Aliyah Diary 6: Getting Comfortable

Here are the previous diary entries:

Part 1: Preparation for departure over here.
Part 2: First Few Days
Part 3: Moving In
Part 4: First Day of School
Part 5: Two Weeks In . . .

Cat Update

Where last we left our cat story, Sad-face, a neighborhood feral cat, was hissing at my own cats and we were chasing him away. Well, he’s been slowly coming back and is more polite. (Perhaps someone has been feeding him … .) I caught this picture of Sad-face lying down next to Wiesley, our cat:

If Sad-face could agree to sit down peacefully with Wiesley, surely so can the Palest… just kidding.

Hitchhiker

In the United States you don’t pick up hitchhikers. In the United States, you don’t pick up hitchhikers. (I meant to type that twice.)

In Israel, I picked up my first hitchhiker since moving here – it’s normal here with people seeking rides from bus stops quite regularly. He’s some guy at the entrance to my neighborhood and I drove him to a bus-stop on the outskirts of the city. He didn’t speak English and he said my Hebrew was good. No it wasn’t though if you’re getting a ride from someone, you say they speak well. (Not “speak good” – that’s not okay … it’s “speak well”).

We’re also having our first Shabbos guests, or as they call it around here, Shabbat guests. Excited about that – we’re settling in enough to have guests rather than, so far, being the guests at others’ houses. We’re not yet here a month – shout-out to my amazing wife. She is also my partner in making sure I don’t forget to do a cheshbon haNefesh. (Literally, an “accounting of the soul” – being aware of your flaws and correcting them.)

Hebrew

You know that scene in the Matrix where ‘Tank’ says that after a while, you stop seeing these green symbols falling down the screen and start to just see what they represent? That’s kind of how Hebrew is going for me. For example, here’s how my mind used to ‘see’ a cereal box with only Hebrew – my brain would focus on the wooden trowl collecting homespun mouse droppings:

No longer because having enough Hebrew around me and the word pops into my head first:

That says “bran flakes”. Funny, because those aren’t flakes whether derived from animal or plant.

The Oracle

Since I made a ‘Matrix’ reference, now for a story about the ‘Oracle’. A few months ago my wife and I made a “pilot trip” to visit the community we now live in. I wanted to meet with the Rav of the community and I was told he was speaking at the synagogue where I was and he was South African. This American guy gets up to speak in Hebrew and I think, okay, close enough. Maybe he’s not that South African.

Turns out he’s not the Rabbi … he’s just an analytical clinical psychologist who told me exactly what I needed to here. That is, what I needed to be here, I did hear from him. (See how that sentence saved my error in the previous sentence?)

He sized me up and made me comfortable with the move. It’s for my ears only, says Morpheous. The short version is that I want to “plow through” and do things 100% … that meant finding an authentically, no compromise, religious place to learn Torah and that’s what I did. While there’s a void for a few years of my recognition of movies, TV, and secular music while I was “all-in”, it never sat well with me to have as little as possible secular education, which was espoused where I went. “You’ll get used to it and see that it is not important” which is fine if you’re into living in poverty and calling that a gift from G-d. (The Rabbi did not look at my kindly when I said that was ridiculous.) On the other hand, if you find those into secular education, movies, and TV, such communities are compromising on the 100% commitment to Jewish thought and action.

I unhappily lived with the contradiction … until my son, only in middle school, was finding basic errors made by secular studies teachers and so began to surface a mini-crisis of faith. This wasn’t working for us anymore … we’re too out of the box … or, as I said to my daughter many times her individuality was causing problems, “I’m sorry I taught you to be so creative. Get back in the box.” A few minutes later … “You forgot already. Back in the box. Just fit in, please. Back in the box.”

(By the way, I still “gave up” TV and find it unwatchable. Constant commercials and brain drain – nerdy Youtube channels are the way to go. Also, I still give up 99% of modern secular music … music peaked in the 1970s and Taylor Swift is a sellout. I like movies though and quote them too much in this blog.)

Living with Chaos

How do you deal with the contradiction of “living in this world” and “living in the next” at the same time? It’s not easy. Do I stay in the United States and help maintain a community there, a community where I taught about the history of Jews moving in since shortly after the Civil War, or be in a place where Jews are really meant to be?

As a super-religious Jew, I couldn’t live in Israel. At least in the United States, it’s acceptable to work. So … there’s some compromise. If you read my blog articles from many years ago – I can’t read them – I don’t have the rigidity that I used to. Some of that, I suppose comes with age and maturity and less fear of chaos, thanks to the Oracle. (Get Smart, anyone? The TV show was better than the movie, in this case – the Naked Gun.)

We should be in Israel – that’s a clear prophecy in the Torah that we will return – and for me, millions of Jews here again is one of the greatest “proofs” that the Torah is true.

So for right now, my “spiritual journey” … and my Cheshbon haNefesh machine have led me to a new community in Israel full of over-educated people who take their Judaism very seriously too, even though religious standards are more lax than where I was when in yeshiva.

Hopefully, unlike my older blog articles, I’ll be able to read this one in ten years.

Food

We have these magical bananas which have been on our counter for almost two weeks and never get ripe:

Here’s Ben and Jerry’s ice cream:

This particular supermarket doesn’t sell ice cream – I think they sell only Ben and Jerry’s in spite because they’re “over the green line” where Ben and Jerry’s insisted their ice cream not be sold.

Remember those red circles telling you if your food has too much fat, sugar, or salt?

It works on me. I try to buy the healthy stuff … and look at this … since when are Nature Valley bars unhealthy? Surprise – the Israel brand next to it has no such food warning labels. Seems they make the product up to Israeli health standards. The Doritos here also have no health warnings – they’re not real Doritos. I refuse to believe it.

Other things you might find in a supermarket here that you don’t find in the United States:

Electricity

This is what my ceiling looks like after two+ hours of work:

The floors, walls, and ceilings are solid, poured concrete. My drill bit set? Useless. I bought “masonry” drill bits. Only slightly less useless … turns out that’s for “soft” masonry like bricks. For concrete you need an impact drill and impact bits … and the Hebrew word for “drill” and “drill bit” are spelled the same, though pronounced differently. That was fun.

Here I am, third set of drill bits and … it’s still not working. Wait … it is. It’s like peeling the banana that never ripens … tough as anything and takes 10 minutes to punch a hole. Slowly, slowly the hole gets deeper. They include mollies in light fixtures here … in America that’s overkill. It’s fine … it’ll stay. Here, I got the holes just deep enough to stick them in the ceiling and … yeah, that’s fine.

Those black rectangles are where I tried double-sided sticky pads. That worked until my wife walked in. <shrug>

Note also that they don’t use those screw-on caps around here. They use terminals with two ends and the wires are brown and blue. The ground wire is yellow and green. So far, I’ve seen that consistently.

There are a lot of little stores around here – including hardware stores – and in the same shopping area there are also large stores such as this Home Depot lookalike (and isn’t):

Transformers

Getting shocked by 120 V isn’t fun though you live. I’m not sure about 240 V though it’s more like 230 V according to my transformer. Israelis look at me like I’m crazy when I go into a store and look for a 1000 W transformer. “We don’t have that and it’d be hundreds of dollars – are you sure you need more than 200 W? It’s cheaper to buy new appliances.” Sigh. So another transformer is coming from Amazon in the US for $62 … for $1500 worth of appliances:

See that little puck in the lower left corner? That’s a wireless mesh thing – because unless you want to spend hours and hours drilling holes in your wall until your wife notices, you are not getting a good WiFi signal around here.

This is how I solved the problem:

Now the internet works on the basement.

I couldn’t maintain my schedule . . . bye Ulpan. 🙁

7am Wake-up
7:30am Synagogue
8:30am Ulpan begins (Hebrew language courses)
1pm Uplan ends
3:30pm Workday begins
12:00am Workday ends

I tend to plow through whatever I need to do and get it done. By the second week, it was just too much, I got sick, and spent two days recovering from exhaustion, thanked the teacher, and quit. I had such a schedule during law school . . . guess I’m not 23 anymore. 🙁

It is a shame not only because I’m not actively learning Hebrew right now – also because it was such a great group of people that I will miss while they spend six months together in a course where I didn’t last two weeks.

What I did attend was grueling – had to be “on” constantly and the neurons in my brain just aren’t wired for language. I grew up on English, raq English and in 5th grade, when everyone else had taken their turn and it was my turn to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance” for the school I said I didn’t know it. Mr. Randosh looked at me with a cross between quizzical and gobsmacked. “Haven’t you been saying it every day since kindergarten?” Yes, though that’s just not how my memory works. I only learned to spell in English through painful spell checking. Grammar … it’s like … there are 100,000 permutations of past, present, future, direct object, not direct object, female, masculine … exceptions, rules, seven basic forms of verbs.

Imagine a guy with stick figure arms trying to bench press – jumping right in there – holding 200 lb weights up for four hours and then doing it again the next day for four hours and working a full day afterwards. That’s how I feel, and worse, I can look at a word multiple times in a store using Google translate (more on that below) and as soon as I go on to the next word, I forgot the previous word. One fact goes in, another must go out. (Kelly, on Married with Children, was on a game show and she lost because the host told her a new fact which meant, since her brain was full, she forgot the oldest fact she learned and it was the next question. You can tell when I became religious and stopped watching TV by finding the most recent TV reference.)

Speaking of holding on 200 lb weights . . .

. . . I got kicked out of the gym. The standard in America: closed-toed shoes. We hear that all over, right? That’s safe. Also, in the U.S. it’s clean – they provide paper towels and spray to clean the machines. I’ve been to this gym 8 or 9 times … I’m on the elliptical machine and that’s when they decide I have to get off and leave because they are “sandals”. Technically – though they are closed at the front I wear them with black socks – I show them and they let me stay.

Kidding. I wish.

The culture in Israel is that people wear sandals a lot so the cultural rule seems to be, “no sandals at the gym.” Can it be an open-toed sneaker? Someone try and let me know.

What irks me is that I’m literally on the machine and there was no, “next time obey the rule we never told you about” … it was “you’re done now.” I stayed on to finish … figuring they weren’t physicality removing me. Then I was escorted out … and told … “and you need a towel to wipe down the machines.” Which is funny because I thought they were unhygienic for not providing paper towels like every American gym does!

Would that have happened at a gym in America if I broke a rule? Not even sure how I’d do that because I’m so steeped into what is ‘normal’ behavior in America.

Also, it’s a secular gym yet there’s an “asher yotzer” poster outside the bathroom (the prayer we say thanking G_d for all our parts working properly that we use the parts to get rid of the stuff we don’t want).

Donations

Another thing no one tells you … how do you get an tax deduction in the U.S. when donating to Israel? Justice Brandeis, Stephen Wise, and a third guy I haven’t heard of and so don’t remember set up an organization which you donate to … and they distribute to organizations of your choice in Israel. It’s https://pefisrael.org .

Wait … there’s one better. As an Israeli if you donate to an Israel charity you get 35% back … deposited in your account. Since there’s a tax treaty you also get the deduction (50% – though it’s more complicated) in the United States. Thus, donations within Israel, without PEF, give you huge tax savings as someone who files taxes in Israel.

Money matters

As a new Israeli you also get monthly benefits – they are suspended if you leave the country. They used to give a lump sum up front though people would come, get the lump sum, and leave so now it’s monthly, directly into your bank account.

At a supermarket neither our Israeli nor American credit cards would work. The cards had been working all day. I haven’t actually used cash for anything yet so I only have USD – credit cards give the best exchange rates. Eventually, I found another card in my wallet and that one worked. Why? It’s like the banana mystery.

The View

Here’s the view from our roof balcony – it’s beautiful.

Go on to Part 7: Getting Ready for the Yom Tovim