Playpen on Wheels

It’s still hot in Tel Aviv, but it’s a waning heat, as autumn comes, no longer the intensity of the shirav, the thick heat that I once felt in the gold souk in Dubai, which literally melted my intentions to do anything but hunt for air con and cocktails.

We’re driving north again to an area past Netanya, where, on holiday Friday, a series of art exhibitions are being held in suburban homes, a novel idea and one that feels very community driven. 

Our first stop is a backyard shaded by a very old pecan tree, a beautiful and wise old thing that stretches its lazy branches over a few tables, cushions and rugs and the trestles set up with jewelry, pottery and the like. Turkish coffee is available and I naturally partake accompanied by some delicious homemade poppy seed pastries.

Our friend and host’s parents are supporting her as she makes a few extra dollars from her excellent baked goods – tough times for a social worker. Her father is a professor of comparative Jewish literature, has written several books, and whose expertise is in Jewish medieval folklore. 

He tells me he is working on a book on 13^th century Jewish women in Germany. How at that time Jewish females were so subjugated that there are almost no texts written by women in that era, especially not in Hebrew, which of course was not a spoken language then. “The language a mother speaks to her child is the language of the culture,” he tells me. Indeed. He also tells me that Christian women at that time who felt repressed and needed to individuate would get themselves to the nunnery, or the monastery, and there were able to write. 

Thus arose the quite significant body of text and poetry written by Christian women in the Middle Ages. Some scholars have argued this was the first recognizable flowering of feminism in the world, allied to and in fact sprouted from faith. But here, with the aid of modern technology, the professor is searching out and piecing together the ancient conversations of these significant Jewish enclaves.

Folklore as well as religion is what grounded and threaded the Jewish faith together through the Diaspora, (as well as food!) and after Rabbinic Judaism created a religious mandate for literacy in the 8^th century or so, requiring all Jewish males to learn Hebrew and to read from the Torah, literacy and education became the template for the advancement and indeed survival of the Jews.  The Torah also forbade Jews from agricultural pursuits, a career still somewhat looked down upon. 

So the written word in the local language, then in Yiddish and later in revived Hebrew, gave the Jews, even when abused and segregated, an advantage in the many lands throughout which they were scattered – in business, law, accounting and record keeping. But at that time it was the boys who did that – the women, were in the kitchen, and always with a child at the breast, one in the oven, and several more by their side.

It’s Shabbat dinner now and we are in a very smart apartment north of Tel Aviv. I am talking to a great grandmother, ninth generation Jerusalemite, who herself however was born in Alexandria in Egypt after the Ottomans expelled her family and a majority of Jews from the Holy City before WW1, which the Turks subsequently lost to the Allies.

This remarkable woman speaks about nine languages including Arabic and Italian, and Yiddish, a language almost decimated by the Holocaust when about five million of its speakers perished. She speaks fluently in English to me, just shy of 90 years old, and with a still-sharp scholarly eye for life’s details, but when she talks disparagingly about her Sri Lankan maid, I hear a particular arrogance that is indeed racist and unkind. I like the woman so much I don’t want to hear this, but it is what she does, and it is revealing.

Education in Israel is exemplary, but as my girlfriend tells me the education bubble is bursting. There are people with Masters degrees working in Hungry Jacks, and people studying religiously for obscure doctorates that are unlikely to yield work. Israelis – Jews, like to work, they work hard and always have, but now times are tough, thus the protests recently, social workers baking cakes to afford a little extra lifestyle and scholars working in menial jobs to survive.

Next day in Dizengoff Street in central Tel Aviv, I see again as I have several times before, a wooden playpen on wheels being pushed down the sidewalk with five toddlers gurgling within! It’s a great sight, and something that apparently comes from Kibbutz life, where the vistas however would be more nurturing perhaps for the little ones than the heavy traffic and often gruff citizenry passing by in central Tel Aviv.

As in all places the business of education is paradoxical and fraught. How do you both maintain culture and tradition, language and the invisible glue of community, while seeing far enough ahead to give breadth and depth to a young person’s vision of the world? To disenable the narrowness that leads to cultural isolation, religious intolerance and fundamentalist practices. In Israel, as in Tehran and Texas, the battle for the minds and hearts of the young continues.

On Face Book a friend posts this, quoting Buckminster Fuller; "Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction." Indeed.