Things that are weird in Israel #17: Bread, bread, everywhere.

This picture is sadly pretty typical for our neighbourhood.   There is bread on the ground, on sewer covers, almost literally everywhere.

Luckily, I knew about this before I came to Israel.  According to halacha, you’re not supposed to throw away useable bread – which is defined as anything bigger than a kezayis (olive-sized piece) worth.  (This may apply to other food as well.)

What this means, in practice, is that all over Israel, instead of throwing away bread, people leave it out (as seen here), or leave it in plastic bags, hanging from recycle bins, dumpsters, and other public spots while the contents get moldy, slimy, and disgusting.

Ostensibly, if it’s laid out like this, then people are feeding animals (presumably birds?) with it, rather than wasting it.  But the birds here are kind of picky, and judging from the mold on these rolls, not all that interested in everybody’s cast-off crusts.

I believe it’s a very good thing to think of bread as something special, as something holy, even.  We should put in time and effort to make it.  We should make it as healthy and delicious as possible, and savour it while we’re eating it.  Bread is absolutely one of the holy things.  Mahatma Gandhi said “There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

But you know what’s holier than bread?  Israel.

Duh.

Eating Out: How Kosher is that Restaurant?

There's a story some restaurants will tell you here if you ask if they're kosher.
It's a long, long story.  If you don't speak Hebrew, it can be daunting to understand the gist of what they're saying.
They'll take a long time telling it.
They'll pull out all kinds of documentation.
They'll explain some more.
They'll point all around the place.
They may even raise their voice, which is scary for a nice Canadian like me.

You may even buy food there, just to shut them up.  After all, they sure wave around a lot and pull out letters that look like they're from rabbis.

See, the problem is that Israelis know about kashrus.  I remember the first time I was shooed out of a non-kosher restaurant because I was obviously religious, but it has happened a few times since. 

Even coffee, which I might have no qualms about buying in a non-kosher place in Canada, whereas here, they might practically refuse to serve me, which I see as a kind of respect for my practice - even if it's different from their practice - and I like it very much, except the one time, very early on, I had to pretty much beg a server for coffee and then decided it wasn't worth it and left.

In Toronto, if I stuck my head into a typical restaurant and asked if it was kosher, they'd probably say something like...
"Ummm, I dunno..."
"We do have vegetarian items..."
"Let me check with the chef..."
"I think so..."

One of the ways that you can tell, outside of Israel, if a place is kosher is to look at the clientele.  If people with kippahs are eating there, it's a pretty good sign.  In Israel, that doesn't always fly.  A totally-kosher mehadrin place may be full of people who look completely non-religious, and there may just be a few kippahs in the crowd at that local non-kosher McDonald's branch.

The other thing about Israelis is that they know how to talk.  Think the Irish have the gift of the gab?  Well, they may, but Israelis are super-good at pretending it’s theirs.

Here, we've also learned early on that you don't ask if a place is kosher.  You ask if there's a certificate, the teudah.  The teudah means everything, almost always.

If you ask if it's kosher, they may say yes.
Ahhh.... but if you ask to see the teudah, that's when you get the long, long story…

Who Israel has instead of rock stars and supermodels (and why I’m glad)

Sure, supermodel Bar Refaeli captures her share of headlines here.  But you know who's a real celebrity in this country?

I'll tell you.

I was sitting down this afternoon in a little cafe in the mall, revving up my voice recorder, buffing up my pen & notepad, or whatever I do before an interview… when I noticed a woman standing outside the cafe, staring intently. 

After a second, she started waving - at the guy I had come to interview.  She waved timidly at first, shyly, and then a little more crazily when she saw that he'd spotted her there.  "Todah," she mouthed at him.  "Todah."  Thanks.

"He's like a rock star here," said the translator.

I nodded, numb, amazed.

Who was this instantly-recognizable mega-star that I had come to interview?

It was this guy:

What’s that you say?

Exactly!  Yeah, this guy.  (The one in the vest.  No idea who the guy in the white kippah could be.)

Yup, him.  Desmond Tutu’s buddy.

3 not-entirely-unpleasant mikveh surprises you’ll discover in Israel

If you're a religious woman, you know all about going to the mikveh.  Once a month or so, for much of your married life, it's just that - a fact of life.

Women who move to Israel sometimes expect the mikveh to be pretty much the same as what they’re used to.

And (pretty much), it is.  But in a few important ways, it's different.  Not necessarily worse, just different.  Since I’m still in Canada, a friend back in Kiryat Shmuel helped put together this list of three things that may surprise you when you go to the mikveh in Israel.

1.  Bring your own supplies.

Depending on where you are, mikvaot in North America can seem almost like a luxury spa

Things that are cool in Israel #7: Ads around the Jewish holidays

Spotted this trio of IKEA ads while shlepping into Haifa the other day. 

I was so charmed that I found myself wishing immediately that they were more of them. 

When was the last time you wished to be inundated with MORE advertising messages?  In Israel, it happens.

Here’s the first one (translation beneath):

Hebrew text:  סירים מעוצבים דיינו / sirim me’utzvim dayeinu
Translation:  “Designer pots, Dayeinu!”  (from the Haggadah song, Dayeinu)

This one is #2 (Like my kids, I don’t know which one of these I love more…)

Have you told your kids about shemittah?

You might know already that here in Israel, this is a shemittah year.

Shemittah is the 7th year of a 7-year cycle found in the Torah, and all year long, Torah-observant farmers aren't working their crops in the usual way.  Yet thanks to a few modern loopholes, many of us, even here, are just buying fruits and vegetables the normal way.

I've been studying shemittah for the last couple of months with a wonderful group of KShmu ladies, using a book called (surprisingly enough!) Shemitah, by Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Rimon.  (There are lots of ways to spell Shemittah!)

If you live in Israel, your kids may find out about shemittah in school if they’re old enough.  But for younger kids, there’s not really any way to find out what it’s all about (at least, not that I could find). 

When I lived outside of Israel, I knew nothing about it… let alone knowing enough to share some of the main ideas with my kids.  We read about it when we read the weekly parsha, and that was that.

The laws of modern shemittah observance can be complicated and daunting for adults, but it really does boil down to a few simple principles.  And my favourite thing to do once I’ve learned something, is to turn around and find a way to transform it into a kids’ book.

So I’ve taken some of what I’ve learned, from Rabbi Rimon’s book and other sources, and turned it into a short, sweet rhyming song. 

(think, "This is the way we wash our hands..." but with a few fun poetic twists and turns)

Here’s the result… a little book called Sharing Shmittah, a “learn-along” song for the whole family.

Excited, a little.

It looks like we may have found our own little teeny, weeny piece of the holy land, up north in Kiryat Shmuel, a wee suburb of Haifa.

We have signed the lease, I’m mailing the cheques today and then… it’s a done deal (I won’t rest easy until we receive a copy back with the landlord’s signature, but I sense that there isn’t a lot of competition for the apartment.  Kiryat Shmuel isn’t Toronto.)

This is just about the world's smallest apartment, way smaller than anywhere I’ve ever lived since having children.  Two bedrooms (which is called a “3-room” apartment here), a living/dining area, and a teeny tiny kitchen (more suitable for a bachelor than a family of four).  Teeny sunroom for hanging laundry (no room for a dryer, but for most of the year, laundry dries within hours of hanging it up). 

There’s one teeny tiny bathroom, but it has a tub, which is rare and nice, although my ulpan teacher warned me that even if you HAVE a tub, you won’t be able to afford to fill it regularly.  It’s a second-floor (which means third) walkup in an older building. 

Honestly, it’s hard to be excited, but I am anyway, a little bit. 

There is really almost nothing good about the apartment except the location is fantastic and it’s cheap.

Kiryat Shmuel is an all-religious suburb of Haifa, about half an hour away from the heart of the city via Metronit (“rapid-transit system” aka a long bendy bus).  We know several English-speaking families there.  I was tempted to write “already” but honestly, I think we’ve met them all by now.

I am excited about the neighbourhood partly because “all-religious” in Haifa means something very, very different from “all-religious” in a place like Yerushalayim.  Here, it means a spectrum more than a particular outfit or way of pulling up your stockings.  It means people who either keep Shabbos or are traditional enough to not mind living in a place where the streets are closed on Shabbos for other reasons.

It means there are a range of people in any given shul, from chareidim in black outfits (okay, not many of these) to regular datiyim in nice Shabbat clothes, to a guy in a T-shirt covered in tattoos who happens to have yahrzeit so he slipped on a kippah and here he is with his daughter in a tank top.

I like it.  When we were first coming to the merkaz klitah, I emailed one of the KShmu’ers for information about the neighbourhood, and the thing he said that struck me is, “our kids play with their kids.”  Everybody’s kids play together.

I like that.

So I’m excited… a little.

A mashal – a fish

Before they left for Israel a couple of weeks ago, my friend Rachel’s husband Ariel, a wonderful rabbi, mechanech (educator) and all-around mensch, spoke in our shul about “Top Ten Obstacles to Making Aliyah (and a response).”

I have the notes here and want to throw them away – but can’t until I share two things he said.

The first is a mashal, pretty much the way he gave it over:

“There was once a fish that lived in water.  He had all the food he needed, all the space to swim in, and was protected by a protective barrier.  His life was fine, consistent and easy.  But something was nagging at him.  He just didn’t feel at home, for he was living in an aquarium.  Sure, the ocean is more dangerous and presents greater challenges and hardships, and it’s very difficult leaving the bubble he is used to living in, which is the only home he knows.  But deep down inside, the fish knows that he was not meant to live in a tank.  He was meant for the open waters of the ocean.  The Jewish people were meant to live in Israel.  That is our true home.

The second thing I took away from the talk (among many, many wonderful things) was from the section on “obstacles” – objections and excuses people give about why they’re not making aliyah. 

There were ten of them that he listed, and this was, “#7:  It’s not my time.”  This is about frum (religious) people who say, “Hashem just doesn’t have a plan for me to go to Israel (right now…).”  And his response, well, one of his responses is, “would you say that ‘it’s not my time to keep Shabbat now?’”

In other words:

You may not be ready / willing / able to live in Israel, BUT that doesn’t mean it’s not part of Hashem’s plan.  Don’t write it off the “bucket list,” even if it’s out of your grasp right now.  Even if it’s waaaaay out of your grasp.  Even if you don’t think it will EVER be within your grasp. 

The mitzvah to live in the land of Israel is on the books, whether we can live it yet or not.  (To be fair, views on this mitzvah within the Torah world range from “it’s optional” to “it’s mandatory” and everything in between.) 

What we should never ever do is suggest, even for a second, or fool ourselves or anyone else into believing that Hashem doesn’t want us there. 

He does.

… All of which said, now that I have recorded this and shared it, I can advance the cause of packing / clearing off my desk by throwing away this piece of paper – so we can get over there and actually see these wonderful friends again in person!!!