Thoughts on flying back to Israel after another brief visit to the US

Flight 90 from Newark, NJ to Tel Aviv must be the punishment that Continental Airlines metes out to flight crew who commit heinous professional crimes. Accidentally open the exit door in mid-flight, resulting in fifteen passengers getting sucked out into the atmosphere?  Under-cook the first class coq au vin, resulting in a salmonella outbreak on board?  Join the "mile-high club"... with a passenger... in the cockpit?  It's the Tel Aviv route for you, mate.  And then you can imagine the screams of protest: "No, no, anything but that!  Don't make me go back there!  Please forgive me!  Dock my pay, demote me, put me in baggage reclaim... Anything but the Tel Aviv route!!"

Yes, the Tel Aviv route must be the short straw in flight crew world.  It is a bizarre world on board.  It's different from El Al: the moment you get on board an El Al plane, you have the feeling that you have entered Israeli sovereign territory.  So you expect all the nonsense and craziness, and it's familiar and reassuring.  On Continental, everything still operates under a non-Jewish framework, but it's weird, it's like the Jews are breaking out of the ghetto and trying to take over the Czar's castle, and there ain't a damn thing that the Czar can do about it.  On my flight back to Israel this past Sunday, one of the stewards was an African-American guy with dreadlocks.  He was used to dealing with quiet, normal Americans.  I don't know what he did wrong but he ended up on the Tel Aviv route.  This poor guy spent the entire flight saying "Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats.  Please, we can't move the plane until you take your seats.  Ladies and gentlemen, the fasten seat belts sign is on.  Please clear the aisles so that we can start the food service.  Please, I beg of you, take your seats.  We are about to crash, ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you take your seats.  You bloody Jews, why won't you sit down?!!!"

I don't know why Jews won't sit down on planes, but they won't.  Worst offenders are the charedim and their hat boxes.  What is so complicated about a hat box?  They act like it's some piece of delicate technical material that must be kept at a precise angle with no sudden movements.  It takes your average charedi about 17 minutes to get the bloody hat box into the overhead compartment before take off ["please, ladies and gentlemen, we cannot push back from the gate until everyone is seated"].  And then once it's in, they're jumping up and down every five minutes like jack-in-the-boxes to check that the hat box is still ok.  They're all speaking Yiddish, which I don't understand, but my bet is that it would translate as:

"Did you check your hat box?'
"Oh, right, good idea, I checked it 4 minutes ago but I should have another look."
"Yup, it's still there, the angle looks good."
"Hey, nice hat box, where did you get it, can I have a look?"
"Yes, but make sure you take it down carefully."
"What is that schvartzer with the dreadlocks saying?  He keeps waving his finger at me."
"He is probably reminding you to check your hat box."
"He's right, I should check it."

I could go on.

On this last flight, there was one point when they were trying to serve dinner, and they'd been pleading for half an hour to get everyone to sit down, and suddenly, as if by a miracle, we hit this really heavy turbulence and everyone sort of scattered back to their seats in fright.  But I know what really happened.  I saw dreadlocks guy on the internal phone first: "Captain, we can't get the damn Jews to sit down.  Any chance you can give things a bit of a shake up there?"

In other news, Melilah is one tomorrow, and is the cutest thing ever.  Her first word was "bruvver" - thank God not "Eshy" or "Vivi" but "bruvver" - already the little diplomat.  She can now also say mayim [water], ball, and "puh" for "kippah".  My mum will be especially proud of that last one.  Eshy slammed his little finger in a door hinge, ripped the nail half off, but he's fine.  Aviv has started speaking Hebrew beautifully; his first word was "zuzi" which means "move!" - interestingly enough, said to a female object, not a male.  The joys of kindergarten.

And other than that we are all doing quite wonderfully in general.

Happy Thanksgiving if you celebrate that particular festival!

Toot-toot!

(That's the sound of me blowing my own horn). Click the link!

Back in Caldwell, NJ

I have been back in the US since Thursday, going back to Israel tomorrow.

Had a lovely shabbat back in Caldwell.  Basically this is how it went:

X [where X is a friend, acquaintance or random person who knows Peri but who I don't recognize]: Hi!  How are you?  So great to have you back!
Me: Yes, it's great to be back.
X [smiling]: Wow, how is everything going, it's so great to see you, so great to have you back - are Peri and the kids here too?
Me: No, just me.
X [smile fades]: Oh.

Family updates

We are coming up to exactly three months since our arrival back in Israel, and we've just finished all the chagim, and I haven't posted for a while, so here is an update that is less "pithy observations about Israeli society" and more "what breakfast cereal the kids are eating these days".

Eshy: Quaker Cinnamon Squares without milk.
Aviv: Cheerios and Quaker Cinnamon Squares with milk.
Melilah: baby mush and Cheerios.

We have had a really good festival season, and we really feel as if we are settling into Modiin, and slowly finding friends and community.  The synagogue thing is kind of annoying: there are two Masorti/Conservative congregations in Modiin, which were originally one congregation but split apart a couple of years ago.  Now they both struggle to survive, but won't speak with each other.  You couldn't make it up.  Anyway, we have been bouncing back and forth between these two minyanim, and actually seem to be finding our place in one of them.  Simchat Torah was really great.  We used a Sefer Torah that we brought to Modiin from Jerusalem, and at some point I will post a blog about our experience carrying the Sefer Torah through downtown Jerusalem, which was quite something.

The kids are back at school tomorrow.  Eshy is doing wonderfully: his Hebrew is improving the whole time, he is making friends, happy, enjoying school, etc.  We had a belated birthday party for him on Friday morning, which was nice for him.  Peri, ever the madrichah, did a whole "science-themed" party with different stations doing different experiments and stuff.  Aviv is also doing really well, although he is finding gan a little hard.  As luck would have it he is the only English-speaker in his gan, and he started out not speaking any Hebrew at all, so he has found it tough.  He is beginning to come out with Hebrew words and even sentences, though, and hopefully within another month or so he will be able to communicate more effectively.  For now we are trying to get him together in the afternoons with other English speaking kids.  Anyway, he still has his Avivi spark and twinkle and grin, and as long as those are still there, we are not concerned.  By "we", I of course mean Peri; I am neurotic and worried sick that he will be scarred for life.  Thank God I married someone sane though.  Melilah is babbling (in English) and beginning to cruise and is just the cutest thing on earth.

We have been spending our free time looking for houses/flats in Modiin, which has so far been a little frustrating, but we are continuing.  Other than that, the past month has been pretty busy with all the chagim.

I am going to be in the US next week for a week, doing some work for JTS.  I will be in Caldwell for shabbat parashat Noach, and at JTS on Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday.  So if you are reading this from one of those places, I look forward to seeing you soon!!

A new idea for breathing life into the peace process

As soon as shabbat went out today I turned on my TV to watch the England vs Israel European Championship qualifier. [note to Americans: this is an important football match for both teams.  Football is a sport that the rest of the world understands and thinks is really good.  You, who believe that American Football is actually a sport, as opposed to a series of TV adverts occasionally interspersed with some big men bumping into other big men, are totally misguided.]

Anyway, this was the first time that I have really seen Israel play football, and they were really, really bad.  You can take the Jews out of the ghetto and you can have them grow oranges in the desert, but let's face it, Jews are not good at sports.  Even "new Jews".

So this gave me a great idea.  The Arabs kicked Israel out of the Middle East qualifying groups when it came into existence.  I think the original reason was because there was no room for the phrase "The Evil Zionist Entity" on the scoreboards in those days.  But this was a big mistake.  If the Arabs played the Jews at football, things would be a lot better in the Middle East.  Egypt and Iran are pretty good teams.  Make no mistake, they would wipe the floor with us.  And this would make the Arabs feel a lot better.  They would be able to say: "Well, the Evil Zionist Entity may have destroyed our armies, bombed our cities, stolen our territory, and ripped out our olive trees, but we beat them 3-0 last week!  Hah!"

They say that pride is an important thing in the Middle East.  If the Arabs would re-admit Israel into their football league, they would get a lot of it back, fast.  Why has Tony Blair not thought of this?

Back to School

It has been a very busy couple of weeks, all leading up to today, when all three boys in the family (Eshy, Aviv, and yours truly) had their first day of school in Israel.

Eshy started kitah aleph (first grade), Aviv started Gan (nursery school), and at the Hartman Institute we had the first orientation day for the new cohort of students.

Eshy's and Aviv's stories are the most interesting of the three.  Eshy is going to a school called Yachad, and it's (so we understand) a genuinely pluralist school, with religious, secular, and in-betweens, all in the same school.  This is extremely rare in Israel.  One of the only other similar models is a school called Keshet, in Jerusalem, but that isn't really pluralist, it's what I call dualist: you have to choose to be either "dati" (religious) or "chiloni" (secular).  For those of us who are in the middle somewhere, or who are religious-but-open, or religious-egalitarian, there's no place in a school like Keshet.  We hope that at Yachad, there will be.

Yachad has a gan program but we couldn't get Aviv in (it was only by a minor miracle that Eshy got in to kitah aleph, and that was only at the last moment).  So Aviv is going to a local religious gan.  We went to a parents' evening there last week to meet the ganenet (gan teacher) and other parents.  Well, I thought that American parents were uptight, but I've never seen anything like this.  These people were crazy!  Imagine a vociferous and raucous debate in the Knesset about the peace process, with left-wingers and right-wingers screaming blue murder at each other for destroying the Jewish people and suchlike.  Now imagine that kind of screaming blue murder transposed into a group of parents sitting on little kindergarten chairs around little kindergarten tables so that your knees are in your cheeks, with pictures of toy trains on the walls and wooden building blocks in the corner, and all these parents with their knees in their cheeks are screaming about snack time being at 10.30 whereas last year it was at 10.00.

Maybe there is a large segment of the population here with congenital hearing defects, and that is why everyone shouts the whole time.  Has this been investigated?

Biking and Arabs

I taught Eshy how to ride a bike yesterday.  I don't know how many other fathers are thinking about Dewey's concept of Psychologization or Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development when teaching their children to ride a bike, but I was (some of the people reading this blog will think that is marvellous - eg JTS students past and present - and some will think I am sad and should get a life - eg my mum, brother, etc).  Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the pedaling, and I am happy to report that after a 1/2 hour in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening, Eshy is riding a bike as if he has been doing it for years.  He is over the moon with himself, it is lovely to see.  And I, of course, view this as cast-iron empirical proof that educational theory is not a load of waffle, but actually works!

Anyway, the biking reminded me of an incident with Eshy a few weeks ago, soon after we first arrived.  We were in Jerusalem on the Tayelet, a beautiful promenade that overlooks East Jerusalem, the Old City, and West Jerusalem.  On one end of the Tayelet there are some statue-sort-of-things - I guess it's some kind of modern art installation, but when we were there it was being used as a climbing frame by a bunch of kids, as most modern art installations should be.  Of course, my kids wanted to go play.  When we got there, I noticed that the other kids climbing on it were Israeli Arabs.  Eshy, being his usual adventurous self, wanted me to lift him up to the top part.  This Arab girl was sitting there, though.  There was room for Eshy as well, but it made it a bit crowded there.  I lifted him up, and he sat next to the Arab girl, and then after a bit she climbed down.

Was it just me, or was there some kind of analogy going on there?

I was my usual lily-livered liberal self, saying to Eshy "make sure you make room for the girl too, make sure you don't push her as you climb on, remember that she has a right to self-determination as well" (ok, I didn't actually say that last part).

"Those bloody Jews", I imagine her saying.  "First they steal my land, then they cut down my olive trees, and now they chuck me off the climbing frame?"

Eshy, of course, was oblivious to the whole thing and just wanted to have fun.  (Maybe that fits into the analogy as well?)

Religious or Secular?

One of the frustrating things about Israel is that for most Israelis, there is either "religious" or "secular" and not a lot of grey space in between. This is a big problem for us in choosing a school for our kids, which maybe I'll write about another time, but it also affects little everyday interactions as well, sometimes in ways that are just breath-takingly astounding and appalling.

For example, as we get settled into Modi'in, we've started thinking about whether we would want to buy a place here. We started speaking with a couple of realtors/estate agents, and this morning we went with one to see a place. Half an hour before we were due to meet her, she called my cellphone and said: "I just realised I forgot to tell you that this place is on a street where there are lots of datiim [religious people]. Is that a problem for you?"

I said no.

And after I hung up, I thought to myself: can you imagine an American realtor saying "there are lots of African-Americans on this street. Is that a problem for you?"

Or: "There are lots of Jews on this street. Is that a problem for you?"

And the worst thing is, the fact that she asked the question implies that she knows that there are some clients who would say "yes, it is a problem. Let's look somewhere else".

When you read about "the religious-secular divide" in Israel, it's not just about Russians needing to get married in Cyprus. It's about estate agents too.

Boxes (ii)

Our new apartment is finally beginning to look like home.

i.e. messy, disorganised, and everything in the wrong place.

Boxes

Our shipment finally arrived at the end of last week, and we have been living among boxes - over 200 of them - since then. We are slowly, slowly, making progress, unpacking and organising.

Here is a little story about getting our shipment stuff cleared through customs.

We are "returning residents" which basically means we get no "rights" at all, except the right to bring in a shipment of household goods duty free. Household goods means furniture, clothes, books, etc, and also extends to most small and large appliances. The only things that we knew we would have to pay customs duty on were a few electronic things like our DVD player.

When we got the breakdown of charges payable from the shipping company representative, it included customs duty on our sukkah frame. (We have one of those metal click-together sukkahs, just like the Israelites in the desert used). Peri was on the phone with the shipping company woman at the time (she deals with all these things because I can't, not because my Hebrew isn't good enough but because I would end up shouting and getting hung up on too many times - see previous blog post re the policeman in Modiin!) Well, when I realised what was going on, it just got too much for me. I started shouting at the phone: "what, a sukkah isn't considered a household good in Israel? This is the Jewish state for crying out loud! How can you claim that a sukkah frame isn't a household good? In Nazi Germany I can understand that they'd charge you customs duty on it, but this is Israel" and so on and so on.

Bottom line: we paid the duty. I am banned from the telephone.

Op-Ed in Jerusalem Report

Here is a link to my op-ed that appeared in the latest edition of the Jerusalem Report. Many of you at JTS may recognise its contents from various classes/Israel trips/chats in the corridor.

Modi'in

As many of you know, Peri and I decided to try living in Modi'in for the year, rather than Jerusalem, where we had previously thought we would go. There were lots of different reasons for that decision that I won't go into. But Peri has a theory about Modi'in and I thought I would share it. Modi'in has been around for only 11 years, and is called "the city of the future". It bills itself as the first Israel city to have been planned thoughtfully, which is a) true, b) a brilliant marketing statement, and c) a rather damning indictment of the previous 100 or so years of Zionist settlement... Modi'in has lots of green space - many of its main roads have the two carriageways separated by lovely grassy areas with playgrounds every 100 yards, which make walking around the city with kids a real joy. In general there are lots of roundabouts (=traffic circles in the US), which calm traffic, and it has a certain American feel about it, right down to the huge shopping centre about 5 minutes outside of town, which feels like it could almost be a Florida strip mall. And because everything in the city is maximum 11 years old, it all feels new, clean, fresh.

So Peri's theory is that Modi'in is a social experiment on Israelis. We all know the standard stereotype of Israelis: loud, aggressive, rude, etc. Modi'in's social experiment says: what if we put all these loud, aggressive, rude people in a nice, calm, well-organised place. Would they begin to calm down and be more polite, cultured, pleasant?

(With my ex-professor-of-Jewish-education's hat on, I would restate this as follows: to what extent does the plausibility structure of Modi'in change the behaviour of those who are exposed to it on an ongoing basis?)

So far, our observation of this social experiment is that it might actually be working. In Modi'in, people seem to drive more calmly. There is not as much hooting/honking. Service in the cafes here is... well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, it's acceptable, but compared to many other corners of the country, that's a huge step forward!

Let me leave you with this vignette to prove the point. Yesterday, I got aggravated at a traffic light and started shouting at this woman in the street who had been having a conversation with the driver of the car in front of me, thus leaving me to get stuck at the red light. I, er, also nearly went through the red light, before Peri, who was in the passenger's seat, screamed blue murder and made me stop in the nick of time. Anyway, just my luck, a policemen was watching the whole thing: my shouting at the woman in the street, my nearly going through a red light, etc. He pulls me over and takes my license and registration. I fear the worst. Peri transitions from blue murder to the silent treatment.

The policeman comes back and says: "Look, you're in a calm place now [he used the Hebrew word "ragua" which I have never previously associated with the Israeli driving experience]. No-one else is hooting here. It's just you. Take this as a warning. In the future calm down". And with that he gave me back my stuff and left.

So now I am officially a calm Modi'in resident. Jerusalem may be more religiously exciting, a more Jewishly powerful environment, but if Modi'in keeps my blood pressure down at the traffic lights, it has a lot going for it.

Visions of Visions of Jewish Education

This is one that you will love if you have read Fox/Marom/Scheffler's Visions of Jewish Education, but you won't get at all if you haven't.

So I am sitting in a little falafel joint in the German Colony having a snack-meeting with one of my new colleagues from the Hartman Institute. Suddenly he says to me "Behind you is standing one of the great philosophers of Israel". I turn around, and see, at the counter, buying a falafel, someone who looks, frankly, like a taxi driver. Unkempt hair, a pair of old tatty jeans, a tatty grey T-shirt, a bit of a paunch. "Who is it?" I ask. "Menachem Brinker" is the answer. "Have you heard of him?"

Someone up there must be reading my blog

Today I took Road 443 back from work and it was a nightmare. Traffic crawled for miles and it took me nearly two hours to get home. Grr!

On Traffic and Territories

One of my first dilemmas in returning to Israel has been what appears to be a relatively simple one: what's the best way to get to work? It's not so simple, though. The quickest way is to take the lovely new Road 443 which zips you from Modiin to Jerusalem in under half an hour. Beautiful new road, no traffic, stress-free, brilliant. The alternative is to take good old "kvish mispar echad" (Road Number 1), which is the main Tel Aviv -Jerusalem highway. In the middle of the day, or later on in the evening, when there is no traffic, this is only about 5 minutes longer than the 443. But any other time that has the faintest whiff of rush hour about it turns Road Number 1 into a parking lot. "So what's the problem? Just take 443!" Well, one of the reasons that 443 is so quick is that it cuts through over the Green Line, into territories captured by Israel in the 6 day war. And while the road was originally designed for use by, and indeed was used by, the Palestinian Arab communities who live alongside it (it also zips you to Ramallah in no time at all), the entrance/exit roads to those villages were closed off after several drive-by shootings, some fatal, during the Al-Aksa intifada. So now it's one of those, ahem, "apartheid" roads, that you read about on the news.

Now, I happen to think that the commuting traffic issue is one that has not yet been fully explored by the right-wing media. I mean, it's all very well that the Palestinians want their own state, but what about my commute? Why should I sit in traffic for 20 minutes just so that 5 million people can have self-determination? If Tony Blair is reading this: take note!

For me personally, this dilemma is an enormous tension between two very important things in my life: (i) Middle East Peace and (ii) 10 minutes' extra sleep at night. So here is the solution I have come up with:

Peace offsets.

You know, like carbon offsets? When Al Gore gets all upset about global warming but then runs up a huge bill air conditioning his mansion, he gives money to various organisations that promise to "offset" his carbon footprint by planting trees, investing in renewable energy, etc. I figure, why not do the same with Road 443? Every time I drive on it, I will make a small donation to Peace Now or a similarly worthy group. So just as Al Gore can have his cake and eat it too, so can I! I can be self-righteous and lefty-liberal about the Peace Process, and go to bed to enjoy my extra 10 minutes' sleep with a clear conscience! Hurray! Who said living in Israel was complicated?

Fridge

...arrived.

The first week

Would you believe that after all the goodbye parties, at JTS and in Caldwell, after all the tearful farewells, after all the have-a-nice-lifes, after sending all our stuff on a big ship through the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, after schlepping 14 suitcases, yes, 14, count 'em and weep, on the plane with us, the Israeli government still won't bloody believe that we are actually back? As far as Ehud Olmert is concerned (or his duly appointed representatives, at least), we are under suspicion of being visitors, tourists, passers-by. But we need to be recognised as residents because that's the only way the kids can get national health coverage. So in order to achieve this, we have had to enter the Orwellian netherworld that is Israeli governmental bureaucracy. It's kind of like a badly designed board game: the National Insurance Office tells us we need to go to the Absorption Ministry. We go to the Absorption Ministry. No, they say, you need to go to the National Insurance Office. And so on...

Anyway, 8 days, a lot of car miles, a few stomach ulcers, and one near-divorce later, we seem to have succeeded. We are now officially Israelis. Again.

There is good news, though. As I'm sure you've heard, the Israel economy has really boomed in the last week. The Eldan car rental agency reports record profits. The stock of Traklin Electric, a large appliance store, is rocketing. And 012, the internet company, thinks Christmas has come early. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Sinclair family is happy to subsidise all these fine institutions. Just when they think they've screwed us for as much as they can get, behold! A new loophole is found that earns them even more money. I have come to the conclusion that the State of Israel doesn't need to strike oil to get rich - it'll be fine if we stay around for a few more weeks...

Speaking of appliances, I'll leave you with a particularly Israeli story. I ordered a fridge over the internet, in the US, from an Israeli internet store. We were due to arrive on Tuesday the 10th, and the fridge was to be delivered on Wednesday the 11th. But on Wednesday morning when I phoned the store to check that everything was in order... let's see how good your powers of narrative deduction are... can you guess what happens next in this story? Yes, that's right. "Oh, they have canceled the delivery for today. You'll get it tomorrow.". Well, screw you, I said. (To myself. I haven't become that Israeli yet). So we ran out to a local appliance store and found a similar fridge there which seemed ok. In these stores, the salesmen work on commission, so it's a bit like buying a car. We told the salesman that we didn't have a fridge at all right now, so we needed it delivered, like, today or tomorrow. He goes off to confer with his manager. "It won't be till Sunday", he says. Can't do it, then, we say. Maybe you could lend us a fridge from the display till the delivery? No, they can't do that. He goes off to talk to his manager again. To cut a long story short, the manager ends up lending us the store's office fridge! I go into the back room, it's a waist-high mini-fridge thing, he takes out the carton of milk that's in there, and I schlep it off into the car. Just like that! I doubt that would happen in Sears.

There is a twist in this tale: the new fridge wasn't delivered on Sunday. Of course not! It's Israel! On Monday we phoned to complain and they said we'll have it on Thursday (which is now tomorrow). So these poor blokes at the electric store have been without their fridge for a week!

Anyway, in short, we have had a crazy, hectic week, full of running around dealing with bureaucracy, buying things, and eating out a lot (well, we haven't had a full size fridge and our pots and pans are on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic). We are living in Modi'in, half-way between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, we have rented an apartment for the year, and it's lovely, and the kids are so far taking it all very very well. We are tired and frazzled but basically happy. Be in touch!