πάσχειν γάρ τι τὸ μανθάνειν ἀτεχνῶς ἐστι

I dreamt that the world was dying of drought. I lived with H. and the stepkids and we were in the final stages, all lying on the ground and waiting for the end. The government had a small amount of water available by lottery for children only, but the stepkids had lost the draw. I wasn't scared or upset, just drained.

In another dream, I improved a black and white oil painting I did by adding a layer of unrealistic colour. When I woke up I tried it - I don't have oils beyond lamp black and china white, so I used watercolour, which was better anyway because the tints are transparent and the resistance between media was something I could use. Is it great? No. But the dream was right that it is actually marginally better.

It was unbelievable seeing my stepkids for the first time in three months. It's hard to express how happy I was to see them jumping up and down from the minute they opened the door. I had had a dream previously that in the interim, Y. had grown a bristly beard (but was otherwise still a child of 9). When I told him this, he related the following (obviously fake, whatever) dream:

"I dreamt you had a big moustache and lots of chest hair." (I interjected to affirm that this is awesome) "You were otherwise bald. Lots of people gathered round to laugh at you, but I had the solution. It was to make you blind. JUST KIDDING, I gave you an eye operation to give you amazing eyes to see through everything, the best eyes, much better than your eyes now. I also gave you beautiful pajamas. You took off the pajamas and had nice clothes underneath and were beautiful."

M. actually seemed younger in appearance than before -- I must have exaggerated how much she should have grown. She was guarding a present for her dad all day, a coin she'd crushed under the light rail, wrapped in infinite tissues, with a handwritten note tied on.

S. was exactly the same as he was when we left, in fact exactly the same as he's always been since the day I first met him.

The leopard print, foulmouthed slouchiness of Jerusalem is a breath of fresh air after manicured Sweden.

There's so much to say about leaving and arriving, some of it too hard, but I will note the following:

- M. gave me a packet to open on the plane which contained a beautiful picture of herself, laminated with tape, and a message saying "To Yonah, have a nice trip. From me, M." I am amazed by the kindness from one just ten years old, the generosity it takes to give something to a step-parent, the insight and unselfconsciousness it takes to know that a photograph of yourself is the best thing for the occasion. It came wrapped in purple construction paper, labelled with pink marker, cut with little blunt scissors--the world of children and its population of distinctive objects, which I am leaving behind.

- The Darda'im gave me a sidur so I can be a good little Darda'ith even in shockingly Ashkenazi Scandinavia. "Who will fill the women's section now?" one asked (I was the only one who went to minhah and the weekly learning on shehitah). The rav gave me a blessing. It's nice to be cared for.

- My yeshivah was, by the end, no longer the place for me. But to think about it, I began in one of the lowest shiurim, worked my way to the top one, and a few weeks before I left substitute-taught a class. That might simply say something bad about it rather than something good about me, but regardless, it's progress.

- There are birches here, thought of in Irish traditional tree-lore as the aristocrat of the forest, represented by the letter (b-sound) in Ogham. Funny how the change in physical environment triggers so much memory. Instead of sandstorms, hoopoes, and cubes: rain, ravens, and triangles. Everything seems washed in iron grey. It's beautiful, but I miss home too much. My physical reality is now a little barrier between me and the learning, if not an unsurmountable one, and it used to be a connection.

Dreams:

1. That Jimmy Stewart, who was 100% conflated with the administrative head of my yeshivah, was involved in huge amounts of drug crime, and dub step clubbing. The dream was mostly him dancing dub step on Toronto subway platforms. I do not actually know what dub step is or where I could have heard this term.

2. That I entered TD bank and saw a huge secretary phone with multiple buttons on a small table. It was shaking, which caused the receiver to hover above its cradle. I went over and tried to push the receiver out of the air, but it just wouldn't work. A clerk reached her hugely long arm over and with sudden violence stamped my hand with a pictograph indicating that it is forbidden to jostle the phone. It was actually a brand and it burnt my hand horribly.

***

I came home today feeling cripplingly depressed, my default mood these days since there is so much pain to deal with. As I walked in the hallway, I hear Y. shout "Forbidden for Yonah to enter the kitchen!" He explains that he's preparing for me a special drink and I must guess what it is. "It's not poison. I think you'll like it, yes, I have an idea that you'll like it." He sticks his head out and cocks it to the side. "You seem like a woman who likes it." After a few moments again: "Don't worry, it's not poison."

I tell him okay, and that meantime I'll go say minhah.

In the end he can't wait and comes to see me while I'm still wearing my shel rosh and talith. He doesn't bat an eye at this, however, as to him it's somewhat normal, and hands me a cup. "But this is just milk," I say.

"IS IT?" he demands.

I smell it. "Yes."

He folds his arms and tells me to say shehakol and drink it. I do.

"What is it?" he asks again.

"It tastes like normal milk, maybe with a little sweetness added." I wonder if he put in a slight amount of sugar? It's the sort of thing he'd do. But he triumphantly revealed that it was goat milk which he bought specially for me. I told him to try some, and he did, and happily exclaimed that he likes it just as much as me.

This encounter made my day. Also the whole thing happened with him wearing his tefilin (which I gave him, my old pair) and a tiny talith which we gave him just a year or so ago, already too small for his body.

It's raining in Jerusalem.

Two weeks ago, we received horrible news that Y. had fallen and knocked out two of his teeth and split his lip; he was in hospital (we found out about it after he had already been discharged). At first the great dilemma was whether he fell or he "fell" -- who knows, with a school like his where we've seen so much? Thinking about it I had truly resolved to go beat his teacher to a pulp myself when H. went to visit Y. and reported back that he seemed very calm, which an emotionally transparent kid like that would probably not be able to manage if one of his role models really did do him that much damage. So it's a relief, but agonising to go through each time Y. gets hurt.

Today I went to pick up Y. from school; I stood under a little stone arch beside the narrow stone staircase to his classroom. On the wall beside me someone had written "Death to Arabs" which I had corrected to "Death to the stupid." I'm acquainted with an Arab woman who works in the area and besides the principle of the thing I don't want that she should have to see this shit just going about her job.

Y. came running down the stairs and asked, "Where's dad?"

"He's sick and waiting for you at the cafe," I said.

He proudly showed me his lip, where a couple of days before a dentist had worked on it to remove the stitches and the ooze/blood buildup (he was so terrified he had to be restrained). I saw a small black spot on it and said "Oh no! What a terrible wound."

"It's not terrible NOW," he told me. "That was before the dentist helped me."

"Oh. Sorry, remember I haven't seen you since your fall. When I heard about it I told myself I'd kill the stone who did that do you." A slight variation of the truth.

Energised by this news, he offered to show me the culprit himself and lead me through a few turns and quirks in the Old City's alley network until we came to a courtyard. "I won't say which stone did it," he told me solemnly. "I'll stand on one of them, and that's how you'll know which one it is." He ran ahead, stepped on a large projecting flagstone, and turned around to give me a serious look.

I caught up with him. "So this is the stone, may its name be obliterated," I mused.

"May its name and memory be obliterated!" he repeated fiercely, "Yes!" He stamped on it.

"Let it be cursed from now until the eternity of eternities."

"Yes... and now you see we are very close to the cafe already."

"We didn't even waste any time."

"In fact we were so fast we GAINED time." He took me by the arm and we hurried on.

At the cafe he and I played Castlevania for over an hour straight. It doesn't sound like a lot but all you do in Castlevania is whip skeletons endlessly, with short breaks for whipping candles and whipping flying witch heads.

Things with Y.'s school progress slowly but surely and lawyers are involved. Hopefully something will come of it. The school wrote a scathing letter saying that our allegations are vicious slander, yet in typical, stupid hareidi self-righteousness couldn't resist adding that they only hit "in an educational way."

Today Y. and I were talking about our two cats, Mercutio and Cleocatra. Y. asked what Mercutio would do if he ever got his hands on "the Gingi," an apoplectically violent redhaired cat that lurked about our neighbourhood once before a certain pair of people may or may not have illegally deported him to the spring Lifta, at the gates of the city and far away. I told Y. that really, the Gingi was Cleo's enemy; they had gotten in some sort of fight once and although nobody knows what happened, every time she saw him she would work herself into fits of hissing hatred. Mercutio, I explained, didn't like him but didn't care much.

Y. disagreed. He said that if Cleo hated the Gingi, so did Mercutio, because "she is his wife, so they are one body, and that means he feels her hatreds, too."

***

I dreamt that H. and I just generally went about openly with tefilin and a talith gadhol, like the Gr"a. We were with my old yeshivah on a shabaton to some university library, another odd location on par with a previous dream in which we went to a First Nations art festival. It was Friday day. H. and I were looking at a corner bookshelf when some Granik, dressed the same way we were, came up and started shouting at H. I intervened and dragged H. to safety, where we sat down on some steps. The steps were exactly the texture of real university library steps, tiled and sort of dusty.

H. left to go to the bathroom and I was left alone as a butch woman wearing a talith qatan came up to me and started asking about my tefilin. To my surprise she seemed like she wanted to wear hers more, too, and wanted to know what the important laws were. I asked her for writing materials and she handed me a scrap of cereal box and a pen. I wrote down,

TAKE OFF YOUR TEFILIN WHEN:
1. Engaged in manversation
2. Going to bathroom (shel rosh, cover shel yadh)
3. Sexual thoughts

By "manversation" I meant "stupid conversation" and I guess I was referring to "lightheadedness," the idea that you shouldn't goof around with tefilin on. She took the scrap of cardboard and thanked me. The advice I gave her was actually pretty accurate for real life.

I dreamt there was a huge bonfire and party in High Park (which is in Toronto, but here was in Jerusalem) for all the immigrants. Special honour was paid to the immigrants from China, who in my dream were some kids from my Grade 5 class,Xiao and Kelly, who are definitely not Jewish or Israeli. I was wearing my wedding dress, but it was silver and very faintly glowing, as if magic, and tiny stars on silver thread were strewn on it.

At one point, I went running with some others, teenagers I think, into a long stone alley lined with dark trees, which lead to the Old City. The flagstones were warped and worn in unexpected places, as in real life. The firelight had faded and it was now very black, but I was proud that I had travelled this path so many times my feet knew exactly where to step. I came at last to a giant iron gate.

In other news, my test on hilkhoth Shabath came back with the additional comment of "fine" (previously when my teacher had read only part of it, it was only "seems fine") The owner of the cats at last sent an email saying she relinquishes claim on them, although in addition she's taking back some money she gave us to go towards their upkeep - I guess that's not so surprising given her previous behaviour pattern. At any rate we now own two monstrously obese creatures who coldly walk on our faces at night; not sure what we really gained from this whole nightmarish transaction.

In a discussion about modesty, M. said, "Some people would call me not modest because you can see that my arms are attached to my torso." She was referring to a trend among some hasidic women to wear a heavy black poncho (always, also during summer). I remember that when I first came to Israel, this was really a fringe trend and was frowned upon by many hareidim. Now their official organisation, the Eidah Hareidit, has finally endorsed the ponchos as necessary for true modesty, and is already at work rewriting the past: posters have been put up saying that this is exactly what our ancestors and the righteous wore. You'd think that anybody with a memory longer than 3 years and/or who is capable of reading any Jewish legal text at all would be shocked by how blatant the lie is, and yet few seem to be batting an eyelid. When will people realise that they are Reformim? How can they get away with using words like "traditional"? Why do even secular people buy into their Orwellian campaign of rewriting history?

Dream #1:

I dreamt that H. and I were at the Kotel in the men's section. H. asked me if I thought it would disturb anybody but I replied that I didn't really have anything in common with the women on the other side. No one bothered me on this account.

In the dream, instead of a stone floor, there was a huge, roiling and deep mat under people's feet. Everyone else seemed to be fine standing on it, but I kept falling over. Fortunately, most of the time people were sitting on the ground, but for the standing prayer I was afraid I would be thrown down.

Meanwhile an assassin was making his or her rounds amongst the people. The assassin's method was to prick people with a very thin needle, so they wouldn't feel it, hundreds of times. The person would end up with huge black contusions disfiguring their body and face, and keel over.


Dream #2:

We lived with Chaim, who in real life is a very very proper and super-knowledgeable trainer of dayanim, but in the dream wore a dirty tanktop and drank beer in a continuous, day-long flow. We also lived with a litter of street kittens, one of whom was my stepdaughter (?!). She talked just like M. When H. and I were going out of the house, I warned M-cat not to put her face in any plastic. "I know," she said. "OK, good," I said. "Because you know even adults die of strangulation that way."

In the dream, dialogue was in Hebrew.

Me: Wow, your new glasses look great!
Y: For the one who talks about my new glasses, fire will shoot out of them and burn him to death.
Me: Oh...
Y: Because you didn't know, you were spared, but now you have to be careful.
Me: Oh, okay... thanks...

The night before last I had an extremely realistic dream that I woke up to find my tefillin was still on my arm. Sleeping with tefillin on is very forbidden and when I woke up for real, the dream gave me a terrible feeling of being animalistic and a bad person.

There are many traditional ways to deal with dreams, which range (depending on the dream's severity) from soliciting interpretations to fasting. In this case since I was on the border of how disturbed I was it seemed like the best option was to go listen to the blessing of the kohanim, and in the middle of it to pray that everything vis-a-vis the dream is okay. At my minyan there are normally no kohanim, but the yeshiva right next door has one, and fortuitously they begin prayers right after the other congregation concludes. I feel extremely lucky.

In other news, I've finally sorted out where I'm learning next year, and it's aweseome, exactly where I'd like to be. I'll be working, too, so it will be hard, but that's life and I'm not overly worried.

Finally, S has taken to pretending I'm Yoshi and riding my back all around the city with extreme pleasure, singing spontaneous songs as he goes ("now we're turning the corner, aiyiyi") and throwing his hands in the air. As Yoshi, I get an incredible amount of love from him: "Yoshi, Yoshi, my cute one, how I love you!" Out of character, he also gave me a sticker of a panda cuddling a baby panda, put it on my wrist saying "This is me and you," and warned me that I should press it occasionally so that it will never fall off.

Things with M continue to get worse. I'm not sure if she's being singled out at home for extra caution around "wicked people" because she's a girl, because she's the eldest, or both.

In this dream, I was a grown-up version of my stepdaughter, who was the top assassin in a city where it was perpetually night. Unfortunately for her/me, we fell under the influence of a sinister group of monks and nuns. There were seven of them, corresponding to "the seven elements."

We first fell into their trap by becoming too friendly with a nun librarian, who took us under her wing and started providing for us. Little did we know that she was planning to control our mind and bring us into the service of the shadowy group. The nun in my dream was played by a person I know in real life, who actually is an ex-nun.

Anyway, we discovered that the way to overcome each monk and nun was to guess which element they were. This part of the dream was very cool, because as soon as we figured it out, there was a spectacular montage of the character and element - really bright, beautiful images. I'm impressed my subconscious could come up with that. The best one was the Water Monk, who was their chief. I remember a bright gold halo jarringly juxtaposed with a pane of glass with perfect raindrops falling on it, then the bottom of the ocean, then his face, then the middle of a cloud shot with gold sunrays.

Grown-up version of Y appeared to help us in the end.