Friday, March 22, 2013

Complications, complicated

So our trip to the consulate never happened, as when we called for an appointment we were told that they do NOT grant the apostille. At all.

Back to square one. There's no way to get this stupid stamp, and at this point the clock is ticking...

Monday, March 18, 2013

אימה חשכה גדולה נופלת

With the recent kickoff of the third intifada, I have been wondering about our impending move.

There is something poetic about the mixture of emotions, their yinyang interactions and the paradoxical experience of feeling both at once.

Terror and yearning are estranged cousins. Both come from somewhere else, both inflame your heart with dreams, and both color your eyes and ears in a way that overtakes all of you. One does so for good, and the other....for worse.

I am at once terrified and enthused about our aliyah. It is the culmination of years, nay, generations of dreams; my heart is hollow here and feels its fulfillment in the confusing contradictions of a modern country with an ancient past, a country where you can never earn a living but everybody has a sense of being alive like no other place, a land where you can be attacked and vilified for your presence there, yet also serve as an example of what it means to be human in doing so.
And yet, the serpentine whispers of doubt encircle my mind when it is supposed to sleep, asking about livelihoods and survival, of safety and security, of visions for the future of my life, our family, our country and our people.

I read of Adele Chaya bat Avda, and heard her mother's searing words (http://youtu.be/--hm28A8jxw), and felt both terror of that being my beautiful child, terror that I could never be half the person she is (for being able to say what she did, and mean it, in her circumstances), and yet feeling the "feeling X" I described earlier - a need to be there, to be one of those whose life and presence means something by dint of its own existence, to be a Ben Yisrael as much as anything else.

My heart and mind are 5676 miles away in a place I don't know if I fit in to, yet desperately want to be in. My thoughts are preoccupied by rock throwers and shootings instead of sequesters and soda bans, my emotions tied up in thwarted kidnappings of soldiers and mothers instead of tax returns and NFL free agency. I worry about whether we will be זוכה to live in Eretz Yisrael and be able to keep the ברית that is the basis of haShem giving us the land, I worry of being able to feed my family with dignity, I worry of the future of a country that despite its infinite amount of shortcomings and idiosyncratic evils, is still the Jewish State and the flowering of a גאולה thousands of years after we were brutally sent away from Home.

And yet, I sit in New York City, scared witless and --itless, wondering if my dreams are a road to the future G-d wants to share with me, or a deluded path of self-destruction...

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Complications

It seems my darling wife's case is more complicated than previously thought.

We finally got in touch with the government advocacy specialist at NBN who quickly got us in contact with the wonderful and polite (who woulda thunkit??) people at the Jewish Agency. It seems our wonderfully unique case was discussed from NBN to Jewish Agency to Israeli consulate in NYC to Israeli consulate in Paris. And we were told the French consul in New York can grant us the elusive apostille on darling wife's birth certificate! This Thursday we will head on down there in the hope of rectifying this and finishing the last bunches of paperwork we will need to make the July flight.

We also mailed her name change certificate in to the state government for its apostille - hopefully we did it right and it will come back :)

So the remaining checklist papers-wise is:
• darling wife's Israeli passport, which needs her French birth certificate apostille and the name change apostille mentioned above
• getting legally married. We obtained our marriage license, and have a month left to get it signed by a licensed rabbi, send it in, and receive our marriage license.
• baby's passport
• and 6 passport pictures per person

And then we need to meet the Jewish Agency for final approval.

Then the fun with packing, furniture, bank accounts, hiring a lift, finding apartments, choosing a landing spot, etc. can start :)

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Feeling X

There is a feeling I get every time I read of terror attacks, or missile strikes, or stabbings, shootings, rock throwings, etc. I don't have a word for it - I don't think one exists.

It's a mixture of sadness, anger, hopelessness, and a yearning to be there with them. During Operation Amud Anan I slept perhaps three hours a night, pacing, constantly refreshing the news sources I was following, and kept thinking of how much I wanted to be there, on the front lines. It made no sense (I am perhaps one of the more scaredy-cat people I know, and am even afraid of roller coasters), and there is NOTHING I can do on a practical level about the attacks, but that was how I felt.

There are reports of rock throwings near Ariel that have critically injured (possibly killed) a mother and her children. I am feeling this "Feeling X" again.

Monday, March 11, 2013

It's a Crazy, Crazy World

I am very active on twitter. (I will not publicize my handle here just yet, though.)
This is mostly due to being bored at work, and there being wifi there, and a kind of insatiable need to engage with other people, see new perspectives, learn new things, and so on and so on.

Naturally, I am drawn to Middle East themed conversations. In doing so, I have met many varied and interesting people I NEVER would have met otherwise - like the 18 year old girl from Qatar who is studying to be a lawyer, a middle aged Palestinian in Ramallah, a mom living in England married to an Arab, but born a Jew, the Palestinian activist Gaza City, some of the Israeli reporters and bloggers I read, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist in Belfast, a liberal Buddhist born Amish (who believed Jews needed to "let go" of the holocaust and "move on" and stop hurting innocent Palestinians), and many other nice people as well. I have debated, discussed, argued, been insulted, insulted others, talked, learned, and taught.

The amazing Palestinian ability to rewrite history, both ancient and recent, is nothing short of amazing. There are legions of people out there who enthusiastically buy into lies, conspiracies, falsehoods, and brazen manufactured stories whose design is so transparent it is an insult to the listener/reader. You can't have a conversation with someone who isn't living in the same world as you!

And yet, insanely, we still try. "Atem k'ruyim Adam" - we are the paragon of human evolution, the vector and cutting edge of progress. And it is we who have learned to treat as human those who do not act it, who glorify the animalistic and death. We still beg to just talk, to engage, to create a world from words.

And yet, this scares the hell out of me. We're surrounded by these people, attacked by these people, demonized in the media by these people, and we grow weary of talking.
And our children - will they bother trying to talk? Or grow up believing there is no one to listen, so why bother?

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Worries

The protracted process of aliyah has some interesting effects.

On the one hand, it is easy to be inspired, move 6000 miles, and then be crushed under the enormity of what you have done and wish you had thought things through beforehand. So the time it takes to go through with this has its benefits.
On the other hand, it can turn your mind into a hamster on a wheel, endlessly replaying scenario after scenario in which you succeed, fail, whither, prosper, crash and burn, or thrive. Sometimes all of the above.

It has been increasingly harder to prepare for saying goodbye to family and friends, to the familiar and the known, to the society and culture you have been a part of your whole life (much as you didn't like it!).
Darling wife is from a close knit family, and they are not thrilled with sending off their eldest daughter and their two granddaughters to a country that holds so much potential for financial ruin, for terror attacks, and where they will only be able to see them on Skype and in pictures.
Friends all make the obligatory "that's wonderful!" remarks to the news we are going to move, though they also mention how hard it is to make a living there, the sacrifices we will have to make, and their hope we can be able to meet our bills.

Support for making such a move isn't easy to find.

It seems that Eretz Yisrael is not something easy to attain...

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Another Day, Another Step

So we finally found out how to get darling wife's name change certificate apostilled. It's easier than we thought! Now all that is left is 6 passport pictures per person, baby's American passport, and darling wife's absolute mess with her French documents we cannot get.

We also discovered that the movers pack us! Gone is the nightmare of staying up late after the kiddies are sleeping and trying to fit our lives into boxes. Now, other people will do it for us! Of course, we will be paying them, but it is part of the fee for the shipment, so it feels free and that is a wonderful feeling.