Day of Judgement for the World

Tomorrow heralds the onset of the two day holiday of Rosh ha Shana - Jewish New Year. The term is misleading as there are actually four new years in the Jewish calendar:

The first of the Jewish month of Tishrei (beginning tomorrow sunset) is the new year for the seasons and the civil calendar. It's the one where we listen to the shofar(ram's horn blasted in a series of long and short sounds) dip apples in honey, eat honey cake and all things sugary to ensure our year will be sweet, eat the head rather than the tail of the fish and bless on beetroot and pumpkin, and fruits like pomegranates and dates. We buy gifts for family members, but these mainly consist of kitchen implements (although this could just be the family I'm embedded in), such as expensive soup pans and boxed cutlery sets, so they don't count as real presents if you ask me. But the kitchen gets well-stocked, so, like, yay. I guess.

The fifteenth of Shevat, or Tu B'Shevat, (around February time) is new year for the trees. This means munching on basket platters full of dried fruit and nuts. Good for the digestive system, unless one goes too far.

The first of Nissan (March or April time) corresponds to the redemption from Egypt and the birth of the nation (rather than the state) of Israel. The Torah’s command that "this month is for you the beginning of the months, it shall be the first month of the year to you." This is honoured now by donating money to the poor in remembrance of the time flour was collected for them in days of yore, but I only learned this just now whilst doing in-depth research for this posting (I opened a book). I think I'm so busy cleaning for Pesach by then that I never noticed - Passover falls two weeks later, on the fifteenth of the month. All Jewish holidays fall on full moon with the exception of Rosh ha Shana, which falls on new moon, as every Jewish month begins with a slither of new moon grinning in a dark sky.

And the first of Elul (late August or September)is new year for the tithing of the cattle, which I don't think has any bearing on those who don't own a herd or two, and without a temple, even those who do have probably found a way around it that involves paying money to Arabs instead.

But Rosh ha Shana is a particularly special time. In my class tonight with the great Rabbi I learn with, we talked of the world being created by din , law. My Rabbi and teacher is incredibly clever and hence, at times, unfathomably obscure, so I'll do my best to summarise what he said in layperson's terms, for my sake as much as yours.

Basically, the Jewish people have a non-bridgeable gap between them and G-d that we do our best to narrow without conclusive success. On Rosh ha Shana, the day the entire world's fortunes for the coming year are judged, man cries to G-d using the shofar and the crying, like the tears of the angels in Abraham's near sacrifice of his son, brings out the hesed or kindness of G-d instead (hence the sheep that appeared in the thicket). Because of this outpouring of kindness, G-d's true essence, the din, becomes hidden, and thus further away from us than ever. So we're faced with the seeming paradox that by trying to get closer to G-d, by crying out to him on this day of judgement in our attempt and yearning to see Him in His truest essence, we actually cause Him to conceal Himself all the more.




This may be a confusing thing, but apparently it's not a bad thing. I bet if my Rabbi read this blog he'd yell, in his Lakeside accent: "NO! NO, No, no! That's NOT what I said!" but that's what I think he said, and so I won't show him this if you don't.

The point I liked best was that our way of connecting to G-d is through intellect, as although G-d has no attributes whatsoever that we can define or comprehend, the world was created through mental acts and thus there is a concept of a consciousness of some kind, even though I'm probably stitching myself up calling it that. What I recall of tonight's lecture, although I'll have to play it back on my likkle machine to make sure, was that the way man connects to G-d is through his intellect, and the Torah is THE way he can connect with the absolute yet indefineable consciousness of G-d.

The reason I love this is that I studied philosophy, and the philosophers of the last four hundred years weren't theologians, which means they denied, or at least questioned extremely critically, the existence of G-d. What led me to this land and this religion was my own searching, and that searching meant starting with nothing. I had no beliefs when I left university and England, not even in G-d, as philosophy annihilated everything that had ever been implanted and I was left completely scraped out from the inside. Then, in India, of all places, little by little I figured out what was and what wasn't. I don't consider the things I learned subjective: I consider them truths that are there to be discovered by all, but in order to discover them, you have to be prepared to give up everything and trust that the outcome of your searchings is, actually, the truth flashing in your face and not the result of too much LSD. The only way I could come close to what I was searching for was to come to this spot, where I could connect with the universal consciousness through my intellect - the same intellect that philosophy claims must, necessarily, refute the existence of any superior sentient being.

Which, in a nutshell, means I'm meant to be here. And I mean here, where I am, not here, where I live, although that must be part of it as well, I suppose.

So on this day, when we pray and cry to G-d that He close the gap between Him and us; that He bestow His judgement on the world with mercy and kindness (or we'll all be doomed, doomed! Ah ha ha!) what we're doing is entering into a wonderful paradox. It's the biggest game of hide and seek, ever. And like all worthy philosophers, I can't be completely satisfied nor feel absolutely alive unless what it is I face when I look inside myself at the close of this year, and what I find at the very crux of my search, is one Almighty paradox.

Shana Tova.

How to Live Life Properly.

Last night I hitched a ride home with a Palestinian from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

(I told my Swedish friend that today and her eyes nearly popped out of her head. ‘Are you Cray-See?’ She yelled at me. She can’t say zed sounds. She thought I was standing by the side of the 443 with my thumb out and I just jumped into the first truck that stopped. I let her think that, of course, for a while, just to amuse myself.)

We chatted enthusiastically all the way home and it was so, so interesting – I insisted my new friend come into my house for a drink but someone in Ramallah was waiting. Shame.

This Palestinian friend of mine is very, very cool. She has a shaved head, a beautiful face and the sharpest of brains. She’s just come back from a conference in Sweden where four delegates from Palestine (her, two other women and a man), four from Israel (four men, dammit!) and four Swedes have been agreeing to terms that will bring something in the way of money or policy – can’t remember what exactly – to Palestine. She has a degree in marketing, spent six months in Spain becoming fluent in Spanish and is learning for the GMAT in order to study a Masters either in the US or Spain so she can do something great (come on brain – why can you never recall the details of these things) for Palestinian women. She’s only 24. She drives a brand new zoomer of a car like a dude, smokes the same brand of fags I don’t smoke and she’s seriously cool and inspiring. I want to know her and the other lucid, bright Palestinian girl in my class for the rest of my days. Teaching GMAT is great! I meet such interesting people who are about to embark on such boring MBAs. But I don’t care – I’m delighted to meet them.

In the office is a copy of ‘Life’s Little Instruction Book’. It’s ironic that books about creating a better life are always lying around in offices, but there’s some crucial advice in there for a more sublime existence, one of my favourites being:

495. Never buy a beige car.

Others worth mentioning are:

6. Have a firm handshake.
69. Whistle.
111. Never use profanity. (Whoops - shit.)
198. Feed a stranger’s expired parking meter.
216. Do it right the first time.
225. Never tell anyone they look tired or depressed.
226. When someone hugs you, be the first to let go.
246. Wave at children on school buses.
283. Never use a toothpick in public.
509. Marry only for love.





So I decided to start each blog page with a suggestion of my own.

Today we begin with:

#1. Draw up a list of your priorities.

In Israel, this is the time of year for changing diaries. This means all the snatches of thought and random ideas scribbled hastily in last year’s diary pages whilst sitting in traffic lights or on buses need to be read, thought about again and dealt with before getting mercilessly binned.

On the inner lining of last year’s hardcover, I found a(nother) list of priorities:
1. Finish book. (Yay! Tick)
2. Get job and money. (Working on the job thing – interview tomorrow in fact - money still an elusive substance)
3. Be happy and fulfilled. (This is obviously a lifelong project rather than a yearly one)

Although they were pretty monumental tasks I set myself, I’m still impressed that there were only three of them - I demand so much less of myself these days. The lists I used to write at the beginning of January every Gregorian year went into double pages. Every year since I was seventeen I wrote almost identical lists:

1. Take your driving test. Really this time. (Still took me ten lists, thus ten years to get around to it - the Tube was so easy! But when I did I had a handful of lessons and passed first time, so HAH.)
2. Write your story. You have to do this before you die. You could die at any moment.
3. Leave no continent unexplored.
4. Try every mind-bending substance known to man to see if any answers reveal themselves, and if not, have fun searching.
5. Party hard.
6. Solve world poverty and bring equality to all nations, races, sexes and creeds.
7. Destroy Babylon and all its deceitful practices.
8. Save the elephants.
(Etc etc ad impossiblum)

I can pick up any one of the diary/notebooks I've had since I was a young adult and the same kind of stupid bloody lists are written in there, things like:

I need:
a desk by a window
a room with a view - any kind of room, actually, would do
the computer moved or the husband moved away from it (pre-laptop days, when couldn't get near the effing machine)
some peace and quiet to gather my thoughts (HAH!)
some sun
an early night (fat chance)
a holiday (mmm – still sounds good)

That was followed by terse statements such as:

"I want to write so badly it aches. I think the latent euphoria is a burning drive to get started that never materialises. But, of course, my time is squandered on menial domesticity, which would be fine if I had three hours to myself every day..."

Well, I’ve got that - until tomorrow anyway. So things are definitely on the up.





My priorities are less clear these days. Priority Numbers One through Four are the children, no doubt about it, but so many other priorities, ones that existed before they did, have to be suffocated in order to keep them up there at the top. Am I the only one that wonders whether this is the still the right course of action? Twelve wonderful, enriching years of running around after them, changing their nappies, mopping hot brows all night, dealing with screaming fits in supermarkets and arguments in hot cars, clearing up their mess, ferrying them about makes me wonder if now might not be the time that the big ones learn the merits of a bus pass and the small ones what tzaharon is like. (Tzaharon is ‘afternoon club’ at school, where someone else ‘supervises’ them from 1.30 until 4pm leaving Mummy to have more time to tick things off in her lists of priorities. Or work like a slave, and let’s face it, that’s usually the reason kids get stuck in there.)

Whatever. I love those bairns and I'm here with the thermometer and the wet flannel in hand, but I think it's time for other stuff to rise up that there list and have their day as well.

So I now think short and long term goals are a better method for success.

Short term goals:
1) Make money from writing. Enough to carry on doing it, anyway.
2) Go to Ramallah. (Still slightly dubious about this one, but quite excited at the prospect too)
3) Make it to the end of the week without a headache.


Long term goals:
1) Have a book on the shelf with my name in the spine.
2) Have two books on the shelf with my name on the spine.
3) Learn the whole of the Torah, the Talmud, Hebrew, and philosophy throughout the ages. By teatime.
4) Make it to the end of the year without a headache.
5) Be happy and fulfilled.

Despite not much on any of my lists being accomplished in the last twenty odd years, have you any idea how happy I am that it doesn’t say ‘Take your driving test?’

Small mercies. Small mercies. That’s all I ask for.

And the wall fell down. (Wall street, Texas, Jericho...what next?)

YAY!

I am not alone in this world. Thanks Karen for being the first to comment on this 'ere blog, and seeing as she, Dad and Hannah are in hurricane-torn Texas, her comment is worthy of being read. What I can't manage to do despite my fiddling is have the comment text actually appear ON the page, rather than in a window that pops up when you click the purplish word comment. Someone needs to speak to the Blogger people. That's what I loved about the late great Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - when a company, eg Amazon, didn't have what he was looking for, he noticed, to his frustration, that they had no system of recording what it was customers were looking for that Amazon didn't stock, so he contacted them and told them what shmucks they were being and they sorted it out (apparently).

It's as much about the gaps and the spaces - what doesn't exist that should exist in our technological world - as what is actually there already. Ahh, the spaces between the lines. Don't get me started on that road - I have work to do this morning.

So although you could just click on Karen's comment (it's the one after 'Over-efficiency') I've decided to cut and paste it here, because this is what they've had to deal with post-hurricane. (Natan used to called hurricanes 'hurrycakes', which I love but it takes the ferocity out of them somewhat.)

"I love hearing about your sweet teeth and am so pleased to see you're talking to people this way - and having a cup of tea while doing so. I'm up late after Guy has gone to sleep after a week of post-hurricane strangeness without power - 7 days total. We sat outside, talked, smoked and drank wine, cooked what we had on the grill and listened to music from the xm radio plugged into our neighbor's outdoor electric source - she had power the day after the storm and it took us 7 days to get ours. Thank god we have a gas stove and water heater! Most of the city still has no power. I sat still more than I have in years. All is in disarray in the area. Piles of debris on every curb and trees down into the middle of houses and across streets. The day after the storm - a week ago today - neighbors were out with chainsaws and rakes and cutters and ladders trying to help each other clear the streets and houses of downed trees. I loved the way we all helped each other and met neighbors we've seen come and go for years, but have never had a conversation with. Today when we finally woke up with power, it was a day of cleaning. Guy and Hannah's boyfriend, Will, in the yard bagging up all the debris on the curb for the trash men and me and Hannah in the house. She put everything back into the refrigerator, which had been off for a week and clean and empty for 6 days - organized all. I cleaned every floor. I've never been so happy to vacuum and mop. All that is done and laundry's being done - all was damp and debris had been tracked in the house. I swept constantly, but it wasn't really so you could walk without getting your feet dirty. Now all is going to get back to normal - we hope. Tomorrow dusting and work. I haven't worked in 8 days - no internet and no power made me quite different - almost lethargic - and content to sleep late and sit out on the deck with coffee and talk. After 3 days we began to get newspapers again and we could see the damage and really know how bad it is. And all this coupled with the financial crisis we're having in this country has made it almost feel like all our structures and things we count on are breaking down. Because they are. Very strange times. I think I should go to bed soon. Getting the last load out of the dryer and heading to the shower. Talk to me."

A very scary Parashat Ha Shavua (Ki Tavo) this week - full of portentious, harrowing, ominous threats that if the Jewish People don't follow G-d's way...Oy va voy. Now I know why Irat Shamaim (fear of heaven) is called fear, rather than awe, and why Orthodox Jews are known as Haredim, Scared Ones. All my hairs stood on end. Then I started reading Joshua and just before the fall of Jericho, one line (9) made me feel much so better about life in general:

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and have courage; don't be afraid and don't be dismayed - G-d is with you wherever you go.

That's my translation, anyway. All those thous and thys ruin it for me and I have to say, it would sound less like I've turned into an evangelical preacher if I quoted it in Hebrew. I'm going to memorise this and recite it to myself when Israel rises up like a beast to consume me.


The title of the Sacred Elephants post was going to be 'Entrapment'. I don't mean to moan, but it's hard enough being a free, eternal, infinite, limitless soul confined to a finite, corporeal, temporally restricted little vehicle called a body, but there are entrapments, lovely as they are, called children, marriage, mortgages, businesses, three-year contracts with Orange etc etc. When the alarm woke me up this morning, I was a completely silver, muscley, male (I suppose) and filled with the most enormous power and, with my fist out a la Superman, I was flying at an incredible speed down this long tunnel. What force I had in me! How fast I was zooming! Wow! No idea where it was I was flying, but the feeling of flying itself...so hugely empowering!

Now I have to write for work. I read this on DouglasAdams.com just now - encouragement for writers in a rather discouraging tone, just to keep us fused to reality:

How should prospective writers go about becoming an author?

First of all, realise that it's very hard, and that writing is a gruelling and lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had better really, really, really want to do it. Next you have to write something. Unless you are committed to novel writing exclusively, I suggest that you start out writing for radio. It's still a relatively easy medium to get into because it pays so badly. But it is a great medium for writers because it relies so much on the imagination. You will learn a tremendous amount from it, and maybe get some useful exposure.
What qualities are needed by an author?
A determination to keep at it.


That's me. Keeping at it. Badly paid. Hoping for a break. Not interested in radio. Having courage. At least I'm not dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane.

Dad, Karen and Hannah, my thoughts and love are with you.

Sacred Elephants

I love a man called Luis Arranz. He doesn't know me and probably never will but this man, this weekend, has captured my heart and if things were different, I'd be packing my bags and on my way to stand and fight beside him.

I shall explain.

Some time over the summer I had a no-way-near-deep-nor-extensive-nor-long-enough email 'conversation' with my friend who will be known henceforth as Sarah about reincarnation. Sarah claims, and I have to quote her here because she's an eloquent one, oh yes:

I group this idea together with the reincarnation idea: they lend an interesting twist to hindsight. If we view the past with divine providence in mind, we can be more comfortable with our track record. If we think of the experiences that branched out of our choices as 'meant to be,' then we are more likely to forage them for meaning and lessons, to try and understand the schema that motivated those choices, and to gain insight and fortitude in our attempt to move forward. But I think that looking ahead at future decisions with that kind of helplessness is irresponsibly fatalistic.

I happen to want there to be such a thing as reincarnation because one life, wonderful and complicated as it is, is just not enough. Those of you who know me know that I do my best to cram in as much as I can and, please G-d, I have a long way to go yet, but in parallel universes, I'm the same age I am now and I am:

1) A doctor and surgeon working for The Red Cross in refugee camps, or on disputed borders (I'm still aiming for this in the back of my mind)

2) An intrepid explorer, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes; or at least an anthropologist off studying forgotten tribes, or maybe a zoologist tagging elephants

3) An entrepreneurial executive career woman with a mega-successful company that is very PC and helps save the world (rather than being a boring, pointless money-making one), because there is this business-head side of me I've never really explored and that's as much of an exploration as any other

4) Working for The EU in Chad with this man, Luis Arranz.

There are plenty of others but the list is rather long and I figure I need to get to the point at some stage.

I poached (weighty word) a National Geographic magazine from work this week because it featured the plight of my favourite creatures on earth, who are now, chokingly, an endangered species. I have loved elephants with a deep empathy (shush Harry- no jokes about ears or weight, thank you) since I was a little girl; Dad used to buy me silver pendants with elephants on them, I bought books about them, collected effigies of them and my favourite wildlife programs featured those most intelligent and mystical of creatures. Mum, sis and I visited elephant sancturies in Nepal and rode on one together (Mum will tell you the hilarious story sometime) and if I had thought about my life just a little bit more carefully when I was a crazed youth, I'd be doing what Luis is doing.

This guy I now love, Luis Arranz, works for the EU, running the Zakouma conservation project, a national-park-sized refuge in Chad that gives some of the last surviving African elephants armed protection against poachers. The international ivory trade was only made illegal in 1989, which is so disgustingly recent, but ivory is still, weirdly, very much in demand. (Who, who in their right minds would want it, knowing what's involved??) The article brought tears to my eyes - pictures of the carcasses of twenty elephants slaughtered in one attack; a male bull with his face cut off in another; the knowledge that their numbers in the Central African region have declined from 300,000 in the early 1970s to around only 10,000 today.

"It is a sad fact," writes J. Michael Fay, "that the vast majority of elephants in southeastern Chad don't die of old age. They die at the hand of man. Yet when I see the Zakouma elephant, all I see is joy. No rage or thirst for revenge - just a desire to protect their young."

How can they not hate us? Why don't they willfully attack us or fear us with a contemptuous, vicious loathing?





(Photo by Susanne Geigerich, www.fotocommunity.de)


Of course, I read the article and that was it. What am I doing with my life? I should be there with my man Luis, an AK-47 slung over my shoulder, riding my hoss into the war against the poachers, fearless, defiant, knowing six of Zakouma's guards have been shot by them in the last year. But a survey in 1985 of the range of heffalumps in the northern part of the Central African Republic showed a sickening ratio of live ones (4,308) to carcasses (7,861)...

Hmm. Apart from the obviously romantic notion of zipping off to Africa (never been to Africa!) is the idea that in this life, we have a chance, maybe even a duty, to do something worthwhile and meaningful. Saving the elephant, to me, is that thing. I can weight that up with wife-iness and motherhood, my own efforts to reinforce the numbers of Am Israel, of making Aliyah, of whatever else I may be achieving (and if there is something else, I can't pinpoint it right now) but I put the magazine down and sighed, and wondered if it was enough to let other people do these seriously important things and whether I could continue to feel satisfied merely loving them from afar.

I know I have a family and all and instead I have to hand the principles of my life over to people like Luis, but it does make you wonder.




(Mario Blaimauer, fotocommunity)


I'm leaving you with an excerpt from Sacred Elephant by Heathcote Williams, a book I've poured over since I was given it (by Tim, I just discovered!) in 1990. This is not for you to consider the elephant, because the elephant is my own particular love; but to consider the thing that means something to you in your life, and whether you can take any action that would really make a difference to both your sense of worth, and to our likkle planet.

"The elephant can walk on the tips of its toes
Along mountain paths that are near-vertical.
It can move in silence without leaving a trace,
And is unembarrassed by its bulk...

The trunk through which it breathes,
The nose and upper lip,
The ringed probiscis,
With sixty thousand muscles
Has nothing to do with baggage...
With it an elephant can remove a thorn
Or pick up a pin,
Uncork a bottle,
Pull up a tree by its roots,
Detect trip-wires and traps,
Doodle in the sand,
Dowse for water underground,
Walk along riverbeds,
Swim across inland oceans,
And sense alien presences many miles away...

...A captive elephant will perform the same last rites
Upon itself.
And from a shared aquatic past
The elephant inherits the one quality
That Homo sapiens has always arrogantly assumed
Distinguishes him from the brute beast -
An elephant in distress
Will weep salt tears.

It is said that when an elephant is in trouble
Even a frog will kick it.
One small, final indignity,
The fate of all minorities,
Is for the elephant to be the butt in a rash
Of seemingly innocent
Archly disparaging jokes...
'How many elephants can you get in a...?'
The answer could soon be none."

Joy to my nishema (soul)

I thought about having some kind of likkle sign at the beginning of those emails where I go off philosophizing so that those of you who aren't hugely enraptured by Jewish philosophy (or any kind for that matter) can yawn contentedly, click the little x, close the page and, like they sang in the kid's program Why don't you, 'Go off and do something less boring instead.' (As kids, Sean and I spent hours musing over the irony of a TV program that began with the song 'sitting at home watching TV, turn it off no good to me, why don't you go off and...', that taught kids, via a program on TV, to not watch TV because there were all these other fun things to do instead and if you just watch a bit more, and next week, we'll show you just what you could be doing if you weren't watching this...)

So my sign will be as follows:




That lovely shell means philosophy is about to meet religion. Leave now: this is your chance. I won't be offended. I know you care about me and I do about you but there's a limit to every friendship. Off you pop. G'night, then.


(Right. Now we've got rid of that lot, we can begin.)

I had a good day, as days go round these parts. It's all relative anyway and for a day to achieve a status of 'good' requires far fewer criteria than it once did, but I had snippets of real joy warming my nishema and for an hour and a half this morning and an hour this evening, I felt home maybe, maybe, wasn't so far away after all.

I have an amazing Rabbi teaching me now, and although his class was the second of the two today, I'm starting there. Now, I have vast problems not only with my level of Hebrew but also with his pronunciation of Hebrew which means in classes one and two I was lost because we're working on Abarbanel's fifteenth century (non-translated) text all in a high level of Hebrew which in itself is challenging, never mind the concepts he's talking about. I wasn't happily, drifting-off lost - I was very very frustratingly lost because riveting stuff was being chewed over and it orbited my head like a celestial body, but today - TODAY - I loved every second. This has to do with the atmosphere in the class (less frosty), the fact I've been working on understanding the subject matter before I go in, and the very quintessence of the subject matter itself. It's heavenly talking about heaven, and cosmic to consider the sun, moon and stars and whether the world was made from this substance or that or if not, from what, then? And who said what about it and who refuted who, and when what was made, in what order, and how?

To take history not as points of events, not to divide the past into blocks of war or revolution or plagues and fires or chronological batches of hundreds of years, but to map it out from one brilliant thinker to another incredible consciousness - from Plato to Aquinas to Rav Soloveitchik; to think of the Middle Ages as Rambam's time, then Ramban, and jump through history using Newton and Einstein and marvel at how the thinking changed as each new world-changing idea or scientific concept came to blow away previous conceptions in the understanding of people and our relationship to the world is to map out the journey of consciousness and intellect itself in its own historical, scientific, metaphysical, theological evolution!

Ach. Breathe. Emma, G-d is good to you. Wipe that tear away. Breathe.

I wanted to go into it here, what I learned. But the phone is ringing. And anyway, I'm trying to breathe because my neck is constantly tense, there's a knot in my gut and I really don't breathe any more.

Really. I'm grateful. For everything.

Over-efficiency

That was actually a really nice cigarette. Haven’t smoked since, though. Revolting habit.

Today and yesterday, the heat returned. Thirty degrees at eight-thirty in the morning; thirty-five or six (or so the thermometer in my car claims) by the time I walk into a wall of running, shouting, ball-kicking, hyperactive children fleeing school at 1.30pm. I gather my lambs and shepherd them towards the car whilst skillfully avoiding the pitfalls of the pizza parlour and the crap falafel across the road, the wine shop that runs a nifty sideline in ice-creams, penny sweets and their personal favourites: gobstoppers, and the hot-chocolate dispensing machine that combines a watery brown cocoa-reminiscent liquid with ten spoons of sugar and is available right next to Tamar's classroom. They wail, they request, they plead but I am firm. No way Joses. Just to arrive at the car without a sugar rush involved is a relief. Phew. And trust me, we don’t always succeed.

Modern English kids are oblivious to the unbounding joy we had of stuffing our little mouths with sugar in all its various boiled, coloured, sherberted multi-shaped and layered, twisted, bon-bonned and undoubtedly poisonous forms. I say ‘we’ but our Dad was anti-sugar long before the rest of the world even knew it was in everything, so sis and I relied on pocket-money days, packs of sweets from Aunty Ann and Grandma’s all-too-soon-ending ‘Season’s Greetings’ sized tin of Quality Street. My kids’ generation know of ‘only one’ and ‘only at weekends’ and at their birthday parties, when I stood holding out a tray of goodies, their friends would take one and look at me, clutching it, terrified, until I said – ‘it’s ok; take a few,’ and then their eyes would pop with forbidden greed and they’d need no further cadjoling. Mothers tut and shake their heads if a birthday party bestows trays of chocolates on the table, a mini-chocolate sellotaped onto the going home present of a book AND there was cake. ‘It’s too much; too much.’ No colourings or E numbers get a look in.

Dentists in England are free for children until the age of sixteen. I took all of my lambs for dental check-ups and eye tests before we left a year ago. Our beautiful, sweet Indian dentist poked their molars with her little pick axe thing, nodded that all was well, I signed the forms on the counter and I was out, feeling very pleased with my mothering skills thus far.

Maayan had a pain in her lower right molar two weeks ago and a trip to the dentist and 250 shekels (35 quid) later foretold tales of woe. She needed a crown, seven fillings (yes, seven, within a year – welcome, little children, to the sugar, colourings, preservatives and sheer volume of consumption of the average Israeli kid) and some weird slime dumped on to strengthen the whatever in her teeth. Five hunderd pounds worth of work, which is 4300 shekels, which takes far, far longer to earn than five hundred quid, let me tell you. It’s like a year’s salary or something.

My obvious thought were: are English dentists doing shoddy work because the NHS doesn’t pay them enough for kids, or are Israeli dentists milking us by over-efficently finding every possible pin-prick of a hole they don’t really need to fill in order to gather in the bucks?

Anyway, we went this morning and My-My is the proud owner of a metal tooth and enjoyed the weirdness of Numb Mouth for the first time. Her friend at school peered into her gob, said ‘Mazal Tov’ and passed her a sour stick to celebrate.

The others need the dentist too. So do I.

I’m not brave enough for this.

Oh, before I go and cry, I read Ecclesiastes (Chapter 3) today, which mentions the same kind of time thing as the Tao does:

'To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born and a time to die;
...A time to weep and a time to laugh;
A TIME TO KEEP SILENT AND A TIME TO SPEAK'

(which is poignant as I wrote yesterday about not being able to promise anything except that I have no idea at all what is promise-able and what isn't. I'm confused. That I promise you).

I checked up who came first - King Solomon or Lao Tzu, because people came from all over the world to hear the wisdom of Solomon. But according to Wikipedia, the source of all absolute truth on the web if not on earth, Lao Tzu lived apporoximately 600 years BCE and scholars estimate the writing of Kohelet to be around 250 years BCE. Interesting. Did they know of each other's work, or is it just kind of obvious that there are times for things?

I just bought a book (Thanks, Dad, for posting the three of them to me) on the links between two of the earth's oldest cultures -Chinese and Jewish - as a present for my friend but I may allow myself to read just a bit of it to see if there's mention of this.

Anyway.

There is a time to go and do other stuff and this is it.

Messyheadedness

Mornings in Jerusalem are as humid as the belly of a thundercloud. The wading-through-the-inside-of-a-peach type humidity of summer has been temporarily usurped; nights have become cold and windy; cars are slapped with dew as we sleep, presenting us with grimy grey boxes to try to manoever into without getting slimed, come morning. Days may be hot enough for t-shirts and dehydrated tongues, but change is definitely in the air.

The cusp of the seasons is the external sign of change. When the weather mirrors the mood - like when it rains at a funeral - it’s known as ‘pathetic fallacy’ for some odd reason. I have the feeling that in the cogs of the Great Machine, a spanner lies in sinister wait. Couples, friends and friends of friends, are splitting up in all directions and there’s a general air of deep-seated conjugal confusion. Tension is rife in the most stable of relationships. We talk of this as we sit at weddings, oddly (not in front of the bride and groom, obviously.) What-we-really-want-in-life and how-much-that-includes-the-other are mirrors in the faces of long-term squeezes. Something beyond our control or understanding must be responsible, surely, we muse collectively. Surely?


Last week’s Parashat Ha Shavua, Ki-Tetzeh, talked of divorce and stoning the evil ones until the rotten core is removed from Our People; be they rebellious children or adulterous women. The judgment seems harsh; but in all life cycles, death and destruction are necessary pre-requisites for creation and re-creation; for purity and rebirth. The creation of the world, ex-nihilo or from some ethereal substance (depending on which camp your tent’s in) is brewing in the dark, dank, silent nothingness.

A new year is coming, and a new beginning.

The Tao Te Ching, in its eternal wisdom, states:

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

This is a time for a messy head.

Perhaps I should quote the Tao when asked if I can promise to feel x or y for the rest of my life. How can anyone promise anything when there are times for even promising and times for saying nothing? Like a substance abuser, I want to get through the next few days, the next week. Beyond that is only a fuzz of white noise.

Clarity lives in a land far, far away.

My prayers this week are for peace in the turbulence of my exhausted mind - which seems ludicrously unattainable right now and I blame reasons outside my jurisdiction for that because it suits me to not blame myself - and to stop smoking. Seeing as I only started smoking a month ago, smoke two a day and don’t even enjoy them half the time, that’s the one that seems more likely to be granted.

Hmm. I’ll just nip out the back door and have a cigarette to think about that.