House

This is not
a House of God
in which: You stage hollow debate
Discriminate
Rate: Fashion, voice, and elocution
Define power by contribution
- Ritual persecution –
Idle chatter, Mad hatter, Odd things Matter

–
A balcony apart
From my heart
(Where a small, quiet temple with fewer rules renews one member
Every September)
–

Because this is not
a House of God:
What kind of holy gathering place
Has nothing growing? In which I cannot count ten.

What we have here
is a House of Men.

- SKE, March 2013

Back when I was working as a journalist, I became interested in the growing study of Jewish heritage texts by avante-garde secular Israelis.

JREP – May 2006 Jewish Bookshelf Goes Primetime

One of the stars of that 2006 piece, Dr. Ruth Calderone, went on to make history last week in the Knesset, where she now serves as an MK for the Yesh Atid party.

I want you to read the PDF I linked to, so I won’t waste any more of your time on commentary here. Except to say that when I did the story, I was fairly certain that what I was seeing was only the beginning of an essential, growing trend, and I have never been so glad to be proven right with the years. Way to go, Dr. C.

The prospect of all sectors of Israeli society re-embracing our cultural heritage texts (I say nothing here about practice, because that’s a whole other tractate, as it were) is just as exciting as all of us sharing military and financial burdens equally.

When a heavy box of old junk that another has packed and stored badly *literally* falls out of the pre-fab suburban ceiling and breaks open on the ONE Day out of *hundreds* that YOU happen to be home, and THE OWNER/ PACKER / STORER happens to not be….What is the symbolism there?

At first I thought it was the boiler exploding. It snowed last night in Jerusalem, and temperatures in our town reached record lows. My contractor friends put out helpful emails to their neighbors: Leave on a hot water tap so your boiler doesn’t explode. I did.

I had just sat down to morning coffee on my first snow day in about 20 years. Earlier, my carpool texted me: The roads to Jerusalem are closed. We are not going anywhere.

I jumped up and down on my bed like an eight year old. I didn’t have to go in to the office, a rare reprieve to catch up on independent work: writing, editing, to-do lists, emails. The kids had school. The husband was running a marathon up north with a bunch of other skinny lunatics who think pneumonia can’t happen to them.

It meant that I had the house to myself for the whole day. Only about the third or fourth time it’s happened in the two years since I started working full-time on the outside, and my husband opened up his own practice from a home office. It was quiet, I was caffeinated, shit was getting done.

So when I heard the loud thud in the roof, I thought: Well. What do contractors know?! A closer investigation, however, revealed no gushing water (Glory Be!) but part of a box protruding from the hatch door leading to the attic. And the innards of that box vomiting out in a way that (of course) dared me to open the hatch, even though I was clearly about to get nailed by: 1. A lot of work *I* didn’t create and didn’t have time for but was going to have to do anyway; 2. Whatever hit me as I opened it. It was like an episode of Lost, only no sexy sweating, what with the freezing temps.

Emboldened by gratefulness that my boiler hadn’t exploded, I channeled my inner girl scout and figured out how to minimize injury and mess while facing this unwanted challenge, all before my coffee got cold. Spreading a heavy blanket on the floor, I pulled the lever to the hatch door and stepped away.

Out poured an old electric shaver (of blessed memory); an earthy green ceramic rock garden desk ornament which rained down intact due to my Be Prepared ethos; several issues of the Israel Law Review; a few much heavier, maroon-colored volumes with titles that made me feel deep sympathy for all lawyers; and the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. I fared much better than most who have been hit by Sarbanes Oxley. The avalanche ended with a flurry of certificates (never framed; my husband is a pack rat but never a show-off) and assorted papers.

Still in Amazonian mode, I climbed up to the roof to straighten out the boxes and check for anything that might have caused the fall. The diagnosis: routine shifting of elements due to extreme temperature and *too much crap*, which used to hide in the old office in Tel Aviv, and is now hidden from view of wife who generally throws everything away unless it breathes and has a respectable IQ.

I made sure the piles were stable, and I backed away without throwing out a thing. I just didn’t have the time.

As to the pile down below on the blanket: Surprise. Very little didn’t make it back into the mangled but salvageable box. Mostly because I want to see him have to hoist it back up, completely full.

It didn’t take that long, but I was ready to be extremely aggravated for having to deal with it at all. Then I found something he saved, something hilarious and brilliant that I had written in 2003 (I said my husband wasn’t a show- off, but I never said I wasn’t) and I read it and cried.

That he had saved it. That I used to write ALL THE TIME because that was all I did professionally. That I rarely do it anymore because my work is about much more than writing these days. That I had forgotten about this piece and it literally fell on my head on a day that I really needed to be reminded that I was am a writer.

I wiped my tears and put the paper on his desk.

Then I stole the rock garden for my desk at work. It is the fee for my time and it’s really more appropriate for a chick. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

When a heavy box of old junk falls out of the ceiling and breaks open and you have to deal with it and you, in the end, don’t really mind that much…What is the symbolism there?

Artemis, by Violscraper

Some spaces wiser
not to fill; Hunger is more
useful than the kill.

- SKE, Winter 2012

On Wednesday, we helped children in a Jewish elementary school in Greece prepare decorations for Hanukkah, the upcoming winter holiday which celebrates the victory of light over darkness, of the miraculous over the commonplace, of Maccabees over ….Greeks . (In Greece, the children learn that the victory was won over the Assyrians. What I would call a nice save. And true-ish.)

I cut out shapes of menorahs and sivivonim (dreidels) from colorful paper, and glued them onto large poster paper with a girl named Alexandra and a boy named Niko, who both understood rudimentary Hebrew. How am I supposed to wrap my head around that?
***

My employer, The Jewish Agency for Israel, sends a few dozen shlichim (emissaries) all over Europe (plus several hundred more around the world) with the goal of connecting global Jewry to Israel, both the People and the place. Experience over the years has proven that through Jewish cultural education and engagement with Israel, both Diaspora communities and Israel emerge stronger. Thousands of young Jews find their way to long term Israel programming (and / or Aliyah) via their shaliach, and many shlichim return to Israel with a strong sense of belonging to a pluralistic, global Jewish community that they hadn’t grown up with as native Israelis.

As we all know from business, politics, and community work, everything rides on personal relationships. One hundred op-eds on Israel’s right to exist or on pride in Jewish identity will not do the work of one adorable, articulate, and energetic 18 or 25 year old Israeli telling students in London, Paris, Milano, or Brussels what day-to-day Israel is like, off the screens and pages, and simply face to face.

This past week the Shlichim serving in the EU (and a few relevant managers and staffers, like me, from the mothership in Jerusalem supporting their efforts) met for a few days of sessions on best practices and brainstorming in Thessaloniki, Greece – a community that was very nearly wiped out by Hitler in 1942. The vibe in this waterfront university town is something like Seattle meets Acre by way of the East Village. While we spent most of the time inside the Jewish community center in meetings and workshops, we took one morning to see Jewish history and life in the city, which included activities with kids in the school.

It is hard to overstate how moved the staff was to have fifty Israelis come to dance and sing with the kids. Our visit made the gym teacher – a 6-foot tall, 250 pound man in a track suit – cry.

It is also hard to overstate how crazy, and how right, it felt to be celebrating pre-Hanukah in Greece with living, breathing young Jews.

What a victory of the human spirit that we survive again and again, and splendidly. And how strangely stubborn and forgiving, that we stay to grow again in communities which would have easily let us be lost, something Thessaloniki has in common with Budapest, a city with an Israel Cultural Center and a flourishing young Jewish community. And more than one shaliach.

The question of why Jews stay in these places when there is a modern state of Israel a short plane ride away is one that vexes many people. However, the fact of a Diaspora by choice (or by economic necessity) should surprise no one, because this tension, too, is an integral part of our history. Goshen in Egypt did not empty out of the Ben Jacobs when the famine in Canaan was long over , just as Babylon did not empty out during the Second Temple period; life there continued to flourish alongside the life that flourished anew in Jerusalem.

It is clear that between the ultimate home that is Israel, and the actual home for millions of Jews that is not, is a third place: the dialectic between here and there, between the reality and the ideal, that could have destroyed us many times, and instead – miraculously – just makes us stronger. The key is how far we have always been willing to go for one another.

At the Athens airport, I bought a lighter from Greece. The better to light my menorah with, in Israel.

Obligatory disclaimer: This is my personal blog; views expressed above may or may not reflect the views of my employer.

Variation on a post from 2009:

I have always been a fan of the top ten list. I suppose it started with Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 (Look it up, Gen Millen), one of the cleverest marketing devices the pre-digital music world ever came up with. After which I graduated to Letterman, who used (uses?) the top ten list as a comedic framing device, which I enjoyed even more. Kids, this was all before Amazon’s Listmania was even an executive web dream, even before the historic Wayne’s World usage of the meme (#3: Garth’s Mom.)

Of course, the top ten format is as old as the hills, actually, one specific hill called Sinai, where, tradition has it, God’s Top Ten was revealed amidst much noisy weather, on this, the Shavuot festival. Whether He intended it as marketing or humor will depend, I suppose, on your general outlook.

Why those ten? Here’s a pretty good analysis, although it only scratches the surface of the rabbinic literature which abounds on this question.

In any event, I have my own top ten, an ethical will of sorts in case I work, shop, garden, clean, and cook till I literally drop today, which seems like a distinct possibility. It’s not at all funny, and as far as I can tell, I’m not trying to market anything, although it’s hard to tell with me. It’s mostly just all serious and mom-ish.

Here’s what I would’ve handed down if it was my mountain, even though I suck at some of them some days:

1. Take responsibility: Be active in your life, work, and community. Don’t despair… Just do something about it. No hand wringing or arm-chairing.
2. Be spiritual in a way that speaks to you; Even if you are a devout Atheist, there has to be Something Larger than yourself and your own needs and urges that brings you meaning. (I think this was also, approximately, God’s #2.)
3. Make the best of things; Perspective, circumspection, ingenuity, friendship, positive assumptions, SENSE OF HUMOR, and hope beat victimhood and anger every time. It’s your choices, stupid.
4. Expect a lot of yourself and try not to expect too much of others (unless they are your kids in which case, expect the hell out of them, as per each child’s abilities.) No one owes you anything. (Except this one guy whose book I edited in 2005….never mind.)
5. Do not lie to yourself. This is the source of nearly all of the Western world’s ills, as far as I am concerned. Honesty with yourself makes 1 – 4 possible.
6. Do not blame. (See #1.) Rider to this clause, as the traits generally co-habit: Do not be overly sensitive when criticized. Try to use it, or forget it.
7. Do not be Wasteful. Water, talent, friendship, energy, emotions, time (especially other people’s!!). All of it: Conserve.
8. Do not confuse anxiety, narcissism, or control with any of the following: love, competency, self-confidence, friendship, friendliness, help, thoroughness, creativity, parenting.
9. Help the people who can not do 1-8. They may make you crazy or angry or sad, but those are the people who need your help, so when you can, you must.
10. Do not spend time or effort on jealousy and comparing yourself to others; it leads to the abominable sin of knocking others down to build yourself up. (Actually, I think this was also God’s #10.)

(Notable good ones that didn’t make it into my cannon: Take good care of yourself; Don’t pay too much attention to what others think; Be realistic; Think before you act, every time. I figured I’d let someone who actually practices those put them in their own top ten.)

I would love for you to write about YOUR top ten in the comments section. WWYHDTM? (What Would You Hand Down The Mountain?)

Marketing, comedic, serious, or otherwise. Will be reading after weekend (since God’s #4 prevents me from doing so beforehand.)

Hag Sameach (Happy Holiday)!

Lets us pretend that I have not just dropped off the blogosphere for months and pick up where we left off. Old friends can do that.

It is 2 hours one hour to Passover and it has been quite a year; I’m not sure I remember breathing at any point.

The fulltime job I began last May turned out to be a calling, and also, fulltime plus…plus. My son’s bar mitzvah happened, and he was great; another son started driving; and both of my remaining grandparents died (no relevance to the driving son, in case you were wondering), which means both my parents sat shiva in the last few months. (My grandparents would have really liked that I made a joke about it. Relax.) My husband became a half-marathon addict, an obsessive hobby I like much better than his last few.

Everything else, pretty much a blur. When I wonder how long I can keep up this pace, I remember that I can rest when the world runs out of coffee in roughly 2047 (I just made that up, but about 500 fellow addicts just completed the aneurisms they’ve been working on)… and that the quiet and time I long for usually just make me feel guilty and indulgent.

Like now, minutes before we begin Passover, I can think of nothing better to do with some surprising free time than to revive my blog. In profound mode, I might wax thematic: Freedom and Responsibility; Structure and Renewal; Family and Tradition. The Four Sons as a model for the stages of child development. If you want profound, try here and here.

In embattled, progressive mode it would be Passover in Israel and the United Front for the Fall of the (divisive, hypocritical) Kitniyot Ban. I could also, in the spirit of Easter, go after the Seven Deadly Sins: The Passover hotel experience actually deserves a book. How did the holiday to celebrate exodus and peoplehood and the journey to a Homeland turn into Five Towns’ Top Model, Live from South Florida? But I can’t muster up the snark today. Maybe it’s all the bleach I inhaled?

Feeling more nostalgic, perhaps I’d write about the seders I remember in my grandmother’s house, when I was the only sentient being under 20, and therefore, the exclusive Four Question-er for many years. Or the Streitz Passover cookies and those half-moon jelly things my brother and I would demolish in the back of the Toyota on the way up to New York, and the voice of the 1010WINS news guy we’d wake up to on the Van Wyck.

But here I am, watching the light fade in a way that tells me that the holiday will start in about an hour, and listening to my testosterone-crazed children fight over imagined territory, and feeling simply grateful. For being created female. And for the freedom to *not* say any of the above. And for the time I had to not say it.

More nothing later.

Here’s what I said at my grandmother’s funeral, earlier tonight:

After hearing such touching words on two continents from my father and uncles, the sons, and just now my mom, I speak today on behalf of all of the grandchildren – Eitan, Gadi, Alex, Elie, Yoni, Yael, Ari, Yaffa, Yonina, Ora, Simi – and their respective spouses. I have the unique privilege of having turned Esther and Al Klein from Mommy and Daddy into Grandma and Grandpa; I hope to represent my generation honorably.

My grandmother died after doing what she said she would do, which is to attend my cousin Eitan’s wedding, last Sunday night, to his lovely bride, Pam.

My brother Elie took Grandma down the aisle. She danced with her children, all but one of her grandchildren (me), and about half of her great grandchildren. She danced with the children and grandchildren of her surviving brothers, Joe and Shalom.

Early Wednesday morning, she began slipping into the next world. This was with the full knowledge that all three of her sons were still in the country, and could be around her in the final hours. She liked to tell of how *her* grandmother, who died of the rarest of all things in her generation – natural causes – slipped away after lighting candles Friday night. After two days asleep, struggling quietly with death, it seemed that my grandma could not let go. So the sons and daughters-in-law had the idea to make Kabbalat Shabbat around her bed a little early, on Friday morning. This is when she agreed to go.

Esther Klein did things on her terms. She accepted God’s will. But to the greatest possible extent, it would be God’s… and Esther’s.

If funerals were given to creative staging, I would invite you to my kitchen for a fitting tribute to this great lady. I would seat you in the corner on a rickety step stool, play some swing music, and let you peel some potatoes for my soup, or very slowly add the ground nuts into the egg whites for the highest rising Pesach cake in Bayswater, if not all of Queens. If you were male, I would also probably get you to schlep something up from where it was stored somewhere terrifying en route to the basement. When you offered to wash dishes, I would joke to you that I had an amazing dishwasher. He was 75 years old and still worked great.

While you were on that step stool, I would tell you stories about my childhood and my sisters and my parents, all gone. I would never cry. I would tell you in a way that never scared you or depressed you, but instead compelled you to bring the story forward, to your own kitchens, later. I would sing along with the music and laugh at your jokes, whether or not they were funny, and I would tell you my distinct opinion on family life, world politics, fashion, economics, literature, or social etiquette, all the while agreeing with whatever you just said. “Yeh,” I would say. There was something in what you just said I could agree with.

Later, we would play Rumikub and I would scratch your back until you fell asleep. I would tell you stories about your father, when he was little, and how he reminded me in this way of my own father, and in that way, of you. Without too much effort, I would tie you generations back, and tie myself generations forward, completely by the way, as you were dozing off. You would never guess that my own wonderful childhood ended at the train tracks, until I would tell you that part, too. There was a perfect sense that nightmarish evil was absolutely real, and also that, most decisively… Ve Von.

We won because, when you are not sitting on that step stool, I am using it, well into my 80’s, to climb to reach things from the top cabinet, teaching you that it’s all about balance.

I tell you about my very religious father who learned at the Shabbat table with my mother. How they used to argue about various Rashis in the parasha, back when most European women were learning the Tzena Re’enna. I would tell you about my very learned and religious father who sent his sons to yeshiva and expected them to work, like he did. I would tell you how my mother prepared blueberry jam for stomach ailments, b/c she was known as something of a medicine woman around town, and, like my father’s dry-goods store, her kitchen was a regular stop for the local poor.

I would create a seamless flow from Nechama Hershkowitz’s charitable kitchen in Seredna to my short but horrific stay in Auschwitz and then Ravensbruck, where I was sustained by my nieces, Ibby and Helen, teenagers of whom my sisters put me in charge… and then right back to the kitchen where we now sit, making potato soup.

Which, if I were my grandmother, would bring me back to my mother, who told me on our first day in Auschwitz, when we were being processed into our potato sacks, to ignore the SS, just as I had ignored the goats and the cows back home. My mother had reminded me, in those two weeks we were together before she disappeared in a cloud over Poland, who was the human being in this situation, and what that demanded of me. I remembered, and reminded, every day since.

What it meant to be human was to have balance. Empathy and a sense of justice. Respect for the dead and a total dedication to the living. To living. A sense of reverence and a sense of humor. Balance. Living modestly but mindful of aesthetics. A dedication and deep gratitude to America, and a complete devotion to and support of Israel. Work outside the home well into her 70’s, and family always first. Being equal parts emotional, intellectual, and physical. Shiurim, survivor’s meetings, family events, the gym. Shul and the Beach, both healing.

Being realistic and optimistic – living on that delicate edge of facing down yesterday and expecting a reversal tomorrow, while completely in the present, today. My Grandma was Zen before anyone knew what that was, except maybe my Uncle Normie.

My grandmother’s life, you would soon see, was a “Dayenu” story. Thankful and disbelieving of every victory, and also always pushing the envelope toward the next one, the one that her father demanded that she pursue.

I could go on forever, making very appropriate comparisons to Queen Esther and to Sara Imeinu from the Parasha – matriarchs who themselves represent dynasties and disasters, Jewish advocacy, relentless optimism alongside realism, and gentle, iron strength in the face of the patriarchy and other nuisances….but it is late. So I will suffice with the story that many of you have heard, but some of you have not, and it bears repeating, mostly because it taught me a lot about what is running through my veins, and that of my cousins, and now all our kids.

It was the endless winter that began 1945. My grandmother and her nieces had just been marched through the snow from Auschwitz to Ravensbruck. The Nazis felt that the end was near, and the final solution hadn’t been totally… solved. To accelerate matters, they put the women in an outdoor tent in sub freezing weather. The calculations were correct. Half died the first night there. The survivors, my grandmother told me, slept very little, and when they did, it was standing or sitting, huddled in groups. They also didn’t let go of their tin cups, b/c that way, they could drink hot soup, when it was available.

Being and asthmatic since age 13, my grandmother got sick. Very sick. She did the forbidden and fell asleep. She thought she would not wake up. But then something crazy happened. She had a dream. In that dream, her father, whom she had not seen since getting off the train on Shavuot of 1944, was standing near a window in a long white robe. She said it looked like a kittel.

He asked her to come look out the window. He pointed actively, like the angels in last week’s Parasha, to a tree with white blossoms, and told her: When the trees start to blossom white, you and Ibby and Helen will be free. Please wait.

So she woke up. She stood up. And she waited. And encouraged others to do the same.

As her father promised, they were liberated in spring. The Swedish Red Cross took my grandmother and her nieces back to Sweden. When they disembarked this more benevolent train, they found that they had arrived in an orchard in full bloom. On every tree, white flowers.

This story, which every grandchild has heard more than once, was Grandma’s way of saying that you need an inner guide, one that is firmly planted in your own authentic roots, but that you make yours, and tell it your way. You need to hang on and believe in God, but you need to do your part to make it so. She believed in Divine miracles made real only via human effort, which is the message of the first Esther, too. She believed in bearing witness to the past, and she believed in writing your own story going forward.

Grandma, we will miss you terribly. A world without you is a strange place. But you have taught us how to balance on a rickety step stool while singing and reaching higher. What more could we have asked to know?

Pic by Y. Ruas

Dear Extremist Haredi Zealot Neighbors,

Hello. It’s been a true pleasure making your acquaintance during the last few days outside the Orot (Hebrew: Lights) Girls’ School in my hometown of Bet Shemesh, a sleepy backwater which was frankly really nice until you got here.

Let’s tell the uninitiated reader about our little quarrel: You feel the land / building allotted to Orot is yours and have invoked your Magical Modesty Clause to (successfully) silence the Haredi street; the Education Ministry and the incredible parent leadership who built the school feel otherwise, supported by the normative citizens of Bet Shemesh who are kinda sick of your Grabby McGrabberson tendencies; and our mostly Haredi municipal leadership, led by Mayor Moshe Abutbol, as usual prefers (when confronted with offending you with femininity and other scary things) to stay quasi-neutral – by which I mean completely chickens**t. (Is that the kind you threw on us, by the way, at the rally?)

The experience of protesting alongside you has been super, though, since, really – where else would we have met? Unfortunately, I don’t really have that many friends from other religions, so it has been nice to expand my horizons. It is amazing that in your religion, all of the Torah that matters really *can* be learned on one foot, as long as that foot is covered by a stocking.

The elegance of being able to collapse your entire world into a single concept – Spread Thy Ignorance, Erase Thine Women from Everywhere but the Delivery Room, and Call it Superior – is just a little awe-inspiring in its total simplicity and apparent appeal to testosterone-based life-forms in tights (and turbans…..) Together with the all-black ensemble and the ability to travel light at a moment’s notice to whatever cause-du-jour you are called to, I daresay, you guys are pretty fabulous.

Although, it would be great if you would stop calling little 8-year-old girls nasty things as they walk home from school. It is not their fault that they were born outside the cage in which you have entrapped your own women and girls. It is time to stop punishing them for it. It’s really enough that you have tanked our real estate. (Thanks, for that, by the way.)

Those bits of tension aside, I’d love to get to know you better. I’ll start by sharing a little bit about ourselves, but since I know you are really busy not working and not learning, I’ll make it quick and reduce this “meeting” (is it too soon to call it a date?) to only one cool fact about our community:

We care about peace and quiet, are known to obsess about quality of life, are very busy with *jobs* (definitions can be found in the Talmud) and community work and army reserve duty and our own continuing (dual-curricular) education, BUT, like most parents, we are never too busy to protect and nurture our kids, in body and in spirit. Kids, male and female.

Listen to this again: We care deeply about the education, personal development, happiness, safety, success, and future of our boys, and of our girls. We expect our girls to become productive, active, educated, helpful members of the broader community, and we invest in them heavily. Even those of us, like me, without daughters of our own. These girls will be raising my grandchildren one day, and that means they’d better be really smart and headstrong; I also hope they know how to find small objects that get wedged into the couch, which chromosomally challenged people (xy) swear have dissipated into space. But I digress.

You said in several news outlets that you would carry on this fight for 20 years. In twenty years, notwithstanding your backward efforts, the first graders that you’ve been harassing will have more education, world experience, some even military experience, and certainly more vitality and promise, than any of the lot of you highly superior grown men, scions of the true something?….I dunno, I lost you at hello.

Because we believe in our girls and the women they will become, the mothers and Torah scholars and doctors and teachers and lawyers (…here’s her card for when you get indicted re: above threat…) we will stand up for their right to a great future. We sincerely hope that more of your moderate Haredi neighbors, with whom we differ on many things but can successfully share a national space, will begin to see that they will need to choose a side here, as painful a step as that may be.

In any event, my Zealot Shmoopie, I’m not sure you understood all this about us before you started this little dance of ours. But it’s been real. See you around. But hopefully (Seinfeld fans? Care to join me?) not around me.

I predict a baby boom in Israel this Spring. That’s more mouths to feed and larger apartments to rent, but the passion of protest and the warm mid-summer night air…It’s all pretty intense, in tents.

It’s an amazing amount of unity, kind of out of the ordinary for here, and, I guess, for Jews in general. Also, Joe Average, and his wife, Lily White-Citizen, seem to have awoken from some type of cable-TV-induced coma. It’s kind of cool.

As a member of the squeezed middle class – two hard working professionals (100+ hours a week of work between us, at least) buckling under mortgages, loans, taxes, groceries and general high cost of living – I want to embrace this social awakening more passionately.

But I am cautious.

I am cautious because the protest’s center is a boulevard named after, of all things, a banking magnate. No, that’s not really why, but I thought I’d point it out.

I am cautious because I don’t understand how to lower taxes and increase government spending, and not end up like Greece (or America.) I don’t understand how to demand better conditions for a large middle-class sector without making that sector shrink, thereby increasing the numbers of real poor, which are already alarmingly high. I am not an economist, but I am not entirely an optimist either.

I am cautious because operatively, I am not sure what can be done in a country with such a huge, mostly necessary, defense budget, and with such limited local consumer power given our small population.

It is also a country whose political system routinely gets hijacked by an entire sector (the Ultra-Orthodox) that only very partially joins the work force…and a system that feeds that cycle by consistently accepting and cynically perpetuating the status quo instead of trying to encourage a growing level of interest in work among the Ultra-Orthodox themselves.

I am cautious because there is a huge amount of unsettled, less expensive land in the Galilee and the Negev regions (both within the Green Line) that the government has been encouraging young people to “settle” for a decade. Homes in these peripheral areas are far less expensive, and the value of expanding into these regions goes well beyond the economic; it goes right to Ben Gurion’s pioneering dream. The populations in these outlying areas also tend to be poorer, so having young professionals move there to help build communities and economies goes to the core of social justice.

If we are serious about all this.

I am cautious because this generation watched while the Kibbutz movement more or less collapsed, even when Kibbutzim went corporate producing saleable products. Could we have saved the Kibbutz, the very model of social justice, we, who are screaming for social justice? Are we, perhaps, engaging in a form of regret? Nostalgia, maybe?

I am cautious because there is no one clear message to the protests sweeping the country; I have asked all of the above questions to supporters and gotten very different answers, all of them heartfelt and real.

I am cautious because I’m not convinced Netanyahu is at fault, or at least, no more so than anyone else who came before him. I hope this is not some cynical ploy to get rid of him for politics while crying populism. That would suck.

I am cautious because cries for social justice need to mean it, for everyone. It better not be about feeding one’s own belly. That would suck more.

Clearly, I want this movement to succeed so we can manage the grocery bills without feeling like we’ve just booked tickets to the Riviera. But even more, I want my less fortunate neighbors to be able to afford to live without the constant, crippling worry of an empty fridge and an emptier bank account.

When I hear tens of thousands of people (peacefully!) yelling for social justice, I get a shiver down my spine, in a good way. *Here* are the Jews! Finally!

It makes me hope this new found passion (about something other than land) is real, unselfish, the dawning of something solid, unified, prophetic. Is this the conscious, caring society which will bring light to humanity? The one we’ve heard about around youth movement campfires?

Is this the first movement – revolt – in a lasting people’s reform demanding accountability of government, balanced national budgets, fair allocation of resources, an end to corruption and nepotism, a reasonable amount of reward for work, and a charitable amount of aid to those in need?

And if so, does anyone have the gravitas to carry this movement from tent to “mishkan” – i.e. the Knesset? Does anyone have the clarity to know exactly what message they’d be bringing first?

Will the Taurus babies named Justice be coming into a brand new world? Or the same old one, via a sweaty tent?

I’m not sure yet.

It smells like teen spirit, but it’s still hard to see Nirvana.