Ozzie Nogg
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Gratitude. Then and now.

8/28/2016

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"This is a test. For the next forty years, I will conduct a test of the Emergency Evacuation System.
This is only a test. 
               
A midrash on Parasha Ekev


There he stands. 
Moses.
Old. Exhausted. Wobbly from dehydration and with swollen feet (despite what the story says), behaving like a regular Yiddishe mama, still lecturing, still wagging his knobby fist in their faces, still reminding those unruly kids of the laws, the regs, the codes of conduct. Reminding them, “You’re not home free yet, bubbeleh. Do not count your chickens before they hatch. Put on your listening ears. Sh’maaaaaaaaaah.”

I keep telling him his blood pressure would be lower, maybe the ulcer would heal, if he’d relax and stop awfulizing. They’re not in kindergarten any more, I tell him. Let it go already, I say. Have a cold beer. Some nachos. Treat yourself, for once. But does he put on his listening ears? Nope.

Instead, he stands beneath the scorching Sinai sky - no hat, no sun screen, a man his age should have more sense - and shouts for their attention. They, the eye-rollers. The kvetches. The entitled.

“Listen up,” he yells. “NOW. HEAR. THIS,” he howls. “I’m only going to say this one more time.” Ah-ha. The magic words. I can almost see the thought balloons above their heads.

             One more time? Cool. Let’s pretend we give a shit.
             Awwwwwww, jeez. We know this routine by heart.
             
Yada yada yada. Borrrrrrrrringgggggg.

And Moses? This aged prophet parent faced with his last hurrah? He leans on his staff and begs, “For God’s sake do not hang out with riffraff. Say please and thanks for what you receive. Play nice with the neighbors, except for the downright rotten ones whose toys you have permission to stomp on and whose butts you have permission to kick.” He’s on a roll. Gathers steam.

“I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again,” he burbles. “If you obey, if you’re good boys and girls, you’ll get milk and cookies and full rides to Yale and McMasions with wine cellars and you won’t need fertility docs and your babies will never get sick. But if you screw up, watch out. If you screw up, all manner of crap will fall in your lap like you wouldn’t believe. So. You. Better. Believe. Good brings good, bad brings bad - it's called quid pro quo - except when good brings bad which brings good but never mind. We don’t have time to debate the existential dilemma of causality right now. Sh’maaaaaaaaaah.”
 

And then the clever old codger, he shifts gears. “In case you think blessings come your way because you’re better than the other guy, because you’re such goody-two shoes, think again, Buster Brown. If power, prestige and pizza come your way it’s because the other guy is worse than you are, so don’t get all uppity and full of yourselves because angels you are not.”

I hand Moses a Gatorade. Between swigs he delivers the knockout punch. “In a few weeks I’ll be dead,” he says, hand clutching his heart. “In a few weeks you’ll be free of my lectures, my exhortations, my two cents. Free of this worrywart who loved you to the moon and back and cared for your well-being above all else. Free of this buttinsky who went before the Judge to plead your case after the shenanigans you pulled at Horeb, Taberah,  Massah, Kibroth-hattaavah, at Kadesh-barnea.”

I hand Moses a Kleenex. “Yes,” he continues, weeping softly. “Soon you’ll be free of me. The one who threw himself on the mercy of the court and begged, Pleeeeeze, give them another chance. Who promised, They’ll change, they’ll be good. Free of the one who fasted, ate nothing for days, not so much as an olive, said whatever it took to save your behinds. To get you to this place. And did that person who bailed you out more than once, who always put your needs ahead of his own, without whom you’d still be working at Target, did that person get even a single word of thanks, a box of cigars, a bottle of whiskey for his trouble?”

And there they stand.

Moses.
The people.
The question between them 
hard as the rod with which he struck the rock.

                                 Ozzie Nogg  copyright 2016




























   






  


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Sam & Ida & the Verrrrrrrrrrrrry Long Marriage

8/21/2016

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Sam & Ida & the Verrrrrrrrrrrrry Long Marriage

On her sixtieth wedding anniversary, Ida decided, “Enough is enough.” 


She texted her children.
“I’m outta here. Don’t ask. They predict a scorcher. Wear sunscreen.”

Then Ida packed a bag, grabbed her car keys, drove to the airport and flew the coop. 


Her husband, Sam, asleep in his chair, didn’t hear Ida leave the house.

When the plane landed, Ida hopped on a bus and rode to the end of the line.

“This is the end of the line,” the driver said.
“Not for me,” Ida said.

She got off the bus and set up shop.

The sign read: Suck It Up Saloon. Open 24/7. Let’s talk. 

Word spread. Women came in droves to schmooze and knock back the vodka. 

“My Sam,” Ida groused, “tells the same stories over and over until I wanna sock him.” 
The women groused, “Me, too.”

“He wipes the dishes and always asks, ‘Where does this salad bowl go?’ even though I’ve told him a million times. It make me nuts,” Ida griped. 
The women griped, “Me, too.”

“He wears a hearing aid and needs a magnifying glass and shuffles his feet and makes odd noises and I hate it that we’re not young anymore,” Ida bawled. 
The women bawled, “Me, too.”

“I’m worried he’s going to stumble and trip and break a hip,” Ida sobbed. “And die.” 
The women sobbed, “Me, too.”

“I’m scared,” Ida wailed. 
And the women wailed, “Me, too.”

Then Ida and the women made a circle and held hands and stamped their feet up and down up and down up and down and screamed, “Damn. Damn. Daammmnnnnnnn!”

“I feel better now,” Ida said. 
“Me, too,” the women said. 

The next morning, a note tacked to the door of the Suck It Up Saloon read, “That helped. Thanks. Buy yourselves tulips once in a while. And wear mascara.” 

Ida tiptoed into her house. She walked over to Sam, asleep in his chair, and kissed his forehead. 

Sam opened his eyes. “Must have dozed off for a minute,” he said. 

Ida texted their children. “Come for dinner. I’m making meat loaf and roasted potatoes. It’s supposed to rain. Wear boots.” 

"I love your meatloaf, Ida,” Sam said. 

“I know,” Ida said. “Me, too.” 


                                                           Ozzie Nogg  copyright  2016


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What do we talk about when we talk about Tisha b'Av?

8/14/2016

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Tisha B’Av  2016

Today is Tisha B’Av.

Twenty-five hours of unrelenting grief 
for catastrophies that befell the Jews 
on this date during history.
Call me heretic.
Call me heathen.
Drum me out of the tribe
b
ecause today I don’t want to go there.

Today I will not mourn the fallen Temples. 
I will ignore Bar Kochba, 
expulsions, deportations. 
I will not fast,
sit on low stools,
cast dust upon my head, 
gird myself with sackcloth
or lament the tenderhearted mothers
boiling their own children.

No.

This Tisha b’Av I choose to relish dinner with old friends.
True blue forever to the moon and back old friends,
each somewhat battered, bruised and knocked about.
Spilling cioppino down our shirt fronts,
gobbling up the cherry pie,
remembering when X left his wife for Y,
remembering when we smoked pot on the train,
drank Chivas on the rocks,
kissed under the moon.

This Tisha b’Av I choose to wash my hair, 
bathe and oil my ancient thighs,
rouge my cheeks,
put on my crimson dress
and celebrate Alice’s birthday. 
We will be neither anguished nor distressed.
We will eat cake.
Speak only joy.
Shout shehecheyanu
for sustaining us and enabling us
to reach this season.

Yes.

This Tisha b’Av I choose to stick my head in the sand
like an ostrich in the wilderness.
Soon enough will His bow set me as a mark for the arrow.
Soon enough will we dwell in dark places,
our dance turned to mourning, 
our tears running down with rivers of water.
​

But today, by golly, I will not weep.


                                                             copyright 2016  Ozzie Nogg






















 

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Remembering Our Lost Olympians

8/6/2016

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Picture
A few days ago, 
before the 2016 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in Rio,
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the games
celebrate the best of humanity
and appealed for an Olympic truce, calling on
all warring parties to lay down their weapons
during the two weeks of sporting achievement.


Methinks the oddsmakers consider that possibility a long shot.
 
To find out why I’m such a cynic -
at least when it comes to nations beating their swords into ploughshares
and the lion lying down with the lamb - 

read the post below
Even this cynic chooses to celebrate the best of humanity.
'Cuz that's you, pals. 

  *                *                     *                 *                *                  *                      *                  *


Oh, how well I remember the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. Not the competitions or award ceremonies, but the grainy TV footage that showed hooded Palestinian terrorists from Black September on the balcony attached to Munich Olympic Building 31, where the Israeli delegations and athletes were housed. 

When the Israeli hostages were eventually taken by their captors to the Munich airport, there was no live TV coverage. No video of the stand-off with German police. Then, after 14 straight hours on air, sportscaster Jim McKay got the news through his earpiece. “They have now said that there were 11 hostages,” he told the world. “Two were killed in their rooms. Nine others were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.”

Before the opening of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, the International Olympic Committee officially, and for the first time, named and honored the eleven murdered Israeli athletes:

                         Moshe Weinberg. Yossef Romano. Yossef Gutfreund.
                
David Berger. Ze’ev Friedman. Amitzur Shapira. Eliezer Halfin. 

                     Mark Slavin. Andre Spitzer. Kehat Shorr. Yakov Springer. 


Springer, born in Poland in the early 1920s, survived the Holocaust and participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After World War II, he moved to Israel, became a wrestling coach and accompanied the 1972 Israeli team to Munich.
Ah, yes. The Appointment in Samarra . . . 

 
But 1972 was not the first year marked by the murders of Jewish Olympic athletes: 

Alfred Flatow (1869-1942): Medal winner at the 1896 Athens Olympics,
​Flatow - at age 73 - was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto where he died, two months later, of starvation.


Ilja Szrajbman (?-1943): Polish national champion swimmer in the 1936 Berlin Games, died in the Warsaw ghetto.

János Garay (1889-1944): Hungarian Jewish fencer won medals at the 1924 Paris Olympics and 1928 Amsterdam Games. Died in Mauthausen, 1944.

Dr. Oskar Gerde (1883-1944):  Gold medal winner in team saber at the 1908 London Olympics and 1912 Stockholm Games. Died in Mauthausen, 1944.

Gustav Flatow (1875-1945): German-Jewish gymnast claimed medals at the 1896 Athens Olympics. In 1940, aged 70, Flatow was deported to Theresienstadt where he perished.

Roman Kantor (1912-1943): One of Poland's leading fencers, competed at the Olympics in Berlin. Deported to Majdanek in 1942, he died there in 1943.

Janusz Kusocin'ski (1907-1940): World record-setter in the 10,000 meters at the 1932 Los Angeles Games. A Polish national hero, he was executed - at age 33 - by Nazis in the Palmiry Forest on June 21, 1940.
​

And, so. While we root for U.S. gymnast Aly Raisman to grab gold in Rio, let’s also remember the four Jewish women who competed with the Dutch gymnastics team in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam:














Helena Nordheim
(second from left, front row): She, her husband and 10-year old daughter were killed by poison gas at Sobibor in Poland in 1943.


Anna Polak (third from left, front row): Murdered, together and her 6-year old daughter, at Sobibor in 1943.


Estella Agsterribe (fourth from left, front row): Gassed, along with her 6-year old daughter and 2-year old son, in 1943 at Auschwitz.


Alternate Judikeje Simons (far right, front row): She, her son and daughter, were killed at Sobibor. 


Elka de Levi (far right, back row): The only Jew on the women's team who survived.
 

Jewish gymnast Mozes Jacobs and Jewish gymnastics trainer Gerrit Kleerekoper - members of the 1928 Dutch men's team - also perished at Sobibor in July of 1943.

Gone. They’re all gone. In the most monstrous ways.

And so, 

We Remember Them 
             by Sylvan Kamens and Rabbi Jack Riemer

At the rising sun and at its going down; We remember them.
At the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter; We remember them.
At the opening of the buds and in the rebirth of spring; We remember them.
At the blueness of the skies and in the warmth of summer; We remember them.
At the rustling of the leaves and in the beauty of the autumn; We remember them.
At the beginning of the year and when it ends; We remember them.
As long as we live, they too will live, for they are now a part of us as We remember them.


Amen

                                             copyright Ozzie Nogg 2016 


photograph of 1928 Dutch Women's Gymnastic Team courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC
                                            





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