Funny kid's quotes
My 4 year old asked me yesterday. "Abba, what bracha do you make on seeing a dinosaur?"
I started taking a sofer course (I need to fix my Sefer Torah), from Rabbi Eliezer Adam. Excellent teacher. See his web site here: http://www.soferstam.org/.
And so I was sitting practicing writing the letters. My 6 year old comes over to me and says, "Abba, nice Reish." I said, "That's supposed to be a Vav." He said, "No, no. Let me show you how to write a Vav". So he takes a piece of paper and writes a Reish and next to it a Vav. He says, "You see, the Reish has a long stick and the Vav has a short stick."
Yes, I need to work on my sticks some more.
On TV Tax, or how I bought Sarit Hadad's new CD
A few days ago I received a bill for the TV tax. Here in Israel if you own a TV, whether you watch it or not, you have to pay a tax that goes to support public channels. I guess that’s one of those things that Israel decided to copy from Europe.
I tried calling the tax people to tell them that I don’t own a TV, but they conveniently don’t pick up the phone. Instead there is a really long recording in many languages that tells you how to pay it automatically over the phone and what will happen to you if you don’t pay (i.e. how the government will take away everything you own and put you in prison, yada yada yada), but nothing about those who don’t own a TV.
So after a few days of futile calls I decided to pay them a visit. I walk into the TV tax office in Jerusalem and it’s this small room with 3 clerks sitting there and no customers. I walk over to one of the clerks and tell him that I got a bill for the TV tax but I don’t own a TV and therefore they should mark in their computer that I don’t need to pay. He takes the bill from me and asks me, “Can you read?”. “Yes”. “What does this say?” I say, “It says that you only have to pay if you own a TV. But how do you know that I don’t own a TV? Don’t you need to mark it down?” He says, “If you buy a TV you have to tell us, and the store from which you buy it from has to tell us as well, by law.” And then he takes the bill, rips it into a gazillion pieces and throws it into the garbage can under his desk. My jaw drops. He says to me, “Don’t worry about it. Bye.”
Well at least Rehov Shamai has lots of nice music stores, so to justify the 15 shekels that I paid for parking, I walked into one of them and bought me Sarit Hadad’s new CD.
And that was my visit to the TV tax office.
Appreciating Sharon
Today as I was driving to work I was listening to the news on the radio, on Galei Tzahal. They were talking about that many people from all over Israel came to Jerusalem to Hadassah hospital to visit sick Prime Minister Sharon. And even though no one was actually allowed to go to the ICU to visit him, people came anyway.
Out of the crowd, the correspondent picked one woman for a live interview who was particularly interesting. She was one of the people who were evicted from Gaza and recently moved to another settlement inside Israel to a new house. When they asked her why she came to visit Sharon she responded as follows. By the way, everything I am writing here was said by her directly without any commentary from the correspondent.
Before the disengagement took place she was extremely angry at Sharon and the government for evicting her out of her home. But a few months ago she moved into her new home in the settlement of Nitzan, near Ashkelon, where many of Gush Katif residents were relocated to. After she moved in, she realized that her life has been drastically improved. There were no more daily terrorist threats and attacks, her children were really happy in the new place, her house was really nice (apparently nicer than the old one in Gush Katif), and her life seemed to be a lot more peaceful. So she came to visit Sharon, to say thank you to him personally for removing her out of Gaza and putting her into such a nice place.
After listening to this I suddenly felt really proud to be an Israeli. It’s not often that we get to hear such things, especially when those who protest always make themselves heard even if they are the minority, but those who are happy keep it to themselves. It made my day.
I wish that Hashem would grant a Refuah Shleima to Ariel Sharon and that his dream of peace and security in Israel would one day become a reality, and hopefully I will get to see it.
