Don't worry folks. I ain't going anywhere. It's just too much fun irritating you by reporting what is actually going on in Israel and the Middle East - even if - and particularly because - the vast majority of you don't want to know.
But when I discovered Al Barger's article on disorders in his home town in 2005, and realized that I could have discussions with folks here, I lived in Jerusalem, in the Armon haNetziv neighborhood in the southeast section of the city, and "Ruvy in Jerusalem" just seemed the natural screen name.
Ruvy is a nickname for "Reuven" that I got from an Israel Navy ship's cook who managed the kitchen where I got my first job in this country. I washed dishes while he made up bagel sandwiches, pasta dishes and the like for long bearded Jews in the Geúla neighborhood where the restaurant is.
Now, though, I live in a village in Samaria, called Ma'alé Levoná, and while I still go to Jerusalem twice weekly or so, my life is centered in these mountains and the Jewish villages and towns in them.
For the last two days, for example, I've been going to the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariél, serving as a "reader" for kids taking an English pre-final test called a matkónet, something like practice tests for the Regents' Exams administered in New York State. You need to pass them to get a certificate of completion from the high schools here. So for fifteen hours this week, I've read paragraphs to high schoolers trying not to give them the answers.
Kids grow up fast in this country, and none of the students I "read" for seemed like high schoolers at all. My wife had a similar impression of the full-bearded youth she read for Sunday morning. The last kid I read for on Monday had fought in Lebanon in 2006 as a para-trooper. But here he was taking his matkónet for English, so that he could get a completion certificate from the high school he attended. Of the four youths I read for, he was the sharpest, and the minute I started talking business to him, his English improved markedly.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - P. Marlowe
R... You punked us... Shame!
Marlowe
2 - Matthew T. Sussman
Actually we have upgraded the BC Magazine interface since you last joined. New features include: you can just change your username without having to write an explanatory article. It was our fault for not communicating this to the masses, please accept our deepest apologies.
3 - Clavos in Havana North
I'm still in Miami, Ruve...
4 - Kevin Eagan
I thought this was the type of article that's reserved for your personal blog...
5 - Dave Nalle
Now that he's left Jerusalem the world is Ruvy's personal blog.
Dave
6 - Dr Dreadful in BFE
So would 'Ruvy in Ma'aleh Levona, a Small Village in the Hills of Samaria Just Outside Jerusalem' have been a bit too much of a mouthful?
7 - Clavos
Mayhap not, but it does lack a certain je ne sais quoi...
8 - Clavos
BTW, Doc.
I'm surprised I didn't get a snappy, arch retort from you in response to my last post here.
9 - Dr Dreadful
Kevin:
I thought this was the type of article that's reserved for your personal blog...
Well, yes, normally, but we all like to make fun of Ruvy every now and then.
He knows he must give the punters what they want, just often enough...
Clav:
Retort has now been posted. Snappy and arch it may not be, but it's uniquely me.
10 - Ruvy
Actually we have upgraded the BC Magazine interface since you last joined...
Since I last joined, Matt? I only joined once.
Now that you have all these new wonderful interface features, all you got to do is advance your communications skills to the same level.
Your apology is accepted. Nevertheless, I didn't mind following Gypsyman, Alienboy and others in announcing a name change. The last straw was Zedd, telling me to "keep it in Jerusalem" on a different thread, said in a most condescending way.
Now the world is my blogging oyster, as Dave points out; the only kosher oyster in the world.
And on own my blog, I don't bother with screen names.
11 - STM at the arse-hole end of the world
Way to go Ruve.
I haven't moved though. I'm still down here at the paradise club in the south pacific.
12 - Ruvy
Stan,
Israel is a pretty small place. Some folks would view me as merely having moved my rear end a bit. A pricey move - NIS 2,800 (at the time, $680)! On a clear day (not today) you can see Tel Aviv from the village's main bus stop and tramp spot. Look to the east, out of my window, and you can see mountains in Jordan.
If I look down into the valley below from my northern kitchen window, I can see two Arab villages running off of Highway 60, one to either side of it. Neither of them existed when Ma'alé Levoná was transformed from an IDF listening post to a civilian village some quarter century ago. Ari'el, the biggest Jewish city in Samaria, is just a few hillsides over, a twelve minute drive away. The whole country is probably smaller than the Sydney metro area, though I wouldn't know that for sure....
13 - STM at the arse-hole end of the world
Israel is, I think, about the size of the coastal strip between the south coast of New South Wales level with Canberra, and the Hunter Valley (starting at Newcastle, the steel city just north of Sydney) - roughly 200-250 miles, and yes, at a pinch probably the width of the Sydney metropolitan area corridor at its outer western limit.
Those distances tend not to be regarded as any distance at all in Oz, especially when you consider that one state, Western Australia, is many times the size of the vast majority of countries on this planet and Perth and Sydney are an entire continent apart with a dirty great desert in between that goes for thousands of kiolmetres and has nothing much in it except flocks of budgies, an endless railway line and a very long, straight road stretching to the horizon that feels like the road to nowhere when you're on it.
I think it'd be like driving from Israel to India, but safer provided you can stay awake. You must carry heaps of extra water with you too in case you break down.
However, I think there's a bit more going on where you are mate ...
Down here, we just cruise along, nicely oblivious. Which ain't a bad thing, really.
14 - Ruvy
Yo Zedd!
You don't get rid of me that easily. To understand why, you need to read this article and remember that we Jews are stubborn bastards.
All variety of goyim trying to kill us off for 2,800 years have failed and will continue to fail.
Take a bow, by the way. It was your comment that finally inspired me (or pissed me off enough) to make the change referred to in this article....
15 - Zedd
You are welcom Ruvy.
What is "goyim" is that Yiddish for germ or New York speak.
Ruvy with Hitler as an exception, I would say that your stubbornness may have played a role in some of the annoyance. If everyone gets mad at you, you have to ask why. If the answer is that "they hate me because I am wonderful" then you know that you have some work to do.
I think that the Biblical elevation has made Jews spoiled (some). Off course Hitlers madness has also made people super sensitive about rolling their eyes at the abnormally, off the charts, attention getting. I cant get over that Jews are in the news every day and just about every show on TV has a Jewish reference and YOU admit that your country is teenie tiny.
I love the "we are suffering" lament here in the US when Jews are the most educated among the highest income bracket, the most saturated in media the legal field and medical field to a degree. Israel is the most supported economically, yet we get to hear the lament constantly. Is it just me?? Yet the Palestinians are locked up because you want their land.
What am I missing?
No rants please just sobber explainations. No Hebrew either.
16 - Dan Miller
Ruvy,
Your headline worried me for a second, but then I continued reading. I'm sure you will continue to piss off people, and am glad that you will. I don't always (or even most of the time) agree with you, but that doesn't much matter. it is much more fun to discuss things with someone with whom you disagree than with someone who is in total agreement; after complimenting each other on brilliant views and high intelligence, there isn't much to say.
Back in the nineteenth century, Robert G. Ingersol, AKA Robert Godless Injursoul, one of the very few Agnostic evangelists, made a lot of people rabid, but also got some of them to think about what they had always accepted. I think that's a good thing.
Best wishes for Passover.
Dan
17 - Matthew T. Sussman
I'm amazed you compared this article to Richard Marcus's coming out piece, considering that Marcus (1) went from complete anonymity to full exposure, (2) explained himself throughout the article why he did so, and (3) actually wrote something touching.
Although I'm glad the precedent has been set that when I want to start calling myself Matt "Coconuts" Sussman, I can submit an article about it and "digress" for the last half of it.
18 - Jet in Columbus
Dear god, I just found myself agreeing with Matt????????????
I've been thinking for some time of dropping the "in Columbus". I really never considered writing an article about it.
Ruvy, I knew who it was before I saw this article. Just as I don't think anyone would seriously think of using the handle "Jet", nor do I think that you aren't already so well established and known here that anyone would dare use Ruvy, unless it was JOM being a smartass, but fortunately we don't have to deal with that contingency.
Welcome Ruvy, I'm glad you're a free agent abroad
Blessings...
19 - Jet in Columbus
By the way, congrats on the "circumsision" as it were of your handle! :) I hope the propper prayers and proceedures were painless....
20 - Clavos
Does anyone know why Jewish men are the most optimistic people in the world?
Because they're willing to cut off the tip before they even know how big it'll be.*
* My best friend, an American Reform Jew, told me that one, so don't anyone get on my case...
21 - Al Barger
Ruvy, I'm SO pleased to see my name so invoked. That is especially true after seeing the title of the article (without the author listing) and fearing that I was clicking on an obit. Silly me - I should have known that you'd be way too stubborn to lay over and die.
Yo Zedd, re: I would say that your stubbornness may have played a role in some of the annoyance. If everyone gets mad at you, you have to ask why. If the answer is that "they hate me because I am wonderful" then you know that you have some work to do.
I'm with you there, Zedd. If "everyone" hates them and intends them death, despite being nice Jews rather than genocidal Nazis, then Brother Ruvy et al may indeed have some work to do ie killing enough of the hatas that the rest of the worthless sonsabitches know better than to screw with them.
Of course, saying that to Ruvy would be pretty much preaching to the choir.
22 - Dr Dreadful
A 'goy' is just a Gentile, isn't it?
Or is it a more derogatory term?
23 - Ruvy
Before going off to write another article, I'll define "goy" for you all, so you will all comprehend it clearly. As you get into it, you will not enjoy what you read, but you're being told the truth, not some kind words to flatter you.
Goy is Hebrew for nation. In the Torah we Children of Israel are referred to as goy kadósh "a holy nation". So that is all that goy originally meant.
With time, the term goyím "nations", came to mean "nations" as in nations other than the goy kadósh. Note please where the accent is on this word. It is on the second syllable, as it should be in a proper Hebrew masculine plural noun.
Until the Roman genocide of our people, that is what the word "goyim" meant - the nations. With the Roman genocide of our people (the Romans didn't have Zyklon B or concentration camps to speed things up, so they took several centuries to accomplish what the Nazis accomplished in six years - kinda gives you a real respect for what modern technology can do, I tell ya) theterm took on a different hue. Unlike all their predecessors, the Romans were really successful in making Judea howl. The stinkin' savages (and their successors the Byzantine Greeks) kept at it until the Moslems conquered Jerusalem and the rest of the Land of Israel about 1,400 years ago.
By this time, Jews were living in what was to become the Holy Roman Empire - what was to become Germany. There they had begun to adapt to using a form of German where the common words were German - like broit for "bread" for example - and where the more intellectual terms, terms that had judicial, philosophical or religious significance, were Hebrew or Aramaic. Hallá is the form of braided bread that was used in the Temple and was (and is still) baked each week to commemorate the Sabbath. This term has religious significance, and is Hebrew. In reality, though, Hallá is just another word for bread.
In German, it is normal to put the accent on the first syllable, and by the 9th century, when proto-Yiddish was already being spoken, Jews began murdering the pronunciation of Hebrew words by shifting the syllabic emphasis to the first syllable to fit the German they were speaking with the goyím - whom with time became goyim. And after 8 centuries of Christian persecution, goyim were looked upon with contempt and hatred.
The Christians have mostly stopped their persecution of our people, but the negative connotations of the word "goy" remain, though a lot less bitter than they used to be. The immense prosperity of American Jews in American society has blunted the bitter hatred of non-Jews considerably. I was brought up short on this fact in a conversation with a young lady 35 years ago on a bus going from Eilat to Be'érsheva; I tried in very broken Hebrew to express my thoughts on non-Jews, particularly Arabs. At the time, I was your typical secular American Jew pushing peace. The girl abruptly stated kódem kol, kol goyím Hayót "first of all, all goyim are animals".
This was and still is the view of many S'faradí and MizraHí Jews regarding Arabs, and for a long long time was the standard view of Ashkenazí Jews of Christians.
I have mentioned in this article that was published here, at comment #13, that Jews in exile tend to self-censor themselves. Thus, American Jews are liable to find these several paragraphs explaining "goy" to you to be racist and unnecessarily provocative - but they are brutally honest and without the standard self censorship that Jews in exile impose upon themselves.
24 - Dr Dreadful
Interesting, Ruvy-in-nowhere-in-particular... ;-) How the usage and meaning of words changes over time and circumstance!
Kind of like how the word 'nice' has done a complete 180 in terms of meaning over the centuries.
I don't think British Jews use the term goy much. The first time I heard it used was on the Bob and Tom radio show over here. They did a musical skit about a Jewish girl bringing her gentile fiancé home for the holidays, and telling the family that it was going to be a 'goyisher Hannukah'.
25 - Zedd
Kinda sorry I asked.