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The army is a picnic

There’s nothing like a picnic outside an army base to rekindle any lost sparks of Zionism.

I’d have to say that the scene last week outside the Ketziot base was an example of something that’s uniquely Israeli – I can’t imagine it happening in any other country.

Our daughter’s in the early stages of six-months of basic training at the base, which is deep in the Negev, south of Beersheba, only a handful of kilometers from the Egyptian border.

Given the chance of spending a restful Shabbat at home or driving two and a half hours each way to spend a couple hours with her during ‘free time’ on her Shabbat on the base, we chose the only possible option.

So loading up the back of the car with a cooler filled with lunchtime delicacies, we headed south. Once you get past Beersheba, there’s not much else – it gets more and more desolate and desert-ed.

Even though I had spent three different reserve duties at Ketziot, where there is also a prison housing Palestinian detainees, I wondered a few times if we were on the right road. But sure enough, the turnoff for Ketziot eventually showed up, amid ‘camel crossing’ signs and the ocassional lone tree.

We drove down the narrow road and turned into the parking lot, only to find… a party! The lot was filled with dozens of cars, and the a neatly designed picnic area – complete with wooden, covered benches and tables, and a large swath of artificial grass – was packed with families and their soldier children.

Some families seem have brought their entire kitchen with them – with portable coffee makers the item of choice for many. Parents were moving around from group to group, handing out cookies, and soldiers were waving their friends/comrades over to introduce them to their parents.

It was like visiting day at college, except the students all had rifles slung over the shoulders and had great tans. After the allotted time, the families started packing up for the long ride home, and our children walked back through the gates of the base to get some rest in their tents until Shabbat went out – but not before handing their parents plastic bags full of laundry.

Hopefully, the visit had recharged them sufficiently to start the week of shooting, drilling and soldiering in good spirits. Only six more days, and they can sleep in their own beds for a couple nights.

High school musical – the hike

A uniquely Israeli creation, the tiyul shnati (Annual trip) has been part of our family’s lives since our oldest child was big enough for one of the outdoor overnight, multi-day trips.

Whether they attend secular or religious schools, the annual trips are generally chock full of walking the land, camping in the rough, rope and ladder climbing water hikes, barbecues, cameraderie, pranks, and living and breathing Zionism.

With 10 months spent cooped up in the classroom, middle and high schoolers earn their three days out in nature, and our 15-year-old son was up bright-eyed and ready at 5:30 am this morning waiting for one of us to drive him to school.

Of course, it’s not primarily about Zionism, it’s primarily about pranks. When I asked him what kind of pranks the kids play on each other these days, he recounted one successful mission last year of entering another tent in the middle of the night, and scrawling in red marker the name of a body part on the forehead of a ‘friend.’

The preparations begin days earlier, with the required trip to the candy story for obligatory ‘junk’ bag of everything we don’t let him have the rest of the year. The school list of required equipment includes enough bottles of water to stock a small pool, but he also insisted on buying a six-pack of Coke. Both the portable music player and the cell phone stayed at home, which was an accomplishment in itself, and almost worth the cost of the trip.

Which is a sore point – a number of students weren’t attending the trip due to the expense involved. On top of the annual school fees and miscellanous charges, the school charged NIS 790 (almost $200) for the trip. I know that there’s the costs of the buses, the guides, etc… but they’re not even staying in youth hostels or hotels, they’re camping out!

If it’s a class trip, meant to build a spirit of student togetherness, there should be a way for all the students to go, even if it means cutting out some of the schedule and shortening the outing by a day.

It’s a macro problem, but this morning, we were dealing with the micro, hastily digging the forgotten sleeping bag out of the closet at the last minute. With that squared away, our young man took his last shower for three days, packed an extra pair of shoes for the water, reluctantly stuffed in something to wear if it got cold at night, made sure he had his red marker, and put his candy in a water-proof section of his backpack. With attention to detail like that, he’ll go far in life.

Nostalgia Sunday – Young Judaea Year Course 1978-9

Here’s where I’m not. I am not in New York City this weekend, at the big Young Judaea Year Course 1978-9 reunion. As much as I reconciled myself to that fact months ago, I still feel a pang of regret at not meeting up with people from that first, most formative and important year of my post-high school life.

Here’s the end-of-year photo of Year Course Section 3. What you see is a group of hormone-addled teens relieved to have made it to the end without killing one another, and bewildered by the thought of starting college after a year of “real life in Israel”.

Whereas the other Year Course groups, Sections 1 and 2, spent most of the year studying in Jerusalem and toga-partying on kibbutz, Section 3 had a unique module that placed us for four months as para-social workers in development towns, in our case, Dimona and Mizpe Ramon. And so, while living in these “Turn Left at the End Of the World” places gave us a more than slightly skewed notion of “real life in Israel” — and our contributions to the field of social work were minimal– we did have our own apartments! Which is pretty heady stuff when you are 18 years old and just out of the house. No wonder I felt compelled to document the Dimona digs. Here’s our kitchen, complete with the ubiquitous Armenian pottery mugs from the Old City…

And our fab apartment block!

Prior to development town, we lived on Kibbutz Neot Mordechai, on moshavim (agricultural towns) and in Jerusalem. Like all other groups, we toured the Golan and Galil. Here’s the Good Fence between Israel and Lebanon — probably a lot smaller than you imagined.

And the Negev, Arava and Sinai, where we made like Bedouin trackers, but with little sense of direction and even less sense of style.

Like all other groups of young people in Israel at that time, Israeli and non, we happily wrecked our tailbones for life on that mode of transportation known as a “Tiyulit”, a sort of tin box on wheels, the interior lined with long hard wooden benches.

What can I say? We were a geeky bunch. Plus, we didn’t get haircuts for months at a time. (Yes, that is me in that image below, on the far right, under that mop).

One place our section didn’t get to spend much time, regrettably, was the youth movement’s Kibbutz Ketura. The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive has an amazing movie from 1976 , called Arava, that documents the founding of the kibbutz — an inspiring miracle in the sand that is still making the desert bloom to this very day with algae farming, exotic plants and solar power.

Kids, there were no cell phones (I probably spoke to my family three times that year, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to wait in line for the public phone), we barely had any cash (certainly no credit cards), parental visits were not encouraged and you only flew home to the States if you were kicked off the program. Ah, those were the days…

A good number of the members of Young Judaea Year Course 1978-9, from all sections, live in Israel and while few of us could be at the real-life reunion, Facebook has provided a platform for a virtual one. Feel free to take a peek.

My dad, the permanent Zionist

I’ve been off Israelity for more than a week now because my father died nine days ago, at the age of 81, after several years of sickness. As is often the case in these kinds of drawn-out illnesses, his death was not unexpected, but came upon us suddenly, so it felt surprising despite knowing that this day would come. So the funeral and shiva were really a celebration of his life, as many friends and family sat and talked with us, my mother and three siblings, telling us stories about him and letting us describe who he was and how he lived his life.

He was a Conservative congregational rabbi for 40 years, and then moved to Israel to retire, a decision that had been many years in the making, and one which didn’t surprise anyone who knew him. For my father, Israel was the be-all and end-all, the Zionist homeland, the meeting place for all Jews, and in particular for him, the Brooklyn-born and New Britain, Connecticut-bred Ted Steinberg who was turned on to Beitar in his youth and tried to fight in the 1948 War of Independence. (While en route to then-Palestine with his college buddies at the tender age of 20, their shop was waylaid in Beirut because of their illegal visas and they spent two months in a Lebanese prison camp before the U.S. State Department got wind of the situation and had them freed.) He then spent the next 44 years teaching, learning, sermonizing and thinking about Israel, before making aliyah with my mother 17 years ago. In between, he brainwashed the four of us, creating, as I like to call it, the influences of Zionism through osmosis.

As my mother says, he always wore rose-colored glasses when it came to Israel, and had a hard time seeing anything negative about this confounding country. But what made me happy during shiva were all the anecdotes, stories and visitors who exemplified my father’s soul and spirit.

There was the Iranian woman rabbi whose name I recognized, who told me that my father persevered in including her in his weekly study group of fellow rabbis who weren’t so sure they wanted a woman in their very male crew. There was the friend who told me that my father’s weekly stint in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens convinced him to join the same group of volunteers. A younger rabbinical colleague emailed us that my father shared with him one great piece of advice, which was, “On every page of a sermon there should be a window and a smile.” Which was very much my father’s m.o.

And one of my favorite moments was when my gardener, Yossi, came to pay his respects. For my father, the fact that I have a Jewish gardener for my small plot of Israeli land with whom I can discuss the issues of Jewish law and its effects on my fruit trees, well, hey. That’s why he moved to Israel. For me? It’s Zionism through osmosis, and I appreciate it more than ever.

A proud parent

Alright, this is delicate. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but I don’t think there’s any way around it.

I didn’t think I’d be raising Torah scholars when my wife and I started having kids some 20 years ago. But I was hoping they’d find their own way to express their Zionism and sense of being Israeli. I guess she could have done this anywhere, but the fact of the matter is second daughter Sarit chose to stand out in volleyball here in Israel. And she’s made herself, her family and her friends proud to know her by the way she’s conducted herself these last few years.

Through no initiative of my own, The Jerusalem Post identified her as a sports person of note in their weekend magazine column ‘Holding Court’.

“When she came to me in seventh grade she was very quiet and delicate,” recalls her coach, Oron Ashery. “She asked just to practice and not to play, and since then she’s just grown and grown in the sport. She’s a very special player in the group. She’s the captain of the team, which made the Final Four. She’s been a significant member of our starting six for a while. Sarit is very brave. Over the years she’s gained confidence, and goes after balls that other players don’t even bother with. She makes it to every practice and helps organize the team – she’s the one who maintains the contact between the players.”

And

It’s pretty likely that when Sarit Brinn’s doctors do a chest X-ray, they see a volleyball beating inside her heart. The 17-year-old Ma’aleh Adumim senior and team captain is so devoted to her sport – which this year saw her team, Tali Beit Hinuch, come out of nowhere to claim third place in the high-school league with a 9-6 record – it’s taken over her life, and she loves it.

Not content to just play for her high-school team, Sarit also joined Hapoel Beit Hinuch Jerusalem in a women’s league that includes older players, and her club finished first, advancing to a higher league for next season.

So when she’s up at 2 a.m. making up the class work that she missed because she’s been at one of three practices or two games a week, it just doesn’t faze her. “It gives me energy to play,” she explains in a phone interview recently near the end of the regular school league season.

At home, she can be like any other teenager at times. But the story did capture her big heart, her dedication and her enthusiasm. Now, if we could just get her take out the garbage.

A TV volleyball star in Israel

While we used to only have one TV station here, now media options are almost as diffused in Israel as they are in the US.

HOT, YES, satellite TV, we’ve got it all – and you can watch alot of the same crap that’s on American TV any time you want. Still, there was something a little precious about the whole country being tuned into one show, having that common bond, and knowing that the next day your co-worker almost certainly watched the same thing as you did last night.

So the fact that my 17-year-old daughter played yesterday in a high school league volleyball game broadcast live across the country on Israel TV doesn’t hold the same weight it might have once held. But it was still pretty darn thrilling nonetheless.

As captain of her Beit Hinuch Jerusalem team, she had read a little statement on mike with the other team’s captain and shake hands before the game. The best of five series was well played and action packed, with Sarit’s team only succumbing in the final tie-breaking match.
Hearing the commentators intone with perfect Hebrew inflection “Sarit Brinn” everytime she returned a ball or made a save, was a huge kick. And the one time they called her “a smart player” put me over the top.

I wish the whole country had been watching the broadcast, but even if it was just my wife, my older daughter and myself cheering and stomping on the floor, it provided one of the great moments of my aliyah. Zionism through volleyball.

Obama’s inauguration enraptures Israelis

With the Gaza ceasefire apparently taking hold, Israelis have been happy to have something new upon which to fixate our attentions in the news. Something hopeful. US President Barack Obama’s inauguration yesterday and the festivities surrounding it this whole week have kept Israelis enraptured.

The one exception to this trend might be American immigrants to Israel, who tend to be a Republican-leaning crowd, often because of the popular perception that the American Right is more friendly to Israel than the Left. This perception might or might not be true, but Americans living in Israel are certainly wary of Obama’s alleged lack of Zionism.

So despite citing nightlife-themed parties surrounding the inauguration which took place in Tel Aviv as well as Jerusalem, a Haaretz piece from earlier this week points out that mainstream American organizations were shying away from the event:

Neither the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel nor the American Israeli Action Coalition – two non-partisan groups – have planned any special activities to mark the swearing-in of the new president. A spokesman for Israelis for Obama, a small group that was formed before the elections and operated mainly online, told Haaretz the group had dissolved after completing it’s only goal of seeing Obama elected.

But even though George Bush is considered by the people here to have been a great friend to the country, most Israelis are optimistic about new blood inhabiting the White House. The Associated Press even hints at some more literal connections between the Israeli appetite for inauguration news coverage and the Gaza ceasefire:

Obama’s inauguration became the lead story in Israeli media, which had been dominated by coverage of the Gaza offensive that began with a massive air bombardment on Dec. 27.

The front page of Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s biggest daily newspaper, featured the smiling Obama and his wife over an English headline: “Good luck.”

Seemingly timing its withdrawal to Tuesday’s inauguration, Israel had already pulled most of its troops out of the ravaged Gaza Strip after a deadly three-week offensive aimed at halting years of militant rocket fire. But the crisis is not over, with reports of shooting along the Israel-Gaza border, and with Israeli soldiers poised to resume the assault if Gaza militants break a fragile cease-fire.

Maybe it’s simply a matter of the incoming president’s rock star-like status, but Obama buzz is not relegated to Democrats – even when it comes to Americans living here. Summing up the feelings at last night’s parties, today Haaretz quotes a young reveler named Guy Simen:

“Even people who did not support Obama are excited, because they know the whole world is watching this event – and they feel close to home. They know that now we’ve elected a man who is supposed to change the world and many people are proud to be Americans.”

Image courtesy lostintransitzine from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

 

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