Haredim and holding babies

A question, please:

Why go through the trouble of leaving Poland when you’re just going to pretend that you’re still in Poland when you live in Israel? At least in Poland you’re dressed appropriately for the weather, instead of imaginary weather.

Maybe I shouldn’t criticize. Maybe I’ll have a religious experience here that will make me, too, pretend that I am still living in the land where so many of us were murdered. Because, you know, those were the good old days…….Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a GREAT idea.


I guess I just thought of all that on the train back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem. The train was packed with Haredi people. And look, I don’t want you to think that I’m using the word “Haredi” too much. No, I know the difference between simply orthodox and haredi. What I mean to say is that there were men on that train who shielded their eyes so that they wouldn’t have to look at members of the opposite sex. There were men on that train who were wearing fur hats, coats, and those weird stockings things. And, of course, they were surrounded by their 8 children.

Anyway, I don’t think the woman I sat next to was Haredi. She had some really cute kids (not that haredim can't have cute kids), and I was really happy to see that her daughter was not wearing those ridiculous thick tights (or tights at all!) in this weather.

She got off in Beit Shemesh (the place where I previously had a horrible phone experience with their Misrad Hapnim), and she was managing her two kids and two babies with some difficulty. She asked me to “catch” one of the little babies and help her off the train, and of course I agreed.

I notice here that people seem to be minding everyone else’s children—“minding” isn’t the word I’m looking for. It’s not like I was babysitting the kid. What I mean is that in the US I would have been really freaked out if some stranger handed me a baby to hold. Actually, I was pretty freaked out about it in Israel, but at least I felt that it was semi-normal here. I noticed on the plane, some little Israeli kid with his mom was freaking out about something and it seemed like ALL the Israelis rushed over to provide comfort. Which is kind of sweet, but I don’t know if I’m ready to do the same. I’m very used to just trying to stay out of the way.

Anyway, the woman handed me her baby to hold for her. And I was sitting down, and when you’re sitting down, holding babies is easy. You just have to make sure they don’t hunch over and smack their head on the table in front of you. But it came time for me to stand up with the baby, and I got really freaked out because I’m not really used to holding babies. I’m the youngest child in my family and I never babysat kids. I mean, I LIKE little kids, and I love entertaining them when I do interact with them (I once convinced an entire class of small children that we would levitate if they were good. And they were good. So after class we all sat down and pretended to levitate and those kids were having a ball using their imaginations…). But little babies are different. I like them, but I don’t know what to do with them.

I tried to look at how the mom was holding the baby’s twin, and saw that she kind of had the kid wedged underneath her arm/armpit. It’s like how you would carry, say, books if both your hands were busy (as her hands were). I mean, you’d be more gentle with a football! And I figured that, whether this country has a “my family is your family” attitude or not, I was not about to hold the kid like that because there must be some unwritten rule that, even though its ima can, you can’t manhandle a stranger’s kid.

Plus there’s the whole problem of me not being pushy. When I was 13 I almost got left on a bus in Italy because, though my parents had gotten off, I did not want to push my way to the doors and be a bother to anyone by having to say excuse me and to ask them to move (unfortunately, things haven’t changed much for me since then. I’m still not very pushy in that way…good thing I came to Israel). I wanted to be like, “Lady, I’ll hold your baby for you, but I can’t guarantee that we’ll make it off the train…”

Luckily some haredi girl saw me sitting with a panicked look on my face, so she took the baby from me and helped the lady off.

Urgent thing I need to learn: How to hold babies.


Oh my G-d, more dancing vegetables on TV! What is up with this country????