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.

This post is about 90% recycled from 2009. But it’s still true, so I figured, what the heck:

–

Every summer, right in the hot, soft belly of July/August, especially on thick, soupy nights like this one, I’m hit with it in the head, like the skillet of an angry housewife: the urge to play Alan Jackson loud with the windows of my station wagon rolled down, hang back on my porch at sundown, and go out drinking with the girls. You guessed that right, son – Redneck Fever.

I’m guessing I can’t be the only (sub)urban sophisticate, the lone overly-serious Jewish girl, with an occasional thing for white trashiness. Growing up in Baltimore / Silver Spring in the 80′s, I was buffered by a strong, warm, and nosey Orthodox community, but just beyond the breach in the bubble stretched vast redneck territory, and boy: the country radio was sweet, and so was the drive out to the pool where I guarded up in Reisterstown, and the trip out to Spa Lady in Timonium. And going Down-the-Ocean, or to school down in Montgomery County via US route 29 from B-more, you best believe we crossed paths with plenty of Earls and Randys.

I’ll tell you what: The thing I miss most about America, truth be told, is not the jumbo sized Mountain Dew, the tiny purse-sized cosmetics flavored like candy, or even Bed, Bath and Beyond. It’s the people. The space they give you, the space in them. Things are simple, basic, and on an as-need basis. Ain’t no right or wrong way to breathe, hon.

Take the relaxed way the locals speak, south of the Mason-Dixon, the reassuring gait out back to the truck to get another part, the walk of a man who ain’t quite sure (and don’t quite care) what the final result was of the Civil War. (Yes, I am aware – this has its downsides…) He’s got time, and he keeps his thoughts to himself.

They are probably straightforward thoughts and not historically complicated, mired in guilt, or otherwise needing of footnotes and subscripts and ardent, multi-nuanced opinions. (Perhaps for this reason, the Iroquois and Cherokee nations have not made too much of a fuss about their Nakba of 1776. What good would it do? Again – I am aware: This has significant downsides.)

But it gets me thinkin’. Where’s the Israeli ability to sit quietly with one’s thoughts? Or to separate sin from guilt, wrong from outright lost? We could use some self-forgiveness around here, some private 12oz. absolution. Calm contrition. Contemplative work. “Hell, was I wrong, but tomorrow is for fixin’. Now back to what needs doin’.” Can you hear that coming from a Levantine mouth? Can you imagine anyone letting it?

And excuse the non-sequitur, but what about baseball? Remember night games in August rained out in the 5th, beer and nachos floating down the aisles, sunburned women in yellow ponchos running to the car and thinking they’d be protecting their hair with the drenched paper program they were holding up over their heads?

Shoot, ain’t nostalgia a bitch.

And if you still had any doubt that Rednecks rock, I refer you to Brad Pitt’s long-ago but still oh-so-relevant debut in Thelma and Louise . Oh, Brad: Why the arthouse pieces that don’t make any sense? Please go back to shirtless in Oklahoma. Much obliged.

Ya’ll listen up: 10 months a year I LOVE that my argumentative, close-talkin’, fast-walkin’, dark, intense, complex, spiritual and spiritual-phobic, text-obsessed, content-driven, apology-addicted, sarcastic and bombastic, cell-phone shoutin’, hi-tech worshippin’, God-ambivalent family of Jews is who I live among, but LORD – if I don’t wish every summer for a wide open I-64 and a beat- up old Ford, some Virginia dreamin’, and a bottle of Mountain Dew so big I can hear my kidneys screamin’.

Amen.

photo by: Susan NYC

I first posted this 2 years ago…but I think it’s still relevant, so I am conserving time and posting it again. (Look at that. I’m an eco-blogger….)

***
Is a memory something you have or something you’ve lost? – Woody Allen (Spoken by Gena Rowlands (as Marion) in ‘Another Woman’)

Today we think of who we do not have and why, and then what that lack demands of us.

Tomorrow, about how we celebrate being alive to meet those demands.

Today is Memorial Day in Israel, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terror, observed here a day before Independence Day. The connection is essential since it is widely recognized that without the former, celebrating the latter would be impossible, while always hoping that one day, this will not be the case. That there will be no more names on next year’s list of the fallen. It is, in other words, a sacred day we wish with all our hearts we didn’t need to observe, and in fact grapple with its necessity all the time.

Here’s something I wrote about potential loss and war when my husband was commanding an APC in Lebanon II. I was essentially the least supportive war wife ever, because I didn’t believe in the war. I later learned, from the Disney franchise of all places, that Hassan Nasrallah was counting on people like me to behave exactly as I did. (What does Disney have to do with the IDF and Hezbollah? Think Mufasa / Scar / Simba / Pridelands / Hakuna Matata / Circle of Life… Or just read the essay.)

In any event, Israel is not quite Western and also has a very small population – death by war is not something distant and abstract, since everyone has either lost someone or knows someone who has. As such, there are no Memorial Day sales and no Memorial Day home games and no Memorial Day picnics. There are, instead (not in addition), countless public ceremonies, school observances, lots of sad TV documentaries (and little else on) and public moments of silence when traffic stops all along the nation’s highways. It’s not a case where some of the country mourns its fallen sons and daughters and some of the country shops or watches baseball.

Memory is pervasive around here, fraught. It is as much something as it is a lack of something.

The mood shifts dramatically sometime around 5 pm, as people get ready for Independence Day, an out and out celebration, complete with picnics, barbecues, parties, fireworks, etc. Much like the Fourth of July.

(But stores: Still closed.)

It seems that Israeli memory is about a conscious decision to always be remembering and forgetting all the time, in the same instant, a constant argument between absence and presence that sometimes results in the type of massive virtual memory overload that can causes one to freeze. Independence Day is, to continue that metaphor, like one big national reboot.

In truth, I sometimes miss the days of memory being something you celebrate at Macy’s, unless, of course, you had someone die in Vietnam or Iraq, in which case your day might look a little Israeli.

In any event, this silence and seriousness and restraint and celebration of life that nearly everyone does around here is very intense and it makes me want to hide some days.

But then I forget that I need to. Memory is like that.

1. I don’t care who you are, if you are white and 85 years old, you really oughtn’t wear yellow.
2. Even a five-year-old boy knows when a kiss is a *kiss*, or just…eh…a kiss.
3. What I am wearing to my son’s Bar Mitzvah: Copycat Pippa dress. The most inspirational thing about the event, really.
4. The best hats on the planet really are in shuls on Long Island. Sorry, Mrs. Beckham.
5. Thank the good Lord (all 3 or 1 of Him, whichevs) that the Archbishop of Canterbury, he of the best hat of all and the extremely somniferous voice, is not my rabbi.
6. ….Although, if I invited him to my son’s Bar Mitzvah, do you think he could wrangle some more of that Divine *silence*?
7. William got a great deal (I think K8 is Gr8) but he’d better watch out for that very chic and scary mother-in-law. (…Who could have walked right out of a shul on Long Island.)
8. The book of Romans can be hot.
9. After learning that the only way to be a king is to be born into it, one of my kids is considering beginning his own monarchy. Blue and White blood.
10. There is no way I am old enough for Prince Charles to look as old as that.

The more I live, the more I see it’s true: There are no perfect choices, no life path that is completely right. More accurately, there are various costs, and various rewards, associated with certain choices.

The economics of living has been on my mind because people keep sending me interesting links. My friend W sent me this one, about two middle aged Jewish women in the LA area who earn their very significant living on dying. The Shiva Sisters provide bereaved, wealthy Jews with meals and the other million little shiva logistics which are so comforting not to have to think of when you are mourning.

The service is obviously essential in any Jewish community, but W does it in my community for free, as a Hesed (Act of Kindness), and I imagine many other communities like mine have their own shiva committees – kind ladies in Land’s End parkas who schlep low chairs and high candles, cover mirrors, organize meals, make sure everyone knows the time of the funeral and the times the families want visitors, get the rabbi to bring by the appropriate books. Etc.

That this is a paid service for our swankier, more secular American brethren makes me sad, mostly for W, who could be a millionaire by now. But never mind. That is the price that community pays for total religious freedom and absolute privacy: They have no strict communal standards of behavior short of lawn length (wear and eat what you like on whatever day you like!) and kids do not drop by unannounced at all hours of the day to play, thereby dirtying $50,000 hand-woven Chilean rugs. But they pay for shiva, and I’m guessing every play date must be repaid in a timely fashion.

In my mostly Orthodox, middle-class, suburban community in Israel, you are likely to get soup from a neighbor if you have the flu. If you have minor surgery, you’ll get a squadron of ladies cooking your family dinner for days. Major surgery or prolonged illness, and you are looking at a brigade. W’s committee swoops in at the first sign of a mortal event (I affectionately call her ‘The Angel of Death.’)

In health, too: You will never have to ask more than two people before you find someone willing to take your 6-year-old for the weekend while you go away for a Bar Mitzvah. Small kids wander freely looking for friends; play “dates” within the community are rare because playing just happens ad hoc, wherever a mother or babysitter is home to let you in. Oreos (thankfully, now Kosher, and heavily imported) ensue. Twelve-year-old boys take the local bus to get burgers, and the street is a sea of pre-teens every Friday night, socializing in the warm evening with few concerns about weirdos and cars (very few people drive on the Sabbath where we live), and too many concerns about their hair.

All of this caring and freedom for younger kids comes with a price: Very little privacy, very little personal space, very little room to declare more than minor theological or practical religious differences – best to keep those to yourself or among very close friends. Our community is Modern Orthodox – people work in very advanced sectors of the real world (engineering, medicine, law, academia) and many of the women learn religious texts on a level that exceeds that of many of the men. Still other women walk around in jeans and a bunch of the guys get together to play poker. Most people are aware of (or even actively engage in) popular culture. We read mostly everything.

And yet, discrepancies between the genders certainly exists, and it also takes very little to create a scandal, as the borders of acceptable behaviors and utterances are quite deliberate, mostly as outlined in the system of Jewish Law and Tradition. It keeps our kids safe and earnest (reward), and keeps creative, free-thinking adults somewhat less autonomously operative than they would be elsewhere (price….although some would strongly argue: another reward.)

I have a recent example, but the local Orthodox among my readers would be mad at me for talking about it, and the non-Orthodox among you wouldn’t believe me, anyway. Let us just say that even on Purim, the most permissive day of the Jewish year, it is best to remain tuned to a Disney frequency if you don’t want to get in trouble. In general, I spend a good bit of time just trying not to get in trouble. Maybe I care too much about what people think…But as words and reactions and observations are large chunks of my job, it is hard to ignore them.

Striking a balance where kids grow up with a real knowledge of and pride in their heritage; where the community is supportive; where acts of kindness are second nature and yet – individuals have total freedom, significant privacy, and ultimate independence – is fairly impossible. These costs and rewards are pretty much at odds. I must say that Modern Orthodoxy does a much better job at balancing these values than the Ultra-Orthodox; religious coercion is certainly at a bare minimum here.

But still – one must know that communal warmth comes with communal heat, just as residential cool comes with a lonely chill.

Some choices help you fulfill your job in the world, and some help you avoid doing so. A person’s central challenge is to choose a life based on an accurate assessment of whether she can afford the price for the sought after reward, and, perhaps, to identify if the reward is keeping her at her most productive, or simply keeping her quiet.

And sometimes, a person’s job is to identify that none of it is about you any longer at all. That is a conclusion that bears an enormously high price, but hopefully, an equally high reward…apparent sometimes only later. Much later.

Ask W about the things she’s seen and heard after someone is gone, and you know it’s true. I suppose it’s mostly worth it.

God Goes Home: In Search of Spencer Ollopa
By M.A. Kohl

Abnormal Psych. was a super course. It was Spring Semester of my Junior year. The professor was old and eccentric. He told lots and lots of stories. He liked to teach outside.

So we discussed Personality Disorders under a huge Willow, an expansive shelter that kept us firmly in the shade. On Borderline Personality Disorder day, it rained, just long enough to thoroughly soak the grass. We stayed inside that day.

I mention this because it was in this particular course, on that peculiar rainy Tuesday, that I became friendly with a guy named Spencer Ollopa. Spencer, like me, was not a Psychology major. He was taking Psych. as a minor. His double major was Marketing and CompuSci.

After graduation, I took my English major and used it for many weeks as a very effective place mat. When the stains started to bug me, I took a trip to Williams Sonoma. And when my lack of a graduate degree started to bug me, I did a painless Master’s in English Lit. in medical school years.

Spencer, on the other hand, went on to get his MBA and then a Masters in Computer Science. His MBA thesis was called: “Putting Your Ear to the Ground: The Future is Here.” (Maybe you’ve read it in paperback.)

It’s a story you already know: Many geeks and an IPO later, by the early Spring of 1998, Spencer Ollopa, Founder and CEO of SearchMe.com, was richer than almost anyone else on the planet.

*****************

“There’s something off about the whole thing, something vaporous and intoxicating,” he said once, intoxicated. “It’s all…too invisible for my taste. I’m waiting for the big bad wolf to blow it down.”

This was back in the magic months beginning 1999. I was out at Spencer’s house, visiting an old pal. He’s the kind of old pal you make sure to keep in touch with.

I had followed Ollopa outside to his veranda, a drink in each hand. He has an overwhelming view of the San Francisco Bay. I could have stayed up there forever, just watching the lights, watching the moon in the water. Then I turned around and looked at his sprawling home. It was all glass. From a few hundred feet away, one could almost not see it at all.

*****************

I called him a few months ago to see how he was doing since the Internet turned rabid. I wasn’t really asking about Ollopa.com, just Spencer.man. Although both were kind of piquing my interest, if the truth be told. The company was being remarkably secretive. He invited me out to the house to talk about it. I tried not to say “Oh, so you still have the house! Thank God!”

I asked if I could do a piece on him while I was there. He said, a bit puzzled-like, “Of course…That’s what I thought you meant. Come anytime after New Year’s.”

*****************

The fabulous glass house is still standing when I arrive, although the wolves Spencer spoke of have been circling for a while. His sister opens the door, greets me warmly. I’ve met her before, a few times, briefly, and as I recall, she’s Spencer’s twin. They look nothing alike, if that’s your next question. She’s a knockout, all lips and legs and great skin. (No offense to pale, sparsely featured Spencer, of course, but the gods were certainly patriarchal in their aesthetic triage here.)

Selena says she’s in the process of moving and Spence is letting her crash. I see her as more of a human filter for unwanted contact.

Spencer strolls down the stairs in a pair of Teva clogs that he brings in from Israel. He could not move any slower unless he were moving backwards. His shorts and shirt are breezy off-white linen, billowing from his body, which is now considerably more sinewy than I remember. He’s lost weight. A lot of weight. He hasn’t shaved in two days, maybe more.

I ask him if he is dating Calvin Klein.

Spencer laughs. “You’ll never let it go, will you? I’m straight for God’s sake. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s just not me. Good to see you, Mak, by the way. Hi, Hello. Welcome.” He laughs again. He looks strange.

It hits me: He’s happy.

*****************

I confront him on it later, over a drink. He had obviously been waiting for me to ask. He’s ready with an answer, dives right into the thing. “I am happy. I am here, you see? I am HERE. The whole damn world fell all around me at the end of last summer, and kept falling. People were – are – going insane. And I’m just not into it somehow…” He sounds almost apologetic, that he can’t muster any more grief or apprehension. It is, after all, his universe we’re talking about, but he seems more than a little detached.

It seems that Spencer had anticipated this plunge into hell, more or less. He had been stabilizing, quietly, slowly, for quite some time before the bottom of the Earth fell out from under Silicon Valley.

“So once,” he begins, out of nowhere, “My CFO is pouring Maalox into this big mug and sipping it like Chardonnay, and I am looking around, doing some quick math in my head, and I figure that whatever happens, everyone in that room would still have somewhere to live and something to drive, and there will still be a company of some size. And then about one minute later, I’m thinking how even that is beside the point, although the point, I can’t quite say what it is. I’m just sitting, in my suddenly huge chair, staring at everyone, they’re all sweating and on the verge of massive coronaries, and I’m wondering: Is this normal, you know, for people to do this? To be this? It was this quick, funny thought – like – I was watching them in the zoo…”

I regard Ollopa with new interest, stare at him a bit, which he doesn’t seem to mind, although I’m trying not to be obvious about it. This man is not nose-to-the-ground Spencer from Abnormal Psych. This man is all eyes. This man looks older but better, handsomer.

He also looks a bit… religious? I ask him about this, but he closes his eyes. God, or Whomever, is off limits.

I spend the rest of the day with Selena.

*****************

Now he’s in a talkative mood again, and he starts right where he left off yesterday, with no introduction whatsoever. “There was something about that day that just totally blew all the bullshit out on a breeze. It disappeared. You know? It’s like, when I tuned back into the conversation my execs were having in there, it was like a foreign language. Like they were on one Earth, with one set of rules, and I was on another, with very different ones, and I didn’t mind so much, being on mine, just I felt bad that they hadn’t jumped over with me.”

Ollopa has come up with a name for that moment: He calls it his founding. That has a nice corporate feel, I tell him, hoping he’ll elaborate. He doesn’t. But he does tell me that he’ll always be Spencer, whether he’s “colonizing the Internet or settling his soul.” I ask him who he’s been to see and where, but I’m up against the fog again.

This kinder, gentler Spencer says nothing else all afternoon. He’s reading a book, John Updike’s The Afterlife and Other Stories. He closes his eyes every now and then, leans back into his lounge chair on the roof. He’s built a solarium up there; As long as the sun’s out, it’s the warmest, most soothing – down to your every muscle and bone – spot on the planet. (If I had one of these, I wouldn’t need the rest of my house. Or food.)

Once again, I talk to Selena about her work (she’s a record producer between projects) while she makes us margaritas in the middle of the afternoon. I could get used to this.

Spencer hasn’t spoken for hours, but his presence is deafening. He seems to be enjoying himself here doing nothing. Did I mention he was unemployed?

*****************

The rest of the story went something like this: Spencer looked at the room full of “dying shell-people”, and started to laugh. Still laughing, he got up to hug every executive in the room. This, he mentions, did nothing good for the rumors about his sexual orientation, or his sanity, but then, he really doesn’t care what people say. That much has always been true about him.

(We settle for sanity, he told me once, back in college, but we don’t have to – settle, or settle. I’m still not sure I get it, but it comes back to me now, as I write this…)

He told them all to go home. To watch TV and to rest and to be with their families. He’d have something to tell them by morning. Please be downstairs in the gym at ten. He sent an e-mail out to sixty other key employees, telling them the same. He called the gym, asked the manager to clear out the equipment. To put it in storage. He wanted a big empty room with carpets and mirrors by morning.

*****************

Ollopa’s top people were sitting on the floor cross-legged in seven rows of ten, a strange tribunal of elders convening under the not-yet burning temple. It didn’t matter that all the facts were not yet in, he said, or that much of the world still thought the ‘net was spread evenly under them. He pretty much knew how the story would end, and sooner than anyone thought.

Here’s what he said, more or less:

The good news: Every one of you still has a job, although there will be some re-sorting and re-shaping of what those jobs are. Be prepared to do stuff you haven’t done since school. This is not true for everyone in the company, so please treat this as good news.
The bad news: Most of you are no longer millionaires and probably will never be.
And more good news: We will survive better than almost any other Internet company, if you people can exit the bubble before it bursts completely.

Spencer launched his re-organization crusade with this:

It’s not over, but it will never be the same.

*****************

So it was written, and so it has been done: SearchMe held on to most (not all, but most) of its upper-mid to high level employees, kept on consolidating its resources, and ultimately carved out a niche for itself on the unraveling web. (See “SearchMe’s Second Page”, page 235.) In a slimmer, more streamlined, less generous cyber-world, portal, product, and premium were taken very seriously, very early by Ollopa. It saved many asses, although, the way he arranged it, not his own.

After putting his house in order these last few months, Ollopa met with that same tribunal of elders on what he says was a freezing day during the recent holiday Season (isn’t California supposed to be warm? Who told me that?), and handed over the reigns to Deb Wolf, Rick Hill, and Ted Marcus, his “tried and true triumvirate of corporate sanity and humanity.” (He told me to quote him on this.)

And then he took himself off the payroll.

He’s just there for moral support, he says, to lend his brain, to occasionally adjust the jib when he can feel the wind changing. He says that he doesn’t want to drain the company of any more money to pay himself; he also feels that his best contribution has already been made, and that he does not want his “old ego-ambition” to kill the company now that it is weaker.

Part of his late summer restructuring last year involved reallocating his old salary to the R&D department, a move he feels might ultimately be the thing that keeps the company, if one can pronounce this sentence without crying, “if not profitable, at least alive.”

*****************

Ollopa must be the world’s most famous intern, other, of course, than Monica Lewinsky. He still goes to work a few times a week, in his Teva clogs, and he “does what needs to be done, meets who needs to be met”, even attends executive meetings, helping “as they want me.”

He’s moved from Luke to Obi Wan to Yoda in the blink of an eye.

“Yoda, huh? Funny you are, Michael, in things which do you say…ha ha … I guess so. That’s what I feel, a bit, now, is old. In this very weird way, because I’ve never felt more free, more like a little kid. I have no where else to conquer, to fix, to do, except in here, in my own space. For example – I’d like to travel, to see things, but I don’t feel like I have to read five books on Italian Renaissance Art before I visit Florence. I don’t feel like I need to be head of the committee to save Venice to go to Venice. What for, you know? I feel like I can just go and visit Italy. Do you know what I mean?”

I am starting to get it, I tell him. That you can feel old – ridiculously old – at just turned thirty. But he, at least, has the advantage of also sounding wise.

*****************

Later, I ask him the inevitable, about the money, the stuff. He tells me that he still, of course, has the house and its contents (which are sparse and lovely and plenty expensive) and two SUV’s, but he’s sold much of everything else, including a plane, a loft on Central Park, and a time share in South Beach. He kept the yacht and the helicopter.

He’s a rich guy, but he might not make any headlines ever again. Ask him if he cares.

I have one more question for Spencer. We’re still up on the roof. It’s getting dark, and now it’s kind of cold in here, and San Francisco is flickering – literally – around us. I forget I am cold. I have no desire to ever leave.

It suddenly occurs to me that Selena might be here now because she was using one or both of those apartments Spencer just sold. She nods, smiling. It’s cool, though, she says – she has her own house in Seattle.

She looks at Spencer and neither of them elaborates further. He just seems genuinely glad to have her here with him. These two and their looks are making me wish for a twin. They literally don’t need to speak.

By the time I get to my question, at the end of the looks, I feel like a bit of an outsider, like my time here is, actually, done.

Damn.

But I ask it anyway: Is he lonely, now that the madness is over? Is enlightenment enough?

“You mean, why is my sister here, and not a woman? No offense, Le-Le. You mean, if I’m not gay, and not busy running the world, why am I not part of a couple, a family?”

That’s what I mean. Selena looks at me quickly.

“I don’t know, Kohl.” Ollopa looks around, looks up for a long time, looks at his feet, looks at Selena: Telling her it’s OK I asked. That I got.

Before I can congratulate myself on this breach of their psychic placenta, I hear him mumbling, “I’m glad there’s something I don’t know.”

**********

From: Michael A. Kohl [maksomething@juno.com]
Date: Wednesday, January 19, 2001 3:30 PM
To: Ken Bogan [kenbo@empiremag.com]
Subject: RE: Ollopa Profile – Attached

Ken –

Here it is, attached. It was a great trip…Thanks. Spencer has changed so much since college…I’m not sure you’d recognize him on the street. He still has that voice, though…Remember? That Nicholson voice. It’s fantastic. But now it doesn’t go with his personality like it once did.

He’ll be in the city next month and wants to get together with you. Said he’d call you. I’d believe him now.

BTW, Yes, I’d love to come up and interview Sandra Dylan for Empire’s August issue …Gee, Thanks Ken! Maybe God likes me after all? Or is it just that you do?

Why do I feel fifteen when I think about calling her manager? Do you remember discovering your manhood in front of Ivy Leaguers? I saw it 25 times. Ahhh, Sandra. I can’t believe she’s turning 40! Yikes!

Anyway, thanks.

Best,

M

**************

From: Webmaster [webmaster@braintoys.com]
Date: Wednesday, January 19, 2001 8:17 PM
To: Hands_Solo [hs2000@hotmail.com]
Subject: RE: Your e-mail of last week

Michael:

Hi. Well that certainly was an interesting e-mail from your drunken depths. lol. Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you…Things have been busy at home.

Glad you felt you could trust me. I’m really sorry that happened to you. I don’t know what else to say…It was a shitty thing your ex did.

I’m sorry if that thing I brought up about choosing our circumstances has got you going a bit nuts…I really didn’t mean to excavate anything…lol…Or maybe I did? Maybe fate has thrown us together to excavate everything? Maybe we chose to speak with each other for a reason? Now I understand why the mental institutions are so full. Once you start thinking like this, where does reality begin?

Anyway – what I wanted to tell you was – Don’t let your ex off that easy…she created this mess, also, you know???

You know, I woke up this morning with a lot of energy – now what to do with it all???

- Maya (The non-artist formerly known as NB)