Family and Belonging

My cousins finally made it here for a visit! To be honest, it is not their fault that it took so long. I have been delaying the invitation, hoping for the day that my house is guest worthy and I'm not too tired to make guest worthy food. My cousins and I grew up 6000 miles apart, and I wanted to be sure they enjoy coming to my house!

Making aliyah does strange things, like taking these cousins who are your blood relatives but you hardly ever got to know in the earlier years of your life, and puts them within driving distance of your new home (of course, the flip side of that is that many other relatives are now 6000 miles away. But while we were in the States, we spent many years living between 900 and 1500 miles from our families. So although 6000 miles is further, but I think I have seen my younger sister MORE often since making aliyah than I did in the 3+ yrs prior to that. And she lives in the NY area. Go figure.).

So, Purim day, we tried to spiff up our house, the weather was gorgeous, our Rakafot are in bloom, cascading down the rocky area in front of our house, our lemon tree is still full with lemons (not sure we will manage to use them all), and I think I made guest-worthy food (to find out more about THAT, you'll have to check out my other blog here, although I haven't written up our Purim menu yet)!

And 2 of my cousins with various delegations from their families, came to visit! How amazing to have relatives who live within 1/2 an hour of my home. Now that we are all grown up, we can get to know each other in a way that is different if we had been cousins who played together throughout our childhood. Most of our conversations are in Hebrew (my second language, their first), although from time to time they try out their English on us. Usually they are forgiving of my mistakes...

This visit really made our family's day. It's good to feel like we belong.

Moving, Spiritual Reflections, and Life in a Quiet Town

We have been living in Northern Israel for a year and a half at this point. It has been a period of ups and downs, adjustments, laughter, loving, discouragement, feeling too hot, feeling too cold, mundane living and spiritual uplifting. It has been quite the ride, and I know it is STILL just the beginning of the ride.

We used to live in Teverya, and about 6 months ago, we picked up and moved to a small town halfway between Afula and Haifa. So much to love about this part of the country, and such a great view! And we have citrus trees...

I love this life. It is so different from our life in Florida. Unbelievably different. While some things were wonderful there, sometimes life just sidetracked us from our goals. Not just Florida, as we also lived in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Georgia. Before that, we lived in Yerushalayim, the holiest of all cities, the only city in the world that fills me with peace and that wonderful feeling of coming home. The only city in the world that as I walk its streets, I feel awed and uplifted, and at the same time I ache, for I know that I will leave and it will not be my home again.

When we lived in America, I went through a transformation of sorts. When we first moved there, we left the holiest place in the world and landed smack in the middle of an upper-middle class town in Connecticut. I felt cut off from my lifeline. I cried. I went through culture shock. And slowly I became acclimated. It took a bit of time, but eventually I started driving and made all sorts of discoveries: no, I couldn't go to the Kotel when I was looking for answers. But I found a Walmart nearby. And then I discovered bargain hunting - consignment shops and thrift stores in bourgeois towns in Connecticut was a little like being in HEAVEN. I discovered that I could live the good life on a really tiny income, as long as I was willing to buy my stuff used. I scoured the Goodwill 25 cent bins for treasures. Those Goodwill wokers in Connecticut never wanted to try to sort out bags of stuff that was donated, so TONS of miscellaneous items got dumped into the 25 cent bins for the poor people to sort through. Well, that was fine with me! And slowly, I changed. I went through a major transformation. I fed my hunger with bargains and thrift shopping... I learned to buy everything reduced. Even my produce - eventually I started shopping the markdown produce at the market! Wow, life became all about the markdown. Instead of the uplifting. It took a while, but eventually, I felt that there was this bit of my heart that was longing to go back to Yerushalayim. A little bit of me saying, give it all up! It doesn't matter what you have. You need to live the life you are destined to live, and you just CANNOT do that in America, shopping, playing (at Disneyworld, sniff!), and living so disconnected from your spiritual home. So far from Yerushalayim...

So why do I live in the North and write about Northern Lights? Because in my heart I long to live in Yerushalayim, yet I know that it is not possible. Not possible for me, to live the life I want to live, in Yerushalayim. I LOVE the quiet solitude of my little town in Emeq Yizrael. It is dark now, and there is silence outside, surrounding our little house in the kind of peace and quiet that never comes in a big city. Perhaps it is false, but I have a sense of security I never really had, living all those years just a stone's throw from the Prime Minister's residence, the President's residence, or the bustling Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, or the truly bustling, bursting, Middle-Eastern-beyond belief Shuk (Machane Yehuda). (Yup, even then I moved around a lot. I am one who always looks and strives to find something better. To make next time around even better. Whether that was with location, work, friends, roommates... now it is a desire to have the best for my family...)

We love our quiet town. It is rather large as little towns go, nearly 8000 residents. But it doesn't feel large at all. The streets are quiet, many tree-lined. There are no traffic lights (except to get off the highway and into town) and people smile. Sometimes there are scouts or groups of kids who go out into the field (behind our house) and make a bonfire, singing and eating fire-roasted treats late into the night.
We can also get almost everything we'd need right here in town. Nothing more than a 20 minute walk away. (With the exception of x-rays. One of our sons needed that and we had to take him to Afula. But Afula is only about a 25 min. drive. Within many cities you may have to travel longer than that for some service or other... just TRY getting anywhere in Haifa!)

My kids are happy with the open green spaces all around us, though they groan about living downwind from the cows sometimes (me, too!). While I am allergic to the outdoors, I wither away inside when I don't have access to it. I love this life.

Come find out more about living in the North. Give us a call and arrange a visit. You can reach us at 054-45-1878 or 054-454-2631.

Northern Lights & Reflections

I have a camera, and sometimes I even remember to take pictures with it.

However, I rarely DO anything with my pictures. I hardly ever upload them to the MyBook I bought so the pictures wouldn't clog up my hard drive. (My 12 yo son has taken it upon himself to do this every so often)

So here is a momentous occasion: I am uploading the picture that inspired the name of this blog. This is the nighttime view from one side of the wraparound mirpeset. Let me know what you think!

Lights all around

I have absolutely neglected my blog, because life just sometimes gets in the way. We are still living in the gorgeous Northern Israel, and I hung out the laundry tonight on my mirpeset with an amazing breeze (yay! the laundry will dry quickly!), and a gorgeous nighttime view of the city lights, the dark Kinneret, and the lights of the various surrounding cities and towns... absolutely stunning.
It made me stop and think about the way the lights shine, and sometimes you can catch the twinkle of lights in a single house, and sometimes it's all a jumbled big mess of lights. Here in Israel, it's so much more likely to be the lights of each house. And each house is significant. We are all part of the future of the Land, the People, the State - and I'm so grateful and happy that we have been able to come back home.

Shabbat

I love Shabbat in Israel; it is quiet and peaceful all around. We actually live in a mixed sort of neighborhood - so the streets are not empty, but they are emptier. And everywhere you look, there are families spending time together. It's not a shopping day or a work day, it's a real day of rest. We spent our day davening, learning, reading, playing games, resting, and of course, eating Shabbat food and singing Shabbat songs. (What about you? Leave a comment about your favorite way to spend Shabbat!)

And now that Shabbat is over, my husband and kids get to go learn Torah in a group in the Holy City of Teverya. There is a weekly gathering at the Maimonides Heritage Center, a program for fathers and children to learn together as a group. They work on a different topic every week, and everybody walks away enriched and ready to have a week filled with good things. What a great way to spend Motzaei Shabbat in this city that used to be a major center of Torah (many Tana'im lived here)!

Archaeological explorations

The apple of Teverya's eye right now seems to be Park Barko, located south of the city right near the Kinneret (right near the Holiday Inn and Malon Hof Gai). It is a wonderful park, still partly under construction. It boasts open green spaces (where my hubby and kids tossed a ball around), a large ampitheater (to be used for concerts?), a nice playground for younger children (swings, slides, climbing structures, etc), a “park etgari” - obstacle course style playground – for older children (this costs 5 NIS per child for Teverya residents, 25 NIS per child for non-residents), and our favorite part: the ruins of the Ancient City of Teverya dating back to the 1^st century C.E.

Oh, and ample free parking is available.

We really love the new park, and my kids love “time traveling” - with my youngest yelling “time tunnel!” whenever we enter the ruins. It's really a great way to spend the day, living in a land steeped in history...

My only question is, if this is Teverya's new pearl, WHY is the playground locked until 4 pm (sunset is about 4:35 this week)?!

Natural Bliss, part 3

I continued my quest for healthy food. I checked the natural/organic section at Rami Levy (supermarket that is commonly known to have the lowest prices in the country). I found a few items I am used to buying – organic flour, whole wheat pasta, organic corn meal, organic cane sugar, to name a few. I even splurged and purchased some, mostly in an effort to make myself feel better about the food I am serving my family, not because I thought the prices were reasonable. I also discovered that Rami Levy carries organic milk, 3% only(!) - where oh where is the fat-free milk in this country? - but for about 12NIS/liter. Slightly out of reach. No organic produce. I did find “Maya Teva” products in the dried goods aisle, which included flaxseed that says on the Hebrew label that it is grown without chemicals and pesticides (this information does not appear in English, so for people with limited Ivrit this would be difficult to understand).
They also carry 3 different types of eggs – conventional (about 10NIS/dozen), free range (about 20NIS/dozen), and organic (about 30NIS/dozen). I opted for the free range, and decided that I should continue my quest for affordable healthy food.

The next time I found myself in the center of town, I made my way over to the little Mazon Organi store. It turns out that it is practically brand new, and has a very clean look and feel to it, albeit small. I decided to buy a few things (organic eggs for 22NIS/dozen seemed a relative steal at the time!)... The proprietor is also an oleh (perhaps from South America somewhere, I couldn't quite place his accent), and is very friendly, though perhaps a bit desperate for human contact after sitting for hour after hour in his empty, pricey store...

I also checked out the natural section in Shufersal Sheli in town. I found organic oatmeal and pricey organic cookies and granola. To my surprise, I even found an all-natural whole wheat bread in the bread aisle! Overall, though, I was disappointed at the lack of selection and availability. By now I had decided that organic jam was no longer a necessity. I would settle for something that is 100% fruit...