Dr Savta’s web log

Once again I am struck by the fact that except for the Christian citizens of Israel, this day is like any other day. When I lived in the US, I understood that the majority culture found meaning in this holiday. Those who were religious/spiritual looked to it as a time to celebrate something very special to them. Those who liked the feel of the season, the tinsel and the snowflakes and the warm fire and the decorations, looked forward to that holiday feeling. And when I was a child and didn’t understand the deeper meaning of the holiday, I too enjoyed the lights and the songs and the smells of pine and the sounds of bells.

As I became more aware of who I was and what my traditions were, I realized that these symbols beautiful as they were, these songs, melodic as they sounded, were not mine They were part of something bigger and something that had a great deal of meaning to others, but they were part of a tradition that was not mine and that did not have meaning beyond the aesthetic to me and my family and friends.

When our children were small, my husband was a US Army chaplain. We moved from post to post from the time our oldest was 5 until most of the children were out of high school. Often we were the only Jewish family in the neighborhood. Never were there more than a few families on base where both parents were Jewish. Most of the time, the families were not observant Jews. I can think of only two or three exceptions. So as Jews, we were isolated from a community.

Meanwhile, our children were attending the local schools and so every year around Xmas time, it was “and now Mrs. Michelson will tell us about Hanuka, the Jewish Xmas.” As the years went on I enjoyed this less and less. It served only to point out to all of the other children in the classs how out of step our children were with them. Granted, the classmates thought that Hanuka was “neat” as I brought along a menorah and lit candles for them and sang songs for them, sometimes teaching them a song and sometimes I even brought along latkes, and I did the best I could, but for me it was a tedious task each year educating several rooms full of children about what we celebrated and how Hanuka was NOT the Jewish Xmas.

My children and I would go shopping, and see and hear Xmas everywhere we were, and, indeed, there was beauty in it, but each year I became increasingly aware of how much I didn’t fit in that place. It simply wasn’t mine.

When I moved to Israel, it was suddenly an amazing thing to be part of the majority culture. I didn’t have to drive 100 or 200 miles to get kosher meat or to visit the mikvah (ritual bath). I did not have to explain why I had holidays that no one else had. Here, with each holiday, the country prepares with special displays, activities, and sale items, but these are for OUR holidays. And this year, once again, I am shocked that December 25 has come and I didn’t even notice it.

To all of my Christian friends, please accept my wishes for a very blessed Xmas and a wonderful new year.

After hearing about this on the news, I looked it up, and here it is, straight from the source, Catholic World News:

Vatican, Dec. 17, 2007 (CWNews.com) - In a break from tradition, the life-sized crèche in St. Peter’s Square will show Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in their home at Nazareth rather than in a stable in Bethlehem, the Vatican has announced.

Instead of the familiar scene of the Baby Jesus laid in a manger, the Vatican’s Nativity scene this year will show the infant Jesus in a home that also includes his father’s workshop. No reason has been given for the change.
*************

But I have a guess…

It was common for Christian pilgrims and tourists to visit Bethlehem, expecially at Christmas time. From 1967 when Israel returned to Bethlehem until 1995 when they handed the city over to the Arabs, Christian residents and visitors felt comfortable visiting the Church of the Nativity and gathering in Manger Square. But ever since the local Arabs launched their terror campaign in the year 2000, Bethlehem has not been a very safe place for Christians. As a matter of fact, by November 2006, the Christian population of Bethlehem had dwindled from the 80% it had been before the terror war to only 15% of the population. It has decreased since then. In addition, visiting Bethlehem has not been safe. Fewer and fewer Christian tourists feel comfortable entering Bethlehem.

So it doesn’t surprise me that Nazareth has been chosen by the Vatican for its Christmas display this year. Nazareth, a city with a large Christian and Moslem Arab population, lies within the “green line” and it is kept safe by Israeli police. People are able to move freely and they can feel safe there.

I wonder if anyone else understands….

When I go to conferences I like to make good use of my time. I usually choose to go to conferences and presentations that I believe will be interesting. I realize, though, that sometimes people have a gift for making even interesting subjects boring. But I don’t like to waste time and in most cases it’s not really appropriate to bring knitting and crocheting or collage materials. So once I am in the room and realize that I can listen with half an ear, I usually will begin writing. In the old days, calligraphing my children’s names used to keep me busy. Now that there are grandchildren, that can take up a good part of the session as I carefully draw each letter of each name. Some of the grandchildren have two names, some of them are pretty long, and one has three names.

But sometimes instead of just using up the time idly, will write something that actually has to do with the subject of the lecture or presentation– which is how I came to write the following.

But first, let me create the atmosphere. I am sitting in a cavernous room in a hotel in Jerusalem. It is dimly lit (”oh my, I can barely see what I am writing!”) and someone is speaking about Jewish Genealogy, a subject that interests me. However, somehow, that person has made it so uninteresting that I have begun thinking about why I am there. I am there to connect to people I never knew, but to whom somehow I feel an obligation. So I decide to write a letter to them, collectively, hoping that maybe at the Heavenly maildrop they will find each other and perhaps share it with each other. And so I began:

Your names were Yaakov, Yitzchak, Ze’ev, Reuven, Raizel, Ada…
Some of your names, we don’t even know.
We have only the barest facts of your existence- a yahrtzeit, a census record, a ship’s manifest, a name on a tombstone.
We never saw you laugh, heard you cry.
We never knew your smile, your touch.
We know you left a land of want and went to a land of plenty– for your sons and daughters and their children.
We know you worked hard, you helped your “landsmen,” you laughed at Yiddish jokes, and you gave everything “fur de kinder.”
Each year at your seder table you looked forward to celebrating in Jerusalem.
And your children, my grandparents, heard and understood.
And your grandchildren, my parents, heard, but did not understand.
And by the time I was born, it was left to my grandparents to say, but for me to understand.
Because what better tribute can I pay you than keeping the faith?
What better gift than fulfilling your dreams?
What better deed that ensuring the devotion of future generations to the land and faith you held dear?

Over ten years ago, I joined a mailing list for people who were interested in making aliya to Israel. English speakers who already were living in Israel answered the questions of those who were contemplating aliya. I got to “know” many of the people on the list from their postings. There were the generous and kind ones (most of them), the intellectuals (some of them also falling into the first category), the “I know everything better than you do’s”, the “I may not know, but it doesn’t stop me from preaching’s,” “I made it in Israel, but you probably can’t’s” and other assorted people.

Some of the people were people I got to meet in real life and aside from having a very different physical appearance than what I had pictured, they were exactly who I thought they were. It is/was a very special group of people.

But not everyone on the list was an answerer… there were those who asked questions. One, in particular, had a a very winning way of asking questions. I read as he asked about aliya– where it would be good for him to live given his “black hat.” It seemed like only a few months before he was here and asking how to get a stain out of his shirt. In a fllash, he was asking about wedding halls, and in what seemed like no time at all, he was asking about maternity hospitals. Then he asked about pediatricians and recently asked for more information about where he could receive services appropriate to his daughter.

As I smiled at his latest posting, I realized that if I were standing behind him in a checkout line, I would not be able to identify him, yet, I have watched his life change over the years and find myself hoping that he will have the pleasure of seeing his family grow and that together he and I and my family and friends and millions more people I don’t know will enjoy living in a safe, secure Israel.

Sometimes it’s the small things that are the ones that bring you the most joy.

I am blessed that my two daughters both live within a 10 minute walk of my home. I am able to see them frequently, usually for a few minutes or an hour at a time, and that feels very comfortable to me.

I see my younger daughter usually a couple of times during the week and almost always at synagogue on shabbat. We have always been close. I see her baby enough to see the day by day changes as her awareness of the world grows. Now that she knows her name and consistently smiles when she sees me, I am working on teaching her to give a kiss. Just yesterday when I said the word “kiss” I saw her pucker up her lips!

I see my older daughter less. The busy working mother of 5, pregnant with her 6th, she barely has time for herself, let alone spare time to spend with me. We talk on the phone, I catch a few minutes here and there when I stop by to drop off or pick up something or someone, and I call to her as we pass her home on the way back from synagogue on shabbat. Usually she and her husband and at least the two little girls come out to their garden to greet us– her little girls with their happy smiling faces and their cheerful voices! Sometimes her older children come out too.

And there are, of course, the family events where all of my children gather. I really am blessed.

But yesterday I received a call from my older daughter and she had a morning free! We left Modi’in on a sunlit day and drove to Jerusalem and spent time walking together and looking in shop windows and having lunch. We talked about the past and the present and the future. How sweet it was! After all of the years of mothering and the years of worrying and seeing her through difficult times, yesterday was such a wonderful affirmation of our relationship. Beautiful (as she always has been), intelligent, accomplished, and possessing a grace and serenity, there was my daughter, there with me. We finished our meal and walked back to the car through the bustling Jerusalem streets.

It was a perfect day.

And when I got home, who was there but my younger daughter and her baby and our new “adopted” daughter! More happiness, more pleasant conversation, more exchanging of kindness and compassion.

Later, after they left, my husband said to me, “Would you like to go out to dinner?” And so we did. Again, it was lovely just sitting and talking and enjoying life.

It was a perfect day

Living in Israel is sometimes surrealistic. OK, who am I kidding? It’s always surrealistic to live in a country that is working and building and thriving at the same time as hundreds of millions of people are preparing for/waiting for/praying for its destruction. It is a country that at once is the best place to live (at least I think so) and is the most self-deprecating, self-destructive country I know. It is a country with a huge amount of intellectual capital with little of it residing in the people who are running it.

So it should not have seemed odd to have lived in two different worlds in the last couple of days. We were getting much needed rain in quantities that were awe-inspiring and the sun would then peek out for a few minutes and then the downpours would resume. Meanwhile, my cousin who was visiting in Manhattan was messaging me about the beautiful weather there. At the same time on Wednesday evening that I was waiting for my fresh mehadrin turkey to be brought to me by a man who lives in Kiyat Arba (outside of Hebron) I was watching the Fox News Network and I was back in the US, preparing for Thanksgiving with the Americans.

And last night, we had our turkey and cranberry sauce and all sorts of goodies including pumpkin pie (baked by my daughter) and apple pie (baked by me) and we enjoyed the company of our children and our current youngest grandchild– and felt thankful– grateful for the home we knew in the US, privileged to be able to come and make our homes here, and grateful to the source of all blessings for all of the blessings that have been bestowed upon us.

Yesterday Israel commemorated the assassination of the late Prime Minister, Yitzchak Rabin. Twelve years ago, he was killed by a man who probably was unbalanced at the time and certainly was provoked by an agent of the Israel government, Avishai Raviv, who has since been sanitized and has disappeared from public view. The assassin has been in jail ever since.

People who teach the “Rabin Legacy” speak of “the right” as having killed Rabin. They speak of the rabbis and teachers whose speech led to it. This is of course, patently untrue. “The right” is not a monolithic group and it certainly does not have a tradition of killing its opponents. In addition, every person carries the responsibility for his own acts.

It was Rabin who pitted himself against “the right,” delegitimizing them in the service of his making a peace with the Arabs that even he knew was unlikely to come. It was he who characterized “the right” as being unworthy of consideration. His words and actions were harsh.

So now, each year on the anniversary of the assassination, the Rabin spokespeople talk about democracy and openness, and it was only last night that one of them said (referring to the assassin) “he and his whole disgusting family of insects…” and then went on in a high-toned manner to deplore “incitement.”

I think that Yitzchak Rabin’s assassination was a terrible, criminal act, but I despise the fact that those who revere him have used it to demonize a significant part of the population. If that is his legacy, it should best be forgotten.

It doesn’t happen often, but this year, we in Israel get to experience what we used to have in the US- a “three day yom tov.” One of the many benefits of living in Israel is that we have them only rarely because except for Rosh HaShana, all of the two day holidays outside of Israel are one day holidays in Israel.

How well I remember being on Army bases in the US with four and then five children, the only religiously observant family, celebrating two days of holiday plus shabbat. Oh my. Aside from the occasional Army couple or lonely single soldiers, we had few guests since everyone else was working and the children’s friends were at school. It was a long three days.

But now everything is different because those three days will zip by with family and friends joining us and with us joining them for meals and conversation and walks in the park. Holidays are such happy, joyful times here. But the three-day yom tov does bring its own sources of anxiety:

1. Where am I going to put all of the food I need to store to serve for the next three days???
2. Will there really be enough fresh vegetables to make a good salad for shabbat?
3. Will 4 potato kugels be enough?
4. Is it possible to stay on anything like a decent diet in the midst of this food orgy?

Tune in for the answers to these and other questions in our next exciting episode:
“Why can’t Yom Kippur be three days long?”

Subtlety was never my strong suit.

Today my husband and I and our older daughter and her youngest daughter got up early in the morning (especially early for our daughter who only last night returned from BlogHer in Chicago) and drove to Ben Gurion Airport. A phenomenal thing happened there.

We were waiting for a planeload (yes, a whole plane full!) of new American immigrants to Israel. The old terminal at the airport was filled with friends, relatives, dignitaries, and anyone who wanted to greet our new family members who were finally coming home.

While we waited, a bus came toward us and on it were a group of Ethiopians who were also coming home. We sang to them “Heiveinu Shalom Aleichem” and with tears in our eyes waved our blue and white flags. And then the buses of American “Olim” started to arrive. We couldn’t suppress our tears of joy. We stood there holding aloft a banner with the names of the people we were waiting for on it. All around us there was music and singing and dancing and people of every age, size, shape, attire, and color were enjoying this moment together.

When finally we made contact with our new olim, it was really a feeling of family being reunited even though they were not members of our family. But at ceremonies like this, sponsored by Nefesh B’Nefesh, we come together and for a short time are everything we are supposed to be- warm, welcoming, and happy to see our family come home.

First of all, I have once again changed the settings on my blog so that real people can write their comments on my postings. For several months it seems the only comments getting through had to do with medications. The spammers know all of the tricks! Anyway, if you would like to comment from now on, it is possible. Comments on past postings are also welcome and I will respond, if it seems appropriate.

And now to life in Israel.

Today I saw some friends and one told me about this incident that he witnessed…

He was in an area of Jerusalem that has recently become home to a large number of ultra-Orthodox people. He was standing near a bus stop where there was a young woman “more unclad than clad” waiting for a bus. As the ultra-Orthodox men walked by, they averted their eyes and said nothing. One of the ultra-Orthodox men walked by and looked in her direction and kept walking. A few minutes later, he returned with an apple and offered it to her. She was perplexed. She said, “For me?” He said, “Yes.” She still looked puzzled. He said, “Eve also didn’t know she was naked until she ate the apple.”