women on the other. This may have seemed awkward—particularly if the bus rounded a sharp curve—but I admire the compromise. The organizers sought to honor Jewish tradition (since the bus also served as an Orthodox synagogue, which requires separate seating) and at the same time would not countenance forcing anyone to sit in the rear. If only we all behaved with such decency.

One bright spot in all this: a Young Israel rabbi wrote a letter to the Post, speaking of the need to expose and be aware of the fundamentalists in our midst. True, we need to be vigilant against people who would bully and intimidate others while using religion as their excuse. The only thing such people seek to teach us is to fear them, and they act as they do not out of reverence, but because they have none.

Dead End

Dead End

Yesterday I went to the Har ha-Menuhot cemetery in Jerusalem to visit the grave of a dear friend of mine who passed away last year. But I never got there. Instead, I got lost.

Perhaps I should explain. Because Jerusalem’s neighborhoods are built on hills, many streets, which run parallel along the hillsides, are linked by perpendicular stairways. So when I saw a long flight of stairs that appeared to lead toward a main road, I took it all the way up ...

... and reached a dead end. Literally. Right there in front of me was a high stone wall, impassive, imperturbable. I barely had enough breath left to contemplate what it has seen and endured, what it would tell if it could talk. But I knew what it was telling me at the moment: this is it, kiddo, the end of the line. Inevitable, unalterable, final. No amount of pleading, praying or anything else was going to change a thing; I was going to have to go back the way I came. All the way down.

I understood then why the two men in religious garb far above me on the same stairway had looked at me strangely when they saw me climbing upward. Of course, they knew where they were going, so they were probably wondering what on earth I was doing there and what connection I could possibly have to anyone buried in that particular section. Well, their wonder was resolved quickly enough.

Another thing about the Har ha-Menuhot cemetery: various burial societies own different sections of the land there. These sections are not connected. You can stand at the edge of one and look over to the section where you would like to go, which is close enough to touch, but that’s all you can do. It seems like it should be so simple, but it isn’t; there’s this stubborn, counterintuitive, chest-high stone wall right in front of you. Like the saying goes, you can’t get there from here.

So although I managed to visit the graves of other friends and acquaintances, I didn’t get to visit the one that was the purpose of my trip. And as I puffed up yet another flight of stairs while the sun went down, vowing to stick to the main roads next time, it seemed that I could hear from the other side, ever so faintly, the voice of my dear, departed friend ... laughing his head off.

Rightful Place

Rightful Place

Although the issue of women in Judaism is important to me, I didn’t start this blog to deal with it exclusively. I figured that I would write about individual issues as they came up, but I was sure I wouldn’t be hearing or writing about them every day.

Until this week.

Novelist and Jerusalem resident Naomi Ragen writes about her recent experience on a public bus in Jerusalem: Egged and the Taliban.

I was happily immersed in an article about Yaddo in Vanity Fair when I was interrupted by an angry haredi man who announced that I needed to move to the back of the bus. I looked up at him, astonished, feeling a flash of what Blacks must have felt in Alabama in 1950.

It only gets worse from there.

Ms. Ragen’s article reminded me of similar incident that happened to me a few years ago when I boarded a bus at the Western Wall and sat down towards the front. Although the buses that go to and from the Western Wall are ordinary public buses, a process of voluntary segregation occurs on them. Men sit next to men and women sit next to women, but both men and women sit throughout the bus. A haredi man who boarded soon after me noticed where I was sitting and waved his hand peremptorily at me, not looking at me, saying: “Yoter le-matah” (farther down). That was it. No polite request, such as “Would you mind sitting farther back, please?” I guess that for men like him, women—or perhaps only those who do not know their place—do not deserve basic courtesy.

But lest we lose hope, here is an article by Rabbi Aaron Frank in the Baltimore Jewish Times on the importance of keeping a synagogue’s women’s section for the women: A Football Minyan.

If even one woman is made to feel that it is hard or uncomfortable to go to shul, we, as an Orthodox community, are failing. If one person, not to mention an entire gender, is shut out, it is simply wrong. Even if an entire year goes by and the women’s section is never used, it should never be given over to men—not ever. Keeping a designated women’s section reminds us all that shul is for everyone.

The issue of the women’s role in Orthodox Judaism has engendered much controversy, but this issue contains none of that. No Orthodox Jew should disagree that women ought to feel welcome in shul. Let us fulfill our mission of making our mikdashei me’aht into truly sacred space. Put up a sign in your shul’s women's section that this is a section for women only, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

Way to go, Rabbi Frank. May there be many more like you among the Jewish people.

The Controversy Continues

The Controversy Continues

Both The Jewish Week and The Forward have published articles about R. Schachter’s “parrots and monkeys” gaffe.

Gary Rosenblatt of The Jewish Week includes several reactions of other rabbis, all unattributed. So Back Row of the ’Beis suggests a “Fun Family Activity for this Shabbos”:

Read Gary Rosenblatt’s TorahWeb article and try and figure out who said all the anonymous quotes.

Well, I’m glad this is being talked about as widely as it is. That’s the only way things will change.