every day at 5 pm...

Before I fell asleep last night, I read an idiotic blog post about aliah (Jewish immigration to Israel, lit. "ascent").

In a post addressed to American Jews, the blogger argued that the recent attempt to bomb the Riverdale Jewish Center in New York* shows that Jews in the US are extremely unsafe. She writes:

Don't you get it? America is NOT your home. You belong here in Israel. The economic problems, worries about finding a job, learning a new language, and interacting with Jews of several cultures completely different from your own, are totally irrelevant.

This lady is completely serious. I don't want to link her, but you can google the quote if you like.

As a punishment for reading stupid junk, I had a nightmare that my parents were moving back to Israel. In my dream, my grandma used her connections to get my dad a teaching job at Bar Ilan University. They were getting ready to sell the new house in Pittsburgh. It was awful. (Not, you know, because Israel is so bad. But because it is not where my parents should be, certainly not after they just made a big and difficult transition, and certainly not for the stupid reasons cited in the above-mentioned blog post.)

So just in case anyone was thinking of doing anything rash....

An American-born Jew dies soon after immigrating to Israel. An angel tells him that he is going to hell, but that he gets a choice of American hell or Israeli hell.

He asks, "What's American hell like?" So the angel answers, "In American hell, you live in a cozy house overlooking the sea, with a pool and an in-home bar, and easy access to a broad variety of restaurants serving food from many cultures. But every day at 5 p.m., a guy comes and dips you into a vat of boiling water."

The man shudders and asks, "What about Israeli hell?" The angel answers, "In Israeli hell, you live in a tiny apartment on the top of a four story building with no elevator and no air conditioning, overlooking a bus station. You eat mostly bread, boiled eggs, tomatoes, and cucumbers. And every day at 5 p.m., a guy comes and dips you into a vat of boiling water."

So the guy asks, "Why would anyone pick Israeli hell?"

The angel answers him, "well... in Israeli hell, no one really arrives at 5 p.m. In fact, the guy with the vat doesn't show up half the time because he's on army reserve duty, on vacation in Greece, or busy with his part-time cab business, or his friends took the vat to make poike on the beach.

"And even when he does show up, the water never gets all that hot anyway."

(It's still hell, though, cause there's no chummus.)

* P.S. A little bit of perspective on the attempted NY synagogue attack.