5/7/99

He comes here looking for logic?!

Who needs these kvetchy new immigrants with their wild ideas of utopian logic?    Like this guy I met, Aaron Weil of Ra'anana.
    He made aliya five years ago. He lands, sets foot on our holy tarmac,  and already starts to complain. Just because the ID card he was given at the airport identifies his wife as "Jew," but him as "Not Registered." 
    He raises an eyebrow at the clerk, and he is told "don't worry, yihye b'seder."  An official of the Israeli government is assuring him that everything will be OK, and it's not enough for him. He has to argue.
    He is shown the door.
    Well, word must have gotten around about this Aaron Weil, because the Interior Ministry gets on his case. It confirms that he is a citizen, but not Jewish.
    Aaron feigns surprise.
    He shows our loyal civil servants his ketuba, which, they point out,  proves nothing except that his wife is Jewish.
    But you can't blame him for trying.
    His mistake was probably admitting that he's from Greenville, North Carolina, which has a Jewish population of 40 families. Our bureaucrats are perfectly aware that the odds of a Jew immigrating from Greenville are close to nil.
    He says that "as a former employee of AIPAC and the Council of Jewish Federations, a past president of Hillel on two university campuses, an  allocations-committee member of my local federation and a volunteer sales trainer for UJA, I was stupefied by Israel's refusal to recognize my Jewishness."
    Our noble rubber-stampers give him a chance to prove himself. Show us a letter from the rabbi, they say. Aaron gets a letter from the rabbi -- in Hebrew, even. OK, they say, so you got a letter from the rabbi, but ... aha! It's not rubber-stamped, so it's not official.
    So you know what this guy does next? He resorts to protektzia, shuffling off to a senior official at the Prime Minister's Office he happens to know, and this guy gets on the phone and hollers authoritatively that this Aaron Weil is Jewish. The phone calls lasts about as long as it takes to perform a circumcision, with the same result: he is suddenly, undeniably, Of The Faith.
    Now that he's Jewish, he thinks he can gripe about Israel like the rest of us.
    He wants to see all the banks lined up and shot, and with them, the credit card companies. Our beloved banks!
    "I wanted to move my account from Bank Discount in Tel Aviv to Bank Discount in Ra'anana. The manager told me I merely close my account and reopen it there."
    Aaron comes up with this bright idea: why don't you just press a button on any one of the thousand or so computers in the branch, and transfer the account?
    The manager looks at him like he's crazy, and reminds him that this is not America. You have to go, wait in line, redo all the paperwork. 
    Aaron tries to reason with this. (Can you imagine?!) "But -- if I have to close my account here, and reopen it there, I might just as well open it at any bank in Ra'anana, including your competitor!"
    The manager nobly responds: "Suit yourself. It's a free country." 
    Obviously, Bank Discount had enough of Aaron Weil.
    Then, he says, the ATM ate his credit card "again." (Obviously, Visa had enough of Aaron Weil too. But he's still not getting the message.)
    "I had to go all the way to Ramat Gan and ask for it back. Why can't the Ra'anana branch of my bank handle that, you ask?  Because, in Israel, one of the most advanced countries in the world, where I can send an e-mail to my mayor to report an animal carcass on my street through the city's Web site, banks have not yet figured out how to share information between branches.  
    "I spoke with Visa and they recommended I ask for a new card. The logic is like this: To print a new card and deliver it to the bank should take a week. If I try and get my original card, that should take three weeks. 
    "It took a moment or two to absorb this. After I got my bearings, I took a shot at this Eastern Bloc logic myself. 'I've got it,' I said. 'Why can't I just report the card stolen and then I can get a new card in 24 hours?'  'You could do that,' I was told, 'but because it wasn't actually stolen, it wouldn't be right.' "
    Faced with good old fashioned Israeli honesty and integrity, Aaron resigns himself to the system as it is, and spends a morning traveling to another city to fill out forms. So? He came here to be Israeli, right?
    Next thing you know, he's picking on our God-given right to charge too much.
    "I opened an account at Blockbuster, and asked how their prices can be so high considering all the competition. The guy behind the counter just shrugged. I then noticed the display of candy, chocolate and popcorn -- at exhorbitant prices. I asked the guy, 'Do you know you're much more expensive than the makolet on the corner?'
    "He looked at me for a moment and then said: 'Look around you.' I looked. The store was jam-packed with consumerism-mad Israelis, filling up on high-priced junk food and trashy movies. And the guy grinned at me and said, 'See! It's working!'" 
    As a true-blue Zionist, I resent this guy taking shots at Blockbuster.
    Then he takes on the IDF.
    "When I got to the army, the great bastion of non-linear thinking and the civil service's only true competitor for bureaucracy, waste and, to put it mildly, creative logic, I was astounded again."
    You can guess what happened. After completing basic training, he's interviewed to determine the profession best suited to him. He answers lots and lots of questions, and it's clear, at least to Aaron, that the last thing they'd do is make him a driver.
    They make him a driver.
    Welcome to Israel, Aaron.
    Aaron?
    Are you still here?