Not Sure This Summer Ever Even Started

I haven't posted in a long time.  Perhaps after the seven years I've been here life gets ordinary.  Maybe as I become more comfortable in my life here, I am not as desperate to write out and then share my experiences.  I have been pushing off writing this post for a long time.  Maybe I never had the writer's inspiration at the same time as energy to sit down and write, but I know the bigger reason is that every time I began this post in my head I got too emotional as tears would fill my eyes and blur my vision.  Sometimes people write to help make sense of the events happening to them, but this summer the realities of life in Israel were so vivid it was overwhelming.

I don't know if summer ever happened here.  It got really hot, sure.  So hot I had challenges like figuring out how to stay cool at night but still be properly attired to run into the stairwell if a siren went off, or lathering on sunscreen and packing a huge water bottle for the two funerals of soldiers I went to on Mount Herzl.  Heat that made us want to stay inside the air conditioned gan all day instead of going to the park, though the real reason we didn't venture out to the park was because we knew we could never get thirteen small children to the nearest bomb shelter if rockets were shot in the direction of Jerusalem.

I spent my summer angry at social media, even when the people posting on it meant well.  I spent my summer in awe of the tiny little country and the love and support I saw people giving each other and giving our defense forces.  I spent my summer struggling with the concepts of national mourning and personal mourning and how to negotiate between them.

I attended Max Steinberg z"l's funeral for purely selfish reasons, to feel a part of something that I felt was too much bigger than myself to authentically experience.  I thought "this might be as close as I get" and should take advantage of the opportunity, as morbid as that sounds.  Just six days later I was back on Mount Herzl for the funeral of Moshe Davino z"l, whose mother worked two classrooms over at the first gan I worked at here.  Every day on the way to my gan I would pass Ruchama who would cheerily say hi and ask me how everything was going.  At her son's funeral I just kept thinking that this is what רחל מבכה על בניה sounds like.  The sound of her crying echoed in my ears for days afterwards.  At the shiva tent two days later I almost felt that she was comforting me, reminding me that we are all in this together.

Tisha B'Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, was no challenge for anyone here.  We were all so overwhelmed with the events of the past two months that none of the rituals seemed necessary.  Reading Megillah Eichah was a poetic version of the news.  That day a ceasefire was declared, and most of our soldiers returned home, though not enough of them.  That shabbat at Torah reading one young man after another recited ברכת הגומל, the blessing for surviving a dangerous situation.  The shabbat after Tisha B'Av is Shabbat Nachamu, a shabbat of comforting.  נחמו נחמו עמי.

This summer I rejoiced like never before at any opportunity.  A boy in my gan turned three and got his first hair cut.  A girl in gan became a big sister.  There were engagements, weddings, births, and significant birthdays.  Good friends became parents.  Hundreds of people moved to Israel to make it their home.  The kids at gan, even when they were at their worst, comforted me with their laughs and smiles.  I had tears of joy to mix in with my tears of sorrow.

Summer, if it did happen, left me exhausted.

This week gan started its fourth year in a new location with twice the kids and a larger staff.  The preparations were exhausting.  This week is exhausting.  But I am exhausted because I am building something.  Maybe what I am building can in the future help repair the destruction of this past summer.  I am exhausted because the pressure to succeed in what we're building at gan feels that much greater.

I keep thinking back to what I wrote after Tisha B'Av in 2011, a few weeks before opening the gan.  It is possible to teach kindness and justice.  It is possible to instill the qualities in young children that we so desperately need them to have for our future.

שמרו משפט ועשה צדקה כי קרובה ישועתי לבוא וצדקתי להגלות

The 2013 JFNA General Assembly

I apologize in advance for the length of this post.  You are under no obligation to read it.  But if you do, feel free to share your thoughts.

On Monday I took off from gan to attend the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly here in Jerusalem.  For under an hour of volunteer work (I got really lucky with my job assignment), I was able to attend the rest of the day’s events for free.  My main reason for doing this was that I simply needed a change of pace.  Life has felt incredibly monotonous lately.  My gan is a short ten minute walk from my apartment.  The supermarket is also ten minutes away, shul on Shabbat is five minutes away, and friends’ apartments when I get invited out for meals are not much further.  It was time for a change of scenery.

My second thought was that I would run into all these people from my past.  I was actually disappointed in this regard.  I saw one friend from high school (who I possibly hadn’t seen since then) but I knew he was living in Israel and was not surprised to meet him at the conference.  But no one else!  I didn’t even really see so many familiar faces from Boston besides Jerry Silverman, who used to live around the corner from me, and Boston CJP President Barry Shrage who goes to my shul.  How boring.  What kind of Jewish event was this (for me at least)?

I knew that by moving to Israel I was putting myself in a bubble.  And by moving to Jerusalem and interacting almost entirely with English-speakers, I put myself in a yet smaller bubble.  I think that my educational experiences at UMD made me that much aware of the big world out there.  Since graduating I find myself reading all sorts of non-fiction and paying more attention to the news.  I suppose some of that has to do with growing up, but the lectures I attended as a History major and the discussions I had with classmates had me piecing together where we all came from and how we got here.  In that way I feel I can keep myself connected to “everyone else” while living in this tiny Jewish country in the Middle East.  It’s how I remind myself to look out from the bubble sometimes.

Attending the GA, or really learning more about the GA by being there in person, reminded me of something else.  I grew up in a community that was very much dedicated to volunteerism and sponsoring programs to help the less fortunate.  No task was too small.  Everyone could help in some way, big or small.  I was also always inspired by my shul’s history.  It started a year before I was born in another family’s library and then moved to my living room for a few weeks.  It was started by a few young families who wanted to create something new in the community.  We were the first Orthodox shul in the area to have Women’s tefilah groups, female shul presidents, and it is also a shul where any member can become a teacher and everyone else is ready and eager to learn and ask questions.  I would frequently hear about work being done by the Jewish Federation in Boston (aka the CJP) and other Federations around the country because I knew people working on the projects and about the fundraising going on in the community.  At the GA I met someone who works at Yemin Orde, an immigrant youth village in the North (that would be so cool to work at one day).  When I said I was from Boston and that my shul’s members were active supporters of Yemin Orde, she knew exactly what I was talking about.

I frequently have these moments where I am grateful to have grown up in the greater Boston Jewish Community.  But when I have these thoughts, I am thinking very specifically about my personal experience in the community.  There were a LOT of Jews in suits at the GA.  There were a lot of people who work for organizations all over North America, in hundreds of communities, on thousands of programs addressing social, economic, and political causes I haven’t given any real thought to in years.  It isn’t that I’m apathetic or uninformed.  It just isn’t right in front of me.  I have plenty of friends who work for Jewish organizations in the US and I read their posts on facebook, but it had simply been awhile since I paid much attention to the inner workings of Jews in America.  I will get back to this in a couple of paragraphs.

I am really curious to look up what the session topics are when the GA is hosted in North America, which happens 4/5 of the time.  I don’t know how the numbers compare in terms of participants overall, but there were a lot of Israelis at this conference (like real ones – not like me), and there was a lot of talk about Israel.  I understand that the Federation allocates millions of dollars every year to programs in Israel and that those programs would very much like this to keep happening.  So they send cute teenagers and young adults (and I mean real young adults, the lower half of the 18-45 years old range that JFNA people kept talking about) to talk about how these organizations have changed their lives so that Federations will want to keep giving to them.

As much as I started getting excited to be caught up on everything going on in America, I very much enjoyed this opportunity to hear about what’s going on outside the four block radius I spend 99% of my time in.  I met two high school students sent by the Society for Advancement of Education, an organization that helps teens from disadvantaged homes and communities get a solid education and grow in capable and confident young adults.  This one girl had a year where she missed 300 hours of school, and proudly told me that this year she has missed only 20.  The Society also runs a program for boys in yeshivas that skimp on (read: skip entirely) general studies (math, science, etc.) so that they can attend yeshiva and still learn the necessary material for completing the bagrut tests and, you know, knowing something that can actually get them a job one day.  I heard a lot about periphery cities like Ramle and Ashdod where organizations like Keshatot not only work to break the cycle of poverty, they cater to both Arab and Jewish citizens under one roof.  There was the conversation about Yemin Orde I mentioned before, and I heard Daniel Birnbaum, CEO of SodaStream, talk about the experience of running a company that successfully employs Jewish and Arab workers together and what it means for the workers and the workers’ families.

Back to the North America side of things.  I joked that I was going to carry around a flask and take a drink whenever I heard the Pew Study mentioned.  Maybe I went to all the wrong sessions, but I only heard it mentioned once, at the end of the day during Jerry Silverman’s closing remarks.  I’m not really disappointed about this, but I am surprised.  I was under the impression that this would be the focus of the conference.  After all, the JFNA is all about tackling the American Jewish Community’s biggest problems.  I have a lot of mixed feelings about the Pew Study.  I don’t know how accurate it is, I don’t know if it really tells us anything new, and since many streams of Judaism in the US were created and strongly affected by the events of the past century, I don’t know if we can really call the current state of things a major crisis.  Sure there are things that can be addressed.  I do feel strongly in the continuity of the Jewish religion, Jewish life, Jewish traditions, and Jewish identity. 

I know from my own experiences what community resources can contribute to those things.  I also don’t think “crisis” or “worry” are the right words.  I am confident, especially after getting a sense of how many people are working for these things, that the Federations will keep doing what they’ve always been doing, in innovative ways, and the narrative will continue.  If anything, maybe the Pew Study was a distraction, but maybe the fact I hardly heard it mentioned at the conference means that people there also felt that way.  On the other hand, I am a bit confused by how much the conference was focused on Israel and American Jews’ relationship with Israel.  I think the focus should have been flipped and have been more about Israeli Jews’ relationship with the community in the US.  I guess Israel does need its turn in the spotlight, and this is why the conference is here only once every five years.  However if there really is so much to do to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people in North America, I don’t know why there was so much about Women of the Wall, Iran, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Isn’t the point of these conferences to get all these people brainstorming together about how to better help their individual communities and contribute to the American Jewish community as a whole?  There sessions were full of inspirational Israeli leaders (not all of them Jewish) who do fantastic work to better their communities.  Were their presentations given to attract the big bucks as much as they were to inspire American leaders to go back and find ways they can be just as creative, imaginative, and innovative?  Maybe they were.  I can’t even fake being a Jewish professional, so I have a limited sense of what was really going on that day.  Lets face it - I could never handle wearing a suit every day.

The most exciting thing I learned at the conference was that at least somebody will consider me to be a young adult for another 16 years and one week.  Sounds good to me.  But here are some other summed up thoughts.

Jerry Silverman talked about how 80% of Birthright participants volunteer somewhere, but only a small fraction of them do it in a Jewish framework, and why can’t the Federations create Jewish frameworks for these young adults (should have made a drinking game for that phrase) to have the same volunteer experiences?  I know Jews like me, “success stories” of Jewish schools and camps, are not who Jerry was referring to, but it is obvious to me why college students would embrace opportunities to do things with more diverse groups of people.  Isn’t that what college is all about?  Even the most secular Jewish student is likely to graduate college and find themselves in a bubble of some sort, whether it be a socio-economical one or more culturally defined bubble.  Maybe there can be Jewish programs to supplement these other ones, but they can’t replace them.  I can spew my own Zionist propaganda about why I live here (okay, in my defense it would not all be considered spewing nor is all of it propaganda) but as anyone who knows me knows, the biggest things I feel I gave up (after Autumn and closer proximity to Fenway Park) are the more diverse informal education opportunities for myself and my future children.  But I will note here that I am not about to be one of those weirdos who comments on the Times of Israel blog posts by Israelis who were at the conference and like arguing that if everyone just gave up and left North America for Israel, all the risks plaguing Jewish continuity would just go away (for the people who move here, but who cares about what is left behind?).  If you are passionate about your community outside of Israel and can be an active player in making it better, I give you my permission to stay there and keep doing what you’re doing.  Just check in on us here in Israel once in awhile (maybe more than once every five years with the GA).

My final thought, or at least the beginning of it:  I went to a session about creating a shared civil society.  The focus was mainly on a shared civil society between Jews and Arabs, but also about a shared one among Jews.  Sharing is not so simple.  Just ask my kids at gan.  I can only hope that the “sharing values” we instill in the kids at gan play into how they live their lives twenty years from now.  The hardest part about sharing is possibly choosing whom to share your life with (or piece of Lego).  I mean that in every sense.  Sharing it with someone (or a community, depending what exactly we’re talking about) that is exactly like me is full proof in some ways, but goes completely against my ideals in others.  Can we have many conflicting opinions, get along great, and come to a compromise that doesn’t threaten our ideals and can be smoothly transmitted to our children?  In theory I think this sounds like a fabulous idea, but as much as I think about the different possible permutations the less promising the possibility seems to me.

I went to a session with three speakers, one of whom is the mother of a kid who was in my gan at Kol HaNeshama.  She talked about when she was younger and thought about the future, on her own and then with her husband, and thought about what school her future kids would go to.  In Israel things are very tracked.  There are the more pluralistic Tali schools that may allow more critical thinking, but they also might not teach skills for learning Jewish texts as strongly as the religious schools.  And the Arabs are completely separate, and shouldn’t Jewish kids get to interact with them too?  How else can there be a shared society (yes, there are possibly things that cannot and should not be shared, but I am talking about everything else).  What do I need to rely more on schools to teach and what knowledge can I confidently share at home?  Maybe Israel can’t have communities like Boston.  Once the entire educational system is involved, it’s hard to bring different kinds of Jews together the way I felt it was done in Boston.  Then again, hard does not mean impossible.  What are the chances Israel can on its own put together something like the GA to brainstorm about these issues? That could be the problem I had with mixing issues about Israel and issues about Jews in America.  I feel that the GA is to bring American leaders together to talk about shared issues so that they can go back and improve their own communities, but in Israel I think the problem is that people need to stop thinking only about themselves and look outwards to see about how we can all be helped together.

This mother told us that even before her children were born, she imagined a conversation she would have with them in twenty years.  It was unclear to her what the situation in Israel was going to be, whether there was one state or two, and what was going on with the Arab population.  But in this conversation her children ask her what she was doing twenty years ago when the country was in the state it is in now.  I can imagine this conversation perfectly.  Her eldest son was extremely articulate and inquisitive, even as a three year old.  She told us that she wanted to make sure she had a response for them.  This was her motivation to get involved in the Hand in Hand school, and school in Jerusalem (with four others around the country) where Jewish and Arab children learn side by side. 

Okay Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly, I guess you have me right where you want me: thinking about the future and my part in it.  When I got to Israel I really wanted to slave away at a non-profit to get my foot in the door and be a part of some cool project that was going to change Israel and the world.  But the phone numbers I found led to dead lines and the emails on their websites all bounced.  So I went to grad school, met some fabulous people (both Jews and Arabs) who are doing cool stuff around the country to make it a better place.  Then I opened a gan and spend every day imparting the values that are important to me to a bunch of toddlers, hoping that maybe just maybe that learning how to share space and Legos in gan will make them better members of society in twenty years.  And now on Monday I spent a day hearing about all the other ways people are working to make my country a better place, some of which I can maybe get involved in.

And I'm asking myself, what now? 

"Hate had the upper hand over love."

The third chapter of Eichah (Lamentations) begins with the words "אני הגבר", I am the man.  Rav Soloveitchik zt"l spoke about how Tisha B'Av is a day of both communal and individual mourning.  It is similar to (and the complete opposite of) how we are supposed to experience Pesach night.  During the seder we celebrate as a community but also have the obligation to recreate for ourselves the feelings and experiences of being redeemed from Egypt.  The "גבר" in chapter 3 of Eichah is an individual feeling the weight of Hashem's punishment and abandonment.

Living in Jerusalem, it is hard to think about the destruction of Jerusalem on Tisha B'Av or any other day.  When I wake up in the morning and remember where I live and then look outside and simply see the other buildings on my street, I feel like I am looking at a miracle.  Just now, after the reading of Eichah, I walked a mere fifteen minutes up the street to the Haas Promenade where one has a magnificent view of the Old City and around it the newer parts of Jerusalem.  What destruction could I possibly imagine?

While I was there I read the קינות for tonight.  The third קינה is about the type of mourning particular to Tisha B'Av (I am taking this from the Koren siddur for Tisha B'Av).  It is based on the line in Masechet Sanhedrin that says "Whoever weeps at night - his voice is heard."  In the third stanza are the words "גדולה השנאה מאת אשר אהבה", "Hate had the upper hand over love".  The miracle of living in Jerusalem is seeing the city built one day at a time.  However it is far from complete, and I'm not referring to the fact that there is no third Beit HaMikdash.  These words from this kinah could be the headline of half the news stories lately.  I might not be able to imagine destruction, but I can see very well what a couple thousand years ago got the Jewish People to the point of destruction.

It often seems easy to say who the bad guys are.  In a lot of cases lately maybe it even is easy.  On Tisha B'Av we mourn as a community and as individuals.  We are individuals who represent our communities.

We believe that one day Tisha B'Av will switch from a day of mourning to one of celebration.  One day love will have the upper hand over hate.  How soon can we make that happen?

Erev Tisha B'Av Two Years Later: A Follow-up

Sometimes I write a blog post and I think it's just okay.  Maybe I just needed to get some thoughts out and wasn't in the right place of mind to write well and coherently, maybe it sounded better in my head, or often I just wait too long to get it all down.  Once in a rare while, and especially rare now that I write so infrequently, I amaze myself.  This post I wrote almost exactly two years ago is an example of the latter:
http://beqx1.blogspot.co.il/2011_08_01_archive.html
It makes sense that I looked back on it last Tisha B'Av and again this year on Erev Tisha B'Av.  Now I think it is time for a follow-up.

Gila and I have been asked numerous times why we decided to open our own gan.  Basically for years we would joke about how there were things being done where we worked that we loved or hated, and one day we would make a gan that had all the things we loved and avoided all the things we hated. Then one day we thought we could pull it off, which was probably the most ridiculous and naive thought ever, but we did.  We took our list of a hundred things and were determined to make them all happen.  Then we found out that, big shocker, running a business isn't as easy as we thought.  Okay, we never thought it was easy, but we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.  So probably something like 75 of those 100 awesome ideas never happened.  Some of them were inexcusable and some of them practically just couldn't pan out.  But things can only get better, and we are grateful to the families who were basically our guinea pigs for the past two years and excited to start all over again next month with a new group.  This time around we'll go for 50 out of 100.

Back to the point of this post, which is what I wrote about two years ago.  Gila and I had a long list of ideas and goals, but one thing was at the very top of it, and that was focussing on emotional and social development.  We wanted our kids to have the life skills they need to survive out there in the big crazy world.  That sounds like a ridiculous thing to say about such little people.  Think about it though.  For most of them gan is the first place they are sharing their space, sharing their toys, and having peers influence their moods and emotions.  Gan is where they learn to get along, learn about mistakes and consequences, and learn how to stand up for themselves.

The same thing happened in my gan these past few months that happened in my previous gan at the end of two years together.  Everyone was just sick of each other.  In gan they are sick of each other's shtick, feel that life is unfair, and there is a clear underlying stress about starting to realize that a big transition is coming really soon.  No one likes change.

Now, while my gan kids were all dealing with each other for the past two years, I was dealing with their parents, which 99% of the time was a nothing but wonderful experience.  In that post two years ago I wrote about how kids learn to push each other's buttons.  They learn what really gets to each other.  Well, the past two years I learned what really gets to me.  It was NOT fun.  I mean, I did not know I had that many buttons to push.  But I was learning the same way the kids were learning.  I had to suffer consequences for my actions, even when my actions were warranted and appropriate.  I was allowed to be upset and angry, but I had to be careful not to take it out on anyone else.  Recently we were talking about a kid who tended to dig himself into a deeper hole when already in trouble, for example he would keep yelling at a friend or grown-up even though he knew he was making his situation worse, and then talked about how that's the kind of bad habit that you never quite give up.

In gan we were very big on kids learning from consequences.  Hitting is never okay, but when a kid is hit because they were being annoying, we point out that maybe they could have avoided this situation, and that we hope they learn for next time.  And then if the same situation happens again we remind them of what happened last time.  I never saw this in my old gan.  It would always be straight to time out without any discussion of what happened, should have happened, and what can happen next time. Thinking back on the past two years, I realize how much I benefited from our approach as much as the kids did.  Any time I would have an unfortunate encounter with a gan parent or anyone else I would come out of it with the attitude that I learned something and can only hope the other person learned something too.  And if they didn't learn it from whatever happened with me, hopefully they would learn it from watching their kids, because I have to say: We did it.

Our kids say "I'm playing with that" instead of pushing.  They say "I don't like that!" instead of pushing.  When they are having a hard time calming down they often take themselves to another room to calm down.  If we make them sit off to the side to take a break, they get up and say "I'm ready to calm down and be a good friend now." and most of the time they mean it, and they prove it to us too.

I don't know how we did it.  How did we pull this off?  Let alone everything else that has to do with the gan.  How did we pull THIS off?  I'm nine times their age and I still struggle with it, and it isn't because I wasn't taught it in gan.  I know they will always struggle with it and we can only hope that they take these skills with them to their new schools next year and better yet - teach them to their new classmates.

I meant what I wrote two years ago that I learned a tremendous amount from the kids in my old gan. They learned life skills too, even if they had to do it the hard way and with less guidance from the grown-ups in gan.  There is an obvious feeling of accomplishment for myself, Gila, and our staff. There is also the added benefit that I helped teach them these skills and they teach them right back to me.

I know they are going out into the big crazy world ready for anything, and they feel ready, but they have absolutely no idea how complicated life can get.  Having their best friend knock down their block tower will be the least of it.  This past year was not the easiest for me.  Exhibit A: the entire month of February, and most of you only know the half of it.  Lets just say it took a lot of "life skills" to get through it.

I'm so lucky that I get to go to gan every year, and not because I get to spend my days fingerpainting, playing with my food, and building with Legos.  I get to have a refresher course every year on how to be a good person and a good friend.  I also get reminded that sadness and anger are legitimate feelings. There was one day I didn't feel well and muttered "I feel crappy" under my breath.  This kid with the best hearing ever asked me what crappy means.  I told her that it meant I was having a bad day, that I know I will feel better eventually, and that maybe I should have chosen a different word.  There are bad days and sad days and unfair days but we get over them and we learn from them.  We learn from each other; we learn from our mistakes and each other's mistakes.  And that's what's going to help make this world a better place.

I said this in the other post and I'll say it again:  If the gan kids can do it, we can do it too.

יגון ושמחה ביום אחד

Just over a week ago I came back from 2 1/2 weeks in Boston reenergized and ready to go.  The month of Iyar was starting - my favorite time of the year.  Buildings, light posts, and cars all over the country get decked out in blue and white.  As I posted on facebook along with a picture of my gan kids waving Israeli flags: Nothing can ruin my Zionist spirit during Iyar.  Really nothing.  I never for a second doubt my decision to live here but you know, we all have our moments, and maybe my cynicism shines through more often than it should.  But not in Iyar.  Iyar is the most perfect month to be in Israel.

When I was in Newton for Pesach my shul rabbi shared this article with us.  The article describes a study in which it was shown that children who know their family stories are more resilient and better at coping with difficult situations.  Having lost my two grandmothers in the past two years (almost exactly two years apart), I have thought about family stories a lot.  My paternal grandmother was always telling stories.  We would joke that she never hesitated to pull the skeletons out of the closet.  I am grateful to my cousin who put together a short video of my grandmother telling some of these stories.  I first watched it about a year after she passed away, and while it was a bit haunting to hear her voice again, I loved that not only did I have a record of these stories - I had a record in her voice, exactly how I always remembered them.  Unfortunately at the end of the video she says that she will not tell the "skeleton in the closet" stories for prosperity because it wasn't fair to the descendants of those family members.  Needless to say, her grandchildren were a bit disappointed.  My maternal grandmother rarely spoke of the past, but little by little details came out, and while she wasn't quick to tell stories plenty of other miscellaneous relatives appeared over the years to do it for her.  My mother also dug out some fantastic scrapbooks when my grandmother passed away.  That's right, you're reading the words of the granddaughter of the nineteen-twenty-something area posture championship team captain.  I know - you would have never guessed.

This article inspired what became the central theme of my Yom Haatzmaut lesson at gan.  I bought a huge map of the world, hung it on the bulletin board, and put thumbtacks in all the places the gan kids' parents and grandparents came from.  I also of course put in thumbtacks for the teachers, as all of us made aliyah on our own.  And I put for Gila and Michelle's husbands because they practically work at the gan too.  We had tacks in eight US states and a total of ten countries.  My idea was to give each kid a story to tell.  Maybe they didn't make aliyah, but their parents or grandparents did, and probably they came from very far away to live in Israel.  Many of them have a sense of what it means to move away from a family.  They know our (the teachers) parents live far away and we need to take airplanes to go see them.  Many have grandparents they Skype with on a regular basis but only see in person a couple times a year.  We taught them that their parents and grandparents moved to Israel because Israel is such a special place, and they wanted to come build new things and make it even better.

It's almost easy at this age.  I can tell them that Israel is a perfect place.  Yes, I had to carefully explain what made the siren on Memorial Day different than the siren they heard back in November, but for a three year old that was forever ago.  When I talked about the fathers that go away for reserve duty, I just said that they were going to help keep us safe.  They don't know enough to ask for details.  And the siren on Memorial Day?  They was to think about the people that got hurt keeping us safe.  In a year or two they will figure out what I really meant by that, but I love that for now they don't have to.  They stood beautifully during the siren.  One kid was waving his flag and humming, but that's okay.  It was still a quiet, reflective moment before we went inside for our Independence Day celebration.  They went home with pretend teudat zehuts and art projects with their family's aliyah story written on them.  They had something to get them excited about where they call home.  And I could continue my month of being of super happy Zionist.  I created a bunch of mini happy Zionists, and what better event to add to my own aliyah story that still feels like it is only just starting?

Yom Haatzmaut is the best day to be in Israel because for 24 hours you can just celebrate.  You can forget about the terrorist attacks and fallen soldiers.  We have Memorial Day for that, and in Israel we do Memorial Day right.  We forget the corrupt politicians, confusing coalitions, and all the other ridiculousness that plagues this country every single day.  We sing Hallel and then... just keep singing.  למרות הכל (despite everything) Israel is one big miracle and lots of tiny miracles happening at the same time.

When I was in 12th grade and the attacks happened on September 11th, I realized that the world was a big scary place and living in Israel wasn't going to make it any scarier.  The following year I was in Israel when a sniper was on the loose in the DC/Maryland area.  A cab driver, upon hearing that I was headed to the University of Maryland, asked why I would go there - it's dangerous there!  My senior year at Maryland a mentally disturbed man opened fire at Virginia Tech, just a couple hours away from UMD, and killed 32 people.  I was reminded at how scary the world can be and at the same time felt that I could be scared anywhere, but in Israel I could contribute to something great.  Then this past Monday happened.  Monday afternoon I streamed the Boston Marathon online.  I didn't leave for shul until I had at least seen who won the women's race.  I came home from shul, ate dinner, checked the men's race winner, and left for town.  Maybe ten or so minutes later two bombs blew up at the finish line.  About an hour later I had several text messages from friends checking in on me and my family, and luckily another friend had called me right before to tell me what happened.

The tables turned.  My mom emailed me to say she was okay.  She spent the day biking around Cambridge, considered going over the bridge into Boston, but went home instead.  My dad had to navigate through police detail later that evening to get to our house because there was an abandoned backpack around the corner.  It's a new perspective that I never expected to have.  I spent Yom Haatzmaut celebrating one home and mourning another.  Someone hurt my neighbors, scared my friends, and no one has any idea who it was and why they did it.  I appreciate the reports of people who have volunteered their time and opened their homes to help those affected by the bombings.  But it's not telling me anything I never knew before.  Boston is full of wonderful people.  It's a fantastic place.  I have experiences all the time that make me appreciate what a wonderful city I came from, both the city as a whole and the Boston Jewish community.  The history of Israel inspires me to no end, but Boston is where my story started, my roots are there, and that is what's going to get me through these next few days.

My Grandma Rose

This is the transcript of what I said this morning at my grandmother's levaya.  When I first got the news that she had passed away, I didn't think it was even possible for Sam and I to get in for the funeral.  Somehow we made it, and I was able to write this before getting on the plane in Israel and fix it up during the short layover in New York this morning.  I also somehow managed to get up and share these thoughts with my family and a room full of people.  I am so glad it happened.

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Fifteen years ago when our Papa Harold passed away and we were asked to share stories about him, it was hard for us to think of a story that involved just Papa Harold and not him together with our Grandma Rose.  Throughout our childhood they were always together, always a unit.  They would come together to pick us up from school, they cared for us when we were sick, and they took us on trips around Boston.

We didn’t imagine how long Grandma Rose could hold on in this world without Papa Harold by her side.  She lived to celebrate the three of us completing high school, college, and graduate school (well almost all of us – Chava and I are still academically smarter than Sam).  She made it to Israel for Sam’s wedding and lived to meet her great granddaughter Hodaya and teach Hodaya her favorite songs.  Celebrating her 100^th birthday last year on Chanukah was nothing short of miraculous.  This year on her 101^st birthday she got to celebrate Chava and Al’s engagement.  She gave her seal of approval when she said that Al was "a handsome young man with a nice smile".  The picture of her giving Al a big kiss on the cheek is priceless.

Having a grandmother who lived to 101 was certainly incredible.  After all, how many life-time Bostonians do you know who were alive to see the past 6 Red Sox World Series championships? But the number of years she lived isn’t what will make her so memorable.  I’ll remember the time Grandma Rose and Papa Harold brought us apples instead of fruit roll-ups to Friday pick-up because they thought a healthy choice was a better choice.  We shot that idea down pretty fast.  I’ll remember how whenever I introduced her to a friend of mine she would say what a nice little boy or girl they were – even when the friends were college graduates like myself but hey, it’s all relative.

My mother told me yesterday that I was such a good granddaughter.  I responded that I will continue to be a good granddaughter.  After all, both my grandmothers will always be looking down at me smiling at my accomplishments, and glaring at me when I put on a wrinkled shirt or don’t brush my hair to their liking.  They somehow managed to do it from 6000 miles away, so I can’t imagine now will be any different.

To conclude I want to thank, on behalf of all of us, the fantastic health aides Grandma Rose has taking care of her.  Barbara, Sharon, Karen, and Hanifah – you became true members of the Zibman household.  You quickly commanded the laws of keeping kosher, Shabbat, and even acquired a sizable Hebrew vocabulary.  You’re all ready to visit me and Sam in Israel.

And lastly, a thank you to our ema for being a wonderful daughter to Grandma Rose while continuing to be a wonderful mother to us.  As you would say, you were a paradigm of virtue, even though I know you will try to argue otherwise. 

יהי זכרה ברוך

The Time Machine

My senior year of college, lots of fabulous things happened.  Among them was the creation of a time machine.  I moved into an unfurnished apartment for my final year of UMD, and while we found some of our furniture in brand new condition on the side of the road and from craigslist (like my bed from the guy from then on known as Hot Bed Guy), I bought a desk chair from Staples.  It came in a big box.  Logically, we decided to cover the box in old Yiddish newspapers and turn it into a time machine.  We put the appropriate WWJD and Go Terps bumper stickers on the sides and used construction paper to make the control panel just inside the time machine.

We made the time machine because we had a big box we could fit inside of (again, it was the obvious thing to do) and because before the start of the year some things happened that would never happen - and I mean NEVER happen.  Except that they did.  And while we spent hours making lists in crayon of possible reasons these things did happen and other lists (also multicolor) about how we could fix the things that did happen (snowstorms, magic potions, decoys), we realized that something bigger had to be done.  We simply had to go back in time and make some changes so that for real these things would NEVER happen.

Unfortunately, we never quite got our time machine to work.  Perhaps it was because we didn't get the wiring right... or because there weren't any wires to begin with.  I am convinced it was because we never got the sound effects right.  We experimented with different variations, and had much fun doing it, but the "situation" stayed the same, our couch got desecrated (long story, but it was OUR couch), and we just had to wait it out.

At gan right now, thanks to Shufersal online (supermarket delivery), we have an oversupply of large boxes.  They aren't as big as our time machine was, but maybe I could connect two or three to make something work.    All I would need is some Yiddish newspapers or maybe some old Jerusalem Posts would do the trick just as well.

I am just as wise as I was my senior year.  Or maybe I'm wiser.  Though sometimes I actually think I was wiser then, but maybe life was just simpler.  Actually life was much simpler.  Cardboard box time machines are a thing of the imagination, though imaginations rock, so cardboard box time machines rock too.

I still think it would be nice to have one again.  Isn't it a nice thought to pretend just for a moment that you can crawl into a box, tap a bunch of colored shapes made out of construction paper, make a series of beeping and whirling noises, and pretend for a moment that it's possible to get a do-over?  To backtrack just a few minutes?  To even just experiment with how something could have gone differently.... or been avoided entirely?

I still have plenty of crayons and markers around and big sheets of paper for list making, but snowstorms are a bit more of a stretch here in Israel than they were in Maryland, and I'm not so sure how relevant a solution it would be for recent dilemmas in my life.  I might just have to stick with the "live and learn" mantra.  Isn't that what grownups always told me though?  And being a grownup is lame.

I think I'll just go ahead and build myself another time machine - for all the things that would never happen (but maybe did anyway), could have happened, should have (or shouldn't have) happened, or would have just been plain cool.