Don't Gel Too Soon

Home and Heartache

Yeah, we’re home – and as usual it’s like walking into an electric fan. We landed, unpacked, did laundry, slept (until 3AM) then Rick went back to the airport for a fund-raising trip to California. I’m working on several major projects and wanting to organize for when the boys come home for the holidays. Grocery lists and activity planning in addition to many hours of business obligations.

Lots on my mind. Today a friend told me about the last conversation she had with her father and I was ambushed by a deluge of memories. It’s tough to come to terms with the loss of a parent. Both of mine have been gone for years and there isn’t a day I don’t think of them — and, often, wish I could ask them something – or tell them something — or just feel their love again. I haven’t felt this way in a long time and it surprised me. I just wasn’t expecting the intensity.

I once sent my dad the lyrics to a Judy Collins song about her father. It’s a wonderful evocation of the love between fathers and daughters and the bitter-sweet realization that one’s life will exceed that of a beloved parent. It’s what they’d wish for us but it’s complicated. Anyway there wasn’t a moment of my life when I doubted the love for and faith in me felt by both my parents.

There were also circumstances in my life that led me, in my memory at least, to be less attentive than I wanted to be. I think it will haunt me forever- times when finances or my own parental responsibilities kept me from visits; times when I let my dad tell me not to come because he didn’t want us to "see him like this." — all those things we all wish we’d done differently. I am beginning to think that this is a real issue for me and one I’ve got to get some clarity about.

This is the second time in the space of the 90 days or so I’ve had this blog that my dad has come up and he’s been gone since 1991. Somehow though I’m more at peace with the loss of him. I can summon memories that make me smile and I know that he had a profound and lovely effect on my sons, which adds to my own fond remembrances of him.

My mother, who died in 1998, haunts me though. I know things in her life frustrated her – and that she would have liked to do more in the world outside the house. My husband told both her and me that I was guilty that my arrival had pulled her out of a promising career but she insisted that that was HER choice and I should get over it. That she loved raising the three of us. I don’t doubt that she loved raising her daughters but I also think she needed more than she was able to get in life as a suburban mom. I don’t know – all I know is that I feel a need to be particularly helpful to elderly women on the street, or the bus, or the synagogue steps. As if I can do for her by doing for them. Agh. I don’t know. I’m going to bed to see if I can beat the last of the jet lag. This is too sad.

DEEP IN A DREAM: THE RED TENT

While I was in Jerusalem I went several times to Pardes Institute, a remarkable school to study the Bible, Talmud and commentaries. My husband and I love to study while we’re visiting places; it all seems so much more real – and sinks in more, too. We were there during the week that the story of the rape of Dinah is read on Shabbat. It’s pretty profound and provocative and a wonderful teacher named Rabbi Reuven Grodner taught the class. We were transfixed: the story of the vengeful brothers and their far from vengeful father Jacob is troubling to anyone – but particularly to women.

I remembered that The Red Tent was written in Dinah’s voice, so I decided to read it. I had tried once before but it seemed too overwrought and almost overwritten then. Now though, I find myself more interested in the stories in the Torah — the universality of Bible stories and all they represent — so I stuck it in my suitcase — and once we’d studied the Genesis story of Dinah I pulled it out.

It’s really quite an experience — almost a fever, like The Virgin Suicides. The sisterhood and love among women, the pain of childbirth, the rivalry and particularly the remarkable power author Anita Diamant provides to each of the main characters — is thrilling.

There’s a kind of Biblical interpretation called a Midrash and those that I, as a beginner, have read, are all pretty male-oriented. This book is one big women’s perspective/Midrash full of love, passion, pain, loss, love, birth, death, misery, joy and poetry. Much of it does NOT appear in the Bible but that’s true of the old Midrashim as well. I can’t stop thinking about the women of this book, their lives and stories. I came to love them and their stories — so very very different from the ones the conventional Bible stories tell.

JERUSALEM DIARY – ALMOST THE END

It’s Saturday night – Shabbat in Jerusalem is over. Last night we went to amazing services at the Wall- mobs of men on their side and women on ours praying, singing and dancing. Some of it is really awesome –standing watching a circle of young women in uniform – Israeli soldiers – dancing as they pray. Other women soldiers in uniform praying with their guns over their shoulders. Little girls praying with fierce concentration – other little girls running, laughing, dancing with the women. The men equally intense and in far greater numbers. ALL to welcome the Sabbath and the peace that it brings.

We returned to the hotel for an ENORMOUS dinner and lots of songs. And laughter. There were several large parties in a huge dining room — and many were singing — tables picked up one another’s tunes and serial singing ensued. Lots of kids running around; enormous families celebrating together. I’m so sorry I can’t show you pictures but I can’t use a camera on Shabbat — you just have to use your imagination.

Today we went to services at a school where the gym is used by a congregation on Saturdays. From there we took a long walk, had lunch with our entire group and a crew of our Rabbi’s family – his sister, her husband and four kids and his cousin, her husband and 6 kids. They are lovely, interesting people – two professors, a therapist and an Alzheimer’s Center director. There were lots of others too – 35 in all – and it was a great time with speeches and arguments and laughter.

Yesterday we met for two hours with a particularly sage rabbi with a spectacular reputation that he more than lives up to. It was quite exciting.
His name is Adin Steinsaltz and he has created schools and study centers all over Israel and in other countries. He looks like a sweet rabinical elf and evokes great emotion – it’s difficult to explain why. Like a jazz musician he riffed for two hours and gathered all that he spoke of together into a remarkable synthesis at the end. I’m going to try to write more about it but just want to get this account down since the ridiculous internet arrangements at this hotel have made posting difficult.

We’re just about at the end of this trip – so busy that my posts have of necessity been short — and it’s been a remarkable journey. I’m hoping to write in more detail when I can. Goodnight for now.

Something there is that doesn’t….

We had a lovely day. It began at the Kotel (Wailing Wall) at 7:30. The guys prayed on their side of the Wall and Lea, the rabbi’s daughter, and I prayed on the women’s side. She’s 7 and knows all the prayers cold – helped me as I’m the newbie and still learning. I don’t want to post her picture for kid privacy reasons but here’s what the scene looked like.

The Men’s Side

The Women’s Side

Then we went wandering. Where?

Sign inside Uri’s Pizza – a tiny hole-in-the-wall that our friend took us to to get caramel jelly donuts (don’t ask!)

We also had a lovely dinner – the whole group — and crashed early. Yeah- lots to talk about about the separation of women and men. Later though. G’nite.

PIX

This has been a great day but I may be too tired to tell you about it.

So here are some photos of

A soup kitchen warehouse where volunteers organize food to feed 5000 families and prepare 300 meals a day

Their kitchen

A funny picture of Jack Abramoff

that he isn’t in.

And some pretty flowers on the edge of the wall overlooking Old City excavations.

More tomorrow.

THE WEST WING AND THE MIDDLE EAST

They carry West Wing re-runs in Israel. I’m sitting here on a break between a day of walking through this holy city and dinner watching and crying. Can’t believe it. It’s the one where Mrs. Lanningham dies – a sad one, yes – but as my husband just said to me – “It’s a television show.” He’s right of course – but not exactly.

Since the end of the Clinton administration, the West Wing hour was the only hour I felt like I had a president I could count on. Seeing it here so long after the show ended and Bravo stopped running it was a real ambush moment. Just reminded me how much I grieve for all I’ve thought should be… and how very much I feel we’ve failed. Talking with our Israeli friends about not so hard; their own sense of despair over the state of this country brought it all back. I’ll get over it…

Before my weeping incident it was a lovely day today. Early morning at the Kotel – me and the rabbi’s 7-year-old daughter on the women’s side and all the guys on the men’s. It was sunny and cool and the city glows in the morning. Of course it’s unsettling to pass through metal detectors to pray but once you’re there, it’s quite an experience.

We had a great breakfast back at the hotel, then went walking with our friend Asher. We spent a couple of hours exploring the Mehane Yehuda market – crammed with vegetables and spices; meat, cheese, sneakers and clogs, sweaters, hats, nuts, loose tea, bottled water and almost anything else you’d want to buy. Asher took us from there to his old neighborhood Nachlaot, historic old houses off narrow streets.. strands of flowers hanging off some of the roofs and historic plaques decorating the walls.

So there it is – another day in Israel — the ridiculous, the sublime and the inevitable intrusion of the political longings that even a great adventure can’t stave off forever.

THE HARD PARTS

This picture, pulled from an image file because my camera battery died, is of a sign that appears all over the Jerusalem neighborhood called Mea Shearim. The article I linked to here calls it a “living museum” but somehow to me it’s always been oppressive. I go to an Orthodox synagogue and am accustomed to some painful facts about the role of women in Orthodox Judaism but this is different. To me it feels so joyless and heavy – I feel it sitting on my chest. No one smiles. No one will exchange a nod or even a glance as you pass them on the street – not the men who technically aren’t allowed to look at women not their wives, not the women – I’m not sure why — or even the kids. They are as closed off from us as if we were on two sides of a glass.

Sure you can buy things but that’s it. And it seems so strange to me that their stores are tangles of goods — no displays, no efforts to make things attractive – just piles and jumbles. I keep telling myself that it’s because the material world is so irrelevant to them. Their lives – every moment – belong to God. And to many I know that’s laudable. In some ways it is… but — and I’m thinking out loud here — in my view God gave us the rest of the world — why shouldn’t we enjoy it, too?

I guess I’ll just have to continue to struggle. I never could stand not being able to connect with people. Maybe I just want the connection that I have no right to expect. My husband says that I’m looking at THEIR lives through MY eyes and I have to open my mind to the acceptable differences between us. But they transmit such disapproval and so clearly feel none of the commonality that I want to feel with others who choose to practice Judaism that it’s tough. I’m thinking as I’m typing that it’s my bad – that I have to simply accept without comment the lives of others and stop wanting them to love me. Wow. Maybe that’s the whole thing — that and what I feel about the women and their very constrained lives. More to come on this I suspect.

Spent the rest of the day wandering around Jerusalem. In the morning we took a two hour class on the story of the Rape of Dina in Genesis. Because it was particularly important to me to read, particularly as a woman, it was quite exciting to spend two hours on it and the views of the sages about it. I love the intellectual activity that is part of Jewish study. Questions — then answers… but always more than one — shared observations, shared theories and opinions. To me the idea that Judaism is not a destination but a journey informed by shared study is wonderful and among the best aspects of it. Just the opposite of what seems to be going on in Mea Shearim. Gotta keep thinking… but right now I’m just going to sleep. Signing off from the City of Gold.

SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN

Here we are in what is supposed to be the best hotel in Jerusalem and the Internet can not get from the wall to my laptop. I’m down here in the business center just touching base but will post more when I have true access to the web, my camera etc. Sleep well everyone – Jerusalem is a huge intellectual, emotional and spiritual provocation. Will tell more later. Gnite for now. I cant’ find the apostrophe on this Israeli keyboard.

ART AND POLITICS

Just to the left is a famous mosaic of Tel Aviv scenes that’s stood in the middle of town since the early 70s. We went with our friends Joel and Nurith to the Nahum Gutman Museum and saw photos of the work, which I loved. Naturally, Joel immediately decided that we had to go see it. And we did. It’s a dear. lovely, loving and evocative work of the three columns you see here, surrounded by a ring of more scenes that serves as a kind of frame — really lovely.

The museum currently features a retrospective of the work of Duda Geva, an Israeli cartoonist who died recently, quite young. His work was kind of disconcerting; much of it joking about the absence of God. He appeared prominently in Israeli newspapers — and the tiny museum was jammed. It’s so fascinating, in a Jewish country, that this very secular man had such a wide following. Typical of the enigmatic nature of Israel in the 21st century – battling between the disproportionately powerful 15% who are super-orthodox and the rest of the country and of the frightful battle for the soul of the country between militant, militaristic right and the progressives. There is such pain and despair — on both sides. I’m going to try to write about it some here in future posts — after two years in progressive and highly secular Tel Aviv we go to Jerusalem tomorrow where religion and more conservative politics rule.

SAFE ARRIVAL

We’re in Tel Aviv (that’s our view on the left) after a lovely set of VERY long flights. The kosher food theme could emerge once more if I let it; horrible on United from DC to Frankfurt — much better from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv. I’ve got to get over this. It’s clear that I have a food thing; it’s certainly partly about surrendering power over what I’m eating but there has to be more since I’m totally fine running a kosher home. I think from now on I’m bringing food — a nuisance for someone who already looks like a refugee when boarding – with laptop, a couple of books, crocheting (on long trips) and more. AND I have to get into the issues that are doing this to me – whatever they are. We’re so happy seeing friends we first met thirty years ago — more details when I’m completely through time changes….