Israeli Food Is Safe, for now

So, um, yeah. The Co-op last night. Utter craziness. First, a recap from the Daily Show:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Co-Occupation
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

The Story

Last night, the Park Slope Food Co-op had a special election, deciding whether to boycott all Israeli-made products. Because we are the Co-op and are totally masturbatory overprocessing Brooklynites, it wasn't actually a vote -- it was a vote about whether or not we should have a vote.

If I put it in one of my books, no one would ever believe it. You can't make this up, people.

Anyway. This international BDS movement (I keep wanting to say "BSDM movement," and really meant to slip up accidentally-on-purpose on stage last night, but forgot to), an organization that wants to boycott Israel, has been trying to infiltrate the Co-op for the past few years. It always comes up, but last night was the real boiling point. Two thousand people packed into an auditorium. Supposedly it cost over $10,000. The election would've cost another $20,000. The entire assembly was people speaking for one or two minutes. It was a LOT of people.


What I Said


I'm a walker, and I've gotten into some of the best fights of my life at the Co-Op. We're all different. We have nothing in common except for the fact that we like really good food. And that's the way it should be. I'm a vegetarian. I totally think the Co-op shouldn't sell meat. I also really hate lima beans, and I'd encourage everyone not to buy them. But I don't think it's right to ban other people from buying them. Keep listening to each other, people, and please, keep the arguments alive. Don't just ban them.

The Aftermath

• Got  home. Our boarders were like, "you're Internet-famous." Went through the Twitters, and there were a ton of references to "the hyper Hasid" and "this surfer with payos." Hey, I even got my own Twitter hashtag, which is super awesome and flattering, if ephemeral. Amy Sohn said "a star is born" about me! My friend Liz said " Highlight 4 me was @matthue on his hatred of lima beans." P.S. my mom is so gonna kill me.
• There were a lot of BDS people at the vote last night. A lot of them weren't actually Co-op members; they were just there to protest. I asked them, and they were really forthcoming about it. Totally fine for them to be there. On the other hand, they were the only ones not waiting to be admitted, which meant that the reporters got to speak to a lot more of them than anyone else--say, for instance, actual Co-op members. I'd call it "infiltration," but then again, I watched every episode of the X-Files  (not an exaggeration) and love conspiracy theories.
• I was one of the last people to speak. Itta said the people around us (big BDS shippers) didn't understand what I was saying -- granted, I'm not entirely coherent; I talk really fast and get bubbly, and the mic was really loud. On the other hand, I got stopped by a ton of people on the way out complimenting me. Granted, they were mostly old Crown Heights Hasidic ladies, but they were still awesome. 
• I still want someone to ask if I'm in favor of the BDSM movement so I can just say, heck yeah!

Pixies and Magical Miniature Butlers

Here's where I get all confessional: I kind of hate New York City.

Don't get me wrong--I love living near a zillion cousins-in-law and a gabillion kosher restaurants. But you know how people say that, in L.A., people say "thank you" but mean "f-- you" and in New York, they say "f-- you" but mean "thank you"? Well, I'd rather people hated my guts but were still polite about it.

The Village Voice just came up with their list of 50 things to love about New York. And, fresh off another shift at the Park Slope Food Coop, I fell in love in particular with #25:

25. Except in select 'hoods like Park Slope and perhaps the Upper West Side, children are viewed as mysterious beings, rarely sighted and only occasionally understood, like pixies or magical small butlers. Until they scream, in which case, they are banished from the palace.

Admittedly, we sometimes are not very good about that (example: seeing Scott Pilgrim in midtown, when our infant was totally quiet for an hour and 25 minutes and then screamed her head off during the last fight scene. (I know, go figure.) But in all other instances: yes.

I really do live in two worlds. At home in Brooklyn, everyone has kids -- often 5, 7, 12 or more. When I'm at work, or hanging out with my non-Hasidic friends in the city, though, my kids are like aliens. (Friendly, curious Gizmo-like aliens; not like Alien aliens.) They are treated with curiosity, amazement (childlike amazement, you might say) and utter wonder, the kind given to roadshow zoos and Times Square subway dancers: Do these things really exist? Can people be that cute without the assistance of Japanese animators?

In general, I prefer the Brooklyn side of things. We live there. We don't have to watch what we say, translating every Hasidic idiom we drop and making sure we don't talk about our kids too much. But the other thing about kids is they wear you out. You have other things on your mind that have nothing to do with them (job, bills, the Buffy season you're in the middle of watching), but the things that they have on their mind (food! peeing!) always involve you.

And therefore, it's a relief -- sometimes a huge one -- to remember that the island of Manhattan exists, to jump on a subway and watch your hipster friends fawning and E.T.-ing over your miniature heirs. Oh, you will say to yourself,they really ARE wonderful and miraculous -- and you'll be right.

Of course, there are limits. Whilst hanging out with my friends Jason and Emily a few weeks ago, I casually mentioned how it's hard to find a good babysitter -- whereupon they jumped at the opportunity. "Call us!" they raved. "We love kids! We won't even charge you!" You do realize, I asked them, that we get babysitters at night, when our kids are asleep? "Oh," they said, shuffling their feet. "Never mind." And then they bought me a beer -- as a consolation prize, I guess.

How to Hate the Gays

Last night I was working at our local co-op market. The crowd there is pretty diverse -- Hasidic Jews, Caribbean immigrants, Park Slope people with $50 t-shirts (ironic, baby, ironic!)...and anyone else in search of good, cheap food. Once a month, I wait in front of the store in a loud orange vest and carry people's groceries. Sometimes you get some good conversations. Other times, you can't believe the people you're talking to.

It was almost the end of my shift. An woman in her late 60s showed up (danger, my mind flashed, slow walker) asking for an escort to the subway station (another danger sign: it's 15 minutes away). I smiled and said sure. She was an old black woman with one of those hairdos that is frozen into place and pastel pink church clothes. It turned out that she lived a block or two away from me.

We made conversation for a few minutes, and I could tell she was gunning up to ask me something. (When you've got a beard and sidelocks and a t-shirt, it's only a matter of time until people ask, in one phrasing or another, what's up with you.) She prefaced it: "Now, don't feel you have to answer this..."

Oh, boy. This was going to be a good one.

She told me how she was a God-fearing, church-going woman, and she believed in every word of the Bible ("Old and New," she said). And she didn't think homosexuality was right. But what, she asked me, do I think about that man in the homosexual club?

"The gay club murders, you mean?" I said. "In Tel Aviv?"

She nodded. "I mean, I know those people have it comin'," she said. "But that thing that happened, it just seems...wrong."

This next part, I don't understand at all. I could have told her how some of the holiest people I know are gay; how the most devout Christian I've ever met was a gay man who believes that Jesus made him gay as one more way of accentuating how we'll never truly understand the mysteries of Creation, and how one of the most Godly books that's been written this generation, Wrestling with God and Men, is about the incomparable onus of being queer and religious, and was written by Rabbi Steve Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi and a gay man. Or I could just tell her how I helped start the straight-gay alliance in my high school and how a group of tranny boys showed me that being a man was okay (or just showed her the book I wrote about it).

But I didn't.

Instead, I said, "Of course it's wrong -- it's just as wrong as opening fire on people because they're spending money on the Sabbath or wearing the wrong color of clothes." I told her I believed that God made everyone the way they are for a reason, and it's not up to any of us to try and decide what that reason is -- it's between them and God."

She went "Mm-hmm" -- that kind of conversational combination of amen and keep on talking that I learned about when I was doing fieldwork in college at black Baptist churches and haven't heard anywhere else. "It's like Sodom and Gomorrah," she said. "People there were doin' all kind of Lord knows what, and God took care of them. And I know that day's coming, but I ain't gonna be the one to tell 'em that. He told Abraham and his nephew to leave that city, and only after they left, God swept down the destruction."

I said, "Who knows what God's really thinking? God's got an agenda. He didn't put us down here to be the Angel of Death; He's got angels for that. All He told us was to love our neighbors."

He? Since when had I referred to God as He? And why was I agreeing with her?

At this point, my brain split up into a few parts. Part of me was freaked that she was asking me as a typical Orthodox Jew, and I was supposed to answer like some sort of spokesman or something. And then part of me saw it as a teaching opportunity, like I was undercover as a gay-people-supporter and I could subvert all her bigoted views and show her the One True Path.

And then there was a part of me that wasn't being subversive at all, but was instead trying to reconcile my own personal beliefs about homosexuality -- as a person -- with the beliefs of everyone around me. And, perhaps, with the beliefs that I am supposed to hold.

And I realized, I'm kind of answering her truthfully. How do I know what God believes about gay people? How does anyone? For all I know, maybe God really did give the queer gene to certain people in order to test their willpower. That sure as hell doesn't sound like the God I believe in -- but, then again, I really firmly believe that God is both more powerful and more clever than anything that we give God credit for.

So, yeah -- I didn't say any of that to her. And she didn't say much more to me -- just took her bags from my hands, nodded like she agreed with me, and started to descend to the subway.

"I think you're right," she said. She'd stopped on the third step down, turned around, and cocked her head, that universal gesture of going into Deep Thought mode. "The Bible doesn't say 'Abraham destroyed the city of Sodom,' it says that God did. I'm going to think about that."

With that, she disappeared into the belly of the subway system, leaving me stunned and thinking. Of all the lessons I could have gotten from her, this was what I least expected: using texual analysis to combat hate -- or, at least, to learn how to hate more lovingly.

She was absolutely right. Man, if she walked into the club in Tel Aviv, I bet she would've given those people a hug. And possibly taught them a thing or two about how to wear floral pastels.

And more illuminatingly, I think she hit upon the basic flaw of fundamentalists -- or, at least, fundamentalists like the Tel Aviv gay club murderer: They really never read what the Bible actually says.