Of Blessings and Curses
Intro:
In her effort to support the southern farmers, Chana bought 50 pounds of fresh lemons. What do we do with so many? What would you do…? Well, you know, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And when life gives you 50 pounds of lemons, you make lemonade, and lemon meringue pie, and lemon freeze and lemon bars and…
Part I:
Routine. What a blessing… and what a curse.
This past week I had 8-hour shifts almost every day. Boredom-breeding routine is our greatest curse. If you are on patrol, at least you are in motion, and the scenery changes. At a static position, like the guard posts at the city’s entrances, the cars are in motion, but you are stationary. How quickly and easily we get bored.
Routine is a curse.
My 8-hour shifts make me yearn for the pre-war work routine of fulfilling educational guiding. Our boys (two sons and one future son-in-law) are still in the line. How they yearn for their routine of university study. My daughter has been delaying her wedding for two months now. How she yearns to create her new routine of married life combined with studying. My wife has a built-in “Mrs. Weasley clock” (sorry – only Harry Potter readers will understand). This device gets a reading on every one of our children’s whereabouts. This clock has been working overtime. How she yearns for the pre-war, relatively less stressful, routine.
Routine is a blessing.
“BOOM.”
A terror attack at one of our posts. Result: both security guards are lightly injured (stab wounds) and the terrorist is neutralized. Yes, I have also been stationed there, and yes, I will be again. And yes, the next attack could be anywhere else as well. Suddenly, your routine is shattered. What say you? Was this routine-breaking event a blessing or a curse? I say: Yes. (The ambiguity here is not the result of a typo…)
Routine is a blessing and a curse. (In the vein of increasing our vocabulary, I would like to institute a new word: BLURSE).
Routine is a blurse.
Part 2:
Our city’s industrial zone has over 300 businesses. It used to be the home base of the giant Soda Stream factory (until BDS pressure forced them to move to the Negev – and in the process only harmed hundreds of Palestinians whom the movement purports to assist). It is home to Israel's largest indoor amusement park (opened in Sept. 2021) – Magic Kass (say it out loud for a good laugh…!). And newly opened “D-City” – Israel's largest home-furnishing mega-mall.
There are also about 12,000 Palestinian workers who enter, and provide for their families, every day. War restrictions have reduced that number by half. And within the city? From the 2000 workers, only a few hundred can now enter.
The scene of the workers lining up in the morning to walk through the security check was too much for one of my close uber-left-wing friends. He considered it a sign of apartheid.
To this sentiment, I have just a few questions:
1. Is lining up for security at an airport also apartheid? After all, I don’t have any bombs on me.
2. When Israeli Jews line up for security checks upon entering our malls, is that an apartheid against ourselves?
3. How come there is no security check of Palestinian police to prevent Jewish terrorists from entering our neighboring village? (Answer – Jewish Israelis don’t enter the village for fear of imminent death)
But back to our workers (although most are employed laborers, some are business owners, and some are managers in Israeli factories). Is our employment arrangement beneficial or detrimental? Yes. It is. It is a blurse.
It is a blessing.
It is the embodiment of coexistence. It is wonderful that two demographies, in one geography, can at least share a peaceful overlap at the workplace. Peace through mutual economic incentives has been a prevailing theory for decades.
It is a curse.
Gazan workers provided the most intimate details of people’s homes for their Hamas recruiters. The terrorist from this past week in my city was a salaried employee in one of the factories. This past summer, our previous inner-city terror attack was carried out by a municipal worker – who got the job because his father had been working in the city for many years. The fact that Israeli society relies on Palestinians is deeply problematic.
I guess we can summarize that this reality, you guessed it, is a blurse.
Part 3:
Just after WWI, determined Zionist Jews went deep into hostile territory to create new communities that would become the borders of the soon-to-be state. Trumpeldor and other young men and women founded Tel Hai in 1916. In 1920, tragedy struck. Eight members, including their leader, were killed in a gunfight against local strongmen. Today, Israel's northernmost city, Kiryat Shmona (City of the Eight), reminds us of the price we paid.
Fourteen years later, Jewish artists erected what would eventually become Israel's first commemorative monument. It is a 20-foot-tall roaring lion. The lion is reminiscent of Jacob’s blessing to Judah “Judah is a lion’s whelp.”
It is styled after the fashion of local lion statues dating from the days of Jacob and Judah. The roar is a victory roar – which is strange as the monument doubles as the tombstone over the mass grave of the “eight.” I have taken many groups to this national site. To many of us observers, the lion is not quite “normal.” For one thing, the roar is silent. For another, he seems to be crying as well. It "sounds" like a pain-filled roar.
Was the story of Tel Hai a blessing or a curse? Yes. This too was a blurse.
Summary:
We will win this war for we have no other home.
We will win for - Ein B'reira - we have no other choice.
And we will win because Jews are the eternal experts at getting lemons and making lemon-mint slushies.
You see, when others see lemons, they see a curse, and decide to make a blessing, a.k.a., lemonade. They see a curse and make a blessing.
Jews view it differently. We see the lemonade already in the lemons. Indeed, we see the blurse.
Even when it comes in the 50-pound variety.
Love, blessing, and blurses to all my readers!
JD