Is It Time for The Times of Israel?

Posted on February 19, 2012 by

      Many of my fellow bloggers in Israel have moved their blogs to www.timesofisrael.com, an ambitious new online endeavor launched by David Horowitz, former editor of The Jerusalem Post. I too could move to The Times, but I don’t want to rush into stardom. I like my loyal 20-120 readers. There is something intimate about writing a blog on a web site that a few people visit, many of whom are related to me.

 I like the banner on my web site, my photo of a piece of Palestinian embroidery from a dress I bought in the Old City in 1968. I like the writing implements on the right side  of the banner, sitting in a cup (which you can’t see because my talented daughter cropped it.) The cup was a gift for my fifth birthday. Certainly you must have noticed by now that one of the writing implements is a kulmus. That’s a Greek word for a pen made from a reed. The kulmus, like the feather of a kosher bird, is deemed kosher for writing mezuzot and Torah scrolls. I like the fact that this particular kulmus has accompanied me from my days as a guide at Neot Kedumim, The Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel  (1993-2000) straight into the digital age of blogging. If I join the The Times blog page, I will have to leave these images behind.

Moving to The Times, should I decide to do so, is like taking the blog out of the country and sticking it in an office on the 44th floor of a hi-rise building on a block with twelve other hi-rises in the midst of a bustling city. The blog looks out the window and sees only windows and more blogs, while today, when it looks out the window,  it sees vineyards, blossoming almonds and pines.   

View from Write In Israel

 The Times of Israel aspires to be a serious online daily.  One of my favorite writers, Mitch Ginsburg, is the military correspondent over there.  I love the fact that the military correspondent writes and translates fiction in his spare time, of which he will have little now that he has taken this job.

If I decide to blog with The Times, the blog editor will need a photo of my face. I can’t decide which image I would like to offer my potential new anonymous public. Should I let my hair hang over half my face — the right side with all the pock marks from adolescence — giving the impression of a mysterious ingénue? Or should I pull my hair back with conservative barrettes and play the wise old gray-haired woman? Should I smile or sneer? These are serious considerations.  

If I decide to move, it will be hard to say good-bye to my baby blog. It’s still learning to walk. Who will pick it up over there at The Times?

All these concerns prevented me from giving a spontaneous Yes to the blog editor when we spoke last week. I know The Times needs women bloggers and they probably need bloggers to represent the over sixty-five crowd and they certainly need bloggers who do not voice opinions on Iran, anti-Semitism and strawberries.  They want bloggers who react to their inner conflicts rather than geo-political, macro-economic and international conflicts. Still, do I want to fill the gap of soft news?   

And then there’s the problem of fame. I’d hate to be driven to drugs like Whitney Houston and end my career in a Beverly Hills bathtub. Somehow, staying in the woods outside Jerusalem and keeping a low profile (about forty-four meters below the rader) suits me.

 Then again, isn’t a writer supposed to want a large audience? If I don’t crave a large audience, am I still a writer? Can I learn to accept having more than 120 readers?

So goes my ambivalence. I share it with you today just in case I decide by the next post to cross over. Should that happen, you will receive the first two sentences of a blog post from writeinisrael.com followed by the line: To read the rest of this blog, click www.timesofisrael.com  If that should happen, know that I will always remain faithful to you, my first readers.

 

 

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Moments for Psalms

Posted on February 11, 2012 by

      This week I went to the Income Tax Authority to get 3 tax forms for my 3 employers. Below the ledge on which I filled out my request I found a small white Book of Psalms. Hands had rustled it’s cover worn.  

     Under the other ledge for filling out requests lay another well-used Book of Psalms, this one black and clean. I wondered if someone had lost these books or if the Income Tax Authority, perchance, had strategically placed this reading material for the anxious public waiting in line for assessment. I was #175.  #132 had not yet been called.  That’s  a waiting period of  6-10 psalms, I calculated, in Jerusalem’s temple of calculations.

     I gave both books to the young woman handing out the queue numbers and directing people to a working photocopy machine on the 2nd floor. (Tip: Whenever you go to the Income Tax Authority, take photocopies of your last salary slips. The in-house photocopy machine is often out of order.) The young woman didn’t know who owned the holy books which led me to believe she had not placed them there. She suggested I leave them on the counter above her desk, confident their rightful owners would return.

     Years ago when I was waiting for my get ceremony to begin at the divorce court of the Jerusalem Rabbinate, I looked around the room for reading material.  The tables were empty, save for one Book of Psalms. I opened it randomly and began reading.

     A week before the visit to the Income Tax Authority, I was present at a medical procedure carried out on the body of a person I love. The officiating doctor joked while he worked and before I knew it, we were walking out of the treatment room as another patient walked in. For the first time in my life, I felt the need for Psalms. I wanted to pray and thank and beseech and bless, but there was not 1 Book of Psalms on the 4 tables in the hospital waiting room. Magazines on design and home, fashion and food lay scattered around the waiting room, but the moment called for something more. I wanted lines of poetry with no specific connection to 2012. I sought rhythms that had survived  centuries and styles. I needed words like the ax that cut through “the frozen sea in us.”

     Yesterday I walked along the beach in Tel Aviv at 8 in the morning. Heavy gray clouds like mountain ranges invaded from the west. White waves rose like loud chords on the turquoise water. The sandy beach was nearly empty, save for a man facing the water doing Chi Quong. I walked to stand behind him, put down my purse and imitated his movements. Two or three other people joined the silent group. The waves became violent  and the clouds darker. Winds picked up as we moved our arms and torsos in a stationary backstroke. I cleared my mind of thoughts about the night before, the breakfast to come, the afternoon visit. I became rooted movement in a whorl of movement, a stone in a storm.

      Another moment, I thought, for Psalms.

 

    

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Good Mourning, America

Posted on December 24, 2011 by

      WriteInIsrael is writing from Cleveland on this Shabbat and Christmas Eve Day, when all the drivers in the city act as if they learned how to drive in Israel. No kindness on the road.  A woman visiting her one-hundred-year old mother at the same facility where my mother lives told me, It’s the holiday rush. Last minute shopping. Wish the nastiness on the roads in Israel were seasonal. 

 But that’s not what I want to write about now. That’s just local resistance to the real topic that’s on my mind at the end of this Gregorian year. As the year draws to an end so does my mother’s life. I came to Cleveland in a flurry fearing I would not get to see my mother alive, but I’m leaving tomorrow knowing I have said my good-byes and done my part “to release her into dying” (hospice jargon).

Part of me, the part that should have been born in the 1840′s instead of the 1940′s wants to stay with my mother 24/7 so I can minister to her every unverbalized need. That’s also the part that imagines my mother living and dying in my house, that imagined brick house somewhere in northeastern Ohio, not far from my sister’s and brother’s. But having been born into the generation that was commanded to leave home at eighteen, I now reside on the other side of the world from my mother and sister and brother.  I rely on the excellent, trained caregivers who know just how to get her from a standing position to prone.

I’ve sat with my mother for several hours a day for the past five days, sometimes just watching her sleep, trying to decipher the words she mumbles like sick and oy. As the hospice nurse told me so convincingly, She’s in there somewhere. Sometimes we get a flicker of her.

The hospice nurse seems to know a lot about dying, though she hasn’t done it herself yet. She says dying mirrors the birth process: your body changes, you know it will end, you don’t know exactly when, but when that happens, there will be a dramatic change. That comparison comforted me for about a day or two.  Also her telling me that my mother will never be alone even if nobody is in the room when she dies. I thought she would say something about Jesus in the next sentence (not a Jewish facility), but she didn’t and I appreciated her ecumenical take on death. Everyone chooses, she said, when they die, that is, when they end their journey. I didn’t tell her that one of the reasons I wanted to leave America at twenty-one was because I couldn’t make choices in supermarkets and department stores. I’ve progressed somewhat in that respect and maybe by the time I hit ninety-one, like my mom, I too will be able to decide when to die.

The hospice massage therapist is a blonde woman who floats in on a cloud of love. She comes with her own three-legged stool so she can sit wherever there is a little bit of room.  Massaging those at the end of life is my calling she explains and I imagine beyond her warm generous smile there is a world of sorrow and pain, but I don’t ask. She has entered my life as a surrogate angel. She is the one who will hold my mother’s hand when I return to Israel. She is the one who will place her hand on my mother’s foot and if my mother should balk, she is the one who will sit next to her quietly, radiating love like a bulb gives off light, listening to my mother’s moans, putting her gentle hand on my mother’s gray hair.

I am fortunate to have such wonderful women in place for my mother. They have assuaged my guilt. Almost.  I can only hope that their lovingkindness will accompany me as well on my journey back to Israel and that within days of my return I will still be able to recall with nuclear vividness those small flickers of my mother I’ve been blessed to experience these past few days, her squeezing my hand, her eyes in mine.

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Coming Home to the National Library

Posted on December 10, 2011 by

 I’ve finally started to write my book. The declaration of doing so on this blog several weeks ago helped me reach the goal. Once I realized  I could not write the book at home, no matter how wonderful my room of my own, I was able to act. The next day I went to the National Library.

As I climbed the steps from the free parking lot to the National Library on the Givat Ram Campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I realized how difficult it is to write a book. There are unexpected twists and turns. You walk down narrow lanes, not sure where you will end up. You come up against steel walls, thinking this is the end, but you go there anyway, turn right and find another path. Eventually, you see the light. After another short climb, you burst into the open space and romp among the tall trees. Guessing that the library and salvation are to the left, as you remember from your last visit in 1967 when you were studying hif’il and huf’al in the august reading room, you bear left and climb some more. Yes, your memory still works. There in its clean Bauhaus frame above and behind the cedars pines and sycomores, stands the National Library of Israel. Crowds throng to its entrance. You join them, deposit your coat and purse and receive a black bag for your laptop and a clear plastic bag for the belongings you will need for the next hour or two while you write your book. You climb yet another flight of stairs, though by now your camera’s battery has gone dead, but it doesn’t matter. The Ardon  glass wall  tells you this might be the best place in Jerusalem and slowly, as you open the door to the reading room in which you first mastered the difference between hem and hen, you realize you have come home.

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Cooking, Writing and Going Cold Turkey

Posted on November 30, 2011 by

Cooking has certain advantages over writing. While you stand over your two-minute egg you can cha-cha-cha. If you forget your glasses in the bathroom, you can still rinse red lentils. Cooking is more sensual than writing. You can taste the cherry tomatoes before you throw them into the pot. You can smell the fresh basil, fondle the parsley, listen to the bubbling of boiling rice. Even the tools for cooking are more fun than a pen or a computer.

Consider the ceramic white bladed knife with orange handle I recently purchased. The knife glides through the skin and innards of an onion with the ease of a surgical blade. Examine the new veggie chopper with its own clear plastic measuring cup. The chopper makes neat incisions and comes with its own cleaning brush!You get more exercise when you cook than when you write. Crushing garlic strengthens the muscles of the arm in a way that typing never could. Using the new veggie chopper demands use of the whole body, especially when chopping an over-sized slice of kohlrabi that is totally unsuitable for this particular model.

It is for these reasons that I have been spending more hours in the kitchen than at my desk. Creativity can go wild in the kitchen when you limit your ingredients to no salt no sugar no oil and still want to eat.  Throw in a little of this, a little of that, add  some red adjectives here, yellow prepositions there and Voila, you’ve created a once-in-a-lifetime dish of veggie something that will never be replicated, neither by you nor anyone else. 

Since November 10th, when David survived his triple bypass surgery, I have forbidden the passage of sugar, salt, oil and processed foods beyond the front door. This may sound extreme, but I believe in going cold turkey. Didn’t I stop sucking my thumb on Thanksgiving Day when I was nine? (Since then, I’ve never touched my thumb, except for research purposes. (See http://www.biu.ac.il/hu/en/cw/ilanot/prose/labensohn.html)  

When I’m not in the kitchen I’m reading food blogs. I started with http://healthygirlskitchen.blogspot.com because Wendy, the blogger, is my brother’s sister-in-law and it’s a great blog. From there I kept clicking. I found a medical librarian at www.happyhealthylonglife.com. After every blog post about the endothelial lining of the arteries and Omega-3, I threw out something from the fridge. The truth made me free. I threw out mustard and ketchup. I hurled almond cookies into the trash. After reading an article by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., a retired surgeon from the Cleveland Clinic, at www.heartattackproof.com, I threw out the goat yogurt and labaneh, his principle being, “You may not eat anything with a mother or a face.” If I were to obey everything this guru who treated Bill Clinton advises, I would have to throw out my beloved olive oil. Maybe after Chanukah, but not yet. For one who lives in the Mediterranean basin, rejecting olive oil is like deleting air.

Sometimes when I’m rinsing the beans, I wonder why one would ever want to leave the kitchen for the desk. You can be so creative in a kitchen. Why write? Nonetheless, something about the writing process pulls my apron strings. Writing is inner and hidden, while cooking is outer and visible. Writing is immeasurable; cooking demands tablespoons. Writing is great for your figure; you can’t eat it.

Cooking and writing have some things in common. For best results both depend on a mysterious alchemy and love. Both rely on the Use of the Imagination. Sometimes I will imagine a whole essay before I write it. All I need then, to get me putting words down is a first sentence. Once I imagine that first sentence I’m ready to fly. The finished product never comes out as fabulous as the imagined essay, though, and always needs more drafts. So too with cooking. The imagined tomato sauce is rich, thick, full of Tuscan aromas. I start with a simple onion, but by the time I finish, no white bean with any self-respect would want to swim around in my wimpy saltless sugarless oilless sauce. Unlike the essay, though, I don’t discard this first draft of tomato sauce. Children in China are starving; right, Grandma? And tomatoes cost money, which doesn’t grow on trees.

Meanwhile I found a new veggie store on the Castel that has gorgeous fresh produce as good as the shuk and I’m enjoying preparing the food with my new tools and when I’m reading the food blogs and recipes, I’m always thinking about the book I’m not writing.  

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What Are My Blogging Goals?

Posted on November 5, 2011 by

For a person who thought a goal was something that only happened in soccer, it was difficult to define my blogging goals when I started to blog. I just wanted to write and for months I hadn’t been writing. The blog format seemed a perfect framework for a blocked writer: short takes and micro essays. Then Lisa Rosenbaum, author of A Day of Small Beginnings (Little Brown, 2006) started a blog called The Write Stop at http://lprosenbaum,wordpress.com  In her introductory post she explained that her blog would be a place where she would go when she had to stop working on her novel, “a place to stop for a short visit before returning to what we do.” This seemed so sensible and much more ambitious than my own blog, which became the place where I go to work. Rosenbaum’s blog is like a lounge where we rest from the real work. I wanted to adopt this concept. The only problem was I wasn’t doing the real work. I had no project from which to rest,  to stop working, other than my blog posts.

 That was my first reaction. Then I remembered that ever since February 2010 I’ve thought about writing a memoir of my bat mitzvah, something like Today I Am a Hot Flash: Celebrating Bat Mitzvah at Sixty-five. I’ve done the research, written notes and some scenes, but have not been able to commit fully, as in “My goal is to finish this book.”  Last week when I searched my soul to figure out what was blocking me from committing to writing this memoir, I discovered Jeremiah. Yes, the prophet himself was ranting and raving, intimidating me into passivity.

Once I defined this block, David,  my partner and coach, handed me a way out. He gave me  Jeremiah written by Rabbi Benyamin Lau, one of my favorite Israeli rabbis. Even though the book is in Hebrew, I started reading immediately. Each page acted like a chisel, chipping layers off my writer’s block. By page ninety I was ready to write.

 First I reread what I had written over the past twenty-two months. Not totally bad. Then I organized all the material – one notebook for the research, another for the writing. I want to declare that this stage of organizing the papers, filing the notes, slipping the pages into transparent nylon folders is empowering.

The next day while riding the #400 bus to my day job at Bar-Ilan, I came up with a possible structure. I wrote it down frantically on the back of a flyer for ballet lessons as the bus ground to a halt, stuck in a traffic jam near Ben Gurion airport. I didn’t care where I was or when I’d get to work because I had a map of where I was going. The memoir had direction, a beginning, chapters, an end. I was flying high.

 Now I have a project. My goal is to finish the project. My brain is working again. It’s writing. Even as I sleep, it’s threshing the material. A kernel of an idea wakes me at 4:30 a.m. and before I even put on my slippers to walk into the living room to do a few yoga stretches before making my morning coffee and sweeping the floor reading yesterday’s paper cleaning the windows watering the plants and organizing my desk before sitting down in front of the computer to read all my emails and surf a little, I feel blessed that I have conquered my block, at least for today. Now my blog too can morph into an airport lounge, that liminal space between home and take-off where we cajole our faint courage to fly.             

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Our Inner Gilad Shalit

Posted on October 21, 2011 by

     I’ve been wondering what it is about the Gilad Shalit story that captures the imagination of Israelis so much so that we want to know if he ate ketchup with the schnitzel and chips at his first supper home. Shalit is no ordinary kidnapped soldier. This is a prisoner whose family became part of the Israeli psyche. Mother Aviva is the incarnation of the biblical Rachel praying for her lost child to return home. Father Noam is the biblical Jacob, unable to rest until he sees his son alive. Gilad is Joseph, the abandoned lost son who reappears after years of silence to save the family from despair.

            If these are the characters who have appeared on Israeli TV and radio every night and in Israeli newspapers every morning, then they, like biblical archetypes, may represent different aspects of our own psyches. I think one of the reasons we could accept the Shalit deal is because Gilad represents the lost child imprisoned in all of us. Usually, this aspect of our psyches disappears during childhood through repression after a family or physical trauma. The lost child, or that part of our psyches which becomes repressed, sits and waits in a dark pit for years. Other aspects of our psyche develop and emerge into the light, but not the lost child. It can take fifty years for the return of the repressed; its worth is immeasurable.

            That’s why we cried when we saw the first signs of life on October 18—the black cap, the white shirt with blue stripes, the frail body pushed by Hamas. We were overcome with awe when, despite his frailty and pain, the returning son stood erect and saluted his saviors. We felt compassion when, driving by flag-wavers and well-wishers lining the road to Mitzpeh Hila, Gilad held his right hand over his heart. The abandoned lost child returned! He spoke with intelligence. Clearly, he was now a man with a strong will to live.

            If Gilad can return from the pit a hero, then there is hope for those of us who live  “normal lives,” but still have to repair wounded psyches.

            We are anxious to follow the hero’s progress of rehabilitation: a walk in the sun, a bike ride, a game of ping pong, meeting with friends. Each piece of news helps us to understand that Joseph lives. He is like us. He walks talks and eats schnitzel. Miracles happen. The lost child returns.

            At the Hof Hacarmel train station in Haifa two hours after Gilad returned home, a young man on Platform 1 opened the glass window covering an advertisement as high as a wall. He covered an old ad with a new one and locked the window. Everyone standing nearby saw four large black words printed on the white page:

Gilad

Baruch Shuvcha Habaiytah

            At that moment we were all Yosef, the blessed child coming back from the dark.  And we were also Rachel and Jacob, waiting with open arms. We were the welcomed and the welcoming. Our hearts expanded in every direction, making room for the return of our own lost selves.

A New Day

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