Another year, another wish

A friend of mine, an English teacher here in Modi’in, posted a very amusing, and very interesting status update the other day on Facebook. She wrote that she had confused a lot of her students when she told them that she “would see them next year....and that she wasn't coming back until next year”. Neither this friend nor the students at the school where she teaches are religiously observant, and she was amazed at how insignificant the secular, or more accurately Gregorian New Year is in Israeli culture.

This concept fascinates me. While there are the standard New Years parties in some of Israel, it really isn’t such a big deal as it always has been in America.

Interesting side note – in Israel, New Years is called Sylvester – ironically named for an extremely anti-Semitic pope and subsequent saint who lived and reigned in the 4th century CE.

I was never so into New Years, even when I lived in the States. I go to the parties, sometimes, because any excuse for a party was good enough for me. But essentially it didn’t really matter to me so much – other than having to remember what year to write on the dates of checks, papers, etc. Other than that, nothing….

But growing up in America, New Years was a big deal. The sales, the New Years Resolutions, the “year in review”, and so on and so forth.

And even though it never really “grabbed” me so much, I do like the idea of taking stock of the past year while looking ahead to the coming one. Yes, that is a big part of what we do during Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year), but living in the “modern” world we do relate to the Gregorian dates, and we do remember things that happened according to the non-Jewish years, so I guess it makes sense to take stock of this kind of year as well.

I started 2010 looking for work – just like I’m ending it. In between I worked for nearly 11 months at a company which had a lot of good things to it and I gained a lot from it, but I wasn’t a bad thing that it came to an end, and as I mentioned in this blog, I have a lot of high hopes for new things to come up very soon.

This year saw my kids grow tremendously – they are at the ages when a year makes a world of difference. Our older daughter, Revital, has been having the best year socially since she started grade school, and we have gotten to see her blossom, and Limor, our 6-year old is developing by leaps and bounds and is every day developing into such a special little girl.

There is a lot that I hope to be able to say by the end of 2011 – I hope that I have a better control over my temper, which sometimes gets the best of me (I’ve been working on that a lot, and plan to continue). I hope to finally get myself both serious and consistent about losing weight.

Obviously, I would love for 2011 to be the year that I can turn my recently-found passion for writing into a full-time endeavor - whether in the professional realm of work, or with the blogging, or whatever. The more I write the more I find that I need to write.

My hope for myself, my family, my friends, and everybody is that 2011 is able to be a year of continued growth, loving, learning, and living life to the fullest. May we all be able to look back on 2010 with warm memories and smiles, and look ahead to the future for even better.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Doors close and doors open

As of a couple of weeks ago, I have been unemployed.

It wasn’t really much of a surprise. For a while I hadn’t really been happy at the job, and I knew that the new manager wasn’t so happy with me either. I had actually been planning to quit within a few days, but essentially they beat me to the punch.

I would have preferred it be on my terms rather than theirs, but that’s probably more an ego thing than anything else.

The big disappointment actually came a few days after I left the job. I had been in negotiations for another job for quite a while - one which I believe was “custom-made” for me, and when I had the third meeting with the CEO (one day before I was let go from my job), he told me that this was moving forward and he really believed that “it was going to happen”. So I was fairly confident that things were on their way to working out.

Until the following week when the HR person called to tell me that the CEO had decided to re-evaluate the position and what exactly he expected from it. This, after several months of meetings, phone calls, and high hopes.

So I’m back on the proverbial market, and the truth is that I am pretty optimistic. There are a few tourism-related positions which I have seen advertised and to whom I have sent my CV. I have also sent my details to a number of positions which I have seen which would (if I’m hired) allow me to turn my newly-found love of writing into a full-time career.

I have also been toying with the idea of going freelance – writing, translating, and the like. I have a few ideas for freelance niches where it seems there is a need, and I believe that I would be able to meet that need pretty well.

I am especially attracted to the flexibility that freelancing would allow me and the time that I would be able to have with the kids.

To that end, I bought a used laptop computer last week (this is the first blog – or anything else for that matter, which I have written using the new/used computer). It’s my first laptop, so I’m still in the “learning what the hell I’m doing” phase with it. It’s not a great computer, but it was very inexpensive (a couple of people who know about these things better than I do agreed that the price was very reasonable), but it should be good enough to get me started. I am hoping that if I can get myself up and running as an independent this will make a big difference.

Of course, any leads from friends will be greatly appreciated, but all in all, while one chapter of my life has come to a close, I have a feeling that a lot of options and a lot of opportunities are right around the proverbial corner. Hope is springing eternal, and I look forward to sharing good news with you all very soon.

The day the train was late

My train was delayed the other day. By a little over an hour.

That's always a pain in the ass, and usually a good excuse for me to get upset at IsraelRail, or anyone else that I can blame for disrupting my day so inconsiderately.

But then they made the announcement explaining the delay and apologizing for it, and I found that I really couldn't stay angry or point a finger of blame anymore.

It turns out that somebody committed suicide at the station in Herzliya, about 4 stations before mine in Tel Aviv, and that was delaying north- and south-bound trains while the authorities were dealing with what needed to be dealt with.

A couple of people who were also waiting were half-joking with each other about how inconsiderate it was (and a couple of others made a comment to that effect on my Facebook page when I posted the status update about what had happened). They asked "why did he have to do it in a way that's such an inconvenience to others" If you want to kill yourself, do it quietly – at home, out of everyone's way…"

I couldn't bring myself to say that – or to even think it. Instead, I tried to understand what would make a person kill themselves in that public a manner.

Now, of course, I'm not a psychologist (and I don't even play one on TV). I took a couple of psych classes a lifetime and a half ago at the University of Maryland, and the most I got out of that was learning all about Classical Conditioning / Pavlov's Dog.

So, although I am far from being an expert on the human mind, like many people, I do make a regular practice at trying to understand people – in my own non-professional, non-expert fashion.

So I couldn't help trying to figure out this suicide at a train station which threw the schedule of hundreds, in not thousands of people out of whack.

I've heard it said (as most likely we all have) that a suicide attempt is a cry for attention and for help. If that's the case, then I would imagine that the person attempting suicide does not to succeed, only to send out the message.

So what does that say about somebody who does do it to succeed? Especially in such a public manner that affects so many others who didn't even know the person?

The only thing that I can think of (and again, I cannot emphasize enough that this these are the thoughts of an un-trained layman – anybody with other insights to the question and ,ore experience than I have are more than welcome to share their thoughts), is that the person is going out with a message to the world.

Rather than the message of the failed attempts of "help me!" this message is more along the lines that "Not only do I have nothing to live for, but in my life I saw myself as a nobody – because I went un-noticed by the world. Maybe I won't be missed after I'm gone, but at least for this one brief hour or two, I will be noticed. I will have an effect on other people's lives".

Not only am I not a trained psychologist with no "real" experience upon which to base this assumption, but I also do not pretend to be a mind reader, and I don't really presume to understand what goes inside somebody else's head. The best I can do is to try to imagine myself in that situation and to guess what would drive me to such an act.

Unfortunately, since the person who did it last week is now dead, there is no way that we can ever truly know what he was thinking, why he chose to end his life or why he chose to do so in the way that he did.

All we can do is to try to be more sensitive to those around us and more aware of their calls for help – whether they call be more obvious or more oblique and implicative.

We can ensure that those in our lives always do mean something to us – always can affect us – hopefully for better rather than worse. In doing so, we can not only help prevent people feeling the need to be noticed at all costs, but we can also make it so that the same people haven't given up on life to begin with, or on their role within that life.

Rather than getting home that day at 2:00 in the afternoon, I got home around 3:15. It really was a pain in the ass, but in the big picture it was nothing compared to a person who felt that his life was so irrelevant, or helpless or anonymous that suicide was his only way out.

I'm happy to give up an hour and a half of my time any day of the week to be reminded how much I love living and that I actually do matter to some people. I wouldn't trade that for anything.

Celebrating the Milestone of Milestones

This week marks a very special anniversary of sorts for me – and it's one that I get to celebrate / commemorate at 3 different times.

It was 9 years ago this week – by the Hebrew calendar it fell on Tuesday, by the Gregorian calendar it will be next Wednesday that I moved into a new reality for life – that of being a father.

Not just a father – but a Daddy, an Abba.

That isn’t to say that it's been all fun and games. There is no shortage of times that she can really drive me crazy, and there's no shortage of times when my parenting "skills" (and occasionally the lack thereof) leave more than a little to be desired. But in the bigger picture, I think there have been far more happy times than sad, loving moments than angry ones, smiles and laughter than tears.

You've seen that t-shirt / bumper sticker / coffee mug, right? The one that says "Any man can be a father, but it takes a special someone to be a Daddy". I never appreciated how true that is until my daughter was born.

Actually – not even then, but rather several months later when she started developing and showing her own personality and I was able to relate to her as a little person rather than a pooping machine.

She was born on Shabbat in the afternoon, the weekly Torah portion read that morning in synagogues around the world was VaYeshev, which was the portion we just read this past Shabbat. It was funny how the Torah reading brought back memories, because it was of memories that weren't there – the day Revital was born I didn't make it to services to hear the Torah.

Sharon had gone into labor on Friday night after Shabbat dinner. I think it started around 10:00 or so, but she didn't wake me up until the pain started getting bad at around midnight. Since we had been very attentive students in our Birthing Class, we knew that it wasn't yet time to go to the hospital – it was time for hot bath, timing the contractions, timing in between the contractions, practicing breathing properly (Sharon, too…) and massaging her lower back ant various times throughout the night.

Somehow in the morning, Sharon had a long enough "quiet" period so I was able to say my Morning Prayer service – obviously not going to the synagogue that morning and finally at 9:30 Shabbat morning, the signs that we learned in our Birthing Class were there and we called an ambulance (we didn't have a car at the time) and we checked in to the hospital at about 10:00.

Then came the waiting.

And then…more waiting.

Then I went down for some lunch in the cafeteria, and hit the hospital synagogue (one of the things I love about living in Israel is that there ARE hospital synagogues) for the afternoon services, then back to Sharon, for some more waiting.

Finally, she was dilated enough, and I won't go into all the gory details, but at 3:20 Shabbat afternoon, I was given my daughter to hold.

All of the stories you hear about the power, the beauty, the magic, the amazing overwhelming emotions of holding your newborn for the first time – for those who have yet to experience it, I can tell you that they're true.

Then they took her away from me.

It is standard procedure here to put all newborns in an incubator for a couple of hours, especially when the birthing is a little out of the ordinary (again – no details, but they performed a vacuum birth) so off she went, leaving me and Sharon alone with a little time to catch our breath.

Now we had time to discuss what we were going to call this little peanut.

We didn't know before the birth whether the baby was a boy or a girl (fortunately as soon as she was born we were able to figure it out pretty quickly), so we had a couple of names at the ready (although Sharon's condition for the names was that she kept the right to change her mind if she didn't feel that the name "fit".

The girl's name we had pre-picked was Revital, which means "saturated with / an abundance of dew", and after looking at her we decided that the name fit – she "looked" like a Revital. But we hadn't even thought about a middle name (very American of us, I know – no matter how long I'm in Israel, there are still some very American things about me).

So now was the time to talk about it. Sharon asked what the Torah portion was that Shabbat, and I had to think about it for a minute since I hadn't been to synagogue.

Then she asked me what happened in it, which was also a challenge to remember. But then I got it – one of the "highlights" of the portion (there really is a lot of meat in this particular one) is the story of Tamar and Yehuda (Judah).

It's too long a story for me to go into here and now, although it's a great story and I encourage you to glance at it yourselves – Genesis Chapter 38. The bottom line is that Tamar is one of my favorite personalities in the entire Torah. In my opinion, she's a woman who sees the clear difference between right and wrong, and will first give others the chance to do what's right with her, but if they don't do it, then she takes the initiative and pushes them into doing the right thing.

The added significance is in her name, which means date palm. The date palm grows in the desert – where there is almost no water, yet it grows very tall, very strong and bears a very sweet fruit.

So too Tamar from this story. She grew up in a place without much "water" which is a common analogy for Torah – meaning that grew up in a place where there was not much righteousness, or fear of God, yet she was strong and upright, like the date palm, and she also bore the sweetest of fruit. According to Jewish tradition the line of the Messiah is descended from the union of Tamar and Judah.

When Sharon and I talked about this, we realized that we had the perfect middle name for our daughter.

There is an idea among some Jews which one of my rabbis once taught me that the naming of a child is the only form of prophecy left in the world.

We name our children either for people whom we want to remember, or with names that have some kind of meaning that speaks to us. When we give these names, we are essentially wishing for our children the traits represented by the meaning of the name or the person whom we wish to remember.

For Revital Tamar, our hope for her is that she should never know lack of water – that is to say always have an "abundance of dew" and that like her biblical namesake, she may grow up upright and strong, with the sense of right vs. wrong and the courage to do what's right – no matter what the risks.

She may have looked like a Conehead for the first few months (courtesy of the vacuum birth), but we wished – that her head is in the right place to see and do what's right – no matter what others say and think.

One last note – regarding both Revital and our younger daughter Limor. They were both Chanukah-season babies. Revital was born 2 days before Chanukah, and Limor 6 days after it. So the holiday that began tonight is the time that both of my girls came into my life. And like the candles of Chanukah, they continue to give our lives a shining light.

The darker a place is, the brighter the light in it are. No matter how dark things sometimes seem around me, these two little lights make everything as bright as a sunny day.