Midnight Rider

It's 11:30 p.m. Tuesday night and I've had a hard day and still have a long night ahead of me, because my husband is leaving for the airport at 3:30 a.m. to make an 8:15 a.m. flight to Los Angeles.

He appears at the door to my office, where I am still slaving away at the keyboard, wild-eyed. "I can't find my Israeli passport!" he says in a panicky voice.

I figure he has misplaced it, a not uncommon phenomenon in our household. And so I search, the kids (who are still up because Abba is LEAVING) join in and we tear the house apart.

No passport. We look up the regulations online at the Nefesh b'Nefesh all-things-anyone-ever-wants-to-know-about-surviving-the-insanity-of-Israeli-red-tape website, and to our horror we see that even though we were immediately given our identity cards (teudat zehut) we had to actually APPLY for the Israeli passport, which my husband never did. It didn't occur to me that it was ever an issue, because I already had one and so did the kids, by virtue of the fact that I was already a citizen before we got here.

Now we are frantic. But he has his documents proving citizenship and date of immigration (teudat oleh and teudat zehut) and his American passport and we decide it will be okay, until Rabbi Tauber calls.

In almost 20 years Rabbi Avraham Tauber has never missed. He has an uncanny instinct and calls within minutes of any major crisis. This is no exception.

It is now after midnight and I quickly explain the problem. "You can't leave the country without an Israeli passport," he informs me. "Call the Border Police at the airport. They will deal with it."

So I call them, and they give me the number for the Interior Ministry (which deals with passports and other official documents). A nice lady answers the phone and I again explain the problem. Thank G-d she understands English as well as Hebrew, though I detect a faint Russian accent. Even better. She will understand immigrant issues, first hand, I think.

And I am right. The Israeli system has second-guessed its citizenry and this time we luck out and get someone nice. "Don't worry about a thing," she tells me, "just tell him to get here an hour earlier and bring two passport photos. We'll take it from there. The price will be double because it's on the spot (she considerately does not mention the fact that it is the middle of the night) but he will have his passport." I ask how he is supposed to get passport photos at this hour. "Oh, that's no problem,'" she says airily. "There are photo machines on the ground floor."

Boy, these folks think of everything.

So my husband prepares to leave, his friend (this is truly friendship) cuts his nap short and arrives earlier and after six false starts in which my husband returns for various items, they leave.

I don't get the rest of the story until he is boarding the plane.

"I arrived at the terminal and went directly to the photo machines," he tells me nonchalantly, "and they are both out of order." This sounds like a bad movie. "Then I go up to the Interior Ministry office anyway, because I figure I may as well. And that was a good thing, because they also have a Plan C, if Plans A and B don't work out."

Now I am curious. What is Plan C?

"This was the best deal of all," he tells me. "The man in the office there said not to worry, and just wrote me out a temporary document letting me leave and re-enter the country. AND IT WAS FREE, BECAUSE I DIDN'T GET A PASSPORT!!!"

This is probably the most streamlined bit of Israeli red tape that I have ever encountered.

Now I know the trick: all you have to do to get something done here in Israel is:
1. Panic.
2. Be sleepless.
3. Call the police and say it's an emergency.
4. Go to the office in the middle of the night.
5. PRAY.

If only the photo machines had been working………….

Cooked Goose for Thanksgiving in Arad

It's that time of year again………

It was October and I thought I would get a jump on the annual tussle to get a turkey in Arad.

Since this year we began to order our meat from Kfar Chabad with the rest of the (Lubavitcher) community – and here it is brought in by truck only once a month – I realized I had to tell our meat guy I needed a turkey, a WHOLE turkey, for November.

He was very understanding, because Eli Bardugo knows Americans. He knows about this weird holiday in which they eat turkeys and he was perfectly willing to order me one, even though they "don’t usually come that way." He even said it wouldn't be a problem, because he orders directly from the schlock house itself.

I got a call from him right on time letting me know that my turkey was going to be delivered early, with the rest of the meat order, but "don't worry because it is exactly as you ordered, at least 9 or 10 kilos." Wonderful! I was overjoyed.

And then falls the axe.

"There's just one small thing. They have to send it cut in half….it'll be split with the top divided from the bottom. But don't worry" he adds brightly, "it will be a whole turkey."

No. I knew it was too good to be true. I blow up immediately, in Hebrew and in English, and I refuse to accept the turkey. Half an hour's effort to convince me that this is okay, and that the pieces will fit together just fine, seamlessly in fact, is useless. I am still screaming.

The man with the turkey says they have to cut it, he's not sure why, says Bardugo apologetically, and this is what they call a whole turkey. I scream some more about mentally compromised individuals who cannot understand their own language and the definition of the very basic word, WHOLE.

Bardugo is at this point promising to call the turkey guy and call me back, which he does.

The turkey guy is now promising to SEW THE TURKEY BACK TOGETHER AGAIN WITH SPECIAL THREAD. "Don't worry, you'll never know the difference," Bardugo assures me. "They are very good at this, and it will be just like a new, whole turkey."

Now I am really screaming, in Hebrew and English, A LOT of English, about how I don't need a turkey jigsaw puzzle, how the turkey guy is not a seamstress and how I am NOT going to pay for a cut up turkey. Period.

Bardugo is rolling at this point. I am glad he has a sense of humor, because I am shrieking.

He finally gives me the cell phone number of the turkey guy, Shimmin, who he says is very nice so I shouldn't scream at him too much. But it is best if I talk directly to him so we can straighten this out.

I call.

"I don't see what the difference is," says this nice man Shimmin. "We'll sew it up. With special thread even. It's not as if it will be in pieces." I tell him I don't CARE if he doesn't see what the difference is, I SEE THE DIFFERENCE and since I am the one paying for it, what I think counts. "I am not buying this turkey," I say to him.

"Then I have no turkey for you," he shoots back. "We did all the shechting for this week already, and I did this specially." I inform him that I appreciate his special treatment and NOT his cutting up of my whole turkey. And I repeat that I will not pay for this turkey, I don't care if he won't send a turkey, that I have been able in the past to get whole turkeys from Tnuva glatt before we started buying from Lubavitch and so I know they exist, and when they have feathers on them they are also whole, as far as I know. They do not walk around in pieces.

"I do not see the difficulty here," I say to him. "Take the stupid turkey off the line and DO NOT CUT IT. It is just that simple. I am saving you work," I tell him. "What is the problem here??!!"

He finally agrees that he will do this for the next shechting but I should talk to Bardugo to set up when to get the turkey and find a way to get it here. Probably not next week, maybe the week after.

I call Bardugo back and update him. He is still laughing about my dedication to this turkey. But good-natured man that he is, he promises to find a way to bring my turkey to Arad from Kfar Chabad after it is wrested from the knife-wielding hands of Shimmin. Maybe not next week. Maybe the week after, and he knows we are cutting it close (no pun intended) because Thanksgiving is right around then. I say I don't care, we will celebrate Thanksgiving late this year, BUT I WANT A WHOLE TURKEY.

He reassures me that I will have a whole turkey.

I hope I do because if I don't Shimmin's goose is cooked.

Emergency Personnel Try to Contain the Chaos After a Kassam Rocket Attack in the Western Negev

This was the scene tonight in the western Negev town of Sderot, home to 23,000 souls -- some 5,000 fewer than we have in Arad. One of the infinite Kassam rockets that have been fired at Israel by Palestinian Authority terrorists in Gaza struck pay dirt this evening, scoring the first fatality since last year. A 35-year-old woman gave up her life when the rocket hit her car as she was standing next to it, near a bakery. She bled to death from stomach and chest wounds on the way to the hospital. A child's worst nightmare come true.

Preparing for Battle Again in the South Land

I have been hearing the planes zooming over my house all day today. I know they are from the nearby air base, the “secret” one near Tel Arad that everyone on the planet knows about.

Dust devils get kicked up by the helicopters as they lift off and touch down in the fields tucked into the hills just beyond the road to Beersheva, but today’s devils are further south, in Gaza.

As I sit at the computer with my fingers flying over the keys, I am wondering where those aircraft are going. Sderot is about two hours west of here, not as the crow flies. I wonder how far it is by plane. After a week of incessant Kassam rocket attacks on the western Negev, it is no surprise that planes are flying here in the south.

Israel Air Force missile strikes on terrorists in Gaza have begun and each side is upping the ante by the day. I have seen this all before.

I remember last May and June, when we often heard the boom of tank fire in the evenings outside our house. We would walk down to the wadi, three houses down, and scan the hills to see where it was coming from, noticing flashes on the ridge by the road that leads to the western face of Masada. “That’s the army practicing maneuvers,” Avi explained offhandedly, attempting to normalize what was clearly target practice for use in the near future in Gaza. We told the kids that new soldiers learn how to use their guns this way. No big deal, we said, turning away.

Yeah.

It was only a couple of weeks later that 19-year-old IDF Cpl. Gilad Shalit was grabbed in that cross-border raid near the Kerem Shalom crossing by Hamas terrorists from Gaza. The kid is still there, if he is alive at all. I don’t know whether to pray for his life, or his death. Are Hamas terrorists as evil, as cruel as Hizbullah?

Tonight a woman died after her car was hit by a Kassam while she was standing next to it in Sderot, near a bakery. Two other people were injured and 12 more were taken to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon because they suffered shock. I really think the shock victims should be considered as injured when we make the tallies in the new pieces we write. Trauma lasts a lifetime. My experience as a clinical social worker has taught me that.

We haven’t had a fatality from a Kassam attack since last November – and that one was in Sderot too, mostly because the town is less than a kilometer from the Gaza border. An inviting target.

Arad is too far to be physically affected by all this action. The most we have had were a couple of so-called “near misses” by a terrorist or two, both of whom were caught long before they got close enough to do anything. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t psychological consequences.

The kids in Arad are talking about terrorists again and my own are afraid to go into their rooms alone. They’re afraid to be anywhere in the house alone, in fact, and they cry at the prospect of being awake when my husband and I are too tired to stay up. I can still remember when they used to celebrate that possibility as an opportunity to create mayhem, screw up the kitchen in an attempt to bake chocolate cake and dance around the living room half the night. That was in Brooklyn.

Now they talk about nightmares they are having, of terrorists attacking, kidnappers coming, robbers breaking in and houses blowing up. And they don’t watch TV, they don’t hear the radio and when I work my news writing shifts, the door is closed and the kids are not in the room.

We have no TV. We don’t play the radio. They listen to CD’s, most of which are with Jewish music, and see videos of innocuous movies like “Shreck”. The most exciting series they have seen on the computer is “Smallville”, and even then, none of the scary or suggestive segments.

And yet they are terrified. I wonder what the kids in Sderot are like.

A Yishuv State of Mind

“Hello?”

“Hello. I have your daughter’s phone.”

“Oh no….”

Faint chuckle.

“Tell someone to be at the corner at 8:00 p.m.”

Sigh. “Okay. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

At 7:45 p.m., I still had no volunteers, so of course I trudged out the door into the cold, dark, windy night. It was perfect weather for a murder, a kidnap, a ransom note. No rain to make things messy; just a frigid, biting cold to make it mean.

I headed toward the corner. A car stopped next to me. “Shalom!!” Moshe was at his brightest, which meant I was in for an hour-long conversation, wind notwithstanding, about the benefits of “Intra”, a fancy nutritional supplement that he believes will even wash your dishes for you. The truth is, the stuff does beef up the immune system; my husband’s gout disappeared because of it. But the enthusiastic insistence of my happy-go-lucky neighbor that the entire world will be saved by this liquid was just too much to handle on a cold dark night.

“Moshe, I gotta go. I’m supposed to meet someone…”

“We’ll get you to drink it one of these days!” he threatened with a big smile. “There’s no escape!”

Cheerful thought. As I turned back toward the corner, I saw the car, headlights blazing, peeling a U-turn with tires screaming in protest. The car slammed to a stop. A horn honked impatiently.

I kicked up the trudging just a notch. As I reached the car, the passenger’s window rolled down. A tired, slightly irritated young man glared at me as I leaned down.

“Here,” he said, clearly resigned. A muscular arm stretched toward me, brandishing the family cell phone.

“Thanks,” I said apologetically. “Give Shloime my best and tell him thanks for bailing out my kid.”

He nodded, a small grin escaping the scowl. The window rolled up. I turned away.

My husband was just getting home when I walked in the door. “Which one this time?” he asked.

“Esty. Apparently she left it on Shoime’s bus this afternoon. They called earlier, but she forgot to go to the corner at 6:00 p.m. and it was the last run. They caught this guy leaving to go home and made him bring it.”

We looked at each other. My children now own the cell phone-forgetting record for the Egged Bus Cooperative, Arad division. And the Egged Arad bus drivers, together, own the cell phone-retrieving-and-delivering record probably for the entire country.

Arad -- it's small town living in a yishuv state of mind. Ya gotta love it.

Gandolf Worked Hard to Always Be With The Family

Gandolf was a glutton for attention and jealous that Sussi and the cats were allowed in the house and he was not. He did everything he could to try and find a way to get in. When the kids would go out to feed him and play with him, when Sinai and I would go out to be with him, he was always right behind us as we opened the glass doors to come back into the house. A few times he actually succeeded and there we were, with a two and a half year old donkey standing in our living room / dining room. It made us realize how very big he was.

Then one of us got the bright idea to pull the tress doors shut so we could have air and light, but not have to worry he would come through the screens. Well that was almost as smart. Gandolf finally solved the problem of not being included in the family gatherings INSIDE the house by trying to poke his head through the plastic tressim ... and broke enough of them in the process to be able to get his head in, like a window.

Sussi generally kept him company at these times. There are no words describe our reaction the day he did this, but suffice to say it was a memorable experience.