The Arab-Chareidi Axis

The secular Israeli world has long lumped the chareidim and  Palestinian Arabs together, making it no surprise that MK Lieberman insisted that the ill-fated Plesner committee also deal with what in IDF slang are called “our cousins” when it came to finding a solution to “equally shouldering the burden.” The question is: 1) what actually comprises that burden; 2) whether the demand that both chareidim and Arabs shoulder a burden they perceive as not of their making might precipitate a chareidi-Arab axis.

The Burden to Be Shouldered

The burden under discussion is the cost of manning and maintaining a military-industrial complex in the barren dead center of the Middle East.

I’ve lived in Neve Yaakov (a northern Jerusalem suburb) over the Green Line for the last 30 yrs,. When I first moved here, I didn’t even know what the Green Line was, but I did note that as I drove to town daily to take myself to kollel and my boys to cheder that the local Arab population was and remains largely agricultural. This was all the more apparent ramping up to Shavuos when you could see Arab women in long dresses out in the fields following a man with a scythe, just like Ruth Hamoabia.

Part of the Arab-Israeli interface is that the local Arabs who perceive themselves as indigenous also see the Israelis as either part-time or potential soldiers.

We lived on Har Hatsofim in the Hebrew University dorms after our wedding and had an Arab neighbor that everyone used to talk to  because she was riotously funny.

She and her black-mustachioed man lived on the edge of the campus in a one-room house that was running with small children. She was known to dispense words of wisdom such as, “Once you’ve had a couple of children, nothing matters.” On another occasion, while carrying an infant who was clearly just nursing, she offered him a huge Arab cookie, saying “Chuli, chabibi (eat it, sweetheart),” after which she broke into peals of laughter.

Shortly after my first child was born, Chuli Chabibi as we’d nicknamed her, ran into us coming out of the building with the new baby-carriage and its first owner. She had a kid in tow then too. But peeping in to have a look at our newborn, she declared, “Just look! He’ll grow up to be a soldier and mine will be a terrorist.”

A Different Point of View

Amir Mizroch, whom I have already praised in an earlier blog posting as an able editor, impeccable writer and valid Israeli intellectual, has taken the trouble to transcribe and translate an Israel Radio interview with a member of the Eida Hachareidis Yerushalayim concerning an ultra-Orthodox take on how they see the “common burden.”

In an nutshell, this possibly atypical member of chareidi, Israeli Jewry does not see the burden as common at all. To be more precise, he does not see it as his or his fellows’ burden but rather one that is being placed upon him by secular Israeli society who have themselves incurred it.

If you are ready for an understatement, Mr. Mizroch finds this enigmatic. But from an insider’s point of view, the correspondent’s responses are self-evident.

Should any Arab nation start raining down missiles on the Jewish State, chareidim will be as likely to catch them as members of the secular sector. But before the initiation of the State of Israel, Jews are reported to have faired far better in Arab lands. The present objection to maintaining a Jewish population in Syria, Iran and Yemen for example, has not been that they are Syrian or Iranian or Yemenite Jews, but because they smell of the Zionist entity.

Similarly, I’ve heard in the name of R. Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld zt”l that until the Palestinian Arabs realized that the Jewish Zionists intended to drive them into the sea, he walked unafraid in the Arab market where they poured coffee at his feet as a sign of distinction.

This means that though Esau hates Jacob, when the Arab population does not feel endangered by a Jewish presence the communities are capable of coexistence in what may be an unsteady harmony.

An Error in Lexicon

But to return to Amir Mizroch’s very upscale blog, he suffers from what I’d like to call an error in lexicon. Very simply, he has substituted the work integrate for assimilate.

How do you integrate a whole population whose entire purpose for being is not to be integrated into anything? Whose entire way of life is dedicated to staying just the way they are? And if they are not integrated into the state, if they don’t serve, and don’t work, and they grow in size, how will we all live together in this tiny, troubled country?

What’s interesting here is not the ultra-Orthodox reluctance to become part of the secular state as that unwillingness to assimilate is a long-standing norm that precedes the any Israeli declaration of independence by a long shot. Rather the focus should be on the secularist demand that the chareidim should or must be just like every other citizen of the state.

In a larger, more tolerant framework such stubbornness would be admired. Parts of America were colonized almost entirely by religious splinter groups and the Amish, for example are to this day rather admired. What is the justification for claiming some preordained difficulty as being able to “live together in this tiny, troubled country” just because the chareidim are different?

There are a couple of stock answers on hand, one of them — attributed to R. Yitzchak Zev Soloveitchik zt”l, the Brisker Rov — is that the be and end all of the Jewish State is the destruction of the Torah. Not as far fetched as it sounds, this view can be attributed to the simple fact that the Zionist entity has no use for the sanctity of the Land of Israel and seems bent on desecrating it as much as possible.

A like opinion has been reiterated recently by no less than President Shimon Peres. Only a few days ago I got a press release from his office in which he is quoted as saying, “The State of Israel is the result of the hard work of people. Not water, not land, not natural resources.” And in a meeting with Eric Schmidt of Google just ahead of the President’s Conference on Tomorrow 2012, when discussing Israeli technological and startup success, Peres said, “It’s the people, not the land. We have nothing here, no other resources.”

Another good answer would be that Israel’s secular entity does not want to be reminded of the common, Jewish burden that its citizens are not shouldering. Every single Jewish male is required to set aside part of his day for Torah study; every man jack, woman and child in the non-religious sector is shirking his duty with regards to mitzvos divinely tailored to each of their abilities.

But probably the bottom line is that each and every member of modern Israeli society is aware of the fact that they are in the wrong.

While demanding that the chareidim join them in saving the Jewish state from the Arab residents who comprise more than 40% of the population, the scions of the Jewish state are fully cognizant of the fact that they themselves are the makers of their destruction.

By obviating every effort to preserve the distinct nature of the Jewish people they have paved a path to a point where there will be no need for a Jewish homeland for the simple reason that there will no longer be any recognizable Jews.

Accident of birth relative to a ruling minority scarcely justifies demands that the bankrupt Western world maintain a geopolitical outpost in foreign, enemy territory.

Au contraire, mon cher frère, not only are chareidi Jews an integral part of the state, medinat Yisrael cannot live without them.

When Politically Correct Is Not the Way to Go

Being politically correct is a form of flattery. And pretending to agree with what is going on is the high road to ensuring personal aggrandizement.

In Israel, where the notion of civil disobedience simply does not exist, political correctness is a way of life. Nor does anyone talk about a UK-type loyal opposition. If you’ve been foolish enough seat yourself on the wrong side of the aisle, you had better be prepared to be wiped off the face of the earth.

Really No Choice in the Matter

Given that Israeli politics is ideological rather than representational, you really have no choice in the matter. MKs simply do not have constituents. I once heard an Israeli playwright say that the way Israelis vote is akin to sexual attraction. It really has nothing to do with party platforms.

Since there are 4 separate censors in place in the State of Israel (including the military censor), it is questionable whether an independent journalist and all the more so an online news source is still morally obligated to run some risks.

I’m old enough to remember when anger was considered a positive expression of social criticism. In the latter ’60′s, Harold Pinter and John Osborne railed against the UK Establishment as the English stage adopted the European theatre of the absurd as a default vehicle, and Edward Albee and Kenneth Koch in America soon followed suit. But as poor, lost-Jew Pinter said near the end of his life, if you keep on complaining about them long enough, eventually they’ll accept you.

A Moral Obligation

Yet what I am asking is when in the course of human events it becomes apparent that an entire nation or at least a seated government has chosen a death course, don’t members of the press (or bloggers or writers or artists or what you will) have a moral obligation to scream because it’s high time to slam the brakes?

About two months ago, ahead of the Israel Presidential conference I got an early invitation to view an interactive that you can still see here. Toward the end of the interactive, you should be able to guide the conversation towards Religion.

With all of his Jewish charm, President Peres barely escapes taking a tumble at this point. Because he is a true believer in globalism, Mr. Peres seems to think that religion is a personal matter and something that can be sidelined, much as it was in American politics until progressive social issues ran afoul of people’s beliefs.

And in yet another YouTube video available at the time, Peres welcomed Eric Schmidt, and went so far as to say that “we,” i.e. Israel, are calling upon the Arab world to join us in joining the new order of the global community at large.

A Mistake Is Being Made

By denying the past and sidelining religion, Peres is as usual playing toward the American and European grandstands. He is ignoring the fact that we are living in the Middle East where religion is a hot topic, and conveniently forgetting that almost all of 16th century and most of 17th century Europe was embroiled in a religious war over the now defunct doctrine of transubstantiation.

The point is that strict adherence to Western secularism in a region that is awash with religious awakening is in itself not politically correct.

The obvious comparison would be an unmarried couple who rent an apartment in a chareidi neighborhood. They can pretend to be oblivious to what the people next door are saying about them, but it’s not going to last.

Several years ago, King Abdullah II of Jordan asked when Israel is going to begin to act like part of the region. Abdullah himself is as Westernized as even the reigning President of Israel could wish, with Georgetown and Sandhurst on his educational credits, but can be counted on to be  unlikely to act out of tandem with other Arab leaders no matter how friendly he has become to Israel and despite growing agro-economic ties.

Peres continues to pretend that peace in the Middle East will come about by acting as though Israel was an adjunct to Connecticut. It’s not, and continuing to declare as Netanyahu does that we are an  outpost of American-style freedom and democracy is not only hypocrisy, it makes this little sliver of land on the old Africa-Asia land bridge into a first-class security breach.

Some Brass Tacks

About a month ago,  The Times of Israel received elaborate praise in from Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. Given the source of the accolade, it should probably be taken cum grano salis. In light of the above, I don’t know that ToI is all that deserving.

It could be that in the specific case op. cit. ToI founding editor was actually going out on a limb when he “revealed” that the US would never ever let the Little Israel go it alone. Admittedly, at the time I also thought so. But that truth has since been backed up by an article published yesterday by Joshua Davidovich.

But in retrospect — and I will admit I have my prejudices here born of some very sour grapes — it could be that Horowitz wasn’t analyzing, just acting as a government servant.

That may seem an exceptionally cruel thing to say, but despite the fact that my FB Friend and former fellow ToI blogger Ronn Torossian complains loudly about the paltry sum spent and fluffy nature of official Israel state PR, I’d like to humbly suggest that there’s no need for any more.

An inordinate amount of time, effort and money is spent not on public relations in Israel, but rather on old-fashion, Bolshevik-type propaganda. As per above, I am a true son of the Cold War and can remember that Pravda contained anything but the truth.

The news in Israel is very carefully coordinated. That means that not only Israeli citizens but informed people everywhere are allowed to know only what the Jewish State deems not only safe but advantageous. Nor does it matter whether your reading an online Israeli or Jewish source or The New York Times or Reuters.

A case in point is the recent headline turnover from “the Chareidi problem” to the Iranian Threat. Though I personally was as glad as anyone to have the heat off our boys in black and attribute that miracle more to the passing of R. Elyashiv a”h more than anything else, the fact reactors and accelerators made an immediate reprise is little less than impressive. Even Davidovich had lamented the sudden lack of saber-rattling.

Let’s just call it orchestrated. And what we should all admit is that even though the Gov’t of Israel is increasingly short on bread for anyone but insiders, we can expect and should be aware that it is far from giving up on the effect of elaborate propaganda circuses.

Working the Secular/Chareidi Interface

As most of you probably already know, I have been locked out of my blog at The Times of Israel. That blog, as per the the title of this posting, was dedicated to working the secular/chareidi interface.

My original assumption was that though Esau hates Yaakov, this shouldn’t apply to the divide between secular and ulta-Orthodox Jews in Israel. Yet what I found is that  Jews who have been conditioned to act like Esau can be quite as bad.

Worse, in fact, as the secularized Jew now has a built-in defense system grounded in his own genetic sense of right and wrong. Once that has gone amuck, there is precious little that can be done.

And so in the length of days I lost my status as a ToI blogger due to “abusing the platform.” To tell you the truth, it has been not a little like getting fired. Not that I was paid or even enjoyed any of the perks offered, but because the whole business had a sense of purpose. I had been waiting for a platform to abuse for some time.

A Chance Meeting

There are two parts to this, both of which I’m sure I’d blogged about before, but just now I can only find one of those older postings here, the second part relating the details of a chance encounter with a non-Jew who encouraged me to communicate my opinions to others.

Coming after a long, self-forced hiatus from the Internet, this had the appearance of a message from heaven.

The second was with a fellow ex-pat who like me had a private, day school education and been an undergraduate at Princeton. But he went on to a doctorate at Harvard followed by a teaching gig at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where I did my graduate work.

I first made contact with this person over CIWI, seeking guidance on going translation rates when offered a project. This got me on a contact list, and accidentally invited to a live jazz birthday party for a friend during the three weeks from the 17th of Tammuz to the 9th of Av, when ultra-Orthodox Jews don’t listen music.

Not wanting to spoil an initiative, I accepted, causing him to write back immediately and admit that a mistake had been made. But he suggested that we meetup sometime later to chat. That didn’t happen until Elul.

The Great Divide

We met at a bakery coffee shop  on Rehov Strauss. I had hoped to lure him into home ground in Geula, but given his deference by appearing something like a fishing hat, I don’t think I could have gotten him any deeper into chareidi territory.

Our meeting lasted well over an hour, ending with protestations on his side to “do it again.” It was important, he said, for both sides to meet. Yet my interlocutor didn’t come across as wholeheartedly chiloni, having mentioned frequenting some kind of beis midrash ahead of Rosh Hashana.

But shortly afterwards, I received an email asking me to detail my beliefs. Specifically, I was asked the kind of questions pertinent to grade-schoolers.  I could easily answer all of them affirmatively.

Did I believe in divine revelation on Har Sinai? that Avraham Avinu had discovered Hakodesh Baruch Hu? all that kind of thing. And then I got a mail back thanking me for having been so honest with my answers and a link to his blog.

There my Internet acquaintance expressed his amazement — no less — that someone so enlightened could be so religious in apparent abandonment of all  critical facility. He even linked to my blog so his readers could themselves perceive my writing talent and intellectual status.

In the Beginning

Later this Princeton-Harvard graduate/Heb. Univ. professor thought it a good idea that I find a venue to continue the dialogue, being as I’m in a unique position to do it. At his urging, I wrote to Haaretz with a proposal, but never got an answer. When the ToI opportunity came along, I went for it.

Actually, I was not at all that altruistic. I was looking to get paid. Even when told ToI didn’t plan to pay its bloggers, I forged ahead. Doing something for nothing is as good a way as any in today’s market to get yourself a job.

I’d got a late heads-up from a friend who had once worked with the ToI newsroom head and later found we had several other mutual friends. The same was true of the founding editor, David Horowitz, who along with Amir Mizroch interviewed me at JPost as yet another mutual friend had advised me back then that the paper was looking for a paid content editor to cover costs of its Web presence. That jobopp fell through because I wasn’t offered a bottom line.

What the Abuse Was All About

I’ve recently tweeted that if I got tossed for “abusing the platform,” then I can chalk this one up as “mission accomplished.”

To be honest, when I picked up the gauntlet at ToI, I had no idea that it would end like this. David Horowitz’s original banner “fair, fresh and fast” waylaid me, and Ops & Blogs is still billed as “The Market Place of Ideas.”

Like many other ultra-Orthodox Jews tired of being browbeaten by JPost, Haaretz and Ynet News, I hoped for an English language news source that one could read without groaning.

Early on in Comments there were remarks that the virtual newspaper was veering left and downright anti-religious, but it didn’t really become clear for several months that the editorial board — either by personal inclination or necessity — would be pushing a politically correct, perhaps even government guided agenda of countenancing homosexuality, promoting bad religion and chareidi bashing.

Thus the premise for my blog became unwanted and even potentially dangerous for the Times of Israel and I was ipso facto “abusing the platform.”

In all honesty, as time went on I became braver and braver, finally even directly assaulting past and present Israeli governments in my zeal to right wrongs done to my kith and kin. But the final announcement from the ToI blogs editor came by Facebook Mail (of all things) saying, “I’m going to have to close your account,” short as it was, it detailed none of the above.

Rather the blogsmeister, with whom I had earlier had quite a falling out over pushing the agenda and creating an ambiance where bloggers were forced to curry favor, now accused me of “ruminations about someone’s supposed ethnicity or nationality” because I had intimated that Shachar B. Cotani might not even be Jewish or an Israeli citizen. He also voiced an objection to “an oblique — and yet very nasty — reference” to a personal favorite.

What’s Left to Do?

Having unsuccessfully networked for a new venue for my blog, I’ve settled on moving it here. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to goad anyone into action as depending on how faithful my regulars are and how much they Share and Tweet what I’ve written, I may or may not get even the minimum of 35 hits that I got on any of my earliest postings.

Moreover, my blog won’t be out there where those who most need it will stumble over what I’ve written. But there is still a lot to do.

As I mentioned in the second paragraph, this has been a learning experience;  I have been jolted out of many of the kindly assumptions that I once held near and dear. Specifically, I’ve been trained to believe in the utter innocence of the secular Israeli, whether you’d like to argue that he is a nebuch epikorus or a tinoch shenishba.

Yet the fact is that the secular Israeli has now been battle conditioned to be virulent about any attempt to bring him back to the warmth and loving care of his heritage. He also doesn’t “Like” anyone who has clung to it.

This means that Torah-true Jews are now involved in a kind of urban warfare —  members of the secular majority are just not waiting for us to accept them with open arms. And now, as a veteran of sorts, I hope to teach others how to wage it.

Sensitivity and Addiction

The connection between sensitivity and addiction is such a moot point that it is hardly worth discussing, yet recently it has become a bone of contention.

In a blog posting on Huffington Post, Russell Bishop has begun jousting with AA adherents over the fact that “My name is Bob and I’m an alcoholic,” is not an affirmative approach to the problem.

Similarly, in an amazingly well-written WSJ article, Paul Carr takes issue with the same phrase, though his problem is really a negation of extended existentialism. What bothers Carr is that one is not necessarily what one does, nor is he defined in any way by his preferences. But that is because the author is holding firmly to the right to remake himself.

But to get back to what is right about Bishop’s blog posting, is that he sees the upside of AA meetings in that it may be the addict or purported addict’s first meeting with other sensitive people of his own kind. Because these people have been roughed up, they take to drink or drugs or food indulgence to sooth themselves.

But that is a vicious circle — the more you soothe, the more sensitive you become. Wearing dark glasses even at night won’t help your eyes get accustomed to broad daylight.

Yet while Bishop proclaims that he is going to offer some “workarounds” for sensitivity, Carr complains that support groups don’t allow failures. He says he has stories of guys who have slipped up once and can’t face up to admitting it to their AA buddies, so they wind up flushing themselves down the tubes.

A Corellative

Add in to this recipe for madness another WSJ article by Kay S. Hymowitz dealing with the protracted adolescence of the American male. Ms. Hymowitz’s thesis is that socio-economic factors have created a new ambiance where the college boy/frat mentality is carried into the early thirties — an age at which earlier generations of American men had already buckled down and were deeply entrenched in raising a family.

Personally, though I readily accept Hymowitz’s description of what is going on in America, etc., I would give it a different prognosis. In my humble opinion, the lad syndrome is a by-product of the American marketing phenomenon.

In a world where marketing forces have very nearly replaced religion, a lack of social responsibility has been engendered, resulting in the exploitation of the common man as worker/consumer to a degree that can be found only in the Gothic novel and its American genesis as epitified in the works of Henry James.

The realization that other people have become a commodity to be enjoyed — if not downright exploited — is something that our society has until now successfully avoided.

This entrepreneurship of the human race is happening not just in darkest Africa (Kony 2012), or in Bangladesh brothels or even New York apartments where upscale marijuana is being grown by imported slaves. Each of us has gotten used to seeing those around us — or nearest and dearest — as opportunities for manipulation, conquest and subjection.

In short, there is what to be sensitive about.

What Can Be Done

Becoming less sensitive is not the way to beat the rap. One has to shudder when Hymowitz lists cocaine as a recreational drug. That has to be a tautology. How can a potentially lethal substance use like heroin addiction be considered recreational?

And dulling is dangerous. Several years ago, a new tact was developed for dealing with what threatens to become a rising global disease. Due to increased air pollution asthma, which kills tens of thousands yearly, is on the rise.

Since asthma is basically an over reaction to adverse stimulants, someone came up with the rather brilliant idea that, rather than treating the effects of asthma with low grade steroids, it would be better to find a way to cut off the triggers much as paracetamol and ibuprofen cut off the nerve tie that links to pain centers.

Problem is that sensitivity is in place for a reason — awareness protects and alerts. People who have had their senses hammered, whether by substance abuse or mass advertising, are endangered. This is why drunks are commonly seen walking out into heavy traffic.

How to Toughen Up

You don’t want to lose your sensitivity, if only because it is a very precious gift. But what you do want to do is to toughen up, meaning that you want to protect it.

What I’m offering here is not a workaround, but rather a direct approach to the problem since the best way to shelter sensitivities is to expose them and put them to work.

What may have lead to addiction, depression, etc., is an adverse reaction to a stimulus. Since the the world is out to destroy me, the best thing to do is to destroy myself before they do. But a burnt earth policy very seldom wins wars.

On the other hand, working through sensitivity may be not only a creative but even the correct approach.

Take a line of thinking like this: I have been gifted to be aware of things that don’t bother other people, though possibly they should. Perhaps I can find away to get them to wake up, but without shouting in their faces.

The downside of all of this is that so far you have been suffering alone. In fact, an AA slogan is “The loneliest game in town.” But if you can manage to get across to others what you see, thus getting them to comprehend what has been until now a negative stimulus, you’ll be way ahead of the game. In fact, you’ll be in the winners’ circle.

And though I can’t promise you that there will be no more pain, at least you will have found a way to make sure that it isn’t directed all that precisely at you.

New blog posting on my Web site.

New blog posting on my Web site.

Ticked Off @Kristof

Here he is, for those of you who don’t know what Nick Kristof looks like.

Suave, vaguely debonair and terrifically collegiate, Mr. Kristof is intent on bearing the white man’s burden by doing good all over Africa and the Middle East.

But, as many of his readers have tried to tell him in his comments, you really can’t help people unless you know what they need.

His latest Sunday column, Is Islam the Problem?, has won him the title of douchebag, of which Kristof seems rather proud as he has retweeted the tweet. And he himself has apologized (sort of) because the title has gotten so many people upset.

But that is neither the long or the short of it.

The article, which is of course very well written, reaches the wrong conclusion by saying that the time has come for the Arab world to stop pitying itself and get to work. But much worse is that with terrific American aplomb, Kristof brushes past the main issue in the present round of pan-Arab unrest and demonstrations.

Being knowledgeable, Uncle Nick quotes Timur Kuran’s “meticulously researched new book,” The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, to point out that Islam is neither here nor there in terms of successful capitalism. The problem is that GDP and job availability are not what all the tussle is about.

When the Muslim Brotherhood says, “Islam is the solution,” Mr. Kristof, they mean it.

What has not entered your American acculturated and trained head is that religion in the Middle East is not just a sub-sub-division of life as it is in the USA and most of Western Europe.

“The American way,” as your forebearer Clark Kent –who was also a mild mannered reporter — put it, is antithetical to Middle Eastern religions such as Islam and Charedi/Ultra-orthodox Judaism as practiced in Israel.

That is not because either of these has any kind of problem dealing with the real world or fiscal considerations, but because they dictate not only a life style but every single aspect of one’s daily endeavors from cradle to grave.

Just to disassociate them, learning Torah specifically changes every part of a person’s being. Insiders are familiar with the before and after pictures of baalei teshuva. It’s not the ponytail and earrings that are missing in the after pics, nor is it the beard and hat that are making the difference. Something has happened to these young men who have sat before the rabbis that has softened their eyes and reset their brows.

On the other hand, as I was taught in my progressive high school (and forgive me, dear reader, if I have mentioned this before) the word Islam means submission.

When an Arab says submission, he mean total submission. You can bet on that, and you’ll win. Because for a fundamentalist — and those people at Tahrir Square that you have been kowtowing with from the looks of it are as fundamentalist as anyone can get for all their democratic lip service — nothing else will make the mark.

So when they tell you that they want a free society like you have in America, what they are saying is that they want to be free like a Holy Roller is free and like Billy Graham was free and that their piety will not keep them out of public service and ultimately out of office.

Islam, Mr. Kristof, can not be cubbyholed into a free and easy lifestyle. It won’t work.

So if anyone is talking about a country where the Muslim Brotherhood or the likes of them have a hand — however democratically gained — in running things, you’d better be prepared to lower your head.

Living Right

I have had a major computer problem recently and just this morning it suddenly went away.

But over the last month I have been saber rattling trying to get rid of it and alarming every possible source that could be remotely involved (and I mean that literally) that they must come to my aid and succor.

And in the end, it was all very simple. The calendar on my computer clock was set wrong.

Get it? the time was right, but the month (not the day) was wrong.

Heaven knows how many times over the last 30 some odd days I have looked at the date and time sitting there ignominiously in the bottom left corner of my screen. I never noticed.

Granted, it said March instead of February in Hebrew — ancient language of the Prophets — but I am supposed to be an MTL Hebrew speaker.

Correct. Though I honestly didn’t know an aleph from a beis until I was about 24 yrs-old, my wife — an native speaker who teaches grammar at seminary level — says she is jealous of the way I right Hebrew. Kein hara.

But all of my adaptability to an adopted language really didn’t kick in here on two accounts:

1. I have trained myself to zero cognition of written Hebrew when it is not dealing inhouse with the Torah.
2. A commonplace, unwitting policy of blaming it on someone else.

To be truthful — as well as kind to myself — everyone pointed me in the other direction. Also, it’s pretty unlikely that I made that calendar change myself, as I never fumble with that part of the clock settings.

But I could have noticed. And I didn’t. Yet, by the grace of heaven and having must have somewhere made the right turn, we pulled through.