Chapter 16: Spreading Wings

[in what has become a tradition, this chapter was written on a bus between Baltimore and Canada, like most of the previous chapters. It’s a long one, probably because it’s more recent and the details, more vivid.]

I have long had a tenuous relationship with Israel. Israelis as a collective bug the shit out of me. Rude, bureaucratic, with very little sense of tact, sophistication, or anything that I perceived as culture. I never really was Israeli – despite being born there, Hebrew is my second language and I always felt like an American in a foreign country.

It’s worth noting that I have met many amazing Israelis. As individuals. Some of my closest friends are Israelis, and some of the awesomest people I know have the misfortune of being from there. But put them in a group and they bring out the worst in each other. Some of the nicest Israelis I’ve met are actually English speakers living outside of Israel. It’s like they realize what a shitty place they were in and extract themselves from it.

When I was religious, I was also essentially a Zionist. Not a political Zionist like those crazed National Religious folk who support the government, God forbid. No, just your standard Ultra Orthodox someone with an unhealthy attachment to a specific plot of land.

Israel, I was taught, Is The Most Important Place in the World™. It is primo real estate. God Himself has chosen it as His Royal Penthouse, the spiritual top floor of the universe with the best metaphysical views. God even had a kitchen installed in Jerusalem with real marble, gold trim, and stainless copper appliances. Only the best animal sacrifices were served to Him there, and he had All The World’s Prayers delivered to that mailing address.

So as much as I hated the day to day experience, this was still a special place, our land, our holy holy dirt pile. “Look, even the Christians say so! We make fun of them the rest of the time but suddenly we’re pleased as piss that they agree with our points.”

When I stopped being religious, any meaning that I had attributed to the place was stripped away and I was left holding a big steaming bag of camel turds. Or more specifically, living in one.

Suddenly, there was no reason to have to go to every government office at least twice – once to find out what to bring because their website sucked, and once to find out they were closed because they were “on a field trip”. There was no longer any deep purpose being on the phone for an hour waiting for some customer support and then have to yell at the person to actually make shit happen.

I distinctly remember being thrown around in the back of a crowded Egged bus, feeling part of a pathetic mass that was inhumanly being hurtled through the streets by a stereotypical asshole at the wheel.

Israelis, everyone loves to say, are like a cactus fruit: prickly on the outside and sweet on the inside. The reason they ask you how much your car cost and how much money you make in the first sixty seconds of meeting you, is because we’re like family. Israel, after all, is Home.

Well fuck that. I don’t want to be a part of that family. I won’t let family talk to me like they do. Yes, I’d rather experience the fake politeness that is the West than the daily grind of existence, the constant attrition that it is to live in the East. Even if the latter is more likely to help me out if I slip on a banana peel in Machane Yehuda market, I still need my four feet of space and my picket fence. Stay out of my yard, if you please, thank you very much. Not that please and thank you are words you’ve ever even heard of.

Living in Israel became a daily burden of existence. It felt like I had to fight extra doses of gravity just to lift my feet. It was like being in space without a space suit – constantly bombarded by radiation.

*** Sidebar: Shalom Tzvi Tries to Get a license ***

Case in point: getting a driver’s license in Israel is an expensive nightmare, which you wouldn’t know because they all drive like total assholes and specialize in killing themselves and others in the process.

Most Israelis subject themselves to this misery when they are young, vibrant, and are getting fucked by life anyway, i.e. when they are 17. Growing up Orthodox, I was taught that a driver’s license was the certificate of the Devil Himself, a gateway to the carnal pleasures of driving up north on Thursday nights and having a barbecue instead of staying in and studying.

So, it was only at the age of 27 that I decided to subject myself to over thirty 45-minute long sessions of terrible driving instruction at $40 a pop, with an all-star cast of driving teachers who yell at you when you make mistakes, and inspectors who fail you multiple times and make you a pay a fortune to retake it. This is the Israeli driver’s license experience.

After 30 lessons where I still hadn’t driven on a highway or learned how to park, I decided to put my driving lessons on pause after the teaching vehicle I was driving in was hit by a car while driving down one of Jerusalem’s many narrow shitty streets. I was hit by a driver zipping at high speeds down the opposite lane IN REVERSE, following which my teacher and the other driver pulled over and proceeded to yell at each other for 20 minutes.

By the time I got over that trauma and was ready to resume lessons, my theory exam had expired. I traveled to the other end of the city to retake it, only to find a sign on the door of the exam office that they were closed that day – it was national Fuck You Day, and I had missed the memo. Wait, every day is Fuck You Day in Israel.

Then the driving testers of Israel went on strike for several months, causing a huge backlog of new drivers who needed tests. Fuck You Day had morphed into the Jewish year of Not a Single Fuck Given. My driving teacher stopped answering his phone.

I decided to get a motorcycle license instead. They need less lessons, are easier to practice for, and I’d be able to actually afford a fucking vehicle once I was done (Israeli cars are taxed 100%, meaning they cost almost twice what a car costs in the US). I traveled repeatedly to the other end of the city. I paid for, and took, the required lessons. I took the first half of driving exam, where you do figure-eights without your feet touching the ground.

I completed mine successfully. They failed me anyway.

After moving to America, I have only the following observations to add:
• I get my license easily within a month of moving to the US.
• The worst American drivers don’t come close to the average Israelis, I saw more almost-accidents in one day of driving in Israel than I did in all my time in Maryland, a state supposedly notorious for its bad drivers.
• Fuck you, Israel

*** End Sidebar ***

I couldn’t handle it any longer.

I needed to get out of that place. It represented all the oppression I’d been through. The stress of constant violence compounded on my constant existential stress. The religious fanaticism I abhorred was never more than a few feet or headlines away.

I was done. So very very done.

So I made the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life: to leave my kids in another country and move alone to the US. It’s a decision I feel a constant need to justify, to myself and the myriad of judgmental people – mostly family members – who thought what I was doing was a. insane, b. immoral, c. selfish, d. all of the above.

The way I see it, there was nothing left of me to do any parenting if I stuck around. I needed to establish my own identity, some sort of internal semblance of well-being, if I was to be of any use at all. I needed to establish a life of my own, which I straight up didn’t have, before helping others build theirs.

So fuck all those people who think it was fine for me to have kids at 22 without ever having worked a day in my life but suddenly have opinions about what it takes to be a responsible parent.

***

I said goodbye to my kids and friends and moved to Baltimore, where I knew a shit ton of people who had all somehow come through Aish before settling there, and where the real estate market was good – that was something I wanted to get into.

I arrived in early December, 2016. It was a few days after Trump won the elections, and a few days after Baltimore’s latest in a long line of shitty mayors assumed power. Just to give you a frame of reference.

I had a single suitcase and a few thousand dollars in my bank account. I also had $80,000 in debt, accumulated over years of living just beyond our means with me in the role of sole breadwinner and failed entrepreneur. I was met at the airport by a friend, who let me stay in the basement of a house he had up for sale for the first six months.

It was bitter cold in Baltimore, but I hit the ground running, and, with no driver’s license or car, I started taking the city’s shitty public transport to get around the city and Ubering to meetups and networking events. To put things in perspective, most Jews in Baltimore have never taken the city’s public transportation once in their entire lives.

Those were dark times, full of stress over affording everything, constant rejection from credit applications due to insufficient credit history, and being away from my kids. I’d sit every morning in my basement room and cry for an hour while I meditated. There was no end in sight to my current situation. I had taken a giant leap into the unknown.

My dream was that somehow my kids would end up in America as well. I felt that ultimately their lives would be better outside the shithole called Israel, just as mine was. I had the goal of building them a better future but I had no clue as to how that would actually come about.

I was constantly comparing myself to my absent father. Was I just as unavailable as he had been? Would my kids be as angry at me as I was at him? We usually fuck our kids up subtly, realizing it retroactively. It’s rare to deliberately make a decision that you know will make things worse for them. Try explaining to a five year old that you don’t see them anymore because you couldn’t tolerate one more day in the country you were both born in.

So I video called them daily. I uploaded 140 bedtime stories to YouTube for them to watch (First one: “Oh the places you’ll go”. Last one: “Bruce’s big move”). As much for my own sake, to feel less shitty about myself; and for the sake of people around me, to judge me less; as it was for them to have a connection to their father.

My first months in Baltimore were a study in contrasts.

How easy it was to get a driver’s license.
How polite customer service was.
How abundant America was, and how privileged people were about it – complaining about meaningless things, consuming on an unparalleled level, and not taking advantage of all the good that surrounds them.
How much further my intelligence, personality, and entrepreneurship took me. You still have to work hard in America, but you see much greater results when you do.

I almost started crying when I walked into the local library, a shitty little hole that was still infinitely bigger than any English section of a library in Israel. I grew up with an insatiable appetite for books and not enough access to (or time for) them, what would my life have looked like if I had grown up near a library like this one?

I actually started crying after taking my first hike through one of Maryland’s many magical parks. Surrounded by mist, stillness, and the sound of a flowing river, I had never experienced such beauty in my life, and yet for my fellow Americans, this was a straightforward 15 minute drive away. Like a hug after going too long without touch, I felt the retroactive pain of the absence of this beauty, of this expansiveness, of this space to be free, be myself. So I sat down on a log and sobbed into the fog.

Within two weeks I was offered two jobs through some networking I did on a local Facebook group. I took a position as a web designer at a local startup, where I still work to this day.

I had spent years in Israel dreaming of real estate investing and educating myself as much as I could, mostly through podcasts. I had then networked locally for months to make connections and understand the local market.

Six months after moving, I bought my first house. $10,000 down and I was the proud owner of a single family home with its own backyard – unheard of in Israel. In what was to become the norm, I was given hell during the financing stage and was given a shitty interest rate, but I still rented out two rooms in the house and ended up living for free.

Just over one year later I was the proud owner of four houses. A simple statement to make, but the amount of financial stress that put me through, and the logistical efforts involved –from managing contractors to dealing with bat infestations – were huge contributing factors to me spiraling into a depression that lasted months.

I have so many stories. And many of them involve Craigslist.

– The catering gigs I took when I first started out and needed extra money.
– The time I tried buying a used bike in a shady parking lot one Friday night from an African American man driving a pickup truck while wearing a Na Nach Breslov Kippah (I didn’t buy the bike, but I wished him Shabbat Shalom when he drove off).
– The time I used a week off from my day job to work for a contractor renovating a house; he later became my contractor on my own projects.
– The time I tenuously presented myself as a real estate photographer and connected with a local commercial developer who ended up mentoring me, signing me to his brokerage, and having me build two of his websites.

I visited the kids as often as I could, which turned out to be every four months. The first summer, they flew in to visit me for five weeks in Baltimore, and I was able to give them a taste of the better life I hoped they’d one day have.

We had a great time. We took road trips. Visited families, museums and theme parks. Most importantly, we were together again, and the difference in their happiness was tangible. The trip turned into a pilot trip, becoming a serious discussion about them moving to America to be close to me.

I had always said I’d live anywhere in the world for the sake of the kids – anywhere other than Israel, whose shittiness was beyond my emotional capacity to bear. The original suggestion was for them to move to Baltimore, but over time it became apparent that Canada would be a much simpler transition for all involved parties – since we are all Canadian, and arguably a better place to raise a family – since America is currently in the throes of Becoming Great Again. And so, on July 1st, 2018 – Canada Day – I packed up once again and moved houses for the sixth time in three years.

The destination was Hamilton, Ontario. And as I drove out of Baltimore for the last time with everything I cared about in the trunk and back seat of my car, I felt the darkness, the stress, the hopelessness, melt away. It was time for yet another beginning.

Full chapter list (Available in eBook Form)

Earning Heaven

“Judaism is about relationships,” sayeth the narrative. “It’s about aligning yourself with truth. It’s about becoming more like God, so that you can connect with God (how that doesn’t work is the subject of a separate article).”

Furthermore, “Only dim witted people, like women and children (a pretty direct paraphrase from Maimonides), follow the Torah for the sake of reward.”

Oh really?

Then what is the reason behind the obsession with consequences that permeates every level of Jewish thought, from the Bible to Halacha to Mussar to Prayer?

Some choice nuggets:

• The Torah spends almost TWO entire Parshas going into excruciating (literally) detail about the rewards and punishments – but mostly punishments – that happen if you don’t follow the Torah. It then spends a significant part of Prophets proving the point that when the Jews listened to God, their neighboring enemies stopped fucking with them.
• My current favorite retarded law: if you forget to pray one of the daily prayers, you can make up for it by praying the following prayer TWICE. If the laws are about relationships, how in the hell does that work? You think you can miss a date with your partner and just make next week’s date twice as long to make up for it?
• “To help you avoid sin,” recommend some prominent thinkers in Mussar movement, “might we suggest imagining intensely the types of punishment that will befall you if you transgress a law?” Like, how about having your soul catapulted from one end of the earth to the other by Angels of Terror™? Or if you ever burn yourself, just remind yourself that hell will burn so much more.
• To really get behind the spirit of the uplifting High Holidays, the focal point for many people is the prayer during which you’re reminded that this is the time when God decides who wins another year at life, and who gets to die: by earthquake, by starvation, by plague, by suffocation; remember the Almighty has an almighty amount of ways He could benevolently smote you.

—

“Aha,” says Kiruv Rabbi you. “Thus is the nature of reality. Stray from God, you get further away from His light, and naturally bad shit will befall you. It’s not reward and punishment. It’s the natural order of things when you stray from under God’s protective shadow.”

To which I reply with two things:

Are you ready to empirically prove it? Because they’ve done studies and people who were prayed for were LESS likely to recover. It seems, if you look around, that bad things happen to good people just as often as good things happen to bad people.

More personally, I once tried proving, (while I was still religious and wanted the results to support the premise) that there were more Terrorist attacks in Israel during Bein Hazmanim when there was less protective Torah learning going on. I could find no correlation.

Because if you can’t prove it, I may just accuse you of using the universe’s chaotic ways to manipulate people to act and believe as you want. Pretty shitty of you, no?

Here’s a gem of an email I just found online, written by a principal to his post-high school seminary in Israel for 19 year old women:

“When most girls were wearing skirts above their knees you made a kinnus (assembly) to teach the world that it’s assur. While the kdoshim (“martyrs”, referring to three Israeli boys who were kidnapped and killed) were missing, I kept asking myself, where is my army? We saved Gilad (Shalit, a kidnapped Israeli soldier, through their spiritual actions), we can save them as well. I have no doubt my army was doing their part. This time, Hashem said no… I have a sinking feeling we’re going to bring Mashiach (Messiah). Sources tell us that before Mashiach there will be a big nisayon that will be very hard to pass. Those who do will merit Mashiach. Those who don’t… (trails off ominously)”

So many threats and massive assumptions, so much guilt and manipulation, in just on excerpt.

More importantly though. Even if bad things and good things, heaven and hell, do occur to people as a byproduct of this whole relationship with God thing, shouldn’t that be the focus? Do I really need to read between the lines, wait until Luzzato’s books 200 years ago, piece together a narrative, where it’s all about relationship?

At face value, Judaism is yet another dogma that controls the masses, except it comes with relationship-dipped carrots, not just sticks.

Quotes

This being a synagogue bathroom, I suppose it makes sense that one would flush religiously.

Genesis and The Big Bang – Extra NSFW

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And water. And light. And trees. And all the other stars and the moon and the sun too. Yes, in that order, motherfuckers, it says so right there in the book. And the fishes. And the animals. And the dinosaur bones in the ground that would one day fuck with those idiot scientists, lol.

And God told all the animals “be fruitful and multiply, and keep on fucking like your very existence depends on it. Because surprise, fuckers, it does.” The animals did just that, and the Lord saw that it was gooood, if ya know what I mean. And the animals thought it was a pretty swell arrangement too.

But in his haste to complete the entire world in just six days, God had made everyone a fuck buddy except for Adam. (God is a real overachiever. No one would have complained if it had taken him a month.) He’d forgotten to make a Lady Lover for the Most Important Part of Creation ™, the Reason For All of Existence®.

He sort of wandered The Garden of Eden aimlessly, dick in hand — both metaphorically and physically.

Adam wasn’t very vocal about his issue, he took a more passive aggressive stance. But his confusion was apparent. He sort of wandered The Garden of Eden aimlessly, dick in hand — both metaphorically and physically.

By the time God remembered to check on Adam, it was late afternoon, and He was flooded with the panic of a parent who remembers it’s been too quiet for too long and his child has probably decided to make breakfast for himself using chocolate syrup, an entire stick of butter, and the microwave on high for 15 minutes.

He rushed over to Adam’s corner of the Garden, and founded him forlornly nerking his throbber at the sight of a water buffalo humping his buffalo gal with the focus and determination water buffalo are famous for.

“Stop it! Stop it! You can’t masturbate to other animals humping! That’s just inappropriate! Also, what’s that near the Tree of life, the Tree of Knowledge, the Euphrates estuary, in Gabriel’s pool of ponderation, and on that footpath? Dude, people are walking there!

“How many times today have you done it already? You’ve been alive for all of what… (God glances at Milky Way, which was now a few light years further away from Andromeda) four hours? You’re seriously like a teenager. I thought I’d skip all that shit with you when I formed you as an adult In My Own Image.”

Adam proceeded to throw a fit that further indicated he definitely hadn’t passed puberty by, nor the terrible twos for that matter. The terms “not fair”, “I hate you”, and “you’re the worst Creator in the Entire Universe” were definitely used.

15 minutes later, God had had enough. “GET UP! Get up off the ground, stop flailing around like one-legged dodo, and dust yourself off. It is definitely time for you to take a nap!” At which point God used his Heavenly Unfair Advantage and cast Adam into a deep sleep, which would normally have taken a human parent at least two hours of begging, cajoling, bouncing around like an idiot, frantic rocking, and insomnia.

During that nap, God took one of his Adam’s ribs, and, being a pretty handy fellow, crafted it into an entire motherfucking lady. A pretty impressive feat, especially considering that once He was done endowing her, she had more fat in certain strategic parts than Adam had on his entire chiseled body.

An entire motherfucking lady (illustration)

Adam awoke from his nap to the best surprise he’d ever seen in his entire life, although granted, that was saying very little. Without so much as a thank you, the two of them started bumping like bunnies. God, exasperated, walked off muttering what sounded like “kids these days”.

The irony is that with one rib removed, Adam was halfway to being able to bend forward far enough to actually blow himself. This would have granted him all the benefits of unlimited blowjobs without any of the side effects of having to deal with a woman in your life.

Bible critics consider this one of the biggest plot holes in the entire Genesis narrative, and a key contributor to their consensus that the creation story “totally blows”.

The Smiling Rabbi

Interesting anecdote about this book cover. It’s a composite of two different Rabbi faces, i.e. it’s not any specific Rabbi, so that I wouldn’t poke fun unnecessarily at someone. That’s how much of a tzadik I am.

From the back cover:

Rabbi Shlomo Levi Birenshmaltz (ZATZHA”L: of blessed, blessed memory), like dozens of others, was truly a unique man in our generation, and his death left a gaping void of hyperbole in our hearts.

He was a man of so many opposites. Intelligence and love. Compassion and bravery. Sweeping knowledge and searing insight.

Those who knew him knew that his smile could light up a room. This flies in the face of contemporary assumptions that religious people aren’t happy. Torah invented happiness. Torah invented smiling (As the verse says: “…And Moshe smiled, and thus he spake.” (Leviticus 69:420)). And who should be a better proof of that than a true master of Torah? An absolute embodiment of Simchas Chayim, he taught us all what it means to love life. He truly loved all people – even non-Jews.

Yet he wasn’t afraid to fight. He fought for what he believed in. He fought change. He fought the status quo. He fought the internet. He fought education. He fought women’s elbows. For a man of such gentle disposition, he could surely transform into a raging giant when Truth was on the line.

He wasn’t without his faults, of course, and this book does not gloss over them. It merely paints them in the best possible light. After all, is not imperfection a more believable and relatable form of perfection? Could it not be said that – like the quintessential job interview response – his biggest fault was he had so few faults?

For surely Rabbi Shlomo Levi Birenshmaltz was a God amongst men. Granted superhuman abilities from birth, and raised in an illustrious family with a long lineage of Rabbis, we can only look up to him in awe. Collectively, we are all equal in God’s eyes, each with our own unique challenges and gifts; but he was definitely better than the rest of us.

It is our hope that this biography serves as an inspiration of what you could become if you were born a completely different person.

Hashgacha Pratis

If you believe in God from a philosophical point of view, you shouldn’t need any emotional scaffolding to keep things up.

The absurdity of one-off inspirational stories of any kind should be obvious to even the most casual of contemplators, and yet it forms a huge part of religious culture.

I can respect this need in human nature – if there’s something you believe in, you want to immerse yourself in it! You want to relieve all the excruciating details in all their climactic glory!

If there’s a sportsing team you’re fond of, you’ll talk about all their sportsing successes and regale with your comrades in the specific escapades of specific sportsfull members. You might be so committed that it never really seems to bother you that you’ve been rooting for a losing team. Why are you so willing to stand behind such a lousy track record? Is it because you were born in that team’s city?

It’s one thing to root for your loser team (that’s right, I said it), and it’s quite another to root for a losing life philosophy. To emotionally psych yourself up enough that you ignore the painful emotional and intellectual realities that come with the package.

I myself was guilty of this behavior, inversely expressed. It was not any of the myriad of philosophical questions that already plagued me which actually pushed me over. I only left religion when my emotional world grew too dark to sustain it.

And so, the irony of my own personal story is that I’m grateful to God for what He personally did to me, the asshole, because now I am able to not believe in Him in the first place.

It’s Hashgacha, really.

An Honest Man

Loopholes

Good news: if you have money, even being A Good Jew in The Eyes of God™ is easier.

Instead of slaving away getting your house clean for Passover, just sell your house to a non-Jew (awesome loophole, Rabbis!) and go to the nearest tropical resort you can find. There, you can enjoy a five star experience that is Approved in The Eyes of God and Man while being entertained by the most inspiring Rabbis money can buy. Wouldn’t want any of that inspiration running dry, would you now.

Because sometimes, Judaism is all about the letter of the law.

Do I own any leavened bread today? No, because somehow one sorry Arab bought all of the city’s bread at the same time.

Is this the live hair of a married woman you are seeing? (the horror!) No, I cut it off and made it into a wig, mothefucker.

Am I carrying outside the zone on Shabbat? Nope, because see those telephone poles?

Did I just make an interest payment on a loan? No, because of that sign on that wall.

And other times, it’s all about the spirit.

Can you have all of your lights and TV and coffee maker automated on Shabbat? Nope, because you’d be missing the point.

Can you fuck a married woman using a condom, since condoms are like, totally spilling seed? Nope, because dude, you’re hitting the point.

Can a woman have a slit in her dress if it doesn’t show any prohibited skin? C’mon! It’s all about whether she’s arousing men, not what part of the body is actually showing.

When does the distinction get made? No one knows for sure. Or, more accurately, “the Rabbis are in disagreement on the subject”. In reality? This is just another expression of social norms – some things just made it in, others are still taboo.

Stop pretending this is part of some higher order and admit you’re just a bunch of fucking people trying to make sense out of life by arbitrarily following a certain set of rules – rules that still evolve, just in a different way than anyone else would call normal.

You claim to be resistant to change, preserving the ways of tradition. In reality you look nothing like Jews, or Judaism, or Israel looked like in the past – you just evolve at your own glacial pace, with your own stupid justifications.

You’re at least as dumb as everybody else.

After a certain Rabbi I knew all too well came out publicly as having had an affair with a married woman, while also reassuring people that there was no “actual transgression” involved due to the absence of penis-in-vagina penetration (can’t remember the exact bullshit language), I reposed this book cover with the following divrey chizuk:

Raboisay. In light of recent events, rachmana litzlan, it’s worth bringing up a recent point I’ve made so eloquently and humbly in the past. As we all know, sometimes it’s the most obvious points that need chizuk, especially if you’re delusional.

Religion is used as a supposed framework for morality:
“Who are we to trust ourselves? To know what’s right?

We need guidance! We need direction! We need clarification!

How many grams of cheese can fall into your cholent before you become a morally repugnant person? How many days old does a fetus need to be for it to be called a murderous abortion? Tell us, oh Torah written when we still thought the sun revolves around us. You know best.

In fact, the opposite is true:

When you look to a book to define what is wrong and right, it’s much easier to engage in the mental acrobatics we all do to justify your behaviors. It’s one thing to rationalize your shit, we all do that. It’s another to have God’s book on your side backing up your hair-splitting insights.

Let’s all take it upon ourselves to be mischazek in speaking as yeshivishly as possible and also not being total fucking idiots about what we KNOW is wrong or right, bullshit religious justifications notwithstanding.

V’hameivin yovin.