They Kill Children

Muslims are a special breed, for in pursuing their cause they have managed to slough off a primal taboo shared by all evil men everywhere: that children are sacrosanct. When terrorists deliberately target schools and school buses and engage in killing children, they have trespassed all boundaries of the moral code that may have once bound them to the rest of humanity.

Two days ago, 3 children and the father of two of the children were killed in a shooting spree that took place in a small Jewish school in Toulouse, France. During their manhunt to find the perpetrator, the police  looked for Neo-Nazis; in essence an attempt to misdirect the gut sense of the public that this vile crime could only have been committed by a Muslim. For appearances now trump the truth in every civilized city on earth.

But the truth in this case would not be suppressed.

These tender children were killed by a Muslim. There is, in fact, a war. This is not a war between countries but a great clash between civilizations that cannot be won by hiding our heads in the sand and pretending it isn’t so.

Looking Elsewhere

The dedication of Muslims surpasses our own. Our fervent wish is for a tolerant civilization where all are free to pursue their dreams no matter their race, creed, or color. But nothing stops them in their desire to make their god the ruler of the free world. Not even our whitewashing of their deeds, our looking for other candidates as perpetrators.

Not a Muslim, we prayed. Oh please not a Muslim. Let us look elsewhere.

But we need to save ourselves. For that we can only examine the truth of Islam in the way its adherents see that truth and strive with all their being toward imposing that perceived truth on the rest of us. In this war, children, tender children, lose their basic meaning. On home territory, their own children serve as human shields. Far from home, Muslims transform children from sacred objects to cannon fodder, mere vehicles for Allah’s unquenchable thirst for believers.



On Facebook we look at photos of cute kittens, puppies, and babies. We love them for their “Aw” factor. But they kill children.

It means nothing to them. It is like swatting flies.

They Kill Children

Or rather, it DOES mean something to them. It means that their dedication to their cause is greater than our civilized desire to preserve civilization. The proof is here: they will stop at nothing to attain their despicable goals.

They will even kill children.

They will gloat over the killing of children and boast of these deeds during television broadcasts on PA TV funded by tax dollars and Euros, a new kind of public implosion, a suicide by the world which, if we manage to survive may someday earn a sobriquet that gives reference to this unique kind of death by the hand of civilization against itself.

Memory and Music

Not long ago, a friend asked me to read over his draft of a blog entry about an acquaintance who’d died in a terror attack. After I read and commented, Israel said, “Did you follow the final link?”

I had not, so I went back in and found the link which took me to a late 70’s song. The minute I heard the opening notes, I cringed. Bad song. Really bad song. The genre itself was doomed to extinction: Country-Western Israeli.

Argh.

I didn’t want to be a poor friend so I listened to the entire song. It was NOT a good experience.

I reported back to Israel who told me that whenever he hears this song he thinks of his friend’s smile; that of the fellow killed in the terror attack. There was a photo. The poor guy did have the proverbial million dollar smile.

It hit me then: the musical merits or demerits of the song didn’t matter. The fact that it was just a really bad song filled with repetitive hooks didn’t matter. The point was the association. When Israel hears that song, it evokes certain bittersweet memories of a time, place, and person.

‘Did I have a song like that?’ I wondered. Of course I did. The Bee Gees’ song, “How Deep is Your Love,” came to mind straight away. Whenever I hear that song, my mind flashes back to a place (Detroit), a time (my angst-filled 16th winter), and the people I hung out with back then.



That got me thinking about other songs I love that deep down, I know are egregious top 40 crapola. I get excited when they’re played on the radio and know all the lyrics by heart.  My iPod is filled with those songs. Earphones make it possible to forego insults like, “Ew. How can you listen to that stuff?” and “Can you turn the sound down, PUHLEEZE?”

I know I’m not the only one to think about this seeming disparity between bad songs and good memories. Ruby Harris billed as “King of the Blues Violin,” recently asked his Facebook friends to share the names of songs they love which have no redeeming musical value whatsoever. Several songs immediately came to mind and I put them out there, knowing that what I was really putting out there was my own neck and rep on the *gulp* sacrificial altar.

Always one to make a spectacle of myself I typed, “Alone Again Naturally!” and then in a burst of creative energy, “Afternoon Delight!”

I was on a roll. Filled with glee I then virtually blurted, “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me!” There followed this resounding (virtual) silence which somewhat resembled the sound of expelled gas during a brief quiet moment at a party.

The silence didn’t last long. Ruby wrote something along the lines of, “What’s WRONG with YOU?” and Dov (my DH) commented, “I don’t know her.”

But you see it’s not about the songs. When I hear, “Alone Again Naturally,” I am transported back to sixth grade and Marjie Rice’s living room on Wilkins Ave., in the time before her family moved to the bigger house on Beechwood Blvd. I remember Marjie putting this Gilbert O’Sullivan 45 on her turntable and hearing the tune for the first time. Sixth grade was really the age when it began to be cool to collect and listen to records. 

I think of the line, “I remember I cried when my father died,” and I feel a powerful twinge remembering my tears when my own father died, not two years later.



And I can identify just as strong a memory as that for every bad song I love.

I realized that there must be some kind of cognitive science behind our affinity for specific songs that lack musical merit. Some scientist must have done a study, right? I turned to Google to see what I could find. I typed “music memories and associations” and waited to see what came up.

While the scope of the research I discovered is too broad to cover here in any detail, I found that Petr Janata, an associate professor of psychology at UC Davis' Center for Mind and Brain had published a study on the subject in 2009. Janata’s aim was to discover what it is about music that evokes such vivid memories for so many people. Among other things, Janata’s findings help explain why music is able to elicit such a strong response in those with Alzheimer’s disease, long after many other cognitive faculties are gone.

It seems that the area of the brain in which past memories are held and retrieved serves also as a hub for linking memories, familiar songs, and emotions. This hub is located right behind the forehead in the medial prefrontal cortex region and is among the final areas of the brain to atrophy during the progression of Alzheimer’s.

"What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head. It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person's face in your mind's eye," said Janata said. "Now we can see the association between those two things – the music and the memories."

I thought of the way couples will refer to a specific tune as “our song.” I can’t hear the song “Take Five” without remembering the first time Dov caught my eye. I was playing this song on the piano when he happened into the room. “Take Five, Dave Brubeck,” he said.

“Wanna go out?” said I.

“Take Five” (Paul Desmond) happens to be a terrific song.




But apparently the quality of the song doesn’t much matter. When I hear the song , “Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)”—a musically undistinguished pop song—memories every bit as strong flood my mind. I think of the sweating sides of a bright red waxed cup of iced coca cola and the underground walkway to Kennywood,  an amusement park in my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I think of summer, and Landlubber jeans, and men’s shirts tied at my midriff. I think of ponytails and Barbara Spiegel, my best friend in eighth grade.

I like hearing the song Brandy. It doesn’t make a whit of difference to me that it’s such a god-awful song. It’s all about the nostalgia.




What songs are linked in your mind with specific events from your life? Do you secretly like listening to a cringe-worthy song?

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brraveheart/2792747305/sizes/m/in/photostream/)

When is a Grapefruit, Not a Grapefruit?

ood blog today, peops. I just ate a pomelit and I realized that I should really write about them because I know that a lot of my American friends have never heard of or tasted them and that's a shame. They are SPECIAL.

 

I still remember the first time I saw the curious fruit known as a pomelo (the fruit I ate just now is its smaller kissing cousin, the pomelit or "sweetie").  I had been in Israel only a month or so. A girl in one of my classes brought out this ginormous thing I thought was a grapefruit. She started cutting away the peel. It took ages. When she was done, there was a HUGE pile of peel and a small pile of fruit. 

 

The pomelo looks a great deal like a giant grapefruit.  The skin is most often green but can run anywhere from pale yellow to yellow-green, going all the way to just plain green. The taste of a pomelo is similar to grapefruit, too, except that the pomelo is sweeter and lacks the acidity of grapefruit.  Just like a grapefruit, a pomelo is eaten without its membranes. One eats only the yellow or pink papules contained within.

 

A pomelo has a large ratio of waste to fruit and it’s a bit of work to get to the delicious insides. The peel is quite thick; there will be at least an inch of peel, if not more. A knife helps. 

Once you get past the thick peel, you still have to free the fruit from the membranes, which are thicker than those of other citrus fruits.  The good news is there aren’t too many seeds in a pomelo and they are easy to remove.

The fruit itself is dry compared to other citrus fruits. The sweeter hybrid known as the pomelit, is much juicier than its larger relative the pomelo and I tend to keep a lot of paper toweling around me when I eat one.

If you like using citrus fruits in spinach, avocado, or chicken salads, try substituting pomelo or pomelit. It’s like the fruit was BORN for this purpose. The sections hold their shape and look like colorful jewels. They add sweetness without the cloying insistence of say, mandarin oranges. At the same time, they don’t make your mouth pucker as grapefruit sections tend to do.

We’re really past the season of pomelos and pomelits, here in Israel, but I’m still buying them up when I see them. It seems I can’t resist them at all. Nor do I want to try.

My favorite fruits:

Cherries

Nectarines

White Peaches

Blueberries

What are some of your favorite fruits?

Pomelo, of course!

Revering that which the World Reviles

nyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I like to sing. I may not always be able to summon up the energy to write in my blog, but I am always ready and willing to sing my guts out. The big news is I've been singing with a newish choir for a few months now and tonight we have our very first performance.

We may not sound exactly polished. It would have been better if we'd practiced for a few more weeks, but the opportunity to perform arose and so we are rising to the occasion. The occasion in question is an event for women only, the Women’s Beit Midrash Rosh Chodesh Adar Celebration which celebrates the new Jewish lunar month of Adar!

At the link cited above, my choir is referred to only as "Judy Kahan's choir." It was the vision of this advertisement which spurred us to try to come up with a name for our group. If we are happening enough to perform, we need to have a name! That's what we thought, anyway.

Now I like to sing, but I also think of myself as a wordsmith. I wasn't going to settle for just any old name for our choir, because naming things involves the use of WORDS. I started brainstorming names and tossing them out to my husband and jotting down likely candidates. I kept in mind something our director, Judy Kahan, had mentioned at our very first rehearsal: that she would like us to dedicate our singing to the memory of Elyse Steinberg (A"H), a woman in my community who succumbed to cancer some years ago.

Once I had a few names I sent some out to the members of the choir by email.

Pyncopation, I dared! Extra Soul, I ventured. Pink Cloud. Achayot* Elyse.

Uh no. They weren't buying.

Some of the women said nothing. Others said, "We don't care what we're called."

Two others suggested more conventional names most of them involving the name of our town or quotes from scripture.

I tried to prepare myself to accept a name that seemed, well, plebeian and just plain BORING to my mind.

Oh darn.

But okay. I squared my shoulders and prepared to give in on the subject. The majority of the women preferred a more normal name. I was a minority here. It was time to show a little sensitivity to my sistahs. I could do that.

I decided that when we next met, I would agree to one of those other names.

Then a funny thing happened. One of the women called and said, "I sense you are upset with me over the issue of naming the choir. I don't care that much about the issue and it's fine with me if you want to choose one of the names you thought up."

Here I was going to try to be sensitive and she beat me to it--the sensitivity thing. Ha!

Made me think of two people who desperately wanted that last portion of chicken going, "No, I'm completely full. You take it," and, "No you. I couldn't eat another bite," with each giving in to the other and saying they didn't care while meantime both cared so dreadfully that whoever won had actually LOST by showing her hand.


Did that make sense? The one who gave in was going to feel good for being kind to the other. That meant that if we chose one of those boring conventional names, my friend and fellow choir sistah was going to feel bad because she suspected I felt bad about the choir choosing HER name suggestion.

Either you understood that or you didn't.

But I realized that I didn't want my friend to feel bad because she would know I felt bad they hadn't chosen one of my names. So I decided I would win/lose and let the choir pick one of my silly creative choir names.

But first I had to come up with something better. Something really, really GREAT! So all the next day, I kept paper and pen close by and jotted down name after name after name. Here was the list I generated:

Jane Doe (get it? as in doh a deer?)
Singing Settlers
Slice O'Heaven
Inner Child
Slightly Unsettled
Kaptains of Kahan

We had our final rehearsal for our performance Monday night. When we polished off those songs as good as we were going to get them, the women all looked at me. Time to pick a name, their faces said. One of the ladies said, "Okay, Varda. Let's hear your list. Out with it."

And so I read them off.

They chose the second name in my list, "Singing Settlers."

I was a little disappointed. That was probably the most boring of all the names I'd come up with, but you know, at least we'd settled on SOMETHING. They were happy and I was, too.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked it: Singing Settlers. The name said something about the ideology of the women in my choir: The world REVILES Israeli settlers, but we couldn't be more proud to bear the appellation of settler. In fact, darn it, we were going to SING IT OUT TO THE WORLD:



WE ARE SETTLER WOMEN.We are fulfilling our birthright by settling the Holy Land and we are filling the rarefied air of the Judean mountains with SONG.

That name is sounding better to me all the time.

Yesterday, I called Judy to ask her help with my part and when we finished our conversation she said, "You know the name Singing Settlers is really starting to grow on me."

Me too.


*Hebrew for "sisters" or "sisters of"