Getting Up With Fleas

There's an old saying: "Lay down with dogs. Get up with fleas."

That's pretty much the way I feel about Glenn Beck as a spokesman for Israel and the Jews. If we go to bed with him, we'll wake up with fleas.

I don't really care if he talks the talk and walks the walk. Our best friend for life? I don't give a flying Ferguson and I'll tell you why: Public perception of Glenn Beck is that he is a nut case.

No matter how sterling his words and deeds as they relate to Israel and the Jews, by pledging our troth to him, Israel and the Jews can only tarnish their image. And if you take the time to research the guy, you will find that his words and deeds are NOT sterling. Not in the least.

Take a look for instance at the following clip in which he repeats the old canard that the Jews killed Jesus (even though we all know it was the Romans). Pay close attention to the hatred in his face at 6:45.


Then there are the racial slurs for which Beck is well known. Wish I had a clip of him insulting Asians on the radio. Luckily, a clip does exist of Beck telling really fat people they should just die.


Or how about his lack of sympathy for survivors of 911? Did you think they were sacrosanct? Beyond censure? Not to Beck.


Not that it matters. Because public perception of Glenn Beck is that he is a certified nut job. That's my perception of him as well. As I watch and listen to him my "nut-job antennae" begin to go, "Bleep, bleep, bleep," as they pick up signals of at least mild lunacy. That's aside from the actual content of what he says: a gut-level reading.

But again, it doesn't matter what I think or what you think. It only matters that to the public, Beck is a nut job. You've all heard of guilt by association? It works with other social ills and traits. If you associate with Farakhan or say, "They don't make 'em like Father Coughlin anymore," that's going to brand you with a certain label because these are people who stand for certain (repugnant) ideas. That would apply in equal parts to (ahem) people who have a history of long association with Reverend Wright.

Not long ago, I was assigned an article on the topic of metamathematics, which is the application of mathematical theories to non-mathematical problems: If Glenn Beck is offensive and strange, and Glenn Beck likes the Jews and Israel, ergo, the Jews and Israel are offensive and strange. Simple as that.

If Glenn Beck really cared about the Jews and Israel, he'd stop aligning himself with them, because all he can do is harm their cause. Which proves his motives are less than pure, IMHO. Can you spell "Rapture?"

I think the Jews and Israel DO need a spokesperson. But that person must be squeaky clean. Beyond reproach. No skeletons in the closet. Israel's spokesperson has to be respected by Democrats and Republicans alike and Europe has to like him/her, too. And oh, yeah: it can't be someone Jewish.

I can't think of anyone who fits the bill. For awhile I thought that maybe Ileana Ros-Lehtinen might be that knight in shining armor. But no. She's got Jewish roots. She is supportive of Scientology. *sigh*

The upshot is that maybe the Jews are just going to have to rely on themselves for now. As Hillel the Elder said, "Im ein ani li, mi li?" (If I am not for myself, who will be for me?) If every Jew will consider that he is an ambassador for his people, that would be an excellent start. Of course, part of that ambassadorship involves being worthy to inherit the land on a daily basis.

April Fool's Day

Yesterday, I was quaffing my first morning cup of coffee in a desperate attempt to wake up and face my usual Thursday marathon. It's a killer--I bake challohs and cakes and still have to generate food for my brood and slug through the laundry. That would be fine except that I also work for a living. I try to churn out at least 3 articles a day.

So there I was dosing myself with caffeine and going through my inbox when I came upon a digest from one of my yahoo groups: the Israel-food list. It is rare for me to weigh in on threads there or pose questions. It's just not my focus these days and I've been thinking about setting this group to "no mail."

But I made a quick scan of this particular digest and something truly weird caught my eye: a thread that began with Mirj Weiss' request for recipes to trick her husband on April Fool's Day.

The suggestions were DISGUSTING and I found myself rolling my eyes. Meatloaf with a hotdog in the center so that each slice came out with a neat little round of frankfurter in the middle. Meatloaf "cupcakes" with mashed potato icing. FEH. I was SO grossed out.

At any rate, I finally moved my duff out of my office chair and into the kitchen to put up my challoh dough. I was slugging through my cooking tasks (when will I ever be able to just take my time cooking and really enjoy it instead of rushing through things and feeling pressured to get to something else??) and got to the point where I was grating garlic cloves on my microplane for our lunchtime meal of chicken fajitas when I grated my thumb.

Nothing new. I'm a klutz, pure and simple, and I'm always cutting and grating myself, sometimes to the point of needing stitches. I managed to bandage my thumb which was bleeding like a stuck pig, but we had these really low-quality bandaids (won't buy those again) and they kept falling off every time I washed my hands.

Now one cannot cook without washing hands. It won't work. And I really don't want to have rubber-glove flavored fajitas which would be the likely result were I to wear gloves to cover my bandaged thumb. Besides, I was in too much of a hurry to stop and put on a glove. I was cooking with grease by now, well-caffeinated and in the groove (if a very klutzy groove).

So I got up, put on a new bandaid, and went on to mixing the batter for my Peanut Buddy Bars, or as we call these chocolate-iced peanut butter brownies: Nutty Buddy Bars. I was adding the eggs and vanilla to the creamed margarine, peanut butter, and sugar mixture when I realized my thumb was no longer bandaged.

EEK! Did it fall into the batter?? I looked around. No sign of a bandage on the kitchen counter where I was working. Not on the floor. GAWD! It must be in the batter.

I looked in the bowl, but couldn't find anything that looked bandaid-like in the mass of bandaid-colored batter. I dug out a wooden spoon and moved the mixture around in an attempt to spot the bandaid and fish it out, but nothing doing: I couldn't find the darned thing.

Then I remembered the thread on the Israel-Food list and things went from bad to worse. You know those cartoons where the good conscience and the bad conscience whisper in the character's ears: "Do it, they'll never know, MWUHAHAHAHAHAHA!" and "Don't do it, Varda. Don't listen to him!"

I thought: "I'll just bake the batter anyway, as is, and when someone finds my bloody bandaid, I'll say, 'April Fool's!'"

I even imagined posting this to the Israel-Food list and the laughs this note would surely generate.

Then I shook my head. HARD. And came back to reality.

Taking a deep breath, I plunged my hand (not the bloody-thumbed one) into the batter and felt around until I found the darned thing. I waved it in the air for an invisible audience, thinking, "SUCCESS!"

Of course, someone else would have deemed the batter unsanitary by now, thrown out the batter, and begun again. But I'm not someone else.

April Fool's!


Chocolate Peanut Buddy Bars

1 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 ¼ cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 t. vanilla
1 cup all-purpose flour
¼ t. salt
2 cups chocolate chips, divided

Preheat oven to 350.

In large mixer bowl, beat peanut butter and butter or margarine until smooth, about 1 minute.

Add sugar, eggs and vanilla extract; beat until creamy.

Blend in flour and salt.

Stir in 1 cup chocolate chips.

Spread into ungreased 13x9 inch baking pan.

Bake 25-30 minutes, or until edges begin to brown.

Immediately, sprinkle remaining chocolate chips over cookie layer.

Let stand 5 minutes until chips become shiny and soft.

Spread melted chips evenly over top. Cool completely. Cut into 1 ½ inch bars. Makes 48 bars.

Proving My Worth and Mettle

When I was a new bride, I owned a Kenwood Mixer. This sturdy stand-mixer came with shredding, grinding, kneading, juicing and egg-white whipping attachments. I ran that thing into the ground as I fed a family that grew by leaps and bounds. Dov tinkered with the Kenwood, failed to find a way to resuscitate my favorite kitchen toy, and finally brought it to a Jerusalem-based repairman.

The repairman LOST my Kenwood. That's right. He misplaced this largish kitchen appliance. Or so he said. Dov thinks the guy thought we weren't good for the money, so he fixed it and resold it to someone else at a bigger profit than he would have made from the repair, anyway.

Sue the guy? Yeah. Right. This is the Middle East. Just write it off.

After the loss of my Kenwood, I made do with a variety of hand-mixers that came with built-in obsolescence. They burned out with great regularity. And each time we bought a new one. A hand-mixer isn't built to mix a very thick or large amount of cake batter and I have a very large family (did I mention I have 12 kids?) with a serious sweet tooth.

It helped that my mother in-law bought me a food processor as a gift after my fifth child, Elyahu's birth. That replaced all the wonderful Kenwood attachments (grater, grinder, and so forth), but couldn't stand in as a mixer for most cakes and cookies. So through the years, we've had a long parade of hand-mixers enter our home in a box and leave by way of the trash can.

Well, getting to the point of my story, my latest mixer incarnation died over Chanuka while mixing the icing for Yitzchak's birthday cake. Our lovely downstairs neighbor Dina allowed us to use her mixer to finish mixing the icing and then I took a prolonged break from baking until such time as I could replace the hand-mixer for the umpteenth time. Such a break is an unheard of luxury for me. I bake every single week, come rain or shine, every Thursday, so we'll have a home-baked Shabbos dessert.

Now, just a short time ago, friends and clients of Dov's opened a branch of the Marzipan bakery in the Old City of Jerusalem, and my son Natan was hired to work in the store. If you've never tasted Marzipan chocolate rugelach, you are missing out on a little piece of heaven. These are the gooiest, moistest, most chocolaty chocolate rugelach ever made, bar none. They DRIP with chocolate. They leak through the plastic lined box, so you have to keep the box inside a bag. Oh my God they're good. Fattening, true. But expensive.

Lucky for us, what with the owners being our friends, and our son their devoted worker, we got a discount. For several weeks running, we ordered two kilogram of these chocolate pastry treats to be delivered late Friday afternoon and not a crumb was left by Saturday night.

But this week something went wrong.

One of the co-owners of the store moved house this week and Dov helped him with various errands, including the delivery of the rugelach inside our town of Efrat. Once Dov had completed the deliveries, it turned out that there were none left for us--the order got screwed up. Dov was not a happy camper and he didn't want to talk about it. I was sick with a virus, and he felt like he was failing me.

Not to worry. Here comes SuperVard. With only 45 minutes left until candle-lighting time, when all work must cease, and we must harbor in the 26 hour Jewish Sabbath, I remembered a cake recipe I could probably turn out with just my whisk. Wacky Cake. I grabbed my Hershey's cookbook from the shelf and started pulling ingredients out of the pantry. I was a veritable whirlwind.

My husband and kids were looking at me like I was crazy. There was no way I could have a cake ready in time for Shabbos. But I kept going. I greased the pan, shook some cocoa around the bottom and sides, and began measuring flour, sugar, cocoa, and salt into a mixing bowl. Then...Horrors!! I saw I didn't have enough baking soda. I was short one teaspoon.

Even though my user-friendly neighbor Dina was recovering from gallbladder surgery, we had no choice but to send a kid down to get some baking soda--things had progressed too far in my mixing bowl to stop the cake momentum now. Dina coughed up a box of baking soda (Thanks, Dina!) and I threw a second teaspoon of baking soda into the bowl and got ready to mix.

The whisk couldn't really make it through that heavy cake batter, but undaunted, I grabbed a fork and kept going. My family was NOT going to go without a dessert on this or any other Shabbos.

Thirty-five minutes later, that cake came out of the oven with moments to spare, high and light and smelling of chocolate. I placed it on a rack to cool and raided my freezer for all the odds and ends of icing I've saved from various cake-decorating projects. By the time we were ready to eat, the cake had cooled enough to ice and after icing my creation, I sprinkled it with blue and white sprinkles.

My family thought I was a miracle maker. I'd show you a photo of the cake, but it didn't last long enough to get a photo. Dov couldn't get over it--how I pulled that off. The kids couldn't either. That pan was LICKED clean.

Another job for SuperVard.

Chicken Story

Dov went shopping at Rami Levy Thursday night and as he approached the meat counter, the solitary Jewish worker behind the counter, who always waits on Dov looked at him and said, "Judge."

Dov was flustered. He stuttered, "How did you know my wife is in Judge?"

One of the Arab workers walked over and shook his head, "Chicken," he said. "He's trying to say "chicken" in Arabic, but he's saying it wrong. It's Juszh!"

Contemplating the Meaning of Funk

I'm in a funk today. I woke up that way and it's been gathering steam. Maybe it started before I woke up. I think it began last night when I checked my mail and found out that a Facebook comment I made on Friday had offended someone. There was nothing I could do about it in any active sense, since I don't post to Facebook on Saturday nights for religious reasons (it's Shabbos somewhere in the world--don't want anyone to err on my account). But I could think about it, worry over it, and obsess.

It was about my friend Michael's hamster. Michael's beloved dog Phoebe passed away earlier this year, and now his hamster Diego had gone to that hamster heaven in the sky. I thought about what I wanted to say to him, something that showed I care yet put this sad event into perspective. I said the wrong thing--I guess. In retrospect--that is.

I wrote: "Maybe you should check the mezuzahs. First your dog, now your hamster..."

Concerned that this maybe sounded a bit cavalier, I added, "Sorry for your loss."

Well, someone didn't take kindly to my comments and said so: " i dont appreciate that mezuza comment.."

"Oh no," I thought. "I did it again. Stuck that darned foot in my mouth again."

"Ouch!" I wailed internally. Yeah. I do stupid things and then I hurt. It's probable I hurt more than the people I hurt with my dumb words if that makes any sense.

So, I went into a funk.




Funk. It's an interesting word. It means a bad smell, a kind of cool music with a beat, and a state of depression. It also means to shrink back from something. Except for the bad smell part, it probably fits me to a T right about now. At least I haven't noticed anyone actively backing away from me today. At least. Thank God for soap and water. Still does the trick, far as I can tell.


Here is why I'm a writer: I take chances and say exactly what I feel, even if it means I go too far and end up regretting my words and wishing I could take them back so fast I'd choke on them, shrivel up, and croak, God Forbid. It means I'm too damned honest and will say what I think when I should shut the hell up. And it means I'm emotional and get embroiled in my own emotions. It's an innate kind of manic-depression that no drug can assist.

Some days I should probably just hide under a rock.

JUDGE--The Song of Devora

Opening night of JUDGE--The Song of Devora is a week from Sunday. My nervous system is starting to take in the nearness of the event, just kind of humming in the background as I go about the daily acts of work, housework, parenting, and being myself.

I still feel a bit of a tingle when I remember the last time I was on a stage. I think it was three years ago. This was during the time I was singing bass in an a cappella choir called Shir A Cappella. The moment that stands out for me at that last performance was the way one woman made her way to me, singling me out of a choir consisting of 13 women to ask, "You're a tenor, right?"





I just looked at her. I was in a kind of stupor, and I couldn't grasp her meaning at the time. Yudit, who sang bass with me, realized I was tongue-tied, so she threw her arm around my shoulder and said, "We're the bass. We BE the bass."

Bass is the lowest of the five voices comprising an a cappella group.

Only later did I manage to process the meaning of what that woman had asked. She was commenting on the fact that my voice is so low that it is even lower than the lowest woman's vocal range, the alto. My voice falls into the male tenor range. This woman noticed the rarity of my range and had sought me out to compliment me.


Wow. I had a groupie!









The thought of that woman sometimes pops into my head at odd moments. It's a nourishing image for me. When I feel filled with self-doubt and insecurity, I rerun that event to give myself a boost. That's not so terrible, is it? I hope I'm not a total narcissist for liking that image of the woman and remembering what she said to me.

I confess that I am in love with performance. I adore getting up on a stage. It feeds my soul in a way that nothing else quite matches.

The day before a performance I'm a wreck and cannot eat. If I try to eat something light, it turns out to be a mistake. It won't stay down. I feel like a zombie or an emptied-out shell, and it's hard to believe that I will be able to do anything on stage except to stand, vacant-eyed and silent, shivering under the lights.

But the moment I am onstage, there is a transformation. I feel filled with electricity and power. There is this superhighway of information flowing between me and the audience. Synchronization is complete. They are mine and I am theirs and nothing else exists. I am flying high, way above the world and my everyday life.

Even later, when the show is over, the makeup is removed and the costume hung with loving hands, I am still feeling the thrill, still feeling high and somehow more alive.

The high lasts for about three days.

As I feel the adrenaline ebb away, something else creeps in and I feel sad and wistful. Almost empty. It's over.

What's great about JUDGE is that it's not a one-time thing. There will be at least nine performances. Maybe more if they like us. We'll see.

I'm ridiculous to think of it, but I can't help but feel sad thinking about the end of this wonderful experience. I don't know why I have to think about that now. I try not to think about it and just enjoy the moments as they arrive--but can you tell--I'm a bit of a junkie when it comes to performance and that includes performance of any kind. Doesn't matter what it is. I like the camaraderie between the performers, stage makeup, the lights, the applause--the whole shebang. It will be so hard to say goodbye.

Photo credits: Sharon Katz.

Chicken Fat and Other Delights

I just did a favorite kitchen task and defatted my chicken soup. I use a lot of bones in my soup and then let it chill overnight so that it gels from all the natural gelatin in the bones. The next morning, I place the pot of soup on the counter, grab a paper towel, press it over the surface of the gelled soup in my stock pot, making sure the towel hugs the very edges where soup meets stainless steel. Then Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzht! I lift the paper towel. Et Voila! The top of the soup is now clear jelly and all the fat is trapped in my trusty paper towel.

Kewl. It's the small things that give me those godlike feelings. I like feeling competent and knowledgeable. It's a hell of a lot better than feeling frightened and insecure, right?

Speaking of which--my job. Yeah. My new job. I'm still feeling my way around the immensity of the task before me. I'm still in the phase of, "EEK. What have I done??? I'm not capable of doing all THAT."

But with time, the brush will be cleared away and I will see the path. I always do. I just have to keep reminding myself of this fact. Of course I feel confident in the kitchen. I've been doing that for 30 years. But this job is something never before experienced. I do think I have all the skills needed to acquit myself well enough. But as the Good Book says, "All beginnings are hard."

Meantime, on other scores, the Raise Your Spirits troupe is getting closer to the opening night of JUDGE, in which I play Hever the Kenite. I have been foresworn from sharing in public what goes on in rehearsals, but there's nothing to stop me from describing some of the funnier interactions I have with my friend Tsipora on the way home from a LONG evening of rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing until you just about DROP from fatigue.

A bunch of us piled into Tsipora's car for the ride home. The rear window of the car was all fogged up. But we were all loaded down with bags of costumes and props and couldn't find the squeegee thing in all the morass of general stuff lining the floor of the car. It was determined that the only one of us who could get out of the car was Avital, sitting in the backseat and that she must wipe the window before we could proceed. But with what would she wipe the window??

I managed to grab hold of Tsipora's handbag which was buried under an avalanche of bags sitting on my left foot (I was in the front seat on the passenger side). Tsipora dug around and pulled out a crumpled ball of tissue which she offered to Avital. Avital took the tissue with understandable reluctance, and just as she was out of reach of hearing, Tsipora proclaimed at large, "Last Use!"

ROTFLOL.