Aliyah: Fifteen (plus 2) things I learned in the last 15 years

Last Friday night in synagogue I sat next to someone who just made Aliyah. She told me that she feels like she has been hit by a bus. Despite the fact that she and her family have been spending their vacations here for the past several years and many people in the neighbourhood assumed they already lived here, the transition from visitor to resident had caught her off-guard. It's a big thing and personally, every time I allow myself to think back to my first year, I have to go to bed and calm myself down. Let's just say that those aren't my best memories.

So, with the help of input from some of my friends who have been there and done that, here's what I know today that I did not know 15 years ago when I arrived.

1.       No matter how hard you try, you are not going to turn Israel into whatever place you came from. At some point you are going to have to accept the old adage "when in Israel, do as the Israelis". This includes learning the fine arts of strategic impersonal yelling, holding your place in line without getting in line, being in two lanes at once, parking wherever it suits you, and the willful rejection of the word "no".

2.       This is not wherever you came from. The country is counter-intuitive. Nothing is done the same here as it is "there". This includes: returns in stores, wedding ceremonies, banking, crossing the street, expecting service with a smile. How ever you are used to things working, it's the opposite here.

3.       Aliyah is difficult and even if you are a capable Hebrew speaker, it is going to turn your world upside down for a while. You may think you are mentally, physically and even spiritually prepared for the move but I am willing to bet buttons to beer caps that you are not. All you need is a day dealing with any branch of officialdom (personal favourites: Bituach Leumi, Misrad Ha P'nim, the maccabi4u website) and you will quickly realize that you are no longer in Kansas and no twister on Earth will ever get you back there.

4.       The ideal development of your child involves their ability to hold their own on the playground ("use your words" is not an Israeli concept) and independent learning until – approximately -- 10^th grade, when the teachers finally shift into gear and start catching-up on every drop of curriculum they forgot to teach your child for the previous nine years. These are truly the roots of Start Up Nation; not the army.

5.       When people tell you that your child will be a fluent Hebrew speaker by Chanuka do not get it into your head that they mean THIS Chanuka. They mean Chanuka several years from now.

6.   Kids turn out differently here. They know that they are all vital components of a country/a people/ a history. They want to do their part to give back to society. They do not need to make academic and extra-curricular decisions based on how to impress a college admissions advisor – they know who they are and what they must do.  Army service, while nerve-wracking for their parents, is a great source of much pride that turns our children into adults so much better than they would have been without the experience.

7.       Going to the army (and some national service) may be similar to getting an undergraduate degree, except for the shitty dorm rooms, worse food, and Hamas and Hezbollah instead of BDS.  It is a valuable experience that will matter later in life – just like university. However, that life and death element is a bit of a game changer.

8.       If you don't want your children to mingle and possibly marry Israelis, moving to Israel may not have been your best idea because there a lot of Israelis here. And as surprising as it may be, Israelis prefer to speak Hebrew and live Israeli lives. You may also have to accept customs and traditions that you believe are uncomfortable for you or bad for your health. I personally like the Sephardi tradition of green-onion-as-representational-whip at the Pesach Seder but I am no fan of meat for lunch.

9.       Winter is colder inside your house than outside. The lack of insulation results in a situation where wearing a coat or heavy sweater to bed begins to seem obvious. Even my dog prefers to go outside in the winter and she is normally no friend of fresh air.

10.   Dead people go straight into the ground. No coffin, just a tightly wrapped shroud. It is incredibly unnerving the first four hundred times you see it.

11.   Israel has a very robust economy. It almost looks like a first world country. There is a crane overhead almost everywhere you look in the center of the country and roads constantly under construction. However, it is all part of the most elaborate sleight-of-hand ruse you will ever see -- you still have to pay Mercedes prices for a Mazda, and $15 for a decent pair of underwear.

12.   Fruit tastes like whatever it is, and can only be found in season. Tomatoes like tomatoes (not wet cardboard), strawberries like strawberries. And dairy products taste like the cow made them specially for you in your backyard five minutes ago. Once you eat here you will never enjoy food anywhere where mass production rules.

13.   The guys carrying visible guns on the street, on the bus, and on the beach, are the good guys and you are really glad they seem to be everywhere.

14.   No one plans ahead. It may have begun as gallows thinking – why plan ahead when we may be dead by then -- but has over time become part of the fabric of Israeli thinking. And oddly enough it works and is truly addictive. Thinking about getting married? Why not next week? Definitely no later than two months from now! Bar mitzvah party venue burned down the night before the party (this really happened), just move the food, the DJ and the guests up the street to the next available party location and carry on.

15. You do not have to be post-secondary school educated to have an opinion on everything from the American presidential elections, to the pros and cons of the interest rates set by the Bank of Israel, or who is right: Boogie, Boujie or Bibi. Every garbage collector, bus driver, gardener, and delivery person has an opinion about what is going on and how things should be.

16.   Oh, and one last thing. The reason Starbucks failed in Israel is because Israelis do not like the taste of Starbucks coffee. There is no conspiracy.

17. Oh, and another thing, lizards have to live somewhere and apparently their somewhere is Israel's everywhere. 

Jewish Grandmothers Without Borders

My mother is visiting from Canada. I could digress on this topic for an hour but instead something my mother said yesterday reminded me of the first time my parents came to visit after we made Aliyah.

Let me begin by saying that when I told my parents we were moving to Israel 13 years ago -- and taking their grandchildren with us -- they smiled -- in that sickly green sort of way -- and then went to a quiet corner to fall apart. They were trying to be supportive but they weren't anywhere near the vicinity of happy. In all fairness, they eventually put on their best happy faces and got on board with our plans.

Approximately five months after we arrived in August 2002, my mother must have sent word to Saddam Hussein that she needed his help with her plan to get us home. Apparently he received her message because he publicly threatened to annihilate Israel in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. I am sure that my mother thought that would scare us enough to send us packing back to Canada.

Long story short: it did not.

Unfortunately once Saddam had publicly announced his intentions, he was hell bent on proceeding with or without my mother. That's when my parents announced that if there was going to be a war in Israel and we weren't going to leave, then they were going to come here. "If my grandchildren are going to be in Israel for a war, then so are we."

If you think for one minute that those were soothing words to me, you are totally deluded. The last thing I needed in the midst of getting gas masks for our family, teaching a three-year-old to put that gas mask on, preparing our shelter and getting ourselves mentally ready for what might be Armageddon, was my parents.

Back to yesterday. In the midst of a brief exchange about people my mother has not seen on this visit, she mentioned how my cousin, whose married daughter lives here, jumped on a plane this summer when the war started; she came to help.

"Lots of grandmothers came," she told me.

I wasn't quite sure if she was peeved that we hadn't ask her to come (keep in mind that the lack of an official invitation didn't stop her the first time we faced a war here) or if she was just reporting the news. I'm still not sure. I simply chose to ignore the comment ... except that obviously it is still on my mind.

Granted this past summer's skirmish -- I don't think that it earned the official title of "war" for some reason -- was more intrusive than 2003. Although we all carried gas masks wherever we went for several months in 2003, we didn't hear one siren. The same cannot be said for this past summer.

And yes, my cousin was probably thinking more about her two-year-old granddaughter than anyone else (sorry guys). In fact, she might have actually been helpful in that capacity. Who knows; I wasn't with them.

There's also the possibility that she is cooler under pressure than my mother. Who knows, she might even have some useful first-aid skills.

Or .... my most assured suspicion ..... she might simply belong to the offshoot of Doctors Without Borders -- Jewish Grandmothers Without Borders. Here's their Charter:

Jewish Grandmothers Without Borders is a private, international Jewish association. The association is made up mainly of Jewish grandmothers and a few coerced grandfathers, as well as any Jewish professionals that the grandmothers deem worthy. All of its members agree to honour the following principles:

• JGWB provides assistance to grandchildren in distress, particularly to victims of natural or man-made disasters, and to victims of armed conflict. They do so irrespective of how displeased they are that their children made Aliyah.
• JGWB are neither neutral or impartial, and don't give a hoot what anyone says to the contrary when it comes to the well being of their grandchildren. 
• Members only respect the Jewish grandparent code of ethics and maintain complete independence from all political, economic, or religious powers.
• As volunteers, members understand the risks and dangers of the missions they carry out and make no claim for themselves or their assigns for any form of compensation -- being there is compensation enough.

If you are a Jewish grandparent who wants to join JGWB, call my mother.  No, she didn't start the group but heaven knows she is a charter member.

My Big (Happy?) Dysfunctional Family

A friend of mine previously from the US Midwest moved to Israel a year and a half ago with her family. She is one of those really nice, always smiling, always positive types that you expect to come from the heartland of the USA. Basically, she's their poster child. And that's why her observations (made originally to her husband and later to me) about our neighbourhood and our synagogue are all the funnier.

About six months into their move to Ra'anana she said to her husband: "Isn't it nice to come to a place where there are no shul (Yiddish for synagogue) politics?" As an aside, let me add that her husband, a native New Yorker, had a less delusional perspective.

I can never hear that story or tell that story enough times. It cracks me up as much now as it did when I first heard it. And after last week, it cracks me up even more.

I promised my AdHoc Overseerers Committee that I would not discuss the issue that brought our synagogue to its philosophical crossroads last week, but suffice it to say that the members of our community spent the last month in the midst of a discussion about how we view ourselves within the framework of Modern Orthodox Judaism. Left, Right, Center, Indifferent, Left with Right Leanings, Right with Left Leanings ..... you get the idea.

In the days leading up to the great vote, emotions were running so high in some quarters that there were many synagogue members who really thought that this issue would irrevocably destroy our community.

Then came Saturday night and the moment of reckoning. After weeks of over-thought angst the members of the synagogue voted last Saturday night and the matter was put to bed. But more important, the synagogue did not implode as a result of the final vote. Admittedly, there were winners and there were losers (and I suspect there were many people who were just glad the whole matter was behind them).

Which brings me to last night and the engagement party of one of our friends' daughter. (Try to follow along with my convoluted thinking here.)

The party was packed with people from our synagogue (and many other people as well). It no longer mattered what side people voted for the other night.

The question any naive outsider could reasonably ask was: "How could you go from the brink of destruction to non-partisan party mode in 48 hours?" And that, my friends, is an interesting question.

When people move to Israel from North America they leave behind a lot -- family, friends, emotional comfort, to name a few. In my mind, they gain a lot more than they lose, but that does not minimize the fact that they have paid a big price to recreate their lives.

And the people who play the biggest role in their new lives (at least in my neighbourhood) are the other members of the shul. People who may have nothing else in common but this one gigantic life experience. They may not share the same political views (trust me, they don't) and they obviously don't share the same views on the observance of Judaism, but at the end of the day, they are the people who will do your carpool if your car breaks down 10 minutes before pick-up. They will feed your children when you are home in bed with the flu. They will drive you to the airport when your parent dies in North America -- and they will be waiting there to bring you home when you return from the shiva.

The grandfather of the groom-to-be spoke last night at the engagement party. He was a very polished, knowledgeable speaker who recounted how, 70 years ago, he managed to survive a pogrom in Romania that left many in his shtetl dead. He also talked about surviving the Shoah (Holocaust). And now, he said, here he was, in Ra'anana, celebrating his grandson's engagement on behalf of all those who never knew there could even be a Jewish state where Jews could live any type of Jewish life they wanted, freely.

And when all is said and done, that is really the ONLY point that matters.