What I’ll remember most about our son Amir’s graduation from 12th grade earlier this week was the hugs. Hugs between the guys. Hugs from the teachers to the graduates while on stage receiving their diplomas. The spontaneous group hug and circle dance the guys did to Mashina’s “Return, Return” at the end of the evening.



It was all so sweet. And it got me reminiscing. I don’t remember ever being so affectionate with my male friends when I was in high school, some 30 years ago. On the contrary, I distinctly recall that, after all 400 12th graders received their diplomas in our high school gym, I gave a big bear hug to my best friend John while thinking that this was the first time I’d ever hugged him or any other guy (girls, well that was another story…)

I also remember that it wasn’t until I arrived in Israel after college and found myself in a more traditional Jewish framework that I got into the habit of shaking someone’s hand. Before that: no handshakes, no hugs. What did we do then? Just glare at each other for 12 years?

Fortunately, when you need to do some impromptu research, there’s nothing like Facebook. I put out my question on hugs and high school. My contemporaries weighed in quickly. No, absolutely we did not hug back in 1978, they said. There were the occasional “soul handshakes” and a few high fives.

By the 1980s, “everybody was doing that stupid BH 90210 hand slap and point the fingers thing,” my friend Boaz wrote. “We used to make out in the hallways but that was it,” Debbie from Modi'in added.

But the times they are a changing, even in the U.S. An article by Sarah Kershaw in The New York Times that my Facebook buddy Yosef referred me to described how hugs have now caught on in high school...outside of Israel. So much so that there are different terms for all the hugging.

For example, there's the “bear claw” where a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out. The "fist bump and slap on the back." Something known as the “shake and lean.” And now the “triple” – any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once.

It’s become so rampant that some schools are now trying to limit hugging via a “three-second rule” or to ban hugs outright. “Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory,” bemoaned a principal in New Jersey interviewed by Kershaw.

The kids disagree, calling it the “hello” of their generation. “We like to get cozy,” said a San Francisco eighth grader. “The high-five is, like, boring.”

What seems to be unique to Israel (and perhaps other Mediterranean countries – I haven’t done a scientific study), is hugging between students and teachers, something that would be absolutely verboten in a litigious U.S. where it could be perceived as bordering on sexual harassment or abuse.

All hugging aside, the graduation ceremony of our oldest child was very emotional for my wife Jody and I. To think that we have come so far as to have a child finished with his formal education. How did we get so old! “Proud and old are not mutually exclusive,” our friend Shira was quick to point out on Facebook.

Some other highlights from graduation:

-- As each boy (Amir attended an all boy’s school) received his diploma, his teacher read a short paragraph describing the graduate (Hartman high school, with a graduating class of 56, is small enough to indulge such a personal touch).

-- There was a lot of emphasis on the army and mechinot (pre-army preparatory programs) rather than "where are you going to college next year?"

-- Amir put together a great slide show with music summing up the six years the guys have been together. The photos of the class from 7th grade elicited some raucous teenage guffaws.

-- Hartman Institute founder Rabbi David Hartman gave an impassioned speech on the importance for religious youth to fight against extremism and intolerance. “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not religious,” he exhorted the graduates.

-- This being Israel, the dress code was casual, though a number of the graduates wore loosely knotted ties over untucked short sleeve shirts and jeans. Needless to say there were no caps and gowns. And so, at the end of the evening, rather than toss their caps into the air, they threw their kippot to the sky.

Jody and I were so filled with pride and excitement. It’s a major milestone...for the entire family. So what did we do when Amir came over to us after the ceremony was done?

We gave him a great big hug, of course.

Since my father died two months ago, I’ve thought a lot about what is the nature of community and, in particular, what is my place in it. It’s not a simple question.

For many years I’ve been what I jokingly call “tefilacally-challenged” (tefilah being the Hebrew for “prayer”). Prayer is not something that’s easy for me to relate to. Yes, I go to synagogue but, more often than not, I use it as a time for introspection, maybe a little light meditation, rather than reading the specific words in the siddur.

One of the strong prayer traditions of mourning is to say Kaddish whenever there’s a minyan. One says it for a year after a parent dies, a month for children, spouse and siblings.

For many observant Jews, this means making an effort to get to synagogue for the three daily prayer services. As I’ve talked with people about the mourning period, I’ve heard repeated stories of ostensibly secular men and women taking on this commandment and deriving great satisfaction from it.

That hasn’t been my experience, though. Indeed, the Kaddish, for me, is even more difficult than the rest of the davening. I’m a very literal person and I find it hard to get my head around the traditional understandings of the prayer: that I’m helping my father’s soul find its way to heaven, or that I am so anguished that I must publicly proclaim my faith multiple times a day, lest I lapse into heresy. In any case, my devoutly irreligious father wouldn’t have wanted any part in all this.

Don’t get me wrong, despite my misgivings I’ve still been saying Kaddish…but only when I make it to shul, which is erratic at best. And yet, as I’ve written before, sitting shiva in Israel was one of the most meaningful moments of my life, primarily because of the power of community. The fact that so many people came from all over the country to support me and to hear stories about my father still brings tears to my eyes.

But I have to ask: does that community expect anything in return? Or to put it differently: what are the essential minimums of participation that qualify one for membership in a religious community?

I’m not speaking about the specific communities to which we belong here in Jerusalem which are as liberal and accepting as any I’ve known. (The joke at shul is that, as long as you show up for Kiddush duty, you’re a bonafide member.)

To be sure, there are many aspects to a religious community: learning, giving tzedakah, hosting guests for Shabbat, celebrating smachot, Zionism, observing Jewish law. But isn’t the prayer community the most central pillar?

Jews for thousands of years have prayed together. The Mishna and Talmud are filled with rules about what to say at what times and in what situations.

Can one come to Saturday morning Kiddush without saying Kaddish? How about if you come Friday night but not Shabbat day? Or if your wife and/or kids are regulars - can you coast by on the zechut of the family?

Many of the same arguments could be made for online communities, by the way. Is it enough to join, or do you need to create a profile, upload some pictures and “poke” a few people? What if you only “lurk” on a discussion forum rather than participate? Are you truly a member of the community if you follow your activity stream but never update your status?

In the midst of all this, I attended a talk by Rabbi David Aaron. A friend had heard Aaron speak on prayer and insisted that we attend. Maybe it would give me a new perspective, she suggested.

I should have known better. The author of such books as “The Secret Life of God” and “Living a Joyous Life: The True Spirit of Jewish Practice,” Aaron’s message was as disheartening as it was exclusionary.

In essence, he said that if you’re not a part of a prayer community, there’s really no point in being in the religious Jewish world at all. The unstated implication: “We don’t want you.” That had me running for the spiritual door.

I had the exact opposite experience during a private meeting with Nachshon David Mahanymi, a Rabbi-in-training with the Jewish Renewal movement here in Jerusalem. His take was that I was getting it all backwards.

The year of mourning is all about creating meaningful ways to remember the person who has passed away, he said. We began to brainstorm alternative approaches for how I could honor my father, in a manner that he would appreciate and to which I could better relate.

There’s an expression referring to the mourning period, “ilu’i nishmato,” which, re-framed in a modern light, might be translated as “to elevate the essence of who he was.”

My father was a writer. And music infused his life with joy. What could I do that would incorporate these two elements of his life, I wondered?

An idea began to form. Perhaps I could sponsor a series of events over the course of the twelve months of mourning that would serve to elevate his name.

And by making these public, it might also be a way where I could connect with community beyond the walls of the synagogue. Call it an “Enhanced Kaddish.”

To that end, the first community event that I have planned will take place on Tuesday, June 9 at 8:30 PM at Kehilat Yedidya, 12 Nahum Lifshitz Street in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. It will be an evening of “stories and song” in memory of my father.

Joining us will be Yoel Sykes and Daphna Rosenberg, musicians from Nava Tehila, who have composed seven original songs based on psukim from various places in the Torah, prophets and psalms. By weaving together the music with the text, my hope is that you will get to know better what my father was like and what he was passionate about.

I’ll continue saying Kaddish in shul – at least when I make it in time - while at the same time bringing my Enhanced Kaddish to the greater community. Beyond that, my year of mourning, I expect, will be challenging and constantly evolving.

I'm OK with that. Are you?

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Please RSVP to brianblum@gmail.com if you are planning to come to the June 9 evening so we can arrange the space accordingly.

Last night, my friend Eliezer and my son Amir dragged me to the movies to see the new Star Trek film. I have not been to a movie theater in more than three years, since we bought our big screen plasma TV. For me, 42 inches is an entirely acceptable alternative to the costs and hassles of going to the theater.

The real reason I've stayed at home watching DVDs, though, is that the Israeli movie "experience" is one that I'd rather not repeat on a regular basis. To give you a feel for what I'm talking about, I'm running a TNL Classic today, a piece that I originally posted over five years ago, about going out to see the Matrix. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past.

(BTW - the audience for Star Trek was surprisingly well behaved. Only one cell phone rang and I even had a clear shot of the screen with no one sitting in front of me. As for the movie, well, Roger Ebert says it better than I could.)

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Amir and I went to see the final installment of the Matrix trilogy the other night. Going to the movies is one of the things Amir and I do, and I have to say it’s really a pleasure to have a child old enough to see the kind of movies my wife wouldn’t go near: you know the shoot-em-up action, sci-fi, and fantasy flicks my aging adolescent mind still craves.

Now, when I go to the movies, it’s for the experience: the big screen, the Dolby surround sound system. The experience Amir and I had at the movies the other night, though, was pure torture.

If I had to call it, I’d say this was quite possibly the worst audience I had ever been in. And as an avid movie buff, I’ve been in some bad ones.

It didn’t help that I was without a question the oldest person in the auditorium. The crowd of mostly pre-teenage boys talked –no, shouted – through nearly the entire film. I’m glad they were enjoying themselves, but…

And then there were the cellphones. Constantly ringing. Followed by more loud talking. The kid next to me must have answered some caller five times in a row, each time belting out in Hebrew “I’m in the middle of a movie.”

Did it occur to him to not answer? Or turn the phone off? Never.

Did it occur to his parents not to buy him a phone?

There were times during the film that I literally could not hear what was being said.

I know this kind of thing is not unique to Israel, although I think we have it worse here than some places around the world. In California I once saw an usher actually escort a pair of incessant movie-talkers out of the theater. Now that's service!

And in North America, you can always change seats. In Israel, however, your place is reserved and Israelis take their seat assignments seriously. They’ll blab away for two hours on the cellphone, but they wouldn’t think of disobeying the seat rule. Go figure.

OK, I admit I’m what you might call an overly-sensitive new age guy. I don’t allow talking when we’re watching a TV show at home either. But that’s all in the family. And I can usually press the rewind button.

When it’s strangers, though, in a public place, I have to weigh my response much more carefully. Because you never know when the way you react to something is going to leave an indelible stain on your kids.

And herein lies the problem: what does a parent do when he is being driven to distraction…but doesn’t want to pass that bad trait down to an impressionable child?

If Amir picked up on my agitation, or if I flew off the handle and started screaming at some pre-teen to shut up (in my bad Hebrew no less), Amir could develop his own low tolerance for movie noise when he gets older.

What kind of role model would I be?

It’s not just in the movies, of course. The parent’s dilemma is constant. We are human. We just don’t want our children to know that.

Well we do, of course, but only the good stuff. Not our nutty, neurotic bad habits. You know, the things we do and know we shouldn’t.

Like drinking straight out of the bottle. The soda just tastes better that way. Come on, you know it does.

Or sneaking chocolate when no one’s looking. We tell the kids it’s for special occasions. So how come Abba gets to have sweets whenever he wants to?

How about arriving at synagogue late again because the bed is just so darn comfortable?

Or saying “just a minute” when I know with near certainty that I won’t be done with whatever it is I'm doing for at least another half an hour?

Then there’s remembering to turn lights off and should I even mention washing hands every time after using… no, better not go there.

You get the picture.

Not knowing which will be the behaviors that may send our kids to years of psychotherapy can, well, send their parents to years of psychotherapy.

And so I sat there at the Matrix and I took it. I didn’t call the theater staff, or wave my fist, or yell out “Quiet please!” into the cinematic darkness.

But afterward, I blurted out my frustrations and the resulting parental quandary to Jody while Amir was in earshot.

“Really, Abba?” was his comment from the other side of the room. “I didn’t even notice.”

Bernard Madoff’s multi-billionaire dollar swindle has been called a “Ponzi Scheme,” referring to a similar scandal perpetrated by Charles Ponzi beginning in 1920. There has been no surfeit in articles on Ponzi, but nearly all have focused on comparing and contrasting Madoff and his would be inspiration.

That’s one reason Chapter 3 in my father’s 1968 biography “Benjamin H. Swig: The Measure of a Man” is so fascinating. The book - which was commissioned by the Swig family to chronicle the life of Benjamin Swig, a well-known banker and philanthropist in San Francisco - describes how Ponzi operated long before Madoff came on the scene.

As a tribute to my father, who passed away just over a month ago on March 22, I am pleased to present here an excerpt from his book.

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To Ben Swig, it was a most peculiar site: this dapper little man with the carnation in his lapel who strode into the Tremont Trust Company [the bank owned by Ben Swig’s father Simon Swig in Boston] one day in 1920, his arms overflowing with wastebaskets, the wastebaskets in turn overflowing with money.

Charles Ponzi had struck it rich. No gold mine was the fountain of his wealth, however, but the dollars of simple men and women withdrawing their life savings, selling Liberty bonds, borrowing from loan sharks, cadging, stealing, appropriating every possible penny that could be pressed into the willing hands of a man already acclaimed throughout Boston as the “Wizard of Finance.”

Ponzi, they said, had discovered money. His plan was simplicity itself. He would buy depreciated foreign currency with U.S. dollars, convert the currency into International Postal Union reply coupons at par, then convert the coupons back into dollars. Result: immediate profit. The coupons were incontrovertibly safe; they were regulated by an international agency which stipulated they could not be sold for less than 28 centimes gold.

The investor was given a tempting choice: he could double his money in 90 days – and many did – or he could hold on and make even more. An organization called the Securities Exchange Company (no relation to the present Federal agency) was set up to accommodate anyone who wished to avail himself of the scheme. But the mere mathematics of the thing staggered the imagination. By a simple process of calculation – of doubling, tripling and quadrupling – it became obvious that anyone joining Ponzi’s operation couldn’t help but become rich.

Of course, it was a swindle – one of the most fantastic, and certainly the most successful fraud of its kind ever perpetrated in the United States.

But it worked. By July of 1920, Boston was literally money-mad. In the first eight months of its operation, the scheme netted Ponzi $15,000,000 from 40,000 people. They were lining up around the block to get in. Ponzi was serving them free coffee and frankfurters as they waited. He was collecting $250,000 a day; his chief assistant, an ex-butcher’s helper, was earning $7,000 a week.

The money that poured into his dingy office at 27 School Street carpeted the floor, overflowed into closets and those unbelievable wastebaskets, lined the vaults in the basement of the million-dollar showplace he had built. He acquired large holdings of Boston real estate, purchased the controlling stock of the Hanover Trust Company, bought out the brokerage firm (Poole’s, which had employed him as a stock boy three years earlier), stocked a cellar with rare wines, and drove around town in a custom-built blue limousine. Wherever the limousine went, Ponzi was mobbed by investors begging him to take their money.

It was Simon Swig’s misfortune to be chosen as one of the bankers with whom Ponzi deposited his ill-gotten rewards. He watched the little “wizard” pyramiding his fortune, depositing more and more money with the bank. He eyed the hysteria that had gripped his adopted city, and worried. Then one day, just on a hunch, he got in touch with a financier friend, Thomas L. Lawson, and asked him what he thought of the Ponzi scheme.

Lawson sent out and bought one of Ponzi’s notes, and discovered to his horror that the lithographed document bore a promise to pay “at any bank” – obviously an impossibility – and not just any bank in Boston, but any bank in the country. Lawson’s advice to Swig was short and sweet: “Get Ponzi’s deposits out of your bank without a moment’s delay!”

Simon Swig moved fast. He wrote a letter to Ponzi, ordering him to withdraw his account and outlining the reasons. “People have come to us and said that your company has given us as a reference,” he added with controlled indignation. “We know nothing about your company, and you had no right to give us as a reference…”

Meanwhile, other minds in Boston were working along the same tracks. One of these was Richard Grozier, publisher of the Boston Post. Suspecting that Ponzi might be a racketeer, the Post assigned one of its top newsmen, William H. McMasters, to get the real story. Between them, the Post and Simon Swig pricked the bubble of Ponzi’s scheme, and the air rushed out with a terrible hiss. Thousands of small investors were caught in the downdraft. Five major banks had to close their doors. For a while, the entire economy of the city was threatened.

The resulting investigation revealed that, in the last six years, the entire issue of postal-reply coupons had amounted to only $1,000,000. Yet Ponzi had already accumulated over $10,000,000 in just a few months. How was that possible? The answer was simple: Ponzi hadn’t bought any postal-reply coupons at all. In the manner of the classic swindler, he had merely used the latecomers’ money to pay off the early birds. Since he kept no books, there was no way of telling where Ponzi was getting his money. When pressed for an answer, the little man had a ready excuse: “Why, I’ve just used the postal-coupon idea as a blind,” he said. “I didn’t want the Wall Street boys to get even a hint of what my real scheme was.

There was no “real scheme,” of course. But the little swindler was as brazen with lies as he was adept in manipulating money. Faced with exposure, he promptly offered to refund all the money taken in, rented an office, and for several days busily handed out cash at the rate of $500,000 a day. Did that end it? Not at all. Before long, new money was pouring in. Police inspectors, assigned to investigate Ponzi, ended up investing in his company. Even after the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning expose, Ponzi managed to collect more than $5,000,000 in additional investments.

Now, at last, the forces of law closed in on Ponzi. It was discovered that he was an ex-convict who had served time as a forger. The United States Attorney moved for an indictment, and the Post Office, which had been working undercover on the case, revealed the extent of its investigation. Still, Ponzi remained unruffled. Leaving Simon Swig’s Tremont Trust Company, he was asked by a reporter if he would mind disclosing how much he had withdrawn. “No, I don’t mind,” Ponzi replied airily. “Almost $200,000.” It was left to the treasurer, looking with distaste at his unwelcome customer, to furnish the exact total. “It was $185,600,” reported Ben Swig, who as usual had everyone’s finances – including a swindler’s – at his fingertips.

Ponzi was indicted on 86 counts by the Federal government. He spent the next three and a half years in prison for mail fraud. Released, he tried to launch a comeback with a “200 percent profit” land swindle in Florida, was jailed again, and in 1934 deported to Italy. He died in 1949 in a Rio de Janeiro charity ward, blind in one eye and partly paralyzed. When his effects were settled, it was discovered he had left an estate of $75. Few who read his obituary even knew who the little swindler was.

I have paid many shiva calls but I never truly realized how important they are until I sat on the other side of the chair.

My father, Walter Blum, died on a Sunday. He was buried on Wednesday. I sat shiva for one day in California at my parents’ home. Then I returned to Israel to complete the mourning process with my community in Jerusalem.

My first act of shiva came Saturday night after the Ma’ariv minyan (the evening prayer) that was held in our living room. As I sat down in the low chair prescribed by Jewish law, wearing my ritually torn shirt, some 25 eyes, many of them strangers, bore down on me.

The tradition is that those who come to comfort the mourner do not speak first. It is up to the bereaved to direct the conversation. Never having done this before, I nervously began to tell of my father’s last days, of how he went from diagnosis to death in less than three weeks.

When I paused, about half of the men and women present got up to leave. I breathed a sigh of relief. Surrounded now by just close friends, I was able to open up.

Over the next two and a half days, I shared stories about my father. At first I was timid. But the more I did it, repeating the same words and answering the same questions, I became more “polished.” I perfected my inflections; I even started doing voices.

Everyone experiences shiva differently. I know it sounds strange to say, but I actually had fun. To the point where one of our friends told me the following Shabbat “I really enjoyed the shiva. I felt like I got to know your father.”

And that was the point. My father was a performer. He started his career as a radio disc jockey. Then, as a journalist for 35 years, he had a magical way with words. By putting on my own “show,” I felt as if I was honoring his memory, celebrating his achievements with joy and verve.

And as I told the stories, I learned even more about who my father was and how much he shaped who I am today.

My father grew up in New York in a modest apartment on W. 83rd Street in a Conservative home. His parents went to synagogue and kept two sets of dishes. But Dad was an iconoclast. As soon as he left the house for college, he rushed to the first non-kosher restaurant he could find and ordered a bacon double cheeseburger. He never looked back.

Dad received an M.A. in Music Composition from Columbia University. During his 10-year career in radio, he played classical music on air and hosted a “romantic” morning show. It was during a gig in Philadelphia that he met my mother. She had fallen in love with his voice on the radio even before they met at a local Jewish students social.

My parents moved to California a month before I was born. My father intended to get another radio job but the town was unionized and he couldn’t find one. Instead he took a part time job at the San Francisco Examiner. They liked him and eventually he became the senior feature writer for the Sunday magazine.

(My own experience paralleled my father’s in many ways: I also intended to pursue a career in radio after college but came to Israel where, in 1984, there was only one rock and roll station…in Hebrew, plus the Voice of Peace, a pirate station broadcasting from a ship off the Tel Aviv coast. I didn’t come to Israel to work at sea. So I too turned to writing.)

My father’s real dream was to write a novel. So every night, he would retire to his den and work for two hours on his old IBM Selectric typewriter. When he’d finished a book, usually after a couple of years of work, he would retype it with carbon paper, then carefully place the original in a box, put a rubber band around it and ship it off in search of an agent.

We would then wait and wait. Inevitably the box would return. There would be a few days of depression. But Dad was tenacious and another book was always on the way. If there were blogs in the 1960, I imagine my dad would have written a very good one.

He did publish one book, a commissioned work on the life of Benjamin Swig, a well-known banker and philanthropist in San Francisco. As we were looking over the book during the shiva, one of the guests flipped to Chapter 3 which was all about a man named Charles Ponzi – yes, that Ponzi – whose actions eventually forced a bank owned by the Swig family into bankruptcy. It was fascinating to read a fresh account of the original Ponzi that wasn’t primarily a comparison with international scammer Bernard Madoff. (I’ll post an excerpt from the book in an upcoming blog.)

In addition to writing, I’m sure my passion for music also came from my father, though our preferred genres differed. When I was a teenager, I tried valiantly to convince my father that Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen was on a level with Beethoven and Schubert. I never won that argument, but now my 11-year-old son Aviv is convinced that Queen’s 1975 ode to histrionics is one of the greatest songs ever written.

My father arrived home from work every day at exactly 5:25 PM. Dinner was served precisely at 5:30 PM. We ate together every night and were expected to talk. Dad took the role as itinerant professor, leading us through discussions on science, history, philosophy, politics (a lot of ranting about Richard Nixon) and religion (a superstitious anachronism of a primitive era).

Those dinnertime debates instilled in my brother and me a life long passion for intellectual pursuit. I can see that now as I try to keep things lively around the Shabbat table. More recently, in the computer age, Dad’s emails have been a constant source of call and response. I will sorely miss our electronic back and forth.

My father’s life wasn’t easy. He was disabled as a child from polio and although he was able to walk well – albeit slowly – for many years, as he grew older an ailment known as “post polio syndrome” set in and he found himself combined to a wheelchair. That made him crotchety for sure, but he could also be quite the charmer, something that many of the residents of my parents’ retirement community cited when they paid their shiva visits.

Above all, he was a fighter. When the cancer was raging in his body, he was given the choice to do nothing (in which case, the doctors said, he had anywhere from three weeks to three months) or to try chemo which would be very hard on his body but that could give him up to a year more. He opted for the latter. It’s probably what killed him in the end.

My father wasn’t perfect by any means. Although he liked my writing (and edited the articles I wrote for the local newspaper while I was growing up mercilessly), he rarely said “good job” or “that’s a nice paragraph.” I don’t remember him ever saying “I love you.” Emotion wasn’t his thing.

That was hard for me. So hard, in fact, that I’ve spent much of the last 30 years being angry at my father for what I didn’t get, losing sight of what I did.

And that’s why shiva has been so profoundly moving. It was an opportunity to reconnect with the good. To appreciate how he positively influenced my brother and me.

140 friends came to visit during the short time I was back in Israel. The more I spoke, the more the things that hurt began to fade away. Now it seems so foolish, to have spent all that energy on something that ultimately proved so unimportant. It propelled me to hold individual talks with each of my kids on the importance of communicating now, not just at the end.

At the end of shiva, our friend Rabbi Ruth Kagan facilitated a “getting up” ceremony. Several close friends shared words of wisdom. Then they physically pulled me up out of my low chair. I changed out of my torn shirt and they accompanied me in my first walk outside since we re-started shiva at home.

When shiva is over, you’re supposed to go back to work. I had a meeting in Tel Aviv and my business partner was frantically calling to tell me about an important presentation we had scheduled for the next day.

But I wasn’t ready. I had spent the last week in a fog, thinking and talking about nothing other than my father. I was constantly surrounded by people. Now I was without that framework but I was still grieving, I felt lost, confused. During shiva, I kept my composure. Three days letter, after watching a stupid Jim Carrey movie, I broke down into hysterical sobbing. The post-shiva period has turned out to be far more difficult than the shiva itself.

I will never forget the shiva experience. It was without question one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done. Judaism got this one spot on right. Of course no one wants to have to sit shiva, but when the time comes, being part of a supportive community makes all the difference.

My father’s name now lives in Jerusalem as well as San Francisco. My fervent hope is that I’ve brought a taste of who he was to my friends and community here in Israel.

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An obituary for Walter Blum appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle last week. Here's the link.

The most disconcerting thing about my trip to the U.S. for my father’s funeral was the “pre-shiva” period (known in Hebrew as aninut).

Shiva is the seven days stipulated by Jewish tradition for mourning following burial. My father died on a Sunday. But the funeral didn’t take place until Wednesday.

The official reason was that it took time to process all the paperwork. The cemetery wouldn’t start digging a grave until they had an official death certification. But doctors generally don’t work on Sunday, so we had to wait until Monday and then it took until the end of the day to get everything processed.

In the meantime, my mother, my brother and his wife, and I found ourselves in a kind of a limbo. Dad was dead but the formal shiva didn’t start for two more days. What were we supposed to do? No one quite knew.

Should we be all happy and normal? Maybe go shopping? I’m not near a big American mall all that often and I needed some new jeans. Would a quick trip to Sears be inappropriate? My mother suggested a movie. She had a video from Netflix she had to return. Eventually we settled on a board game. My father loved games.

Mind you, it’s not like we didn’t have anything to do. I arrived Monday afternoon and within a few hours we had met with Rabbi George Schlesinger from Congregation Beth Ami, the local Conservative synagogue. He was wonderful, able to bridge my brother and mother’s less observant world and my more traditional concerns.

On Tuesday morning we dealt with the funeral preparations.

Carol, our funeral home “salesperson” (for lack of a better term), was as personable and chipper as could be under the circumstances. “Hello and welcome to Daniel’s Chapel of the Roses Funeral Home and Crematory,” she burst out with an ear-to-ear smile. “We’re here to help you with everything you need.” And then, while patting my mother on the shoulder, she added “Oh, so sorry for your loss. Now let’s take care of business,” she exclaimed, returning back to perky persona.

Despite her abundantly outgoing nature, Carol was patient and professional as she explained to us how the funeral home itemizes everything into products and services. “Services” include caring for the body, refrigeration and transport. The main “product” is the casket which is jarringly priced like a holiday sale in a clothing store – for example, $1,595…plus California sales tax of 8.5%, for a total of $1722.60.

The caskets can cost up to nearly $7,000 for a deluxe model made out of steel and mahogany. Now, Daniel’s isn’t a Jewish funeral home – there are none in the small Northern California town of Santa Rosa where my parents live – but there is a corner containing several plain pine caskets appropriate for a traditional Jewish burial.

My mother was already reeling from the price of the funeral – the total eventually came out to close to $8,000. “We’ll take that one,” she told Carol, pointing at the perfectly acceptable basic model.

Next stop was Santa Rosa Memorial Park. Tim, the cemetery guy, had the same demeanor as Carol – charming and upbeat, a quiet “so sorry” and a pat on the shoulders, then down to work. I suppose it couldn’t be any other way. If you spent all day sporting a deliberately dour expression, you’d quickly go mad.  

We drove to the small Jewish section where our task here was to pick out Dad’s plot. Did we prefer a location near the bench or the tree? How about next to the road?

The biggest issue was whether Mom would buy two plots or one. She had long held that she wanted to be cremated – only $1,695 plus an urn starting at $80, according to the 8-page Daniel’s price list. Now she wasn’t so sure. There was a discount on the second plot if you “pre-pay.” It was all so much, coming at us at a time when we scarcely in the frame of mind to make these types of eternal business decisions.

One other comment from Tim: all graves in California are required by law to be lined and covered with concrete, something that’s frowned upon by Jewish tradition because it prevents the grave from being filled in entirely with earth. The reason? Flooding. A few years back there were some intense rains and a number of coffins residing in a cemetery built on a hill went sliding down into the backyards of local residents.

We went home and had lunch, but my day wasn’t done yet. I had missed seeing Dad before he died. Now, I decided I wanted to see Dad in the funeral home. I had asked the rabbi if that was halachic – he said there was no clear direction as not much had been written about the subject in Jewish literature - but I knew I needed to say goodbye in person.

Dad was lying on a bed in the corner of a large room. There was a curtain, couches and flowers. He was alone – no shomerim to guard over him (they would come that night as part of the services provided by the local chevra kadisha). Dad’s face looked much more gaunt than when I’d last seen him at my brother’s wedding a year and a half ago. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.

I started to talk to Dad, at first in a whisper, but steadily I gained the confidence to speak in an almost conversational tone. Tears flowed down my face as I reviewed his life, our times together, his challenges and his successes.

As I walked out, I kept turning back, filling up another tissue. I’d reach for the door, then turn again. I knew once I walked out, I would never see Dad again. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

By the time the funeral was held the next morning, I was more composed. It was an entirely “kosher” funeral. We did everything you’re “supposed” to do – tearing kri’ah (or ripping a garment), saying Kaddish and walking out between two lines.

We returned to my mother’s house and began the shiva. A friend of my mom brought over a tray of cheese and crackers, bagels and fruit. Another made brownies. Many residents from the retirement community where my parents moved 9 months ago stopped in to pay their condolences. A surprising number of my friends made the hour and a half trip up from Berkeley. Later in the day, Rabbi Schlesinger came back to lead an egalitarian minyan for Ma’ariv (the evening prayer) where we said Kaddish again.

It was clear that there would be no more formal shiva the next day. People were already moving on. My brother had generously offered to go through paperwork with my mother and to set her up on the computer (Dad had always handled all the email communication). Mom had started negotiating with the retirement community management to secure a smaller apartment.

But I wanted to sit a complete seven-day shiva. I didn’t want to work. Going for a run didn’t seem right. What would I do all day? There are only so many hours you can surf the Internet.

It’s become traditional for members of our community in Jerusalem to try to “finish” shiva at home with friends and family, even if just for a few days. I wanted to honor Dad’s memory by telling stories about his life to our friends waiting in Israel.

Plus my family needed me. Jody had been fighting pneumonia the entire time I was gone, and the kids were quite broken up over the loss of their grandfather. I re-booked my ticket and headed out at 4:00 AM for the drive back to the airport and a morning flight.

I felt guilty about leaving so quickly. My mother was stoic – “don’t worry about me, I’ll be OK, I’ll sit here in the dark.” OK, she didn’t say the last line, but you get the point.

And my mother is in a good place. She has tons of new friends in the retirement community. It’s a very upscale place. My brother calls it the “cruise ship.” There’s a small library, a private movie theater with plush leather chairs and popcorn, a fitness center and even a man-made lake with paddle boats. Instead of an ordinary dining hall, there’s a restaurant with waiters, menus, daily specials and an executive chef. And there are tons of trips and activities - visits to museums and the theater. Last month they went to the City to see Wicked.

Dad loved it too. One of the saddest things is that he only got to be there for 9 months. On the other hand, his last months were very good ones.

When I was saying my goodbye to Dad in the funeral home, I found myself trying to make some sense of it all. He looked so singular, so disconnected in death. But then I began to imagine him differently. A part of something bigger. It’s kind of cliché to say that if Dad wasn’t there, neither would my brother or I be around. But it’s true. Dad was his own person of course. But he was also a critical link in the continuity of the Jewish people. Dad was the result of 4,000 years of Jewish history. And his children will be responsible for the next 4,000…this time in Israel.

I don’t know if Dad – a proud Jew but never one who yearned to visit the Holy Land - would have seen it that way. But it gave me some peace, some closure. Maybe that’s what’s meant by the phrase traditionally said to the bereaved, “may you be comforted by the mourners of Zion.”

I had planned on running in the Jerusalem Half Marathon last week. Instead, I found myself running half way around the world in a frantic attempt to kiss my father one last time before he died.

The sprint from the diagnosis of cancer to his final days went alarmingly fast – less than three weeks from start to finish. There was barely any time to think through treatment courses, let alone work out emotions that were hitting our family like blunt objects hurled with laser precision.

One moment he couldn’t breathe, the next he was starting chemo and the oncologist was optimistic. Then he stopped eating.

When the call finally came to “get on a plane now,” my mother wasn’t sure he’d even know who I was when I got there….if I arrived in time. Over Shabbat, he had told my mother he just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up.

It all happened so fast. Just 4 days earlier, my mother had asked the doctor if her son in Israel should come. No, the doctor said. He has time.

As my Delta flight wound its way to the U.S., I prepared myself by pouring through “Wrestling with the Angel,” a pluralistic compilation of essays about Jewish approaches to death and morning edited by Rabbi Jack Riemer. I took notes to share with my family when I arrived in preparation for what now seemed inevitable.

Q: Why do we tear kri’ah, an article of clothing, when a person dies? A: It’s a very graphic act that serves to remind the mourner of the importance of life at a time of loss.

Q: How should one act at a shiva (bereavement) visit? A: Don’t turn it into a cocktail party with finger food where the mourners have to play “host” and everyone avoids talking about what’s most important.

Q: Why is it traditional to put stones not flowers on the gravesite? A: Stones are permanent and more appropriate for preserving memory. Flowers wither away.

With my head swimming in Jewish thought and the exhaustion of being up all night, I switched on my cell phone as the plane landed in New York. It rang almost immediately. Jody was on the line.

While I was in the air, Dad had died, she said. My mother, my brother and his wife Jen were there at the end and saw him take his last breath. Jody was crying. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

Somehow I had a sinking feeling that this would happen, that he would pass away while I was en route. I reviewed my flight options. The only way I could have gotten there in time was if I’d rushed to the airport immediately after I spoke to my mother at 10:15 PM on Saturday night and went from counter to counter looking for a open seat on the midnight flight to New York before they closed the gates.

In the meantime, I still had another plane trip to go. The next six hours on the way to San Francisco were among the hardest I’ve ever experienced. I was fighting back the tears the whole time, in order not to alarm the flight attendants.

I had so much I had wanted to share with my father. Even if he didn’t understand a word, I wanted to hold his hand, to tell him I could have been a better son, to forgive him for his own shortcomings, to say I love you one more time.

In our last major conversation since the diagnosis, Dad told me that this wasn’t the way he wanted to die. He didn’t want it to be drawn out and painful. He wanted to die at home not in the hospital. And it was too soon. He was only 81. He still had things he wanted to do.

But death of course doesn’t play by a schedule. If there’s anything I’ve learned by the process so far, it’s that we’re not in control. Dad had his expectations of how he’d die; I had my vision of saying goodbye.

Some might say it’s all in God’s hands. I’d simply say it’s not in ours.

My son is now a driver.

Those six words are probably as significant, if not more - at least to him - than becoming a bar mitzvah. When you’re 13, you get counted in a minyan but other than that it’s just another day in 7th grade.

But 17…that’s the year you transcend being a mere passenger to taking command of a 3,000 pound metal death machine and hurtling it through – and against - the most dangerous waters in the world: the Israeli highway.

I’m so proud.

Fortunately, Amir is very good behind the wheel. He makes complete stops, always signals, and keeps to the speed limit – things that, after more than 30 years on the road, I am sometimes less pedantic about.

He ought to. After 49 lessons, Amir is surely ready for anything the streets of Jerusalem throw at him.

I of course am a nervous Nelly in the car with him, though I try my best not to show it. When I jerk my head back and forth, I’m not checking the intersection for oncoming cars. No, I’m just stretching my neck a bit, keeping it limber.

Learning to drive in Israel is very different than back in the old country. The most obvious: the driving age is 17, not 16. And, unlike in California where I grew up, you can’t get a learner’s permit before you take the test. You can’t even start lessons until you’re of age.

And they’re expensive too. For those 49 50-minute lessons, we paid NIS 90 (about $22) each. The test is nearly $100 and it’s pretty much unheard of for a student to pass on the first time. I heard of at least one Israeli who had to take that darn exam 11 times before getting her license (I would have given up on 8 and resigned myself to taking the bus).

Fortunately, new immigrant drivers who already have a license from a Western country only have to take one lesson before the test and don’t need to pass a written theory exam. Jody and I both passed the first time through.

Israeli testers are a tough bunch. You fail if you make just a single mistake. Amir pulled out too far on his first go and the examiner tapped the brakes. Buzz…you’re out.

The whole process has made me more tolerant of the tens of “learner” cars that prowl our southern Jerusalem neighborhood, slowing down the already clogged streets and generally driving me to distraction.

When I was 15, we had lessons in school. They were free. And we spent half our time in a simulator. This was before video games were widespread, so getting to play what was essentially an educational arcade video game was a real treat.

I nevertheless only received a B+ in driver’s ed. It dragged down my entire GPA and ruined my chances of being selected as class “brain” for the high school yearbook. Maybe that was a good thing.

A couple of weeks after getting my license, I scraped into a poll at the entrance to a local drive-in movie theater (does anyone remember those?), forever blighting our nearly new Dodge Custom Coronet. Don’t worry, though, you can get in the car with me. I’m quite proficient these days. Really.

Once you get your license here, you can only drive with an adult for the first three months. So we’re taking every opportunity to let Amir get behind the wheel for the experience.

But having a teenager driver, well, it drives up the insurance significantly. Like, $1,500 a year on top of the $900 we’re already paying for just Jody and me. And mind you, we have a 14-year-old vehicle already, so we barely even pay beyond the mandatory liability coverage.

Fortunately, the insurance company has a special deal. If your child drives no more than 60 hours a year (approximately 5 hours a month – perfect for army age kids who are only home every other weekend), the price drops to just $250 a year.

How do they track how many hours - the honor system maybe? No way. This is hi-tech Israel. Every time Amir gets in the car, he’ll have to send a text message to a special number. When he gets out, he SMS’s again. Bizarre, but I guess it works.

In the back of our car there now hangs on the window a yellow “New Driver” sign. Apparently it’s mandatory. I had thought it was meant to torture the average impatient Israeli by making it harder to honk and scream if they know it’s a newbie.

I admit, I sometimes became one of those ugly Israelis. But no more. After all, it could very well be my own son in one of those cars.

It was Purim evening and Jody and I went dancing. It was an exhilarating night out as thousands of revelers, young and old, from around the country, came to shake and bounce and twirl to free form world music until the wee hours of the night at the post-Megillah Boogie Jerusalem annual extravaganza. We stayed until 2:00 AM.
 
When we got home there was a message on our answering machine. It was from my mother. Her words were stark.

The doctors didn’t know if Dad would make it through the night, but he did, and now he was in stable condition.

Wouldn’t make it through the night? The previous update was that the surgery he had to remove fluid from his collapsed lung had gone well, that he was weak but in good shape. When we left for Boogie, all signs were that things with my father were looking up.

I called my mother on her cell phone. It went into voice mail. I called my brother. His office manager said he had stepped out to lunch. I was plunged into uncertainty, lacking the basic data to even know how to feel.

When I finally spoke to my mother, she explained that my father wasn’t able to breathe but, ultimately, the doctors got his airways open. The severity of the attack, however, suggested that the cancer was moving more aggressively than originally thought. They would have to wait for the oncologist to know the full story.

My brother has been doing a great job trying to get answers. He camped out in the office of my father’s primary care physician until he squeezed himself in between appointments.

For me, it’s been incredibly frustrating being so far away and knowing so little. My mother said not to get on a plane…yet. My brother was more pessimistic. He felt that my father had already given up and was not fighting anymore. He had no appetite and was getting weaker and weaker.

When I spoke to Dad last night, though, he actually sounded pretty good, like his old self.

The oncologist finally came the next day. He said he’d been waiting on tests that had to be done outside of the hospital (why he couldn’t have communicated that instead of leaving us all in the dark for a week, I don’t know).

The news was good and bad. Dad wasn’t in immediate danger. He’d be starting chemo immediately, which hopefully will dry up the fluid in his lungs. But the cancer wasn’t curable, the oncologist said. The chemo could buy him another six months, maybe a year but not more.

When I told the kids the situation, 11-year-old Aviv asked if the treatment would hurt. We said yes. He then asked why his grandpa would want to put himself through such suffering if he knew he was going to die anyway.

Maybe he wasn’t ready yet, I responded. Maybe he needed time to say his goodbyes.

That’s not going to be so easy for my father and me. Since we made aliyah, our communication has mostly been via email – jokes, personal updates, political rants. Now, it seems, the relationship needs to be flipped on its head, morphing from analytical to emotional overnight.

But how do you suddenly talk about feelings vs. facts after so many years? It might be easier if I lived nearby, but popping in for a few days and then flying out again makes the task doubly difficult.

In the meantime, I’m trying my best to participate in his care from afar, Yesterday, I checked out the local synagogue websites.

My mother called a Rabbi Schlesinger from Congregation Beth Ami, a Conservative synagogue, to discuss burial options. There is no Jewish cemetery in their area, he explained, nor any Jewish funeral homes. There is apparently a small Jewish section in the Santa Rosa cemetery.

To my surprise, though, there is a cross-denominational Chevra Kadisha which helps families make arrangements and advises them concerning traditional practices and requirements. This includes shmirah (guarding) and taharah (purification) of the body, preparing condolence meals, and putting together a minyan to say Kaddish.

There’s also the local Chabad emissary who arrived in the hospital on Purim day bearing hamantaschen and singing cheerful songs. He told my mother he’d be available to help with whatever they needed. I’m not a Chabadnik by any means, but bless them for the outreach they provide.

Before Dad took this turn for the worse, I suggested he write a blog himself, to chronicle his experience, like Rivka Matitya who I wrote about here last week. Dad was, after all, a journalist, working for the San Francisco Examiner for nearly 35 years.

He didn’t sound particularly interested. That’s not surprising. He’s got so much hitting him all at once right now. And it’s only been a week since the initial diagnosis. So for now at least, my posts, from 7,000 miles and 10 time zones away, will have to do.

I want to end by thanking all of my readers who have written with words of support over the last week. It means so much to me in this state of confusion.

I’ll be in touch again soon.

When my brother called at 7:30 AM, I knew something was wrong. We had already made a plan to speak at 8:00 PM that night to discuss some work we are doing together. What could be so urgent about revising a project plan?

Dad had been diagnosed with lymphoma that morning, my brother said. It was too early to tell how far it had spread, what stage it’s in, what the course of treatment would be, or even what type of lymphoma he had out of the dozens of variations.

Nevertheless, I felt my heart drop into my stomach. I was stunned. My brother and I discussed what we should do next. We resolved to speak regularly as news came in. I took a long hot shower. I felt my eyes get misty, but it could have been the steam.

My next thought, though, caught me by surprise. I felt a strong need to spread the word via social media. I intuitively knew I had to blog about it. I updated my Facebook status and posted to my Twitter account.

The responses came in quickly. Suggestions on who to talk to, where to look for more information. Personal reflections on their own experiences. Words of support.

I have been using social media since 2002 when I started this blog. Over the years, my readership has grown to include people from California to Australia, most of whom I’ve never met.

My subscribers have shared in my parenting triumphs and political ruminations. Restaurant reviews, travelogues and hi-tech profiles. They have, in many ways, become like an extended family. So it was only logical that I would want to draw some comfort from the community.

I’m certainly not the first to use social media this way.

My friend Rivka Matitya has been blogging about her own cancer at the Coffee and Chemo site. While most of her posts are about trying to lead a normal life - being a mom, paying board games, swimming – some are more grim.

Lying in bed at 1:00 AM with the computer in her lap makes her feel "less isolated and less sorry for myself,” she said in an article last year in the Jerusalem Post. Writing the blog also helps her explore certain ideas that are easier written down than shared in conversation.

“By being able to write about it and put it out there, that was the first step toward articulating those fears about breaking down, and that was very important - I can discuss it now, talk to somebody about it without sobbing," she said.

Another cancer patient interviewed in the Post described the online experience this way: Her writing, she said, “was an outlet for me to write down whatever I feel without fear of being judged for showing weakness.” Perhaps appropriately, when she went into remission, she received the news from her mother electronically – via SMS.

In addition to individual blogs, there are also a number of dedicated online communities - such as MyCancerPlace, What Now? and NPR’s Our Cancer - where individuals can come together to share stories and advice, post pictures, and interact with other members via forums and groups.

It’s impossible to say what’s coming next for my dad. The one thing I know for sure: You’ll be reading more about it online.

Lately, my wife Jody and I have spent a lot of time getting in touch with old friends via Facebook. It started when I received a friend request from Larry. Larry and I were best buddies growing up. But after I moved away, we fell out of touch. I’ve looked for him from time to time via Google but never found any contact information. It had been 20 years since I last spoke with him. But through the wonder of social networking, we’re back in contact.

Larry connected me to another high school friend who connected me to a college colleague. It’s been a blast.

And it got Jody and I thinking: What if there had been a Facebook when we were teenagers some 30+ years ago. The whole concept of “getting back in touch” with old friends as we are doing now simply wouldn’t exist. We’d be connected from the start and would stay that way (unless we were "unfriended" for some unforgivable offense).

As we shared status updates, we’d always know what achievements the high school jock had attained, or what type of relationship an old flame was in (undoubtedly “it’s complicated”).

That’s just one of the differences between us old fogeys and the “digital natives” - a term from the book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society - to describe young people born after 1980 for whom the Internet was already a given by the time they hit surfing age.

Lev Grossman at Time Magazine wrote a funny piece this week that echoes what I’m saying. He lists a number of reasons why social networking tools such as Facebook are even better for “digital immigrants,” as Palfrey refers to us, who didn’t grow up with social networking. Among his conclusions:

1. We’re no longer bitter about high school. Digital natives may be “hung up on any number of petty slights,” Grossman says, but when a person who insulted us way back when asks to friend us today, we say sure. Because we’re bigger than that now.

2. Facebook isn’t just a social network; it’s a business network. Sure, LinkedIn may “officially” be the professional social media tool, but it’s Facebook, with its 175 million users (and counting), where we make most of our work connections.

3. Facebook lets you share pictures of your children. Digital natives may be snapping shots of friends at school or the beach, but we’re just kvelling by posting albums of our grand kids.

4. Facebook means you don’t have to remember e-mail addresses. Just log on and search. You never have to leave the walled garden.

5. We’re more careful about our privacy. You won’t see us posting half-clothed drunken pictures of ourselves at a fraternity party that may lead to a potential employer, looking to vett a job candidate via Google, to disqualify us without even getting to the interview.

Indeed, the relationship to privacy is probably the biggest difference between digital immigrants and natives, the latter of whom have no problem living their lives entirely in public.

For example, my teenager daughter Merav last night bemoaned the fact that her grandparents asked about her new boyfriend. “That’s my private business,” she wailed. “They have no right going there.”

“But you posted it all in your status for everyone to see!” I countered. She stormed out of the room.

Now, in a controversial move that had the blogosphere up in arms this week, Facebook tried to quietly change its Terms of Service to so that if a member quits the site, his or her content will no longer be deleted.

The newly added clause read:

“The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook service: Prohibited conduct, user content, your privacy practices [and] gift credits,” among other types of data.

Facebook probably had no alternative: Once you post content, everyone else can see it and, as a result, it now becomes “owned” by the public. An example, from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post defending the change:

“When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message.”

Not much of an apology, the blogosphere complained, and even The New York Times picked up the story.

In the end, the power of crowd won the day. Yesterday morning, every member’s Facebook home page included the following prominently placed message:

“Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

The drama is undoubtedly not over yet, but round one goes to The People.

Nevertheless, none of this is likely to change the way people use Facebook. Most younger Facebook users don’t care and it won’t be long before they’re out of school and in the mainstream. The Berkman Center’s Palfrey points out, going back to the job interview example, that soon “employers are going to be digital natives themselves and [will] be a lot more lenient about what tattoos [i.e., those incriminating photos] may still show up.”

Even as a relative newcomer to Facebook, I’m not going to complain because I get so much out of the system. If I ask a business question, I immediately get a slew of responses. If I post that I’ve caught a cold (like I did this week), in come the condolences from around the world (a phenomena that goes a long way to helping span the wide divide between Israel and "the old country").

And when I want to get in touch with an old friend, like Larry, there’s nothing to compare. I’m living my life in public too. It’s just one more way the digital generation gap is blurring.

Click here to read the full interview with Palfrey.

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This article appeared earlier this week on the AIMGroup.com website where I blog about interactive media, social networking, online video and classified advertising.

My wife Jody has been in the States for the last two weeks to celebrate her father’s 70th birthday, leaving me a “single parent” back in Israel. I’m pretty good at handling the day-to-day activities at home, taking care of the kids, keeping the house running. Except in one area.

The kitchen.

Frankly, I’m a total nincompoop when it comes to cooking. I imagine that if I lived alone with no family, I’d be the take out king. Chinese one night, falafel or schwarma the next. There’s no lack of fast food these days in Jerusalem. We even have our choice of upscale sushi bars.

But I have three growing kids who need a well-balanced meal, and money for eating out every night isn’t exactly flowing like Dead Sea water. So before Jody left, she made me a two-week schedule of meals along with a detailed shopping list.

The meals on the list were pretty simple. There was macaroni and cheese, pasta with cheese, grilled cheese toasts, burritos with cheese, lasagna with (you guessed it) cheese.

Actually, there wasn’t anything on the list that didn’t involve flour and cheese, except for one night when I was supposed to make “orange soup” with sweet potatoes, carrots and pumpkin. But it was a long day and I had two intense deadlines that were going to take me easily past midnight. So we ordered pizza instead...with extra cheese.

All of the starch was supposed to be balanced with a nice green salad. Emphasis on the “supposed to” part. I finally got around to cutting up some veggies at the end of the first week and then only when everyone was so constipated we could barely move.

There was also what I fondly like to call the Day of Disasters. It started when 17-year-old Amir and I were putting away the groceries. A large jar of oatmeal was perched just a tad too close to the edge of the pantry.

It crashed to the ground spewing glass and oats everywhere. I thought about scooping up the flakes into a new jar but I was worried that they might be too “crunchy.”

Then when I was carrying a bottle of olive oil to the table to dress the salad, it too slipped out of my hands, landing on a dinner plate and splattering all over 10-year-old Aviv’s pants. The bottle, thankfully, didn’t break, but the plate did.

Next, we sat down to what turned out to be a highly unusual dinner. Merav, our 15-year-old vegetarian daughter was eating out at a friend’s house, so I decided to treat the boys to some meat. At the store, a bag of what looked like meat-stuffed raviolis looked tempting. And a real change – no cheese this time!

I brought it home and heated it up, just like the instructions on the package said, then served the ravioli to my little carnivores. But something just didn’t seem right about it. The meaty dumplings looked forlorn on the plates. Maybe they needed some sort of sauce?

That’s when I realized it. These were kneidelach, meant to be served in soup not on their own. Everyone chuckled, Aviv came to my defense saying they were delicious, but I felt defeated.

As if it couldn’t get any worse, here was the coup de coup de grâce (or in our case the coup de glida): The case of the ice cream. Earlier in the day, we had bought a small carton of Ben & Jerry’s butter pecan. It’s our tradition that when we buy a decadent dessert, we always take a sample as soon as we get home.

Amir was the first in. He pulled off the top. The protective seal was open. He peeked inside. A large chunk was missing. He called down to Merav’s room – had she somehow sneaked in and snagged a bite while we were still bringing up groceries from the car?

No, she said. Same question to Aviv. “There’s ice cream?” he exclaimed.

Someone apparently had opened the ice cream in the store, scooped out a large spoonful, and put it back in the freezer. Both Amir and I instantly felt sick to our stomachs. We wondered if we had been poisoned.

Clearly this all was a conspiracy, a plot hatched in some evil fiend’s mind to make us miss Jody or, when we eventually told her the story, to compel her to take pity on us, rush back from her trip and cook up a nice pot of tofu and broccoli.

Ultimately we decided not tell Jody about our fortnight of eating badly…at least not immediately. Better she enjoys her time in the States fondly thinking of us as an independent and resourceful brood rather than a collection of culinarily-challenged cranks.

And truth be told, we survived just fine. No one was rushed to the emergency room or came down with rickets.

Jody returned last night. Jet lag may delay our departure from kitchen duty another day or so, but it won’t be long before we’re back to “normal life” and the boss is in charge again.

Welcome back sweetie. We’re glad your home!

And oh yes, when you go shopping next week, don’t forget to check the ice cream!

I’ve been "unfriended" by my 15-year-old daughter. No, I don’t mean she’s stopped talking to me. But Merav and I are no longer friends on Facebook.

The ostensible reason? We grounded her. She accepted her punishment but, in retribution, she blocked me access to her profile. That means no more status updates, no photo albums from the latest school trip tagging her friends, no private messaging.

Oh yes, she unfriended my wife Jody too.

Now, you might say that communicating via Facebook is the ultimate dehumanization of the parent-child relationship. It was bad enough when we started instant messaging each other in the same house. But I’ve come to rely on reading Merav’s status line to know how she’s feeling.

Did she have a good day at school? Is she brogus with a friend? Did she enjoy last night’s movie? It’s all updated in near real time, whether at home or school. Pretty much wherever there’s a WiFi connection. Check out this BBC parody of what happens when the borders between reality and Facebook blur too much.

Jody took a more sanguine approach. “A teenager needs her independence. She shouldn’t have her parents watching her every move online,” she said.

Maybe. But did Merav have to be so glib about it? She practically danced around the room when she informed me of my demotion.

Apparently, I’m not alone in the friend/unfriend conundrum. The New York Times this week ran a piece about the subject. Author Douglas Quenqua delineates the different types of unfriendings, from the impersonal – removing a contact you made a party, for example, but whom you can no longer remember – to the vindictive (like Merav).

It’s probably a good idea to weed out old Facebook connections from time to time. That must have been what was behind a recent Burger King promotion, called “The Whopper Sacrifice,” where the hamburger chain offered a free Whopper to anyone who severed bonds with 10 of their friends.

Burger King says that the viral promotion contributed to the ending of nearly 234,000 friendships before it was shut down after Facebook informed the company that it was violating the site’s Terms of Service by sending notifications letting the unlucky unfriended know that they been dumped for a sandwich. (Facebook doesn’t email you when you’ve been unfriended; you have to find out more serendipitously.)

The entire campaign struck me as terribly cynical but nevertheless deliciously amusing.

I’ve found Facebook invaluable in finding old friends. After I missed my 30th high school reunion, group photos from the event started popping up from old classmates who were similarly Facebook addicted. It was a blast.

Riding on that high, I began plugging in names of people with whom I’d spent time as a child. One search was for a dear friend Jennifer. But when I searched for her, I found two entries. Neither had a picture. So I friended them both.

Only one accepted my offer, which allowed me to see her previously private profile. She was born in 1974. Unfortunately, I was already friends with Jennifer in 1974, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a newborn at the time. Click, a logical unfriending.

Sometimes, though, you put out a friend request and the person doesn’t respond. You start to wonder why. Did the person just not see the email asking him or her to confirm? Or was there some hidden animosity that led the person to refuse. I reached out to several colleagues with whom I’d had nasty fallings out years ago. I hoped that maybe the informal chatty Facebook culture would break the ice. I still haven’t heard from them.

For the uninitiated, all this may sound like a huge time suck. It can certainly be that way if you don’t manage your inclinations with enough tough self-love. But ignoring it means missing out on what has become this century’s biggest social phenomenon.

Just consider the numbers. More than one in five of the entire Internet population has been to Facebook. That’s the number from ComScore, which reported that in December 2008, 222 million people visited the site, or 22 percent of the total Internet audience, clocking up a staggering 80 billion monthly page views. That’s up over 120 percent from the same month in 2007.

Another study – this one in the U.K. – reported that more than half of employers found that new hires expected to use social networking sites like Facebook at work. Accordingly, 46 percent of employers allow their workers to use Facebook at any time, 31 percent limited use to certain times, and only 23 percent blocked it entirely.

Facebook, of course isn’t the only social media site which is changing the landscape of communication. Twitter, which I’ve written about before, has well over 4 million users who spend good chunks of their day “tweeting” 140 character or less micro-blog posts about everything from what to order at Café Aroma to the latest technology news (I find both Twitter and Facebook to be invaluable sources of industry news and I justify my time on them as “doing research”).

One of my favorite new sites is called TweetWasters. It’s singular purpose: To calculate how much time you spend on Twitter and then present you with a cynical comment on how non-existent your social life must be.

The service adds up how many tweets you’ve posted, broadly estimates that you spend 30 seconds composing each, and spits out the total number of hours you’ve "wasted" on Twitter.

I entered a couple of my Twitter friends into TweetWasters. One had spent 15 hours to date on Twitter. Another a whopping 2.38 days, to which TweetWasters proclaimed “Um, you are aware there is a real world out there right?”

I’m not that bad off (TweetWaster cynically commented that “My grandmother uses Twitter more than you do”), but I do value my online friends. Which is why it’s been such a blow to lose my daughter’s Web companionship.

I’ve asked her several times to reconsider. Her response: “You’re not my friend, you’re my father.”

Well, I suppose I can’t argue with that. And I can still see her status updates on her Gmail chat and Skype. At least until I go and blab about it publicly and she blocks me there.

Ooops.

The week didn’t go at all as I expected. When Jody made plans for her and Amir to go to Cleveland for Jody’s grandmother’s 90th birthday at the same time as Merav and Aviv were to be in sleep away camp, I thought: this is great. I get the house all to myself. Peace and quiet to work without interruption.

Plus I can do whatever I want, whenever I want with no responsibilities. I can make a mess and no one will nag me to clean it up. With no kids around to throw dirty clothes on the floor, their rooms will remain spotless. I can take long showers (without worrying that the hot water will run out), leave all the lights on and eat junk food every night.

Sure I would miss my wife and family. But as friends expressed their jealousy - and even envy - at this opportunity I had to watch as much TV as I wanted (in between work of course), I began to relish the thought. On Saturday night I drove Jody and Amir to the airport and then came home to begin my two weeks of serious fun.

Instead, I found myself strangely floundering. I kept to a routine. I got up every morning and went for a run. I ate breakfast, took a shower, then sat down at my computer as usual. But I couldn’t get going. All that time to be productive and I found myself perusing the Internet for way too much time.

I had hoped to finally check a few items off my to do list, but the list just grew. I had a bunch of movies to watch from our DVR. Didn’t get to them. A pile of newspapers and magazines to read through. They’re still stacked in the corner of my room. I wanted to update my podcast but the task seemed too daunting.

Instead I found myself obsessed with Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, an Internet musical written and produced by Joss Whedon, the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. The story of a singing mad scientist, Dr. Horrible is a kind of Rocky Horror Show for Generation X. The tunes are pretty good too. I’ve watched it about 10 times already.

I had my own horrible plan: to eat my way across Jerusalem. I made a list of all the fast food places in the neighborhood: Burger’s Bar, Falafel Oved, Shnizi, New Deli, Tal Bagels, Sushi Bar Rehavia, Soya, the shwarma place on Yohanan Ben Zachai Street.  Every night a different treat served in under 3 minutes. Salad? That was for wimps.

But then I couldn’t do it. All that grease and frying made my stomach queasy. Friends asked me to come over to dinner and I gladly accepted. I brought them grapes and cake.

Why was I so scattered, I wondered. The silence, no distractions - shouldn’t I be having the time of my life? But it’s exactly because there were no interruptions that I think I was so unproductive. In some bizarre, counter-intuitive way, I seem to need to be pulled in different directions in order to work – and play - efficiently.

I need my kids to barge into my office with stories of their days. I need to exchange emails and instant messages with Jody about bills and plans. Having to stop when someone else decides dinner is ready (rather than me ordering in when I feel like it) somehow frames my day so I can do what I need to.

It’s like what the parenting books say about children: they need boundaries, structure to thrive. That’s me too.

Most of all, I need my loving wife who pushes me to be my best. 30 years ago, when I was a teenager, I was kind of geeky. OK, very geeky. I thought that I would be alone all my life. I couldn’t imagine anyone loving me, let alone getting married and raising a family. Rather, I imagined spending all my time working. Excelling in my profession. Eating at fancy restaurants in exotic countries – but always alone.

Now I know that’s not true. Without Jody and my kids surrounding me with boundless love, I would never have achieved anything. I would have floundered like I did this week.

My experience has also taught me a lesson about Judaism. Jewish law propounds the value of boundaries. Not being able to eat everything we want or having restrictions on what we do on Shabbat and holidays is said to actually give us more freedom, not less. I believe it.

Jody and the kids come back in a few days. The homecoming will be filled with kisses and tales of everyone’s exciting days in the U.S. and at camp. I can’t wait.

And maybe with all the hubbub and commotion, I can finally get some work done!

It’s been a year and a half since I reported on our family’s using a “chart” system, described in the column “Charting a New Course.” So, you might be wondering right, how did it go?

The short answer: well, there’s good news and bad news.

We had two goals when we set up our chart system. The first was practical: we wanted to get the kids to help out more with chores around the house and at the same time reduce the level of stress that resulted from never knowing who was “on” for a particular chore on any given day.

The second goal was more behavioral: we hoped that by instituting a clear system of rewards and consequences, over time we could create new patterns of interaction where the kids would pitch in without needing to be asked.

So far, we’ve succeeded nicely on the first…and failed miserably on the second.

The most important take-away lesson? If you’re going to try to enforce a chart, you’ve got to be willing to play the part of policeperson, at least when you’re getting going.

If it was up to my wife Jody, we’d probably be doing great. She loves laying down the law and handing out tickets for infractions. But it’s exactly someone like Jody you need to make this system work.

As I wrote in that previous column, for the first few days we had a lot of self-directed enthusiasm from the kids. Our youngest son, Aviv, was raring to do anything and everything asked of him for the simple pleasure of being able to check off the tasks on his personal worksheet. The two older kids were more motivated by the prospect of the reward at (it’s amazing what a little Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey can bring out in a child).

By the end of the second week, though, beds were no longer being made consistently nor were the dishes being cleared with the same gush of gusto we had in the initial rush of compliance.

Jody and I debated what to do next.

“They should lose their reward,” Jody said. “And receive a consequence.”

“So which is it,” I asked, “lose the reward or receive a consequence?”

“Both,” Jody replied.

“That’s not fair,” I sputtered, sounding more like my sixteen-year-old son Amir than a stern but loving father seeking to instill positive values in his children.

Before long, it was clear that the parents who had painstakingly set up the chart system didn’t see eye to eye themselves. And this was just one of a number of nuances that neither of us had quite thought through yet.

Such as: what do we do if the reward is a family activity? Do we not rent a movie for Saturday night? That punishes everyone. But how can we exclude one child from the evening’s fun just for failing to pick up a sock?

And: should we be checking the kids’ charts each day or use some sort of honor system? What happens if a kid does the tasks on his or her chart but doesn’t actually check them off?

And: should we hang the charts on the refrigerator for easy access and review? (“No way,” said fourteen-year-old Merav, fearing the public humiliation should any of her friends come to visit).

But the most critical question came down to this: should we give the kids a warning or grace period before coming down hard?

Jody took the maximalist approach. “They need to have something taken away if they’re going to learn,” she posited.

I went the opposite way. “What do we really want to accomplish here? We want the kids to do their chores, right? Does it matter so much how we get there?”

Jody wanted to say yes, but I could see she wasn’t entirely sure. That was enough for the old softie and dysfunctional disciplinarian that I am to win this round.

“Why don’t we try it my way,” I suggested. “If it doesn’t work, we can always get tough later.”

As if that was ever going to happen. Once we started down the slippery path of non-enforcement, there was no turning back to the purity of chart heaven. Rather than consulting their charts and proactively stepping up to the job, the kids waited for a parent to tell them who was on for clearing the dish rack tonight, or who was supposed to take the trash out.

If I saw that clothes hadn’t been picked up, I’d gently remind the culprit to make sure his or her room was straightened up by morning…or when school was out…or before bed the next night at the absolute latest, I’d warn, finger wagging unconvincingly.

Sounds like a great big flame out, doesn’t it? But you know what? It wasn’t. That’s the crazy thing. After a few weeks of our modified system, the floor was being swept and the kitchen counters were getting wiped down. Maybe not right away or without prompting. But they got done. And there were no disagreements over who was supposed to do a task – it was all written in the chart in black and white (Arial 12 point actually).

Sure, it wasn’t where we thought we’d end up when we started charting this new course. But it was as ship shore a start as this family’s likely to make, and reducing our family stress level is nothing to throw the whole system overboard for.

Stay tuned for more…when we finally drop anchor, I’ll be sure to let you know.