OPINION

To Every Thing There is a Season

Dave Schechter

From Where I Sit

Eating home-grown fruits and vegetables provides an undeniable sense of accomplishment. I prefer to work outdoors in the morning, before the sun rises over the tree line and the day’s heat sets in. I wear a green-and-yellow John Deere cap that reads “Farm Iowa,” next to an outline of the state where I went to college and began my career, and where my mother grew up. She and my youngest sister sent me the cap and a similarly emblazoned sweatshirt last year as birthday gifts. Every so often I call and give them a video tour of the crops.

The tomato plants refuse to be bound by their cages and their vines have become intertwined. Their fruit has an aroma and taste superior to those stacked on grocery shelves. Along with adding flavor to our salads, and serving them with our basil leaves, tomato sandwiches are among my favorite “Southern” foods.

We have harvested romaine lettuce, kale and collards planted over the winter. I am not a fan of kale or collards, though others here like the taste.

The banana and bell peppers are coming in and, by the time this is published, the cucumbers hopefully will have appeared. The lone okra and eggplant have yielded little thus far.

I worried — rightfully, it turned out — that shade from our monstrosity of a kiwi plant would limit the raspberries. The adjacent blueberries grew in decent numbers. An especially plentiful blackberry crop has been nibbled as snacks, baked into a pie, shared with friends (one of whom made jam), and frozen for future use.

In truth, just as satisfying as consuming that produce has been watching its growth. Before planting the garden box, we turned and fertilized the soil and put down newspaper to retard the growth of weeds. We water and weed as necessary, but otherwise are pretty much hands off.

It can be more challenging to adopt a similar approach with our adult children, ages 22, 28 and 30. Learning when to offer advice and when to hold our tongues is a process. Our daughter uses a particularly colorful phrase when she feels we have stepped over her line. Her younger brothers have their ways of letting us know.

With all the love we could muster, and certainly while making our share of mistakes, we did what we could to teach our children well, and to give them both roots and wings. Now, we may delight in their successes and ache for their disappointments — without reflexively reaching out to catch them when they fall.

To varying degrees, they are “launched,” though our basement resembles a storage locker for toys, trophies, school projects, and other items that at some point must move with them or be discarded. They have heard, more than once, how I came home from work one day many years ago to discover that my parents, as they drove from Chicago to Des Moines, had deposited boxes marked with my name on the front yard, to the amusement of my housemates.

Though the recent college graduate, now learning the ins and outs of the technical side of the film business, sometimes spends the night here, the nest has become quieter. So, when we were all under one roof again on a recent weekend, the kids’ laughter and even the gibes they directed at each other were welcome sounds.

This household has endured its share of oncological challenges the past couple of years, none so much as our middle child. After a difficult year, for him and for us, he — in the parlance of cancer patients — rang the bell, ending months of chemotherapy. The best news came in June, when his doctor said that tests showed him to be in remission.

To reboot a life interrupted by disease and treatment, he moved out and relocated to another city. The lessons he has learned and the obstacles he has overcome at a relatively young age have given him added confidence to embrace change.

Back in the garden, the berry harvest grows smaller by the day, just as the veggies are ripening.

Another transition is underway. Before we became parents, we were just “us.” Now, for the most part, we are again. As our children build lives of their own, we have an opportunity to stretch our wings, to explore what that means and to write a new chapter in our lives.ì

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Letters to the Editor

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Letter to the editor,

There is an increasing number of Orthodox Jews falling down the QAnon rabbit hole and becoming followers of the conspiracy.

Save the Children Israel on Telegram uses the actual charity’s logo but is a QAnon propaganda platform. The posts reproduce many of the same QAnon tropes available on English language QAnon channels: an evil cabal, children kidnapped and trafficked, insisting that 8 million children a year go missing. The channel explains how American convicted pedophiles can use Israel’s “right of return” as a loophole to avoid prosecution in the United States and make aliyah to Israel.

On the QAnon Hebrew channel, they circulate comparable content you could find on the American channels. They promote the fallacy that doctors and childprotective services are ripping children away from their mothers. QAnon in Israel rekindles age- old conspiracy that circulated in the 1950s among Mizrahi families who alleged their healthy children were being stolen to be given to Ashkenazi families or killed for their blood. For decades 1,000 families lived with their doubts and deep distrust of Israeli authorities that there had been a systematic scheme to abduct the newborn babies from families of recent immigrants from Yemen and give them to childless Ashkenazi couples. This myth even existed in [this letter’s co-author] Yulie’s own family, after they immigrated from Tripoli, Libya, when two seemingly healthy children were pronounced dead at the hospital during a routine postnatal exam.

Save the Children Israel identifies the usual boogeymen: George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Further, the channel alleges that former President Obama purchased his two daughters from Clinton’s underground trafficking network (whose underground tunnels exists throughout the D.C. area) since they also allege that Michelle Obama was not born female. The channel attacks Soros, the Pope, Tom Hanks, and many of the Hollywood targets, connecting them to Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

Unique to QAnon in Israel is the addition of several Israeli celebrities to help the channel resonate by adding local flavor, hip hop singer Momy Levi is accused of having sexually abused a boy of 11 ½, rock musician Aviv Geffen, the singer and poet Daniel Oz (son of Moshe), musician Amrani Brockman (for wearing a shirt with a logo that connects him to the pedophilic cabal) and even the popular TV show “Zehu Ze” for singing a song about pizza in season 3 episode 1.

QAnon Israel supported Netanyahu and reiterated some of the most conspiratorial statements from former PM Netanyahu about how the social media companies colluded with his enemies and caused him to lose the recent Israeli election. The QAnon channel in Hebrew even suggested that Netanyahu refuse to leave the residence – before Bibi announced he wasn’t leaving for an additional two weeks.

The existence of a QAnon Israel may have some of the same corrosive effects on Israel’s already brittle democracy, and religious leaders from within the Orthodox community need to disavow it before it grows out of control as it has in the United States.

Mia Bloom of Atlanta and Yulie Maimon, Sandy Springs

Letter to the editor,

Avi Zinger holds the Israel franchise producing Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. His business is located in Be’er Tuvia, a moshav near Ashkelon (a city frequently targeted by missiles from Gaza). Ben and Jerry’s has announced that it will not renew the license, set to expire in December 2022, because the business sells its ice cream in Israeli communities located beyond the Green Line (which Ben & Jerry’s calls “Occupied Palestinian Territory”).

In fact, the land in question was liberated from illegal Jordanian occupation in 1967 only after Jordan fired on Israeli-controlled western Jerusalem, thereby allying with Egypt and Syria in a war instigated with the open intention of destroying Israel and annihilating her people. Palestinian leaders, while condemning Israeli “occupation” of “Palestinian land,” have rejected several Israeli proposals that would have led to the emergence of the first-ever-to-exist Arab State of Palestine.

The problem is that the Palestinian leaders are more interested in trying to replace Israel with a Muslim-majority state than in making any effort to build a Palestinian state.

Many Israeli businesses in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (areas dubbed the “West Bank” by the Jordanians) employ Palestinians as well as Jews and serve both Jewish and Palestinian consumers. They should be lauded for showing that Jews and Palestinians can co-exist, a first step toward realizing the dream of Two States for Two Peoples, a Palestinian state living in peace with the nation-state of the Jews.

Ben & Jerry’s announcement unfortunately supports the Palestinian leaders’ anti-normalization stance, which condemns Palestinians who join in Israeli efforts to end the conflict. For the sake of peace-seekers in Israel, I hope Mr. Zinger will continue with business as usual while searching for a new business sponsor. I urge Israel’s supporters, worldwide, to boycott Ben & Jerry’s and protest its wrongheaded move that abets people working for Israel’s destruction. ì

Toby F. Block, Atlanta

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