14/10/94

The Land of Misconceptions

They think everything here is religious; theyג€™re wrong: itג€™s political.

    The first time my grandmother visited Eretz Yisroel, she was shocked to see people smoking cigarettes, even in holy Jerusalem.
    When I first came here, I was dumbfounded that not everybody understood Yiddish.
    Israel is the Land of Misconceptions.
    You call this a Jewish state? It's the only place on Earth where the bagel is not a Jewish food. Even if you can find a piece of lox, the bagel you put it into is baked by Arabs.
    A nice Sunday brunch of a corned beef on rye is another example: a Jewish favorite found only in Christian countries. There's no corned beef to speak of, absolutely no rye bread, and the crunchy dill pickle on the side is neither crunchy nor dill. And no one knows from brunches because there's no Sunday here, it's just a Monday a day early.
    A radish salesman makes a fortune, drives a Mercedes, lives in a villa, and everyone respects him. A professor? That's not a job for a Jewish boy in Israel. (You ever hear of the radish salesmen going out on strike?)

    An American Jew comes here, gets hungry, looks for a nice meal. You think he's going to step into a Chinese restaurant? Of course not: in America that's staple Jewish food. Here he's looking for his roots, so he eats felafel, shwarma, tehina and other fine Arab foods.

    (Maybe you remember this Jerusalem Post story from a few years ago: our food critic noticed a sign on the door of a Tel Aviv restaurant that read "Sorry, no more cholent." The place was famous for its cholent. He stopped in to enquire. The owner of the restaurant explained that the recipe was in fact a secret known only to its Palestinian cook who couldn't come to work from Kalkiliya anymore because of the intifada.)

    Over there, Jewish penicillin is chicken soup; the closest thing we have to that here is Vitamin P, which is not what you eat but who you know.

     Everywhere else we thank God that Kahane's boys defend us from the enemy; here, we throw them in jail for doing the exact same thing.

    Everywhere you find a Jew, they're waving our flag and dancing our hora and singing Hatikva and pushing coins into a pushke box to build the Zionist state. But here? Only the Jews living practically on the Jordanian border wave an Israeli flag. Nobody dances a hora. When Hatikva is played on TV we shut it off. And pushke boxes here are in support of the anti-Zionists.

    Over there, a Jew is a Jew -- but he's not a fanatic about it until somebody calls him a Jew, which is antisemitism. But no matter how bad things get, he knows there's one place on Earth where he can go and be a Jew without being called one.

    But here no Jew is a Jew, he's an American or a Swede or a Brazilian: he is what he didn't want to be anymore, what he came here not to be but has become rather than what he came here to be. (If you read that a couple of times you'll see it makes perfect sense.) People just don't walk around this country saying "Hello, I'm Bob and by the way, I'm Jewish." 

    Only in the Jewish State can a person call someone a Nazi and get away with it, because only here can a Jew be antisemitic.

    Out there, the denominations range from rejectionist to Reform to Conservative to Orthodox; here, we go from rejectionist to Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox to rejectionist.

     There, the synagogue is the hub of Jewish life, a cultural and social center where some people sometimes also pray; here, if we even know where the synagogue is, we go to pray, period.

    There, an influential rabbi is a spiritual leader they look up to; here, he's a political leader we look out for.

    Misconceptions abound. There, a religious Jew is a religious Jew if he looks like one, and that's that. But they think that here is where it's at, spirituality-wise. Here? Hah! Nobody is just "religious." If I tuck my pants into white socks and you use a hairpin to keep your kipa on then you're not fit to break bread with. If I don't tuck my pants but I have an untrimmed beard and I wear a brown frock and a fur-lined hat on Shabbat I would never speak to my daughter again for marrying the son of a man who doesn't tuck his pants and has an untrimmed beard but wears a black frock and a fedora on Shabbat. Mind you, this is only true among people who are avowedly not clothes-conscious.

    Depending on where you're from, a yeshiva is a sanctuary for young men evading either seduction or induction.

     It's no better regarding the secular. In the Diaspora they think our kids have values, that no one does drugs, no one drives drunk, AIDS is unheard of because no one here is homosexual, there are no Jewish prostitutes and random murder is a thing only goyim do.

    They think everything here is religious; they're wrong: it's political.

    A Jew who can't make a simple million dollars: only in Israel. We're lousy businessmen, but terrific warriors.

    Overseas, we're the People of the Book, but actually, we'd rather watch TV.

    They think Tel Aviv, the First Modern Jewish City, is Jewish.

    Funniest of all is that once a year there's always at least one planeload of misconceivers who spend all that money to come and get a nice all-Jewish suntan in sun-baked Israel on exactly that day that it snows.

WE have news for the Gentiles, too.

    Christians come to the Holy Land. They go to the Via Dolorosa and don't expect it to be an Arab marketplace. Manger Square is a parking lot. Bethlehem is a dusty Arab town, not as it appears on Christmas cards. Nazareth, that revered center of Christianity, is half Jewish and half Arab.

    For that matter, half the Arabs are Christian, and half the Jews are Arabian.

    The Chinese used to believe that Israel must be a vast country because we wield such influence over America.

    American Jews think they wield influence over Israel. We let them think it.

    Visitors come to marvel at this bastion of democracy, and don't seem to notice the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity in action, government by the people, rule of the majority or, for that matter, buses operating on Saturdays. They finally find democracy at its best when they tour a kibbutz, the world's purest form of communism.

    (There is logic in that which only we can possibly understand, for how many purveyors of Israeli democracy actually come from democratic countries? Our politicians come from places like Poland, Russia, Iran and Morocco; not from Switzerland, America or Australia. Well, okay, Samuel Flatto-Sharon was a Frenchman.)

    Everyone thinks the Mossad is in on every secret from Timbuktu to Tuktoyuktuk; we wonder if perhaps they've disbanded.

    The world thinks it's a magnanimous gesture that we're giving back Gaza.

    They think we live in terror of terror. Frankly, I worry more about Jewish thieves than Arab terrorists.

    They're outraged at our mistreatment of the Arabs; we're proud of how much we hold back.

    They think the Jews and Arabs can make peace. We know we can't, until the Jews can make peace with the Jews, and the Arabs with the Arabs. (It should be recalled that not even miracles ever got us to agree on anything: God was able to split the Red Sea, but couldn't unite the Jewish People.)

    That brings us to dear old Mrs. Fields, whose concept of the Land of the Bible is as misconceived as it can get. I met her in 1985, when I went to Boston to represent my country in the North American Scrabble Championships.

    When I sat down to play Mrs. Fields, a black church-goin' Bible-thumper from Mobile, Alabama, she smiled politely and said: "So where ya from, honey?" It was a casual question, because she did not know I was the first-ever foreign player at their championships. "Jerusalem, Israel," I said, nonchalantly.

    She (practically) blanched, gawked at me, eyes wide as saucers, and exclaimed: "My, oh my, I never imagined people actually live there!"