True Ancestor

An ideal night at the old ballyard

Last night, I had a perfect evening at the ballpark with two of my favorite people.

One was a young man whom I met when he was an inner-city kid who received a fellowship that took him to work for a summer with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. I've known this man (whom I'll call Kendall just to preserve his privacy) for eight years now. I became something of a mentor to him and have done my best to help him through more ups and downs than most people of my acquaintance admit to in a lifetime.

The other favorite person with me was Gabe who, at about 6 weeks shy of his 12th birthday, moves into a ballpark like a netted dolphin being re-released into the ocean.

The game started at 6:05, but Kendall, Gabe and I arrived early so Gabe could run around to the left field bleachers and try to shag batting-practice homeruns. He'd brought an indelible-ink marker so he could seek autographs; he came equipped with his baseball glove, a White Sox hat and sunglasses, because left field looks straight into slanting rays of the sinking afternoon sun.

Kendall and I stood a few rows behind Gabe, trying to converse, but batted balls kept screaming down at us from the upper atmosphere, rocketing off the seats and the concrete stairs. We moved to stand side by side so we could keep our eye on Gabe and on the meteoric baseballs at the same time.

Men jostled for position when a ball descended toward them from behind a scrim of bright sunlight. Once or twice, a fan with a glove would lunge in front of another fan just in time to snatch a souvenir away from him.

Then a ball was hit, and it was clear from the moment it left the bat that it was headed right for Gabe, who, standing in the first row behind the White Sox left-field bullpen, was about 350 feet from home plate. No one moved to jostle with him, and like an expert outfielder, he held up his glove, called out, "I got it!," and gloved it almost casually. Fellow souvenir-hunters applauded him. We got while the gettin' was good.

It had been a humid day, but as evening settled in, the clouds were chased away by a gentle breeze from the north. Mark Buehrle, the Sox' aging ace, pitched against Roy Halladay, the ace of the Blue Jays' staff. Both pitchers worked quickly and efficiently, and the game was over in just a little over two hours. The only runs were scored thanks to the efforts and enthusiasm of Danny Richar, the new Sox second baseman playing in his first major-league game, and Jerry Owens, a rookie center fielder, whose first big-league home run scored Richard ahead of him and the Sox won 2-0. The White Sox now only vaguely resemble their 2005 championship version. That's probably a good thing.

Kendall sat to my left, Gabe sat to my right. We were surrounded by colorful characters. During one lull in the action -- a collective moment of disbelief when the home-plate umpire missed what should have been a called third strike -- two men cried out in unison: Hey, Ump: Get off your knees! You're blowing the game! Non-parental adults laughed, while parents turned towards their children and said firmly that they weren't going to explain that particular joke. I explained it to Gabe anyway. He thought it was hysterical.

Directly in front of us sat a young man, maybe in his mid to late 20S, with his date next to him. The guy was fairly well built, but was wearing neither a belt nor underwear, so we were treated not only to a fine ballgame but a sterling show of Plumber's Butt for the entire evening. Gabe was tempted to try to throw a nacho chip so that it stuck in the young buck's butt-crack, but I told him that a true Sox fan only assaults umpires, not other fans.

The post-game fireworks show was timed and "choreographed" to snippets of well-worn classics like Blue Danube and Ravel's Bolero. From where we sat, the fireworks trailed down and seemed to drape themselves over a full moon, rising red over Lake Michigan. And as we drove home, the magisterial skyline of the Loop seemed to stand on tip-toe, looking for the first fireworks of Venetian Night.

For all the wonders of this summer, this was the best, most restorative evening of the season; the kind that makes time take a breather. The gifts of a ball dropping toward Gabe's glove, and the trailers of the fireworks dropping toward the ascending Moon, descended gently toward us without a care in the world.

--T.A.

God or No God, It's All Good

Does God exist or not?

Does God care or not?

A lot gets said on the topic, but little gets said as clearly, as concisely or as sensibly as this (h/t: RLC).

Shabbat Shalom--

--T.A.

Religion and Sports -- where all is not as it seems

The recurrent scandals in sports and religion are actually part of the same phenomenon: the exploitation of our desire to be united in amazement, by people who realize there's power and money to be had.

Barry Bonds is not a pedophile priest. He's a guy who realized that he could exploit wonder for personal gain. He was aided and abetted by people who more closely resemble pedophile priests -- his "trainers," his agent, and officials of Major League Baseball, who encouraged Bonds in his quest for deification because it would help them accrue money and power, when in fact the cultivation and sharing of amazement was their job.

Pedophile priests are seekers after power and possession. The priesthood has for centuries been the favored sanctuary of those who need trusting souls on which to prey. Whether these priests become perverted in or by the priesthood, or whether their perversion made them seek the priesthood out, isn't a topic I can address, but I think I can safely surmise that the architecture of holy bureaucracy whetted their appetites and provided walls behind which they could perpetrate and conceal their sins.

Cheating athletes and pious rapists violate an unspoken contract between us and those we choose to elevate: instead of sanctifying the experience of communal amazement, they exploit it. Instead of celebrating life, they defile it. And instead of leading us in exercises of self-renewal, they betray us.

The late Renaissance scholar and baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti understood that wonder was on the wane in baseball and in all of American life. In his bright, shiny paean to the essence of sport, Take Time for Paradise, Professor Giamatti said he thought sports represented not our desire to be closer to the gods, but to be god-like. The difference between sports and religion was crucial:

I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of each other and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know. Whether celebrated by Pindar or Roger Angell, sport is, however, ultimately subversive of religion because while it mimics religion's ritual and induces its fanaticism and sensation, sport cares not at all for religion's moral strictures or political power or endless promises.

That last sentence may or may not have been true when Giamatti wrote it, almost 20 years ago, but it's certainly not true now. In fact, sports is exactly like much organized religion today, not in its moral uprightness but in using a grave pseudo-morality to hide its more cynical goals of self-enrichment and self-perpetuation. Sport has become a church, and the fiercely political, pseudo-spiritual bureaucracy of churchdom has become sport: in their accrual of fanatical devotion, their hollow and patently hypocritical moral posturing, and most certainly in their thirst for power, church and sport are blood brothers.

Greek athletic festivals, Giamatti notes, had religious connotations and featured religious ritual, and it's mostly from the Greeks that we inherit and intuit the connection between the Divine and the divinely human. But that connection has frayed, because instead of striving to be closer to the Divine, we honor those who more closely impersonate it. With apologies to J.K. Rowling, it's conjurers, not wizards, that are our national heroes.

We've increasingly reserved our wonder for feats of athleticism because we came to believe we couldn't trust anything but our eyes. And now, too late, we realize that our eyes have been suckered, along with the rest of us.

--T.A.

Crisis of Faith: Letter to a Disillusioned Reporter

I read the article in the LA Times that me True Ann-Sister linked to, and felt compelled to write to the author, William Lobdell. He was a practicing Christian, preparing to convert to Catholicism, when the scandal of clergy sexual abuse, and the Church's handling of it, drove him away.

Here's what I wrote to him yesterday:

Thanks for your very brave article on the test of your faith. It was a moving and difficult piece.

As a fellow spiritual seeker, I want to offer just a few words of my own perspective, which may comfort you:

• if there is the sort of God the Judeo-Christian tradition claims, then that God's path for you has turns and twists in it whose true shape, whose true causes and reasons, may yet be unknown to you, may in fact never be known, as cruel as that may seem. Numerous seminal figures in our respective traditions (like, say, Job, and perhaps even Jesus himself) lacked clarity on the nature and reason for their path until suffering had come to exemplify and even surpass the unbearable. Why? We'll probably never know; on the other hand, we'd never have heard of Job or Jesus, and never learned from them, if their suffering hadn't transcended the rational or bearable.
• There's plenty of literature that ponders why bad things happen to good people (even, as I'm sure you're aware, a very good book by that name). None of the answers are comforting. The Jewish view, roughly speaking, is that God has set a world in motion and withdrawn His ability to control that environment, enabling not only free will but also, sadly, the kind of random tragedy, the suffering of innocents and the more-than-occasional triumph of evil that you depict so clearly in your article. The archetypal exile from Eden is (I think) about exactly this: that we have to till the soil of our earth and our own spirits, live by the sweat of our brow, and generally work like hell just to avoid physical and spiritual starvation. There are no guarantees: if there were, we'd be angels. Exile from Eden is about how we have good and evil mixed together within us, and how we must always struggle to be aware of this, to separate and never confuse or lose sight of either one.
• The terrible problem with organized religion is that it becomes a power structure, and power attracts not only those who long to serve but those hungry for power. They may wear collars or kippot, but all too often a uniform meant to comfort or command can deceive. It is, I'd submit, the sacred duty of individuals to wrestle, not only with their faiths, but with those who lead them in the discipline of that faith. That the Catholic church has failed in this mission is a terrible thing, but in the long run it will lead to either the deep humanization or the terminal humbling of that institution. That this change comes at the expense of innocent people is a terrible thing, but that doesn't change the fact that much good in our lives and lifetimes has come due to the suffering of innocents. I believe we're passing from an era of more corporate control of spiritual life into a time in which the individual, and in a wider sense, the individual community, directs that life. This change won't come easy, and the pendulum will likely one day swing again, but it's always been our task to answer the spiritual call and direct our own spiritual life, and perhaps that's just being made clear by the betrayals we all, in our lonely ways, suffer.
• Reviewing the teachings of Jesus -- and for that matter, of the Buddha, of Swami Vivekananda, or Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, just to name a few -- will show you just how seriously spiritually inclined people took the task of the individual to contend with an inherited or accepted faith. If you're a spiritual person, you have to continually answer the call, or, in fight parlance, answer the bell. It won't leave you alone, because, for whatever reason, that's how you're wired. Part of the task of answering involves arguing, fighting, refusing to accept what seems senseless.
• All this is a long way of saying that a spiritual mentor, and/or community, does exist for you -- even if only inside of you, waiting for you to help it manifest. Despite the corruption and cynicism that grows within any corporate structure seeking self-perpetuation, there's wisdom at its heart -- wisdom that requires (in the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel) "radical amazement," which you have experienced and which will on some level never leave you. Find a teacher who nurtures and helps you continuously renew that radical amazement, because it is one of your greatest gifts, and one that makes your life an example, and a clarion call, and more open, and therefore, in all likelihood, more painful.

I'm writing this at work, for which there really is no justification. I've done so because I believe, as you do, that religion is tarred with too thick a brush of cynical "reason," and that surely the world must have room for both reason and faith. As a reporter and a spiritual person, you embody and contain both, and the world needs people like you to hold onto both.

Yours in gratitude -

--T.A.

From the Middle East to the Wild West

Two weeks ago, the One True Wife and I were watching the Sun come up in the Negev. This evening, we're fresh back from five days in Montana, visiting a family of three that knows how to have fun -- and taught us a thing or two.

The friends are unusual people, not only for their love and stewardship of the natural environment but their ability to have fun in it, too. The five days included hiking, fly-fishing, wake-boarding, target shooting, parade-watching, a festival celebrating a small Montana town's logging culture -- and shooting off a homemade potato cannon (hairspray and a flame introduced into one end of a PVC tube, with a potato jammed into the other end). While our friends felt the contradictions inherent in burning fossil fuels (and hairspray) in the pursuit of fun, they also devoted themselves to creating an environment where wildlife could pass freely across their property, with nothing more than the occasional sonic-booming potato to startle them.

In the process of this latest trip, the Wife was transformed from a Nervous Nellie into a sharp-shooter of Annie-Oakley-esque proportions, and Gabe wake-boarded behind a boat for almost a half-mile at a time. He clambered up steep granite rock faces, and did everything that an 11-year-old could dream of doing in an entire summer (including many things he's begged me to do, for which I had neither the time, the patience nor the aptitude).

The vacation was more than just an excursion with a beautiful backdrop. We got something of a feel for the battles that shape life in the West. The Bitterroot Valley of Montana, where we cavorted, is a culture at war with itself. Ranchers and loggers use a great deal of water from the local streams and rivers -- reducing their flows in summer by almost two thirds -- but they also provide work in one of the most impoverished states in the union. Fishermen and -women have almost no water to fish in -- and rapidly dwindling stocks of fish to catch. Non-native weeds and plants are wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. All these problems are exacerbated by weather that has been remarkably hot: the sunsets and moonrises are blood-red, and the air was hazy every day from one of the worst fire seasons in recent memory.

The people of this valley want to preserve their way of life, a life that leans heavily on the land. They have and proclaim faith that the land has the ability to provide for human consumption and to rebound from heavy use. Depending upon what lens you look through, they are either right, or they're deluding themselves.

All we knew was that both white-tailed deer and mule deer came by our friends' house every morning and evening; that one morning, a herd of more than 100 elk moved slowly by, like some Lascaux cave painting come to life. The larger females stood on their hind legs to pluck juicy leaves from deciduous trees; and Nature seemed grand and omnipotent and unperturbed.

But we drove through valleys whose encircling hills were completely denuded by previous fires; we rafted and swam in a river we dared not drink from; and we attended Darby Logger Days, a festival that proclaimed the unending and unerring right of Western men and women to maintain a way of life whose economic and spiritual basis is the cutting of timber. 

Many stretches of forest we drove or hiked through were strangely uncluttered; ominously pristine. This, our host told us, was the result of the Healthy Forests Initiative, which promises, among other things, to "reduce dense undergrowth that fuels catastrophic fires through thinning and prescribed burns." What we saw, however, were forest floors opened, because of this thinning, to the heat of the Sun; and where before thick undergrowth had retained moisture and allowed for undergrowth, now there were only swatches of tinder-like grass and enormous piles of chain-sawed pine and larch -- perfect kindling in the perfect setting for the next forest fire, or so it would seem.

Be that as it may, we forgot ourselves. We played in the open air, got burned in the sun and bitten by bugs, fired potatoes over the horizon, and fell exhausted and contented into our beds at night, knowing that the next day, we would still see, out our window, a seemingly endless world of beauty and harmony that soldiered on in spite of us, and would one day right itself, with or without our help.

--T.A.

Scenes from Israel #5: The Negev

We are up at 4:30 in the morning. The sky is just beginning to consider alternatives to darkness -- the horizon has raised its eastern eyebrow at the thought -- as we pile into the bus.

Fifteen minutes later, the crunch of the desert underfoot and a few hushed conversations are all you can hear.

And fifteen minutes after that, we enter a gully that runs down toward the Dead Sea, to the east.

The sky changes color in layers, and the desert does, too: the strata of geological sediment advance toward the sky in bands of ochre and cream, and the sky moves to meet it in black and wine-purple and a whole array of orange, until they meet in the middle, at a color that has no name and that exists, it seems, only here, only at this one moment. When you try to look directly at it, it's not there. Only when you look away -- when the curtain of darkness rises enough for you to see the mountains of Jordan on the other side of the Dead Sea -- does each color reveal itself to you. Soon, every band rises and disperses: all the colors are different. Soon after that, they are gone, as a trumpet-blast of white light begins to build behind the mountain ridge.

Then, it's morning. There are crickets on the shattered rocks and ibex on improbable perches above you and weird flying things that are very interested in your nostrils and your ears, and it's hot, and you're thirsty.

Many took pictures; I didn't (you can always find pictures of the Negev). I didn't want anything between my eyeball and the world.

Soon after that, it was time to come home.

--T.A.

Scenes from Israel #4: the Erez Border Crossing

It's strange to see it rising out of a desert landscape of scrub growth and barbed wire. It looks like a piece of O'Hare Airport dropped out of the sky. It's the newly completed terminal at the Erez border crossing between Israel and Gaza, and it sits nearly empty (no photos, sorry: we were asked not to take any). Built to accommodate some 4,000 crossings a day, the terminal currently handles about 400 on a busy day. Hamas, which doesn't recognize Israel, will let through only individuals (like people needing medical treatment in Israeli hospitals) and the massive shipments of aid on which Gaza's 1.1 million residents rely.

Before visiting the terminal, we are ushered into a low concrete building on the adjacent military base. Air conditioners are snarling furiously. Inside the building, the snarling sound is muted to a hum and whisper. We crowd into a whitewashed room and sit around a square of tables, where Israeli soldiers have placed sweating pitchers of lemonade and plates of cookies for us.

We are briefed by two officers of the Coordination and Liaison Administration of the Israeli Defense Forces. These people are in charge of a task that must be peculiar to this part of the world, explained, in a question, by the young officer in charge: "How do you work with a partner who is completely dependent on you, but who refuses to recognize you?"

And the first thing you notice about these officers is how young they are. They look scrubbed and untroubled: if they'd been born in the US, they'd be the college friends of your sons and daughters. But they're dodging bombs and moving massive amounts of food, water, medicine and other goods to a neighbor that would gladly kill them.  One of the solders tells how a mortar shell missed him by three feet, just the previous week.

They brief us quickly on the structure of the administration, the types and amount of aid moved; they show a video-clip of a local UN representative praising their work (and we all appreciate how unusual it is to hear a UN representative praise Israel).

Then we board the bus for the short drive to the actual Erez terminal. Once there, we stand in the unforgiving afternoon sun as a woman in a full-length black hijab rushes past us: her son has passed through security on a stretcher and is being loaded on an ambulance that will take him to an Israeli hospital. We pass through the glass doors into the large, air-conditioned hall to almost total silence.

The man in charge of security is introduced to us by his first name only. He looks like he might just have sneaked over the border from Baja into greater San Diego. The difference, you quickly learn, is that he is a veteran soldier and security expert, and he's armed to the teeth. In fact, every Israeli within sight has either a concealed weapon, a semi-automatic rifle or something similarly straightforward -- at the ready.

The scruffy guy in charge of security explains that the security system for people crossing in from Gaza is designed to scrutinize them electronically: they enter Israel without anyone laying a hand on them. Still, no security system can prevent confrontation. Bombers are caught, gunbattles erupt (the phrase "shit happens" must have been invented for this place).

The hair on the back of my neck stands up: for the third time today, I realize that any second, something could whistle out of the sky and explode.

Soon enough, they say, that feeling goes away, only to be replaced by a vigilance, a pervasive distrust, and a howlingly dark sense of humor. 

In this part of the world, where every nerve ending detects the presence of the sacred, it turns out that the fewer nerves you have, the better.

--T.A.

Scenes from Israel #3: Crowd at the Kotel

The third of several posts about a week spent in Israel as a participant in the Wexner Heritage Program.

It's Friday evening. The crowd at the Kotel grows as people pour in from the Jaffa Gate, come down the steps through the Arab Shouk, pile of tour and Egged buses and meander in from hostels, hotels. There is every flavor of Jew imagineable, and then some.

We leave a little early so that we can get back to the hotel for Shabbat dinner. We ascend the steps toward a security gate and the steps up through the Shouk. It's mere moments before the beginning of the Sabbath.

The gate is off a narrow alleyway, and a large group of Asian Muslims -- baggy white shirts and pants, white skull-caps, colored vests -- is making its way through the security entrance. We try to go out the unsecured exit but are literally almost bowled over by a procession of (ultra-)Orthodox Jews (black hat, payot, knickers, black leggings, black shoes) rushing to get the Kotel before Shabbat commences. The Muslims turn to watch as the Orthodox Jews openly circumvent the security process and knock us out of the way.

Finally, one of our group says to one of the Orthodox, "Do you mind?!! Can you let a few of us through the other way?!!"

The Orthodox rush on toward the Kotel, while the Muslims pass, one by one, through the secured entrance, a process that will likely take the whole group at least 10 minutes.

So started the previous Sabbath. May this one have a more peaceful beginning, for all of us.

--T.A.

Scenes from Israel #2: An unorthodox, ultra-Orthodox welcome

The next several posts will be excerpts from a week spent in Israel as a participant in the Wexner Heritage Program. In reporting what I saw, and not so much what I think, I hope to convey the vivid and incredibly complex patchwork that is life in a state that doesn't know the meaning of "normal".

While our group of Wexner program participants was visiting Israeli communities around Gaza, another group went to visit Mea Shearim, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem. The idea of these trips was to give we American Jews some sense of the "many faces of Israel": yet other groups met with Arab Christians, with Palestinians whose lives and communities had been sundered by the security barrier, with Muslim spiritual leaders in the Muslim Quarter of Jersualem's Old City, and with settlers in West Bank communities. Although all our trips included some risk, it was the group of Jews who visited this Mea Shearim that wound up feeling most threatened.

Our friends in the group reported it this way (quotes are my attempts to reconstruct from memory what was said):

They made sure we were dressed modestly, so as not to offend. Women in our group had their hair covered, and they wore long sleeves and skirts. Men had on shirts past their elbows, and long pants.

As we were walking through the community toward the yeshiva we were going to visit, people were glaring at us, and some shouted at our tour guide, asking did he make sure we were modestly dressed, asking us what we were doing there, stuff like that.

When we got to the front door of the yeshiva, things got really ugly. As we walked up the steps to the building, a crowd started to gather. They began shouting and pushing us away from the door. Then a bunch of them -- young men, mostly -- physically blocked the doorway with their bodies. I really thought it was going to get physical there, with these guys shouting and pushing us back, and people hemming us in on all sides.

Our tour guide explained that we'd been invited by the rosh yeshiva [principal of the yeshiva] to visit the place. Just then, the principal steps out and begs people not to behave in this way, to let us in, that we'd been invited. The crowd of men moved back to let the men in our group in, but they would not let the women through the door. So the women stayed outside while we went in to visit with the principal.

So we go in, hoping to talk to him about the community and the school, and their attitude towards Jews like us who aren't ultra-Orthodox. We had our answer soon enough. There's shouting outside and something starts flying through the windows of this guy's little office.

At first we were scared, but then it turned out that somebody was throwing kugel at us through the window! Big gobs of it are splattering against the window pane and flying onto the floor. The principal goes over and shuts the window, but pretty soon bigger and bigger gobs of kugel are slamming against the window.

At that point, we all agreed to cut our visit short.

At the end of the week, the group received from the principal of the yeshiva a profound apology on behalf of his school and the entire community. The tour guide also returned the check that was to have paid for his services.

It was clear to our friends who experienced this that it was a non-representative minority of ultra-Orthodox "Jewligans" who perpetrated this near-violence. That reassured our friends, but it also saddened them that this community, which sees itself as a guardian of Jewish values, couldn't or wouldn't control its most confrontational element, in whose view the shaming of fellow Jews was entirely justified.

--T.A.

Scenes from Israel: Life at the Edge of the Gaza Strip

The next several posts will be excerpts from a week spent in Israel as a participant in the Wexner Heritage Program. In reporting what I saw, and not so much what I think, I hope to convey the vivid and incredibly complex patchwork that is life in a state that doesn't know the meaning of "normal".

Our bus leaves the town of Sderot and pulls up at the Black Arrow monument. It reveals the combination of aggression and precaution that is everywhere on display in Israel: guard towers, barbed wire, cocky 18-year-olds in Army fatigues and Hum-vees -- and a commanding view of hostile territory: the Gaza Strip. Although only a few hundred yards away, Gaza is separated from us by two fences, hovered over by a surveillance blimp, and watched from a thousand invisible angles.

Just in front of the Black Arrow, bulldozers are knocking down trees and flattening the earth, and a low barrier wall designed to thwart shots at patrols is being erected: here, every battle is anticipated, and every dance begins with a deadly acknowledgement of the inevitable: in clearing this ground, Israel is saying that before long, tanks will be rumbling into Gaza, and the hunt for rocket-launchers there will intensify.

From here we head to Kibbutz Nir Am, an agricultural settlement less than two kilometers from the Gaza Strip. We file into the community room, where we're met by Shai, who is in charge of all agricultural work at Nir Am. Shai has blunt features, a clean-shaven head, a classically loud, hoarse Israeli voice, and he speaks excellent English, the result of having lived in South Carolina for 15 years. He peppers his speech with words you don't often hear out of an Israeli -- words like "y'all" and "yonder." He remembers life in the U.S. fondly, but he also remembers being called "desert nigger." Even under the circumstances, he is glad to be back home.

"Life here was paradise," he said. "You had beautiful land, fresh clean air; in the morning, the air was so fresh and still ... You had work to do, and you had a beautiful place to raise your kids. Then, in 2000, the Qassams started to come."

Shai has just come in from his work, and even though it's still morning, his entire skull is beading up with sweat. He takes a well-worn handkerchief from a pants pocket and employs it like a windshield wiper. "You know, it is not easy when your kid -- a lovely, happy child -- becomes angry and withdrawn. When, at 9 years old, all of a sudden she starts wetting her bed at night. But that comes with the territory."

"The territory" is Gaza, a neighbor teeming with 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them unable to find employment, come and go, or feed themselves without massive shipments of UN aid that come in through Israel every day. Almost every morning and evening, the rocket alarms sound at the kibbutz, and people head for their safe rooms.

The results, often terrifying, are not without their absurd humor: Shai notes that only a few days ago, the rocket alarm sounded -- about 15 seconds after a rocket hit.

Recently, a horse on the kibbutz was killed by a Qassam rocket. When Shai was asked if the government compensated the kibbutz for such losses, he smiled sadly.

"Sure," he said, "but look: you can get compensation for the value of the horse, but what about the time? For years you fed it, raised it, trained it ... your kids loved it ... This horse was wonderful with kids. How do you get compensated for that?"

To add to the absurdity, Shai says that the insurance agent dispatched to examine the remains of the horse tried to minimize the claim by claming that the dead animal was, in fact, a mule. One remembers the classic debate from Fiddler on the Roof and sees how little we've changed over the centuries.

Before we leave, Shai takes us to see a house on the kibbutz that was recently damaged by a Qassam. Its concrete roof looks like it's been worked over by a jackhammer.

The Qassams fall dozens of times a month. This one came around 11 PM, skipping off the roof of the house and hitting another but inflicting little physical damage. It did, however, terrify the elderly inhabitants of the house it first hit.

Shai was asked what he would have the government do with Gaza. Without hesitation, he raised his hands, palms up, slid them forward, and said words that were echoed verbatim by several Israelis we met on our trip:

"Give it to the Egyptians on a silver platter."

Shai waved goodbye and blew kisses as we drove away. Only after we were back on the road did I learn that Shai's wife  recently left him and their two children: they love Nir Am too much to leave, and she loves peace and quiet too much to stay.

--T.A.