September 2000

Who bothers following the Olympics when your own son is a World Champion. Even if Ari’s trophy is now adorned with a thin coating of dust, our pride and “kvelling” have not subsided. The Elkana Orthodox Primary School is the first World School Chess Champions, and Ari, playing on Number 2 board (out of 6), held the only 100% record throughout the 9-game competition. The full story, the drama, the intrigue (there was plenty of that), the victory, and the holiday in Manhattan and London will be featured, we hope, in a new Spielberg box-office smash hit, coming soon to a cinema near you.
But if Spielberg rejects the script, you’ll have to come over for Tea (a quaint English custom) and hear the story from us (it’s too long to type). We’ll send you some of the snapshots that capture the occasion in a separate mail, “bli neder”.
It was fun to track people’s reactions to the children’s victory. For example, when ALL Israelis (and I have nothing against Israelis) heard that 6 children from Elkana flew to New York and won a World Championship, their immediate response was invariably:
- Who paid for the tickets? (Are any readers blushing?)
- Who paid for the accommodation?
- Was there prize money? No? I’d complain!
A Gentleman’s Home is His Tent
We did the usual stuff again this summer - 5 days in Eilat, swimming, sunning and sun-screening ourselves on the beaches, and 5 days camping in Hurshat Tal (near Kiryat Shmone) - which is my idea of ‘a foretaste of the world to come’.
Few envisage their ‘kindgom of heaven’ as a place with no bed, floor, walls, air conditioner, bath, shower, fridge, freezer, TV, cupboards. But for me, a stuffy, sandy, muddy, dusty, mosquito-infected 2.5m sq. tent to share with my loved ones, is the closest I have known to paradise.
- Daddy, it’s hot
- Daddy, what’s that scorpion-like thing doing in your sleeping bag?
- Daddy, it’s too far to the toilets; I’m going behind the tree
Snakes, Roller-Coasters and Graphical User Interfaces
All the children talk about from their summer hols is the “Anaconda” roller-coaster that Ari rode in the Luna Park (the others were too young, Mummy was too ‘responsible’, and Daddy thinks anyone who pays good money to be scared witless, thrown helplessly in all directions, twisting, turning and looping the loop in contravention of the rules of gravity, needs their head examined).
- Daddy. Daddy. Take us again Daddy. Please Daddy, please
- Ask your mother dears, I’m busy….
Ronald Reagen, Bill Gates and Michael Isaacs
Did I mention myself yet in this newsletter? No? I thought not. In which case, I’ll tell you about me. At work I have switched responsibilities. I now deal with my company’s PR (Public Relations). “Wow!” I hear my old acquaintances say. “And to think, we thought he would end up as some loser brain surgeon”. Well thank you for your thoughts, but this new area of PR actually has its attractions.
If you want to know what PR is, try this: “How did a senile film-star with dyed hair and advanced Alzheimer’s become the most popular President of the most powerful country in the world?” Or “How can dot.com companies that never generated a single cent of revenue be sold for hundreds of millions of dollars?” The answer is – good PR.
Maybe you still don’t know what I do, but hopefully you think it’s very important.
- What is it that you do, dear?
- I produce PR content - press releases, white papers, articles for trade journals, handle outreach to media and analysts
- Yes, I see, that’s nice, but what do you do?
Barmy and Barmitzvas
Boy has this last year flown by! So much so, that Ari’s barmitzva is almost upon us. I well remember refusing to believe that the swelling in Judy’s stomach, six months after it was first planted there, was ever going to emerge as a baby. Window-shopping in Shilav was a total shock. Could this be real? Picking prams? And us barely out of school (Primary school)?
12.5 years of parenting didn’t have much effect, and I approach Ari’s barmitzva with a similar refusal to recognize facts. All credit to Judy for snapping me out of my dwam (there’s a good Scottish word; go look it up in a dictionary). With her prodding, we have now booked a place for Shabbat, a place for the “do”, Ari has started to learn the leyning (Parshat Mishpatim) and arrangements are progressing nicely, except for the hotly-disputed issue of whether Daddy should wear a tie for the occasion:
- I was born without a tie; I was married without a tie, and I expect to die without a tie, so why wear one for the barmitzva?
- Did you wear a tie at your barmitzva?
- That’s entirely beside the point.
E-Tonement
Repentance is a bit like ecology - clearly very important, and admirable when championed by others - but it tends to take second priority in real life, like when you choose to use disposable nappies or take the car rather than walk. So Rosh Hashana approaches every year, and with it, a fervent belief that repentance should be done, just not necessarily by me.
Here’s a high-tech solution for this. A teshuva chain mail. Send an email to 5 people asking for their forgiveness and offering them your forgiveness on condition they forward the email to at least 5 more people, with the same stipulation. Within hours, Klal Yisrael online will have given and received dispensations. The next step is to shlep laptops to Shul on Kol Nidrei for last minute, real-time updates.
- - Will you forgive me?
- - Press OK or Cancel to reject
Family News
What you’ve all been waiting for. Although Ari is now in secondary school (7th grade), the move from primary to secondary school was unnoticeable; no excitement; no new uniform (no uniform at all for that matter). However he does have to be in school one hour earlier for shacharit, and studies on average for two hours a day more.
Naftali and Elon have moved up to 3rd and 5th grades respectively. They continue to hate school with the passion they left off with at the end of the last academic year. Elon has been selected to join the 5th grade basketball team which introduces a regimen of training sessions into his life. Judy, who has witnessed his play on court says that when Elon has the ball, no one else can get near it.
Orli has blossomed into 1st grade, and loves it (girls are so different from boys). She greets her school teacher with more enthusiasm than her brothers greet their parents.
This semester Judy is teaching a course in C++ for the first time. Her students continue to grade her with an average of 4.7 out of 5. Looks like I’m not the only one in the world who knows she’s the best.
Shana Tova and Hag Sameach
Michael, Judy, Ari, Elon, Naftali, and Orli Isaacs