Fresh off the boat

so tonight is the night that i got off the plane and started my first year in israel in 1998. monday night after parshat lechlicha i remember it well. I flew in with my buddy yossie his uncle picked us up from the air port, we ate dinner by his grandmas house in Jerusalem and headed straight for down town. this would be my very first of many crazy nights in down town Jerusalem. I remember thinking to my self after drinking a polish butterfly and a beer that i was drunk in less then four hours after getting off the plane. Well as i said this was the first of many.

so to tell the truth the real thing that i want to write about is my first year in Israel. I always find my self going back there. It was one crazy year. lot of kids come out here for the first year after they finish or drop out of high school. Ha i think that all the people that i was with that first year did not finish high school. well allot of us did but not before coming out to Israel. Well now that i think about it i cant seem to find the right sequence of words to express what went on that year in short, it was just so much.

Well there was allot of drama thats for dam sure, lots of drugs, lots of partying, for me there was a lot of deep contemplation which led me to some crazy things and well in the end i am the only one from the whole crew that was here that first year that is still here and never left. Wow great big realization this post was completely spontaneous but it so happens to be that this week in the lunar or Jewish calender is the exact week that i came to Israel my first year. I know this because a week from this upcoming shabbat is parshat chayey Sarah. In Jewish tradition that week we read the portion of the bible where Abraham bought Hebron for a berial ground for his wife Sarah. In Israel thousands of Jews spend the weekend in the ancient and well very much disputed city to stake the historical claim to the holy site shared by us with our Ishmael cuisines. From that second weekend untill now i have kept that tradition, this year please g-d will be my 13th consecutive year.

Life is one crazy trip

Monsey and Rebellion

It’s a funny thing and I say this a lot to people. I only lived in Monsey for two years but for some reason people still associate me with Monsey. The truth of the matter is that I lived in Miami for fourteen years and I am only really in touch with one of my friends from back then. In contrast to that I still have a very good connection to the people that I became friends with during the two years that I lived in Monsey.
What the hell is Monsey anyway?
Before I get into Monsey I really need to talk about Miami and LA a bit. Truth be told I could sum it all up into one sentence, six words. Miami- bubble, LA- prison, Monsey- rebellion.

Feb/25/1997

So here is where my journal started. My very first entry is about a day in the life. I almost missed the bus for school. This is not surprising at all because I would stay up until two in the morning every night and I would a lot of times go to sleep in my clothing so that I wouldn’t need to get dressed in the morning. This day two of my friends, leby and ari, got busted by the roshyesheva for smoking cigarettes. I smoked my first cigarette since I was in Brooklyn, which I have no note of when that was. But I do have that I smoked this cigarette by stoge rock. That night I spoke to toby on the phone for the first time in about two months and then I spoke to josh about ending it with this girl.
Now there is a lot of explaining and background to go through for anyone to understand what was actually going on here. For example what the hell is stoge rock? Who are these people? Where is this taking place?
Well the backdrop for this story is Monsey NY. We were all just a bunch of Jewish teenagers growing up in an ultraorthodox community that put on us way to many rules. They say that rules are made to be broken but the problem with that is that once you start breaking the rules, you break them one after another. Trampling each one underfoot you run ahead smashing through restriction. Severing all the chains that bound you. Racing into the horizon, to freedom. The problem is that for some of us freedom was a freefall and we didn’t stop until we hit the bottom. We learnt too late that the last cords we cut were our safety line.

Being a teenager

I would guess that we all have similar stories about growing up and being adolescents. The thing is that I wrote a lot down in a journal that I still have today. One of the reasons I would keep it was so that when I got older I wouldn’t forget what it was like and I really hoped that it would help me to better understand my own kids. So here I am I am 29 and I actually have kids of my own. But the oldest one is only five and this old journal that I have is starting to fall apart. So I figure I will start to put down this information from my old journal on to this blog.
A lot of the things that I have written down are really just facts about what happened in my day to day life but there are also some deeper insights into how I thought and felt at the time.

Gray water

OK so i Will give a ten minute blog post for the sole purpose of writing. do you know that with the water the you use to wash dishes, shower, wash your hand and brush your teeth. you could grow enough vegetables for two people. i have a really big garden and i use only gray water from my house to water it. the crazy thing is that i probably only use about half of my gray water.

My Job

Last night I was at a wedding and someone asked me what I am doing now for work. I answered him that I am back working security. Now I live in Israel and me and most of my friends served in the IDF in this one infantry unit. So working security for us is all ways a sure way to make a decent living and pay the bills. The thing that is different about my current security job is that I actually work for a Palestinian contractor who builds Jewish homes in the west bank towns. Now the reason that this is interesting is because it’s a military law that creates the need for my kind of a job. The Law says that any Palestinian working in the west bank towns needs to have an armed escort. The reason for this is that in the past there has been numerous cases where a Palestinian worker, in some cases that had been working for the same Jewish person for ten years and even more, that one day decided to go jihad and kill his boss in the name of Allah. So what I do is I pick these workers up at the entrance to the town. I wand them down and check their bags. Then I sit by the construction site in my little shade hut that I made out of a cardboard box. Some rebar and a old table I found in the trash. It’s a good job. The pay is good and I get to write this blog.

Health and Ecology

I personally see it as a fact that everything that we do that is bad for the environment is also bad for our health as human beings. This should be a convincing factor in showing people that we need to live in harmony with the natural world. Take for example air pollution, bad for the environment and bad for us. The green house gases in our earth’s atmosphere are causing global warming. Did you know that researchers are finding large numbers of polar bears that are drowning to death because of the melting polar icecaps? Did you also know that air pollution has been linked to respiratory problems such as asthma and even lung cancer? So do yourself and the planet a favor be, earth conscious. Whenever you can walk don’t drive. Use reusable bags when you shop, and spread the word.

Making amends with the past

What has happened to us in our lives until this moment has created for us the live that we now live. We have brought into our lives our friends, occupations and all of our habits.
Habits are things that are very powerful. I think that most people don’t realize how powerful habits are. Habits have many forms, such as emotional, social, nutritional, financial and pretty much anything that you do repeatedly is a habit. We have good habits and bad ones. What habits have you acquired in the past?
Never mind that for right now because that was the past. What we decide and commit ourselves to now is what will create our future. So instead of dwelling on the past think about what you want in the future.
Don’t have any regreats about the past because that is just what you had to go through to become the person that you are today. Again it is the choices that you make today that are going to create your future, so settle for nothing but the best.
Most important remember that life is great and you should enjoy every moment of it.

What is holistic?

Well in short holistic is the idea that everything in the universe is really part of a great big one.

Yeah that doesn’t seem to be very clear but please g-d through out this blog I will explain and expound on the idea.

One of the beautiful things about living by the holistic philosophy is that according to this way of life when you help someone else you always get rewarded greatly for your kindness even if you don’t see so right away. Now I have felt this way for a long time now but just recently I have started to listen to all these self help lectures. One person who makes this point very strongly is Napoleon Hill. He is really the first to put down these ideas for improving ones life into an organized philosophy. He is famous for his book "think and grow rich" and he says very clearly one of the surest ways to secure yourself success is to always go the extra mile to render service to others. He says that by doing so one will always be rewarded for his efforts. Which when looking at the world and universe as really being one entity would make perfect sense.

FIRST INSPIRATION

The inspiration to start this blog came from a moment today that I found myself spacing out and thinking about a movie I had just seen and a book that I am in the middle of reading. The thing that bothered me about this was that I found these fictional stories to be more exciting then my own real life. I really am not one of those people that thinks that they have a boring life I mean I really do have an amazing life full and exciting. So when I caught myself and stopped to get myself really excited about my life I decided that I really want to start a blog. But really its more of an e-journal for myself then something for other people to read but if some one finds it interesting then they can feel free to read away.

So lets start off with this I am 28 and my wife is over due to give birth to our third child! Defiantly not boring right. I also live in the Middle East, in the west bank settlement of nofey prat. I think this can already be the beginning of a great and exciting story stay tuned I plan on putting ten minutes a night into this more for myself then anything else but I hope this can be inspirational and enlightening for others.