Eldest and I are flying to Amsterdam far to early tomorrow morning. See you all next week, Wednesday-ish.
posted by Imshin 18:31

Cross Country
In high school, I was on my school's cross-country running team for a while. I was good at running long distance and I liked it, but I wasn't crazy about cross-country.

Running long distance track is like meditation. Once you have found your pace, you are free. Your mind soon shuts down and all you are aware of is your steady breath, the feel of your body movements, and the sound of your feet as they hit the ground. This is true for practice. Races have a different energy, but still, the steadiness, the sound of the footfalls, and your breath, always your breath.

I didn't like team practice, although I liked running in the evenings, on my own. They told me I had good style, which I found flattering, but I wasn't really very interested. Running in school was mainly an excuse to get out of games. When they started playing basketball or volleyball or something, I would tell the teacher that I was going out to run. She was quite happy with this because she needed me for races and I didn’t come to team practice.

Cross-country races were no fun because you couldn't get into a steady pace. There were constant surprises along the route, ups and downs, sandy bits, muddy bits, sun, heat, rain (the three and a half days of rain a year always seemed to fall on race days), missing the arrow and getting lost. You never knew what you were in for. And I missed that soothing, calming, steady awareness of my breath. I wasn't really the sporty type and always felt a bit out of place at these sweaty, dusty competitive sports events. I tried to skive off such events at one point, but my teacher lived in my neighborhood, right on my route to the bus stop, and curiously she always just happened to be coming out when I tried to sneak past.

* * * *

It would be nice if life could be like track. Someone would just show us the right direction and we'd be off, like the Energizer Bunny. But life is more like cross-country. You never know what's round the next corner or over the next hill. It's difficult to build up a steady pace. You have to be alert, ready for whatever surprises may lay in your path. You can't switch off and just run.

Another thing about cross-country is, you see, that there are no short cuts and no packing it in. You can't just give up in the middle and cut across the track towards the changing rooms should you decide, in your exhaustion, that you made a mistake and this is not for you. However tough it gets, however tired, broken, wounded, and desperate you are, you must finish the course. It requires stamina and flexibility and a dogged determination. And, unlike track, it's a team effort.

But somehow most people seem to think we have a right to run track. They think normal life involves moving along a steady, foreseeable course.

People crave predictability. People need a feeling of control. But these are illusions. They do not exist. Still people try to find quick and easy solutions for complex problems.

We Israelis used to react differently after terrorist attacks. We desperately wanted it to stop and we scrambled for instant fixes, each according to his or her basic beliefs.

Now we know, and we have known for a while, that there are no instant fixes, no quick and easy solutions. Bombing the living daylights out of them, and/or forcing them all onto trucks and dumping the lot of them on the other side of the border, will not bring about the desired impact. Neither will immediate, unilateral withdrawal to the 1967 border, and/or complete, unquestioning capitulation to each and every last Palestinian demand. Sadly, our experiences of recent years have shown us that not even moderation, compassionate dialogue and willingness for true compromise will do the trick. Nothing short of our ceasing to exist will suffice.

Because, as Melanie Phillips says:

...The Palestinians could have had a state when it was offered to the Arabs in 1948; they could have had it any time between 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank was illegally occupied by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt; they could have it after 1967 when Israel offered the conquered territories to the Arabs in return for peace, which was refused; and they could have had it in 2000, when almost all the land was offered again at Taba, and to which the response was the past three years of mass murder by the Palestinians.

In the face of this realization, and the depression and desperation it elicits, cross-country running has turned out to be a good preparation for life. Stamina and flexibility and a dogged determination. And team effort.

The collective experience of the Jewish people, down the centuries, has been like a particularly harsh, never-ending, cross-country event. As a people, we have learnt tenacity and adaptability.

D. thinks the Palestinians have more staying power than us. They don't.

posted by Imshin 18:19

Melanie Phillips has a blog. Goodie. For instance

But instead, victim and victimiser in the Middle East have been stood on their heads. Israel -- whose settlement policy is wrong and morally corrupting, but that is not the fundamental issue here -- has instead been demonised and dehumanised, and blamed for trying to prevent its citizens from being murdered, a defence which is represented as aggression; while the Palestinians' deliberate targeting of the innocents is said to be legitimate or understandable self-defence. It is this denial of truth, logic and history, this grotesque moral inversion, which is driving the violence in the Middle East --which, like all such terrorism, seeks to achieve precisely this kind of reversal in public opinion, in which the Europeans and Americans between them are so hideously complicit.

Thank you, "Tom Paine", for pointing this out.
posted by Imshin 18:14

Writing aids healing. I can bear witness to this, but now it's scientific. We'll have the doctor prescribing blogging soon.
posted by Imshin 18:12

The Lord God called out to the man and said to him, "Where are you?" He replied, "I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid."

Genesis 3, 9-10 (From the new translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the traditional Hebrew text)

Last Yom Kippur I fasted to save my mother. It didn't work.

I know I shouldn't have fasted to save my mother. This was fake belief, belief for an end, belief in idols.

I didn't really believe it would save my mother. It was more a matter of being one with her beliefs. Giving more energy to her prayers. Fasting for her because she no longer could. Not that she could eat anything either.

This year I have no patience for God and His fasts.

I know recent obsessions and passions have been a way of coping, of channeling my anger and my frustration elsewhere. Because when I try to look at them and understand them, I always end up staring at my mother's photograph with that familiar block of pain throbbing mercilessly in my heart.

Last Yom Kippur I asked forgiveness from my mother in public. It took me a long time to write. I was very nervous about doing it, but I knew it had to be public. I felt I owed it to her to shout it from the rooftop. Later, towards the end, other things were said in private. I am grateful that she died knowing how I felt about her.

This year I will ask for forgiveness in private.

This year I know who needs my forgiveness and acceptance. I know who needs me to tell her that it is alright to be still feeling the pain; that it is okay to be angry; that it is understandable to be swept away with strong emotions

and that it is natural for her to be hiding from herself. But only for a little while.

Seeing as this is Yom Kippur, it would be a good idea for me to also remind her that being swept away, as a way of coping with pain, has its limits. She must remember that the only true possessions that a person has are his or her actions. She must not get lost.

Gmar Hatima Tova

posted by Imshin 12:19

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