SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
Comments on Israel? She gave me a few.
“ rabbi from B1
her. I told Thomas that the young men were starting out in the press corps and hoped to be reporters. She kindly shared notes about journalism with us. “You’ll always keep learning,” she said. It was an honor. Then I asked: “Any comments on Is-
rael? We’re asking everybody today.” Like saying a password to enter a new, secret place. “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” she replied, and “go home” to Poland and Germany. We were in.
The gentle give and take has now been broadcast, transcribed and thor- oughly dissected. However, a strict transcription misses the accuracy of the audiovisual. Only in the director’s cut, the video, are the nonwords, the sound, the noise, the true reaction. And that was my “oooh.” “What were you thinking when you
said ‘oooh,’ rabbi?” asked Fox News, as did many of the other national and international media outlets that probed and jabbed for my innermost thoughts. Well, I was thinking “oooh.” Oooh. Most heard it the first time. Certainly during the multitude of reruns, “oooh” became part of the song. It was a response by a rabbi to Thomas’s comments, and it was from my soul. I merely asked a question with a video
camera to a columnist. She answered me with an opinion that was unacceptable not just to me but to former and current press secretaries, politicians, the president, her agent and a great many other people. Her freedom of speech was not stifled; on the contrary, it was respected. She didn’t say that the blockade was unjust, or that aid was not getting to Ga- za, or that there was a massacre on the high seas, or that East Jerusalem is occu- pied, or that the settlements are immoral . . . and get out and go back to West Jeru- salem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Eilat. No. This was not the two-state solution. This was get the hell out and go back to the places of the final solution, Poland and Ger- many. The Jew has no connection with the land of Israel. And why? Because, as Thomas went on
to explain to me, “I’m from Arab descent.” That’s it? That’s all you got? Do we all travel with only our parents’ stereo- types to guide us, never going beyond them to get to a peaceful destination? In the past weeks I have relived this moment over and over, on television and radio, in newspapers and blogs. I’ve lis- tened to a constant stream of com- mentary. And my sharpest impression is this: Where before I saw a foggy anti- Israel, anti-Jewish link, it’s now clear.
This feeling is not about statehood. It’s about an ingrown, organic hate. It’s a sen- timent that bears no connection to his- tory, dates, passages or verses. Erase the facts, the dates and the lore. Erase the Jew. Incredibly, even the Nazis said to the Jews, “Go home to Palestine.” But Thom- as and a babbling stream in our world and country dictate to Jewish people to “go home to Poland and Germany.” Yeah, I said “oooh.” My “oooh” was the sound of the shofar
ram’s horn calling a loud primal tikeya, the extended ancient whole note from my very core. My existence was being erased. Every room in every Holiday Inn in America has,next to the bed, in the draw- er, a Bible, beside the yellow pages and the breakfast menu. Christianity believes in the Jewish ancestry. Islam believes in the prophets Moses and Jesus. Can we just rip away the history of Jews in Israel like a Band-Aid, one quick motion across the centuries? Oooh. One may disagree on fences and rights
of return. There have been handshakes, summits, accords, cease-fires, negotia- tions and boycotts. It’s all been on the ta- ble, under the table or sometimes tabled. But the connection between the Jew and Israel is valid, historical, ancient, mod- ern, spiritual and eternal. The relation- ship is beyond the state of Israel. It is a unique relationship of a religion to a land. The Jews are “bnai yisroel,” the chil- dren of Israel. Even when they are away, they are connected. Even during exiles and diasporas, they are connected. Even during inquisitions, pogroms and a Holo- caust, they are connected. My grandmother used to kibitz,
“Friends you choose; family you’re stuck with.” The Jew is stuck with Israel. There is no ungluing the connection. It is beyond the ambiguous term “chosen people”; they are “the people who have no choice.” It is more than a religious belief; it is a value and a moral barometer of the Earth. His- tory, truth, integrity and the foundation of our world are not negotiable. “Tell them to get the hell out . . .” We went back to the East Room for the
Jewish event and then onto the South Lawn as Marine One carried away the first family for the Memorial Day week- end. We stopped in Maryland on the way home for some kosher shwarma. The New Jersey Turnpike looked the same, but we were already traveling on a road in a post-oooh world.
rabbi@rabbiLIVE.com
at
washingtonpost.com/liveonline. on
washingtonpost.com
David F. Nesenoff will discuss his article Monday at 11 a.m.
KLMNO
Pelé should go back to the museum.” — Diego Maradona, coach of Argentina’s World Cup team, rips into Brazil’s soccer legend, part of a long-running feud
B
B3
SUSY PILGRIM WATERS
Those of us who knew her, if only casu- ally, jumped to conclusions: “Typical fi- nance jerk . . . up and leaves his wife.” But no, it turns out, she left him. She had an affair. And she’s apparently much improved, complete with a new apart- ment, a new lover, even a new start-up company. At once exhilarating, gutsy and faintly embarrassing, the spectacle looked just like your classic midlife crisis. Except your classic midlife crisis has
Midlife crises: Not just for men I
by Pamela Paul
t seemed like a familiar scenario: the stay-at-home mom with two young children. The Tribeca loft, the Wall Street husband. And, after less than a decade, the divorce.
DAVID F. NESENOFF David and Adam Nesenoff at the White House the day they met Helen Thomas. . What’s the big idea? The Afghan war meets the Boer War
With every war, it seems, there’s also a fight over the proper historical analogy. Is the war in Afghanistan like the Vietnam War, the conflict it has just surpassed as the longest in U.S. history? Or is it like the Soviet misadventure in the same land? What about post-surge Iraq? Peter W. Singer offers a different parallel, and it’s a war America didn’t even fight: Britain’s Boer War, at the dawn of the 20th century. And the implications are grim. Speaking on a panel this month during the annual conference of the Center for a New American Security, Singer, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, was asked to name his biggest worry for the U.S. military going forward. He invoked Britain’s battle from 1899 to 1902 against a South African militia that it vastly outnumbered. Though the Brits eventually prevailed, victory came at such a cost in blood and treasure and time that scholars often point to the war as the beginning of the end of the British Empire. “My worry is that Afghanistan becomes America’s Boer War,” Singer said. “. . . Great Britain got engaged in a grinding war where
by the end of it, its definition of success was just to get out.” Singer is not the first to cite the Boer War as
a cautionary tale for the United States. In his 2008 book “The Post-American World,” Fareed Zakaria noted that conflict’s apparent similarities to the war in Iraq. Like Britain, “the United States has been overextended and distracted, its army stressed, its image sullied. . . . History is happening again.” (Zakaria went on to conclude that the U.S. and British situations were fundamentally different, but the comparison still feels instructive.) One of Singer’s insights could prove especially useful for America’s fighting force. In recent years, the U.S. military has revolutionized its approach to the battlefield, focusing on counterinsurgency as the way to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if this approach succeeds — and the jury is still out —it may not be where warfare is headed. Britain “retooled its force to get very good at [a] particular kind of warfare,” Singer said. “Unfortunately for it, that particular kind of warfare wasn’t the whole of where war was changing to.”
always been male terrain. The fast car and the buxom secretary were the ca- thartic release — snap! — after years of mounting marital boredom and the pressure of providing for a family; the pivot when a man shifted from wanting what the guy 10 years older had to want- ing what the guy 10 years younger had. It was Billy Crystal running off to become a cowboy in “City Slickers,” Jack Nicholson cheating on his pregnant wife in “Heart- burn,” Kevin Spacey buying a vintage Firebird and lusting after a sexy cheer- leader in “American Beauty.” Not neces- sarily forgivable, but recognizable and therefore understandable. Switch the pronouns, and the scenario seems preposterous. Yet what’s really preposterous is the idea that Gen X women don’t have the same financial re- sponsibilities, the same stresses, the same professional disappointments that dogged the men of our father’s genera- tion. We do. So why wouldn’t the daily slog of work and family commitments stir in us the same desire to chuck it all in favor of something new? Having come such a long way, we may
even have more cause than men for mid- life breakdowns. After all, the gray flannel suit has been long mothballed. The men I know, no longer their families’ sole earners, seem to be chugging happily toward middle age, pleased with their post-millennial mix of shared breadwinning and gung-ho fatherhood. In survey after survey, to- day’s Baby Bjorn-wearing dads say they’re much more involved with and ful- filled by their children than their fathers were.
—Carlos Lozada
lozadac@washpost.com
But though Gen X men spend more time with their kids, they’re still less en- gaged than their wives in the hard work of parenting. They may devote more hours to household duties than hus- bands used to, but studies show that women, even those working full time, shoulder a far greater share: Working wives still spend nearly twice as much time on child care as their working hus- bands, and more than 50 percent more
time on chores such as cooking, clean- ing, shopping and home repairs. Now consider that this particular work-life juggling act — with its dueling parental and professional demands, carefully calibrated multitasking and re- lentless pressure — is currently in rota- tion among late 30-something and 40- something women. According to a new report by Princeton and the Brookings Institution, women, particularly college- educated professionals, are delaying marriage and children as never before. Having put off kids for so long, we’re now up all night breastfeeding and skipping out of sales meetings to attend our ump- teenth parent-teacher conference, while at the same time helping to pay down the mortgage and sock money into our kids’ 529s. All this precisely at the moment we’re supposed to hit the pinnacle of our careers. We’re tired. It would be helpful, then, to acknowl-
edge that women have just as much cause for meltdown as men. The recogni- tion that all this is enough to tip some- one over the edge might help women navigate the disappointments and con- fusions, the uncombed hair and forgot- ten dental checkups, of midlife. Where is our “Old School” or our “Hot
Tub Time Machine?” When do we get to have “The Hangover?” But for the boom- erama chick flicks of Nancy Meyers and “Cougar Town’s” cartoonish version of female lust, women onscreen are has- tened from “Pretty in Pink” to “Driving Miss Daisy,” swiftly bypassing all that takes place between wedding and wid- owhood. (Unless you were among the 18 people who sat through last year’s “Motherhood,” starring Uma Thurman as a woman simultaneously over- and underwhelmed by her kiddie-encum- bered lot. In which case, you may actu- ally feel worse.) Nor does the baby boomer precedent seem relevant to us. For women born in the postwar period, midlife was all about transformation — a yoga-centric quest for enlightenment featuring “sister cir- cles” and discreet cosmetic procedures. Each setback was refashioned as an es- sential passage by Gail Sheehy, the au- thor of such boomer tomes as “Meno- pause: The Silent Passage.” But these women could be “40 and fabulous” only because their children were long since out from underfoot, leaving them free to self-fulfill. Their vision of midlife wom- anhood seems both blindingly optimistic and wholly inadequate to the dilemmas of my generation, as we attempt to con- vey assured professionalism while teeth- ing-biscuit crumbs hang glueily from our lapels. For us, something tougher and more
selfish, something that cannot be buffed away by a chemical peel, is going on. We don’t need to prepare for the “gift” of menopause. We are anxious, dissatisfied,
insecure and, above all, desperate to stop pleasing others for a single afternoon and start doing something for ourselves. We may even be better at this than
men: We certainly wouldn’t stoop to any- thing so tacky as muscle cars or hair plugs. I know one French mom who des- ignated a “chambre des disputes” in her home, festooned with flowing purple fabric that her husband would never tol- erate. Another friend is taking a four-day weekend in New Orleans with a college roommate, promising debauchery un- encumbered by spouse or child. Whether it’s an eco-spa getaway, a return to grad school or one night a week dedicated to out-of-home endeavors, each of us de- serves something more than a yoga ses- sion or a new hairstyle. Of course, this could well go in a re-
grettable direction, as it sometimes has for men. A consistent body of research shows that wives file for divorce more of- ten than husbands and in large numbers say they are happier divorced than they were when married. Seven to 10 years into our marriages, I’ve begun to hear restless rumblings among my peers. One friend, over coffee, confided that she was dying — dying! — to have sex with some- one other than her husband. She even suggested separate vacations as a mutual anniversary gift. After a dinner party re- cently, a fellow mother warily pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights stashed in tin foil and a plastic baggie and growled, “It’s either this or an affair!” Another friend propositioned her son’s tutor over e-mail. That he said no — you’re married, and doesn’t that still mean something? —only deepened her crush. One film last year, “Up in the Air,” gave
a glimpse of what might come. When George Clooney’s character realizes with dismay that he’s devoted his life to an empty job, he turns to Vera Farmiga’s character for absolution. A recognizable male midlife change of heart! But in- stead, he runs headlong into her crisis. Turns out she’s married; he was her af- fair. The slap in his face is resounding. “You never see a female midlife crisis, or that a woman can be so demanding and unapologetic and libertine with her sex- uality,” Farmiga told the Hollywood Re- porter. “. . . As women, we do want it all — as mothers, as career women — and we always cater everybody else’s needs — our children’s, our husband’s, our fami- ly’s. And this was a woman who was say- ing, ‘These are my needs, these are my desires.’ ” I’m certainly not recommending that women become chain-smoking, cheat- ing narcissists or that we break George Clooney’s heart. But I do believe it’s time to get a little selfish. Approaching mid- life, we’ve earned it.
Pamela Paul is the author of, most recently, “Parenting, Inc.”
Outlook’s editors welcome your comments and suggestions. Write to us at
outlook@washpost.com.
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