One of the last photographs ever taken of Tamar Ariel shows her sitting inside a small sukkah in Nepal and smiling. She had built the sukkah from materials she found in the middle of nowhere so that she would be able to sit inside it and recite the blessings over bread and over eating in the sukkah during the Sukkot holiday.
There is something else about that photograph: She is wearing trousers. In this generation, nobody pays any particular attention to a woman wearing trousers who still observes the commandment to eat in a sukkah. It is not surprising, nor does it seem contradictory. We have become accustomed to young women who think for themselves while remaining loyal to halacha, Jewish religious law, and manage to reconcile the two.
Capt. Tamar Ariel, who perished in the blizzard in Nepal and was known as the first religious woman navigator (in the Israeli Air Force), did not start any rebellions; she never saw obstacles in her life. Yet we should still be grateful to her; she left behind a path lit with blazing torches, and other young women will certainly be following in her footsteps.
Ariel attended an ulpana, a religious high school for girls, and performed two years of national service as a group leader in the Bnei Akiva youth movement. Then, wanting to contribute as much to the country as she possibly could -- because such was her upbringing -- she began the long and arduous pilots' course. During the course she fought in combat and was injured, and was well aware of the people watching her from a distance (myself included) praying for her success, that she would not drop out, that in Nepal she would not lose the drive to observe Sukkot, that the "navigator" and the "religiously observant woman" inside her would peacefully coexist. She succeeded and set an example: a true navigator who could navigate between the sacred and the mundane, heaven and earth.
She wore trousers throughout the entire pilots' course. That is only logical when one is engaged in that kind of work. Incidentally, "religious women in trousers" have been a non-issue for the past two or three decades. Around me are hundreds, even thousands of women, some wearing scarves on their heads, who wear trousers and are careful to wash their hands ritually before eating bread and count the Omer, the traditional seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot, in the spring. Yet Ariel chose to wear a skirt to her graduation ceremony. That choice was a significant one, because as modest as she was, she understood the responsibility she carried. She knew that her long skirt, with its hem sweeping the floor of the parade grounds, would convey a message to the religious high-school girls watching her.
I myself volunteered for national service, not for the army. If I had to do it over again, I would choose the army. The image of Tamar Ariel is one example, an answer to the sticks-in-the-mud who fear the idea of religious women serving in the army. In 2010, during a training flight in a T-6 Texan II aircraft (an "Efroni" in Hebrew), Ariel had to eject before landing. The plane crashed and she suffered a broken vertebra. An inquiry into the incident found she had performed with impecable level-headedness. Another pilot who witnessed the crash and went to assist her told her family this week that as he was running toward her, he thought about how to give her first aid, since he knew that as a religious woman she would not touch men unrelated to her. Everyone in the course knew that Ariel observed the prohibition on "negia" -- including those unaware that it does not apply to situations in which a person requires medical help.
"I found her lying on the ground, huddled up and crying," he recalled. "When I asked whether she was crying because she was in pain -- and a broken bone in the back is painful in the extreme -- she said, 'I destroyed the plane. Does the Air Force have another Efroni-' I calmed her down, telling her there were other planes. I don't know whether there is any other member of an air crew who, a moment after being saved from a crash like that and breaking their spine, would care about army property."
The graphic headlines in the newspapers after the Nepal disaster were like a sword in the hearts of Tamar's family. At first: "They froze to death" (Yedioth Ahronoth, last Friday). Then: "How we left Tamar to die in the snow" (the online news sites). The headlines could have been worded more sensitively. When Ariel's cousin was asked to give an interview with Oded Ben-Ami on Channel 2, she specifically asked not to have to comment on what happened during the blizzard, not to respond to the chilling account of Eitan Idan, who was forced to leave Ariel behind in order to survive. Ben-Ami still asked her the question during the live broadcast. She asked not to answer. Ben-Ami thanked her and stopped the interview. Even in the snow, people look for blood.
It is better to hear about Tamar Ariel as she lived, with her warm smile; who took care to recite the proper blessings and prayers, and during vacations would ride her motorbike in the Elah Valley and the Galilee; who never missed Shabbat prayers at the synagogue even when she came home exhausted from the army. Tamar Ariel, the guitarist and drummer, who always played the drums during the dancing on her moshav the night after the Simhat Torah festival. Tamar Ariel, who knew her way around a page of the Talmud and could navigate F-16 fighter jets.
Her family is religious Zionist, members of the agricultural settlements. Six children. Her father is a farmer, her mother provides support to religious women in the army. Her grandfather was captured by the Jordanians in 1948, her parents were among the founders of Moshav Massuot Yitzhak. Two of her brothers serve in elite units, and she was the first religious woman to complete the pilots' course.
"The nation of Israel called you T [because the full names of pilots are censored], but we called you Tamar," said Rabbi Meir Nehorai, the rabbi of her moshav, in his eulogy. "You left us at the summit, somewhere up above, in the places where you usually were, close to heaven. Your natural place was on the summit, and tears fell from the heavens, which mourned your death."
The rabbi recounted how, when the news of Ariel's body being found arrived at the peak of the "hakafot," the customary dancing during the Simhat Torah festival, her family asked that the service, with its singing and dancing, continue -- this time for the elevation of her spirit. The whole community was proud of her. When she completed the pilots' course, her father was called to the Torah reading in the synagogue in honor of the occasion, and all the congregants sang the well-known song from Psalms, "Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice."
"Now the heavens weep," Nehorai said.
One of Ariel's friends met her when Operation Protective Edge ended. After taking part in the operation, she was exceptionally thin.
"We didn't have a chance to eat," she explained. "We had a lot of work."
The air sorties were ongoing, and all the crews could do between them was sleep. The adrenaline also made her forget the need to eat. Ariel, who had played a significant role during the operation, was supposed to receive a citation for excellence. The members of her squadron planned to tell her about it when she came back from Nepal. They never got the chance.
When someone from her family asked her to take care of herself in the war because it was so dangerous above Gaza, Ariel answered: "I'm in a safe place. When I'm up there, I think about the soldiers down below. I pray for them, that they come back safely. When I'm in the sky, I'm protected."
Every soul has a purpose
The Tismotek event, a meeting of hundreds of families who have one or more children with Down syndrome, was held last Sukkot. The families attend the happening to give and receive strength and encouragement, embrace one another and rejoice in their children. The message of the event was one of gratitude for the gift that these families have received, and a rejection of society's pity. Children with Down syndrome possess high emotional intelligence and are blessed with abundant compassion and love. The birth of a child with Down syndrome is not an occasion for mourning. Quite a few children with Down syndrome are abandoned in hospitals, but the enlightened mothers who came to Tismotek say their children are worth their weight in gold.
This sort of discourse is sorely lacking here. How badly we need people who see the good in their situation, who would rather put emphasis on the beauty of it instead of complaining. Some people wrote to them on Facebook that they were irresponsible, that their children were stealing the taxpayers' money, that mothers should abort fetuses diagnosed with Down Syndrome. But these mothers are not giving up. Their goal is to change the way people think about Down Syndrome.
Vered Azizi, a mother of six children, including a daughter with that extra chromosome, told me: Every soul on earth has a purpose. "People with Down syndrome have unparalleled patience and love for others. They can work in nursing, for example. They are an asset, not a liability. They contribute to the fixing of the world because they add good will, empathy and joy. They are talented in theater and in music. All we have to do is see that."
No masks, please
The basis of post-modernism is distancing oneself from absolute truth. There is no hint of good and evil, but rather an abundance of parallel narratives: "Everyone has his own truth."
I don't know about you, but I have had it up to here with that line of thinking. I have a compass and it shows me where north and south are. The scale tells me how much I weigh. It is not a matter of "narrative."
Even poverty is something that can be measured, and poverty in the State of Israel is measured in relative terms. The poverty line is relative. It was reported this week that one in every seven Israelis "felt" poor over the past year. Might that depend on the exaggerated consumer culture? Might it depend on who the person's neighbors are, or on something he saw in the mall and did not buy? Maybe it was an item about how much the general manager of a bank earns? It is inconceivable that economists adhere to polls that talk about feelings.
I am not dismissing poverty. I do refuse to faint from statistics that say "one in every five Israelis goes through trash cans" or that we have almost 2 million people who go to bed hungry. That is not accurate. There are poor people, and there are hungry people. The answer to the question of whether this is a nationwide plague is "no."
While the right wing seems to have quite a few problems when it comes to writing and public relations, the left wing has a problem with integrity. My friends, I do not believe you. It is appropriate to protest over starving children as long as it is done without exaggeration ("every third child in Israel") and truthfully. If you want to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, use the voting booth. Do not use photographs of a child covering his face, or the weakening of society, or headlines that smear Israel's reputation. Be honest.
When wicked people use environmental groups to oppose the Nitzanim construction project, the purpose of which is to provide housing for the displaced residents of Gush Katif, and succeed in getting it shelved in the name of environmental considerations, I do not believe them. I do not buy the idea that they are worried about the future of the Desert Poplar that grew on the banks of the Mivtah seasonal stream, which passes through the nature reserve. Their opposition to the plan is political.
Do you truly care about violence, about democracy? Why did you not cover the terror attack in Beit El last Monday? Two terrorists who infiltrated the community set fire to the home of Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, the head of the pre-army academy. They definitely meant it to end in murder. They also left a PLO flag in the yard. The owner of the home, an officer in an elite unit, managed to stop the fire that was spreading on the terrace, and miraculously no one was hurt. You did not hear about that.
The previous week, Hebrew graffiti with spelling errors that Hebrew speakers do not make was found in a Palestinian village. The village's proximity to the settlement of Kfar Tapuah, which suffers from a negative image (that is unjustified) was enough of a reason for the media. All the settlers of Samaria were put into a lineup for their involvement in hate crimes and Jewish terrorism.
Are you truly concerned about women's rights? Leave the haredi women, and the half of the bus where they sit, in peace. Fight against the new commercial by the cable company Hot, for example, in which a teenage groupie invites a Mizrahi singer performing onstage to her home (inspired, perhaps, by the Eyal Golan case-), and then takes him into her bedroom with obvious intent. All the big feminists shriek about segregation in the public health clinics in the heart of haredi neighborhoods, but say nothing when our daughters learn from television that it is cool to sleep with a singer whom you do not even know.
Do you really care about human beings with no regard for differences in religion, race or gender? Do you care about social justice? Really? "Your ad was not approved for publication because the Shatil website does not list jobs beyond the Green Line." This sentence was written by the social justice activists of Shatil when they received a job listing for a caregiver at an afternoon day-care center in Elkana. An afternoon day-care center for children!
Shatil is a good example of the illusions of protests. "I am going to Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] on foot," Vicky Knafo said in 2003 when she began her famous trek from Mizpe Ramon to Jerusalem, becoming a leader of the single parents' struggle. Only later was it reported that she had received advice and public relations support from Shatil, which belongs to the New Israel Fund.
In the protests over the cottage cheese prices in 2011, it took only a basic sense of smell to realize that the people protesting on Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard in their paid-for tents were not all that anxious about the large haredi families who, as they said, could not afford cottage cheese. What they wanted was to replace the government.
Our democracy can tolerate the overthrow of a government. Go ahead, protest. Demonstrate. Write essays. Use the ballot box. Tweet. But do it with clean hands, not in costume. The devious use of an environmental, social or feminist agenda for political purposes might work once or twice. After that, nobody will buy it anymore -- and really, 30 people attended the demonstration protesting the price of Milky pudding snacks two weeks ago.
The results are in
In my column for the Yom Kippur supplement, I wrote about the genetic testing that has the Jewish world in an uproar. I promised to publish the results of the tests that I did through Family Tree DNA, and they have arrived. There are no big surprises. I would not stop being religiously observant if my test showed my blood contained the genome of complete non-Jews. Judaism is part of my spiritual DNA. In any case, the genome supported that I was found to be of Jewish origin. The findings about my ethnic origins were a bit surprising, though. It turns out that 85 percent of my ancestors belong to the Ashkenazi diaspora. The rest are Mediterranean/Sephardi. I was sure I was half-and-half. My husband was happy to learn his wife is Polish. It helps explain our cuisine.
The mitochondrial DNA test tracked my direct maternal line. It turns out that a female ancestor of mine 28 generations ago belonged to the population cluster with the scientific nomenclature K1a1b1a1. Hello, grandmother, nice to meet you. She was evidently of Ashkenazi origin. The second test, which concentrates on the Y chromosome that passes from father to son, was conducted on a saliva sample given by my brother. This test found that our paternal line goes back to an ancestor scientifically known as J2-M172. Hello, grandfather, nice to know your name. The researchers identify this population cluster as Sephardi, which is appropriate to my birth name, Delarosa. Surnames pass from father to son, and my father's side has a tradition that they are descended from Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492.
The results of the third test came from all my ancestral lines together. I received a list of hundreds of "relatives" from all over the world who share DNA sequences with me, most of them Jews, with a small Irish/Scottish minority. I have the option of sending an email to all those people, and some of them have already written to me, asking various questions. Someone in Australia is looking for family connections on behalf of his 90-year-old grandfather. One email from California asked for snapshots of my relatives to see whether there was a resemblance. Several of the people who came up as relatives of mine have surnames that were adopted by "anusim" -- Jews forced to convert to Christianity during the Inquisition. Interestingly, they also include a fair number of Arabs.
Let us observe the sabbatical year together
People in many Israeli homes have begun going through trash cans, and not for financial reasons. The sabbatical year has arrived, and much of the produce (mainly vegetables) is considered as having the special sanctity associated with the sabbatical year, which means that its leftovers and peels must be placed in a separate trash receptacle.
The extra bother of having to find out whether a pumpkin is from the "sixth-year harvest," and so exempt from the special receptacle, or labeled "Otzar Beit Din," produce administered by a special rabbinical court on the consumer's behalf, whose peels require the special receptacle, often gets on my nerves. On the other hand, it is a true opportunity to discover the sources of our food. Ecology and kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) sound like two separate fields, but it is only during the sabbatical year that I need to know where my tomatoes grew and who raised my parsley. Come observe the sabbatical year with me.
טעינו? נתקן! אם מצאתם טעות בכתבה, נשמח שתשתפו אותנו