On Ice Scrapers And Other Solutions

This morning I had to scrape ice off my car's windshield. This statement may appear banal unless I add that it was the first time ever that I experienced such low temperatures in Tel Aviv, a city where  the average temperature during the winter months is 18 °C and it can easily go up to 25°C.

Since I don’t own an ice scraper, I resorted to the old trick of using a credit card, which I learnt during my long stay in cold climates in the US.  My partner was impressed, he has never seen ice on a windshield before, and thought me resourceful.

Since Thursday we have been having a historic winter storm in Israel. In Tel Aviv it has been raining continuously, and we had several hail storms. Also, it was the heaviest snow storm since 1953, Jerusalem is still covered with almost a meter of snow and is disconnected  from the rest of the country.  Snow continued to fall across Israel till Saturday afternoon resulting in major power outages and road closures. At its worst 60,000 houses did not have electricity, now it is down to 18,000.

 Back when my daughters were young we went down from Iowa City to St Louis for Thanksgiving.  At the end of the weekend when we were heading back, we heard a winter storm warning. Still we decided to take a chance and drove back hoping that we would be able to get home on time.

Unfortunately, as we drove north the weather got more and more severe, with a blizzard and zero visibility. We almost made it, but near Fairfield Iowa, a mere  59 Miles / 94 Km south of Iowa City, the highway was blocked and rescue operators  evacuated the stranded passengers  to the homes of the townspeople who offered to put them up for the night. 

The whole operation was swift, efficient and calm, our very young daughters (2 and 3) were not even alarmed.  The four of us spent the night at a home of a very welcoming couple who fed us and put us up.

The generous members of the Fairfield community opened their homes to strangers in need as a matter of fact.  Besides the humanity of the invitation, what impressed me most about this solution was its simplicity. As the weather became increasingly dangerous, the rescue forces  prepared for the eventuality of closing the road and lined up volunteers.

I have been listening to the Israeli radio since Friday, hearing speculations and accusations of who is to blame for the unfortunate outcomes of this winter storm. I am sure that we could find numerous errors and poor judgments, but there was no way to predict something so unfamiliar, which has not happened in Israel for 60 years. Perhaps a simpler  question to ask is who is responsible for the winter storm, and that of course would be God or Nature, thus it could be easy to just pin the blame on Him.

At the end the army was called to the rescue; it has the right equipment and the expertise. As Israel allocates so much money to the needs of our Defense, it is only fair that the army come through at a time of need by clearing the closed roads and helping those who were stranded in their homes without electricity, water or food.

But perhaps  before  the next winter storm it is a good idea to line up a pool of volunteers in other cities who would put up people who are at risk of being stranded in case of a storm. When the storm starts they could be transported to safety before the roads are completely closed.

 The rescue operation in Fairfield was simple and inexpensive, and in the freezing weather it really felt like a heartwarming solution.

Kindness Of Strangers": A Different Holiday

 When we were in the US, we always dreamt about going back to Israel so that our daughters would grow up there. When they were in second and first grade respectively it finally happened. My husband got a position in Ben Gurion University in the southern city of Beer Sheva, and I got a job teaching English in a public high school.

 We arrived to Beer Sheva late in August few days prior to the start of the school year. Our daughters spoke Hebrew, but they needed extra help with their reading and writing.

I started teaching at the high school, but as I have never taught before, I was not at all ready for what  happened in class. Instead of teaching my students the wonders of the English language, like I had planned, the noise in the class forced me to constantly discipline them. I had no experience and had no idea on how to make the students sit quietly and  listen to me, and as a result I could not engage them. I felt uprepared and  helpless.

 At the end of an especially exhausting day, some ten days after the beginning of the year, I realized  that I was not up to the job. Moreover, I felt  that I would not have the needed energy to help my own girls with their  Hebrew if I kept on struggling with the students to teach them  English.  When my husband came home that afternoon I told him that I decided to quit, he understood.

 I went down to the public phone to call my supervisor;  it was simply not done to quit after the beginning of the year, and I expected  that she would be furious with me. But instead she listened and said that she understood, she told me that she would come to visit me the following day.

 When she came over she was most sympathetic and  shared with me the  difficulties she encountered after she immigrated to Israel some fifteen years  earlier. She arrived here as a young woman and started teaching right away, it was hard but she got used to it.

Like her, we were young when we moved to tohe US and faced some challenges in our new country, but we too managed. However, moving back home we were sure that since we knew the place it would be easy and familiar to adapt to Israel again. My failure as a teacher came as a shock.

As it was several days before the High Holidays, my new friend invited our family to her home for dinner. Our families got along well and it was a beginning of a lifelong friendship. Although in quitting my job at the  high school, I obviously created a problem, she recommended me for another job. About  two months later when we wanted to buy a house, she and her husband had known, even before we did,  that we needed  someone to cosign for the mortgage loan. At a great financial risk if we defaulted on the loan, they offered their help and cosigned our loan.

 Although this is not a Christmas story, the kindness of my former boss is surely in the spirit of the season. We were strangers, but she and her husband were never suspicious toward us, quite the contrary: they were generous and made us welcome.  This experience has changed not only our reality at the time, but it also affected the way we viewed the world: it inspired us to become more accepting and in a way made us better people.

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