Brilliant Idea

Next time there's a clock change scheduled, I vote that we move them by half-an-hour only, and then never change them again.

Mothers of young children unite.

Irrationally Disappointed

Well, EmaII left us to go to Auntie Em tonight and thence back to America tomorrow. So I filled out my absentee ballot for her to mail for me when she gets back (since that will be much faster than mailing it from Israel).

This means that I can no longer hope that a different candidate, for whom I actually want to vote, will magically appear. I am disappointed, as irrational as my now-lost hope may have been.

Ingenious

You know how it's really tricky to make a properly-fitting oak tag crown? It seems like no matter how carefully you measure the wiggly child's head, the crown is either too big (and falls down to the kid's ears) or too small (and perches precariously on the very top of said kid's head, constantly falling off).

Well, Israelis have it figured out. See the crown BSM came home with on Friday? (The class had a mini-Simchat Torah celebration, which I think is super-adorable.)

That's right, ladies and gents. By folding back the ends of the Bristol board (or whatever you want to call that heavier-than-construction-paper stuff they use to make crowns in pre-school) and inserting two rubber bands into the pockets created by the folded ends, BSM's teachers made a paper crown with elastic.

Israeli Boy

Aunty Em gave BSM a miniature soccer ball when we saw her on Shabbos. (It's exactly like a soccer ball, but scaled down for a pre-schooler). He did a lot of kicking it around, and a little bit of boucing it, and now BSM has started bouncing it off of his knee, pro-style. Little Israeli boy.

Show Some Love

Before Sukkos, I was commiserating with a local girl about how her family wasn't planning to do anything exciting on Sukkos since her mother gave birth on Erev Yom Kippur (and her father hates planning trips, or something like that).

Another girl from our neighborhood was sitting with us, so I asked her if they had anything planned. She smiled gently and shook her head in all warmth and innocence, saying simply, "We love our sukkah."

I've heard her father hold forth on the evils of daytrips during Sukkos. He explains with fire and bafflement and passion that Sukkos is the culmination of the High Holiday season, and its joyful holiness is embodied (shockingly enough) in the sukkah that we build. "How does it make any sense," he cries, "to go through the entire month of Elul and then Rosh HaShana and then the Ten Days of Repentance and then Yom Kippur, to finally reach the point where you can build a sukkah in which you can be fully surrounded by G-d's presence, and then abandon that sukkah to go on random daytrips??? It's better to just shorten Sukkot from a week to one day if people are just going to waste it!!!" I can follow his logic, but while his position sounds sensible, it's just not my speed.

His daughter's take on his position, however, absolutely resonates with me. A soft smile. A shy light in her eye. "We love our sukkah."

Yes. I completely understand that. I love my sukkah, too; why wouldn't I make the most of it? So this year I did a lot of just sitting in the sukkah, relaxing, chatting, reading, lying in the hammock, being with BSM without really doing much. It was exactly my speed.

Lost in Translation

Note: Hebrew has no word for it; objects are all either he or she.

Before BSM goes to sleep, he has to hug and kiss Husbinator night-night. Recently, as Husbinator prepared to go upstairs to take a nap, BSM declined to give him a hug and kiss nap-nap. Rolling right along, Husbinator pivoted and gave BSM's chair a hug and kiss nap-nap, instead. BSM burst out laughing, saying (in English), "We don't hug the chair! He is not people!"

The Israel Museum

Over Sukkot, we went to the Israel Museum. The main pull for us was the annual Kite Festival, which was cute, but less exciting than I had hoped. There were one or two professional kites, and very many kids and adults running around and occasionally tripping over each other as they tried (and about 50% seemed to manage) to get their kites aloft in the intermittent evening breeze.

My excitement for the day was found, surprisingly enough, in the Shrine of the Book. I wasn't expecting to be bowled over there, because I feel strongly ambivalent about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sure enough, the Shrine of the Book was every bit as awkward as its name implies, and then some. Yes, I'm interested in two-thousand-year-old documents, regardless of who wrote them. But I'm decidedly uncomfortable with a museum exhibit that feels like a shrine, especially when the object of said shrine seems to have been written (and very possibly respectfully discarded) by what I'd call a group of heretics.

But then I went to the lower level of the Shrine of the Book. And I saw the actual Aleppo Codex. Let me rephrase that to begin to express my excitement: I SAW THE ALEPPO CODEX!!! Sure, this document is about a thousand years younger than the "main attraction" of its exhibit, but unlike the (religiously sketchy) Dead Sea Scrolls, the Aleppo Codex comes with an approbation from the Rambam himself.

Let me try again: I WAS IN THE SAME ROOM AS THE ACTUAL TEXT THAT MAIMONIDES USED TO WRITE HIS SEFER TORAH. I am blown away. Seriously blown away. Rambam copied his Torah scroll from the actual book that I was looking at. I TOUCHED THE GLASS CASE OF THE SAME BOOK THAT RAMBAM USED TO WRITE HIS SEFER TORAH. I'm still totally blown away.

Also, if you happen to find the huge chunk that went missing some time between 1943 and 1958, you should probably let someone know...

Speaking of the Aleppo Codex, when I was trawling the internet for links for this blog post, I came across a three-minute video. Here there be Drama.

Winterizing Vehicles

I don't think we really "winterized" our car in America. Today's synthetic oils work just fine across both winter and summer temperature ranges, and snow was rare enough that we didn't need to put on snow tires/chains or load up the car with kitty litter, sand, and salt.

Since moving to Israel, we've winterized two cars. For the first (no longer in our possession), we figured out how to close the driver's window before the rains started. Currently, we're getting the headlights on the Mazda fixed. The headlights started to be unreliable in the summer, and have only gotten worse, but we do so little night driving that we've been able to avoid dealing with it. Now with the rainy season coming on and sunset getting earlier, it's time to "winterize our car", Israeli-style.

Instructions

My kibbutz-buddy Shoshi sent me these instructions from a pepper grinder on Friday:

"To use: remove the cover, turn over the jar, turn the grinder counter-clockwise. If you don't own a clock -- try both ways."

Rosh HaShana Foods

I'm convinced that Israelis aren't trained properly in wordplay. I can't remember each incident, but on the rare occasion that I pun in Hebrew, Israelis seem to be impressed rather than chagrined. This has happened often enough that I don't think they're just being nice, either.

There was that time we were making clay lamps, and one of the women complained that her project looked more like an elephant (pil) than a lamp. Being a good little member of my punning family, I kindly told her to just add the letter tav, and then she'd have a wick (p'til). Ba-dum, chick! Correct response fro the crowd would have been appreciative (or pained) groans. Instead, I got a resounding "Pssshhhhh!" (Yeshivish noise for being duly impressed.)

Since incidents like these keep happening, I'm less and less sure that people are just being nice, or even that they're actually impressed by my surprising (and erratic) grasp of Hebrew. I honestly think Israelis don't pun.

Take Rosh HaShana simanim (auspicious foods). OK, we eat apples and honey for sweetness, and fish head to be like the head and not like the tail, but many special foods are straight-up puns. Black-eyed peas are rubiya, which is punning distance from "many", so we eat black-eyed peas for many merits. Gourds are kara in Aramaic, which sounds like the Hebrew "tearing", so we eat gourds for evil decrees against us to be torn up. Jewish tradition encourages people to make up their own Rosh HaShana auspicious foods, and my parents aren't the only one who serve "lettuce, half a raisin, celery."

Olives came up as a topic of conversation at our Israeli hosts, and the father asked, "But what would the prayer associated with an olive (zayit) be? It took me a few seconds, but I got there reasonably quickly, "Play with Yiddish, and do something with zees (sweet)." That's when I discovered that he wasn't actually expecting an answer to such a difficult question.

Thus, when someone at the table suggested eating horseradish (chazeret) with bananas (banana), I wasn't surprised that no one even tried to think of a fitting prayer. Granted, it's a ridiculous combination, and I'm not sure how it came up, but you can't keep a good (or bad) punster down. So I scratched my punny bone and said "שנחזור לבנין שלם". Why don't Israelis do this? I am confused.

Orbits are Easy

After blogging about my conversations with BSM about why the moon doesn't fall down, I was inspired to go on ebay and buy a beach-ball globe. A few days after that, I saw a kid's ball printed with a (Hebrew) globe. It was cheap, BSM is currently without a 10-inch bouncy ball, and I was impatient for my little science demonstration, so I bought it.

My plan was to spend a few days explaining about various countries and oceans ("This is Israel; we live here. This is America; Bubby/Savta/Grandma/etc. live here. This is the Ocean, like we saw at the beach.") until BSM began to grasp that the ball is actually a model of the world in which he lives. Then I'd add another ball for the moon and show it going around and around the earth.

BSM found the ball and got very excited. "You bought me a present? This is a ball? It is for me?"
"Bring it over here," I told him, "I want to show you something cool about that."
BSM, being an obedient child (and excited about additional features on his present), complied promptly. As he was walking over to me, he said, "This is like כדור הארץ [Earth/globe]. Show me ישראל [Israel]? That's where we live. The blue is water."
Say whaaaaaaaaaaat???

I knew that his Thursday teacher (Israeli school is 6 days a week, and the workweek if 5 days a week, so preschools have a steady substitute once a week) started a unit on "Nations and Countries" with the kids, but she's only been there 2 or 3 times, and these children are three years old. I'm floored that she already got them to master the globe so quickly.

My curriculum in a shambles, I figured I'd do the briefest little, "See Israel. See America," and hop straight to the moon. BSM was totally cool with a smaller ball representing the moon, and he liked that it went around and around the Earth (and weirdly, that alone seemed to satisfy him about why the moon doesn't fall). However, he did not totally approve of my model: "Also the Earth spins, though! On a... On a... What's it called?"
"Axis?"
"No... Spins on a..."
"On a stick?"
"Yeah. Earth spins on a stick."

So I had to rotate the Earth while the moon orbited. Because BSM knows what's up.