Dovid to Cheskel to Moishe...

Scrambled words - Cool

I have received this email:

Someone out there either has too much spare time or is deadly at Scrabble. (Wait till you see the last one)

DORMITORY:
When you rearrange the letters:
DIRTY ROOM

PRESBYTERIAN:
When you rearrange the letters:
BEST IN PRAYER

ASTRONOMER:
When you rearrange the letters:
MOON STARER

DESPERATION:

When you rearrange the letters:
A ROPE ENDS IT

THE EYES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THEY SEE

GEORGE BUSH:
When you rearrange the letters:
HE BUGS GORE

THE MORSE CODE :
When you rearrange the letters:
HERE COME DOTS

SLOT MACHINES:
When you rearrange the letters:
CASH LOST IN ME

ANIMOSITY:
When you rearrange the letters:
IS NO AMITY

ELECTION RESULTS:
When you rearrange the letters:
LIES - LET'S RECOUNT

SNOOZE ALARMS:
When you rearrange the letters:
ALAS! NO MORE Z 'S

A DECIMAL POINT:
When you rearrange the letters:
IM A DOT IN PLACE

THE EARTHQUAKES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THAT QUEER SHAKE

ELEVEN PLUS TWO:
When you rearrange the letters:
TWELVE PLUS ONE


AND FOR THE GRAND FINALE:

MOTHER-IN-LAW:
When you rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER

Yep! Someone with waaaaaaaaaaay too much time on their hands! (Probably a son-in-law).

Hannity interview a muslim guy who is on the Terror watch list

Gotta' Love Rosh Hashanah

"Jewish Girl Blues" by Bradley Fish - loving the girls...

The secret life of the Rabbi's daughter

West London: a 16-year-old girl in pastel-blue cowboy boots dissolves a tab of acid under her tongue and heads across to the squat where her dealer lives. He hands her a stash of drugs, and she reaches into her bra for the money to pay him. Then the atmosphere changes.

“I sense sex in the air. The acid is kicking in and I lie back on a tattered beanbag and Tim and the other squatters stand around me in a half moon. I see them swaying in psychedelic colour. I know what they want. I want it too. I tease my tits out of my bra. I feel powerful, in control…”

Thirty years on, the wayward girl is a nervous first-time author whose explicit reminiscences are about to create a stir in polite Jewish society in Britain and beyond. It isn’t just what she describes (“a true story of sex, drugs and orthodoxy”), it’s who she is – the granddaughter of a chief rabbi of Israel, daughter of a renowned London rabbi. Streets in Jewish communities around the world are named after her family.

She has shaved five letters off her surname to become Reva Mann, but she is instantly recognisable in the small, gossipy world of Anglo-Jewry. For a non-Jewish analogy, imagine the frisson if a graphic autobiography were published by a daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Religious leaders’ offspring are supposed to behave themselves or at least keep quiet – not to reveal all like this.

The book is a publisher’s dream, a gripping tale of a woman searching in all the wrong places and ultimately finding herself, which begs the questions: why did she get lost? And how lost did she get? The answers to both are riveting.

She misspent her teenage years in a chemical haze, shaming her family, frequenting drug dens and seedy clubs, sleeping with strangers. Finally she was hospitalised with hepatitis B, which she had picked up from a heroin addict. It woke her up to the fact that she was putting herself in real danger. “I wasn’t addicted to a particular drug. I was addicted to the false sense of intimacy that I reached when I was stoned out of my mind.”

She was a middle-class girl from a dysfunctional family. One publisher has called the book “a beacon of light to women”. If this makes it sound alarmingly like a cross between a self-help book and a misery memoir, let me assure you that it’s much more fun than either of those. Not least because, thank God, Reva has a sense of humour. What’s slightly surprising, given the voracious sensuality so lovingly detailed in the book, is that, in person, she is so shy.

Physically, Reva Mann is tiny. Her voice is so low that even in a quiet room I have to strain to hear her. She is a quiet 50-year-old – a nonsmoker, virtually teetotal. Abstemious, controlled. She doesn’t even touch coffee (“no stimulants”), drinks hot water and lemon instead.

Looking back, she says: “I wasn’t in control at all. I was lost, I was miserable, I was frightened. I didn’t feel safe.” It’s a word she keeps returning to. “Drugs and losing myself gave me a very temporary illusion of safety.” Her huge, dark eyes look out from another world; her short, mussed-up hair adds to the impression of a kitten rescued from drowning. This is misleading, however, because in fact Reva rescued herself. And how desperately she was in need of salvation. Not just once, from her promiscuous, drug-abused youth, but a second time too, from the religious sanctuary she fled to in Jerusalem.

The book is hard to put down – it’s so personal and raw. It’s not always pretty, but there’s no self-pity. “It’s brutally honest,” she says. “I’m not the subtle-hint type. I’m telling it as it is. I’m passionate, and you can only be who you are.” She decided to write it while she had breast cancer. Having read the book, I know when and where she first felt the lump. I also know, or feel I know, Reva’s mother and lover intimately. Along with her emotionally inarticulate father, her mentally handicapped sister, her ex-boyfriends and her kind but sexually repressed ex-husband. I know how Reva lost her virginity, why she had an abortion, how exactly she gave birth to her three children, and all the ins and outs of her lesbian fling. In short, I know the sorts of things about her that you might tell your closest friends. And many more that most people would want to keep to themselves.

Once upon a time, she was the life and soul of the party – free and easy, up for anything. Some of her friends miss this old Reva, she says. Then she swung to the other extreme, the equivalent perhaps of running off to a convent, immersing herself in the highly regulated life of an ultra-orthodox Jewish wife. She lived in a religious enclave in Jerusalem, where married women wear wigs so nobody but their husbands can see their hair, and dress in long sleeves, high necklines and black tights, even in the heat of an Israeli summer. Where couples have sex at prescribed times of the month, and sleep in separate beds the rest of the time.

Then, feeling stifled, she threw off her sheitel and fled the house in tight jeans in search of hot, adulterous sex. Not long ago she might have been stoned for this. Finally, she says, she has found a better way, somewhere in between her two, radically different, former selves – “the sinful and the sacred, the religious and the profane”.

As she describes her zigzagging path between rampant drug-fuelled sex and intense religious devotion, she gives a fascinating insight into the usually cloistered world of ultra-orthodox Judaism. Some of the rules, taken to the nth degree, seem pedantic: the debate over whether or not you should tear toilet paper off the roll on the Sabbath, for example (you’re creating two halves on what’s supposed to be a day of rest). Or having to let a rabbi inspect her underwear to decide whether or not her discharge was clear enough that she could be pronounced “clean”.

But it would be wrong to imagine Reva has turned her back on her religion. “I’m passionately Jewish. I love Torah [the code of Jewish law].” She adores her faith, talks about it movingly as if it too were a lover. Some of the rituals she describes, such as taking a mikveh, or purifying bath, to be ready for sex with her husband after menstruating, are strangely beautiful. “When you’ve got your period, your body is in a state of not being able to create,” she explains. “That makes you impure, although it’s a terrible translation – the Hebrew word doesn’t have a negative connotation. So we separate. Then we purify ourselves in the mikveh, which is like a rebirth. You come out in a state where you can conceive, in your ultimate feminine state.” In “impurity” they don’t touch at all. It sounds drastic, but it works for hundreds of thousands of couples, she says. When they come together again it’s a real event.

These glimpses of an exotic world add a Memoirs-of-a-Geisha edge to her own emotional journey. The book started off as a fictional account, but an editor told Reva the plot wasn’t realistic: all these things could not have happened to one person. But they had – to Reva. I suspect there is more she’s not telling us. More sexual shenanigans, more bizarre religious practices that she left out lest she be accused of embellishing. She didn’t need to make anything up. But she did want people to understand she was telling the truth. “That was when I realised I was going to have to ‘come out’,” she recalls. “I also understood there was something here that was going to reach out to people. So I went for it.”

“Mann” in Yiddish has connotations of being “a somebody”. Growing up, she felt like a nobody. She had wealthy, respected parents, a liberal education at a private London college. But the polished veneer hid secrets and lies. Her mother suffered from manic depression, and was addicted to prescription drugs. “She relied on uppers to get her through the day and downers to help her sleep at night.” She would perch on window ledges and threaten suicide. One minute she would be exuberant, warm, glamorous; the next, shabby and hysterical. “I never knew what it was going to be – this mum or the other mum – and I didn’t feel safe.” That word again. Her mother told Reva: “You’ll be the death of me.”

Her mother had breast cancer and had a mastectomy when Reva was 12, but nobody talked about what was going on, which Reva found terrifying. Her parents were both hypochondriacs, overwhelmed by anxiety. Her father was a hero to his congregation but couldn’t talk openly to his daughter. There was never any question of trying to get professional help for her mother’s psychological problems: what if people found out? Difficult feelings were kept in, hidden. “I wasn’t allowed an opinion, a voice, an emotion. My dad kept everything on an even keel for my mother. My parents were so far off in their own world that they never seemed to have time for me.” Yet she idolised her father, still does. “He was an incredible leader of the Jewish people. An original thinker, a huge personality. Being his daughter wasn’t easy, but he was my dad, he made me who I am today. And my mum: she was nuts, but she was great. She was so funny.

”Her mother had once been a modern-languages teacher, “a strong, innovative person”. The woman Reva grew up with was “a shaking jelly”. Part of what had gone so very wrong was that their first child, Michelle, five years older than Reva, had severe learning difficulties, having been deprived of oxygen at birth. As a little girl, Reva was devastated when Michelle, her playmate and best friend, was sent away to live in a residential home. From then on, Reva was terrified of being abandoned. Rightly so, it seemed, when, on finding out about her first serious boyfriend, her parents cut her off.

Why? He was not Jewish. She met him at the backstage bar of the Hammersmith Odeon when he was taking photos for a music magazine; she was friends with a groupie. They snorted cocaine together and had urgent sex in the dirty toilets. Despite this sordid beginning, the boyfriend, whom she calls Chris, was a good sort, and his family welcomed her with open arms. They moved into a flat that she found through a contact of her father’s. Her father gave her 24 hours to leave his house, erecting “an icy, impenetrable wall around himself”. Cut off from her family she felt uprooted, adrift and homesick. She felt she had exiled herself. “It was my worst nightmare,” she recalls. “My sister had gone. I saw that from a child’s perspective. And now me. I felt lots of anger. It was very hard. I was more lost than ever. Now, today, I understand it.” Has she forgiven him? “I didn’t forgive him. I didn’t have to forgive him. I understood him. I came to terms with it. The community was important to him, and he’d had enough. I’d put him through the wringer. Of course, when I found out he’d bought the flat, I realised he was just playing tough love.”

Reva was ecstatic when she realised her father still cared. Her boyfriend was horrified. They split up, and Reva moved to Israel, with her parents’ blessing. She trained as a birth assistant. Then, in her mid-twenties, she enrolled in a yeshiva, a religious school, where she effectively trained to become a wife. It was there that, one night, religious studies between girls turned into something else: she found herself making love to a fellow student. “I took the dominant role, relishing the opportunity to experience and enjoy a woman the way a man does, and slipped my finger inside her until her pleasure could be heard on the other side of the dormitory wall.”

“I’m not into women,” she tells me today, slightly sheepishly, likening the atmosphere at the yeshiva to a boys’ public school. “There was lots of repressed, unleashed sexual energy.” She loved the place, although her old, wild life still threatened to pull her back. “I had a feeling of coming home. A feeling of safety, that I’d been searching for. A community, love, belonging.” It’s easy to see how someone from an emotionally chaotic background would find security in an institution with strict rules, a blueprint for how to live. The yeshiva had its own matchmaker, a formidable woman from eastern Europe who sent Reva on cringeworthy dates. “Darlink, you need someone who can understand your past…” One suitor was put off by the way she tucked into her salad – “He feared your appetite might spill over into other areas.” Another told her he tied his ankles to his bed at night to avoid rolling over onto his front in his sleep, lest he be tempted to masturbate. Weirdos, she thought. Still she yearned to be a good Jewish wife.

And then she was introduced to Simcha, a kind, humble, religious man. He gave her a prayer book instead of an engagement ring. She ignored this warning sign that he was “horny only for heaven”. “Here is the combination I have been longing for, the union of body and soul that will finally satiate me,” she thought. Wrong. They married after knowing each other for a matter of weeks, and having never touched, literally. She wore long sleeves and a thick veil. Simcha was too religious for her parents’ liking. “After all the sacrifices we’ve made, the elocution lessons, the nose job – is this our reward, having you wear that dowdy dress and mumbling prayers?” her mother asked. On the wedding day, her father looked around at the guests despairingly: “Why has she rejected my Judaism and gone for this cultist idolising of half-wits?” The wedding is one of the funniest scenes in the book. But the marriage was a disaster. She was utterly lonely and incredibly frustrated. Simcha belonged to the strictest Hassidic sect of Judaism and hid his fear of intimacy behind the ultra-orthodox rules. She likens his touch to “the soft petting of a kindly uncle”. But they had three children together (now teenagers).

As she went into labour with the first, another terrible, hilarious scene ensued (the film rights can’t be far off). Between contractions, she found herself trying to calm down both her parents. Her mother was panicking, thinking back to her own traumatic labour with Reva’s sister, and needed her Rescue Remedy. Her father responded by thinking he was having a heart attack and reaching for his little blue pills. Her husband wittered on about the sufferings of the Jewish people: “The amniotic fluid is like the water of the Red Sea parting. Your contractions are the birth pangs of a nation being born.”

When she gave birth to her third child, Simcha wasn’t even present. That was when she realised she could do without him. Their divorce was precipitated by Reva having an affair with the builder, who came to fit a new kitchen and later whisked her off on his motorbike. Her husband reacted calmly, and carried on being a good father. They’re on excellent terms today. As she says, “Our divorce was better than our marriage”.

And then came Sam, whose level of pain matched hers. They met in a bar, struck up a flirtatious conversation. A few tequilas and a joint later they were in bed. “Every time I hold you I feel how starved you are for love,” he said. It was Sam who suggested she visit her sister, who she hadn’t seen for over 20 years. Unfortunately he was also heavily into drugs and pornography, and constantly lusted after other women. “Sam gave me everything I needed – and everything I didn’t,” says Reva. “It’s five years that I haven’t seen him and I’m just starting to get over it. It took me a long time because it was so intense. It was the deepest connection I’ve ever had with a man. He understood what I was, and how much I needed everything I didn’t get when I was a kid.”

With her parents’ death, Reva came into her own. Her father died first, with Reva by his side. It was beautiful, she says. “The most wonderful experience. I was privileged to be with him. I saw that when someone dies, it’s just that they’re not around. They don’t really die. I saw my father’s soul leave, I saw the body just become a vessel. It just carries you. This is what life is: we live, and we die. You see your own vulnerability. You realise every breath you have is a gift.”

Her mother’s death was altogether different. She committed suicide. After her father died, Reva had persuaded her mother to come over to live with her in Israel. She even got her to see a therapist, which Reva’s father had never done. She thought she could finally achieve what he had not. She sees this now as an attitude of pride before a terribly hard fall. I think she was just doing her best, like any daughter would. The therapy session went well. Too well. Faced with too much truth too soon, her mother committed suicide the following day, by swallowing sleeping pills and tying a plastic bag around her head.

In retrospect, she realises her father had somehow kept her mother alive. “He had a way to make her feel okay. Which I stupidly did not understand. I thought I could put her in therapy at the age of 80 and everything would be fine.” Does she regret that? “Well, she killed herself the next day. Because she was very bright, and she got it. I have been told since that people who go through that kind of epiphany, who are suicidal, often kill themselves, and that it was actually irresponsible of the psychiatrist – he should have gone more slowly. But she did not want to live. She could not cope. She was an anxiety mess.

“It was the most painful thing, out of all the things I have been through.” Did she feel responsible? She nods. “It was so terrible. I’d thought: finally, I’ve got my mum here! I’ve always wanted a mum. I know that if I was with her for more than five minutes I’d be tearing out my hair, but I miss her so much.”

Her mother had talked about killing herself for years. Was there any sense of relief – after living under the cloud of the possibility for so long? “You’d think so, but no. A mother is a mother, even if they don’t function properly and you’re mothering them. You have a basic need. There are certain things you can’t replace. Who else is interested in every detail of my children? And when you lose both your parents, you become an orphan.”

Reva changed their names out of respect. “I’m not hiding my identity. I just wanted to be a bit removed. It’s like a buffer zone.” I suspect this buffer zone will prove to be tissue-thin. She says she wouldn’t want her teenage children to read the book, because they’re too young to read about their mother as a sexual being. Reva hopes, possibly naively, that people will consider the message of the book as a whole, rather than focus on particular scenes. “I’ve used those to show what it’s really about – this ricocheting from one extreme to another, and to keep that feel of what that is so that when I come out of it you can see the power of what was holding me.”

She never questions the existence of God. She has experienced moments of religious ecstasy, but says chasing after this is more escapism. What she craves now is not ecstatic highs – “I couldn’t cope with the down any more” – but “the real thing. A continued sense of wellbeing. I never understood that all of what I was doing was just medicating terrible pain. Finally, I allowed myself a rendezvous with that pain. And I realised: I wasn’t bad, I’d done all these things for a reason. Now I’m only going for nourishment. I’ve found myself. I have myself. I don’t need some guy to make me feel worthy of being. It’s been hard. It’s a lonely journey.”

How painful was it to write? “I had to relive it, that was part of the stress. I didn’t want to go back, I wanted to go forward. But you do write so much better when you are in that state. When the tears are streaming down your face, you can really express it. You have to go into a trance, almost, where nothing else exists, just that chapter.”

Does she feel sorry for her earlier self? I can understand why her boyfriend Chris thought her parents were bigots. Her father wouldn’t even look at him. Tears well up in her eyes, but she insists: “My parents were amazing people. We have this saying: if everybody were to put their problems on the table, everybody would pick their own up. You’d rather have your own.” Does it feel exposing, to have her highs and lows in print, on the page, out there? “It was scary at first, but I’m happy with it,” she says. “I feel so much better in myself that I can tell the story because that’s not where I am. I don’t relate to that any more. It’s in me, it’s my past, but I don’t feel it’s exposing of me today. Nothing destructive is pulling me back now. I have self-respect. I’m okay with myself, for the first time in my life.”

Writing the book was part of her healing. “I was waiting to get back to life – but I didn’t have much of a life to get back to. Writing everything down was about my beginning to be a new person. I wasn’t just getting it off my chest.” She laughs at the painfully apt metaphor. She hopes the book might help people who are going through cancer, or divorce, or who are trapped in a destructive pattern of behaviour. Hiding, not brave enough to cope with whatever’s pushing them towards it. “I feel that with this book I’ve done something good. I’ve done what the Torah is really about, which is loving your neighbour, in the way that my father and my grandfather did, reaching out to people. If I could do that, I would feel I was a good Jew.” She sighs wistfully. “Then I would feel I was really the rabbi’s daughter.”

Despite her protestations that she’s a changed woman, you sense the old Reva isn’t quite dead. That’s why she keeps everything so carefully in check; she’s balanced, but precariously. “We can both have a glass of wine and you’ll be tipsy and go home and have a nice evening. For me, that glass might lead to two or three… I know that taste and it’s the taste of oblivion.”

The Rabbi’s Daughter: A True Story of Sex, Drugs and Orthodoxy, by Reva Mann, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on Aug 16, 2007.

Taken from the TimesOnline.

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