Loving Israel is in the Details

A friend, Rabbi Paul Kipnes, sent this along.
 by Joel Chasnoff

NEW YORK (JTA) -- In honor of Israel’s 62nd birthday, I’ll forgo the expected Op-Ed about Israeli government corruption, the Bibi-Obama drama, or the Israeli Rabbinate’s stranglehold on marriage and divorce.

Instead, I offer this love letter to Israel: "Top 10 tiny details about Israel that make it the most wonderful country on earth."

10. Egged Bus #394: The midnight ride from Tel Aviv to Eilat. The trip begins in the gray-stucco slums of south Tel Aviv. Two hours later, you’re rolling through the desert beneath a blanket of stars. You crack open the window. The desert smells dry and ancient, like an attic. At dawn, you pull into Eilat as the city comes to life.

9. The way Israelis refuse to cross the street on a red light. Drivers blare their horns the instant the light turns green. Yet pedestrians refuse to cross the street until the sign turns green. I’ve witnessed this phenomenon at 3:00 a.m., the streets bare and not a car in sight.

8. The Jewish soul of even the most secular Israelis. I served in the Israeli Army with kibbutz kids who were so anti-religious that they never even had a bar-mitzvah. But on Friday nights, as the brigade sung the Sabbath Kiddush en masse, I could see my secular comrades mouthing the words.

7. Flush handles on Israeli toilets. Almost all Israeli toilets, both public and in homes, have two flush handles -- one for “light” loads, and one for heavy ones. This saves Israel’s most precious natural resource: water. And it’s genius.

6. Drop-dead gorgeous Israeli soldiers. The men are hunky, the women beautiful. Try not to drool as you watch them strut down Ben Yehudah Street in their olive-green uniforms, M-16s slung across their backs. It’s not so much their physical beauty that charms us as what they embody: Jewish power.

5. Shuk Ha-Carmel on Friday afternoons. So many things about Israel drive me mad. The bureaucracy is crippling. Government offices operate when they want, for as long (or short) as they want, usually something like 8 a.m. until noon Mondays, Wednesdays and every other Thursday. Each week, another group goes on strike -- schoolteachers, garbage men, postal workers, phone operators, cable guys, bus drivers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, airport baggage guys, and the old men in blue jumpsuits who walk the streets of Tel Aviv stabbing pieces of trash with meter-long spears have all struck in the past year -- so the country never runs at full power.

The Knesset, Israel’s 15-party parliament, is trapped in a state of perpetual gridlock. And yet, when I step into the Carmel Market and hear the shopkeepers barking their wares, smell the mixture of frying lamb, goat cheese, and human sweat, and watch the people line up to buy flowers for Shabbat, I remember why I love Israel so much. It’s the excitement of the place, but also the Middle Easterness of it -- the barking, the bargaining, the haggling that’s at once friendly and brutal. At pushcarts and stalls, middle-aged men with gold chains and raspy cigarette voices sell mangoes, lemons, whole and quarter chickens, cow lungs, cow tongues, cow testicles, sheep brains, 50-plus varieties of fish, calculators, knockoff Nikes, carnations, sponges, girdles, batteries, and men’s and ladies’ underwear.

Friday afternoons, with only a couple of hours until sundown, the peddlers shout their last-minute pre-Sabbath bargains: “Tangerines, 1 shekel, 1 shekel!” “Pita, hummus, chickpeas-- yallah! Shabbat, Shabbat!” Whenever I walk through the souk, I think about all those American diplomats who call Israel the America of the Middle East. If those diplomats really want to understand Israel, they should leave their fancy Jerusalem hotels and take a stroll through the Carmel Market.

4. Chocolate milk in a sack. Half a liter of Kibbutz Yotvateh chocolate milk sealed in a palm-sized plastic bag that you rip open with your teeth and then squeeze, causing the milk to shoot into your mouth in a way that makes you feel like you’re drinking straight from the udder of a chocolate cow. Need I say more?

3. The incredible bond between Israelis. Maybe it’s a remnant of shtetl life in Europe, or perhaps it has something to do with living so close to your enemy. Whatever the reason, Israelis act as if everyone is everyone else’s next-door neighbor. The first time I experienced this unique bond was the week I arrived in Israel to begin my army service. I was driving to Tel Aviv in a rental car when a guy pulled up next to me at a stoplight and beeped his horn. “Hey, achi!” he called. “My girlfriend’s thirsty. You got water?” Beside me, on the passenger seat, was a bottle of water. But it was half empty.

I held up the bottle. “It’s already open,” I said.

“No problem,” he replied, and stuck out his hand.

A week later, I was at my girlfriend, Dorit’s, family’s apartment with her parents. It was dinnertime and we had ordered pizza. Finally, after two hours, the pizza guy showed up on his motor scooter. He was disheveled and sopped with sweat. “I got lost,” he whimpered.

“So come inside! Sit!” said Dorit’s mother, Tzionah. “Coffee or tea?”

“Coffee,” said the pizza guy. “Milk and two sugars.”

While Tzionah made the coffee, Dorit’s father, Menashe, opened the pizza box. “Please take.” He offered a slice. The pizza guy waved him off. “Nu! You’re offending me!” said Menashe. “What’s your name?"

“Oren,” said the delivery guy.

“Oren. I insist. Eat.”

And I’ll be damned if Oren the pizza guy didn’t sit down at the kitchen table and eat the pizza he’d just delivered. As we ate, I thought about all those porno movies where the lonely housewife invites the pizza boy inside and seduces him on the kitchen table. In the Israeli version of the story, the pizza boy doesn’t make love to the housewife. Instead, he sits down with the family and eats pizza.

2. Dropping off a passenger at Ben-Gurion Airport. You pull up to the Departure door, hug your loved ones goodbye, and watch them walk into the terminal. Then you inhale a breath of sweet Israeli air, look up at the cloudless Tel Aviv sky, and think, “They have to leave...but I get to stay in Israel.”

1. ____________________________________________ . I leave this one up to you. What do you love most about Israel? E-mail me joel@joelchasnoff.com and I’ll post your responses on the blog page of my Web site.

(Joel Chasnoff is a stand-up comedian and the author of "The 188th Crybaby Brigade: A Skinny Kid From Chicago Fights Hezbollah," about his year as a combat soldier in the Israeli army. View photographs from his army service and meet the characters from Joel’s book at www.joelchasnoff.com.)

Words from the Rabbi of Beit Warszaw

I just received this post from Rabbi Denise Eger, a rabbinical school classmate - well worth a read.

On Monday I wrote about the death of the Polish President and many Polish government leaders in the tragic plane crash over last weekend.
On Tuesday I visited the Polish Consul General here in Los Angeles with several other rabbis to bring condolences on behalf of the Jewish Community and The Southern California Board of Rabbis.  They were extremely touched. The Consul Genral is Ambassador Joanna Kozińska – Frybes. You could see on her face the visible toll that this has taken.  She has been in the foreign service of Poland for many years and was an Ambassador to Mexico for the Polish government and lost many friends on that plane.  She personally knew more than half of those who perished.  We visited for 30 minutes talking about the impact this will have on the country.  We spoke about the revival of Jewish life in Poland.  More than 2/3 of American Jews have some tie to Poland in their ancestry.  We spoke together of the changed nature of Poland in the last 20 years and the strong ties between Poland and Israel.
She was grateful for our visit. And we signed the condolence book in the special room they have set up to pay tribute to those who perished.
On Monday  I also wrote about the rebirth of Jewish life including the Reform synagogue in Warsaw-Beit Warszaw.  Here is a message from the rabbi, Burt Schuman about the tragedy. So you can understand first hand the impact on the nation and the Jewish community.

RABBI BURT E. SCHUMAN
April 11, 2020 27
Nisan 5770
Dear Friends,
I have been deeply moved by the expressions of concern and support I have received for the people of Poland at this time of cataclysmic national tragedy. Not only did we lose President Kaczynski and his wife on that fateful plane crash yesterday over Smolensk yesterday morning, but much of Poland’s political, economic, military, and diplomatic and religious leadership, including the chiefs of all branches of the military, the presidential chaplain and army chaplain, the deputy foreign minister and other foreign ministry staff, the president of the National Bank, the head of the National Security office, leaders of the Institute for National Memory, the head of the Olympic Committee, the civil rights commissioner, officials of the Ministry of Culture, the Deputy Speaker of the parliament, several presidential aides and former three members of parliament. In addition, the leaders of veterans’ groups, the last President of the Polish Government in Exile and several heroes of the Polish resistance also perished in that flight. Many of these individuals were people that I either I had met and conversed with or had seen at official functions, adding to my own personal sense of shock and grief. The context and timing of their deaths has added to our collective pain. First, these leaders were en route to the Katyn forest at the invitation of the Russian government to observe the 70th anniversary of the hideous massacre of tens of thousands of Polish officers, among them approximately 900 Jewish officers and military chaplains by Stalin’s secret police. Second this comes at a time when Jews in Poland and around the world are about to observe Yom Ha Shoah, and thousands of people are preparing to go on the March of the Living. As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has eloquently stated this is the greatest tragedy t o befall post-war Poland. Historians might agree or disagree, but one can state unequivocally that is the greatest tragedy to befall this nation since the restoration of democracy 20 years ago. Many in our community lost close personal friends. Moreover, the Jews of Poland have lost a great friend and advocate in President Kaczynski’s who not only spoke often and eloquently about the Jewish contribution to Polish history, on many occasions, including commemorations at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial and this past summer at the 65thanniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto this past summer, but also hosted regular events at the Presidential Palace such as his famous dialogue with Israeli President Shimon Peres, and his annual Chanukah lighting ceremony. Moreover, he demonstrated that support in deeds as well as words as in his financial support for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and his visit to Israel on the heels of the Second Lebanon War. We in Poland’s Progressive Jewish Community join our sisters and brothers throughout the world not only our fellow-Jews but people of every religion, nationality and culture in praying for and with the people of Poland in this time of national tragedy.
L’Shalom,
RABBI BURT E. SCHUMAN

Take Me Out To The Ballgame...

Monday afternoon was everything baseball's opening day should be: sunny, almost seventy degrees; throngs filling Miller Park to capacity; the hometown Brewers in crisp white uniforms, heroic, lithe and testosterone laden.

The world of the fan is a swirl of pungent aromas. It begins with forty five thousand eight hundred and eight people in close proximity, many sweating beer. Add to that a variety of high notes: popcorn over here, pizza over there, bratwurst all around, and beer, beer and more beer. The sweet and sour mix signals spring's arrival.

While one can anticipate the stadium's "surround-smell environment," a winning game is less predictable. Alas, the boys of spring were inconsistent, leaving multiple runners on base at innings' end. As Abba Eban once quipped (not about the Brewers) "they never miss(ed) an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

Yet, the magic of opening day trumps the final score. Who cares who won? The season has just begun; there will be another one hundred and sixty one opportunities to win. What's more, baseball infuses the coming months with the possibility of existential redemption. As Roger Angell wrote in Once More Around the Park:

"Baseball is the writer's game, and its train of thought, we come to sense, is a shuttle, carrying us constantly forward to the next pitch or inning, or the sudden double into the left-field corner, but we keep hold of the other half of our [train] ticket, for the return trip on the same line. We anticipate happily, and, coming home, reenter an old landscape brightened with fresh colors. Baseball games and plays and mannerisms-the angle of a cap-fade stubbornly and come to mind unbidden, putting us back in some particular park on that special October afternoon or June evening. The players are as young as ever, and we, perhaps not entirely old."

 -Rabbi David Cohen