Day 238: Hafuch

Do you know who your plumber is? What his name is? Where he’s from? What his back-story is? No, you don’t know any of those things, do you? Because you don’t take the time to talk or listen to your plumber. Maybe you’re busy with work. Maybe you don’t speak Spanish or Polish. Or maybe you’re just an elitist pig.

Well here in Israel, we take time to talk to our plumber, or at least listen to him share his entire life story.

Adi the Plumber was here a few weeks ago, and it’s fair to say I know more about him than I do about my own children. Adi struggled in school in Israel but when his family moved to Singapore at age 10, he did much better. In the late 1960s, Singapore was a young nation just starting to kick ass, and it looked to Israel for military expertise after Israel kicked so much ass in the Six-Day War of 1967. Adi’s father worked for the military and was hired by the Singapore government to help build the Singapore air force, which was non-existent at the time.

Before Adi was a plumber, he also worked on planes. Before that, he lived in our neighborhood and went to Aran, the school where our kids go. Currently, his grandkids go to Aran, and I’ve since seen Adi on the block picking them up from school.

If you’d like to know more about Adi, he is an amateur musician and some of his work can be found on YouTube. His main source of income, however, is plumbing, as he charges approximately $60 for about 10 minutes of actual work.

I admit that chatting with Adi was pretty interesting, as I learned quite a bit about his family and the history of Israel. But the whole situation seemed pretty strange because I was once, like you are now, a privileged jack-ass who demanded service from my workers, not conversation.

This experience was one of many demonstrating that everything in Israel is hafuch. 

Hafuch is pronounced ha-FOOCH, but the ch is not pronounced like the ch in choo-choo train. Rather, it is the wonderful Hebrew letter chet, pronounced like the ch in the familiar Hebrew saying L’chaim! (“To life!”), which even the most Gentile of you has heard when Jews make a toast.

Hafuch means backwards, upside down, or inside out. A broader, more liberal definition includes anything that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. In other words, something that’s screwed up.

The more time I spend in this strange land, the more I realize how hafuch everything is here.

The COVID situation is hafuch. Anti-vaxxer Israelis are forging vaccination certificates, and Israel bought so much vaccine that it’s now selling doses abroad.

Politics is hafuch. Israel has had four elections in two years because Netanyahu can’t maintain a coalition. But he somehow keeps getting the most votes in each election, thereby getting yet another chance to build a coalition. The Boss’ hairdresser shared some of his wisdom on the topic of politics: All politicians piss in the pool. Some, like Biden and Netanyhau, piss while they’re swimming. And some, like Trump, piss from the diving board.

History is hafuch. Earlier this week, we spent the day on a kibbutz in southern Israel with one of the Boss’ cousins, Yael. Turns out that Yael’s grandmother, mother, and aunt were on the “Kastner train,” which left Hungary in June 1944, made a strange, extended stop at the German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, and eventually made its way to Switzerland, where approximately 1,600 Jews found safety. In exchange for this freedom, Kastner (a Hungarian Jew) gave Adolf Eichmann (the German SS officer in charge of deporting Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz) gold, diamonds, and lots of cash. Kastner was initially praised for saving so many Jewish lives, and he emigrated to Israel in 1947 where he became an important government spokesperson. Soon, however, allegations surfaced that he’d been a Nazi collaborator, an Israeli judge ruled that he had “sold his soul to the devil,” and he was assassinated in 1957. Though the Israeli Supreme Court ultimately overturned the lower court’s ruling, Kastner’s legacy is controversial. (As a Jew and a history teacher, I strongly encourage you to do some Googling of your own.)

The weather’s hafuch. Two weeks ago in mid-March, it was 90 degrees.

Birthdays are beyond hafuch. Every one of the 30 dudes on my basketball WhatsApp group felt the need to wish one dude happy birthday with orange basketball and birthday streamer emojis.

The money and time spent on kids’ birthday parties is egregiously hafuch. OG turned 10 in March and Broosevelt and Noni turned 7. The Boss spent many hundreds of dollars on cakes and for a guy to juggle with fire, walk on stilts, and eat our pizza.

Our most recent tiyul (trip) was hafuch. Nearly all of the tiyulim we’ve been on this year have been with the Boss’ aunt and uncle. A couple of days ago, however, the six of us did our own tiyul to the north where we hiked around a nature reserve and splashed through shallow rivers. On the drive back, as we climbed through the hills surrounding the Jordan Valley overlooking the ancient city of Jericho, we should have been listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo or some other spiritual shit. Instead, I was forced to listen to the Boss belt out “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips.

Pesach (Passover) was hafuch. For the first time in our lives, we celebrated Pesach in Israel. Should’ve been a special day. A symbolic day. A day to remember. The only thing I’ll remember is that I was stuck with all the kids in a Tel Aviv suburb with one side of the Boss' family while the Boss spent eight hours in Jerusalem with the other side of her family sipping wine and snacking on matzah.

There’s a teacher here who’s most definitely hafuch. Your first grade teacher was likely a nice old lady with grey hair and glasses; Broosevelt and Noni’s 1st grade teacher (Shulamit) is a straight-up bitch. The Boss asked Shulamit if she could send cupcakes to school for the kids' birthdays. Despite the fact that everything in this country happens at the last minute, Shulamit insisted that the sending of cupcakes be planned far in advance. Yelling ensued, and the Boss and Shulamit officially have beef (again).

Panini epitomizes hafuch. In theory, she’s studying for her bat mitzvah, playing soccer three times a week, doing her best in an impossible English class, learning advanced Math in Hebrew, trying to keep up with both her Israeli neighborhood friends and her international school friends, and dealing with the trials and tribulations of being a tween. In reality, her soccer team has lost its last three games by a total score of 26 to 2, she doesn’t know how to combine like terms, she recently moronically complained that her “french fries tasted like potatoes,” and the other day on our glorious hike, she exclaimed, “I have another case of rashy thighs.”

OG is hafuch in her own special way. She and all the native Hebrew speakers/readers/writers in her class took a Hebrew reading comprehension test. She scored near the top of her class. I still don’t get it. What I also don’t get is how sweet little Ms. Rainbow Zebra tried to play her parents by asking the Boss if she could have friends over, and then when the Boss said no, she asked me the same thing. I said yes, the friends came over, and the Boss was not pleased. I was also not pleased, but I do respect the power move. You would think someone with this evil intelligence would finish her homework and not spend all day on the couch in a filthy Snuggie.

Broosevelt’s making me hafuch. He is obsessed with numbers: counting how many days until the Boss’ 96-year-old saba (grandfather) turns 100, the age of NBA players, and the height and weight of Pokémon. The other day as I was doing my business in the bathroom, I was fully engrossed in my reading material about the Ground-Fire Legendary Pokémon Primal Groudon.

Boni used to be a loser American with no Israeli friends. Now her world is hafuch: her social calendar is full and everyone wants to have a play-date with the silky-haired, gap-toothed grilled-cheese eater.

One final note: We’ve decided to stay in Israel for another year! Every day is beautiful here, the kids speak Hebrew and have friends, and the Boss is tan and slender. Wish us luck.

P.S. April Fool’s! As planned, we’ll be back in August. We figured that right as my Hebrew was really starting to pick up and right when I’d found a weekly basketball game and made some tennis friends and found my footing at work, we’d get the hell out of here.

Hafuch.