Gemahim, gemahim everywhere

Among the crazy things I am doing this year is taking a course in journalism in a college in Yerushalaim.  

So, here I am pretending to write, and in the break I run to the facilities to wash my face.  And there, at the mirror, is a box of make-up wipes, with a note on them: "גמ"ח למי שרוצה לקחת" = Gemah for whoever wants to take.

Ceasefire

I guess we don't yet deserve to win.

Very sad.

Yes, we still have to thank HaShem for the many, many miracles.  The miracle of Iron Dome.  The miracles of so few people being hurt.  

But watching the enemy celebrating their victory in Azza right now is really painful.

Kipat Barzel

I apologize for forgetting to mention another Israeli leader, with whom I do not agree, who did a tremendously important thing for Am Yisrael.

Amir Peretz, who is way too left for my tastes, was the initiator of the Iron Dome batteries, which have shot down over a hundred missiles from Azza in the past 3 days.

No one is perfect.  There are a lot of different groups with their own ideas of how to help Am Yisrael and develop Eretz Yisrael.  And Hashem is using many of those groups to bring blessing, salvation and Geula.

It is up to us to appreciate all of Hashem's hasadim and his messengers.

Hessed, hessed everywhere

Of course, you will not be surprised to hear that the "Isuzu 4x4" email forum has created an internet link for purposes of hosting families from the areas under fire.

And the fact that none of us are surprised shows how great Israelis are.  No one is too concerned with his own personal life and leisure to be apathetic now.

I hope that the rubbing shoulders involved in hosting people from the south, will help the hosts from everywhere in the country feel closer and more caring about our brothers all around the country.

Gaining Historical Perspective

DH was at work , minding his work-related business, when a co-worker, presenting information at a meeting, gets a call from her babysitter in Gedera.  "What should I do,  we were just ordered to spend the next few hours in the miklat."  Should she take the kids to her parents' house?  Stay at the house with no adult till she gets home?  Go to a neighbour?

Parents have to leave work early - if their work is within those 40 km from Azza, work is over for today or longer.   If not, they have to stop, abandon what they are doing, and get back to the kids.

They pick up all ten kids who are still waiting for a bus at Masmiya.  yes, the car has only 7 seats.  But leaving them out there exposed - is that better?

The makolet is open for a couple of hours.  People are trying to get out as fast as they can.  While they want to make each other feel better, each person is preoccupied with their personal worries.  One woman's preemie nephew has been moved to another hospital.  One grandmother ha five grandchildren serving in the army now.   Everyone is a bundle of nerves, fuses are short.

How many wars have you been in Israel for?  How did affect your mood?

Israel has had more than one war per decade.   And that is without counting all the "periods" of terror attacks, pogroms, and general anti-Jewish/ anti-Israeli activity by Arabs, that have been going on for over one hundred years.

Nerves in Israel are tight.  Moods fluctuate quickly.  it would be interesting to do a psychological study of the Israeli Personality.  But we all know , without any statistics, that an Israeli is a loving, caring, tense, hurried-and-worried, doing-the-best-she-can parent, sister, grandmother, daughter, who has been too too many funerals.

That our neighbours and coworkers are not complete traumatized is a miracle.

I think that it behooves us to show some appreciation for what "Israelis" go through and have been going through for all these decades, in order to enable our generation to make Aliya to a first-world country that was complete desert only 75 years ago.  
More understanding, patience and kind words to our Israeli neighbours, more emotional support, and more involvement in national issues, seem a good way to start.


My latest idea is to collect games to take to people living in their miklatim.  

Our Kids Are Human

"I thought that raising my kids here, they'd be so spiritual."  A friend said that a couple of weeks ago, and I know exactly what she meant.
My own daughter, who has always been involved in so many Eretz Yisrael experiences - attending WiG  demonstrations at 3 months, setting up a games room for kids expelled from Gush Katif when she was only 9, changing the program of  her 10th birthday party to writing letters to the parents of Israel's missing soldiers because 2 soldiers were kidnapped that day, reading Arutz Sheva news daily and being addicted to Latma - this same daughter often thanks my husband and myself for making aliya so that she didn't have to.
Just last week, she told her Olah-Hadasha cousin that if she had grown up in a nice large house in Canada with grandparents and cousins around the corner, she is not sure that she could have left all that to make aliyah.
Our children are human.   Mitzvot that are easy for us, might be hard for them.  Mitzvot that are hard for us, might be "insurmountable challenges" in their eyes.
Or, perhaps, they are keeping the mitzvot, but the fire that we feel for these mitzvot is much dimmer in their souls.
Their priorities in terms of mitzvot might be different than ours.
They might look for a meikel psak where we are davka mahmir.  Or compromise where we aim to be steadfast.

Is this a reflection of us as parents?
Or is it a reflection of their own human-ness?
Of the fact that every person has different levels of need for physical comfort, for personal expression, for community belonging and , yes, even for spirituality?
I hope and pray that my children absorb my values becasue I am convinced of my personal beliefs.   But do they have to express these values in exactly the same way I do?   Are they not allowed to have a yetzer hara, which, if they tell me about it, maybe I can show them examples of people with similar yetzarim who also do / did Retzon HaShem?

Shortly afteer dd's conversation with her cousin, I checked out Rav Haber's parsha email.  "Coincidentally", he wrote words that spoke to the heart of this issue.

http://www.torahlab.org/calendar/article/raising_cain/?utm_source=Raising+Cain+2+-+Rabbi+Yaacov+Haber&utm_campaign=noach+2012&utm_medium=email

And, while I have learnt that parents should not despair if their children are not exactly as they had wanted, I do think that my parents should certainly see much nahat and take some credit for the fact that their many children, who are all living "different lifestyles", are all involved in Torah AND community.  There are, after all, 70 facets to Torah, and each child and grandchild spreads the glow of a different facet.  

Yitzhak Rabin's yahrzeit

(The doctor who saved X's life is not Shomer Shabbat.   Worse than that, this same doctor lobbied the UJA to cut funding to a religious school to give money to a multi-faith concert, being preformed on Shabbat.  X's children refused to thank the doctor for the surgery, they don't even want to thank Gd for saving their father's life.  How could He use such a terrible person as His messenger???)

The Canadian government that granted my mother and her parents refuge from Germany in 5708 (early '48), is the same government that denied Jews refuge during the years of the Holocaust.  Yet my mother and her parents are forever grateful that they had where to begin their lives.  They are grateful to Hashem for allowing them safe refuge, for not being sent back to Poland or Hungary (where some Holocaust survivors were killed by their old neighbours).  And they are careful to show their gratitude to their host country by respecting the symbols and laws of the land.

Rabin wasn't Evil Incarnate.

He did a lot things that I personally am unhappy about.  I mean really, really unhappy about.   Really, really , really unhappy....

You get my drift.

But, I think that we will do much better, as siblings and as a nation, if we are able to occasionally recognize and appreciate the mesirut nefesh of people with whom we do not agree.  This doesn't mean that I wouldn't  have been happy to try him for war crimes (aka Oslo), presumably find him guilty and make him do avodot sherut to help the families he destroyed - for the rest of his life.   But even in his punishment, we would have to show some respect for a person who did not say, "life is comfortable here in the cafes of Tel Aviv," as did a percentage of Jews in Eretz Yisrael way back 70+ years ago.  He joined the Hagana, and risked his life helping other Jews escape the Atlit prison.  He risked his life fighting with the British against the Vichy forces in Lebanon.  And he risked his life to save thousands of Jewish lives, in many battles during the Israeli war of Independence (at the age of 26!) , reclaiming neighbourhoods of Yerushalaim and Ramat Rahel , and ending the Arab Siege Around Yerushalaim.

Could I have done everything Rabin did?  Pass up a full scholarship to Berkeley to stay here and fight with pistols against 11 fully-armed Arab nations?  Sure!!  Well, probably.   Maybe?  

Could I have withstood all the pressure before, during and after Oslo?  I'd love to think so, but I wasn't there.

Would I still like to see all the Oslo folk behind bars?   Yes.  But, again, that doesn't take away from the good that any of them did ever do.

And here are some of the interesting things some of them have done:

Shimon Peres overcame American pressure on France in the 50s, and convinced the French government of the early '50's to sell weapons  planes and tanks to Israel.   Of course, he had to get over the antisemitism of some French cabinet ministers too.  Not easy. 

And Mr Peres was among the developers of our nuclear facility in the Negev.  Each and every one of us, with all the preparations we are making for a possible war with Iran, should appreciate the significance of Peres' contribution to our safety in this particular area.

Yossi Beilin.  Prepare yourself for a surprise.  We tend to think of Beilin as a self-hating Jew, or at the very least, as someone detemined to erase Jewish identity in order to appease the goyim.
But the truth is, that even as Beilin was encouraging the government to rethink the connection between Israel and Diaspora Jews and especially the financial dependence of Israel on American Jewish philanthropists, Beilin himself initiated the idea that Every Jewish Youth Must Visit Israel.  From this idea came BIRTHRIGHT (Taglit) - which has brought many "unaffiliated" Jews back to our common heritage, given them Jewish identity and strengthened their connection to Our Land and Our Heritage.  In polls, Youth who participated in a Birthright tour expressed 51% more commitment to marrying a Jew.   That is no small feat, when intermarriage takes away more than half our children everywhere outside Israel.

All in all, it would be really easy if life were as described in certain newspapers, magazines and books - "they" (leftist, nonreligious....) are "all bad" , and "we" are the good, committed-and-therefore-persecuted Jews.   But the reality is so much more complex than that.   

This doesn't mean that we let them off the hook for what they did wrong, but it DOES mean that we have to respect the good they did.

And we can use this auspicious date to do so.

11th Heshvan we remember that Rahel prayed for her children,  and Hashem promised that we will return.  And here we are.

12th Heshvan we recognize that The Return is a complex reunion between millions of Jews, from thousands of years of separation, with hundreds of cultural , religious and personal differences.

Maybe on the 13th of Heshvan, we can say, "Hashem, we are up for the challenge.  We can reunite with respect.  We have patience for the process.  We want to do our part to bridge the gaps."

Thank You for letting little-old-me be part of this.

(And thank you to my wonderful Bechor who shared these historical highlights with me.)