How far do we have to walk to find a cure?

When I got up today I was looking forward to the first annual Breast Cancer Awareness Walk that was held in Ra'anana in honour of two wonderful local women who succumbed to the awful disease in the past few years. Now that the walk is over, all I can remember is how sad I am.

The first woman honoured today was Mindy Greenberg who died at 43, four years ago. I didn't know her very well but everyone who did liked her a lot. The first time I met Mindy she called me to ask me to please have my son Zeve stop trying to drown her son Noam when they played together in the local pool. At the time I was mortified because we all know how much everyone loves getting calls from strangers telling them that their five-year olds are potential murderers! The biggest irony of that call was that pretty much ever since then, the boys have been very good friends. Such good friends in fact that Mindy commented on it to me about a week before she died.

The second woman was my very good friend Diane Taragin. Diane died almost a year ago and not a day goes by that I don't think about her. She was a special woman -- she was very serious about her Judaism but you could always count on her to say such outrageous things that you thought you would choke with laughter. Of course, all those outrageous things were probably things that the rest of us were thinking -- she just had the guts to put her thoughts into words and throw them out there for public consumption.

There's so much I miss about her that I couldn't make a list even if I wanted to, but the one thing I want to mention is that not long after her funeral I was back in the Ra'anana graveyard again for another funeral. On the way out I stopped by her grave to leave a stone and on the way into her row I noticed that very near by was the grave of one of Israel's most notorious mobsters who had, just prior to Diane's death, died when his car inexplicably (?) blew up on the streets of Tel Aviv.

I burst into laughter because all I could think was that if Diane knew that such a dubious character was in her hallowed row she would have started a campaign to have him moved elsewhere. And if she had come across him in the Netherworld (which I guess would have been unlikely since she is with the good guys and he definitely is NOT), she would have given him a piece of her mind about his behaviour and its impact the country.

And that's why I came home today much sadder than when I left. I don't want to talk about these women in the past tense. I don't understand why, despite their access to excellent medical care and their families' willingness to do anything to help them, there was nothing that could be done. I don't understand why bad things happen to good people. I don't understand why good things happen to bad people. There's a lot of things that I just don't get.

However, since there probably are no satisfactory answers to these questions, those of us left behind will keep telling stories, laughing at the memories, and walking to find a cure.

My city is your toilet

People often ask me how I get the ideas for what I write here. The truth is that for the most part things just happen and I am just left to report them. I rarely have to sweat it out thinking of what to say because life continually presents moments that leave me speechless.

And today proved to be one of the best speechless moments I have experienced in a very long time. Early this morning a pregnant woman with a small boy presented my next story right out of the blue.

I was walking to my 8:15 doctor's appointment on a downtown street in Ra'anana. There weren't a lot of people on the streets yet, however I noticed a woman and a small boy who was probably two-years old. Normally that wouldn't be such a big deal but in this case it was because the boy wasn't wearing anything other than a T-shirt.

The woman, who I can only assume was his mother, looked normal enough. She was nicely dressed which led me to believe that she could afford pants for her child. She didn't look spaced out so it's not as if she forgot to put some sort of bottoms on him. But here it was, not even 8:30 and this little kid was just out on the sidewalk having a nice stroll without pants, diaper, or underwear.

I am sure if feels great to be out walking around without pants -- if you are two. A nice cool morning breeze to air out your privates. Who could ask for more than that? And I am not a prude. Naked little kids are fine -- in places where nudity seems within the boundaries of propriety. The backyard. Maybe the beach -- although you could get one heck of a sunburn on your nether regions.

See what I mean? I could never have come up with this line of thought on my own. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried for a week. It never would dawn on me to write about a kid without his pants. However, that is exactly what happened.

I knew almost immediately that I wasn't going to be able to simply let this go and walk by as if there wasn't a pantless kid a few feet from me. So .... as I passed the woman, I asked her in hebrew where her son's pants were. I would have asked why he wasn't wearing pants but I wasn't sure I could say that properly in hebrew so I opted for the simpler question.

I am sure she was surprised but she told me that she was toilet training him, so rather than run the risk of wetting his pants (like he would be the first child on earth to do THAT), she simply didn't put any pants on him.

On the face of it, it almost sounded reasonable for a brief moment. But speaking on no one's behalf but my own, that is the most warped logic I have heard in a very long time. I can understand taking that approach in one's own backyard, but on the city streets????

Essentially, she had decided that it was better for her child to walk around pooping and peeing anywhere he wanted -- just so long as it wasn't in his pants. She was using my city as her son's toilet. Can you imagine if every toilet-training child in town was allowed to do this? We'd be living in the middle of the sewer in about three days. You would have to wear Wellies all year round -- and a nose plug. The rats would think they had died and gone to rat hell -- all smack dab in the middle of God's country.

Frankly I had no idea what to say next, so I just nodded half sympathetically and half incredulously -- and then I walked away. I hope she didn't mistake my disbelieving smile for complicity. I was simply trying to keep my face suitably neutral so she wouldn't know how mortified I was.

I am still not really sure what to make of the whole matter but since it is now 12 hours later I guess I am just going to have to let it go. And I am going to avoid the sidestreets of downtown Ra'anana until enough time has passed that I figure this kid has been toilet trained.

There's no hope for Hope

Last week I noticed a series of lingerie posters along the main thoroughfares of Ra'anana and most of them looked like they had been the victims of a religious fanatic graffiti artist. At first I couldn't figure out why someone would do that, but when I mentioned it to my husband and then showed him the ads as we drove along the main street, he noticed that the graffiti was very uniform.

He is much more observant than I am -- and I don't mean from a religious perspective. However, after he mentioned it, I started looking more carefully. Lo and behold, I had to agree. This was definitely not the work of an overzealous religious person.

Of course, at the time, I couldn't figure out exactly what the goal of the marketing plan was, and over the next few days I forgot all about it. Only later did it become known that it was a marketing ploy by the lingerie company.

One of my favorite things about Ra'anana is that I find the religious community -- at least in my neighbourhood -- to be very tolerant and the collective approach to observance is "live and let live". I surely did not experience that in Toronto and I am not sure if it exists in other parts of Israel, but religious tolerance (by religious people) seems to be alive and well on the east side of Ra'anana. And that is why I was originally baffled by the graffiti.

Fortunately I have friends who are also detail observant And one of them took it upon herself to call the corporate offices of the company and ask about the posters. Here's what one of the two co-owners of the company, Yafit, told her:

"We had to do this because we knew the posters would be ruined anyway by the religious community in Ra'anana." And if that wasn't presumptuous and insulting enough, she added that if, in turn, secular people thought that religious Ra'anana-ites did this, and it bothered us, then we (religious people) obviously felt guilty.

What the heck is she talking about?

What exactly was I supposed to feel guilty about?

I can't even follow her warped logic. If I didn't damage the posters then I wouldn't feel one iota of guilt.

And more important, why would someone willingly start a smear campaign in Ra'anana -- a city where secular and religious citizens seem to co-exist peacefully most of the time. If I was going to incite a smear campaign against a group of people in the community, then I would probably be more careful to cover my steps. And if perchance I was confronted about my tactics, I would probably think twice before verbally attacking the inquirer.

Co-owner Yafit also showed her complete lack of understanding of most religious people living in Ra'anana. This isn't Mea Shearim or Betar Illit. Apparently she hasn't been to one of the city pools on a Friday afternoon and heaven knows she hasn't actually spoken to any of us or she would have know exactly how ill-informed her campaign logic was.

Speaking on behalf of many of the religious people in Ra'anana: We are modern orthodox Jews. And what that means, in the most general of terms, is that while we observe Shabbat and keep the mitzvot to the best of our ability, we are educated and worldly. We travel. We work. We read.

My synagogue alone is populated with lawyers, doctors, PhD's, professors, business people, and ivy-league college graduates. My friends are ex-partners in big city law firms, math professors, architects, high-tech wizards, bankers and the likes. We are as comfortable in meetings in New York and London as we are in our synagogue. No one that I know is going to go out and buy a can of spray paint to cover up some babe in her underwear on a poster.

And as immigrants from Western countries, we are proponents of free speech. Just because we don't walk around in our bathing suits and underwear doesn't mean that we can't hack it when other people do. If we wanted to live in a closed society, we never would have chosen Ra'anana to begin with.

And finally, any Jew who thinks that inciting anger and hatred between Jews is a good thing is, in my mind, the lowest of low. Well, maybe not the lowest. I put child abusers on that level, but I am willing to allow Jews who encourage hate between Jews to have the next rung up on my decency ladder.

I am not the first to say this and I won't be the last. The worst enemy of the Jews is other Jews. And Yafit, my friend, you have just proved the point better than I ever could. Willfully concocting a plan that could be misconstrued by secular Jews to make them dislike religious Jews more than some of them already do, is truly pathetic. I wish your new lingerie store everything that it deserves.

(late addition note: someone contacted me this morning to say that while we are mostly modern orthodox, some of us have children who have surpassed their parents' observance and as a result, are uncomfortable with such ads. I don't think that means that they would go out and spray paint them but these people deserve acknowledgment as well. Ra'anana is a diverse community that should celebrate its diversity rather than working to harm it.)

Back to How I Got Here -- Part 3

The week in Netanya was a real eye opener. Dave, Chaim's friend, came home from his business trip. That actually cramped our style a bit because, after all, it was his house and I felt more self-conscious with him there.

But I had no idea how self-conscious I had yet to feel. A day after Dave arrived, so did his Russian girlfriend who, for these purposes, I will call Bratslava (in English that translates to Bitchella). She was a hot blonde babe -- with a four-year old son. She had left her abusive Russian husband (or so she and/or Dave reported) and had moved in with nice (much wealthier, Canadian) Dave.

She couldn't have made less effort to befriend us if she was in a deep coma. Actually, I think that people in deep comas are capable of responding to some stimuli -- she was not. At least not to anyone who wasn't male, available, drooling at her feet, and heavy walletted.

Let's suffice it to say, we* did not hit it off. The only time she even acknowledged my presence was the day she crawled out of bed around noon and noticed that I had fed her son breakfast and lunch. You would think that that would have broken the ice. It didn't. And then, later that evening when she and Dave asked us if we wanted to go out with them, we naively asked who could we get to stay with the kids. Yet again, she looked at me like I was a really offensive, irritating alien. You will luuuuuv the answer.

David (rather sheepishly) told us that they don't get babysitters; they just left the 4-year-old at home alone when they went out.

I don't think I have to tell you how that ended. They went out. We stayed home.

The next few days were more of the same, and I was counting down the days until we could leave outer Netanya and go to some place with people I could "get".

Finally, after a week of "fun" we packed up our new rental car and drove down the highway about 20 minutes to Ra'anana, where we spent the next three weeks.



NOTE: (*WE, in this case was me and Bratslava... Chaim probably thought she was a hot babe too. It's a man thing. Of course, recreation and procreation bring out different feelings even in men.... I think.)