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Respecting the Edges - Same-sex Adoption

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Waiting for an explanation as to how I could say such a terrible thing, my girl-friend looked at me horrified. She had said that after the Israeli courts decision to oppose same-sex couples adopting, she was thinking about leaving the country for good. For her it was the last straw on a high stack of daily injustices, frustrations and mishaps which come with life in Israel. For the record I openly state that I fully support same-sex couples adopting children, but my comment required some explaining. “I’m glad I live in a country where same-sex couples are not yet allowed to adopt.” I had said. And this is what I meant. In this day and age when the gates of liberalism have been flung so far open that there are no longer boundaries or constraints on almost anything, I am glad that in Israel, we still have healthy debate around important issues like adoption, abortion and gender pronouns. Almost daily I am shocked by what floats across my newsfeed. I am shocked that
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Big Girl Undies

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Don't come out until you've been wearing your big girl undies for more than a week. My girlfriend, a mother of four, and I always joke about how compatible we would be if only we were gay. She doesn’t mind folding the washing, I quite like to cook and we get along like a house on fire. “We could just bring a gorgeous young Jamaican guy to come visit a few times a week,” she suggests playfully as we sip on our rose water tea and dream about our little shared shack on the beach. The thing is though, that I don’t really like men with Rastafarian dreads, and she doesn’t like them groomed and clean shaven. Pity about that. Though it’s taken me a lifetime of being in my big girl body to know exactly what I do and don't like. So when a twelve year old comes out to her family and community about being gay, trans or cyber-gendered, I would suggest she return to the drawing board of her fertile imagination and wait a few years until she really knows who she is
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We are all Wonder Woman

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There is a clip I shared on Facebook showing the mother of the disgusting specimen of garbage who killed twenty three year old Hadas Malka in cold blood last Friday, saying, “I wanted him to succeed, in killing twenty, fifty, one hundred of them (Jews). Thank god, I am proud.…” A friend of mine commented on the post saying, “I feel nauseous”. The chasm between the two mind-sets is obvious. Though I am not generally one to talk in absolutes, this difference between them is as vast as that between good and evil itself. That the obvious has to be stated; that Jews and Muslims are neither good nor evil, speaks to the profound stupidity accompanying this generation of university and universally educated and their accompanying quasi-journalist. But what is fundamentally true is this, Jewish mothers feel nauseous at the very thought that any mother would be proud of her child for having killed an innocent human being in cold blood, because she believes he will be rewarded in the wo
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Location: Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
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Taglit - A Missed Opportunity

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I admit to being a little arrogant when it comes to wearing the 'mother' archetype and I am entirely comfortable adding Jewish to the equation. Never more so than when I am out in public in Israel. Somehow I feel that every child is partly mine and while I'm not one to tell other mothers to cover their babies naked heads in the cold, I have been known to pat one or two as they pass by.  I found motherhood relatively easy. Actually that's a lie. I found motherhood excruciatingly difficult, even to this day. But it does come naturally to me. As a very young mother I was very confident. I was determined enough to breastfeed while many gave up easily, confident enough to handle my newborn without help and gutsy enough to go up against the established norms of the day declining mandatory immunization. My blood pressure was low enough for me not to be a helicopter parent and my faith high enough to trust that my kids were fine, even if the road was often and litera
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Location: Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
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Seven Years of Famine

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In my opinion and from my experience, when it comes to making Aliyah, it takes a family three years to get their bearings and seven years to integrate. Children do not pick up the language in a few months, unless they are two and learning to talk, and even with the assistance of Waze, after seven years I still get lost trying to negotiate my way through the complex and decayed socialist systems of Israeli bureaucracies in all their rotting glory. Spiritually speaking, I have taken a dive to the mirky bottom of hopelessness as I look towards a future where the gap between the have's and the have not's seems to grow exponentially larger, like the government debt collection agents punitive tax on those who have fallen through the cracks of a system seemingly designed specifically for that purpose. It is almost impossible to survive in this country without a foreign income, unless you are privileged and intelligent enough to work in the high tech sector, or are either a busines
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Aliyah Anniversary

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This March marks our family's four year Aliyah anniversary, and much as I hate to admit it, in some strange ways, Israel is starting to feel like home. As I drive from our home town of Zichron Yaakov down the winding hills through Binyamina and on to the flatlands of Pardes Hanah, I now recognise fields and landmarks as if I had grown up amongst them. I know how to avoid the morning traffic and still get to the bank on time. I know the shortcuts and the back roads, and I know the one way streets even though the inadequate signs are covered with overgrown foliage. That old familiar feeling of knowing an area well enough to give directions, in Hebrew, to strangers who suddenly stop in the middle of the road, oblivious to the seven car pile-up they have caused behind them, sits comfortably in my psyche. When I arrogantly dare step onto the pedestrian crossing and confidently march across the street, admittedly risking my life but more importantly disregarding the shock I inevitably ca
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Natalie

You all know the story of the old man who walked along the beach picking up starfish that had been washed up onto the sand and tossing them back into the ocean. A young man stopped him and said Are you crazy old man, there are thousands of starfish along the shore, do you really think that your tossing them back into the ocean one at a time will make a difference? The old man bent down, picked up a star fish and tossed it back into the ocean. He looked at the young man and replied To that one, it just made a difference Natalie is sixteen. She lives with her boyfriend and his family in a 'block' in Pardes Hanah. A 'block' is an apartment building, but 'apartment' is too luxurious a word to describe where and how Natalia lives. There is no elevator in her building, no lights on the landings between the six flights of stairs that are littered with used clothes and electrical goods that no longer work. There are no paintings on the landings, no balconies, no plants
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