Ilana Epstein’s 10-minute pasta sauce

I’ve struggled for much  of my life to find a pasta sauce I liked that wasn’t prohibitively priced.  In the US, our family liked Barilla sauce (to match our Barilla pasta, of course).  But here in Israel, we find, the pasta is still affordable, but the sauce is not.  (It comes in jars half the size of the ones in the States, at twice the price.)  We’ve tried a number of jarred sauces here, and they range from just okay to disgusting.

Of course, my children like the absolutely worst-tasting sauces on the market, and until recently I have been willing to buy them for them (while also buying the more expensive, better-tasting stuff for the Cap’n and me).  But then we have two jars of sauce sitting in the refrigerator, growing mold since I’ve cut down on the amount of pasta we eat.

I was grousing recently about the poor pasta sauce situation to Ilana Epstein, my friend and cooking guru, and she offered me a simple solution: Make it myself.  (Now why didn’t I think of that?)  She says she makes pasta sauce every week, and has found a balance of flavors and acidity that pleases her picky children as well as herself and her husband.  Below is her recipe:

2 large onions, chopped

Olive oil

6 garlic cloves, sliced

1 lg can (28 oz or 800 g) whole peeled tomatoes

1 lg can (28 oz or 800 g) chopped tomatoes

1 handful basil leaves (more, to taste)

A sprinkle of fresh or dried oregano

1 tablespoon brown sugar

Juice of ½ lemon

Salt and pepper to taste

Sauté onions in a little olive oil.  Add garlic, then both cans of tomatoes.  (Be sure onions are completely softened and cooked before adding tomatoes, as the acid from the tomatoes will stop the onions from cooking.)  Using a knife, break up the whole tomatoes while they simmer in the pot.  Season with herbs, and add brown sugar and lemon juice.  Season to taste with salt and pepper.  Simmer for 10 minutes.

This sauce makes a chunky sauce.  For those who like chunky sauces, you’re done!  If you prefer a smoother sauce, run it through a food mill for a more even texture, or whiz it in a blender for super-smooth sauce.

One can vary the recipe.  Ilana recommends including roasted garlic instead of fresh, or adding chopped celery and carrots to the onions for a nice Napolitana sauce.  Tinker with the acidity to get it to taste, either adding lemon juice to add acidity or sugar to decrease.

This recipe makes 1.5 liters, enough for one dinner’s worth of lasagna or baked ziti, and some left over for the children to have with pasta for lunches.

On bleeding hearts

Disclaimer: This is a combination rant/analysis of a problematic type of person in the world today.  I acknowledge that the majority of the readers of this blog do not fit this description.  Therefore, if you do not see yourself in the post following this disclaimer, do not be offended.  If you do see yourself, you might give some thought to how you formulate and express your political views.

I occasionally find myself debating with bloggers and commenters in the blogosphere.  Most recently, I mixed it up a bit with someone on Westbankmama’s blog.

I am not the most eloquent spokesperson for Israel, and I am also not naïve enough to think that what I write changes anyone’s mind.  Someone who thinks that Israel was the aggressor in Operation Cast Lead, who thinks that the Goldstone Report is a valid document, or who bleats incessantly about Israel’s “occupation” of “Palestinian land,” is someone whose mind is made up, and the facts are unlikely to change that.

I should point out that I am not a critic of liberal politics in general.  I think it is no accident that, as Matt Santos on “The West Wing” points out, “Liberals got women the right to vote.  Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote.  Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty.  Liberals ended segregation.  Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.  Liberals created Medicare.  Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.”  Why did liberals effect all of these social and environmental changes?  Because they care about people.  I think that’s laudable, and I agree with it.

In the policy changes listed above, liberal politicians and activists identified the vulnerable, the underprivileged, the oppressed—in short, the underdog—and sought to change the social equation to give that underdog an advantage.  That habit of identifying the underdog and championing those who appear to be weak or put-upon has continued.  But something I have found disturbing in recent years is the fact that while liberals claim to care about people, they don’t always care about facts.  Well, not all of the facts.  And only about SOME people.

If I’m a liberal thinker, my first job is to find the underdog.  And these days, quite frankly, it’s hard to pick out the underdog in a line-up.  The guy who appears to be the underdog may not be right.  He may be immoral, or devious, or hateful, or oppressive, or just plain wrong.  Sometimes the guy who looks like the underdog is not really the underdog at all.  It takes a well-informed person with a critical eye and the ability to ask questions and scrutinize the situation to spot when this is the case.

I don’t believe that liberal-minded people are unintelligent.  Most of them are very bright, thoughtful people.  But I have noticed that there are some liberal-minded people who have serious blind spots in the way they view the world.  They are underinformed.  They don’t ask questions.  They don’t know which questions to ask, or even how to ask questions.  They assume that the people they think are underdogs are all truthful and sincere.  They assume that those who have any power over the underdogs are heartless, self-serving, and bloodthirsty.  In short, they are as ignorant and prejudiced as they accuse others of being.

At the conclusion of the Six Day War in 1967, Israel was the darling of Planet Earth.  The world had just seen a tiny country with very limited resources go head to head with its much better-supplied, better-trained neighbors intent on destroying it utterly, and crush them in less than a week.  What happened between 1967 and 2009, when Israel is without question the pariah of Planet Earth?  Has Israel’s essential nature changed in the intervening years?  Has the Arab world’s?  No, and no.  But in the last 42 years, Israel has grown from a small developing nation to a world leader in science, technology, and agriculture.  Even in its worst years, with buses blowing up, tourists staying away, and high unemployment, it has had the capital to continue to build its cities, its roads and railway system, and its industry.  Meanwhile, the Arab world has changed very little from the cluster of “monarchies” and despotic regimes, where the haves live in palaces and the have-nots live in squalor; where non-Muslims have few (if any) rights; where women cannot drive or vote or walk out of their homes unaccompanied; where gays and adulterers are stoned in public; where peaceful protesters are gunned down in the streets by lawless thugs hired by the government to keep the “peace.”

So why doesn’t the world’s liberal-minded populace still champion Israel?  Because they cannot.  In their view, economic success precludes “underdog” status.  Rooting for Israel would be like rooting for Microsoft (in the Cap’n’s words)—an impossibility for someone who can only see the underdog as poor, third-world, non-White.  The worldview of many liberal-minded people has become very simple.  Too simple, in fact.

I’ve given considerable thought to what would actually transform such well-meaning people from champions of terrorists and despots to champions of the actual underdog.  Here are some of my conclusions:

-Refrain from automatically romanticizing the underdog.  Love of the disenfranchised has traditionally been a strength of liberal activism.  It worked many times in the past few hundred years and allowed Western civilization to advance in fairness and equality, but the world has changed, and things are not always what they appear to be anymore.  Some wealthy, successful white people use their money and influence for great good in the world, while some non-Western poor people spout hatred and relish spilling the blood of innocents.

-Let your values be your guide.  When judging other societies, take a look at what their core values are.  If you value freedom, civil rights, tolerance, rule of law, and democracy, look at how the people you sympathize with view these same values.  Do they share them?  Do they embrace them?  Do they treat each other and their neighboring societies the way you believe human beings ought to treat one another?  And if they don’t share your core values, ask yourself why you support them.

-Let your opinions and positions be determined by ALL the facts.  In arguing with someone on Westbankmama’s blog, I argued that Palestinian Arab leadership has turned down three very generous offers of a state in the last 10 years.  My opponent ignored that, and blathered on and on about Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinian land and “aggression” against its people.  He either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, about how the Palestinian Arabs ended up without a state in the first place, and which countries are actually responsible for their statelessness (Jordan, Egypt, Syria) and who is responsible for the failure to resolve their refugee status (the UN).  Buzzwords like “occupation” and “aggression” and “war crimes” trump the facts with such people every time.

-Learn the facts.  When I stop to reflect, I remember that when I first came to Israel in 1996 I had a very left-wing view of politics in Israel.  I believed that they had been harsh in their dealings with the Palestinians.  I believed that the handshake between Yitzhak Rabin z”l and Yassir Arafat y”s would put both peoples firmly on the road to peace.  When I heard someone on NPR read a news story in which the Israelis had demanded that the PLO renounce their goal to destroy Israel as part of the beginning of the Oslo Peace Process, I was angry that the reader added, “The PLO is not expected to agree to this.”  Why not?  I believed the Arabs wanted a peaceful conclusion to what I viewed as a simple turf war as much as the Israelis.  Then I set out to learn the facts.  In reading books about the history and background of the conflict by many different authors (journalists, diplomats, popular writers), I realized that the conflict is much more complicated than newspaper stories, radio and television segments make it out to be.  And those newspapers and other media outlets are often limited in their access to the events and facts, rely on not-always-reliable witnesses, don’t always check their facts carefully, and are naturally limited by deadlines and the ignorance and prejudices of their reporters.  In other words, those sources often present half-truths and cockeyed stories to the public, and don’t always print their retractions on the front page.

To gather the facts takes time, and many people find themselves pressed for time these days.  Nonetheless, if one feels strongly enough about a subject, one should do it the justice it merits to find out all they can about the history of the conflict or region, and weigh different perspectives in figuring out where their sympathies lie.  If I were sitting in my comfortable chair on the other side of the world from where the events are happening, I would make damned sure I’d done my homework before I started leaving comments on people’s blogs, defending a people about whom I know nothing against people about whom I know even less.

Since my debates tend most often to be about the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict, I will take the liberty of listing some recommended reading about the issue from different points of view, from insiders and outsiders, eyewitnesses, journalists, and academics, who look at the issue from many different angles.

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Siege

Hands down, best book I’ve read about the conflict.  Irishman O’Brien cannot be accused of belonging to either camp, and I am amazed at how well he “gets” both sides of the issue, and explains their motivations and actions.

Daniel Gordis’s Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End

The most up-to-date of these books, having been published just last year.  It describes the toll on the psyche of Jews both in Israel and abroad of the wars and terrorism, but also why those should not define Israel’s character or its sense of purpose.  Beautifully written.

Mitchell G. Bard and Joel Himelfarb’s Myths and Facts: A Concise Record of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

This small volume covers the history of Israel from shortly before the War of Independence to current events.  It lays out commonly held beliefs about the conflict—e.g. “Palestine was always an Arab country,” “The West’s support of Israel allowed the Jews to conquer Palestine,” and “Israel is militarily superior to its Arab neighbors in every area and has the means to maintain its qualitative edge without outside help”—and then debunks them with the facts.  (My volume extends to shortly after the Gulf War in 1992; I believe there is an updated version.  And Mitchell Bard has a less concise volume which may provide even greater depth.)

Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem

Friedman’s account of his stints as New York Times bureau chief first in Beirut during the First Lebanon War, then in Jerusalem during the Intifada.  Gives some dated, but valuable, background on the first direct conflict between the IDF and the PLO, as well as a look at what one might view as the turning point in how modern wars are fought (particularly between national and terrorist entities).

Larry Collins and Dominic LaPierre’s O Jerusalem

A thorough, slightly romanticized view of Jerusalem during the War of Independence, particularly the siege of the city and the role of the British who tacitly supported the Arabs during the war.  The reported massacre at Deir Yassin is presented here as fact; it has been hotly disputed through the years, and has been discredited by those who investigated it.

Ze’ev Chafets’s Heroes and Hustlers, Hardhats and Holy Men

A down-to-earth account of Israeli society in the wake of the Yom Kippur War (1973) and how it changed the Israeli government, its people, and ultimately, the Middle East.

Rav Meir Kahane’s They Must Go

Contrary to the accusations that Rav Kahane was a racist and a terrorist, I have never read anything by him that suggested he was either.  This book includes the most sympathetic analysis I’ve read of how Arab Muslims and Christians cannot be expected to take joy or wish to participate in the Zionist adventure that is the Jewish State, and what the options are.  It also includes a house-to-house description (very difficult to read) of the massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929.  Kahane had no love for Arabs, but I believe he understood them better than most people, and did not shrink from turning a critical eye to their TRUE plight in Israel.

Solomon Grayzel’s A History of the Jews

A sparsely-written, yet somehow elegant history of the Jews, and one that takes as its starting thesis that when Hashem closed a door on the Jews in Jewish history, He opened another somewhere else.  A Jewish history with a decidedly Jewish perspective.

In addition to these books, I have found articles by others with expertise in various areas to be helpful:

J.H.H. Weiler is an expert on “international law” and its limitations.

Shmuel Katz z”l wrote incisive articles about Israel’s relations with its neighbors and the peace process.

Khaled Abu-Toameh, an Israeli Arab, is one of the best journalists on the Jerusalem Post staff, and is an eloquent critic of the Palestinian Authority.

Brigitte Gabriel and Nonie Darwish, two Arab women, have riveting stories to tell about their lives in Arab society, and the demonization of Israelis they witnessed firsthand.

Sarah Honig’s biting critiques of Israel in the Jerusalem Post don’t sound like those of most of the rest of the world, but they are nearly always valid, in my opinion.

Daniel Gordis’s essays, available on his website, detail his family’s struggles with the politics and realities of living in Israel, with discussions of the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the unresolved hostage situation of Gilad Shalit, the waning interest in Israel by Diaspora Jews, and the need in Israel for a new leadership training institute.

I have been grieved to see the European Union, the United Nations, and even many in the United States lose their moral compass.  Whether the excuse lies in political correctness, a natural antipathy toward Jews (i.e. anti-Semitism), fear of their own growing Arab/Muslim populations, or a hope of winning those populations over to them through appeasement, I don’t know.  But failure to tell the truth, look the facts in the eye, and stick to what they know is right cannot lead civilization to any good.

The science of fall foliage

While this is not a Mayflower-specific fact, it is one that I gleaned from reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, and that interests me greatly:

Neither Bradford nor Winslow[two governors of Plymouth Colony] mention it, but the First Thanksgiving coincided with what was, for the Pilgrims, a new and startling phenomenon: the turning of the green leaves of summer to the incandescent yellows, reds, and purples of a New England autumn.  With the shortening of the days comes a diminishment in the amount of green chlorophyll in the tree leaves, which allows the other pigments contained within the leaves to emerge.  In Britain, the cloudy fall days and warm nights cause the autumn colors to be muted and lackluster.  In New England, on the other hand, the profusion of sunny fall days and cool but not freezing nights unleashes the colors latent within the tree leaves, with oaks turning red, brown, and russet; hickories golden brown; birches yellow; red maples scarlet; sugar maples orange; and black maples glowing yellow.  It was a display that must have contributed to the enthusiasm with which the Pilgrims later wrote of the festivities that fall.

Book Review: Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower

I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction in the past few months.  At the end of October, I decided at last to pick up a book I purchased a couple of years ago, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War.

Philbrick, a Nantucket resident, became curious about the Pilgrim story while researching the Wampanoag Indians native to his island.  He divides his book into three sections, reflected in the subtitle: the story of the small group of Separatists who left England (where their religious practices were outlawed) for Leiden, then sailed for America; the careful diplomacy with which the English and the Indian sachem, Massasoit, forged an alliance and partnership in Plymouth Colony; and the unraveling of that relationship as the next two generations of English grew and required more land, and Indian society found itself undergoing change, both internal (with the many Indian sachems in the region jockeying for supremacy) and external (with some Indians maintaining their alliance with the English, while others believed the English had outstayed their welcome and should be sent packing).  This latter conflict became known as King Philip’s War (June 1675 to August 1676).

The author has created an impressive work, thoroughly researched and documented in fascinating detail.  Some historical narratives that pack a large amount of information are dry and dull to read; this is not so.  (At least not for me.)  He attempts to understand the inner workings and motivations of both the English and the Indian communities, and does not take sides.  He himself makes the observation that

When violence and fear grip a society, there is an almost overpowering temptation to demonize the enemy.  Given the unprecedented level of suffering and death during King Philip’s War, the temptations were especially great, and it is not surprising that both Indians and English began to view their former neighbors as subhuman and evil.  What is surprising is that even in the midst of one of the deadliest wars in American history, there were Englishmen who believed the Indians were not inherently malevolent and there were Indians who believed the same about the English.  They were the ones whose rambunctious and intrinsically rebellious faith in humanity finally brought the war to an end, and they are the heroes of this story.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing in this story (besides the fact that it’s the first thorough account of King Philip’s War I’ve ever seen) is the focus in the last section of the account on Benjamin Church, perhaps one of America’s first true frontiersmen.  While his maternal grandfather had arrived in Plymouth on the Mayflower, Church was a true American: of Separatist Christian stock, but independent in the way he chose to live.  He settled himself on the edge of Indian country, befriended both Indian and English, and played a crucial role in the war that erupted between the Indians and the English, communicating with both sides, and relying on friendships and trusted individuals (both Indian and English) to lead him to success.

My mother tells me she did not care for the book.  Her interest lies in the story of the Pilgrims (from whom she’s descended), but I don’t believe it extends as far as the hostilities.  This is also not a very romanticized account of the English.  Philbrick acknowledges the Pilgrims’ place in the American pantheon of religious freedom-seekers, but insists that the history of the Plymouth Colony extends far beyond the First Thanksgiving.  He writes, “When we look to how the Pilgrims and their children maintained more than fifty years of peace with the Wampanoags and how that peace suddenly erupted into one of the deadliest wars ever fought on American soil, the history of Plymouth Colony becomes something altogether new, rich, troubling, and complex.  Instead of the story we already know, it becomes the story we need to know.”

As a former U.S. history teacher, I found this book incredibly relevant.  It seems very little attention is paid in history books to the time period between the landing of the Pilgrims and Puritans (in Boston) in 1620 and 1630, respectively, and the end of the French and Indian War, when England began a program of taxation on the American colonists.  Mayflower provides a detailed account of the delicate relations which existed between English and Indians, and the many events that both strengthened those relations and tore them apart.   European/Native relations in the U.S. are poorly understood by Americans, whose education exposes them to little more complexity in this area than Hollywood’s portrayals of cowboys and Indians shooting at each other, and (if they’re book-readers) Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.  Philbrick’s refusal to demonize either side makes this book a great source of light, and (mercifully) less a source of heat.

Having covered the main substance of the book, I want to add a few very interesting things I learned from the book:

At least 1000 Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip’s War, with ships—in direct contrast to how they would travel in the 18^th and 19^th centuries—carrying their human cargo from America to the Caribbean.  The English colonists did this not for profit, but out of fear of having Indians from rebellious tribes living among them.

While nineteenth-century Indians in southern New England regarded King Philip’s War as a conflict between the English and the Indians, earlier generations who had experienced the war first-hand (or knew those who had) remembered it not as an “us versus them” question, but “more like being part of a family that had been destroyed by the frightening, inexplicable actions of a once trusted and beloved father [King Philip].”

And while many Americans take great pride in the knowledge that they are descended from the Pilgrims of Plymouth, Philbrick writes, “In 2002 it was estimated that there were approximately 35 million descendents of the Mayflower passengers in the United States, which represents roughly 10 percent of the total U.S. population.”  Perhaps it’s not so uncommon after all.

The memorial that wasn’t

Like most bloggers, I occasionally get spam comments on my posts.  I usually don’t mind, and once I’ve ascertained their irrelevance and self-serving nature, I simply delete them.  But the subject line of the spam comment I received in my inbox this morning after yesterday’s Tragical History Tour post caught my eye: “Memorial to Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.”  This was one of the stops we made in Warsaw on our tour, so I was curious to see what this commenter had to say about it.

It turned out to be a link to an article he wrote 14 years ago about New York City’s failure to build a memorial to the heroes of the uprising.  It was exhaustively reported and rather tedious, especially for a non-New Yorker like myself.  But my eye always enjoys a good picture, and there was a photograph at the top of the article of the cornerstone laid in 1947 in Riverside Park.  The inscription engraved on the cornerstone read thus: “This is the site for the American memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Battle April-May 1943 and to the six million Jews of Europe martyred in the cause of human liberty.”

“Martyred”?  “Cause of human liberty?”  No wonder that memorial never got built.  In the communal yizkor, the slaughtered six million are called martyrs, having died l’kiddush Hashem (sanctifying God’s name).  But this doesn’t mean they died for a reason.  They were not political organizers, social activists, or freedom fighters.  They were men, women, and children with ordinary lives who happened to belong to Am Yisrael and, through no fault of their own, ran afoul of a people with a hatred murderous enough to attempt to eradicate them.  Their deaths did not result is greater freedom for anyone else.  No one’s life was improved because Jews were gassed and cremated.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Their deaths have helped to illustrate why the human race, according to T.H. White, deserves to be called not homo sapiens, but homo ferox.

Anyone stupid enough to misunderstand what REALLY happened in the Shoah has no business trying to build a memorial commemorating it.  A memorial whose message is reflected in the inscription above would lead future generations unschooled in history to believe that the Shoah was a good thing, and that the world was a better place for it.

Thank God for small mercies.

Tragical history tour

I exchanged pleasantries with a friend on Shabbat.  He told me that he and his wife were to spend that evening with a friend who had recently returned from a trip to Poland.  Since most Jews don’t visit Poland just to sample the borsht and visit the church where Chopin’s heart rests (his body lies in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris), I asked if their friend had made a Tragical History Tour, a well-beaten path of ghetto remains, cemeteries, and crematoria.  He had.

This leads me to consider one of the knottier issues of bringing up children in Israel.

We are a tiny country.  We can’t visit our neighboring countries on vacation.  It’s difficult enough to travel to friendly countries, given the issues of kashrut and Shabbat.  Our kids traverse nearly every square meter of this country on foot through family and school trips to the North, the Negev, and everything in between.  But when they leave the country, it’s usually to see grandparents and relatives in whatever quiet part of the world we come from, and by the time they graduate from high school, they’ve only seen the outside world maybe half a dozen times (if their families don’t have the means to spend every summer on Long Island).

During a typical senior year (at least in the religious schools in Israel; I’m less aware of what happens in secular schools), kids are offered the chance to participate in school-sponsored trips to Poland.  The itinerary of these trips generally covers Warsaw (ghetto remnants, Mila 18, the main shul and cemetery), Lublin (including the old yeshiva and Majdanek), and Krakow (again, ghetto remnants, Ram”a shul, main shul, and Aushwitz-Birkenau).  Side trips can include Wiszkow (where a large monument was erected to the destroyed community and includes a cemetery with a special walk allowing Kohanim to perambulate around the edges), Treblinka, and any of a number of tiny villages with memorials or vestiges of Jewish life (e.g. Ger, Sandomiersz, Gura Kalwarya, Kielce).  When the Cap’n and I joined a group from the program we’d done here in Israel, we found ourselves meeting up with the same girls’ school group every day or two as we all trudged our way through this dolorous chapter in Jewish history.

Parents in Israel are faced with a difficult decision as this trip looms.  Do we send our kids on it, and let them see with their own eyes the hatred that the rest of the world feels for Jews, and the outer limits of the violence the world has been capable of visiting on the Jews?  Do we allow our kids to confront the shock, horror, and raw emotion that such sights cause?  Do we send our kids, who are still so young and immature, on a trip to visit Death rather than take them skiing at a nice kosher resort in the Swiss Alps?

Or do we decide to send them, preparing them in advance by discussing anti-Semitism and other events in Jewish history that were motivated by similar hatred (though not on the industrial scale of the Shoah)?  We were once at the house of some friends, enjoying a Yom HaAtzma’ut barbeque, when the subject of the ma’apilim (illegal immigrants to British Mandatory Palestine, most of them refugees from the ovens of Europe) came up.  One of our hosts’ daughters asked, “But didn’t the world care about the Jews?  Didn’t they want to see them settled safely?”  Through Herculean effort, I didn’t gasp and splutter at her naiveté.  Clearly she hadn’t yet been on her school’s Tragical History Tour.

When the time comes, the Cap’n and I are agreed that our children should go.  It’s a fact that seeing those sights gives kids (and adults, as we discovered) a feeling of overwhelming anger—so much anger sometimes that we have no place to put it all.  But in time, the anger becomes more focused and gives us purpose.  The Cap’n said that especially since most Israeli kids go into the army when they get back, it is essential for them to know what they’re fighting against.

The world has changed so little.  A French diplomat can call Israel a “shitty little country” and know that he will not be reprimanded, nor even disagreed with.  A Swedish newspaper can print a blood libel against Israel and the world will not cry “foul.”  The president of Iran can turn up annually at the UN and make speeches calling for the murder of six MORE million Jews (i.e. the destruction of the entire Jewish State), and end his speech with people still in the room.  Violence and vandalism against Jews and Jewish property increase steadily around the world.

Hatred of Jews may never result in anything that looks just like the Shoah again, but it’s clear that that hatred hasn’t disappeared, nor the will to act on it lost.  If our children want to live as Jews in the world (and especially in Israel), they need to understand this.

Missing out

Yesterday, while enjoying a very pleasant Shabbat lunch with neighbors, the subject of becoming religious, conversion, and intermarriage came up.  My neighbor told me about a family she knew where a grown child married someone very religious, came to live in Israel, and hasn’t seen her parents since.  But not because she herself is too frum for her parents; it’s because her parents are still too resentful, decades after her marriage, to see her again.  As a result, they didn’t attend her wedding and have never been to Israel or met their grandchildren.  I remember hearing about the bad ol’ days when Jewish families would sit shiva for children who married non-Jews, but to carry on as though their daughter is dead because she’s TOO JEWISH?  How messed up is that?

My neighbor then made a similarly astute observation about children who grow up and intermarry, and it got me thinking.  I don’t advocate or encourage intermarriage; it is accompanied by complications and frequent lapses in communication between marriage partners, and often results in identity-confused children.  But I also do not believe intermarried children should be shunned by their families.  Many years ago, the Cap’n and I attended a reunion of our respective (affiliated) yeshivot, during which the rabbis held an open question-and-answer session on any topic the attendees chose to discuss.  One young man stood up and said that his brother was planning to marry a non-Jewish woman, and what should he do?  The head of the yeshiva immediately seized on the question and told the young man that he should cut off his brother immediately: not speak to him, not attend his wedding, not engage in any further communication.  I began to prickle with sweat, and could feel myself reddening with rage.  After a moment, though, the yeshiva head changed tack, and said, “Well, maybe you should still keep up contact.  After all, she might convert some day.”

At the time I couldn’t focus on anything more than what I perceived as the bigotry and hypocrisy of this rabbi.  His first recommendation was straight out of a Polish shtetl.  His second was only slightly better.  The fact is, this yeshiva’s programs were designed for ba’alei teshuvah who, by definition, grew up with weak Jewish backgrounds.  Did no one stop to think that perhaps the young man’s brother had had as weak a Jewish upbringing as he himself had?  And that his brother may have been part of that large percentage of Jews with weak backgrounds who don’t see the point of marrying Jewish, and that what was done was done?  Do those from weak Jewish backgrounds who “get religion” have the right to act like sanctimonious asses to their siblings?

But there is a third, very remote, possibility no one brought up in that conversation.  That is, think about the good that can come of 1) living as a Jew should, i.e. treating others with kindness, understanding, and forgiveness, and 2) letting the non-Jewish spouse AND CHILDREN see that.  My father’s Jewish family wasn’t pleased when he chose to marry my non-Jewish mother, but because they accepted that this was reality, they were warm, loving, and attentive to my mother and us children the whole time I was growing up.  (Much more so than my mother’s family, as it happened.)  That feeling of belonging with my Jewish family was one of several factors that I believe contributed to my decision to choose Judaism for myself when I grew up.

Intermarriage, while not ideal, is not necessarily a permanent state with inevitable consequences.  I occasionally hear of non-Jewish spouses who, after decades of marriage to a Jew, finally decide to convert.  It is no less possible for the halachically non-Jewish children (or even grandchildren) of those marriages to convert.  The statistics are not high for this, but it should be obvious that the more included those parents and children are in their extended Jewish family, the more likely they are to see themselves as belonging to the Jewish people, and the more natural it would be for them, if they desire the stamp of halachah on their Jewish identity, to convert.

Everyone’s life is “their turn.”  Our parents had their turn to choose how they would identify themselves, whom they would marry, how they would run their household, how many children they would have, and how they would chart their upbringing.  We have our turn, and our children will have theirs.  None of us has the right to judge the previous generation for their choices, and they do not have the right to impose on us for ours.  While we can influence the next generation through education and modeling of our own choices, the decision to be religious (a la us), haredi, secular, or intermarry is theirs to make.

Rainbow cake

Last week, in honor of Parshat Noach, I baked a rainbow cake.  My friend Heather (you remember the one with the corrupting influence?) introduced me to the idea from this blog.  She made the cake when we visited them last summer for a birthday celebration for her daughter and Peach (who were born three days apart six years ago).  Once the batter was made and dyed, here is how she layered it in the baking tins:

And here is the big moment when she cut the first slice:

I did the minor decorating job on Heather’s cake, piping some white flower-shaped tufts of “cloud” with the icing and the scalloped border.  The main difference between Heather’s cake and mine is that hers was entirely store-bought and mine was entirely homemade.  What I discovered is that a compromise is good for this cake.  I recommend the finest store-bought ingredients for the cake (Heather used the whitest mix she could find, and Wilton gel food colors), and a good homemade buttercream frosting for the outer decoration.  Cake mixes have a denser batter and hold the dye better; my homemade batter was too slushy and the result was more of a tie-dyed cake than a rainbow one.  And store-bought frosting (in the cardboard can) is too soft to hold any kind of shape when spread or piped on a cake. Here are a couple of shots of my recent decorating job.  (Sorry the sloppy, tie-dyed effect couldn’t be displayed; it was cut on Shabbat.)

The cake as a whole is almost sickeningly sweet, and barely looks like food.  But if you want to make friends and establish influence with members of the child set, this is the way to go.

For those who are looking for a good buttercream frosting recipe, here is the one I use, based on the recipe I was given at the Wilton basic cake decorating course:

150 g margarine or salted butter, fresh out of the refrigerator

2 tablespoons water (or milk or whipping cream)

1 teaspoon flavoring (vanilla, orange, rum, etc.)

1 tablespoon meringue powder (Wilton makes this, and it can be purchased online or in a craft store like A.C. Moore or Michael’s)

560 g powdered (confectioner’s) sugar (1¼ lbs) (do NOT use superfine sugar; the frosting needs the cornstarch to give it consistency and bind)

Pulse margarine in food processor.  Add liquids and meringue powder and pulse together until blended.  Add sugar about 100 g (or 1 cup) at a time, pulsing in between to combine.  I recommend using a spatula to scrape the sides and bottom of the food processor bowl and pulsing a little more to be sure to incorporate all of the frosting.

This method makes frosting with a stiff consistency, suitable for making roses.  For medium consistency (other flowers) add an additional 1-2 teaspoons water or milk and blend thoroughly.  For spreading (also vines, leaves, and lettering), add an additional 2-3 teaspoons water or milk and blend thoroughly.

If I know I’m only making frosting to spread on a cake, I simply reduce the amount of powdered sugar I add to the food processor.  Test frosting with a spreading knife between additions, adding the last 200 g of powdered sugar gradually.

Kosher Cooking Carnival #46

Mimi of Israeli Kitchen hosts this month’s Kosher Cooking Carnival.  My jam tart recipe is included, along with other mouth-watering dainties and kosher food commentary.  Check it out!

Knitting revolution

Caution: The following post may be esoteric and tedious to non-knitters.

When I first learned to knit, I acquired skills slowly.  First knitting, then purling.  Then casting on (in the inelastic knitting-into-the-same-stitch mode) and binding off.  I never learned seaming or picking up stitches, or anything more complicated than simple cables.

Then I set it aside for a couple of decades.

Since I’ve come back to it, I have endeavored to learn multiple casting-on and binding-off methods as well as fancier things like running stitches, bobbles, complicated braided cables, lacy patterns, the works.  I can seam, increase, decrease, and am on the brink of doing some colorwork.  I’ve purchased several books with intricate patterns and methods (basic, Celtic, Viking, Fair Isle, among others).  I own a reliable reference book for basic techniques from knitting and purling to finishing techniques.

But one thing has always bothered me: I’ve been a slave to knitting patterns.

When I was first learning to knit, I couldn’t read a pattern.  (What Dumbledore sees in them in the sixth Harry Potter book is beyond me.)  My mother interpreted them for me when I was younger, and over time I’ve learned to decipher them, but I’ve still not been satisfied.  Just because I can read a pattern does not mean (to me, anyway) that I am a really good knitter.  Like cooking, there is a difference between someone who must follow a recipe and someone who can alter a recipe to taste (or to what is in the larder) or create something entirely new.

A couple of years ago, the Cap’n and I took the kids to the States.  While we were there, I visited a large knitting store (WEBS in Northampton, Mass.) where I shlepped my new knitting books around and tried to find yarn to suit the sweaters I wanted to knit.  I asked a store salesperson for help, and she guided me to yarns for each project.  I made my selections, dropped a small fortune at the cash register, and boxed my things to bring back to Israel

On that same trip to the States, my friend Heather gave me a copy of Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitting Workshop.  It’s a small volume filled with wisdom and techniques for making a few basic sweaters for any sized person—without a pattern.  I loved Zimmerman’s opinionated views on knitting (including her hatred of seaming) and devoured the book.  I also ordered a similar book called Knitting in the Old Way by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, which is a more in-depth exploration of the history of the knitted sweater and how to design a sweater, including shape, fit, and color or textural design, all without a pattern.

But at the time, I was still too inexperienced and too timid a knitter to embark on a serious study of this oh-so-independent discipline.  I had my yarn and my patterns, and was set with projects for a few years.

But during the intervening time, I have discovered two things: 1) despite the salesperson’s assistance, many of the yarns I purchased are inappropriate for the projects I had in mind, and 2) over the last couple of years, I’ve fallen out of love with some of the projects I had planned on knitting.  What am I to do with all this yarn I have if I don’t have patterns that suit it?  I’ve tried to find new sweater patterns I could knit with what I have, but there is little in my books that suits.  So last week I spent hours on the Internet looking at patterns, with little success.  (Nearly all of the projects were unsuitable to my taste, climate, and basic sense of modesty.  I mean really, what woman in her 40’s wants to walk around in a dishtowel with a couple of shoulder straps?  Even with a shirt underneath…)

In the end, faced with a stock of really nice yarn with no certain future, I’ve gone back to those books and read them more carefully.

After really absorbing their message this time, I feel as though I’ve had a conversionary experience.  I learned how to knit in the first place so I could make exactly what I want in a sweater rather than relying on whatever the stores stocked—and pattern books are the equivalent of stores, in my opinion.  It’s not cheaper to handknit—not when you add up the cost of materials, knitting equipment (needles aren’t cheap) and time spent knitting (which is time not spent working, doing laundry or dishes, or driving the kids somewhere, though I do find it easy to knit while I help a kid with homework), but it is pleasurable and rewarding.  And with a handmade sweater, I should be able to choose the materials, the design, the exact fit, and the finished product should look better on me and be better made than anything I can buy retail.  When I rely on patterns, I give up a large measure of that independence.

This does not mean I’m finished with patterns.  There are some really wonderful designers out there (I really like Jo Sharp, Alice Starmore, and Ann McCauley) who design some smashing-looking sweaters.  What it does mean is that if I want to knit a pullover in the round, a cardigan in one piece, or steek a sweater I’m supposed to knit in 5 flat pieces, there are resources I can use to help me figure out how to do it.  If Jo Sharp’s sweaters are too boxy or shapeless for me (or my kids), I can alter them to make them more fitted.  If Ann McCauley designed a gorgeous knitted pattern but I don’t have the right yarn to make the exact project she designed, perhaps I can adapt her pattern to an entirely different sweater.  Knitting has always been enjoyable for me, but from now on, it will never be the same—in a really good way.

It’s a bit like the experience of discovering Orthodox Judaism, where the traditional has come to look revolutionary in the modern world.  Lehavdil.

The Goldstone Report

I don’t know what it’s been like in the rest of the world for the past few weeks, but it seems like every day here in Israel there is talk about the Goldstone Report, a 575-page report submitted to the UN Council for Human Rights by a committee headed by Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist (who also happens to be Jewish), in which Israel is accused of war crimes in Operation Cast Lead, aka the Gaza War of December 2008-January 2009.

The remarks about the report include the fact that Goldstone, in choosing to chair this committee and sign his name to the scurrilous report they produced, has given it weight and credence because of his stature as a prominent member of South Africa’s Jewish community.  They include the fact that he could have recused himself from that particularly onerous job, but didn’t.  (Although Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and nowadays an international political player with no great love of Israel, could smell a stinky job a mile away and turned it down.)  They include the fact that he’ll never eat lunch in the South African Jewish community again.  And they include the fact that in an international landscape in which Israel is routinely vilified, represented most publicly by the UN, this report is another assault not only on the Jews, but on the truth.

Recent articles about Goldstone include observations that he’s backpedaling to the Jewish world about the report, softening his criticisms of Israel to Jewish audiences, while standing staunchly by the report in front of international listeners.  In a conference call with US rabbis last week, Goldstone is said to have urged Israel to carry out an independent investigation of its military prosecution of the war, saying “If the Israeli government set up an appropriate, open investigation, that would really be the end of the matter,” as far as Israel is concerned.

Perhaps I’m jaded, but I’m not terribly shocked to see a Jew signing off on such a report against Israel.  While his daughter claims that Goldstone “is a Zionist and loves Israel,” there are many Diaspora Jews like him out there who say they feel an attachment to Israel, but who nonetheless find it irresistible, expedient, or therapeutic to accuse Israel of atrocities while overlooking the violent, civilian-targeting behavior of Israel’s terrorist enemies.  Many Jews are uncomfortable with the power that Israel possesses to defend itself, embarrassed to see it in conflict with poor, oppressed-looking dark-skinned people, preferring instead to see the Jewish people (and Israel as the international, public face of the Jewish people) as pacifists, victims of others’ violent attacks, and committed to turning the other cheek (a Christian notion).  Many Jews find themselves exhausted emotionally and unable to maintain a front of support for Israel, in effect “losing their love for Israel.”  (See also Daniel Gordis’s response to the author of the previous article.)

Many such Jews in the world have lost their feeling of the Jews as a people.  (Daniel Gordis’s piece in Friday’s Jerusalem Post describes this well.)  Such Jews have come to see Judaism as a Western, liberal, democratic tradition.  Such Jews labor under the impression that Judaism is a religion of individuals in a multi-cultural society.  Such Jews have apparently lost the sense of Jews as a community and a nation which is not only permitted, but obligated, to defend itself from enemies who seek to destroy it.  Such Jews are half-blind to their own tradition.

They are right that Judaism values the life of each and every person, regardless of whether that person is Jewish or not.  This is why the IDF in Operation Cast Lead did everything within its power to limit the damage to life and property of non-combatants in Gaza.  They are right that abuses of power are wrong on the part of a military force.  This is why the IDF investigates each individual complaint of abuse on the part of its soldiers, even in combat situations.  They are right to believe that when the IDF or the Jewish State commit errors or abuses, those errors or abuses should be pointed out, investigated, and dealt with.

Where they are wrong, however, is to think that jumping on the bandwagon of Israel-bashing (i.e. calling Israel a “fascist” or “racist” state, or accusing the IDF of “disproportionate force” or “collective punishment”) is an appropriate response.  There may be very smart people doing this—academics in the UK, Swedish journalists and newspapers, European diplomats, not to mention the many smart Arabs who claim to care about the Palestinian Arab “refugees”—but this does not make it right.  Were these intelligent entities to apply the same standard of behavior to Hamas and other terrorists, they would be quoting the Geneva Conventions, criticizing Hamas for using the Gazan population as human shields, dressing combatants in street clothes to make them indistinguishable from civilians, using ambulances to transport weapons and mosques to stash explosives, and firing rockets from the basements of office buildings and hospitals.

By the same token, it would praise Israel for voluntarily ceasing hostilities for hours every day to allow humanitarian supplies into the enemy zone.  It would laud the IDF for dropping countless fliers and sending thousands of text messages to Gaza residents urging them to flee the area before sorties were carried out.  It would acknowledge that Israel’s military did its best to execute surgical strikes, to avoid harming civilians, and to heal the hurts of those hit by building a hospital at the Erez border crossing to provide free medical care to Gaza residents.

But we don’t live in a world where those who decide what’s moral and ethical can see such things.  We live in a world where such people have selective hearing, see what they want to see, and have their minds made up before the facts are ever presented.  I don’t like to raise the nasty issue of anti-Semitism, but if someone can provide me with a different explanation for why Israel is subjected to standards not applied to any other country in any other situation at any other time in history, I’d be glad to hear it.  Goldstone’s report is a juicy steak thrown to slavering hellhounds hungry for fresh meat.  His may not be the only offering, but it’s definitely one the dogs will find hard to resist.

In the meantime, Goldstone urges Israel to conduct an open investigation of its own into its behavior during Operation Cast Lead, claiming that were it to do so, “That would be the end of the matter.”

If only.

What a tart!

I was once a barmaid in Cambridge, UK.  Sitting around, enjoying our complimentary beverages at the end of a night, the bar staff would occasionally discuss some of the looser-moraled patrons after they’d had cleared out for the night, using the expression that is the title of this post.

But it’s also what I say when I make this embarrassingly easy and utterly delicious Shabbat dessert.  It was originally billed as a recipe for a Czechoslovakian cookie, but since there is no more Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, and because it works better as a tart, I call it a tart now.  The crust is still a cookie crust, flavorful and crumbly as a fine European pastry, and when made with raspberry preserves, is guaranteed to knock your socks off.

1 C. parve margarine, softened

1 C. sugar

2 egg yolks

1 t. vanilla

2 C. flour

1 C. chopped nuts (I use coarsely ground almonds to great effect)

¾ C. jam

Cream margarine and sugar.  Add yolks and vanilla; cream well.  Blend in flour and nuts.  Press dough into greased 9” tart pan, saving extra aside.  Spread jam over dough.  Shape remaining dough into flat circles (I make mine different shapes) or cut out with cookie cutter, and arrange on top of jam.  Bake at 325° for 1 hour.

Ordinarily, I suggest using butter in a recipe that has so few ingredients, but margarine really works just fine, and then you can enjoy it after a meat meal.  It is delicious with tea, and decadent with vanilla ice cream.  Bon appetit!

Fall foliage

One of the things I knew I would miss when we made aliyah was the incomparable fall foliage in New England.  Israel in the spring is stunning, but it’s nothing like the sensory blast one gets from the yellow birches, red maples, and green and brown oaks of the northeastern US.

But today, I was heartened to see this gorgeous photo in my email inbox.  It was taken by Yehoshua Halevi and is on his photo blog, “Israel the Beautiful” (to which I subscribe and receive weekly photos of Israel).  He took the photo here in Gush Etzion (of which Efrat is a part).  Check out his other photos of Israel in all her seasons at his blog.

I heard someone once say that Israel is supposed to contain a little of everything that is in the rest of the world, but in miniature.  Mini-Sahara (the Negev), mini-Mt. Everest (the Harmon), mini-Lake Superior (the Kinneret).  And now mini-New England, here in Gush Etzion.  Who knew?

Who does motzi?

In Newton, Massachusetts, where the Cap’n and I adopted most of our practice and traditions for keeping Judaism modern Orthodox-style, we observed that in about half of the families we knew, the lady of the house said the blessing over the challah on Shabbat (“motzi”).  Kiddush was nearly always said by the male head of household (though in at least one household I observed, the woman said kiddush for one of the meals), and in a few households, the male head also said motzi.

In our house, I have continued to say motzi on Shabbat.  This is not generally the practice among the English-speaking families we know in Israel.  In fact, I may only have seen one other household in the three years we’ve been here where a woman says motzi.  But to us it makes sense.  We both contribute to the running of the household and the creation of the Shabbat meal.  The Cap’n makes kiddush since he does nearly all of the shopping (and grape juice is definitely something we buy rather than make at home).  I make motzi since I do nearly all of the food planning, prep, serving, and clean-up.  (The Cap’n makes the phone call when we invite people for a meal.)  While I rarely make my own challah, it’s symbolic to me of the home-made part of the meal, for which I deserve full credit.

I imagine there must be many reasons for the man to make both kiddush and motzi.  Men get most of the speaking parts in Judaism (remember the wedding ceremony?), and this is another speaking part.  There is a tradition that a person should say 100 brachot a day, and since this is probably more binding on a man than a woman, this gives him an extra bracha to say.  In some households, I suppose the man is considered the founder of the feast, even if his responsibility for it began and ended with earning the money toward it.  (This doesn’t hold up in many families today, but families today look less like they did 100 or more years ago, when these practices get cemented into tradition.)

That’s how we do it, anyway.  If anyone has more accurate information on why men do both in most households, feel free to share it.

Vegetarianism and veganism

Jews are picky about their food.  And it’s not because we don’t like food, but because the Torah instructs us regarding what foods we can and cannot eat, and with which other foods.  As a by-product, it makes it difficult for Jews who observe dietary laws to socialize with non-Jews, and makes traveling to exotic locales more complicated.

The Crunch girls are even more picky about their food.  As kids, they tend to prefer foods they can easily identify, and avoid foods that are combined.  (The main exception to this is any food with ketchup on it.)  Two out of three will try new foods without a fight, and one will usually like what she tries.  (Baby Bill likes most foods, God love him.)  Lately, in an effort to decrease the power struggle that often ensues between parents and children in our house over food, I’ve been making less meat of a Shabbat.  We’ve had at least one dairy meal for Shabbat for the past few months, and sometimes two.  The girls ask where the chicken is when we host for lunch and I’ve made dairy or parve, but I don’t get the feeling they miss it much.  It also allows us greater creativity where dessert is concerned.  Butter, with its superior taste and lack of trans-fats can replace margarine, and milk and cream can replace soy milk or Rich’s whip.  In many respects, Shabbat is made more special by the absence of meat.

But still, for me, total commitment to vegetarianism is a stretch.  I know slaughter isn’t pretty, even when it’s done in a kosher manner.  I know the animal has, in most cases, not led a free-range existence, feeding upon grass or seed, running through a barnyard, bedding down in a deep pile of straw in its own stall at night.  I am aware that stock have antibiotics and hormones coursing through their veins (and, by extension, muscles), and fish—both fresh and salt water—live in waters polluted by heavy metals.  I blogged once about MOOSHY, the practice of confining meat consumption to Shabbat and holidays.  For the most part, my family stands by that.  The occasional bowl of chicken soup, the spicy chicken kebabs at our kids’ favorite restaurant, the burger every month or two are satisfying in a way I haven’t yet found with dairy or parve foods.  These meat dishes are sometimes fattening, but no more so than the rich dairy dishes made with starches, cheese or cream.

I’ve been thinking about this again since friends of ours recently became vegans.  (“Gee, I thought they were still Church of England…”)  It seems they read a book that convinced them that animal products were unnecessary for good health, and that plant foods provide all a human needs for a healthy diet and balanced nutrition.  I’ve little doubt this is true, especially in a time when consumption of animal foods is complicated by ethical issues (for stock and workers), pollution, overmedication, and consumer health issues.  And the sanctimoniousness of certain ethical vegetarians (who by definition still consume dairy and eggs) doesn’t hold up to scrutiny when the poor conditions in which the cows and chickens live are exposed.

Vegetables and fruits, of course, have their own problems with pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides used to excess by large-scale farming operations.  Many is the time I’ve brought home healthy-looking vegetables (especially sweet peppers, for some reason) and had to throw them out after one bite when all we could taste was chemicals—not even the pepper itself.

I’m no closer to locking in on a firm diet than I was before I began to think and wonder about all these issues.  Carnivores say that the protein in meat and fish is more bio-available than plant proteins; vegetarians say it’s not.  Carnivores say it’s healthier for children to eat meat while they’re young; vegetarians say it’s not.  Lately, the Cap’n and I have been discussing the discrepancies between what medical science tells us and what messages are put out by the public health industry.  In the end, I’m never sure what to think.

So for now, I think the Crunch table will still see the occasional meat meal.  And because some of the produce we’ve been getting in the stores and at the shuk is so riddled with chemicals, we’ll be looking into organic produce, which seems more popular and readily available in Israel than ever before.

I welcome others’ thoughts on this issue.  I’m already so confused, let’s just make my head spin, shall we?

Book Review: E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News

Amidst all my heavy-weight non-fiction of the last few months, a friend shoved a copy of E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News into my hands.  Its sparse prose, Newfoundland dialect, and total immersion into rural Canadian fishing culture was a welcome escape from religious extremism, assimilation, and worldwide (and soon to be universe-wide) hatred of Israel.

Proulx is fond of short sentences—fragments even.  She uses this prose style to great effect reflecting the thought-speech of Quoyle, her protagonist in this book, a doughy, unlovable, simple-minded man in his 30s with few talents but a heart of gold.  (As he learns the journalism trade, he eventually begins to invent headlines in his own head to describe the events of his life, such as “Man Sounds Like Fatuous Fool” and “Girl Fears White Dog, Relatives Marvelously Upset.”)  His choice to leave a ruined life in New York State and move to his family’s place of origin in Newfoundland enables him to begin again—professionally, socially, paternally, and ultimately, romantically.  He and his aunt, who makes the move with him, are not the most appealing characters in the novel.  Neither are his two young daughters, who are confused and scarred from their own chaotic former life and behave like unkempt savages most of the time.  The characters who won my admiration in the novel were the native Newfoundlanders with their tough work ethic, love of the sea, and wry, self-deprecating humor.  The protagonist’s social life revolves around the four other men who put out the local newspaper, a collection of gossip, car wrecks, sexual abuse, recipes, foreign news lifted from the radio, and—Quoyle’s feature and the title of the novel—shipping news.   The news staff is a cast of sharply-cut characters whose conversations and arguments provide Quoyle (and the reader) with the historical background of the town, the demise of the Newfoundland fishing industry, the many disasters that came with confederation with Canada, and current events in the lives of the townspeople.  Quoyle and the reader both come to love the dialect, salty humor, and rugged will to survive that marks the people of this small corner of North America.

The one thing I didn’t like was that it took nearly 150 pages for me to decide I liked the book.  The sordid details of the life Quoyle left were difficult to get through, and it was a rough transition in Quoyle’s battered station wagon from his disastrous marriage in New York State to Newfoundland and his wind-battered ancestral home where the family stays temporarily, to where he and his daughters ultimately decide to make their home in the town.  Quoyle and his aunt were not characters I could warm to easily, and while that may have been part of Proulx’s point—that sometimes we don’t come to care about people right away, but over time feel at least a grudging sympathy for them—it made me think seriously of putting the book down and finding something more pleasant to read in the early chapters.

I ended up loving the prose, though, and between the wonderful characters and Proulx’s gift for description, I have half a mind to make a trip myself to Newfoundland.  Here is Quoyle, contemplating the sea on p. 209:

These waters, thought Quoyle, haunted by lost ships, fishermen, explorer gurgled down into sea holes as black as a dog’s throat.  Bawling into salt broth.  Vikings down the cracking winds, steering through fog by the polarized light of sun-stones.  The Inuit in skin boats, breathing, breathing, rhythmic suck of frigid air, iced paddles dipping, spray freezing, sleep back rising, jostle, the boat torn, spiraling down.  Millennial bergs from the glaciers, morbid, silent except for waves breaking on their flanks, the deceiving sound of shoreline where there was no shore.  Foghorns, smothered gun reports along the coast.  Ice welding land to sea.  Frost smoke.  Clouds mottled by reflections of water holes in the plains of ice.  The glare of ice erasing dimension, distance, subjecting senses to mirage and illusion.  A rare place.

Okay, so the place sounds like an icy hell.  But a “rare place” indeed.

A human Ponzi scheme

The Israeli government seems determined to free terrorists from prison.  Sometimes it’s to boost Abbas’s sagging image among his own people.  Sometimes it’s as a “confidence-building” measure to coax the Palestinian Arabs to the negotiating table.  And sometimes, as of late, it’s to negotiate the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit.

First, 20 Palestinian Arab women were released to secure a video of Shalit to prove he’s alive.  (At least the government made sure he was alive first, unlike last time when hundreds of Arab murderers were released in exchange for Uri Regev’s and Ehud Goldwasser’s corpses.)  These women were not arrested doing their family’s shopping, or while hanging laundry on the line.  They were suicide bombers whose attempts were foiled, were caught smuggling suicide belts, and assisted in the murder or attempted murder of innocent people.

That was just for the video.  Next there’s talk of emptying the prisons of another 1000 Hamas terrorists (most of Israel’s Hamas holdings) in exchange for Shalit himself.

I’ve written in the past about the Torah’s attitude toward redeeming captive Jews.   But if you look at the big picture, i.e. the long term result of “prisoner exchanges” like this, it begins to look like something quite different.  Because today’s prisoners are yesterday’s terrorists (or terrorist-wannabes), and tomorrow’s unrepentant ex-cons who will return to a life of terror.  When they’re put in prison, it isn’t to get them to repent their actions (the origin of the word “penitentiary”); it’s to get them off the streets where they make their murderous mischief.  Setting them free mocks everything that put them into prison in the first place: the laws against murder and terrorism, the risk to the lives of the police, army, and Shin Bet who captured them, and the certain danger to civilians in releasing them again.

I’m no economist, but I was recently made aware of a financial scheme in which people invest large amounts of money on the promise of fat returns.  There really are no such investments, and new investors simply end up paying the dividends for the older investors.  Eventually, this robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme (also known as “Ponzi”) catches up with the operator with disastrous results.  Lives are ruined, fortunes down the tubes, and people everywhere feel as though their expectations and dreams have been shattered.

How different is a Ponzi scheme from what the Israeli government has been doing?  The government is responsible for guaranteeing us security.  So it arrests criminals who have been found to have threatened that security.  Then, to provide even MORE security, i.e. through the illusion of peace or a ceasefire or talks or in response to American pressure or for a video, the government agrees to release those prisoners.  The civilians who were killed by the terrorists just released are gone; they’re not coming back.  But with the lives of unknown Israelis who will die in future attacks plotted and executed by those just released, we’ll pay for even MORE security.  And then the whole process will be repeated.  According to Wikipedia’s definition of a Ponzi scheme, “The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going.”  In other words, it’s the same security we keep getting promised, but gets paid for by an “every-increasing flow of” … blood.

The main difference I see is in the currency (dollars v. human lives).  For those who were shafted by Bernie Madoff, at least you still have your life and your family.  I’m not sure we’ll be able to say the same to the grieving families once these Hamas prisoners are released and return to the waiting arms of their terrorist comrades.

Leaving home and the ushpizin

This year in our sukkah, the Crunch family had a discussion each night at dinner about who the ushpiz (Biblical guest) for that day.  The first night, we talked about Avraham, his order from Hashem to leave his family and journey to a new land, perhaps never to see his family again.  He obeyed this command, and took his wife, servants, and livestock and set out.

Because Yom Kippur and the story of Yonah the prophet was so recently in her head, 4-year-old Banana pointed out that Yonah was also commanded by God to make a journey, but unlike Avraham he resisted, ran away, and it took living in the belly of a giant fish for a few days to straighten him out.

The next night we began by discussing Yitzhak, Avraham’s son, but found the conversation turned toward Rivka instead.  In some sense, she found herself in a similar situation to that of Avraham and Yonah, where she was presented with the option to go to a new place to live.  But unlike Avraham, she would be leaving her immediate family and everything familiar to her behind, and unlike Yonah, would probably never be able to return home again.  Yet at a tender age (and the Cap’n had no interest in discussing the outlier opinion that she was only three when Eliezer’s proposal was made to her; putting her age at 12 or 13 is quite young enough) she had the middot (good character qualities) to merit Eliezer’s offer, and the guts, foresight, and perhaps the prophesy too to accept them and make her journey.  In the end, Rivka struck us as the gutsiest of the three.

Book Review: Daniel Gordis’s Does the World Need the Jews?

The davening on Yom Kippur is so intense and so lengthy that is has been my habit when going to services to take with me a book or two of interesting and challenging Jewish content for those times when I need a break.  About ten years ago, the book I took with me was Daniel Gordis’s 1997 Does the World Need the Jews?: Rethinking Chosenness and American Jewish Identity.

I was captivated by his introduction which retells the story of “The Little Mermaid,” both the original version by Hans Christian Andersen, and Disney’s They-All-Lived-Happily-Ever-After version.  His point was how Jews have encountered American society and found themselves faced with the choice between maintaining a separate identity as Jews, or foregoing their distinctive Jewish identity in favor of becoming Americans.  I love stories and his introduction, with its use of Andersen’s fairy tale, did a beautiful job of elucidating the complexity of confronting the “melting pot” attitude in American society, as well as the challenges of maintaining one’s identity in an inclusive society.  By contrasting the two versions of the mermaid’s tale, Gordis effectively illustrates the fantasy of abandoning one’s Judaism to join a world that is more attractive, but to which we do not entirely belong, and the pain and foreignness of abandoning what we truly are as Jews.

For a host of reasons, that was where I stopped ten years ago.  But after reading Gordis’s most recent book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End (which I will review later) in which he seeks to answer the question, “Why be Israeli?”, I was interested to go back and finish the earlier book.

Does the World Need the Jews? tackles a similarly complicated question, i.e. “Why be Jewish in America?”  There’s been plenty of ink spilled over the issue of Jewish continuity and fears about intermarriage, assimilation, and simple drifting away of young Jews from the faith of their fathers.  Rabbi Gordis meets this issue head-on and explores the many sources of discomfort of American Jews, the attempts made by rabbis in the 19^th and 20^th century to adapt American Judaism in order to slow the drift, and the deep relevance, wisdom, and value of Jewish ways of thinking, learning, and debating that make it worth holding on to.

Gordis, who writes “Dispatches from an Anxious State”, is the author of many books, founding dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and currently Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.  He writes compassionately about Jews in America and Israel, and from his experience living in both countries, understands their unique challenges and strengths.  This is of particular value to me, since living in Israel I sometimes feel as though I’ve lost a sense of American Judaism and its worth.  This book outlined for me some of the potential for good in Diaspora life.

Gordis’s central argument is that Jews have a unique mission in the world—a mission to share their wisdom, their belief in the worth and dignity of all people, and their love of freedom.  He points out, however, that over the years, American Jews have become confused between Jewish values and secular, liberal, American values.  Because the struggle to become real Americans often conflicted with the education of young Jews, the desire to be American often won the day at the expense of Jewish education.  Without spending the time learning what is Jewish, Jews only learned what was American.  This is what has created the sense in many American Jews that Judaism is liberalism.  Gordis writes, “In this scheme, Jews internalized the commitment to individualism and autonomy that often characterized liberalism in America.  The more Jews equated Judaism with liberalism, the less law in their religion made sense.  If American life is about freedom and autonomy, Jews wondered, why should they care about a constraining religious tradition that erodes their autonomy?  …And Jews are discovering that without law at its core, Judaism will not be very different from Christianity” (p. 144).

The confusion between Judaism and liberalism takes many forms.  Gordis describes the toll political correctness and multiculturalism have taken on Judaism’s unique voice.  He validates the discomfort many liberal-minded Jews feel as a result of hostility from those in the Black, feminist, and academic world (where the role of Jews in the slave trade is sometimes wildly exaggerated, Jewish law is rejected categorically because of its sexism, and Jewish institutions host speakers who deny the Shoah).  In one of my favorite discussions, he criticizes the phrase “Judeo-Christian ethic,” which he says really “‘just means Christian.’  It pays lip service to Christianity’s Jewish roots, but little more.  After all, what is ‘Judeo’ about the Judeo-Christian ethic that is not also Christian?  What, in other words, is distinctively Jewish about that tradition?  Why is it not simply a ‘Christian ethic’?”  In the fullness of his discussion, he points out that Christian texts (i.e. those texts foreign to Judaism) are viewed as part of this ethic, but Jewish texts foreign to Christianity are not.  He writes, “The bottom line: in America, ‘Judeo-Christian’ is a polite way of saying ‘Christian,’ and American Jews so desperately wanted to be included that we never noticed” (p. 176).

Perhaps the most dramatic example he gives of Jews abandoning their own particularism in the search for acceptance and universalism is the inscription on the wall of the $65 million Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, which not only leaves out any indication of its Jewish nature in the name of the building, but also offers a very stripped-down translation of a displayed Torah passage.  The translation of Genesis 12:1-3 offered is, “Go forth … and be a blessing to the world.”  What the Torah passage says in its entirety is something quite different:

The Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you and curse him that curses you; and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.”

A rabbi at the Skirball Center said the intention behind the ellipsis was to appeal to unaffiliated Jews, to give them the impression that the people at the Center were not “dogmatic” (pp. 50-51).  It is presumably this same desire to appeal to non-dogmatic Jews that informs the Reform decision to cut out part of the Havdalah service in which we bless God who has separated the light from darkness, the Jews from the other nations, and the Sabbath from the six days of Creation.

The book has many strengths.  Gordis carefully avoids pointing fingers at, or even mentioning, specific Jewish movements.  I believe he is right to do this, since the movement with which one affiliates is not necessarily an indicator of one’s practice of Judaism.  He believes that the answer to the fears about Jewish loss of purpose are applicable to Jews of all ages and movement affiliations: study of Hebrew and Jewish texts and incorporation of traditional practice in the home.  He sets out to make Jews feel comfortable again with the notion of chosenness, examining texts, holidays, and liturgy to extract a Jewish message for Jews left ignorant by their upbringing.  He distinguishes Judaism from American liberalism, revisiting Jewish sources to emphasize Judaism’s stress on the community rather than the individual.  And he urges Jews to rededicate themselves to Jewish education, both for children and adults who were abandoned educationally after becoming bnei mitzvah.  “Our leaders,” he writes, “feared that by placing too many demands on Jews, it would force us to flee.  They imagined that in an era in which Jews could easily decide not to remain Jewish, the logical step was to raise as few ‘obstacles’ to Jewish identification as possible.  …If we are to be honest, American Jews will need to acknowledge that Jewish tradition speaks if and only if it is lived; there is no way to appreciate it from the sidelines” (p. 244).  Gordis’s book is a clarion call for American Jews to educate themselves and take up their mission.

I find his message inspiring, and see potential for it to revitalize young Jews in America, especially those who are still trying to define themselves and develop their Jewish identity.  I think perhaps he is overly optimistic in his encouragement of Jews to participate as Jews in public, political debates including those over abortion, capital punishment, teacher tenure, flag-burning, and family size.  Americans who populate the extremes in those debates are usually secular and focused entirely on individual rights, or fundamentalist Christian Americans for whom those are black-and-white issues determined by a literal reading of the Bible.  I can’t imagine either set of combatants being interested in Jews getting involved, especially if that would involve introducing ambiguity, multiple opinions, and uncertainty about the truth into the fray.  In short, I think even if Jews were to raise their unique voice over these issues, there would be few interested in listening.

In addition, at the beginning of his book, Gordis stresses that his message in this book is for all Jews, including those uncomfortable with God, who are not interested in embracing traditional practice.  Yet in the rest of the book he calls for all Jews to return to traditional (not necessarily Orthodox) practice.  While I know that for Conservative Jews (of which Gordis is one, at least through rabbinic ordination), Judaism is seen as a culture rather than merely a religion, I still saw this as a contradiction, and one which might not appeal to people for whom practice has no meaning without some belief in God or sense of religious obligation.

Despite my critiques, reading Gordis’s books gave me a new perspective on Diaspora life and its potential for contributing to American society—if American Jews heed his call.

Obama, Prince of Peace

On Friday, the Cap’n came into the kitchen where I was preparing my last festive meals for the 5770 holiday season and said, “They’ve announced the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.”  Then he fell silent.

“Nu?” I asked, taking my French apple pie out of the oven.  “Who’d they give it to?”

“The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner is Barack Obama.”

“What?”

My response here was the same as when he called me from his office on the morning of September 11, 2001 and told me that a plane had flown into one of the buildings at the World Trade Center.

And quite honestly, I’m still scratching my head over this.

Let me think this through, now.  I have been under the impression for much of my adult life that Nobel Prizes are awarded for achievement.  Economists and scientists get them for discoveries they’ve already made and theories on which they’ve expounded at length.  Authors get them for bodies of work—sometimes decades’ worth of writing—that has stood the test of time and made a significant cultural contribution to the world.  And in most cases, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to a person or persons viewed as having accomplished great things in the service of world peace.

But something has obviously shifted in the world.  This year’s Nobel laureate for peace has been in office for nine months, and made one significant speech of international interest in that time.  The Israelis and Palestinians are no nearer to hammering out an agreement.  Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s reputation (and that of Fatah, his political and sometimes-terrorist party) has nosedived since he was pressured by Obama to attend a summit in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, delighting their openly-terrorist enemies in Hamas and making Palestinian Arab unity even further from being achieved.  The Arab world has no more interest in recognizing the Jewish State than they had before the famous Cairo University speech.  And the questionably-elected Iranian Islamic Republic is full-steam ahead on its nuclear program while Obama continues to entertain the illusion that at this stage in Ahmedinejad’s nuclear enrichment program, diplomacy still has a role to play.  (This brief assessment does not, of course, explore the status quo in North Korea, China, the Sudan, Liberia, or any other hot spot on the conflict-ridden political world map.)

I don’t dislike Obama as a person, and I still think he may do good things for America domestically speaking.  But I think it’s significant that rather than award the prize to someone who has been getting his or her hands dirty saving people in developing countries from starvation, disease, and political collapse, it was given to an inexperienced former senator from Illinois whose only significant international accomplishment was to make a speech minimizing the Jewish right to live in Israel and making nice to the Arab world.

I’m not saying that the next person to earn a Nobel for peace has to have overseen the signing of a final status agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs.  The Great Handshake on the White House lawn between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin (who shared their prize with the current President of Israel, Shimon Peres) was something people thought impossible.  Although their clandestine agreement, the Oslo Accords, was doomed to failure (and in fact brought years of war with over 1000 Israeli civilian casualties), the photo-op of what everyone thought was little more than a fantasy wasn’t insignificant.

In other words, the Handshake was tangible.  It was the product of painful concessions, eating of words, and temporary shelving of aspirations in the name of peace.  It represented a concrete commitment (at least on the part of Rabin and Peres; Arafat was just playing along for the international attention) and was a visible meeting of enemy, disparate minds.  It was something.

So what does it mean that this year’s Peace Prize winner is Barack Obama?  Is it because there were no other promising candidates?  The Cap’n said there was a short list with some very worthy people and activities on it.  Is it a gesture by the Committee to put pressure on the Leader of the Free World not to get involved in a military conflict in Iran?  I don’t think there’s any need for that; Obama has made clear his intentions to recall American servicepeople from Afghanistan and Iraq in the near future, and that he has no interest in getting Americans involved in any further military activities.  (Editor David Horovitz wrote in last Friday’s Jerusalem Post that if Obama’s plan for diplomacy and economic sanctions against Iran fails, his approach will most likely be “assuring the American people that the US security establishment will protect them from a nuclear Iran, but that he was not prepared to authorize the use of military force to prevent a nuclear Iran.  And it is certainly possible to envisage much of the American public applauding him for such a stance.”)  Is it an advance bonus for someone the Committee thinks might actually be able to make peace in the world, but needs the pressure of the award to make him follow through?  Perhaps that’s the most likely theory of all.

I don’t believe for a minute that Obama’s Cairo Speech merited this prize.  Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute didn’t get her chemistry prize this year for making a speech about chemistry; she was awarded it after decades of brilliant thinking and hard work.

The hard work for President Obama has hardly begun.  Let’s hope he does it by actually bringing about peace.