Wartime and Holidays

If you live in Israel and you talk to folks from your native country, they all say, Stay safe! And I repeat it back, You stay safe! Because the world is a crazy place. 

It is March 15, the war with Iran began on Saturday, February 28. 

February is a short month so if we do the math that brings us to a 15 day war so far. 

Two weeks and a day. Feels longer. But honest, except for an occasional missile from a hostile country, you would never notice. (Why so hostile?!) Israel has a few war songs, but nobody's singing them now. Most of our songs are about the love of the land, our beautiful, bountiful land. As they sang in the movie Milk and Honey, 

We want it green and so it's green for us. 

We also worked it. By we, I mean Jews. For hundreds of years, under other peoples, it lay fallow, produced mostly rocks. Come here. You will think you are in a first world country because you are.

But back to the war.

It feels inconvenient, is all, or so it feels, not dangerous, not by war standards. I picture Vietnam and napalm, horrible mayhem, mass slaughter.  Life Magazine photos. This is not that war. 

A week ago if you talked to Israelis they might say they felt that the conflict is winding down. Maybe, but that's in the Old Mighty's hands. Or in the hands of Her representatives. We all hope it is almost over, I mean, the holidays are coming. Everyone has a holiday in the spring. I'm not listing them all, ask your buddy Chat. But for example,. 

There's the East Asian Qing Ming celebrates ancestors, sorry, no pic, it felt like adding a picture of people objectified unnecessarily.

And the Japanese Hanami about memory, renewal and nature

Cherry blossoms for Hanami

Hindu holiday Holi-colors and joy, good over evil

Passover matzah: Jews couldn't wait for the bread to rise! Matzah on the run from Egypt so it looked like this

Muslim Eid-al-Fitr

Christians celebrate rebirth, sacrifice and redemption with Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter

Muslims have Ramadan,  month of reflection and charity that ends with Eid-al-Fitr 

Should be a happy time, no? 

And yet the world feels upside down to many of us. We have to b e ready for anything, and I don't just mean in Israel, all over the world. 

News flash: terrorism is not the work of the Jews. We didn't invent it, aren't into it.

Living with uncertainty, tolerating uncertainty-this is a life skill, it is something we teach in therapy. Breathe, watch happy shows, laugh at comedians on Facebook and Instagram. Do what once made you happy. It probably still will. 

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Fasting

The Kotel, Western Wall

It was a fast day yesterday, meaning no food or water from sunrise to sunset (we have 25-hour fasts, but this one, the 17th of Tammuz is considered a "minor" fast, less intense). FD and I woke up at 3:45 am to get in some breakfast before sunrise.

This helps tremendously, a pancake or two, a cup of coffee, a couple of preventive Advil. But when you're fasting until 9:15 pm on a summer day, you get more than a little thirsty.  I traditionally tease my children with a text, a reminder of the joke about the old Jewish guy on a train in Europe. He continuously bemoans aloud, "I'm so toisty," until someone finally listens to him. (There are variations, all with the same punchline.). It is my final text of the long day.

Anyway by 9:00 that day I'm at work, where people are often talking about food, and their diets, how cutting out certain foods, white flour or sugar especially, helps them lose a couple of pounds and improves their state of mind. Abstaining from anything is empowerment, imho, in moderation.

A Jewish fast is an empowerment opportunity of a different sort, however. It is thought that the Old Mighty (my grandfather's nickname for Her) is more accessible, a little closer on these set days, that She's really listening, hoping we'll connect sincerely, and more often. And when we fast, we're more likely to tune into that side of ourselves, the side that communes with a higher power, people say. I like to call this part of us our religious life. We have many lives, all tucked inside, and this can be one of them, or not.

When we're depressed it can go missing.

As it is also the Muslim month of Ramadan; Jews are not the only ones fasting this day. This has to be an interesting month, psychologically, for the cousins, and the world over their effort is both baffling and admired.

There are two summer fasts for Jews, one the 17th of Tammuz, then another, more compulsory, on the 9th of Av, three weeks apart. The fasts remind us not only of the destruction of the Holy Temples of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (586 BCE) and the Romans (59 CE), but also the many bloody initiatives of other nations intent upon destroying the Jewish people.

mass grave in Belson

Since the experience with Germany in World War II is so close to us, and because there are still survivors of the war, some of whom are still around to speak about it, and cinematic footage of them in dirty striped prisoner pajamas, blank-eyed living skeletons, and footage of the dead, too, ominous mountains of real skeletons, mass graves, thousands of confused, terrified men, women, and children shoved onto trains for days, no food, no water, no toilets, on their way to the ovens, and death marches, miles in the snow in those thin pajamas, sub-zero weather, those who stumble and fall, if they aren't already dead, shot on sight. The Holocaust reduced the population of Jews in Europe dramatically from almost 17 million to less than 11 million. But what is 6 million Jewish people, after all. What do Jews even contribute to society?

Oh, never mind. It wasn't my intention to go here. It is too sad. For a look at photos of the Holocaust, mountains of Jewish shoes and eye-glasses, maps of concentration camps, emaciated bodies, look at Shamash.org or better, visit a Holocaust memorial museum, like the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance  in person. Any Holocaust museum will do. Anytime.

Fasting, if you do it six times a year, for many years, is still likely to be dreaded each and every time. But it isn't really that bad, and those of us who wouldn't, couldn't, miss a fast, know it. The less spiritual can point to the benefits, purging the body of all the garbage we've eaten the week before. When the fast is over, if we don't eat too much in breaking it, if we keep dinner moderate and healthy, we feel great, assuming we haven't a "caffeine headache." (Hence the early wake up before dawn for coffee).

And even the next day, today, at the pool at 6:30 in the morning, when the body has adjusted to the cool water, the jump in serotonin in this therapydoc's brain is measurable, words for this post swimming in the brain with every stroke.

It is paradoxical that the anorexia of depression functions to increase depression, makes it worse, denies a good state of mind. The treatment is to increase appetite, and certainly, make sure the patient sleeps a solid six, at least, which is one of the benefits of medication. Sleep and food are healing.

So unless fasting is one of those things your doctor tells you to do before a procedure, or your clergyperson really recommends as a traditional way to connect to certain events and your Higher Power (assuming the pri-care has signed off on it), take all this talk of fasting from food and water for many hours at a time with a grain of salt.

Preferably on a no-yoke omelet, half a bagel on the side. With butter, thank you, and at least a quarter of a cantaloupe. They're in season it just so happens.

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