Aliyah Diary 9: Nasrallah-ed all over the floor

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 . . .
Part 6: Getting Comfortable
Part 7: Ready for Guests and Yom Tov
Part 8: Visiting Jerusalem – Kotel and Concert

Some Updates from Previous Posts

Cat update: our third regular feral cat, Salem, has been coming by now:

He’s missing an ear. Seems he’s been through quite a trial. Which? I don’t know.

Here’s an, as yet, unnamed cat weaving in and out of this man’s American gym wheel seat thing during an outdoor minyan:

The internet cable running down my stairs wild as curly hair in humidity has been relegated to Japanese hair straightening treatment:

Gym update: I got ‘carded’ or ‘flagged’ (depending your sport) for wearing a belt. When I first went to a gym in New Jersey I wore a button down shirt tucked into the belt – never have I seen so many helpful Americans offering me advice on weight lifting. In Israel … I was wearing a pair of ambidextrous hiking pants and I forgot to take off the belt before I walked in. I offered to show her a description of the pants on Amazon and she let me go in. Meanwhile, in New Jersey there were men with beards, white shirts, tzitzis hanging out of their pants and dress shoes (beer belly for extra points) using the machines.

Also, I used to like to go to the schvitz (sauna) after working out … they don’t have them in Israel probably because it’s a hot country anyway. Solution: get in the car – keep the windows closed and the air off. It’s a time-saving multitasking sauna on wheels.

It’s been cooling off here – very nice late in the day … cool breeze … 85 F … sweater weather, even for the kid who is used to always be hot no matter what. Apparently, the solution was to make her even hotter. Funny how we adjust to the temperature.

I found one of the coveted green labels on a food item finally:

I have figured out person to person payments now – using my bank’s app. I have no exchanged $$ for shekels … at all. I use my credit card from America with 2% cash back. The only shekel I use is a 5 shekel piece I didn’t pay for (I shnorred it – read earlier post.)

Still have not been able to make an appointment for my driver’s license. Nefesh b’Nefesh person managed to do it. She got me an appointment an hour’s drive away … I’m actually cool with that. I need to get out of my daled amos and see more of Israel.

Amazon update: my first shipment came early … only about a week after I ordered it … and to my door. My wife bought a new dress online for Yom Tov (it’s halacha and a very good one for marriage) from the same American company. They shipped it from the U.K. and it came in three days. So far, a lot of success with foreign ordering. Also, Israeli zip codes are specific to each house – might be useful to use, though Israelis often don’t.

Costco Update: Just kidding. Still no Costco here. We did, however, get about 20 mangoes when we ordered four we made our own bag of frozen mango:

Pedestrians

Sir, there are no cars coming.

Does not matter – rare exceptions will a pedestrian cross when there is a do not walk sign. It doesn’t matter that no car is coming for the foreseeable future.

Further, I never, never, ever, not once not had a car stop for me at a crosswalk. There can be a bus barreling down the street and I reach the intersection and look askance to avoid making the guy stop … he does anyway. This is not New Jersey.

I’m usually the rare exception (when no one is looking).

Israeli Driving

Israel has a reputation for rude people and bad driving. Quite honest when I say this – I have never, not once encountered a rude person so far … that I know of. I don’t understand curse words in Hebrew.

That being said, I’ve seen the organ donors on the highways … the ones who zip in and out to get past everyone. 99% of people are driving just fine … it’s the 1% that make the rest look bad. (Kind of like the inverse of the 99% of other lawyers making me look bad.) Then there was this one time I’m slowing into a stopped traffic light and the car behind me, without enough room, zips around to get in front of me, almost hitting the car in the lane next to me followed by aiming at and missing my front bumper.

Then it happened me a second time two days later.

It was the same guy the second time too. He better not drink and drive. I want a clean kidney.

Israelis are much more likely than Americans to back in when parking. Here’s a row of eight cars facing out of the parking spots. Apparently, in China 90% back in and in America only secret agents do so they can get out quickly in an emergency. Why Israelis do it? Emergencies? Chinese cars?

Interruption to Talk about the Axis of Evil

Today is two days after Nasrallah was killed. He was Israel’s Bin Laden. The United States – which I love and am immensely thankful to – tells its allies to keep things light … don’t spark a larger war. They told this to Ukraine which listened and is still dealing with missiles flying over their heads and they told this to Israel. Biden (who, again, I’m immensely thankful for his decades of support of Israel) said, “don’t go into Rafah”. Israel went into Rafah and took the border with Egypt to stop further weapons into Gaza and took out the last of Hamas’s organized forces. Then Biden (in a more lucid moment) said, “Don’t take out Nasrallah – that won’t secure peace.” Israel did, to a livid America.

On Sunday we woke up to a new Middle East because stiff-necked Jews don’t listen. A year ago Israel was under attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, Houtis, and HIranians (the H-theme … hi!). After the world’s best urban warfare campaign in the history of the world, Hamas is no longer an army and the number of Israeli soldier deaths in far below any estimations pre-war.

In Lebanon the Christians, Sunnis, and Syrian exiles celebrate what has got to also me one of the top five, if not top, war maneuver ever. 100k missiles pointed at Israel – terrorists can’t shoot them if the brightness of their beepers is blinding. (The Hebrew word for “beeper” is also … “beeper” … there’s a more formal word though I’m not using head space to memorize that.) Then they take out the entire command structure of Hezbollah followed by their replacements, knowing exactly where each of them are.

Very few details actually make it to the news. This Telegram channel is where you get “play by play” of what’s happening during the war with local videos, what the locals in different places are saying and doing, and what an explosion of 28 bunker busting bombs looks like:

The new middle east looks like this:

Hamas: “We’re winning!”
Israel: “You haven’t got any arms and legs left. How are you winning?”
Hamas: “Come back, I can still bite you!”
Gazans: “Hamas is the best! My tent is leaking.”

Israel: “Hezbelloh, are you there?” “Hezbelloh?” “Bueller?” “Bueller?”

Iran: “I don’t walk softly because I don’t carry a big stick.” (Look of Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy quotes)

Yemen last month: “Maybe we shouldn’t lob a missile at a country with F-16s when we don’t have any air defenses.”
Yemen this month: “Nah … let’s do it again. We still have three power plants left.”

Harvard and Columbia students: “From the river to the sea, intifada revolution!”
Israel: “Do you even know how to swim?”
Harvard and Columbia students: “No, but it rhymes. We’d cheer for you if you had a rhyming motto.” Israel: “No you wouldn’t.”
Harvard and Columbia students: “What’s the best jingle you can come up with?”
Israel: “Leave us alone.”

When I speak to relatives in America it’s … Trump this, Trump that. Heterosexuals this, heterosexuals that. Israel is doing this wrong or doing that wrong. It’s so quiet here. Leave us alone.

Ulpan Update

I’m now doing video lessons with an Ivrit (Hebrew) tutor six times a week. We repeat the same thing over and over until I remember things – in Torah learning we say that learning something 100 times is incomparable to learning the same thing 101 times. My secular Ulpan teacher will soon agree – word, by word.

She keeps saying, “moozikah” (music) when I get too stilted with my talking. Everything rhymes (except our jingles) … there’s a cadence to it. I’d write an example. I just can’t remember any. Well, there’s this one … I kept saying “b’beiTah” … “coming home”. No, it’s “ha’beiTah” and all T sounds at the end of words require pressing so hard on them you could pop your ears. Now we have a song like a school girl playing hopscotch … “ha-beiTah, ha-beiTah, ha-beiTah…” If you see me in person, ask me to sing the song. I need practice.

The other major thing I learned is that if you over emphasize the last syllable then she thinks I’m pronouncing it right. I’m literally saying it to mock her and she says, “good”. Is there no justice in this world? So I say it stronger … “even better”. It’s not, “ishti” (my wife), it’s “ish-TTTEEEE”. I’m not always mad at her, sorry! She’s a nice woman and I love her very much!

The teacher asks me to practice some word where with two ches’s (chet’s) followed by a tzaddi…. all in a row. My mouth muscles do not move in that order, yet she keeps making me say it. “Did I get it yet?” “It’s better” though her facial expression says otherwise. There’s a reason you never hear an Israeli cough – the pallet stays clean at all times. (I once thought it was an Israel coughing – it was an American, sigh. Even the smokers have clean pallets around here – and good kidneys, I hope.)

In English, the lazier you say it, the better. It’s like a language designed for a fat guy (whether he goes to the gym or not) to slouch on a lounge chair with his chin against his chest and beer balanced on his belly. That – that – is good sounding English. Try doing that in Hebrew and your vocal cords will tear.

(Fun fact: We had a guest who speaks Russian – she said Nasrallah means “diarrhea” in Russian.)

You know what Hebrew words I do remember? The ones where I make a fool of myself in a store for five minutes. Know what electric tape is called? I’m thinking … seret choshmoli … literally, “electric tape”. String lights maybe, they ask? What could I possibly be asking for? Oh no … they call it, “seret d’bikuk” Glue tape or, as I like to think of it, tape for covering the mouths of people possessed by spirits.

Those electrical connectors for wires below that? They’re called bananas. No further commentary or joke needed. The person who named it did that already for me.

In other news, we have a tri-lingual handyman (Hi Tessa). One of those languages is Spanish so it feels like a New Jersey handyman. Not so … he is quite fluent in English too and I traded him something to translate part of a patent application from English to Spanish … that would NOT happen in America. These are words like, “dielectric” and “russit nasrallah” yet he understands them.

Meanwhile, a German guest said to us, “I haven’t taken any uplan – I just picked it up from listening to people and I need level hey (5)”. I thought the levels only went up to 3! Ugh. Germans, gevault! (She also taught us the “gevault” in German means “violence” and she can’t get used to hearing the Yiddush word here.)

Back to School Night

Back to School Night is the night where parents go to the school to meet their kids’ teachers … or, at least, that’s what they do in America. I avoided these things except for when my wife made me go … then I became a teacher and realized how valuable it is for teachers to see your face and know who you are. These things are as boring as waiting at an Israeli crosswalk – so I spiced things up as a teacher. I had the place laughing so hard they were falling on the floor, bending their chins to the chest trying not to hurt their vocal cords.

I stepped it up a notch the following year. It probably will not surprise any reader of my blog to tell you that I was banned from speaking at any more parent-teacher conferences. (I’m not kidding and maybe one day I’ll share my notes from these speeches on the blog.)

In Israel … it’s different. Besides that I have no idea what’s going on and the worst thing in the world is hearing everyone laugh around you and having no idea what was funny (middah k’neged middah for what I did to some parents of the … “they have potential” kids), I was in pain. We didn’t meet the teachers – we sang achaynu bais yisroel together. People are selling jewelry, shofars, and yarmulkes in the hallways:

The “hallways”, by the way, are mostly outside.

We got an hour speech about the dangers of the internet (in Hebrew). You think smartphones are a problem in the U.S.? In Israel the guy said kids get phones at about 8 years old! Whatsapp is all but necessary in middle school! Writing your teachers of the opposite gender can write to their students on Whatsapp at all hours! In America we call that, “one step away from jail.”

Finally, we get to meet one of the teachers … only it’s the same exact time for every grade. Which kids teacher do we go to? This is seriously how we decided: the first classroom of one of our kids that we find, we will go there. That’s sort of how we find anything in Israel.

My wife went to one, I went to another. This is middle school and we sat, not like in America in straight rows with a teacher speaking for 10 minutes before we switch to another … we had circle time. We sat in a circle while the teacher pushed her stroller to and fro to keep her baby quiet. One of the parents took over for her. That was another 30, 40 … felt like three hours … of being talked at in Hebrew. Didn’t even get one of those carpets with the blocks of numbers and letters for nap time.

“People will tell you that your kids will be fluent by Chanukah and it’s not true” is frequently heard around here. We have not yet found a single person that tells us they will be … just people telling us that people will tell us that. We hope we are helping their PTSD subside by listening to us. For myself, it took me a month of being here before my first breakdown. I thought I’d have many more months. Details are not for a public blog.

Go on to Part 10: Driver’s License