Category Archives: 400 thoughts

thoughts from the 400 bus and beyond.

On Jews, Jerusalem, Women and Walls

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Note: Reflections based on my rare February and March 2013 trips to the Kotel. Based on today’s news, I figured today’s as good as any to post. 

I’ve been to the Kotel, the Western Wall, way too many times in the past year. Previously, I had a comfortable average of maybe once every two or three years. Maybe less. It felt long enough between trips. And the trips are always for the sake and pleasure of other people.

But throughout the last year, I’ve accompanied various visiting family members through the Old City, the pathway inevitably leading to the token Kotel visit. Some pray, some don’t. I never do.

The Kotel, the Old City, and even Jerusalem for that matter have come to symbolize discomfort, pain, ambivalence, shame, conflict. I don’t want to pray in those places. I don’t want to pray alongside people I can’t trust. I don’t want to reach deep into myself and summon a spiritual presence in such a political place.

You know where it’s lovely to pray? In a forest. There’s plenty of forest around Jerusalem. I live in it. I think it’s a not-so-big-secret that many other ancient sects of humanity get that we don’t. Man-made holiness hurts. Holiness existed before we did. Why wouldn’t we jump over each other to access that?

By all means, if the Kotel means something to you, enjoy it. Women of the Wall, Women for the Wall, women who wear falls, women who wear shawls. Men who throw garbage, men who who wear jeans, men who think learning is working, men who think working is earning.

When I’m standing in the Kotel plaza, I’m filled with anger and pain. So please, count me out. Take my spot. I hope though that between me and you and everyone else, some kind of spirituality will eventually solve our crisis.

——-

Things I can’t handle #745873: Beit Shemesh Taliban mother and daughters. Visiting the Kotel in March 2013.

 

To the immigrant parents I grew up with:

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Dear immigrant parents of childhood friends,

Hi. How are you? Have I told you lately your English is incredible?

It was really fun growing up with your kid. Maybe I’m still even friends with your kid. Most of my friends from childhood had immigrant parents it seems. It really felt that way, at least.

To the point where I kind of felt like an outsider myself. The all-American. None of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. I’m not complaining. Or bragging. But I just always felt like an outsider in my own community. A big part of that was my family’s religious status, too.

Anyway. I just wanted to say – I watched you as a kid. Not in a creepy way. In a curious way. The way words rolled off your tongue; the words had different edges to mine. The way you’d sometimes mention a story about back home where you grew up. The way occasionally I heard you speak another language, only for you, it wasn’t the second.

The way so many of you had groups of friends with the same background and you’d get together. Everyone there spoke your first language and I didn’t understand, or understood a little because it was my second language. Or how a group of people from different countries could still commiserate over the Old Country, even if the nationalities were unique to each of you.

I always wondered what that was like. To be from somewhere else.

Now I’m here. Somewhere else. And I’ve got kids. Kids with immigrant parents. And  I’m so caught up in my own tangled ideas about being an immigrant, labeling ‘whereyoufrom,’ speaking words with different edges, making it, that on some days, I could just cry.

And some days, I do.

They say, you can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends. But when you’re an immigrant, sometimes it’s the opposite. You get thrown in somewhere where people talk like you, and slowly build what becomes your family.

I guess you guys did that, too. I remember there always being someone at a party or event, labeled as ‘my cousins… I mean, not my real cousins, but my cousins.’

I get it now. Even if we’re not totally there yet.

I also get, after eight years, that it’s ok to melt into your own people for a few minutes sometimes. It’s ok to show your kids that there are so many parts to what make them whole.

That they can feel comfortable with different crowds.

I don’t want to hold my kids back. I have a lot of my own crap to work out. I worry about it a lot.

But once in a while, I have this thought:

That for you, parents of my childhood friends, it’s now thirty or so years later…

…and your kids have done just fine.

 

P.S. – Seriously, your English was always amazing. I appreciate it so much more now. Even if, upon request, I did sometimes explain the slang.

Fifty-Two Paragraphs

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Sometimes, pretending to be an amateur photographer helps me be creative.

In choosing a photo to submit for this week’s Fifty-Two Frames, I asked my husband about a cheeky idea I had.

“I think you’re a writer, not a photographer.”

In other words, I seem to enjoy playing with the captions more than handling the photographs. Really, I’m photojournaling.

“Start a Fifty-Two Paragraphs. That’s who you are.”

Intriguing, and then I went off to class, where tonight I was one of the writers to be critiqued on a submitted piece. That exercise may have finally knocked me over the head.

I’m not being the writer I am today.

Ten-year-old me is being the writer I am today.

I’m twenty years late to my own party.

When I was a kid, I had a fear of writing things down because I knew they’d never be as perfect as they were in my head. I ended up focusing on poetry and journal writing. It was easy to perfect poetry, and it was easy to let journal writing be imperfect.

Now I’m an adult, and I’m still journal writing. I’m trying to write fiction, to tell the stories I have inside, and all I’m doing is tugging at a grain of whatever it was I had back then.

It’s not working.

At least I’m learning.

So… Fifty-Two Paragraphs?

The innocent on Memorial Day.

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I told Koala he could come with me to the Yom HaZicaron ceremony if he likes. I told him it’s a time where we remember all the soldiers and all the good things they do for us.

“And if you want, during the siren, you can think about your uncle who is a chayal, or zayde who was a long time ago.”

“I want to think about them and all the chayalim.”

After the siren, I asked him if he had thought about the chayalim. He told me he  forgot, he was “thinking about other things.”

That’s ok. He’s four.

Here’s to innocence.

Yom HaZicaron in Tzur Hadassah

Go gaga for mongal. Or…

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Recently I came across this ‘infographic’. I don’t know the source or whether the stats are correct, but it still resonates because we all know what the sky looks like by the time Yom Haatzmaut is over:

1636 פרות, 1884 כבשים, 548 חזירים, 685,000 תרנגולות... ביום אחד. יום העצמעות שמח.

1636 cows. 1884 sheep. 548 pigs. 685,000 chickens… in one day. Happy Independence Day.

The animals. The air. The smell of our hair. Nothing is left untouched when we get excited about something as a nation.

Are there alternatives to a gluttonous meatfest when celebrating the most important event in modern Jewish history?

How about…

  1. An early hike, before the smoke settles
  2. A day at the beach – it’s not as crowded as you’d think, and no bbq-ing allowed
  3. A block party – a group in Efrat puts one on every year – what better way to celebrate community?

I know it’s ‘what’s done’ and I know we as a country love to barbecue in general. But surely we could diversify a little bit.

Maybe an even healthier by-product would be less audible duf duf music.

Speaking up.

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It won’t be long before Jewish parents of school-age children no longer remember the point. The memory becomes a faded square of yellow fabric, eventually disintegrating under museum lighting. The pictures, cliche. The speeches, routine.

It’s probably already true to some degree, but most of us are young enough to remember the first time we met a Holocaust a survivor. Really met.

Who will remember those who remember?

We’re going to have to preserve the message, the memory, the moment somehow.

Linking the past to the present, the moral to our future.

What about teaching our kids to speak up?

Speak up the way some of our grandparents didn’t. Speak up when everyone else would rather speak about something else.

Speak up against intolerance. Speak up against misunderstanding. Speak up against baseless hatred.

Speak up for healing. Speak up for moving forward. Speak up for the people who can’t.

Who am I kidding, we’re Jews <insert stereotype>, Israelis <insert stereotype>, Middle Easterners <insert stereotype> – we don’t know how to speak up?

Psst.

Constructively.

What I learned running 21 kilometers in the 2013 Tel Aviv Marathon

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Last Friday, I did a highway practice run in preparation for the Tel Aviv (half) Marathon, and experienced an epiphany.

It started around kilometer four, and I fully appreciated it after completing all 16km.

By 4km, jogging uphill under a warm 7am sun, I was done. I really was ready to slow to a trot, turn around, get in my car and give up. I had my phone on me; I’d call my husband on the walk back and vent about not having what it takes.

But I didn’t. A tiny tiny part of me was moving my feet. A voice I couldn’t really hear clearly was forcing me to keep going.

The epiphany is not that running – or any physical challenge – is 90% mental. I knew that from four previous 10k’s in the last year and a half.

It’s how brilliantly amazing athletes are at combining the powerful self talk with any level of fine physical ability and empowering chemical reactions.

Running is a 360° high, and all at once, I understood there is always a place in the self talk for achieving that.

This was a week after spontaneously registering for the Tel Aviv Half Marathon; after Jerusalem, I literally said fuck it and knew the only thing stopping me from running a half was saying to everyone and myself I wasn’t ready to run a half. After each of my last three 10k’s, I knew I could have done more. A lot more.

This past Friday, I ran the Tel Aviv Half Marathon. There were a lot of excuses available, offering several respectable outs: The forecasted heat wave, which postponed the full and pushed our starting time up an hour. The fact that my furthest distance in my two-week training was 16km, and I had done it just once. The four hours of sleep I ended up getting the night before.

But I arrived at the starting line at five minutes to 6. It was already hot, but I felt prepared. I was watered well from three days of binge drinking, well-fed, had read an excellent article about keeping an elite state of mind, and told myself over and over I had absolutely nothing to lose.

I felt free as soon as we started. By kilometer 5, I knew I would finish the race. By kilometer 10, I knew I would finish it running. It felt great to have that confidence and control. It wasn’t an ego thing; it was knowing my body, being familiar with my preparedness and most of all, feeling totally at ease with my self talk.

After reaching 16km, the excitement really kicked in. I was passing my furthest distance and I felt fresh. Then something totally new started to take place after 17.  I don’t really know how to express it other than I had this totally emotional response with every new marker I passed.

I literally felt so good about each kilometer achievement, I had an overwhelming emotional desire to cry every time. I was overcoming some enormous challenge every time I saw a new number – 18, 19, 20. After a year and a half of procrastinating and making excuses, I was here and just doing it.

To be honest, it’s probably part of the ‘high’ I was on; like any other high, feeling the world in the palm of your hands… But that’s what it was. I looked around at all my running peers, and could hug every one. We were all together – most of us not pros, maybe a lot of us doing this for the first time – and we were each doing this to feel amazing, to achieve something personal, to just do it. There was a freedom in its meaningfulness and meaninglessness, and the world was a better place because tens of thousands of people had made the same decision to do something big within their own personal lives.

It was powerful, empowering, and between 20 and 21, I was flying.

It’s obvious that most of us don’t allow ourselves to take big leaps all that often. Maybe it’s wise to keep it at a moderate pace.

But when you’re fresh enough, fortunate enough, focused enough to hear that tiny tiny insistence that you can make this happen… know there’s an all-powerful high at the other end, waiting to blend your sweat with your tears.

————————————————————-

The following are some pics and details from Tel Aviv Marathon day. Earlier in the week, the full was postponed due to the predicted heat wave. We started earlier, at 6am, when it was reportedly 26°c. The aim was for everyone to finish by around 8:30am, when it was 29°c.

Set out early to make it for the new start time – 5am Tel Aviv:

5am Tel Aviv, Marathon morning

Tragically, the marathon ended with one death – a 29-year-old half marathon runner who collapsed. Out of 35,000 runners, 50 were in need of medical care of varying degrees – from first aid to critical hospitalization.

I do think the marathon organizers were very well prepped throughout – giving warnings, broadcasting tips, pushing up the starting time, adding majorly to the water supply, providing rinses.

But walking towards the starting line, I’ll admit it was daunting to pass such a fleet…

Ambulances lined up pre-Tel Aviv marathon

It was already pretty exhilarating while lining up with thousands of my peers.

Lining up the morning of the Tel Aviv marathon 2013

And just to drive the point home a little harder… While stretching my legs at the starting line, I spot this guy:

Running amputee.

See you at Rishon Letzion on May 3?

 

Universe.

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Sometimes we ask the Universe for something and we don’t even realize it.

Sometimes we actually do realize. Sometimes we actually get it.

And then sometimes you struggle so much with the reception, until you acknowledge it’s what you didn’t want to want but needed very much.

So, thanks Universe.

 

(Also, Rolling Stones.)