So I spent hours and hours fussing with the tags on my blogger template in an attempt to change the look of my blog. I was trying to go for a sort of, uh, Tibetan monastery look.

But since I am - to put it kindly - an HTML ignoramous, I could not figure out how to get rid of that stupid green line between the header and the body; nor could I figure out how to extend the header horizontally to meet both margins.

If anyone out there can help, please let me know. I saved copies of the old and new looks in a Word document, if that helps.

Oh yeah, and since I am - after the aforementioned hours and hours - totally unobjective at this point, please do not hesitate to let me know (kindly, of course) if these colours don't really work. (They're not hideous, are they?)

(via Pony)

Scene: Lisa's bedroom, 7:00 A.M. The telephone rings.

Lisa: (sleepily) Hello?

Male voice: Yeah, is this Mrs. Lisa? We're from Super Gas. We're waiting downstairs with the canister you ordered. Can you come down and show us where we should hook it up, and give us a cheque?

Lisa: It's 7:00 A.M.!

Male voice: Well we coulda been here at 6:30, but we thought it might be too early.
************************
Ah well, never mind. The weather has been so beautiful all week that I might as well be up early to enjoy it. The sun is shining, and mid-day temperatures have reached 21 Celsius for the past three days - although the nights are pretty chilly - so I've been spending most of the daylight hours with friends at outdoor cafes, or wandering the city. This is the huge advantage of being an underpaid journalist (and having lots of friends who work similarly irregular hours): I can set my own schedule (unless I'm on deadline) and I'm not stuck in an office all day.

I've also been having a great time playing with posting photos to my blog. Here are some I took the day before yesterday.



Mid-afternoon on Rothschild boulevard. In the background is Gili's kiosk cafe, where I met my lovely neighbour and fellow blogger, Savta Dotty. In the foreground, bottom right, you can see...my shadow.


Continuing on to the Carmel Market, this is the shop of the Amari brothers - purveyors of practically everything. Here's where I buy tehina from Nablus (the best), spices, Italian coffee, Canadian maple syrup, French jam and homemade date-stuffed cookies (on Fridays only).


This is one of the many shops in the market that specializes in imported foods from the Far East, catering to the preferences of Israel's foreign workers. I thought Rinat might appreciate its name. Doesn't the guy wearing the hat look a lot like the actor who played Cher's father in Moonstruck?

It turns out that Ran and his wife, Delian, were actually out surfing when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka. They are safe, but badly shaken up by the experience. So far, he has been unable to write in his blog - but he was able to access the comments section, where he pasted in an extraordinary letter written by Delian to her father. Here is an excerpt:

Basically we rode out the first huge wave on our boards and stayed above the water/wave while everyone else was being swept away and everything was being destroyed. Then the water pulled back out of the bay we were in and we barely managed to avoid being swept out to sea with the current. We landed on the beach after the first surge, but couldn't go ashore because another wave was coming, our surf instructor told us that it was a matter of life and death that we stay away from the shore so we started heading back towards the water before it surged back in. We really didn't know what to do. Unfortunately we had to cross some flood waters as they ran back from the inland to the sea - it was filled with mud, sand and debris. We were still attached to our surf boards and I was swept under the mud by my board in the middle of the river. I have to say that I did almost drown - I had the thought in my head that this was such a stupid way to die. Luckily, because I was still attached to my board (even though it had sucked me under in the first place) I was eventually pulled up to the surface with it before I blacked out. I managed to pull my board to me and flopped on top of it until I could breathe again, then started trying to look for Ran. He had jumped in after me and had taken off his surf leash so I was worried that he'd drowned. I couldn't find him, the second big wave came in and I was pushed on to the shore because I was too exhausted to fight the surge. I was able to catch some branches before hitting very much, then got off of my board and starting screaming for help.

Click here and go to the comments section to read the rest. It's the most powerfully written, stunning eyewitness account you're likely to read. No photograph or video recording could make the experience of surviving the tsunami seem more real or immediate.

Local news coverage of the tsunami has focused on the many Israeli tourists who are injured and/or missing. The foreign ministry has swung into full emergency gear, sending teams out to the stricken areas to locate and evacuate Israelis. Hence this (perhaps slightly tasteless) cartoon that was published in Haaretz on Tuesday:

I think I may actually have figured out how to post photographs on my blog. For my debut photo, here is the first shot I took with the digital camera I purchased in Tokyo, about two days before I left Japan. This is a fruit basket in a Tokyo supermarket. Note that it contains 9 pieces of fruit. It cost 5,200 yen - or about US $50.

When I arrived in Bangkok a few days later, the first thing I did was stop at a stall that sold beautiful fresh papaya and pineapple for about 25 cents per portion. I ate nearly an entire pineapple right then and there, while sitting on a stool near the kerb and grinning between bites.

Last week my sister Adina's friend Ran posted a blog entry from Sri Lanka, where he was enjoying a surfing holiday. I was a bit jealous. I'm invited to the wedding of my friends Helena and Manu in India next month (in Rajasthan - far away from the current devastation) and I've been complaining for weeks about being unable to afford the trip.

I'm not jealous of Ran anymore. Just worried.

Officials say as many as 4,500 people are known to have died in Sri Lanka, one of the most severely hit nations, and that perhaps 500,000 are homeless.

I keep checking his blog, hoping to read "I'm back in Hong Kong [where he lives with his wife, Delian], everything's fine."

Or words to that effect.

What an unbelievable tragedy. I cannot even imagine the terror of seeing a 5-metre high wave approaching me, nor the grief of all those thousands of people who have lost loved ones, their homes and their livelihoods. It's staggering.

UPDATE: Ran and Delian are okay. (see comment from my sister for details). Phew.

Thursday night at Jah Pan was interesting, 'though not as much fun as I thought it would be. My friends and I arrived well after midnight, but despite the late hour there was a sense that the party just hadn't taken off. Who can say why some evenings succeed and others don't? The right ingredients were there - good music and interesting people (if you're wondering why I didn't mention booze, it's because Israelis don't really need alcohol to warm up; they're not big drinkers) - but somehow the combination didn't gel.

And besides that, for me the night resembled a mildly nightmarish version of "This is Your Life." It seemed as though half the men - the weird half - I'd dated since moving to Tel Aviv were there. Among them was one I'd nicknamed The Stalker, because he thought that "I'm not interested" meant "please call me several times per day on my mobile phone, using a blocked number so I won't know it's you, and oh yes do appear at my door after midnight to inquire as to why I haven't returned your messages." After awhile it got to be sort of farcical: I'd just turned away from the bar after exchanging greetings with one guy, who had his arm significantly draped over his new girlfriend, when I literally smacked into The Stalker and nearly spilled my Goldstar beer all over him. He stood completely still as he looked at me with an unsmiling "gotcha" expression and intoned, "ShaLOM, LIsa." Gak.

There were a few minor celebs there, including Yisrael Aharoni, a well-known and extremely strange-looking (click on the link to see what I mean) chef. Aharoni has hosted several cooking shows, lends his name to a number of cooking products and many years ago opened the first Chinese restaurant in Israel - Yin Yang. More recently, he has made the entertainment news for losing about half his body weight and for coming out of the closet after a lengthy marriage that produced a couple of children. He is now a fixture on the club scene, and is usually accompanied by an all-male entourage.

I stuck around for the live acts. There was a very talented Iraqi-Jewish oud player who was accompanied by a non-traditional band that included a saxophonist and a tuba player, followed by a belly dancer and then a mixed Arab-Jewish hip hop act. The hip hoppers were named Tomer (Jewish) and Sadj (Arab); the latter had a Palestinian flag painted on his wrist and a keffiyeh draped around his neck. They sang in Hebrew, with lines like "two countries for two nations," "today's kids deserve a better future," and "war is bad, peace is good." The mostly Jewish audience got pretty into the act: they danced, rhythmically pumped skyward two fingers extended in the "V" sign (for victory or peace, depending on your interpretation), and periodically expressed their appreciation with loud whoops and Middle Eastern-style ululations.

After Tomer and Sadj finished singing they jumped off the stage; Tomer fell into the waiting arms of his friends, who thumped him on the back and told him how great he'd been, but Sadj, after stepping on my foot and apologizing profusely, just disappeared. I turned to one of my friends, who was also a friend of Tomer's, and asked, "Where's Sadj?" She just shrugged indifferently. And I wondered again about the gap between ideals and reality; between tolerance and acceptance.

And then I just felt tired. The combined cigarette smoke of a hundred or so revelers had penetrated every fibre of my clothing and every strand of my hair; the hydroponic stuff that had been passed around had made me dizzy and slightly nauseated; it was late and I wanted to get up early for yoga class in the morning. So I called it a night.

Friday was much more fun, despite the at times heavy rain: as usual I went to yoga class and wandered around the Carmel Market in the morning, then hung out with friends at cafes in the afternoon. I decided to stay home on Friday night, catching up on some of my emails and making a big pot of chicken broth for Yemenite vegetable soup. I simmered the chicken broth for three hours, chopped all the vegetables and added them to the pot, smiling as I anticipated drinking hot, spicy soup while I watched Before Sunset on DVD (for the third time) and listened to the rain falling outside.

And then I discovered that I was out of cooking gas.

I was sure that practically all the bloggers who are Members of the Tribe (the Heeb tribe, that is) would've been all over this story by now, but it's been up on the New York Times Web site for at least 12 hours and so far not a peep on any of my regular reads. Not even from Esther..?

Which means that I get the scoop. Ha!

In an article entitled "Today He Is a Dog; Actually, He Always Was," Gawker gossip columnist Lily Koppel reports that Mark Nadler, a New York cabaret singer, just threw a bark mitzvah for his 13 year-old dog.

In the long walk of history between man and dog, the bark mitzvah could be seen as an unexpected pit stop. Yet it was celebrated on Saturday night in the Bronx in a traditional way, with a party for family and friends of the 13-year-old that included a chopped-liver sculpture, choruses of "mazel tov!" (or, in this case, "muzzle tov!"), a cantor and gifts.

The party planners included Mr. Nadler's partner and a cousin from Israel. They served the "colorful dips...in double-bowl dog dishes." One of the guests wore

...a red, rhinestone-studded leash, which she had bought for the occasion, around her waist like a Chanel belt. "I told my guy it was his one chance to lead me," she said. "And I let him for a minute. At the pet shop they thought I was being kinky. I told them I was going to a bark mitzvah."

And to the guest who happened to be a cantor, Mr. Nadler said of his dog, "He chanted his arf-Torah this afternoon." *

And excuse me for doubling up on that pun by noting that Lisa wants to b-arf.

I dunno why, but this story didn't strike me as all that funny. Witty and ironic, yeah. Well written, definitely. But funny..? Mostly it's kind of neurotic.

*The haftorah is a segment from Prophets that is read after the weekly Torah portion, both of which are traditionally chanted by the bar/bat mitzvah celebrant.

Loads of weekend fun plus some last-minute work to finish before Sunday morning have combined to put substantial blogging on hold for another day or two.

Despite the cold snap (single digits in Tel Aviv - both inside and outside my apartment) socializing was in full swing on Friday-Saturday. The highlight was Friday night, when a bunch of us celebrated a friend's birthday at Saloona , a relatively new lounge bar on Tirza street in Jaffa. Fantastic place - highly recommended: gorgeous decor, perfect lighting, excellent service and great music. The DJ had the entire clientele dancing - even me, although I tend to look like C3PO on acid when I try to groove to the beat. The friend who dragged me to my feet laughed and said that I "dance like an Ashkenazi." (!)

Meanwhile I was having my usual strange thoughts: like how weird it is that Arab pop music has become so cool on the Tel Aviv scene, and what would clubbers in Cairo and Beirut think if they could see a bunch of the infamous "others" rotating their hips in a sort of modern belly dance and shouting out the Arabic lyrics to their pop songs. (Yeah, I've been told that I think too much).

The DJ, Mauran Paz, will be playing a set called Maghrabeat (a play on the word Maghreb, which is Arabic for the region of North Africa that's comprised of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) at Jah-Pan, starting at 11:00 PM this coming Thursday night. I'll be there, and so should you - if you're anywhere nearby.

I've got lots of stories churning around in my head, but won't have time to post anything substantial until the weekend. Meanwhile, here's a little giggle: For a few months now I've been buying my face cream and soap from a crunchy-granola guy who makes body products based on aromatherapy principles in his Galilee home. He doesn't have a Web site - just relies on word of mouth and a few health food stores that stock his products. Recently he decided that it'd be a good marketing move to translate his labels into Russian and English.

So now he sells "Bath Sope" and "Face Creme."

Yesterday afternoon I took a quick break from yet another work marathon, and popped over to the branch of Lechem Erez on Sheinkin street to buy a takeaway vegetarian sandwich for lunch. While waiting for my sandwich to be prepared, I observed the following exchange between a customer and the girl behind the counter:

Customer: I came to return this jar of jam my wife bought on Friday.

Counter girl: Why? Was it spoiled?

Customer: No, it's just not tasty. It's beet jam. Whoever heard of beet jam?

Counter girl: That's why you're returning it? Because you didn't like the way it tastes?

Customer: Well, yes. I mean, it's expensive! So I want to exchange it for one of the normal jams - like strawberry, or something.

Have you seen the suicide bomber Barbie doll? Via Mobius - who found it on this site.

I suppose this is an example of the trend for, um, irony?

I'm continually amazed by the power of the camera to alter a person's look and image. Last night I saw an old acquaintance performing a song he wrote in a music video on Israel's Channel 24, and it was a freaky, jaw-dropping experience: A dorky guy with bad manners and terrible dress sense had been transformed into a sex god. So for all the girlfriends who find it amusing and/or annoying to see how men drool over photographs of models whose stick-thin frames and blank-canvas faces have been made-up, back-lit and photo-shopped until reality has been left far, far behind, I have news for you: this can be done for men, too.

Yet another reminder that things are usually a lot different from the way they seem on the face of things.

Just thought I'd mention it.

If you want to see the throbbing heart of multicultural Tel Aviv - and you do not suffer from crowd-induced anxiety - go to the Carmel Market on a Friday afternoon. That's when the foreign workers - the Chinese, Fillipinos, Ghanians, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians and Thais who work as cleaners, caregivers to the elderly, construction workers and agricultural workers - do their weekend shopping at the end of the relatively short Friday workday.

The Israeli shopowners quickly figured out that there was a lot of money to be made in supplying these workers with their native foods. There are shops with names like Far Eastern Grocery and Little Manilla, where you can buy everything from oyster sauce to fufu flakes. Near the cash register there are long-distance calling cards for a variety of countries; there are also stacks of a local English-language weekly called the Manilla Times, which reports on issues relevant to foreign workers in Israel - whether their children who were born and raised in Israel will be eligible for basic citizens' rights, where the free health clinics are located, the latest scandalous stories about brutal tactics employed by the immigration police against illegal foreign workers, and so on.

There are many Russian groceries all over the market - and throughout Israel - that sell foods from the old country to the more than 1 million Russians who immigrated to Israel over the last decade or so. (There's even an Israeli supermarket chain, called Tiv Taam, that specializes in imported foods). That's where I go to buy loaves of heavy, 100% rye bread made with natural sour instead of yeast, Earl Grey tea (leaves, not bags) for a fraction of what it costs in the supermarket, bags of buckwheat, homemade cherry preserves and excellent cheese buns.

The first thing you notice in all these Russian stores is the heavy, spicy and pleasing odour of charcuterie. Basically, you've entered pork heaven. The array of sausages, smoked ham, pork belly, salt pork, pork shoulder and salami in the display cases seems to be endless. They're all stacked on top of each other in a bewildering variety, mixed up with the smoked and grilled turkey breasts and huge wheels of cheese. Russian women with frosted blue eyeshadow and bright yellow hair, wearing old-fashioned white shop assistants' coats, slice the meats and wrap them for the customers. Sometimes they know Hebrew, but often they don't. For some reason they always assume that I'm Russian and inevitably address me in that language. When I respond in Hebrew they look at me disapprovingly, as if I've gone native and denied my true heritage or something. My Hungarian great-grandmother notwithstanding, I guess I am pretty much Russian - although my forebears left when Nicholas II was still czar. Who knew that my ethnicity was written all over my face?

The most amusing thing, though, is watching and listening as the clientele carry out their transactions with the shop assistants in Russian, choosing the bacon and ham they want to purchase for the weekend meals and then, as they reach across the counter to pay and receive their very unkosher packages, they say, in Hebrew, "shabbat shalom" (good sabbath). Without a trace of irony.

And the saddest thing is seeing the Chinese workers. They are invariably men, ruddy-faced peasants with bad teeth from impoverished rural areas in China. They wear clothes stained with plaster dust and paint splotches from their work on construction sites, their hair looks as if they chopped it off themselves, using dull scissors, and they always look exhausted, bewildered and lonely. They walk in groups of two and three, wheeling their bicycles through the pushing crowds of people; bags of bok choy, tofu and sliced pork hang from the handlebars. They speak barely a few words of Hebrew, and live very hard lives here - working 14 hour days on building sites, sleeping several to a room in crumbling old apartments, saving every hard-earned shekel so they can go back to their villages and upgrade their homes and farms.

The only time I ever saw a Chinese man in Tel Aviv smile was when I happened to be in the market around 7 o'clock one winter night, after most of the shops and stalls had closed. I picked my way through the heaps of rotting unsold food that had been dumped on the ground for garbage collection and tried not to look at the impoverished old people who were sorting through the refuse, looking for salavageable edibles, as I made my way to my favourite vegetable stand. I was surprised to see that, instead of the Israeli proprietors, a short, stocky Chinese man stood there, humming to himself as he expertly trimmed the bad bits off heads of lettuce and bunches of greens with a long-bladed knife. He held those vegetables with real tenderness, looking at them as only a farmer would. I stopped and asked him how much a bunch of coriander cost; in response he smiled widely, exposing a mouthful of silver-capped teeth, swept his arm to indicate everything on the stand, and said, in broken Hebrew, "Shekel. All shekel." Twenty-five cents.

The next time I saw the proprietors of that vegetable stand I asked them about the Chinese man. They told me that he worked all day on construction sites, and then came each night to clean up their stand. The deal was, they paid him 100 shekels (about $20) to do all the cleaning, and he could keep the money from any of the leftover produce that he managed to sell. It didn't make a difference to them - if the Chinese man didn't sell them, the vegetables would simply be thrown away.

I am an Ashkenazi Jew who was born and raised in Canada (albeit on the West Coast,where it rains nearly every day but rarely snows ) but I love Moroccan-Jewish food and I hate the cold. When the night-time temperature in Tel Aviv falls to 10 degrees Celsius (AKA early May in Toronto), I pull out the cashmere scarves, polar fleece jackets and thermal socks. And then I head out to eat harira soup at Suzanna in Neve Tzedek. This thick, lemony soup filled with garbanzo beans, lentils, tomatoes and chunks of beef, and seasoned with cinammon and cumin, is one of the few bright spots in the admittedly short cold season. It was introduced to Israeli cuisine by Moroccan Jews, and now it's one of those cross-cultural dishes that everyone loves, whether their grandparents came from Warsaw or Casablanca.
This weekend, I'm going to make some and invite a few people over to share it with me. I might even fry up a few latkes as a side dish. Consider this my contribution to fusion cuisine and winter weight gain.

Doughnuts
So last night was the first night of Hanukkah and the smell of sweet dough frying in vats of hot oil positively permeates Tel Aviv. For those of you who didn't get the connection between the first and second clauses of the previous sentence, in Israel the traditional holiday food is jelly doughnuts - balls of deep fried dough injected with jam. They look just like these things, which are called - strangely - Berliner Ballen. In Hebrew they are called sufganiyot (sing. sufganiya). Perhaps sufganiyot were introduced to the local diet by immigrants from Germany?
As my lovely pal Allison points out, the traditional leaden blob of dough filled with pinkish jelly of uncertain - though definitely artificial - provenance has evolved significantly over the years to keep up with the travel-broadened Israeli customer's increasingly demanding palate. I'm waiting for her verdict on the tequila-spiked sufganiya from the Roladin bakery chain; meanwhile I remain loyal to the gorgeous, crispy little creations from Lechem Erez - purveyor of cutting-edge carbohydrates, from rosemary foccacia to sourdough-olive bread and beyond.
The bakeries have turned over whole sections of floorspace exclusively to stacks and stacks of constantly replenished trays of sufganiyot. People are lining up to purchase them by the dozen - for school, office and home parties. I wonder how many get consumed, nation-wide, each Hanukkah?
Last year at this time I was having a what-in-the-world-was-I-thinking short-lived romance with a perpetually impecunious musician who had long hair and a charming smile. He decided to earn a bit of quick cash during the week of Hanukkah by working a swing shift at the Lechem Erez factory, making sufganiyot. The musician inevitably arrived home reeking of oil, and the heavy smell clung to his hair despite multiple shampooings. I was so grossed out by the odour that I couldn't touch a single doughnut for the duration of the holiday. Which was probably a good thing, since they are rumoured to have around 500 calories each.

JUBUs
No, they're not gummy candies. They're Jewish Buddhists - and they're simply everywhere. I first became aware of the JUBUs about 10 years ago, when I read The Jew in the Lotus - which is not actually a book about the JUBU phenomenon, but rather a fascinating description of a trip undertaken by a group of Jewish religious leaders, representing all the main streams of Judaism including Orthodoxy, to Dharamsala, India, for a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan spiritual leader had come to the conclusion that his people were going to be in exile indefinitely, and he wanted to consult with the Jews - those experts on survival in exile - on how to maintain his people's religious, cultural and spiritual identity outside their Chinese-occupied homeland.
I was fascinated by this book - all the more so because I knew Blu Greenberg, a leader of the Orthodox feminist movement, and wife of well-known New York rabbi Yitz Greenberg: Blu and her husband were among the group that went to Dharamsala, and there's an amusing anecdote in the book about the difficulties she faced in keeping strictly kosher while travelling.

I decided to write a paper on the JUBU phenomenon. And a funny thing happened on the way through the research: I learned some pretty interesting stuff.

It seems that around 75% of the American Buddhist leadership is of Jewish origin. Among them are Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Ram Dass, who were pioneers in American Buddhism way back in the 1960s.

Sylvia Boorstein wrote a book with the catchy title, "That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist: On being a faithful Jew and a passionate Buddhist" . Mark Epstein, a Harvard-educated psychologist and practicing Zen Buddhist, wrote a book about his melding of traditional Western psychology with a Zen Buddhist approach in his book, "Thoughts Without a Thinker." These are just two relatively recent examples of the vast number of books written by JUBUs.

I phoned Tricycle Magazine: The Buddhist Review , figuring that - since nearly all the surnames on their editorial board ended with "berg" or "stein" - they must have a lot of interesting information about the JUBUs to offer. Oh yes, indeed, said the soft-spoke young man who answered the phone - but the thing is that we're terribly busy preparing our special Christmas edition right now so could you call back in January?

The Jewish Buddhists were busy getting ready for Jesus's birthday. Okaaay.

Next stop: Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, the very dedicated, warm and intelligent leader of the Anshe Chesed synagogue on West End Avenue and 101st Street. Rabbi Strassfeld told me that Buddhism had become so popular among his congregants that he'd introduced Vipassana meditation to the Wednesday morning shacharit (dawn - but don't take that literally) prayers.

And then I went to talk to Ari L. Goldman, former New York Times reporter (religious affairs), author of "The Search for God at Harvard," and dean of students at Columbia University's graduate School of Journalism. He's also a very thoughtful and intelligent guy, and a practicing Orthodox Jew; Ari dismissed Sylvia Boorstein as "a flake" and expressed general disapproval for the bizarrely syncretic aspects of the JUBU phenomenon.

At the time I was inclined to be equally disparaging, but today I'm just bemused and curious. The JUBUs exist, and that's it. I'm certainly not going to tell any group of people that they're not allowed to believe in something, or that they can't follow a certain lifestyle that harms no-one and makes them happy.
In Israel I go to meditation retreats with lots of fellow Israelis, and we certainly don't think of ourselves as JUBUs: we're just people who are attracted to aspects of Buddhist philosophy and the benefits of meditation. Meditation retreats are a sort of mental housecleaning exercise. You calm the mind, gain some clarity and perhaps some inner peace as well. It's not a religious practice.

But in America Jews who are into Buddhism have defined themselves: and when you define yourself as a Jewish Buddhist, you cause lots of people to start flapping their hands aggressively and splutter words like "assimilation" and "weirdos." Parents and Jewish educators worry that the JUBUs are a cult, like the Moonies, and that their kids will get sucked in. Well, they're not - but they might.

Why Buddhism? Well, partly because for Jews it's less of a betrayal than Catholicism. No, that was glib - sorry. I think it's because Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion. It's thus easier for Jews who, for whatever reason, feel aliented from Judaism - but don't want to abandon their identity completely - to reconcile a spiritual practice of meditation with loyalty to their Jewish heritage. There is no idol worship involved, no godhead, no text that outright contradicts Jewish theology.

I say, whatever makes you happy. Mahatma Gandhi said, All religions are true. And the Dalai Lama is reputed to have told one of his advanced students who was of Jewish origin - "Now go back to your own heritage."

And what brought all this on? Well, it was this wedding announcement in Sunday's New York Times.

Pamela Lee Cohen and Milo Oliver Bernstein were married yesterday at the Puck Building in New York. Dr. Bernard Weitzman, a Buddhist minister, officiated.

The bride, 33, is a doctoral candidate in motor learning at Teachers College at Columbia. She graduated from the Juilliard School and received a master's degree in dance from the University of Washington. She is a daughter of Patti and Gibby Cohen of Westport, Conn.

The bridegroom, also 33, is an owner of INA, a group of four consignment stores in New York that specialize in clothing and accessories by contemporary designers. He graduated from the California Institute of the Arts. He is the son of Ina Bernstein of New York and Harvey Bernstein of Bridgehampton, N.Y., and the stepson of Lukie Bernstein.

Well, they look pretty happy in the photo.

The perils of laziness
On Friday I wrote about a new Israeli publication called Eretz Acheret (A Different Country) and mistakenly added that it does not have a Web site. In fact, as a reader named Eyal kindly posted in the comments, it does. This is something I would have known if I'd taken the trouble to do a search on Google: Eretz Acheret is the first result. Embarrassing! I don't know why the site isn't listed on the contents page of the periodical, but there you are - it isn't. So go ahead and have a read - nine of the 15 articles from "A Letter to Europe" have been posted. If you like what you see, then I really recommend you take out a subscription - for this and the future editions that will be published every three months.

Good karma
The chef and part-owner of Pastis, the restaurant at which I ate dinner on Friday night, is also named Eyal. I discovered his Provencal fish soup and goat cheese salad almost as soon as I moved to Tel Aviv, but our friendship began about two years ago - over morning coffee at Gili's kiosk on the boulevard across from the restaurant. A few months ago Eyal asked for my help in translating his new menu into English, and later with some English-language correspondence. Since then I've stopped by the restaurant several times for coffee (or lately, herbal tea - sigh) and a chat during his down-time, or for a lunch-time salad eaten at the bar, but until this past Friday night I hadn't eaten dinner there for a long time 'cause I've been - er, cutting back on expenses (shall we say).
Friday night, however, my date wanted to treat me and he asked me to choose the restaurant.
We had a lovely meal - lightly fried calamari rings with with a homemade red-pepper flavoured mayonnaise for a starter, entrecote steak with pepper sauce (him), grilled perch on a bed of creamy mashed potatoes (me), a bottle of shiraz, Eyal's unmatched creme brulee for dessert and espresso to finish. But when we asked for the bill, the waitress told us, "Eyal said you don't get a bill."
My date was confused (I hadn't explained my connection with the chef), but recovered gracefully and left an enormous tip that no doubt made the waitress very happy indeed.

A compliment
Adi Nes called Saturday afternoon to thank me for the article I wrote about him (it was published on Friday). He said he'd received five phone calls about the piece on the day it appeared in the paper, and claimed that he didn't usually get so many responses, so quickly. I was really touched that he took the trouble to call - and that he asked for permission to post the article on his Web site.

I feel a little guilty about boasting (I'm Jewish, guilt comes with the territory; and I'm Canadian, so modesty is supposed to be part of my character) - but I also can't resist; it was so great to get nice feedback after all that work. Forgive me?

I love Friday in Tel Aviv. It's the holy day of the secular Jewish calendar, with its own set of rituals that go by the Hebrew acronym SEX (SKS in Hebrew): sponga (cleaning the house); kniyot (grocery shopping for the weekend); stalbet (relaxing and hanging out). I usually skip the sponga part and get right to the kniyot and stalbet.

After my morning yoga class I walk up Basel street to Dizengoff, and inevitably run into a guy who walks around selling flowers for the sabbath; I purchase a bunch, and then continue on to pick up some groceries. If I'm in the mood to fight the crowds, then I head for the Carmel Market; if I'm in a mellow post-yoga haze, I just walk home - via Dizengoff and Ben Zion Boulevard - and stop by my local grocery store to pick up a few essentials. My "local" is owned by Chen and Yaniv, who are best friends from childhood. They are gorgeous and sweet: they allow me to run a tab and always keep copies of my favourite newspapers set aside - lest they be sold out by the time I wander over.

Today when I arrived Chen was sitting outside the grocery store, chair tilted back against the wall and face turned skyward to catch the warm winter sun, while Yaniv worked the cash register inside. It was such a spectacularly beautiful day.

The usual gang was hanging out at my corner cafe, Ginzburg. Greetings consisted of hugs and kisses on each cheek. I don't need to tell Ronen, the Yemenite bartender with the rasta locks who works nights as a club DJ, how to make my coffee. It's the only one I drink all week, because coffee does bad, bad things to me. Within minutes I am sitting with my double machiatto, exchanging gossip and newspaper sections with my friends. I see most of them all week, but there's something about the relaxed atmosphere on Fridays that contributes to a lot of levity. Sometimes we test each other with the "brain strain" questions in the weekend supplement of Haaretz. (sample question: "Whose stained-glass windows adorn the Metz cathedral in Germany?")

Ginzburg has a certificate of kashrut, which is rare in Tel Aviv. It means the cafe has to close just before the sabbath. We like to sit at the tables outside and wait for 30 minutes before sunset, when the Orthodox woman who lives across the street positions herself on her balcony - Fillipina maid standing at attention nearby - to verify that the cafe is indeed preparing to close. Sometimes we wave at the elderly woman, but she just stares back at us, stoney-faced and disapproving of our obvious lack of religious observance. We are not at home preparing to greet the sabbath!

Now it's evening, and soon I'll go meet another friend at yet another cafe - because she has a rare two-hour window of freedom while her children are at a matinee film and her husband is at The Tel Aviv University health club taking a swim.

Friday night dinner is the meal of the week, the time when extended families get together. Sometimes singletons throw dinner parties; and sometimes I take advantage of standing invitations to eat at the home of various married-plus-children friends. But tonight it's dinner with a friend at Pastis, a French-Mediterranean restaurant on Rothschild Boulevard, followed by a movie at the Cinematheque.

No big nights out on Fridays: that's for teenagers. ;)

Shabbat shalom.

Ever since Allison linked to Manolo's Shoe Blog, I've become an addict. This post about Karl Lagerfeld ("The Evil of the Lagerfeld") is my absolute favourite. I've read it about five times, and it still makes me giggle. And this one. Oh, go on and read the blog. It's hysterical, it's full of brilliant fashion advice (e.g., "the super-fantastic shoes for the poor girl who does not have the hundreds of dollars to spend") and it's got some pretty clever social commentary too. After all, fashion is real life.

That was the frivolous (but important!) part of this two-part flog. And no, no-one is paying me for this - I swear. (Although maybe the Manolo will send me a free "Evil of the Lagerfeld" T-shirt or something...hint, hint).

The less frivolous plug is for a new periodical called Eretz Acheret (A Different Place). Until recently it was published only in Hebrew; last month it debuted in English with an edition called "A Letter to Europe: The Continent through Israeli Eyes." This is a collection of articles written by a cross-section of Israeli intellectuals and/or journalists, reflecting a wide variety of opinions. Contributors include American-Israeli journalist and contributor to The New Republic Yossi Klein-Halevi, the Hungarian-Jewish intellectual Janos Kobanyai and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger (daughter of Amos Oz).
In her introduction to A Letter to Europe, editor Bambi Sheleg writes:

This edition is mainly an attempt to clarify how Israelis who were raised on the lap of European culture view the European zeal to judge Israel on ethical grounds. How do these "ex-Europeans" assess the state of the Continent today?
The diverse voices expressed in the pages of this magazine articulate a multifaceted, still unresolved approach toward the continent where most of the Jewish people lived for over a thousand years. They range from cold diplomatic analysis, nostalgic yearning and deferential approbation to uncontained rage, infinite pain, utter disappointment and prophecies of doom.
After more than 60 years, we feel the time has come for the start of a true dialogue, one in which Europe not only voices its opinion of Israel and its actions, but also hears what Israelis think of it.

I read most of this 76 page magazine in a single sitting. The writing is of an extremely high quality. Unlike practically everything else you'll read about Israel's relationship with Europe, this is journalism that truly achieves depth and analysis.
There's no Web site for Eretz Acheret, but you can obtain your copy by sending an email to acheret@netvision.net.il. I think a one-year subscription costs around NIS 150 (about US $35). It's well worth it.

On Tuesday morning at 6:00 A.M. I turned to the graphic person who was putting together the supplement I edited, wrote for and generally sweated blood for and said, "Do you realize we've been working for 21 hours straight?"

It's a damn good supplement, though. While riding home in a taxi (one of the few work perqs is a free ride home for late-night toilers) I looked out the window at the gray light of early morning Tel Aviv in winter and felt...satisfied. Hey, all you Israel-based Anglos who know where I work, gimme feedback when it comes out with the paper on Friday!

Oh, and how to woo me: come visit on Tuesday night with a recording of the episode of "Love Hurts" that I missed (because of work) burned onto a disc. This is definitely the way to my heart.

It will take me another day to recover from this work marathon. Posting to resume tomorrow - after tonight's party to inaugurate my friend's new studio. (I do not believe in all work and no play).