Author Archives: riskwithinreason

This morning, we celebrated our twin daughters’ bat mitzvah (the ritual celebration of a girl’s 12th year and the alleged reaching of maturity) on the ancient ruins of Masada, in Israel’s Judean Desert.

We awoke at 4 am, sipped some coffee and filed on to a cable car that whisked us up the mountain in time to watch the sun emerge over the Moab mountains of Jordan, on the eastern shore of the salt-encrusted Dead Sea.

We took in the stunning scenery toured the ruins of King Herod’s palace and heard the famous story of the Jewish War, in 70 A.D., where 957 men, women and children defied the months’ long siege of the Roman Army under the blazing sun.

With cisterns full of enough water to last them for years, and massive storehouses of food, the zealots fleeing the Romans thought they had outsmarted the army until slaves were put to work building a ramp up the western side. It was clear to the hundreds of ancient Israelis that this last stronghold of Jewish territory was doomed.

And so on the last night before the Romans breached the walls, the zealots took a very controversial decision. Despite the clear Jewish prohibition against suicide, the people decided they would rather die as free people than be killed or enslaved by the invaders. They drew lots on shards on pottery with their names insribed (later found by archaeologists and showcased at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem). Men and women put their own children to death, then killed themselves by the sword or by leaping off a cliff. The 10 chosen with the lots helped the remaining few kill themselves and then finally committed suicide.

When the Romans entered the walls, they found the place empty, except for 2 women and 3 children who chose not to die, and told the story to the Roman historian Josephus Flavius, who documented the incredible tale.

After touring the ruins and hearing the story of the place, we moved to the ancient Beit Hamidrash, which served as both court and place of study, and held a short service where our older daughters, along with 4 other children spoke the words of the same Torah by these zealots lived and died.
Prayers were said. A hora was danced in 40 celsius (104 F). Mazel tovs (good luck) were shouted, moms got teary-eyed. It was beautiful and moving and memorable.

But like many Jews who know this story, I was also very unsettled. I was uncomfortable commemorating any kind of heroic suicides with my pre-teen daughters, knowing the disturbingly high rates of adolescent suicide in certain high-risk groups. I couldn’t help thinking about the suicide fantasies and glamourized, romanticized death narratives embedded in teen stories, music and film (of which the current vampire craze is but one example).

The notion of heroic suicides doesn’t sit too easily in Jewish tradition either. The laws of the Torah are unequivocally against it. Suicide victims may be barred from burial in religiously sanctified cemetaries.

It helps to understand the context in which the Masada story fit into the Israeli nation narrative. The archaeologists who excavated there in 1963 found the actual lots and skeleton fragments that confirmed the writings of Josephus Flavius. The story of Jews who chose courageously chose to die by their own hands instead of placing themselves at the mercy of their enemies resonated less than 20 years after the end of the Holocaust. Similarly, a tale of brave, defiant fighters defending the last Jewish stronghold for 2,000 years was a poetic complement to the emerging history of the brand new state of Israel, then only 15 years old.

But history has continued unfolding, and today’s historians are still uncomfortable glorifying the suicides, preferring instead to focus on bravery, defiance and resourcefulness. And of course, the fresh terror of the suicide bombers (especially before the security fence was built in 2004) has put a whole new spin on the very idea of suicide being heroic at all.

So while we celebrate, there is a spectre of sadness and ambivalence, a fitting complexity perhaps for a country and region so deeply and irrevocably marked by millenia of human civilization. Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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One of the big worries parents have with their kids online is the complete lack of supervision when it comes to material posted about them. The Internet is such a big place – how can we (and they) keep on top of pictures in which they are tagged? How can we know if someone makes a comment about them or refers to them on a website?

The easiest solution is to set up a Google Alert with your child’s name. This is an easy enough thing to do – you can literally Google “Google Alert” (or click on the above link) and follow the simple steps to filling in the details. You will need to set up a gmail email account if you don’t already have one, but you can set that to automatically forward any emails received to your active email address. You can create as many alerts as you like.

Use the name or nickname your child uses with their friends. Setting up an alert for Isabella Persephone Smith won’t be terrible effective if everyone knows her as Bella Smith. Google will send you emails with links to websites where your child’s name comes up.  Place the whole name in quotations (“Bella Smith”) so that you don’t get emails every time someone on the Internet uses the word “Smith,” which would be both annoying and ineffective.

Now some careful readers will note that this scheme will really only work for people with uncommon names. A Google Alert for “John Smith” or “David Cohen” or “Sanjay Gupta” or “Zhi Chen” would be utterly pointless. In those cases, you can finetune the alert by throwing in other particular search terms, such as the name of their school or the town in which they live.  You can ask that the alerts be delivered as they occur or collected and sent once a day (assuming anything comes up).

Use a minus sign (“-“) in front of any terms you want to exclude from the results (example: London -Ontario). You can also use a plus sign (“+”) in front of a term that you want matched as precisely as you type it, excluding spelling variations and synonyms (example: +Alissa to exclude searches for Alyssa or Elisa or Alicia, etc.).

You can also use “site:”  if you are particularly interested in a specific site.

“Alissa Sklar” site:facebook.com will return all of the publicly accessible mentions of my name on Facebook. Just typing in “Alissa Sklar” facebook will return all links that use both my name and the word facebook. It seems like a small distinction, but it can help weed out unnecessary results.

What do you do if anything unpleasant comes up? That depends on who sent it and where it was posted. You can generally request that tags be removed from pictures quite easily, and you can choose your method of response to any unpleasant postings. The Google Alert means you and your child can respond quickly, hopefully before anything gets spread too far. Kids already dealing with cyberbullying will need to be particularly vigilant, but for most kids, most of the time, this kind of knowledge is simply about developing an awareness of one’s digital footprint.

And that’s knowledge we all need, no matter how old we are.

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We’re in Israel on a family vacation for the next two weeks, a trip to mark our twin daughters’ 12th birthday and my mom’s 65th. A big year that required more from us than the usual birthday candles.
Coming here has been a really big deal for us, emotionally, financially, logistically. And although we’ve been planning it for a couple of years, we were a little bit nervous about bringing our children to a place so fraught with tension. It’s hard not to be nervous when you follow the news, when every fresh act of violence twists your insides. I understand that statistically we are in no more danger than we would be on an LA freeway (probably less in fact), but the images from the news get seared into your mind.
Anyhow, in our first two days here in Tel Aviv, I’ve learned a few things. The first is that we carry a very North American perspective on risk. People here (like people in most other places on the planet outside of urban North America) don’t get so worked up about mundane daily dangers.
No one wears a bicycle helmet, for example. Seatbelts seem largely optional in the front seats of cars (never mind the back seats). Kids run freely, seemingly unsupervised, in public spaces. Many more people smoke cigarettes. It’s safe to say our 3 children (along with 2 other pale, blonde kids with English accents we spotted yesterday) are the only ones on the beach wearing sun-protective swim shirts over their bathing suits. In fact, I haven’t seen this many people slathered with baby oil since the early 1980s. I saw one such shiny woman speed down the boardwalk on her scooter in a thong bikini (no helmet), cigarette in hand. I had to laugh, she looked so happy. (Still, I was glad she wasn’t my daughter!)
In fact, everyone seems much more relaxed. People are out with their small children at the cafes on the beach late at night. Women of all shapes and sizes wear bikinis with no self-consciousness. People generally seem fitter and healthier (all that smoking notwithstanding).
I can’t help thinking that these small daily activities must seem much less risky in the face of certain Israeli realities. All teens here spend at least a couple years in the army. Adults put in 30 days of reserve duty every year until late middle age. They’ve all faced some pretty tense situations. They’ve known loss in a way most North Americans have not intimately understood in many years.
They have also seen random, brutal danger in daily life. Arbitrary, life-changing violence on a city bus, an outing to a shopping mall, a nightclub, an evening stroll along a crowded street.
“Ein brera:” A distinctly Israeli expression to express how you carry on despite all this. There is no choice. Life is risky. Get on with it.
The news at home carries the stories of conflict, of course. But it doesn’t show the millions of people who go to work and school on a daily basis. Who relax in cafes in the evening, sell their wares in the markets, ride peacefully side by side on the bus. That’s what you see when you here.
The realities of life in the Middle East are never that far away. When was the last time airport security brushed your fingers for traces of explosives on a flight to Edmonton? Have you ever paid attention to an unattended briefcase? A young man oddly dressed in a bulky jacket in the July heat?
The risks we see at home come to seem like indulgences, like the extra perks we get for living in places like Montreal, Boston or Sarasota.
I’m not saying they aren’t worth our vigilence and care, just that it really is a matter of perspective. Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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