risk(within)reason

Last week, we found ourselves sitting in what amounted to a two-thousand-year-old basement with some pickaxes and trowels. The archaeological dig we were a part of was the site of a biblical “tel”, or a hilltop that saw successive civilizations building on top of each other.

When the Edomite people who lived there realized they were about to be conquered, they threw all the stuff they couldn’t carry out into the deep underground rooms they’d chiseled out of the chalky rock.

Together, my husband, mom, 3 girls and I picked out bits of ancient pottery and bone. We worked together to figure out what was worth keeping and what was just dirt that needed to be carried up to the top to be sifted more carefully in the bright sunlight.

Nobody bickered. Nobody argued. Nobody shoved or pushed or grabbed anyone else’s bucket.

I looked around in the dim light of this really old basement and thought about how much I treasured these occasional moments of familial peace and bonding.

You certainly don’t need to fly all the way to Israel to engineer these moments, but a family vacation of any kind really does help. It gives us brief respite from the usual every day stresses and pressures.

And although these Kodak moments make up a lot of our most cherished moments, we can (and should) make an effort to build them into our regular lives as much as possible. The literature on the importance of shared family meal times is pretty conclusive about the protective effects for teens, the building of self-esteem, the establishment and maintenance of healthy and open dialogue. This is the stuff of life, the textured weave of who we are.

Even the bickering – the bane of my existence – has a larger purpose. The shrill, whiny and raised voices of your kids, as annoying as they can be, means they are learning to work out disagreements, negotiating for themselves and practicing coping strategies.

Sometimes (say, stuck in traffic at the end of a school day with a carpool full of over-tried kids), I repeat this to myself over and over again.

Family time isn’t necessarily quality time either. Sometimes we ask our kids to turn off their electronic gagdets in the car on the way to something, just so we can all catch up and be together, even if it’s just for 10-15 minutes. Or take 5 minutes to all sit down for breakfast before we disperse for the day. And even when the girls fight over the last glass or orange juice or pancake, I tell myself it’s still worth the effort.

After all, you get a lot more of those workaday moments than you do camping, hiking, going to Walt Disney World or digging for pottery in the ancient Edomite equivalent of a rec room.

And every one of them is equally worthwhile, even if they don’t all end up in our photo albums. Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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