OK, So I’m Alert…Now What?
If I lived in northern Israel during this current conflict on the Lebanese border, life would be dramatic and traumatic right now. But since I live in Ra’anana, a suburb just north of Tel Aviv, it is merely uncertain and unsettling.
These were supposed to be the relaxing boring days of summer – mornings with the kids in camp, afternoons lazing by the pool or at the beach. But since the war began, the routine is far less relaxing. I wake up, turn on the news, check where the overnight bombing take place, and make sure it’s OK to send the kids to summer camp.
The shock of the war took place on the third day, when the news came that Hezbollah was in possession of long-range missiles that could reach as far as Tel Aviv. All of a sudden it wasn’t about those poor folks up north. It was about us.
And we got the strangest instructions from the IDF: residents of Tel Aviv northward were told only to “stay alert.”
Stay alert? What did that mean? I followed orders and immediately made myself a strong cappuccino. OK, so I was alert. Now what? The order sounded suspiciously like the government was merely trying to stay, “if this happens, you can’t say we didn’t warn you, but really, we don’t have a clue.”
But I wanted specific instructions, darn it! Should I let the kids go play at their friends’ house or not? Go to the movies? Could I go grocery shopping or not? Was keeping my dentist appointment a risky venture?
Soon it became clear that everyone around me was functioning normally, going about their business, albeit ALERTLY. It wasn’t clear what good this would do if we were in the dentist’s waiting room and hear a siren for a one-minute warning till a missile hits.
When the crisis began, my first thoughts were for my friends in the northern part of the country, who I immediately called and asked if they wanted to stay with me. My friend Erika, who lives in Rosh Pina, thanked me for the offer and declined. She had moved her two kids to relatives in the center of the country, signed them up for day camp there, and then headed back up north to her house. She and her husband were determined not to be driven out.
But many people are saying yes to the offers of hospitality. There’s lots of enforced family togetherness around Israel these days, with northern relatives from Haifa or Tiberias or Safed coming to take refuge with their kin in the center and south of the country. Others are staying with generous strangers. People are definitely getting on each other’s nerves a bit, but with what’s going on, they keep the big picture in sight and are just happy to be alive and safe.
As for me, I won’t be driven out of Israel, even though I’ve got plenty of friends and family who would be happy to host us. The kids are on summer vacation anyway, they point out. Why don’t you come for a visit? But I know that being overseas when something traumatic is happening to your homeland is harder than being there. So the kids are in camp, I’m by the pool, the beach – and the computer and the television set – watching, waiting, and of course, being alert.
Send it to Five…
Cpl. Gilad Shalit’s kidnapping is heartbreaking. Though most of the nation had no idea who this 19-year-old was before being kidnapped by Palestinians, today everyone is following his story with hope for a happy ending.
And while people likely mean well when they send mass emails and mass SMSes, there’s something erroneous about turning a tragedy into junk mail.
In the last three days, my email inbox and mobile phone inbox have been inundated with messages concerning Shalit. And many of the messages are unintentionally insensitive to the crisis.
“Send this email to five people to help set Gilad Shalit free.” Really.
Or, “Read this passage of Tehilim (Psalms) and pass it to five others. If you don’t, it’s because of you that Gilad Shalit won’t be found.” And yet another, “Keep this chain going… send this message to at least five people and tell them to pray for Gilad Shalit.”
I delete the messages. I find them stomach-turning. I find they make light of a situation too terrible to imagine.
I don’t know the Shalit family. But I can say that I truly hope for them that Gilad is found. I apologize in advance for not sending the SMSes and emails I get on to five others. I am repentant that I continue to break the chain messages.
I will pray on my own terms for their son. I imagine most people would prefer to do the same.
An electric wedding
A happy bride writes:
My fiancee calls me up a week before the wedding and says: “We have a wrinkle.”
The electric company posted a notice on our apartment building that there
was going to be a power outage in our neighborhood to allow for a major repair. The problem was that it fell out exactly on the day of the wedding.
I called the electric company to ask (re: beg) them to postpone the repair
work, since we really, really needed the use of the aptartment to prepare for the
wedding (you know – makeup, hair, etc.). I was immediately transferred to a
manager named Zion. He understood the problem and explained that they
couldn’t reschedule the power outage put he would see what he could do.
Two days later we spoke and he said that he had sent some people to look at
the problem but that they were having trouble isolating our building from
the rest of the area. But – not to worry – if he couldn’t resolve the problem
- we could have a room in the electric company’s building to use as we wish!
I was flabbergasted – I asked him if he’d ever see a Kallah (bride) leave from the
electric company. He said: “actually, it’s happened before :-)”.
The next day he called and said to wish the Kallah Mazal-Tov and that she
would have electricity because he personally went to look at the location and he
found a solution.
So we get up bright and early on Sunday, and lo and behold, there is a
generator parked right outside of our building. That’s right – our building
was hooked up to electricity all day from our own private generator while
the rest of the neighborhood had a blackout! It was truly amazing.
We sent a warm thank you letter to the electric company along with this picture.
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“That’s Not My Problem”
We finally moved last week. After months of renovations that I began chronicling in the post Ka-Ching, by the time you read this we will be firmly – if not entirely comfortably – ensconced in our new home.
The process went remarkably smoothly. For the amount of work we had done on our new apartment, the timeline was quick (a fast three months) and the screw-ups were minimal.
Except for one.
We were about half way through the process. We had hired a carpenter recommended by our architect. He had come to install the cabinets under the sink in the children’s bathroom. This required some drilling into the ceramic tiles on the wall.
For reasons that I still don’t understand, Menachem the carpenter aimed his drill into the wall in a line directly under the sink faucet. I wasn’t watching at the time, but in retrospect this seemed as likely a place for a pipe to be placed as any. So it shouldn’t have been surprising that, as the drill bit went in, water began spraying into bathroom.
“Uh oh,” Menachem muttered to himself and then began calling out those three little words you never want to hear during a shiputz (renovation): “Yesh lanu baya.” Houston, we have a problem.
Tomer, the contractor – who was standing a few feet away in the adjoining bedroom – came running.
“Why why why?” he groaned, which is the Israeli equivalent of “oy” and “you idiot!”
“Why didn’t you ask me first?” he demanded of Menachem who shrugged helplessly.
Tomer immediately got to work with one of his crewmembers. They had to shut off the water, drill away the tile to reveal the plumbing guts within, patch up the pipe with several metal connectors, put a new tile in, and reapply the roba (“grout” in English, which sounds to me more like a disease than a plumbing material) which seals the tile against moisture.
While he was working Tomer turned to my wife Jody and me. “He’s going to have to pay, you know. 1200 shekels. That’s the cost of this.”
Was NIS 1200 – about $260 – the right amount? We had no way of knowing if it was too high or low. But the concept seemed fair. You cause damage, you take responsibility. The matter was forgotten for the next six weeks until it was time to settle up with the contractor.
As Jody reviewed the bill for all the carpentry work we had done with Menachem, she deducted the NIS 1200 from the total and showed him the final number.
“No,” Menachem said as he looked at the paper.
“No…what?” Jody responded.
“No, I’m not going to pay for that,” Menachem said matter-of-factly, pointing at the NIS 1200. “It’s not my problem,”
“How can this not be your problem?” I interjected. “You drilled a hole, you hit a pipe, you made a mistake.”
“No,” Menachem repeated. “How can I to know what’s behind the walls?”
“The contractor was standing right there!” My voice was getting louder. “You could have asked.”
“It’s your house. It’s not my problem. I won’t pay.”
Now, if it had been a matter of negotiating over how much to pay, I could have dealt with that. But for a supplier to clearly cause damage and then deny any responsibility whatsoever, that was beyond my comprehension.
Of course, I’ve heard about this kind of attitude – it’s typically Israeli. You see it among our politicians every day. One government office passes the buck to another.
Remember the horrific tragedy in 2001 when the floor of Jerusalem’s Versailles Wedding Hall collapsed killing 23 Israelis? The owners blamed the contractors, the contractors blamed the inventor of the ill-fated “Pal-Kal” system, and everyone blamed the vacancies in the city’s Building department for a shortage of inspectors.
But up until today, I imagined this as a quaint anachronism to be suffered from a distance. Something to laugh about if it wasn’t too personal.
But Menachem’s approach was as in-your-face as it comes. And he wasn’t planning on leaving until he got his money.
All of it.
Now, there are two emotional elements at play in this drama. Resistance to being a freier – the Israeli epithet for “sucker,” someone who gets taken advantage of – and a strong distaste for conflict.
For an Israeli, being a freier is the worst possible outcome of any encounter. Jody and I, on the other hand, abhor conflict. We hate it when a previously positive relationship is marred by a disagreement.
We hate being freiers too, but if we have to choose between being a freier and conflict, we’ll invariably opt for the latter. We want to be able to run into our contractor if we’re walking down the street and shake hands with a smile.
You’re probably thinking, what are the chances of that? But Israel is a small place. You’d be surprised.
“Let’s split the difference,” Jody said to Menachem. “You pay 600 and we’ll eat the rest.” We were clearly being freiers, but we also had a nagging suspicion that maybe our contractor, wasn’t being entirely fair either. NIS 1200 for a job that took a couple of hours while he was already on the premises…wasn’t that laying roba on the bricks a bit thick too?
Again we were stonewalled. “If you don’t want pay, what can I do?” Menachem said, disparagingly. “But I’m not agreeing to pay anything,”
“Fine, if that’s the way you want it, you get nothing,” I said. In this battle of wills, we still had the upper hand: we had the money.
“35 years in the business and this has never happened before,” Menachem muttered under his breath.
Sweat was pouring down Menachem’s face. Our hearts were beating (well, mine was, I can’t vouch for Jody’s).
And then Menachem blinked. Just a little. He started scribbling on our page with the numbers. He wrote a new amount. It was the total minus NIS 200. He shoved it in our direction.
“And what, we’re supposed to just absorb the remaining 1000?” I responded to his “generous” offer.
“It’s not my problem.”
Not again…
Jody and I huddled but held fast. Menachem continued to sweat and then scribbled some more. He upped his proposal to NIS 400.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. But we took it. We’d raise the issue of the remaining NIS 800 with our contractor. Maybe he’d come down. Or maybe we’re just the biggest freiers in Jerusalem. Probably not that either, though that’s how it felt at the moment.
Immediately, Menachem’s face relaxed. He smiled for the first time in a long while. He asked for a glass of water.
Jody pulled out the checkbook. Then we walked Menachem to the door and shook hands as if nothing had happened.
And that’s the flipside to Israeli stubbornness and the absolute rejection of ever being branded a freier. Israelis don’t hold grudges. They are quick to forgive.
Once Menachem had given in enough to feel he’d “saved face,” the matter was closed. He never admitted any responsibility but at least he felt magnanimous. We could meet on the street or share a cup of coffee on the beach. It took a little bit of mental carpentry, but ultimately we were able to craft out our own happy ending.
One worry remained: were we setting a bad example for our children…that one shouldn’t stand up for one’s convictions? Why should they fight for causes they believe in if their own parents give in over such a clear-cut open and shut case of negligence?
Well, that’s not my problem…
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Have you had an experience in Israel where you’ve encountered the “not my problem” won’t-take-responsibility syndrome? Post a comment on the blog here or on the This Normal Life blog…and let’s share the misery!
When Your Street Has a Website
Lisa writes:
Well, it’s not exactly my street, but it is about 10 seconds’ walk away from where I live. Sheinkin is synonymous with all that is trendy and cool in Israel, ‘though there are some who use the term “Sheinkin types” as a derisive synonym for artsy-fartsy bleeding heart leftists.
That image is pretty outdated, ‘though. Sheinkin has seen quite a few incarnations over the last 60 years. Once, during the 1930s and 1940s, it was elegant; then it was seedy and rundown for a long time. During the late 1980s it was discovered by the bohemian crowd and became a central meeting place for actors, musicians and writers. Now it’ s roughly equivalent to – oh, West Broadway in Manhattan, Notting Hill in London or Queen Street West in Toronto. Briefly edgy but now mainstream trendy and somewhat commercialized.
I try to avoid Sheinkin on Fridays, the first day of the weekend, when half the teenagers from greater Tel Aviv gather to see and be seen. Traffic – both pedestrian and vehicular – slows to a crawl on that day as Yossi, Yoni, Osnat and Merav stop to greet all their friends. \
Anyhow, check out the site. It’s got a history of the street, links to various shops, video of the day and more – so much more. You can even buy stuff online and have it sent to you.
