What could I possibly add to this?

The people of the school book

Well, I am thrilled to say that the People of the Book (I prefer that to the Chosen People because I am not sure what we were chosen for) have now sent the Children of the Book back to school. And not a minute too soon.

If I had to clean up my kitchen one more time 20 minutes after I had just completed a proper and thorough clean-up of my own doing, I was going to murder someone. Death for Crumbs might not sound like reasonable cause for you, but it does for me.

Which brings me back to the Children of the Book. When I was a kid I loved school. All my friends were there and how much black and white tv could you possibly watch on two channels? School was were the action was -- nevermind those ancient teachers with the wobbly underarm fat that entranced me for minutes on end or the incompetent teachers who I quickly realized were older than me but definitely not smarter, which wasn't saying much for them. School was fun.

And when I later figured out ways to have my parents think I was in school and my stupid teachers to think I was home ill, I was set. Without school, I would have been sunk. So why do my kids think that going to school is such a punishment?

I have told them at least a trillion times that if they are home they better be in bed with a temperature of at least 102 -- and preferably vomiting. I have also said that I am not going to hang around all day keeping them company or taking them places. NO, I am sorry. Children need to go to school to hang around with other like minded cranky people who think they would be having more fun at home and I need to be able to go to the bathroom without someone looking for me.

I took care of them when they were babies. We went to more stupid playgroups than I care to remember. Gymboree. Baby Ballet. Baby Karate. Baby Swim. Oh, and my personal favorite, Baby Sing-a-Long, where my son would promptly leave me in the circle of mothers and agreeable babies while he went outside to play alone. I have paid my dues and now I want to send off happy children for a wonderful day of learning.

I do not want to be SMS'd from class. I do not want to receive calls from the bathroom where someone is on the toilet and constipated. I do not want to make social plans for three weeks from today when you should be in class. I do not want to know what bitchy thing the teacher did to you today. I do not want your teachers to call me or send me notes -- particularly in hebrew. I do not want your teachers to know my name.

I want you to sit in class. Learn a little something and be the Children of the Book that you were chosen to be.

How heat waves can alter history

After experiencing a month of what I consider intollerable heat, I have come to the realization that many things that have or have not happened throughout history were probably influenced in someway or another by the weather.

Israel, like much of the northern hemisphere, has experienced its hottest August in recorded history. While I love to say that I was there for superlative events, I prefer the good ones and "hottest summer in recorded history" is not one of those. That said, the last time I complained about the weather on my blog, my old high school friend who now lives in Cyrus wrote to say: "38 degrees? That's it? It's 44 in Cyprus." That took the steam out of my rant and also provoked me to make a mental note to stay away from Cyprus in the summer.

The heat also proved to be the deciding factor in the cancellation of our end-of-summer family trip because how can you go on a day-long water hike when all the hiking routes that had water, have dried up because of the heat?

Which brings me one of those historical moment thoughts. It dawns on me that if someone like Vivaldi had lived in Israel during a heat-wave, he might never have written the Four Seasons. Actually, skip the heat wave, if he had lived in Israel he, at best, would have written, the Two and a Half Seasons: Hot, Hotter, and Damp. Not the most inspirational environment.

And the hotel chain? I think it would be hard to market the Two and a Half Seasons Hotel.

And all that Ansel Adams photography?All that would have survived were his mountain views. Lovely, but without the depth of his existing porfolio.

Now, on the upside, maybe many of the world's wars and other such skirmishes (I don't know why they call them that in the media, but I like that word) might never have happened.

If the Crusaders had arrived in Jerusalem wearing all that iron-clad gear in the middle of a heat wave they would have been smart to have just turned around and left Jerusalem alone or even better, they would have died of heat exposure and saved the Jews a lot of subsequent grief. Without the Crusaders initiating a couple of hundred years of murdering Jews for no good reason (of course it took until 1990 something for a pope to admit that), we Jews could have been much better positioned to beat the pulp out of that little evil part-Jewish pyscho dictator Hitler and now we would be at least twice as many people as we are. This in turn, would have possibly (I said "possibly") made the modern-day fanatic anti-semites reconsider their plans to annihate us. Oh, they would still want to but we would be a much bigger and stronger group and since they are all essentially rhetoric heavy, action lite, we might have been in a better position than we find ourselves.

Notice that all the good heat waves come when you don't need them.

You can never go home again

Someone sent this link (see bottom of post) to me yesterday and when I read it I had the strongest sense of melancholy I have experienced in a long time. I grew up 12 miles from Glace Bay, in the bustling city of Sydney, Nova Scotia. (Take that description with a grain of salt please.)

And exactly as the story reports, we were all raised to get an education and leave. I did and so did almost every Jewish kid I knew.

After I finished graduate school I went to work for Stelco in Hamilton, Ontario, which at the time was Canada's largest steel manufacturer. As the junior writer I was excited when I was invited to join the Communications team at a steel tradeshow in Toronto. While I was on a break from my duties during the show I decided to have a look around. I came across the booth for the Sydney steel plant, Sysco, and I, being a 100% Cape Bretoner in my heart (in not my physicality) stopped to say hello.

The CEO of Sysco just happened to be there at the same time. He asked me my name which I enthusiastically offered up because I was a proud Cape Bretoner. Of course he knew my father which was not surprising firstly because Cape Breton has a small professional community and my father was one of the more senior members at that point. And secondly because I came from a large family that was known far and wide in those parts.

Then he asked me where I went to university and what I had done there. I proudly gave him the abbreviated story of my BA and my MA, and how I was now working for Stelco in Hamilton. To me, that made us sort of kindred spirits. Ha.

Mr. CEO just stood there looking at me and then he pretty much exploded: "This is precisely the problem with your people," he said. 'You are encouraged to get a good education but you never bring your skills and knowledge back to Cape Breton where it is so sorely needed.' (I am paraphrasing because this happened in 1985.)

I tried to explain that Jewish young people have to go where there are other Jewish young people if we are going to perpetuate our people. And Cape Breton was definitely not that place. But frankly, he didn't want to hear anymore. He just sort of walked away. And I was left standing there feeling like dirt -- and on some small level, rightfully so. He wasn't Jewish and he didn't get the Jewish thing.

Anyway, after reading this article in the National Post, I can't help but think back on that moment. I love my life in Israel and I have no regrets, but there is a tiny piece of me that will always feel 100% Cape Breton.



http://life.nationalpost.com/2010/08/02/closure-of-cape-breton’s-oldest-synagogue-marks-end-of-era/

Things that never ever happen in Canada

It takes about six months to plan a bar mitzvah -- at least the way my friends do it here. Yes, you could do it in less time but I live in a hyper-drive sort of neighbourhood so no one "throws" a celebration together at the last minute -- even if they said they did.

Which brings me to my friends who are celebrating their son's bar mitzvah this coming weekend. After months of planning the location, the food, the music, the events, the order of the synagogue activities, and a thousand other small details that would take too much space to explain, it is finally time.

They decided to hold the event at a fancy hotel in the north of Israel rather than celebrating in our synagogue, which is located one block from my house (but that's an aside).

Back to the hotel.The only thing that is important about it for my story-telling purposes, is that we are staying there for two nights this weekend and it is located near Kiryat Shmona. Kiryat Shmona is located in northern Israel on the western slopes of the Hula Valley on the Lebanese border. The Lebanese border is the key phrase here. (See map above)

Anywhooooooooooooooooooooo. The anticipation of a weekend in a nice hotel has been building among those of us who are attending. It's been a big topic of conversation for the past few weeks. And then it all came to a screaching halt around 3:00 p.m. yesterday afternoon when for some irrational reason the Lebanese Army decided that Israeli soldiers pruning trees on Israeli soil was pissing them off so they decided to start shooting over the border.

Obviously it was a ruse by the Lebanese -- because even CNN thinks that they over-reacted to the UN approved activity on the Israeli side and CNN is not know for taking Israel's side on anything. But that is not the point.

The point is that since the news broke yesterday afternoon my friends and I have been on the phone going through the kind of soul searching that never occurs in Canada. Do we still go to the bar mitzvah? Are we unnecessarily risking our lives and those of our children who are coming with us? And for those of us who are not taking our children, are we risking making them orphans all for the sake of a bar mitzvah? Are we over-reacting? Are we under-reacting? Are we reacting on principal or fear? Are the reports in the Hebrew press the same as those in the English-Israeli press? Are we reading between the lines or are we too naive to do so properly? Are we willing to jump in our cars on the Sabbath and drive away from there if things get worse -- even though we are observant Jews who don't drive on the Sabbath?

And those are only a few of the questions that we have addressed in the past 21 hours.

Of course there are no cut and dry answers. All we really want to do is go away for the weekend and let someone else do all the work while we hang out enjoying the celebration. In Canada it would actually be that simple. In Israel it rarely is simple because the situation can change on a dime -- as opposed to Canada where there is no change analogy because "the situation" never changes.

Man plans and God laughs. I don't know who said that first, but this is an excellent example of that idea in action.

For the records, as of this moment, we are all going. Someone we know called someone he knows in the Israel Defense Forces and the word, for now, is: all clear. The problem is that no one called the Lebanese Army or Hizbollah to see if they are in agreement. They probably are not. Stay tuned.