A Fly and a Cockroach Shake Hands

I love the way my friend Rachael Welt sees the world, and the way she tells stories.

We learn together once a week, and our conversations always weave our Torah learning through the text of our life stories. Today’s stories illustrate one of my favorite principles.

"This is what the Holy One said to Israel: My children, what do I seek from you? I seek no more than that you love one another and honor one another; and that you have awe and reverence for one another." -- Tanna d'Bei Eliyahu Rabba, 26:6

Rachael recounts a recent trip to the Mahane Yehuda shuk.

“I have never seen at one time so many people using walkers, walking on crutches, walking with canes,” she said. “And the shuk was packed with people. And of course, walking behind all these people with walkers and so on made it very slow going. Still, not one person started screaming ‘Why are you moving so slowly? Why did you come to the shuk? Don’t you know you could fall down? Why don’t you move out of the way?’

“This is the shuk I’m talking about, where people regularly yell and scream at each other – and not one person rushed these people. Not even the shuk workers with the heavy pallets they carry everywhere. Those guys never have any patience! But that day, they did. Everyone waited patiently for the old and infirm to make their way through the shuk. It was amazing!”

Rachael’s face glows when she tells stories about the good in her fellow humans.

She tells another “only in Israel” story.

“I was in Jerusalem, getting the car repaired. I was feeling a little faint, because I hadn’t eaten enough before leaving the house; so I decided to go to a nearby supermarket. As I started in the door, the guard, a man in his sixties, put up a hand and stopped me. ‘We don’t open until ten,’ he said to me. I checked my watch and saw there would be a bit of a wait. And then I saw the line of people with shopping carts. I’m thinking, I don’t need a big shopping cart. I only need a few items.” Nonetheless, she joined the line, prepared to wait with everyone else until the guard allowed entry.

“People started to say to the guard, ‘Nu? It’s ten minutes to ten. Let us in already! It’s five minutes till. C’mon, let us in! See my watch? Let us in!’ But the guard had his orders, and he was used to this. He held his ground. ‘Ten o’clock,’ he insisted calmly.

“This one guy ahead of me, but still pretty far back in the line, decided he’d had enough. He pulled out of the line, pushed to the front, and tried to get by the guard. The guard stopped him, and the guy started yelling at him.

“The guard, still calm, said to the guy, ‘You know what? You’re a zvoov,’ a fly. And the guy yells at him, really angry now, ‘And you’re a juke!’ a cockroach.”

As Rachael tells the story, I am laughing a little, because I am convinced that these conversations, with this much invective, could never happen in America. People might yell at each other, but it is never this colorful. The two men went at this for several seconds, the guard speaking calmly, the enraged customer getting so upset, and louder and louder, to the point that Rachael was praying he didn’t have a knife. She could just see herself being witness to a terrible incident.

“The man kept yelling, and saying he was going to complain about the guard, and not only complain about him, he was going to write a letter, and he went on and on, getting more and more excited.

"The guard told him, without raising his voice, to step back. The man stepped back only a step or two. ‘Only this far,’ he said. ‘No further. I’m staying right here.’

“Suddenly, the guard walked over to the man, and stuck out his hand, and the other fellow took it. ‘Please forgive me, my friend. It will all be okay. I ask forgiveness.’ And the other guy calmed down. A moment later, at ten o’clock on the dot, the guard allowed the stream of people with their carts into the store.

“But that’s not the end of the story,” says Rachael, with her patented Rachael smile.

“Later, as I was going through the aisles, the guy came up to me. ‘You see?’ he said, ‘He apologized to me. He admitted he was wrong, and I was right.’ I said to him, ‘I think you were both a little bit wrong, and a little bit right.’ (After all, calling someone a fly was not a nice thing to do, and certainly calling someone a cockroach and threatening him is wrong.) ‘The main thing is, you made peace.’ I don’t think he really understood me, because he really thought he was right and the guard was wrong. But I saw that the guard kept calm, offered his hand, and the man took it! And the guard asked for forgiveness. What an amazing People!”

I believe that Hashem teaches us to see Him as a Parent so that we can know how to behave toward each other. As a mother, nothing makes me more distressed – dare I say enraged? – than when my kids are unkind to each other. Conversely, nothing causes me to feel more overjoyed and elated than when they get along and speak well of each other.

Rachael and I learned a lot today. But I am convinced that the holiest moments of our learning were when Rachael spoke aloud words of validation about the behavior of God’s children toward one another. If our learning together doesn’t bring Mashiach closer by itself, surely the stories of Jews rising above their pettiness to respect one another inches the Geula just a bit closer.

15 Iyar 2018.

Cherries! Like little hearts bursting wth love for this Land...

Yom chamishi, 3 Tamuz 5769.

I did not pick these cherries at the currently ongoing Gush Etzion Cherry Festival. A sensitive anesthesiologist-cum-blogger nicknamed QuietusLeo (aka "The Sandman") took the shot on a recent trip with family and friends.  I easily convinced The Sandman to share his excellent photograph of the cherries with the promise of a story...

The Dearly Beloved brought me to Israel for my first visit in 1991.  This little vacation of nine days (from July 4 until July 13 -- it was so special that I still have the dates locked in memory!) was to replace the honeymoon the US Army didn't schedule into its plans six years earlier.  By now, we had two little kids.  We could not have made this trip without the loving and competent help of my dear Mama, a"h, who kept the kids fed and entertained while we were away.

My dear husband wanted to show me the exciting tourist vistas of Israel that he had seen on his two previous visits.  He wanted to show me Masada and the Dead Sea, and the locale of The Good Fence.  His memories there in the Eighties were very powerful.  With the knowledge he possessed as a US Army officer, he argued with the old fellow in the kibbutz about the sounds he had heard the night before.  "Why were track vehicles [Army lashon for 'tanks'] moving late last night?  And where are all your young men?" the Dearly Beloved asked his host.  "Ehhhhhh...  those weren't track vehicles you heard.  And our young men are... you know... just out and about."  But my husband knows his stuff.  Only later did he learn that he was an aural witness to the beginning of the 1982 war in Lebanon.

But that was history.  I wanted the "now" of Israel.  I was already imagining living here.  (I promised I would visit the tourist places with him after our aliyah.)  I wanted the "thrill" of visiting the kupat cholim clinic with my friend, as she took her child for a checkup.  I wanted to wait in line at the bank, just to see if  I could cope with Israeli bureaucracy.  (Fortunately, US Army bureaucracy, with its "hurry up and wait" regimen, had prepared me to survive here.  Insider's tip:  bring a thermos of coffee, a good book, and a positive attitude.  You will meet nice people, and actually have time to get time to know them.  Don't expect to accomplish anything in less than two visits; and don't try to cross more than one bureaucratic hurdle per day.)

I shlepped my long-suffering husband around with me and our friend, Naomi, as we visited the makolet, the health clinic, the bank, and the shuk.

The shuk is why this story is all about cherries.

Our Israel-savvy, holy-but-worldly hostess showed us from which stalls in the shuk to buy.  She picked up vegetables at one stall, fruit at another...  With her guidance, we bought grapefruit that was so perfectly ripe, it seemed to fall open in our hands; and the sweetness made it taste closer to its cousin the orange than to its sour brothers we had encountered in the States.  But it was the cherries that made Naomi cry.  When she watched The Dearly Beloved -- no longer a lad at 43 -- turn into a small, delighted boy when he tasted those cherries...

You have to know that my friend Naomi doesn't cry easily.  She isn't one of those folks who sees a Hallmark card commercial and gets all misty-eyed.  But when she saw forty years drop from my husband's face at the remarkable sweetness and holy perfection of a cherry at its peak of red, ripe lusciousness, as if he'd never tasted anything so unbelievable, a tear came to her eye.

To this day, nearly twenty years later, Naomi gets a bit emotional when she buys cherries.

And she and her love of this Land and what G-d causes it to produce get a big chelek in our success here.  She taught us that what makes a successful aliyah isn't how well you can transplant your little chunk of America in Israeli soil.  What matters is how much you respect what Hashem gives to His Land, and His people in the Land, just as it is.

What if the meraglim had said, "Hey, Moshe!  See these really big grapes?  We can make really BIG wine..."

Glossary:
Kupat Cholim:  health care provider
Makolet:  neighborhood grocery store, a "mini-mart"
Shuk:  open-air marketplace
Chelek:  portion
Meraglim:  the Spies who came back from Canaan with an evil report about the land, planting doubts about their people's ability to wrest the land from the indigenous peoples  -- forgetting that G-d had told them to do it, and that He was on their side