Men plan…

My mother, a fluent American-born Yiddish speaker, used many phrases attributable to her parents and their cohort, who had learned them in the old country. One of her favorites was mensch tracht und gott lacht! Man plans and God laughs. If I ever needed proof about the veracity of this little saying, the past few weeks provided it. It is true! God’s laughter echoes in my ears.

It’s all about the plans for our next trip to Israel, a trip that as of now hasn’t happened, despite endless seat assignments, credit card payments, and kosher meals ordered. And we are hardly novices. Over the past nearly 60 years we’ve made the trip well over 150 times. The simple lesson here is that time flies, but sometimes we do not!

This trip was to be special. True, the winds of war are howling, but we’ve already shown ourselves to be pretty calm when that happens. From that Yom Kippur day in 1973 when we sequestered on French Hill in Jerusalem with our four little kids and one ancient dog, we’ve shown true grit, feeling then, as now, wartime dread, but knowing full well that in time of war in Israel, we need to be there, not here in New Jersey. It’s not bravery at all. It’s actually a form of cowardice. Difficult to explain, but true nonetheless.

This is to be our fourth trip there since that catastrophic October 7, 2023, a day that will live in infamy, and brought fear into our hearts, as our soldiers, our chayalim, including our own grandson Aaron, were called to serve in watime Gaza.

And of course our souls are suffering alongside the hostages who are languishing in the appalling tunnels of Hamas. Let them out!

But this trip also has exciting and happy overtones. Our grandchildren, Josh and his wonderful wife Shosh, Jerusalem residents, were expecting a baby, a sabra. The due date was August 15, which as I write this, is tomorrow.

Eager to meet the new addition, we booked our tickets to be there for the birth and whatever festivities we prayed would follow the arrival of a healthy baby. A brit milah performed by the baby’s own sabba, mohel Rabbi Mark Cooper, enasconced in their family’s apartment in Arnona? Or a simchat bat, a newer tradition to honor a new daughter, welcomed heartily to a family that once knew only sons and brothers? The parents-to-be chose not to know the baby’s gender. This savta-rabba opined it would be a boy.

The family history is very compelling. Votes for gender could have gone in either direction. Shosh comes from a family of five daughters. Josh comes from a family of five sons. But the next generation is a complete mixture of girls and boys, with no pattern at all. So we all waited, just like in the olden days when belly shape was the only predictor, and was it ever unreliable! Truth to be told, gender didn’t matter. We knew our family would love a boy baby or a girl baby. Period!

Thus we booked the first set of tickets, with United Airlines, where we had already, according to their own figuring, flown over a million miles. That gave us what the airlines immodestly call status. But immodest or not it entitled us to certain perks that we enjoyed and it became our airline of choice. So we were set, until Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas made havoc with our plans and United canceled their flights to Israel indefinitely. Our millions of miles were totally worthless. And so we jumped into action.

We tried to find an airline that we thought would continue flying, beyond the obvious El Al; it became abundantly clear that finding the tickets we wanted was becoming increasingly challenging, even impossible. And then, success was ours! We booked Austrian Airlines, which was committed to making the flights. Until two days ago we received updates about printing our boarding passes 47 hours in advance.

And then, yesterday morning, we received email from my Israeli sister, indicating she was so sorry we weren’t coming. Was she being funny? No. Not at all. Austrian Airlines was canceling its flights to Tel Aviv. We really weren’t coming, unless we could rent a rowboat and get out of a landlocked European country. And the ever-trustworthy El Al had no seats leaving Vien (aka Vienna) until well into September.

We hustled and used all of our somewhat limited brain power. And then we accepted that when baby arrived we would not be there. So we made new reservations, this time getting into TLV on El Al in mid-September. Remember what I said about men planning? Obviously we’re still doing it but hoping that El Al will continue to operate no matter what the situation on the ground is!

And what about the baby? He could wait no longer. He arrived two days ago, a beloved boy as I correctly opined. So, as humans do, we are making the best of the situation, rationalizing that our arrival will certainly not have the young man driving us from the airport to Jerusalem, but it may have him treating us to cherished happy faces, and who knows, maybe even a whiff of a smile? We love him very much already. Of course we do!

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of eight. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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