One Life to Live

If the message from Our Town is that the living don't get it, don't value it, life that is, perhaps the author hadn't spent enough time with some of the really special and inspiring people we have been fortunate to cross paths with over the years.

For the second time in the last few weeks we were in Jerusalem to pay a shiva call. Two very different families in very different neighbourhoods, each one though, in all its generations, a credit to the city and to the Jewish people. Modern Orthodox/dati leumi, Hareidi, secular - each person contributing so much to making the world a better place.

Tonight's shiva was for a longtime close family friend, a true Lamed Vavnik. So many people probably just passed her by on the street and dismissed her as another faceless, nameless generic older Hareidi woman in dark clothes, a drudge maybe, a drone, a media stereotype.

It would have been their loss though to have allowed that stereotype to blind them to this most special woman. She was a pillar of faith, of modesty, of loving kindness to the stranger and to her nearest and dearest alike. She touched so many lives, always with a kind word, a hearty laugh, a zillion watt smile, an infectious optimism, meals for the sick and the new mother, hospitality to the lonely and the new in town. And all with the utmost humility and modesty in her small Jerusalem flat.

She told her children that she hoped they didn't marry rich. "Don't let the material blind you". Not that she would have wanted them to lack for anything, but Torah and people always came before things and materialism. She was satisfied with living modesty because she didn't see things or external trappings, she saw souls, she saw people, whatever they looked like.

Her family straddles the divide of Hareidi and Hiloni, devoutly religious and devoutly secular, immigrant and native born, holy Jerusalem, hedonist Tel Aviv and the socialist kibbutz. In the crowded little flat in the heart of Hassidish Jerusalem this evening all those disparate worlds came together with love and warmth to honour her memory and attempt to comfort her grieving family.

She will not feature on the cover of Vogue or Time or The New York Times or The Atlantic. So many supposedly enlightened and modern people would have declined to give her the time of day or assigned her any consequence. But she is the sort of person who truly made the world go round, who healed wounds of many kinds, who brought incredible light in to the world as long as she was in it.

It was a privilege to have known her since I was a child. May her equally wonderful children, grandchildren and husband find great comfort in their memories of this humble tzadeket, and may Hashem Bless them all with many many more years keeping her light shining on through their kindness and good deeds.

This is just a drill

Six year-old comes charging in to the flat after school "Imma, Imma! We had a what do you call it, where you have to run fast?"

"Sport class?"

"No, where you have to run fast because of the noise!"


"Targil? (drill)"

"Yes Imma! That one, a targil where there is an azaka (siren) and you have to go quickly with your tor (line) and get to the miklat (shelter) as quick as you can without tripping anyone up"

He has a huge grin taking over his little face, eyes bright, glowing with pride, hopping from foot to foot in a little dance of excitement.

"And my tor was first! I was first! We did it in 20 seconds! And I got a sticker! And it was such a BIIIIG miklat Imma! It's so big it isn't a mamad (safe room), it's a great big huuuuge miklat with room for everyone and my school is so big with so many children that we have to have FOUR miklatim like that! It's so cool, it's like a superhero fort with big windows with shirion (armour). I asked my teacher if I could bring my light sabre or a sword tomorrow but she didn't like that idea."

God Bless the teachers who made it so much fun for the kids to practice running to the shelter and thank God in our region it was only a drill.

Holy Tongue

I spent the evening in a large auditorium packed to the gills with a huge crowd periodically singing or shouting out Hallelujah, The Lord Is One and calling upon God in prayer.

No, I was not at a religious revival, women's spiritual event or Orthodox gathering.

Just your run of the mill Israeli folk and pop nostalgia concert performing songs by secular song writers with a secular band for a mostly secular audience.

That's what happens when your national language is Hebrew and all this biblical and Jewish stuff is just part of the general culture and frame of reference, so say, making a pop song based on Ehad Mi Yodea from the Haggadah makes sense when just about everyone at least knows the original from kindergarten and likely also their family seder.

Like the other day when I heard a song by Israeli rapper Subliminal where a quote from Jewish sources is juxtaposed with the F word (used for emphasis) and in a weird way it makes sense in the context of modern Israeli culture in a way that would be completely bizarre and out of context in English.

Call it ruminations of someone who absorbed Zionism with her mother's milk, but these kind of things just emphasise to me how good it is to be home and how blessed we are to have this home.

Gaza's War of Attrition

Had the vaguest inkling of what the Israeli villages near the Gaza border went through last night. Accidentally left my mobile phone switched on and in my room over Shabbat.

From around midnight last night we were woken over and over again by the Red Alert rocket warning app going off on my phone. That's rocket alert after rocket alert through the early hours of Shabbat morning in dozens of Israeli villages and towns. Over thirty rockets fired in to Israel.

Usually I have the app configured to just ping loudly for alerts in our area (of which thank God there have been none for years) but I recently had my phone repaired and never got around to reconfiguring the app for my area only.

So over and over the screen of the phone flashed with locations around the Gaza border and the clanging alert sounded and we had a glimpse of the terrible Friday night the people living there had, running over and over to their shelters, praying that Iron Dome successfully intercepted all the launches aimed at so many Israeli civilians in their farms, villages, towns. Praying that no more fires would be started in the fields and woodland.

And we were only alerted to the rockets. Not to the thousands of rioters on the Palestinian side once again trying to storm the fence, throwing bombs and molotov cocktails over the border, launching more booby trapped balloons, destroy the fence and infiltrate Israel, part of a campaign to wear down the Israeli forces on the other side of the border, get them used to the constant riots and God Forbid one day use this is cover for even more deadly attacks. It's a war of attrition and it's been going on now for months, escalating little by little, creating a new routine which every day has the potential for deadly consequences.

Blessed Memory

Uncle just phoned in tears. He's in Tel Aviv watching Big Brother's choir perform in a gala Jewish music concert with several choirs, hazanim and well known Israeli singers.

Big Brother's choir just performed Shlomo Carlebach's beautiful "Barkhi Nafshi" right before the interval. Despite the large group of boys and the huge concert hall my uncle could make out Big Brother's clear strong voice passionately singing with every fibre of his being, and he choked up remembering his mother singing that very same song in her clear as a bell soprano.

"Are you old enough to remember that?" he asked weepily over the phone.

Am I ever. Bubbe, my maternal grandmother, didn't just sing it, she poured her entire self into it. She could stand there chopping the fish or kneading dough and for half an hour or more she could repeat over and over with a prayerful passion that must have stormed the gates of heaven "Borkhi nafshi et Hashem" to Carlebach's soulful melody.

It was one of her absolute favourite songs and she sang it often.

As I held the phone in one hand and a sort of dozing twin on my lap I happened to glance up at the newspaper on the chair next to me and a little chilll washed over me as I remembered the date. My grandmother's 16th yahrzeit falls later this week.

I can think of no better way of honouring her memory than for her grandson to sing her favourite Carlebach on the stage of Tel Aviv's Opera House in that same impassioned style of singing he inherited from the great-grandmother he never got to meet. It would please her so.

Danger: Balloons

If you are in Israel have a talk with your kids about not touching or going near balloons or kites they might see in the street, park or even floating in to their own garden.

If it isn't their own balloon they should stay away and call a grown-up.

For months now our Gaza neighbours have been sending thousands of balloons with incendiary devices or explosives attached, designed to cause fires or maim an unsuspecting person who touches the balloon or kite.

Some balloons have booby trapped toys attached to them.

Most of these have landed in nearby Israeli towns and villages just across the border from Gaza where they have sparked fires destroying large tracts of farmland, woodland and nature reserves, killing livestock and wildlife.

Some have drifted widely in to other areas of Israel, including Beer Sheva, Bat Yam, Jerusalem and Modiín.

Teach your children, your neighbours, tourists, visitors - DO NOT TOUCH balloons you come across in the street, a park, hanging on a tree, stuck on a street lamp, caught on your garden fence - wherever. Teach your kids to call a grown-up, make sure grown-ups know to call the police.

Burning fields

At a lovely leibedik wedding last night I met a woman from a village in the north-west Negev. She asked me if I could smell the smoke on her clothes because her region has been burning for days and weeks by now as fire-kites are sent over from Gaza in waves to destroy the fields, woodland and nature reserves on the Israeli side of the border.

The gentle hills and lowlands of the North-West Negev are Israel's grain basket and this time of year are covered in flammable fields of ripe wheat which can ignite and burn out in minutes, before fire crews can get to them, tons of food crops lost in an instant. Food which would go to Palestinians in Gaza, not just to Israelis.

In this clip you can see video of the arson damage to the farmland in this region. If you are wondering why no villages have burned, it's a mix of luck and sparse populations, there is a lot more farmland and nature reserve land than homes, though some fires have come pretty close and homes have had to be evacuated because of the proximity of the flames.