Ideas and Impressions: The joys of being ‘Papa Jason’

Jason Moscovitz

By Jason Moscovitz

It has been a crazy summer. The Trump business has gotten as bad as it gets, although, as always, it is difficult to know where the bottom is.

Here, in politically civilized Canada, the election is around the corner. There are so many things to think and write about. But somehow, for me, as the summer ends, there is only one subject that I feel like writing about.

The subject is family. This is about having a chance to be a grandfather in real time and in person with all of my family in the same time zone. Please excuse me, but my chances do not come that often as my five grandchildren come from three different countries: Israel, Great Britain and the United States.

The two oldest are almost four and almost five. They are certainly old enough to engage with each other – as well as with their grandparents – once everyone figures out which language they can do it in.

Shalev is the little boy from Jerusalem who speaks French and Hebrew. He undoubtedly understands English, but does not speak it yet. Beatrice, the New Yorker, speaks French and English.

My daughters deserve all the credit in the world for honouring their mother’s wish to see their French preserved for another generation – not an easy thing to do in New York City and Jerusalem, but they did it. Good thing too. Without their French, the young cousins wouldn’t be able to talk to each other.

Culturally, welcoming grandchildren to what to them is a foreign country leads to fun moments. Shalev, my first-born grandson, sees everything. He often remarks on how big the houses are in Canada. He often points out that three floors in a house is a lot.

After he returned home, he asked his mother why they lived in such a small apartment. She told him houses in Israel are smaller than in Canada. He looked around and said, “Well, there

is one good thing about that: in a small house you don’t have to run to the bathroom when you have to make
pee-pee.”

Despite the infrequency of his visits, Shalev’s Canadian blood runs strong. He never leaves a park without finding and collecting huge maple leafs. At the cottage, he lives to go canoeing. When there is no one to go with him, he sits in it alone on shore with a paddle in his hand pretending to be a voyageur.

Shalev, who loves music and can sit for hours watching street performers, got a special treat this year. His parents took him to Gatineau where he saw Cirque du Soleil. He still can’t believe what he saw and heard.

His cousin Beatrice is almost four, but when she speaks you think she is six. New York City can’t be an easy place to grow up and the street smarts a child develops are uncannily real. She lives in Queens, where the overhead subway runs outside her bedroom window. Once asleep, believe me, Beatrice can sleep through anything.

When I visit there, I always think of the childhood flashback from “Annie Hall” when the family dining room and china shook from the nearby roller coaster on Coney Island. New York City is a noisy place, but resilience can see you through.

Beatrice goes to a multinational daycare and the class photo would make the Statue of Liberty proud. She can sing “Happy Birthday” in Spanish and Mandarin with perfect accents in both. Her mind is wide open.

Emile from England will speak French and Hebrew, but his Israeli father insisted he soon get a tutor once a week to begin his English lessons. So I guess I can look forward to a grandson with a British accent by next summer. I think it will make me laugh.

Aurianne from Jerusalem is always smiling. At 14 months, this was the first visit to Canada she might remember. The same goes for Felix, who’s a month younger. He is the lucky New Yorker. His bedroom is on the other side of the apartment. The subway is not outside his window but I can’t say his room is silent.

Being “Papa Jason” to all five is my treat, wherever, and in whatever language.

Modern Mishpocha: The unexpected lessons of Barbie

Stephanie Shefrin

By Stephanie Shefrin

When our daughter was born, we wondered how we were going to raise her to escape the gender stereotypes we experienced in our own childhood. You know, the pink is only for girls, trucks only for boys’ stuff.

Indeed, that theme was one of the first I explored when I began writing this column almost six years ago, just a few months after she was born. So, it’s fitting perhaps that for this, my final [regular] Modern Mishpocha column, I find myself considering it anew.

Because my house has been invaded by Barbie.

I can remember playing with Barbies as a kid. It’s a vague memory. I built a dollhouse in my closet out of shoeboxes at one point, and at another played a game with my sister that involved popping off the Barbie heads and whipping them around the room. To me, they were dolls, nothing more, nothing less.

But as we know, Barbie has come to be more than just a doll. She’s ended up an example of how girls were encouraged to look a certain way, and act a certain way from the moment they were born. And that certain way was like a Barbie.

So, I swore, no daughter of mine was going to end up with Barbies.

But slowly my perspective shifted.

I had decided my girl shouldn’t play with Barbies because everything I read and absorbed suggested they are the social equivalent of letting her use containers with BPA in them: toxic and would stunt her emotional and social growth.

Then I watched her play with them. I realized how much she enjoyed it, and how much fun she had building imaginary worlds with these doll friends.

So, when all she wanted for her sixth birthday was a Barbie, I decided I was going to buy her one.

When we gave it to her, her eyes nearly popped out of her head. “But you hate Barbies,” she said. “It’s complicated,” I replied, “but you love them. And it’s your birthday.”

See, I had come to realize three things:

One, to have a meaningful relationship with my daughter I need to meet her where she is, not where I’d like her to be.

Two, I don’t truly believe Barbie has a negative influence. I was more worried about being judged for letting her play with them.

And three, Barbie has come a long way since the “math is hard” days, and the cartoons and range of dolls available are a lot more diverse and inspiring than the unrealistic bodies of the past with their airhead ways.

Those lessons are easily applied to the choices I make about community life.

How often do I just do something because it’s expected, not because I find meaning? How often do I just dismiss an idea out of hand, because it goes against what I thought I know, instead of approaching it with an open mind? How often do I act because I fear being judged?

I know many who believe this community judges its own mercilessly. These are people who believe they are considered lesser if their kids aren’t in day school, if their Federation pledge didn’t go up this year, if they’ve chosen to live in a neighbourhood with few Jews.

I have been accused of passing that kind of judgment in this column.

If I sounded judgy – and the editor of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin and my husband will back me up when I say I often worried about that – it was never my intent.

We all talk these days about living mindfully, and in writing this column I had hoped to encourage conversation and dialogue about how and why we make the choices we all do.

Recently, Ami Wise wrote a thoughtful letter-to-the-editor in response to a column of mine about our family’s decision to enrol our girl at the Ottawa Jewish Community School (OJCS) and my struggle to understand why some people see no value in full-day Jewish education.

In his letter, he wonderfully articulated why public school mattered to his family and why it was of tremendous value to them, and how they balanced that value with finding other ways to meaningfully connect with the Jewish community.

It got me thinking about what we’re missing out on by being at OJCS, what elements of that matter to me, and how we can find ways to fill those gaps.

It’s letters like his, and the subsequent thinking it made me do, that I wanted this column to inspire in others. So, thank you Ami, and thanks to everyone who has read and engaged over the last few years.

I hope we can keep talking.

A View from the Bleachers: The relationship between the Diaspora and Israel

Rabbi Steven Garten

By Rabbi Steven Garten

Summer provides perfect opportunities for two kinds of reading. Long lazy days at the cottage or beach or even in the city offer time to read mysteries or spy thrillers. It takes a quiet and relaxed soul to ponder the subtleties of a great mystery/thriller writer. However, summer can also offer abundant possibility for pondering more significant mysteries than those offered by the new Rebus, Bosch or Banks novel.

We might want to investigate the issue of gun violence and mass shootings in the U.S., or the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and North America and wonder about its impact on our security as a people. Events in France and Poland certainly cause us to pause and ponder.

But perhaps the most challenging mystery for which summer might offer ample thinking time is what happened to the relationship between Diaspora Jews and the State of Israel. There is a growing disconnect between Israel and the Diaspora. It is palpable not only in the intensified criticism of the Netanyahu government, but the ongoing discomfort with the increased power of the Orthodox religious authority, and certainly the discomfort expressed by North American Jews about the “occupation.” The recent case in which the Federal Court of Canada ruled that it was “misleading and deceptive” to characterize wines from West Bank settlements as “products of Israel” was brought by one individual Jew and at least one [nominally] Jewish organization. Though it could be argued that neither party has ever had a strong relationship with the State of Israel, it is beside the point. The indicators are obvious to any and all who wish to look.

Matti Friedman, author of the Aleppo Codex and Pumpkinflowers, has written a most unusual book, Spies of No Country. It is about Israeli espionage at the time of the state’s founding. It is unusual for two reasons. The usual story of the Mossad or Shin Bet begins or ends with the white European “founders” as the heroes of Israel survival. But in this book the protagonists are Israelis born in the Arab world who, due to their appearance, language and cultural understanding, will venture back into what was once familiar and now highly dangerous territory. Many will die for a country they scarcely knew. Many will be forgotten by the country they gave their lives for.

In following the story of four heroes of what was known as the “Black Section,” the reader is challenged not only to learn a bit about a little known story of Israeli history, but to better understand the burgeoning disconnect between Israel and western Jews.

Friedman, a Canadian by birth, writes, “I came from the west, with the European stories of Israel – the kibbutz, the Holocaust, the Labour Zionist mystic. The longer you are here, the more you realize that those stories do not fully represent Israel. Half the country came from the Muslim world and that informs everything about Israel – cuisine, behaviour, music, religion, politics. Many Jews think the basis of the country is the European Jewish world – Herzl/Ben-Gurion – and that the Jews from Muslim countries came and joined that story. I think it’s the opposite: Israel is part of the continuum of Judaism in the Muslim world, together with remnants of the European Jewry.”

Friedman argues most North American Jews try to gauge the country through outmoded categories such as religious or secular, right or left and he suggests Israelis are neither. He quite convincingly posits that Israel does not rest on socialism and secularism. It rests on a bedrock of Jewish identity that has a lot to do with people who came from Baghdad, Aleppo and Casablanca, whose understanding of being Jewish is informed by life in the Middle East and the Arab world.

He suggests that early on the state ignored the wisdom and experience of its “black” founders but now, 70 years later, that experience and world view permeates the Israeli experience.

“Israel is part of the Middle East,” he writes. “Herzl’s dream of Vienna and Ben-Gurion’s dream of cultured Europe might have held sway once, but they no longer hold the power to mould the policies and life of most Israelis.”

Friedman challenges North American Jews to dislodge the old paradigm and see that what is there is not what we hoped would be there.

In mystery novels there is often a formulaic and complete ending. Not so in Spies of No Country, but there is lots of great Middle Eastern ‘food’ to digest.