Love in the Time of Intolerance Part III

Love in the Time of Intolerance:  Everything is Meaningless

I’m a MEANINGFULNESS junkie. The most important book I’ve ever read is “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl.  His famous quote, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."  is my e-mail signature.  The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s book, “Toward a Meaningful Life” was one of the main reasons I stayed in the Chabad cult for as long as I did.   Everything HAS to have meaning or I disengage, or worse, don’t connect at all. 

My line each time I return from Israel to LA is I’m going from meaningful to meaningless.  Although I’m born and raised here, in fact, I’m a second generation Angeleno, I’ve never felt this is HOME – I’ve been longing for where that connection, that feeling I belong, in the most ancient of ways.   The place I can go deep because I AM deep.  I’m not sure why or what the cause is for my lack of respect for LALA LAND, but I suspect it has to do with the transitory nature of the City.  The old joke that if you’ve just arrived but written a screenplay or gone on an audition while waiting tables, you qualify as a LA Native.  I connect much more where there is a strong sense of the history that I carry in my genes, or perhaps in my past lives where walking the cobblestone streets of Boston, or Paris, and that indescribable feeling of my DNA settling the first time I set foot on the ground in Nairobi, on the Terra Firma of the Mother Continent.  And of course, most powerfully in Israel, where EVERYTHING MEANS SOMETHING, and nothing just exists.  At least that’s the marketing campaign.

But maybe I’m wrong about LA.  Meaning is, after all, subjective.  So, why don’t I ascribe meaning to living in Los Angeles?  Surprisingly, I just realized this is the first time I am even asking myself this question, and the answer is I honestly don’t know.  My line to myself when I am out of sorts, which is a good deal of the time, is that “I can’t find a place for myself.”  These days it’s even harder for me to curl up with a book, no matter the comfy reading nooks I have in my home.  But is this because living in LA has no meaning and if I were somewhere else, I would naturally just be able to “just be”?  Carefree yet grounded and solid with meaningfulness oozing from my every pore?

Hell if I know.  It is true that I suck at small talk.  Girl talk bores the shit out of me.  Gossip irritates me.  I can’t “just hang.”  It’s why, I tell myself, I hate dating.  Hiding behind demanding meaningfulness has allowed me to judge and assume and not “get out there”.  To stay safe and not risk.  Oy. 

For some reason, these lyrics from “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel just ran through my mind:

“In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains….”

I’ve not been valuing down time. I’ve not been valuing laughter.  I’ve not allowed myself fun.  I don’t live in the moment.  I’m dragged down by my skewed addiction to “meaningful”.

Epiphany number one literally just now:  I’ve been conflating meaningless with self-care.  A good friend has been in more war zones and battlefields and hellholes than most civilians.  As the Executive Director for Doctors Without Borders in LA, and now a leader in global prison reform she’s a frequent flyer into Hell:  famines, genocides, war zones, rape camps, all of it.  She’s selfless and driven and brilliant.  Her answer when I asked her how she deals with what she sees and does:  Mid-century Scandinavian furniture – after all, she’s Swedish.  She scours thrift shops, old furniture stores, and loves finding that odd end table or something to place next to her reading nook.  It keeps her sane.

I have not allowed myself to have a meaningless pressure valve.  I need one now more than ever. The truth is I’ve never valued myself enough to cherish meaninglessness.  Epiphany number two: unless I ascribed meaning to everything than I did not have meaning.  My self-worth is strangle-strength bound to the meaning I give to everything outside me.

Of course, my subconscious, or Higher Self has been leading me to this realization all along.  It’s no accident that my favorite writer is Milan Kundera and two of my favorite novels of his are “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Immortality” and of all the Hasidic Masters distilling ancient Jewish wisdom, my heart and soul are soothed by the teachings of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who’s  central message is to never lose hope and to find joy and cause for happiness in everything that happens to you.  

Epiphany number three:  I have to believe I am worthy of moments of joy, of beauty, of awe and of love.  It’s crucial for me to consciously curate those moments:  those stand-alone experiences that are not tied to anything “larger”, have no baggage or agenda or weight of the world attached.

Epiphany number four:  Everything is meaningful.  Even the things that are not.  

I Rest in the Grace of the World

I Rest in the Grace of the World

The Peace of Wild Things

Snuggle Leica-la

Savor a perfect cappuccino

Listen to music I love

Curl up in bed and read

Drive listening to great music

Sit on the ground

Yoga

Meditate

Pray

Bird watch

People watch

It’s probably telling the part of my bat mitzvah at age thirty-six that got the most tears from me and knowing laughter from the audience was the last stanza of the Kohenim blessing: “….and may G-d grant you peace.” Pretty much everyone there knew me too well, including the wonderful Rabbi, who said this with so much oomph I think he believed he could conjure up the Messiah as well, with about the same odds. 

I’m….intense, which is a polite way of saying that Inner Peace is not my default setting.  Or, as the sweating, drained masseuse told my  then girlfriend after two hours of struggling just to untangle my shoulders,  “Yael has an adversarial relationship with the Universe.”

Most days that’s an understatement, but some days it’s not.  The word “PEACE” in any language grabs me by the heart.  Probably by the throat too.  I talk a lot about it.  I chase it.  I try to cultivate it.  And, more often than not, I fail.  Craving inner peace is my default setting.  I am dying to trust with a capital T, to have unshakeable faith with a capital F, and to finally let go of my hyper-alert and control freak nature is my dream.  Spending the rest of my life in this hell of believing everything is up to me is my nightmare, and one I live daily.

I have had indications my soul is far more chilled, after all, this lifetime is not its first thrill ride.  I have had enough past life visions to wonder if Mel Brooks’ 2,000 year-old Man was my drinking buddy.

It’s not that I don’t have tangible proof of how amazing things are when I get out of my own way.  I am a fucking Rockstar at manifesting (see prayer notes in Kotel wall if you don’t believe me). I’ve had incredible glimpses of what it feels like to LET GO and LET G-d, and it’s nothing short of bliss.  It’s these moments, however fleeting, that keep me trying. 

There’s a line in the script of one of my favorite films, “Under Fire”, when, describing the female lead, the screenwriter uses the phrase “with a tough grace” to illustrate how the character faces the world.

I love this description, and wish it applied to me.  In my best moments I think it does.  Someone once asked me what the phrase means and why I admire it so.   Because I think it means you allow for most things to be out of your control, but you don’t lose sight of your part in the grand scheme of things.  You see the beauty, the joy, the sadness, the pain, the fear and the love and through it all, you are detached enough to not try to control everything, but you commit fully to what is up to you. But is that the ability to rest in the grace of the world??

The character in “Under Fire” was a war journalist.  I’m a recovering photojournalist with some war and genocide experience. That’s a lie, though, to say we can leave those worlds we’ve parachuted into behind.  We don’t ever recover.  We try to process what we’ve seen and done and witnessed into a narrative, a memory box, that does not destroy our psyche or our lives months, years or decades later.  But inner peace? 

So how does one who’s been on “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” World Tour rest in the grace of the world when you’ve borne witness to so much the opposite?  By relentlessly searching to also bear witness to those grace-filled moments and even to hoard them.   Just as I am trained to unflinchingly see our most horrific moments, I’ve consciously had to train myself to see the even more powerful moments of grace, and let me tell you, that’s much harder. I flinch.  We don’t give as much value to moments of beauty, of joy, of awe, of love. I know this in my bones and my bones ache for our inability to value moments that save us.

Years ago, on my 43^rd birthday, alone and kind of feeling sorry for myself, I stopped by the CVS to pick up some things. It was Prom Season.  Just then, four couples on their way to their high school prom swept in, the girls grown up and stunning in their beautiful formals, the boys scrubbed and shining in their tuxes.  They were full of the future, of possibility – their feet barely touching the ground.  As I watched them make their way across the store, they passed an older woman in a wheelchair who’d obviously had a stroke.  Her face was literally frozen permanently into an expression of surprise.  Her eyes wide, mouth open.   Slouching beside her was her husband, leaning in exhaustion on the cosmetic counter.  The young couples glided past them, and as they did, her eyes locked on them, and I could see she was wishing for each of their young lives to be blessed with only moments of grace.  She saw I noticed her, and so I blew her a kiss.  And with every incredible effort, she blew me one back.

Love in the Time of Intolerance Part II

This is what life does.  I’m standing at the Kotel, finally staring down my internalized homophobia, coming out to G-d and putting a prayer in the wall “Paging Miss Israel.”  A plea to meet my bashert, the woman of my dreams who would, for all intents and purposes, complete me.

This is what life does. Armed with my new bravado, I brave the few “lesbian bars” in Tel Aviv.  The first one was Yelped as a café, so I kill time and order dinner…and wait….and wait….as more and more straight families come in.  Finally, I call the waitress over and ask, discretely, if I am in the right place.  “Oh”….she says, with a knowing smile.  “We’re a family café now. Try this other place”, and she writes it down.  I hail a cabbie who silently drives me down a dark street, points down the ally (this is SO cliché….) and says….”Em…..you know, it’s a….. different club.”  “Thank you,” I say.  “I’m different.”  “He gives me a funny look I interpret as “Funny, you don’t look Lesbian” and drives off.

This is what life does. Inside, it has the same dark, sad vibe as the depressing lesbian bars in LA.  A few young women laughing together eye me suspiciously.  I try to get the bartender’s attention – what’s the international sign for being ignored?  Finally I order a gin and tonic.  A woman who’s been drinking alone and definitely not my type slides over with her drink and I notice an odor:  the national drink of Israel:  Red Bull and vodka.  She asks me what I’m drinking and if she can smell it.  I give her my drink and leave. 

This is what life does. Back at my hotel, the gorgeous woman working the night shift asks how my night was.  Feeling awkward, I tell her a little bit about it.  She wishes me goodnight.  A few minutes later, she friends me on Facebook letting me know she’s gay, but just getting over her latest relationship and not available.  Oy.  I’d not even asked.

This is what life does. A few months later, back in LA, I get an email invitation from a Hadassah acquaintance to go to a political event in LA on women’s rights in Israel.  Since I used to work for the Israeli Consulate LA,  I don’t pay much attention as to the details and put it on my calendar. 

This is what life does. Miss Israel of 1980 is now a women’s rights activist.  Not just Miss Israel, but just elected Miss Israel of All Time.  Literally.  Her title is Queen of Queens.  Supermodel gorgeous woman with a dazzling smile and an inner light that takes your breath away.  The light comes from her Neshama.   At the end of the event I introduce myself, and I’d be happy to help her cause.

This is what life does.  A couple weeks later, I get an email from her forwarded to me by the wife of the current Israeli Consul General asking if we can all meet for breakfast soon to discuss working together.  We meet and plan.  We do events in Southern California and get to know each other.  She’s wrestling with filing for divorce when her two kids finish high school soon and go off to college.  Slowly we share details about our lives.  Past loves and relationships.  What I don’t share is my current truth.  How much desperation, depression and despair I’m in.  How the stress of being the sole caregiver of my parents and on guard against an older sister who only wants her inheritance combined with the soul crushing agony of knowing I am not doing what I am meant to do in this life is killing me.

This is what life does.  She goes to Israel for the summer to do events and invites me to join her to continue our work.  I know when G-d is handing me a lifeline and I grab it.

This is what life does.  Two weeks before I am to leave, my Dad has to have emergency surgery to put in another dialysis access point, with slim odds.  I find the strength to tell my Mom that no matter what happens with Dad, I’m going to Israel.  They have caregivers helping now. Thankfully his surgery is a success.

This is what life does.  Two days before I’m to fly to Israel, my internist notices a funky ultrasound around my heart.  Water in my pericardium.  He sends me to a cardiologist.

This is what life does.  The cardiologist is an Orthodox Jew who is not going to stop me from flying to the Holy Land.  The water is barely a thimble full and his guess is it’s most likely from an old bacterial infection.  I know what it’s from.  It’s the tears I have not shed from the life I have not allowed myself to lead.  

This is what life does.  My Hebrew birthday begins the next evening and the day before Erev Shavous: the birth of the Jewish people standing before G-d at Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah. It’s the holiday that celebrates showing up.  I arrive in Israel just hours before sunset.  She picks me up and I put my feet in the waters of the Mediterranean just as the sun sets and I tell her what happened and we toast my health and my birthday. 

This is what life does.  A decade after my prayer in the Wall, she is absolutely my bashert – but not in the way I’d prayed for.  She’s my soul mate best friend, and in many ways, the guardian of my Neshama. With her and her kids, I finally have a family that loves and cares and nurtures me and I them.  My heart is healed, as is my soul.

This is what life does.  “You can’t always get what you want …you get what you need”.  Or, as she reminds me when things seemingly go awry, G-d has other plans.

Love in the Time of Intolerance Part I

Love in the Time of Intolerance Part 1

“We took you on, lock, stock and barrel.”  To this family to whom I had traveled ten thousand miles from Los Angeles to Cape Town to meet, clearly, I was something to take on, a burden.  I was unworthy of their love and acceptance, and by extension, since they were my conduit for finding my way back to my religion, to Judaism, I was, even more devastatingly, unworthy of G-d’s love and acceptance.  I was a bad Jew.  Their statement was a damning sentence that would ring in my ears for close to a decade.

That judgement, that intolerance for ME, for who I was, lodged and festered in my already damaged psyche.  I’d already been infected by my family, by society, by stories.  San Francisco family trip, tomboy me just out of 4^th grade, touring Height Ashbury during the Sixties….A woman in jeans passes us.  Mom says to me, “you see that?  If you don’t stop playing with (cowboy) guns, that’s what you’re going to be.”  “What’s that?” I asked.  “A fate worse than death.” Mom answers.  I instinctively knew what she meant.

So…..I dated boys and fell in love all the while clamoring for an escape from who I was and at the same time, subconsciously, powerfully, insatiably drawn to discover what it meant to be a Jew. The idea of Tikkun Olam- repairing the world, runs SO DEEP in my DNA that I cannot see life as worth living unless I am bringing light unto the darkness.

 That longing for that Jewish connection and running away from being a lesbian is why I married Joey at twenty.  My parents were convinced it was to get out of the house. Fucking understatement but what drew me in even more was Joey’s widowed Dad and family were Jewish with a capital J.  Holocaust survival, escaping from a labor camp in Siberia to Palestine, building the newly declared State of Israel, emigrating to the US in search of a better life.  They were living the history I’d passionately studied.  I loved the holiday dinners. The food. The stories. English, Hebrew, Yiddish and a mix of Russian and Polish and German. The ritual of the Seder.  They called me the Shabbos Shiksa, my Reformed upbringing subject of scorn.  When the hypocrisy got to be too much – theirs’ and mine, Joey and I divorced.  He went on to marry his real Shiksa secretary and I came out of the closet.

My Yiddishkeit soul has been searching for my Neshama’s home here on earth.  Born in a Jewish into a mostly atheist family - Swerdlow’s after all, are infamous in Soviet circles) and an observant and terrified-of-G-d Grandmother on my Mom’s side, I was constantly searching for my own connection.  Getting confirmed at Wilshire Blvd Temple by the Father, Son and Holy Ghost Rabbis didn’t cut it.  They tried to amp up their attendance with electives so I learned photography which became my profession but that’s about it.

Just after getting divorced, I got Bat-mitzvah’ed at thirty-six at Beth Chayim Chadashim, one of the two LGBTQ synagogues in LA.  My Parsha was Bamidbar.  Building your tabernacle in the desert, and since I’d been wandering in the spiritual desert my entire life, I gave a great speech about finally finding myself.  I lied.  I was still lost. Coming out of the closet was only liberating this lifetime, and I was on a desperate search for the immortal.

A couple years later, I fell in love with the Shiksa Goddess down the street.  We were best friends and after one thing lead to another, I got my heart handed to me in a million pieces.  

Which brings me to the afore mentioned Chabad family I thought would welcome me with open arms.  A bit of backstory:

With my heart shattered in a million pieces by Lisa, after a particularly awful meltdown, I demanded of G-d the following: “Bring me, right now, my spiritual mentor, partner, and companion for I know what I’m meant to do in this life, but I’m lost as to the Path, and don’t mess around.”

The next day, I have an email in my Swerdlow@aol.com box.  From Nicole Green in Cape Town, South Africa.  An errant email meant for Miriam Swerdlov, the only living relative of the Rebbe, with one missed letter on the keyboard, and instead, the Chabad Shilach answers my prayer. This starts an almost daily (not on Shabbat) email conversation, meeting her LA mishpocha, and finally flying to Cape Town six months later.  Make no mistake, I’d come out in the second email.  Expecting to receive a “you’ll fry in hell” instead she asked if I have a proper mezuzah on my door.   I was floored.  Could this be the acceptance I’d longed for?

Not so much.  In between massive amounts of coffee, scotch and cigarettes they did their best to convince me I’m not really gay, that it’s the result of abuse, that I can marry some loser bachelor in the community for appearances (who the hell would I be fooling??), and all sorts of other conversion therapy attempts.  Their pressure worked…for around seven years.  I call it doing time with Chabad.

In 2009 I finally went to Israel.  In Jerusalem over Shabbat, my internalized homophobia reached its peak.  The next day, I went to the Kotel and put my scrawled prayer in the wall, begging to be relieved of this self-hate, this intolerance for my own being, for self-acceptance.

I also put a prayer in the wall “Paging Miss Israel….” And she showed up….but that’s another story.

Witnessing History

50 years ago today I was in Miss Brown’s 1st grade class at Wilshire Crest Elementary School when the Principal stuck his head in and motioned her to come outside.  A few moments later, she returned, and with tears in her eyes, said the President had been shot and we were all being sent home.

My Mother was waiting outside.  It was the first time I’d seen her cry.   

We were glued to our black and white television.  The funeral cortege went on for hours.  I don’t remember what my parents told my sister and me about President Kennedy, just that they were incredibly sad and shaken.

Soon after, on a visit to my Grandparents apartment, I saw their commemorative LOOK Magazine on the coffee table. It was devoted to the coverage of President Kennedy’’s assassination.  Around fifty images in black and white of November 22, 1963 in Dallas and the aftermath:  the State funeral in Arlington National Cemetery: Jackie, Robert and Teddy dignified in their grief and anguish, hundreds of thousands of Americans lining the procession of the horse drawn casket, Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest and murder by Jack Ruby, and finally the last image on the back of the magazine, of John-Jonh’s salute of his father’s casket. 

Pouring over those images became my reason to go to Grandma’s.  I hunkered down in the corner chair with my historical treasure, oblivious to other family members.  Each photograph is seared into my mind’s eye: black and white,  light, angles and shadows on grieving faces. 

I willed myself to enter each picture, to be THERE.  A  I wanted to be an eyewitness to such a momentous event, to  understand and experience how history feels.  I knew then what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I am eternally grateful that I had the opportunity to live my dream.

A really great friend and mentor once remarked that photographs are seemingly meaningless moments made immortal.   That may be true, but even more so, photography is at its core, as Sontag wrote, “Darkness illuminated by little points of light.”  

So it’s my hope and prayer that on this 50th anniversary of one of the most horrific events in American history,  that the light with which JFK is immortalized in thousands of images pierces the darkness in which we find ourselves as a nation now.

It's Loki hot in LA and it's Rosh Hashanah and I am not connecting to the most sacred of High Holy Days.  It's not the synagogue's fault. I was happy to find IKAR, a wonderful progressive social action oriented synagogue that, if I were to join a temple in LA, would be the one:  the services were excellent, the Rabbi's sermon brilliant and the people welcoming, with old and new friends.

My reality is no matter where I've wandered, Chabad or Modern Orthodox or Reformed or LBGT specific or Conservative, worshiping in a synagogue consistently fails to transport me to that place deep within my soul on the day when you are supposed to connect the most.

No synagogue, no Rabbi, no congregation compares to the most poignant Rosh Hashanah I have ever experienced in Camp Lokichokio.

Almost twenty years ago, in the summer of 1994, I was living my greatest dream as a photojournalist: on assignment for International Medical Corps, one month flying around Kenya, Somalia, Southern Sudan and finally to Rwanda, just after the genocide, landing the day after Yom Kippur.  Talk about the meaning of saying Kaddish.

But this night, on Rosh Hashanah,  I was almost asleep in my tent when I heard the blast of the Shofar.   Someone in the tent next door to mine was listening to the BBC on their shortwave, broadcasting news from the Middle East, from Jerusalem.  I sat straight up in my cot, overcome with homesickness. Imagining my parents at our family dinner.  At that moment I questioned where I was, thousands of miles away in the most northwest corner of Kenya, the only Jew in the base camp of Operation Lifeline Sudan, on the border with war torn Southern Sudan.  I spent a hot, sleepless, emotional night.

The next morning, I took my video camera and wandered the camp, creating a video diary of the day.  My accompanying audio commentary was that it was Rosh Hashanah, and that even though I was desperately homesick, I finally felt connected to what it means to really be a Jew: Tikkun Olam. I was finally living my life's purpose, documenting through my photographs that the world needs for ALL of us to help repair it.  After all, the Jewish people are charged with the responsibility of being the Light unto the Nations. Photography is, at its essence, darkness illuminated by little points of light, and if ever there was a need for that Light, the wars, famines and genocides of the past few years in this region was it.

Staying at the camp were leaders of the  Dinka tribe from Southern Sudan, on their way to a World Food Programme conference in Nairobi.   Their leader, a beautiful elegant man named Aquiele, called out to me from their chairs asking what I was filming.  I explained it was Rosh Hashanah, and that I was on my way back from the mess tent with apples and honey to celebrate the New Year.  He wished me a happy new year, and asked how they could make my new year special for me.  Instantly in tears, so moved by his genuine interest to know why this skinny geeky looking short haired white women was wandering around with a video camera talking to herself, I joined them, explained the Jewish New Year, the significance of apples and honey, who I was and why I was there, and that I was homesick.

Aquiele gave me a huge smile, asked me again, how they could make my New Year happy for me, and so together, we said the Shechecheyanu prayer, thanking God for bringing us to this moment.

Time to Start again

Some times Life appears to be one bizarre non-sequitur after another....but when you see the grace in every single event, suddenly your winding Path becomes vibrantly, beautifully evident, then your heart opens with gratitude for the Journey and floods your being, giving you the courage and the faith to follow your inner Light and fly. ‎#NeshamaSafari#TheoryoftheKosmikSlingshot

Fragrance Diplomacy

I love a man who wears his cologne effortlessly.  Not the I-Sprayed-a-Whole-bottle-of-Men's-Obsession-All-Over-Me, and the elevator at the end of the day still reeks as it did that morning, when you lost the delicious scent of your latte to warpath pheromones attacking your sinuses.

I love the quiet scent.  Watching the hilarious Old Spice ads and You Tube videos, http://www.youtube.com/oldspice brings back old family stories:  My Mom loved the fragrance so much and it smelled so good on her she wore it when she and my Dad were courting.  He gave her a bottle as a gift, and then she gave one to him, he still has it in his cabinet--truly an antique.  It was another of their bonds, still unbroken after 70 years together.

I will always love the smell of Brut http://www.brutworld.com/-it's why I fell in love with journalism--or, in the interest of full disclosure, a journalist.  Mr. Robin Nelson, brown cordoroy jacket with patches on the elbows and that baby blue Oxford shirt and khakis with loafers.  I was 14 and on a  family vacation: a Princess cruise to Canada and Alaska, Robin had just turned 18 and was traveling with his Aunt and Sis.  He had just finished his first year at Indiana's Ball State University, and was flush with the possibilities he would write for the Washington Post one day.  This was 1970, post Kent State but pre-Watergate, and Robin was sure he would do his part to save the world.  And he was always prepared too, with a Reporters Notebook and pens at the ready in his pockets.

My Dad had just given me my late Uncle Morrie's Argus C3 camera, even then, it was older than dirt, but after that first click of the shutter,  I knew I would be the photographic equivalent to Robin's crusading hell-raiser.  We sat in the lounge of the Princess Italia as it steamed away from the various ports, Robin reading passages from Upton Sinclair's  social action classic, The Jungle.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair . I was hooked. On crusading stories, on saving the world, on Robin, and on Brut.  The last night of the cruise, we stayed up in the lobby, laying on the couch, watching the waves and talking about what stories we would do, the impact we would have.  I fell asleep on his chest, the gentle smell of Brut lodged forever in my senses.

I wear Tsar http://www.vancleef-arpels.com/en/van-cleef.html?zone=eu#/parfums/  the fragrance I've worn for a couple decades now.  I love how it wears off, and I get compliments all the time from both men and women.  But there's more of a historical reason:  allegedly, my great grand-uncle was Russian-Soviet apparatchik Yakov Sverdlov, the guy who gave the order to murder the last Tsar, Nicholas II and his family.  Call it my apology to the Royal family,  a tip of my fragrance hat or simply a sick sense of humor, either way, I know I smell good.

My Dad must feel the same:  ever since he operated on Liz Taylor - he was her Proctologist- Mom has been buying him Liz's White Diamonds Cologne.

Which brings me to the title of this post: Fragrance Diplomacy: after all, one of the cardinal rules is the importance of face to face encounters.  So, our pheromones are the essence of our attractiveness in its most primal form.  It's our First Responder on high alert and we don't even have to think about it.  Smelling good:  It can be a lovely way to close those last three feet.  Given the incredible popularity of the Old Spice Guy, this seems like a no brainer.

And Robin, thanks for inspiring my career track.  Forever, each time I smell Brut, I remember that night, and how I hope you followed your dreams.  Thanks in part to you, I have.

Casualties of Empowerment: Part I

So I've been back in LA now for around a week and a half, and this phrase--Casualties of Empowerment-- has been bouncing around in my psyche since before I left. 

This trip to Israel was magical in more ways than I could ever describe with mere words.  The hot tears finally melting my hardened heart and quenching the thirst of my parched spirit were absorbed by the gorgeous sand beaches of Tel Aviv, and so many other, incredible places and experiences.

I don't recognize myself in the mirror just yet, and I haven't since around the second week.  My facebook photograph, taken on my birthday at this great nightclub in Tel Aviv, with me somewhere in between my first and second vodka shows someone I know is me, but someone so incredibly happy, so at home and fully filling out her skin--with a stunning tan---that I have to look twice sometimes to make sure it's my profile page. It's not a Yael I am used to, at least not in LA.  It's the Yael that now thinks of herself as Israeli, not American Jew.  I've been searching for home my entire life, and now that I've found home, home now inhabits ME, fully, and, even though I am back in LA.

I guess the reason this phrase in this context keeps coming to mind is that without becoming empowered, I would not have made this journey, and this journey had casualties left in its wake. One casualty is who I thought I was. 

I was way too caught up--indeed caught, trapped by my own self-image--in being who I thought I needed to be: The Martyr, and what a wake up call it is to realize that even though you can get your ya-ya's met by sacrificing yourself, there is no way you can be truly fulfilled, or happy hanging on that cross (yeah, well, religious imagery is the theme of the locale).  But more than that, you cannot reach your true potential as a human being, and do what God or the Fates have planned for you.  You are not fully living, you are just existing, because in order to be fully alive, you have to be walking your Path.

My personal definition of empowerment is the steadfast courage to risk everything on every level to fully live your beliefs, especially the belief of who you are meant to be,  to relentlessly pursue your Path to make a difference for good in this life, and the full acceptance of the responsibility and consequences of taking that Path.  In my mind, it's the sacred Oath to Self, and I am humbly grateful to finally swear to it.   Thanks, Illana.

Freefalling...Tel Aviv style

Sunday morning:  It's 4:00 in the morning and I can't sleep, and have one of those toxins released headaches, thanks to an amazing massage earlier today, along with shiatsu pushing of all my emotional trigger points.  As Hannah the Healer said when she finished, all the toxins are raging through my bloodstream right now....an Israeli understatement.

So, I'm hugely emotionally wired right now and it seems the universe is throwing spiritual fastballs and curve balls these past few days and it's all I can do not to strike out.  What makes it all harder to deal with rationally and not overreact is that I am not at all in my comfort zone, with nothing to grasp on to when I freefall. So my fears and issues rage with nothing to talk me down from the ledge.

At least if I am home then I am home when this happens. Here I am home, but in such a different way. I am spiritually home, physically I am in Israel so I have come home, but I am not in my own home, with my own trappings and distractions and comforts and escapes. This stunning view of the beach is great comfort but it is still not mine, with my stuff in the drawers and my photographs on the walls.  I miss Leica-la badly and I miss my stuff, my routine that you only have when you are at your address. It blows my mind that today I went from dreading going home to missing home. I miss my friends in LA, but even that is a metaphor because BFF Paul is now in Taiwan (healing my heart via Skype), Lana is still in Doha, Brigitte is in New York, and most beloved Lauren and David and the kids are poised to move to Charlotte. So what also weighs on my heart more than ever is that I will be coming back to an LA that is a colder place than when I left.

An hour before going out on my birthday I had scary news about my Dad, and essentially said good bye just in case something happens while I am not there.

Tonight I spoke to him and he's having one of his bad, confused days.  My Mom is a stepping up to situation like a rock-star, but I worry about her too.

Today, Saturday, Shabbat, I went to synagogue for the first time in around 5 years. It was a completely different experience than any I have ever had. Going to synagogue in Israel by definition is a different experience. It's that local call thing again.

What added to it was that this was at a Rabbi's home in Hertzilya, and it was so gentle, and so that even though it was all in Hebrew, and I did not fully comprehend what was being said, it didn't matter.  I felt welcome, I understood the essence and I absorbed what I needed to further piece back together this spiritually cracked heart of mine. Thanks again, Illana:) 

The View From My Living Room: Tel Aviv

Souk at Ben Yehuda, Jerusalem

The Absolute Best Iced Double Espresso, LaLoush Cafe, Jerusalem

Street Graffiti, Jerusalem.

Fogged in all day, Jerusalem (and, Tel Aviv too)

Kotel, Women's Side of the Wailing Wall, Jerusalem

Old City

Souk at Ben Yehuda, Jerusalem: This pix gives me hope