Allison pointed out this post, by Laura at 11D. She says maybe blogging is not going in the direction we were expecting.
posted by Imshin 23:12

Karen Alkalay-Gut about living and creating in Tel Aviv. I especially love the poem at the end of April 1st.
posted by Imshin 23:04

Guess what? I made Story of the Month on Cafe Diverso for April. That means my story will be on the home page all month. Scroll down, it's at the bottom.

It's called Why was this night different?

An excerpt:

Why was this night different?

Mum sat quietly smiling at her place by the big, festive dining table Bish and I had set out in our living room for the evening. She was so tiny, so fragile, no more than a shadow of the plump bundle of energy we had always known. She had been diagnosed just three weeks before, and even though the chemotherapy she would be starting, after the Passover holiday, gave us hope, I think we all knew deep inside that it was the last Seder Night she would be with us. Little did we know that by the end of the evening, Seder Night would have changed forever, and not only for our family.

Every year in the spring, on Seder Night, the whole extended family gathered to retell an ancient story of how our ancestors were freed from slavery in Egypt, to embark on a journey into the desert that would eventually lead them to the land of the Fathers. Religious and secular alike, on the first night of Passover, Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora took part in telling the story to the next generation. The sages of old had bequeathed a memorable way of passing it on.

You can read the rest here.
posted by Imshin 10:08

Preparation for Yom HaShoah
My youngest’s class will be responsible for the Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Day) ceremony at their school this year. I personally think they are too young, it’s usually done by the fifth graders, who are a year older, but the teacher thinks it’s a good idea.

They began the preparations a few weeks ago with a trip to Yad Vashem’s branch in Givatayim, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. They were shown a film about Auschwitz and a writer came to talk to them. I asked Bish to go with them, because I know my little one is sensitive to the subject of the Holocaust and I just wanted one of us to be there.

Yesterday was the second stage of the preparations, a workshop at school with the parents. One of the parents, a history teacher, talked to the children about Nazi ideology. I thought this was a very wise choice, which helped the children put the Holocaust into some sort of historic and philosophic context. Children in this country are bombarded with difficult imagery and rhetoric from a very young age. It is important for them to understand that there was an idea and logic (however warped) behind the incomprehensible evil.

After this we split up into little groups of children and parents, and talked about how the Holocaust touched us personally. This we tried to express visually by making collages.

After breakfast, we were fortunate enough to be able to listen to a wonderful woman called Hannah Gofrit. Hannah has written a book for children about her experiences as a child in the Holocaust. The children had all read her book and the whole session was just her answering their questions. But what answers!

The children tended to ask very specific, technical questions about details that they hadn’t understood in her story, such as ‘How did you breathe when you were hiding in the cupboard and in the sack of potatoes?’ And out of these simple questions she conjured up for us a very powerful, compelling image of what her life was like – the deprivation, the helplessness, the fear, the mental exhaustion, the minute by minute struggle to survive, for years.

She spoke so wonderfully, with such strength and optimism, without even the tiniest hint of self pity, that it didn’t really register with me at first, the horror. Hers is a story of survival.

When it hit, it hit hard.

Her answer to how you breathe in a sack of potatoes – when you are a child hiding in a sack of potatoes, you become a potato. And potatoes don’t breathe.

Cross posted on Israelity)
posted by Imshin 10:00

Okay okay, so it’s not as bad as it sounded yesterday. A person is allowed to have a bad day.

Luckily my art class was great last night. My fellow students probably thought I was a raving lunatic, I was that weird (or maybe just silly). But I really didn’t care. I’m actually a bit embarrassed to say what I did. It sounds so silly. I’ll only say that I spent part of the lesson sitting on the floor completely wrapped in cardboard wrapping (I’m blushing just to be writing that).

If I was all artsy fartsy I could say it was the artist being the art or some rubbish like that. Our teacher said it was a pity she hadn’t brought a camera, but that wasn’t it at all. I wouldn’t have done it if there was a camera. I wasn’t acting. I wasn’t attention seeking. I was playing.

I think that as we grow older we forget about playing. Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s like Picasso who, I have read, reached perfection at the age of twelve and spent the rest of his life learning how to draw as a child.

We have to learn how to play again. When we were children it came naturally, we just did it. But we have lost that natural ability, shed it like an old skin, and it was left discarded somewhere along the path, unwanted and unneeded, or so we thought.

When I say playing, I don’t mean pretending to be children and ingratiating ourselves on any kids we happen to know, although some people are good at playing with kids without any pretending, like my Bish. I’m not, but mind you I wasn’t much good at playing with kids when I was a kid myself. It’s not that.

And I don’t mean playing games, with set rules and teams and clearly stated goals. It’s not about winning or even about ‘participating’. I mean playing free, with no aim, with nothing to gain, just for the fun of it. Just because.

And that’s what I did last night in my art class. I couldn't understand why i was so happy, then I remember thinking to myself "Hey, I'm playing!"

So why did I keep wanting to apologize that I wasn’t sitting nicely by the table and creating something that could be seen and touched, something that I could take home to show Bish?
posted by Imshin 17:53

More thoughts on the decision to not grant citizenship to the children of foreign workers.
Government policy is rarely unaffected by bureaucracy and the government finds it hard to get anything done if the bureaucrats are opposed. Remember that excellent BBC series ‘Yes, Minister’? It had us rolling on the floor in hysterics, but we could just have easily been crying and pulling out our hair in despair. It was so painfully realistic it was tragic.

When Bish was toting his law draft around the relevant government ministry, the elected policy makers were all for it. It was the “professional” bureaucrats that torpedoed it. One of them in particular had no problem at all to lie through his teeth to get it thrown out, simply because it made him look bad.

My strong feelings about this subject probably stem from a personal place. It's always personal.

Recently, I’ve been feeling disillusioned and depressed by my fifteen years in one particular corner of the public service. I don’t usually talk about this here, and I probably should just keep my mouth shut, but I am so utterly fed up. I used to believe my work meant something, that it was beneficial to society.

I’m not sure if things really have got so much worse or if it’s my eyes that have now opened wide enough to witness the general laziness and lack of interest, the ineptitude, the stupidity.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s all just (un)healthy (but) normal mediocrity. Maybe instead of lowering my expectations I’ve been raising them far too high, for reasons connected not to my workplace, but to blogging and to the insights it has presented me (so much for the joys of being aware). Maybe it is a new and perhaps misguided confidence in my abilities that is pushing me to demand more not only of myself but of those around me.

Whatever the reasons, these strong feelings of dissatisfaction have been stifling my ability to express myself lately. I’ve got to get out of this bitter little rut I’m stuck in and get on with things.

Maybe I need some of that bureaucratic indifference myself so I won't be upset by it all. There seems to be enough of it going round.
posted by Imshin 19:32

I spent the afternoon reading Nathan Alterman's play "The Ghosts' Inn". I haven't read it since high school. Powerful stuff. I didn't really understand it in high school, but even so I was very moved by it.

I'd like to say something about it right now, but I'm not sure what. I think I'll just go and wash my hair.
posted by Imshin 20:47

The Horror of Bureaucratic Indifference.
Someone I know is privy to the inner workings of a ministerial committee that grants and revokes licenses to those wishing to work in a certain profession. On occasion he has commented on the arbitrary fashion in which the committee members vote to revoke licenses, unaware or uninterested in the fact that they are taking away these people’s livelihoods, sometimes unfairly, sometimes just on a technicality, destroying small businesses that have been painstakingly built up over years.

It’s not that they are bad people sitting on this committee, my friend explains to me. They are good and well meaning. It’s just that they never take the time to think of the implications of revoking a license. They don’t really regard these hard working professionals, struggling to make a living, as real people.

For many years the committee had no representative of the professionals it was discussing, and ultimately judging, among its members. They saw no need for such a representative; they were not really interested in the point of view of the people they were dealing with. In recent months, as a result of much lobbying, a representative has finally been appointed to the committee, revolutionizing its work purely by forcing its members to see the consequences of their bureaucratic indifference.

On Friday evening Youngest (at the ripe old age of nearly ten) observed that she didn’t like this country. She said she liked the way the country looked and this was home and she didn’t see herself living anywhere else, but she didn’t like the way the people behaved. I was unhappy about this observation, until Bish commented to me quietly that Youngest had been very upset by the item we had just been watching on the news about how the state had decided not to grant citizenship to a limited group of children of foreign workers, who had been born here, who had grown up here, and who were now between the ages of ten and eighteen. I must admit it had upset me as well. Maybe I too am not proud to live in a country that behaves in such an inhumane way.

Bish pointed out that the decision didn’t stem from racism or from wickedness. He said it was just indifference to the fact that these are real people, real children. Not numbers, not statistics.

It was apparently the Ministry of Finance (dear big hearted Bibi Netanyahu) that was opposed, fearing it would be costly, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade, who feared it would complicate things for them in some way. God help us.

Well, I don’t care why the decision to treat these children like human beings was turned down or by whom. I say it’s time to stop this and just do what's right. These kids have grown up Israeli and now they're our responsibility.

There are only a few hundred of them for goodness sake, a few thousand at the outside. And it's not as if they're only out to use the state. They will do their military service, they will work and pay income tax. They will raise families to love this country. They want to be here, not to ruin us or use us, but to be a part of it. They get dressed up in fancy dress in Purim, for goodness sake, even though they're not Jewish. So what if they don't qualify according to some law. They're just as Israeli as everyone else they grew up with.

Update: As always, Alisa has interesting observations:
Imshin, the two issues are not the same. Although there is very likely a considerable degree of bureaucratic indifference involved in the handling of the issue of foreign workers' children, we should not forget that the question whether to let them stay is a question of policy. I tend to agree with you (albeit very reluctantly) that they should be allowed to stay, but that is really for the politicians, not for the bureaucrats to decide.
posted by Imshin 14:51

home