Aviv had been anxiously awaiting the big day for months now. On his eighth birthday, he knew, he would get to go out with his Imma and Abba for a private dinner where he’d hear about “the most wonderful, beautiful, miraculous thing in the world.”

“But what is it?” Aviv would ask my wife Jody or me at regular occasions in the months leading up to his birthday. His big brother and sister just smiled knowingly. They’d already been let in on the secret.

You see, in the Blum household, age eight is when we first talk to the kids about sex.

Many of you probably think eight is too young, but in our experience it is about the time when the other kids in school start talking about “it.”  In fact, it was just a few weeks after The Talk with Merav, then 12, that her friends started up with their own stories.

We wanted our kids to hear about sex from us first, in a positive loving context, not from some boy or girl in school who would inevitably spin the subject as “dirty” or “gross,” employing only partial and most probably incorrect information.

We also hoped that this approach would establish open communication about a subject that can so often be cloaked in discomfort and embarrassment.  So far, that has been the result with our older kids.

Picking where to take Aviv out to eat was perhaps the hardest part of the whole process. We wanted it to be nice – this was a special evening, after all -- but it also needed to allow us some privacy.  Aviv's choice, the now defunct Pizza Meter - a South American-style restaurant in our neighborhood that was painted entirely in burnt orange and played loud and lively Brazilian salsa music - wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a quiet, serious discussion. But it was Aviv’s birthday. So Pizza Meter it was.

We started off by talking about how much we love Aviv and how proud we are of all his accomplishments – pretty generic stuff, but it set the tone. A 10 percent a week bump in his allowance helped put him in a good mood.

Then we turned to the juicy stuff.

“Now, you know that your parents love each other very much, right Aviv,” Jody began.

Aviv smiled innocently. He had absolutely no idea where this was leading.

“And also that we’re very attracted to each other.”

“What does ‘attracted’ mean?” he asked.

“It means I think your mother is very beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the world, and I like to be with her. I like to kiss her and stuff,” I said.

“And I think your father is the most handsome man in the world,” Jody said.

At this point, our pizza arrived and we took a short break to chow down. We had ordered a dish that sounded appropriate for the evening: the “Cha-Cha-Cha” pizza.

After we had filled our tummies a bit, we launched into what happens after kissing.  We then proceeded to tell him exactly how babies are made.

Aviv's face registered a priceless mix of shock and subtle satisfaction at suddenly being admitted to such an exclusive club of knowledge; at discovering that there was something new about his body that he had been clueless about just moments before.

I felt a similar mash-up of emotions: at once proud of our proactive stance, and at the same time more than a little bit sad that, however well thought out our intentions were, his precious innocence necessarily had to end here and now between slices of Cha-Cha- Cha.

As we continued our discussion, we talked about how sex should only be between two people who care deeply about and are committed to each other. We emphasized that sex is an expression of love and that, by the way, it feels really good.

“How good?” Aviv asked.

“Well, it’s like getting the best massage in the world," I ventured a stab.

Aviv looked skeptical. “You know I don’t like massages,” he said.

Now, if you’re expecting me to kiss and tell you all the technical details of how we explained the mechanics of sex, I’m sorry I’ll have to disappoint you. We’re still PG-rated around here.

Suffice it to say that Aviv’s ears perked up a few times more when he was presented with various new pieces of information that seemed illogical to his eight-year-old mind. We checked in with him regularly on whether he had any questions. In general, it looked like he’d absorbed it all. How well he’d gotten the message, only time would tell.

As we paid the bill and headed home, I was satisfied that things had gone well. But I also realized that we had gotten one thing wrong. There’s something else that’s really the most wonderful, beautiful, miraculous thing in the world.

Being a parent.

When is a chair not just a chair? When it becomes a metaphor for a personal obsession with seeking perfection.

It started innocently enough. I bought an expensive new office chair to soothe my aching back. I sit in front of my computer up to 10 hours a day so I figured I’d be well served by sitting in something more suitable than the $50 chair I’ve been using for the past 10 years.

I’d had my eye on the Herman Miller Aeron chair for years, since they were a status symbol in hip dot.coms. The Aeron is an eye-catcher, made of a knitted plastic material called Pellicle that allows air to flow through the seat and back. There are various adjustments to support the lower back and the chair rocks back and forth in natural motion. On the Internet, the chair receives nothing but accolades from customers who have bought one. So when we visited a Dr. Gav store recently and they had a floor model for sale at a discount, Jody and I made an impulse decision. We purchased it.

Now, when I tried it in the store it wasn’t as comfortable as I’d imagined after everything I’d heard and read calling the Aeron “the most comfortable ergonomic chair ever designed.” But I figured I just had to get used to it. The Aeron arrived a few days later and I started to use it.

The discomfort continued. The lower back support pressed in too hard. The seat depth was too great, causing it to jut into my knees.

I debated what to do. I made up my mind that the Aeron, despite all my expectations, was just not the chair for me. I went back to the Dr. Gav store. As is typical in Israel, they wouldn’t give me my money back but they would exchange it. I tried another chair called the Controller. It was made of soft leather, had a high back and felt much more comfortable than the Aeron. Despite all the positive feedback on Herman Miller’s signature office chair, I decided to swap it for the Controller.

I got it home. Half a day later, my back was killing me. The Controller angled me in such a way as to hurt not my lower back but my mid-range back. The arm rests were too stiff. The rocker put pressure on my thighs.

I looked online again. No one had anything but positives to say about the Controller. I started second guessing myself: maybe I shouldn’t have gotten rid of the Aeron after all. Maybe I should swap it again for something else – a massage chair, a mattress - and give up on the whole office chair idea completely.

Or maybe it wasn’t the chair but was me? How could I be so miserable over two of the highest rated chairs in the industry? I went to my therapist to discuss my chair trauma.

My therapist listened patiently to my complaints then shared her view. I was looking for the perfect chair, she said. The problem was, no such thing exists. Indeed, there is no perfect anything. Life is made up of a series of trade offs. The back might be softer on one chair, the tilt better on another. The happiest people, she suggested, are those who can actually revel in ambivalence.

What my therapist was saying resonated. It was more than the chair I realized. My obsession with perfection is deeply ingrained. I get easily disappointed. When I go out for a meal and order a dish that isn’t the best there can be, I get depressed. On our recent trip to New York, when we went to the theater, I kept wondering if the show we had chosen not to see would have been more enjoyable. I even get upset if I didn’t get a perfect night of sleep.

How did I get this way? My therapist said it’s not uncommon for someone who suffered during childhood to develop this kind of reaction as an adult. And I certainly suffered: I grew up fat and lonely. I had few friends; kids at school taunted me, they kicked and hit me. A coping mechanism children like me develop, my therapist explained, is a view that when they grow up, everything will finally be perfect. It’s a way of staving off the void of depression that would otherwise overwhelm a difficult childhood.

I eventually grew out of it, slimming down by my teens. But now, as an adult, that need for perfection I developed as a kid has kicked in big time, just like my therapist said. And it’s not serving me well.

My therapist suggested I try to transform my chair experience into a corrective activity that could help turn around this negative obsessive way of thinking. In Hebrew, it’s called a tikkun – fixing something that’s broken. If I could accept the chair as a real, naturally flawed object, with all the trade offs that entails, and stop my perfection-seeking script, I might be able to break the cycle in other areas as well.

I resolved to work with the chair. No more thinking about returning it or second-guessing or regrets. I had to learn to live with it. Only by making peace with the chair and the metaphor that it represented in my twisted psyche could I hope for some sort of peace.

It’s been several weeks since I decided to keep the chair. Is it perfect? Not by any means. My back still hurts, but less so, as I’ve given in and allowed myself to get used to it. I can see its benefits, and it’s certainly better than the $50 chair I was using before. I haven’t broken my obsession with perfection yet. But I’m hopeful that the longer I sit, there may be something for which, eventually, I can stand up and cheer.

“Lunch was very nice, but I was hoping we could sing a few zemirot,” commented one of our guests this past Shabbat. He didn’t mean it in a critical way; he was just expressing his hope that would sing a bit around the table before tidying up the dessert and heading for a Shabbat afternoon nap.

The thing is, I’ve been down on zemirot for a while now. That’s is a real change from how our family used to be. When Jody and I were studying in Israel in the mid-1980s, singing songs around the Shabbat table was an integral part of our communal experience. We learned zemirot from our teachers at Pardes, we introduced new tunes to our friends, we even took to occasionally penning a melody ourselves.

But after years of the same tunes, I got tired of our repertoire. All the traditional songs had become intolerable dirges or sounded like British marching ditties. “Yom ze meCHUbad, mikol YAmim ki vo SHAbat TZUR olaMIM (toot toot)” we’d belt out, swinging our arms like we were in an Irish pub carousing after a football match.

When we started going to a Shlomo Carlebach minyan several years ago, we tried applying some of the melodies we heard there to the words of the zemirot, but it never quite fit right. My friend Eliezer succeeded in updating some of Birkat HaMazon, the grace after meals, but that’s about as far as it went. We hummed a few wordless nigunim with the incumbent lalas and yayas, but it wasn’t the same.

We always have a great time at the Shabbat table. Lots of yummy food, good conversation and laughs. But zemirot had dropped off the radar.

That was until Saturday night when we went to hear the New York ethno-Hassidic world beat rock band Pharaoh’s Daughter making its first appearance in Jerusalem. Led by the charismatic Brooklyn-born Basya Schechter, the seven-piece band, which is among the darlings of the new Jewish music scene in New York, is hard to categorize. With Schechter on lead vocals, oud and guitar, and featuring Daphna Mor on back up vocals and woodwinds, Pharaoh’s Daughter performs in four languages – Hebrew, Arabic, Ladino and Yiddish and have a play list that ranges from neo-Klezmer to Egyptian-tinged Middle Eastern rhythms.

National Geographic described the band on its World Music Podcast as fusing “Middle Eastern and Jewish sounds with a dark, indie pop sensibility, making music that has traditional roots, and a hip, modern edge."

NewYorkCool.com referred to the band this way: “Have you ever wondered what would happen if Pink Floyd and PJ Harvey crossed paths in a cafe in Israel and subsequently took a road trip to South Africa? What if they met up with Radiohead in Morocco along the way?”

Pharaoh’s Daughter’s sold out Motzei Shabbat show was held in Jerusalem’s Beit Avichai’s new auditorium which sports some of the best acoustics I’ve heard at any concert here or abroad. The audience was a classic Jerusalem mix of religious and secular, young and old, proving the band has legs that extend beyond the trendy twentysomething Jewcy and Heeb scene in New York.

But the highlight of the show for me was Pharaoh’s Daughter’s re-conceptualization of the traditional zemirot. I’d be hard pressed to repeat them at the Shabbat table – the instrumentation and harmonies were too complex for the average Shabbat meal – but it was a treat to hear how far a field a multi-talented musician like Shechter can take the classic lyrics of these Talmudic and Kabbalistic songs. From the lilting guitars of the show opener Lev Tahor through an audience participation sing along version of Yona Matzah and into the closing number HaShomer, Pharaoh’s Daughter returned a sense of swirling spirituality that has gotten lost in our own Shabbats.

Pharaoh’s Daughter is about much more than new fangled zemirot of course. A highlight of the show was a guitar duet between Schechter and Avi Fox-Rosen setting the early Yiddish poetry of Jewish philosopher A.J. Heschel to music. Another high point was a “performance art piece,” as Schechter called it, recreating a traditional Yeshiva “taitch” (from the band’s 2000 release “Out of the Reeds”) where Hebrew is translated into Yiddish in a chanting sing-song. It helps that Shechter grew up speaking Yiddish as well as English.

Pharaoh’s Daughter’s fourth CD is Haran and is available here on Amazon.com. The band, described on its own website as “blending a psychedelic sensibility and a pan-Mediterranean sensuality with Doors-like improvisations, liturgical chants with Middle Eastern, and spiritual stylings” has toured the Middle East, Africa, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Kurdistan and Greece. Pharaoh’s Daughter has played the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and debuted at New York Central Park’s Summer Stage series in 2004.

Schechter grew up in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of New York’s Boro Park and, in an interview on PRI’s "The World" radio program, explains that until the age of 15 she went to all girls schools and was only exposed to boys and music when she participated in a teen trip to Israel where she “had a boyfriend who played me Led Zeppelin and introduced me to all this music I had never heard before. I would learn the melodies note by note,” Schechter says.

Schechter later left New York and her religious community to hitchhike around Turkey and Africa.  She learned to play the oud in Morocco and the saz in Turkey. Today, she and Pharaoh’s Daughter flautist Daphna Mor both play in the musical ensemble that accompanies Friday night services at Manhattan’s conservative B’nei Jeshrun synagogue.

The band’s performance in Jerusalem was a delight – pushing the boundaries of Jewish music while inspiring our Shabbat table beyond the dirges of yesteryear. Go for the music, go for inspiration on new age zemirot, just go. Don’t miss Pharaoh’s Daughter if they come to a town near you.

Last Thursday, my wife Jody and I roused ourselves out of bed at the ungodly hour of 4:50 AM in order to arrive at Ben Gurion Airport, not for a trip to some exotic destination, but in time to greet an El Al flight of 191 new immigrants making aliyah to Israel. The process was inspirational and exhilarating. We were among more than 500 similarly minded Israelis who came to cheer, applaud and otherwise show their support for the new arrivals.

It made me think back to our own family’s aliyah. My, how times have changed.

When we arrived in Israel almost 13 years ago in October, 1994, we were the only new immigrants on the plane. We told our flight attendant about our exciting new status and she merely shrugged her shoulders in a typically Israeli way (shades of things to come) while muttering a muted mazel tov. There was no one at the airport to greet us. No flag waving. No enthusiastic hordes.

Instead we scrambled like everyone else to be first through passport control, then made our way upstairs to a cavernous hall that had been built to handle a plane load or two of Russians all arriving together. We had, in fact, been worried that we might come at the same time as a Russian aliyah flight and get stuck for hours in immigrant processing. Instead, we were shown into a small room where a perfunctory clerk stamped our papers and gave us our teuda oleh and temporary immigrant passports.

Flash forward 13 years. New immigrants from North America now fly together on a plane designated just for them where Ministry of the Interior officials walk up and down the aisles completing all of the paperwork from tablet computers.

Upon arrival, the new immigrants walk between two lines of cheering crowds waving flags, holding up hand decorated signs and otherwise keeping up a remarkable amount of energy for so early in the morning. It reminded me of the “Shalom Kita Aleph” ceremony for first graders entering elementary school…only this time with adults.

The front rows of the two lines were reserved for a cadre of army soldiers; behind them were a gaggle of religious seminary girls wearing blue and white who’d painted their faces with Israeli flags and “I love Israel” in little hearts. A big bearded man blew a shofar as each busload of immigrants disembarked. A live band (well, a guy with a keyboard) played “Heveinu Shalom Aleichem” over and over. The arriving immigrants looked overwhelmed by all the attention after a 12-hour mostly sleepless flight.

Among the new immigrants on this flight was our cousin David Gilbert, a radio news reporter who, after nearly 8 years living in Israel as a tourist, finally took the plunge to become a full-fledged Israeli citizen.

Once inside the arrivals hall, there was a large stage set up in front of the baggage claim conveyer belts for speeches. Dignitaries included representatives from various government ministries; Elazar Stern, the head of the army’s manpower unit; Danny Ayalon, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.; and Tal Brody, who years ago was a star basketball player for the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team and remains one of the best known North American immigrants to Israel.

The hoopla was choreographed by Nefesh b’Nefesh, an aliyah organization that has had a remarkable track record in boosting immigration from North America and the U.K. This was Nefesh b’Nefesh’s 31st chartered flight, the 18th of 2007. All together, Nefesh b’Nefesh has brought over 13,000 immigrants to Israel since its establishment in 2002, nearly 3,000 alone this year, and an 80 percent increase in the past five years.

Last Thursday’s flight included 82 singles, 32 families with 25 children, 30 future IDF soldiers and a former ballerina for the Zurich Ballet who made aliyah from New York with her husband and two children. The youngest oleh in the group was 3 months old, the oldest was 96. The flight also included 6 dogs and 2 cats. Pictures taken by long time aliyah advocate Jacob Richman can be seen at http://www.jr.co.il/pictures/israel/history/2007/a260.htm.

Nefesh b’Nefesh, which was started by Rabbi Yehoshua Fass and businessman Tony Gelbart, has been instrumental in the dramatic increase of immigrants from the West. The Jewish Agency, however, disputes Nefesh b’Nefesh’s numbers, saying that immigration from North America actually dropped 7 percent this year and that aliyah from the U.K. is down 20 percent. The Agency claims that Nefesh b’Nefesh has deliberately inflated its immigration numbers to justify the group’s request for more funds from the state and from Jewish philanthropists. Nefesh b’Nefesh says it needs the money and claims to have a waiting list of some 20,000 Jews.

While North American aliyah may or may not be up, both sides agree with the Absorption Ministry which reports that the overall figures are down. In 2007, 19,700 immigrants arrived in the country, a decline of 6 percent from the previous year and the lowest number since 1989 after the wave of immigration following the fall of the Iron Curtain. The largest number of immigrants in 2007 still came from the former Soviet Union at 6,445. In second place was Ethiopia at 3,607. North America had 2,957 and France held strong at 2,659.

Israel’s total population is about 7 million. Approximately 118,000 people have moved to Israel from North America since the founding of the state, and over 1 million have come from the FSU.

Nefesh b’Nefesh certainly puts on a good show and makes for a comfortable and supportive landing. But new arrivals eventually have to move past immigration and deal with the “absorption” part of the process where, I’m afraid, no cheering crowds or speeches by well dressed dignitaries can properly prepare a new arrival for Israel’s plethora of crazy drivers, surly store clerks and questionable customer service.

But the fact that 191 new immigrants nevertheless chose this week to throw their lot in with the rest of us was good enough news for me – and reason to get out of bed in the wee hours of the morning.