Haim Watzman

Republicanfellas — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

One very large hand landing on your shoulder is not a good sign at McCloskey’s on 46th Street. Two hands, one on each shoulder, is red alert. And that is what I felt Wednesday night as I was downing a shot of Wild Turkey and wondering whether the blonde doll behind the bar had health insurance. Mrs. McCloskey runs a good bar, but does she provide employee benefits? Could I risk making a pass at a good looker who might not have seen a doctor since she was last in the emergency room with a bloody nose?

illustration by Avi Katz

I did not look right and I did not look left, just crooked a finger at the girl to show her I needed another shot in my glass. But I could feel the two goons settling onto the stools on either side of me. I could feel their emanations, I mean. What was emanating was “red state,” and “shaft the poor,” with a dash of “corporations are people.” Goons do not need to be seen to be felt, and I mean even before they shove a piece in your backside.

The blonde poured me a shot. I glanced up at her and said: “Gorgeous,
you see these two guys on my either sides? Would you mind telling them to move on?”

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Bananas — “Necessary Stories” from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

Yes, that’s my seat, but don’t worry about it, just let me squeeze past, I’ve gained some weight and the belly doesn’t squeeze like it used to, I’ll sit over there next to you. No, really, it’s just fine, yes, that’s my name on the seat, but how could you know, you’re a stranger, and who would bother to tell you because I hardly ever show up. Anyway, I built this synagogue, with some help from my brothers and sisters, so all the seats are really mine. Do I smell bananas or is it just my imagination?

That young rabbi gets on my nerves. See the way he parades behind the Sefer Torah, looks just like Eli Yishai from Shas, I think at the yeshivot they bring in plastic surgeons and acting coaches to make them all look that way. Same short-trimmed beard, same beanpole physique, same clothes, same words coming out of their mouths. You think it’s not polite for me to talk to you while everyone’s blowing kisses at the holy scroll? Don’t let it bother you, like I said, I built this place and I can do whatever I want.

You know why I’m here? To say kaddish for my father. Died 27 years ago today. And not a day too soon, believe me. He was a domineering bastard. You know the kind, from the old generation, no education, no knowledge of the world, no interests beyond telling his wife and kids what to do every day of their lives and every minute of their days. Each year I tell myself that, enough, I won’t go this year,

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Bottom Up — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

It was Timothy Asfal’s fingers that caught my eye when I boarded an overloaded 21 bus at Davidka Square on the way home to Talpiot. I could see them clearly because he was seated in the front row, on the aisle just behind the driver, clutching a plastic DVD box. Tim has the slender, agile digits of the artistic weaver he is, so finely-shaped that you want them to touch you.

illustration by Avi Katz

Tim and I have been friends since the 1980s, when we were both lonely and dreamy young men new in Jerusalem. I valued his company then because he had the wit of a sad clown and could see deep into my soul. Even then the beauty of his fingers stood out, but I barely noticed the way he looked then, or that the rest of his body was out of proportion. Now that he lives in Beit HaKerem we don’t see each other that often, even for a year at a time. And I admit that these days, when I run into him, I am taken aback for a moment. I notice all the things that friendship once led me to disregard. His body is thick, fleshy, and hirsute. His head is long and angular, with a protruding nose and ears that are two sizes too large. Maybe, in part, these physical flaws are even more noticeable now because when he was young he had hope. He could be ironic about love because he believed deep down that despite everything he would find it. Now, in middle age, he is unhappy and lonely.

It was late on a Thursday afternoon in mid-June and the bus was packed back to front with shoppers from the Machaneh Yehuda shuk, the open-air produce market. Their baskets sprouted basil and leeks and the fragrance of raw carrots filled the air. I pushed myself onto the bus and, while I couldn’t get far, I managed to wedge myself right up against Tim’s seat, standing between a teenage couple grooving to their Ipods and each other and a Kurdish grandmother who sighed intermittently as if the entire world’s sorrows were on her shoulders.

Tim barely smiled when he saw me. His head swung back and forth slowly, first to me, then toward the fair-haired woman in a blue summer dress who sat on the seat to his left, deeply absorbed in a paperback. His head halted just where he could see her out of the corner of his eye.

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Niot Project Update–My Visit to a Test Anxiety Workshop

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Haim Watzman

Niot at his high school graduation

One student slouched, another grinned. Two girls focused intently while one gazed at the facilitator skeptically. Five students from Boyer High School in Jerusalem took a break one afternoon this week from basketball, studying, and piano lessons to attend a test anxiety workshop sponsored by the Niot Project. Anxiety has become a huge problem, especially for younger generations thanks to the huge pressure they are under to perform academically. Xanax, a drug used to treat anxiety disorders, is the most prescribed medication in the US. Some people don’t like to take drugs like Xanax because of the chemicals used in it that alter the chemistry of your brain. So, Anxiety sufferers look towards CBD products from places similar to Blessed CBD to help with their anxiety.

It was the third out of six sessions. Yehiel Asoulin, the psychologist who led the workshop, spent the first part of the hour teaching a study skill. He gave the students a short article to read and asked them to sum up each paragraph in turn, as they read it, in the margin of the pages. One participant claimed that it was too time-consuming, but others agreed that it had helped them focus on the content and made it easier to recall.

The second part of the workshop was devoted to relaxation exercises, designed to help the students relax when they encounter stressful situations while studying for or taking exams.

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Little Secrets– “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

“Don’t look,” said my friend Alon. “But the former Shin Bet chief just sat down at the table to our right.”

I gazed intently into my soy latte and then, without moving my head, squinted over in the direction of said table.

illustration by Avi Katz


“All I see is a blur,” I said. “I think I need to get my peripheral vision checked.”

“No, that’s really the way he looks,” said Alon.

Alon is a correspondent for one of the major dailies. I’d called him in desperation on Saturday night because I had a column to prepare and had no idea what to write. Alon knows everyone and everything and I figured he’d be able to slip me a scoop.

“Meet me at 10 a.m. in the Aroma Café on Arlosoroff Street,” he told me. “We’ll brainstorm. And it’s a good place to pick up a tidbit or two.”

The cafe was buzzing at mid-morning. Nearly every table was taken, and at least one person at each table was a familiar face. Over the bar hung a large sign with large letters: “Aroma Arlosoroff: A Quiet Spot For Intimate Encounters.” The morning sun flooded in through the plate glass windows that made up three of the café’s four sides.

“It’s where I meet my most confidential sources,” Alon whispered as we walked through the door. “If you come here, you gotta know how to keep a secret.”

“I see there’s free WiFi,” I said.

“Hey, stop staring,” Alon hissed.

“But that guy over there, surrounded by the paparazzi,”

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Other Nights — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

“This night is no different from other nights,” says Pharaoh, “True, on previous nights I have had a son, and on this night I do not. But this is not relevant to what I must do now.”

“This time sounds different from other times,” says Mozart, “for in previous times I did not have a son, and now I do.”

What time is it? I write this two days before the Seder night. It will reach its readers a few days before Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

It is not a good time, I tell the friend who sits down next to me on the row of chairs outside the sanctuary. I have a glossed Haggadah open on my lap. I am trying to prepare for this year’s Seder, to think of how to retell, once more, the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the sea. Pesach is next week and my son Niot, who was a soldier, will have been dead for a year. The earth has circled the sun a single time since the last Seder, which was the last night he was with us. We are cleaning and preparing once more to eat matzah and bitter herbs and tell again the story of how we came out of Egypt. Two and a half weeks later we will again remember the fallen soldiers. But this year is different, for there is a newly fallen soldier to remember, and he is my son.

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The Bitterness of Egypt, in Memory of Niot

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Haim Watzman My thoughts on the significance of the bitter herbs, on the anniversary of my last night with my son Niot, appear in this week’s “Shabbat Shalom,” the weekly Torah portion sheet put out by Oz VeShalom/Netivot Shalom. It’s available in both Hebrew and English Thanks to Kaddish Goldberg of Tirat Tzvi for giving … Read more

The Niot Project / “בנאות למידה”

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Haim Watzman

Dear Friends,

This coming week, during the Pesach holiday, we will mark the first anniversary of the death of our son Niot z”l. Niot, a soldier in the IDF’s Golani Brigade, was killed in an accident. We miss him very much.

In Niot’s memory, his family has established, in cooperation with the Society for the Advancement of Education, the Niot Project to help teenagers with learning disabilities and ADHD. We have prepared a brochure explaining the project, and more detailed information is available on the Society for the Advancement of Education website.

We would be pleased to have your support for this important project. Donations may be made in the following ways:

In the USA: Tax-deductible contributions to the Niot Project can be made by making out a check to “PEF Israel Endowment Funds Inc.” and mailing it to 317 Madison Avenue, Suite 607, New York, NY 10017, USA, with a cover letter indicating that the donation is for The Niot Project, at the Society for the Advancement of Education, Jerusalem.

In Israel: Tax-deductible contributions to the Niot Project can be made through either of the following routes:

By mailing a check made out to the Society for the Advancement of Education (Address: P.O. Box 16252, Jerusalem 91162, Israel).

Donations may also be made on-line (choose the Niot Project button).

Wishing you a happy Pesach,

The Watzman Family

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Spring — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Dani held his coffee glass up to the sky. The residue the Turkish coffee grounds left on the sides filtered the rays of the late March sun like a gossamer veil that brings to light precisely what it hides.

Nuriel, Dani, and I were on our bellies on the top of a desert hill come to life for a brief week or two after a late and south-wandering thundershower. We lay on velvet-red poppies with voluptuous black irises and brassy-yellow mustard flowers watching two formations of our platoon converge from the west and south on the slopes of the next hill over. That hill, guarded by evil-eyed cardboard cutouts of Syrian soldiers, was ours to conquer. Nuriel, Dani, and I were the fire team meant to keep the paper riflemen’s heads down with high-intensity machine gun and mortar fire until the two attack forces were positioned to make their final run toward the defensive positions. Nuriel’s arm, its spare dark down glistening, was draped over his MAG machine gun. Dani’s much thicker elbow rested on a pack full of assorted charges for his 60mm mortar. I was the team leader. The platoon had done a dry run of the maneuver an hour before and now the live fire version was beginning. But the formations were still far off and we awaited our lieutenant’s order to begin the barrage. So we had taken the opportunity to make a round of coffee on Nuriel’s camp stove.

illustration by Avi Katz

Nuriel, a baby-faced kid new to our unit, just six months past his three-years stint in the Givati Brigade, was explaining to us why he had felt compelled to tell Merav, to whom he had just gotten engaged, that he first fell in love with another woman on a flower-strewn hill like this one during his first furlough after basic training.

“My friend Mendy and I were hiking a trail on Mt. Meron in the Galilee,” he told us, “and we saw two spots of white on a boulder. We got closer and saw that it was two girls in linen shirts washing their faces in a spring that spurted out from the side of the mountain into a large pool.

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Reborn Jews

by

Haim Watzman

This article was solicited last year by the Jewish Review of Books but got cut in favor of material on the summer protest movement. I forgot about it and just yesterday found it in my computer. I hope it will interest SoJo’s readers

I had two adoptive families in Kiryat Shmonah, Israel’s northernmost town, when I lived there for three months at the end of 1978. I was 22 years old, I’d just arrived in Israel, and I was attending the ulpan that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would not only teach me Hebrew but lead to my decision to make my life in this country.

Talmud study at Bina

The ulpan set me up with a middle-class family that lived in one of the relatively spacious apartments halfway up the mountain slope on which Kiryat Shmonah lay. The loquacious mother, in her early thirties, had a job with the city; the father, a square-shouldered, silent veteran of the Yom Kippur War, was a manager at one of the factories that were the town’s major employers. They were model scions of the country’s Ashkenazi, labor movement elite—generous, dedicated to family and country—and strangely un-Jewish to this green American newcomer. If I stopped by at lunchtime, when the family’s two small daughters came home from preschool, I’d be invited to partake of a square, if unexciting, chicken dinner. (They ate dinner at lunchtime, a practice then so universal in Israel that my wife, who grew up here, still calls the main meal of the day “lunch,” even though we eat it in the evening.) If I went by on Friday afternoon or Saturday afternoon I’d get the same freshly-cooked meal. On Friday nights they had omelets, finely-diced vegetable salad, and nine-percent white cheese. There was no wine and no ha-motzi blessing. They didn’t even fast on Yom Kippur.

On my own, I made friends with another family.

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Once More, With Feeling — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

The sniffles turned into sobs during the dissonant piccolo solo. The Israel Philharmonic was about four minutes into the first movement of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony and the weeping distracted me from the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, who seemed not so much to be cuing the orchestra as to performing a long slow death dance.

The tears were coming from a little girl in a long-sleeved dress who was sitting two rows in front of me in the Jerusalem Convention Center’s high balcony. She looked to be about eleven years old and she held her hands tightly to her cheeks as she wept. Her shoulders heaved in a way that seemed to indicate that she was holding much more sorrow inside than she was letting out. But then the strings returned with a desperate restatement of the opening theme that descended a chromatic scale into a lower depth of agony. When the music dissolved completely into a virtual silence, she let out a very audible throaty gasp. The older couple sitting in front of her turned around to eye her. A boy in a black kipah who was sitting one seat away—apparently an older brother—sidled over beside her, gave her a smack on the back of her head, and whispered something angry in her ear.

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Confessions of a Cross-Sitter — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

To the respected Torah scholar, Rabbi Rosencrantz, may he live a good and long life, amen:

I would not disturb you at your studies were it not that the problem I face is pressing and the agony of my soul no longer bearable. Nor would I dare to write you under a false name, if it were not so embarrassing, but this you will no doubt understand as you read. I plead with you to respond quickly and with all the wisdom at your disposal, as my family, my livelihood, and my soul are all at stake.

It’s about public transportation. That is, I have a bus issue. Perhaps the word “issue” might be misunderstood. Perhaps I should say a seat problem. But perhaps that, too, may sound improper. Let me get to the point.

illustration by Avi Katz

Each morning I kiss my wife and children good-by and descend the narrow stairs from our modest apartment in the Holy City of Jerusalem and wait, along with many of my neighbors, for the number 2 bus. As befits our God-fearing neighborhood, the passengers board and the men take seats in the front and the women proceed to the back.

I swipe my Rav-Kav card and begin to walk down the aisle. A seat presents itself but I decide to try further back. I continue down the aisle toward the swivel section of the double bus.

For quite a long time after glatt-kosher buses began running in our neighborhood, I convinced myself that I was just looking for a more comfortable or convenient seat. But yesterday I was confronted with the truth.

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