On the following Friday morning, I took a break between my shifts at work to have breakfast with my friend Alex Margolin. Since I last saw him (almost a year ago), he had gotten engaged to a British comedienne, and I wanted to hear whatever I could about her. But I made the mistake of letting slip that I had my own news to share, so I only got the basic details before Alex's curiousity got the better of me. I keep expecting people to at least blink in surprise when I tell them that I'm gay, but I should know better than that when talking to someone who lived so may years in LA. Alex had plenty to ask me about the topic, though, having never been much involved with the issue in the Jewish world before. It was a good experience for me to explain in person the position at which I've arrived. The thorny question to debate was whether and how to tell our mutual friend, Dov, about me being gay. I was going to be eating Shabbos lunch at Dov's house the next day, and I wanted to figure what I was going to say, if anything. The big deal is that Dov is probably the most Charedi friend that I have. Unlike all the people I'd come out to so far (excepting my mother), he's not virtually guaranteed to accept my decision to seek my bashert from among the menfolk.

Alex took the role of debating against me saying anything, mainly because my natural bent was toward revealing the issue. The main question that Alex posed was why I wanted to tell Dov. What good was I trying to achieve? We acknowledged that this question is a close corollary to the query that is commonly directed at gay people by very diverse segments of the straight community: "Why do you have air your laundry out in public? Do you really need to flaunt what you're doing? Can't you just keep quiet about it?" On a certain level, that question is grossly unfair because it ignores the fact that heterosexuality is flaunted so profusely and flamboyantly by our culture on every street corner, from virtually every advertisement, from art, music, and literature, and especially from the simple everyday actions like remarking on the attractiveness of a member of the opposite sex or holding your arm around your spouse's shoulder. But life's not fair, so a witty retort of "why can't you quit rubbing your straightness in everyone's face?" isn't going to change the world's mind about anything. So I had to find some better answers than that.

On a personal level, one reason why I wanted to tell Dov was so that our friendship could be more real to me. It is very nerve-wracking to spend time with a person with any regularity when you never know when the conversation is going to touch on one of the thousand topics about which you have to dodge or engage in passive deception just to maintain the illusion of your straightness which exists in the other person's mind by default. My friendship with Dov was one of the few that I made during my years of living in Jersualem that wasn't just a superficial dance of pleasantry rituals. The friendship would be cheapened for me if I were to continue to omit a huge aspect of myself from it. Alex warned me, however, that coming out to Dov could quite possibly kill the friendship off, whether with a bang or with a whimper. While that possibility might not be the most likely, it's significant enough to demand consideration. Since I responded that I was willing to risk losing my friendship to Dov, there had to more behind why I wanted to tell him.

A few moments of thought made me realize that I also had a more global agenda. The near-total, suffocating silence that has been the traditional response of the Orthodox Jewish world to homosexuality through most of history is just starting to break in very recent years, but there is still a very long way to go before this world will have woken up enough to achieve an acceptable response. Since this frustrates me, of course, I want to do any small thing I can to pinch people hard enough to pull their heads out of the sand. If a member of one of these mostly-closed-off segments of the Jewish world were confronted with the reality of a homosexual friend, it would be a drop in the bucket toward where I want the world to go; a drop that could potentially cause some ripples. It's very hard for a person to respond with the unfeeling rhetoric that dominates most of the dialog on this topic when a familiar human face is attached to the issue. Alex replied with the caveat that it is quite possible that being confronted so close to home might merely spur someone like Dov into active negativity toward gay women and men and the needs that they might claim. Alex sensibly presumed that inducing opposition to my opinions on gayness would be the opposite of what I wanted. But although I'm not sure I was so good at communicating this to him, I tried express to Alex that even an active hatred of gays didn't seem as bad to me as the stifling, willful denial of our existence that currently dominates the scene. Still, Alex made an emotionally compelling point: it's ostensibly safer to do nothing rather than actively cause damage.

There was also another personal factor which inevitably had to color my arguments in favor of revealing: namely, my own feelings for Dov. I knew he was my type as soon as I first met him at the weekly class that he used to teach and which would I attend, so it came as no surprise when I started to fall for him. After a while, I started learning with him in a different group on a daily basis, and later still, that transitioned into me learning privately with him every night at his house, where I could get closely acquainted with his sweet wife and adorable sons. If you have any imagination at all, you should be able to picture the bubbling cauldron of emotions involved with a crush that is not only unrequited but has to be kept top secret from everyone involved. Moving away from Jerusalem was my way of extracting myself from that mess. Coming back after several months of cultivating a much saner emotional space and directly confronting a situation which use to cause me so much anxiety would be a way of proving to myself that I'd put the past behind me. Further still, successfully facing a situation where I'd likely face resistance to my decisions would prove to myself that I have the strength to stand by my decisions.

After talking so thoroughly with Alex, I was probably less sure about what to do, but I certainly had a more concrete grasp of the issues and a lot more caution. Alex and I parted with the agreement that telling would have to be done very carefully if any good result was to be expected. So what did I do? I went to lunch the next day, where the other guests were a couple of Dov's wife's female cousins. I played with the boys, who bounced off the walls as usual. The table conversation stayed pretty pareve. I had no desire to drop a cannonball into the pool right in front of people I hardly knew, so I hoped that I would be able to catch Dov in a one-on-one conversation after the meal when he wasn't so distracted by the kids. However, I wasn't able to snatch an opportunity to do this. In the process of putting his youngest to sleep, Dov wound up falling into a nap himself. I'd hung around long enough for one afternoon, so I made my farewells and thanks for the lovely meal and took my leave.

So, all that fuss and it comes out to nothing? Maybe not such a bad thing. I certainly had my motivating reasons to come out of the closet to Dov, but there's nothing that can't wait. Anyway, everybody that matters will find out pretty soon after I've got a boyfriend to introduce to them.

I just got back to Tzfat late last night. I've been busy all day working and arranging for work coverage for the next couple days, so it looks like I'll have to wait until after Rosh Hashana to finish writing about the rest of my recent adventures in the Jerusalem area. Until then, have a sweet and happy new year! G'mar chasima tova!

On Thursday night of the day of the Parker bris, Seth was working all evening, so I joined Rachel and her friends for a night out. Our first destination was the local office of Nefesh B'Nefesh where they were throwing a reunion barbecue for recent immigrants who'd come over with their help in the past year or so. I met up with Rachel at her apartment, where she introduced me to Adelia and reintroduced me to Alina, whom I'd met at the bar the previous night. I also got to meet Rachel's month-old kitten, Meeko, for the first time.

We dawdled at Rachel's apartment for a while as Adelia and Alina hedged about their decision to go to the barbecue. We finally left a little after the event was scheduled to start, which didn't bother us as we planned to arrive fashionably late anyway. We had to walk almost the entire breadth of the downtown area to get to the stop where we could pick up the right bus, and the pace was slowed by the crowds in the sidewalks of Yaffo street. This gave me the opportunity to chat with Rachel and get to know Adelia and Alina a little bit. When we finally got to the bus stop, the cheerful banter continued, but we started to get pretty darn impatient after waiting for around 15 to 20 minutes. We were just starting to walk away and hail a taxi when our bus finally arrived. The bus took its time wending around the city, and there was still a good bit of walking after we got off the bus, so by the time we reached the office building, we were all hungry for some grilled meat. The Nefesh office was decorated with banners and pictures advertising all the happy olim (immigrants), including a big banner starring Rachel and her sister. This banner had been plastered to the sides of half the busses in the country a couple months ago, but Rachel had missed witnessing these ads personally since she'd been visiting the US at the time.

The barbecuing was taking place on the office's balcony, which was crowded with people elbowing to get the next ready piece of food off the grill. The burgers were taking very long to cook, so we settled for hot dogs for our first helping. I saw a few faces that were vaguely familiar, but no one that I knew well. The other girls, particularly Rachel, bumped into more than a few people they knew, but we still wound up munching our meat in our own little circle rather than mingling much. It didn't take long for Rachel and Alina's friend, Erica, to join us. While we'd gotten to the party about an hour and a half late, Erica had arrived almost as soon as it started and had been waiting for us since then. We hung out long enough for two rounds of food off the grill and a platter of melons before deciding to seek a more exciting venue.

After a long and winding bus ride back across town, our enlarged group arrived at O'Connell's, a kosher Irish pub close to Seth's house. I got a nice rich Irish draft beer that I hadn't tried before, and Rachel educated us in the custom of tossing the peanut shells on the floor. I conversed mostly with Adelia, Rachel, and Erica, on topics ranging from family and relationships to music and beverages. Rachel showed me a cute fishtank screensaver on my cell phone that I hadn't realized I had, and we were treated to an appearance of the ultra-rare mermaid animation. It didn't take long for the cameras to come out and take goofy pictures. After a while, we were joined by Rachel's sister, Jackie, accompanied by her boyfriend, Eric, and Seth's friend, Berko, thus ending my status as the only boy in the group. We shared a plate of spicy chicken wings, and wound up our adventure sometime between midnight and one. Seth finished work at about this time and he met us outside the bar to wander around town some more, but we didn't find anything fun, so I broke away and went to bed.

It's been a long time since I've been out socializing with girl friends, almost since the middle of my college years. It was certainly great fun to get back into that swing.

The one problem with Tzfat is that (as far as I can tell so far), there's practically no social life for an American-born single looking to change the single status. Now that I'm equipped with the right gadgets to take my job with me away from home, I'm ready to wander around in other cities and restart some sort of social life. So when Eliyahu invited me to Shilo for the bris for his new baby boy, it was the perfect excuse to haul myself out to Jerusalem for a little getaway.

On last Wednesday night, I took the 9pm bus out of Tzfat and arrived in Jerusalem at midnight. After walking from the central bus station to Seth's apartment, I met up with Seth, who had just gotten off of work. He took me to a bar named Yehoshua which the owners of Seth's restaurant had recently bought. A group of Seth's friends were there, including his lovely girlfriend, Rachel. Having the right connections, Seth was able to get plenty of drinks for us on the house. I was presented with a shot of whiskey, after which I ordered a Guiness which I drank at the table with some of Seth's friends and coworkers, and then joined Seth and Rachel at the bar where I finished off with a shot of arak.

Since I had to get up for the bris in the morning, I left the others at the bar and went to bed. In the morning, I was still groggy from the previous night's travels, but I jammed in a shift of work before I left for the station to catch the bus to Shilo. Unfortunately, I timed things just a hair too close, and I missed the bus by thirty seconds. I was able to knock on the bus door as it just started to pull away, but the driver just looked at me and shook his head.

I sent an apologetic SMS message to Eliyahu, thinking I was going to miss the bris, but as I was strolling away from the bus station, I got a call from one of Eliyahu's friends who promptly offered me a ride to the bris. I had to grab a cab to get to the necessary rendezvous point, but I wasn't spending my bus fare anyway. After a few fumbles, we found each other, and arrived at the bris just in time for the cutting.

The ceremony was over quickly, and at the breakfast that followed I was able to schmooze with some friends I hadn't seen in quite a while. The bagels were good and it was all very nice. Some of the people at the bris had been on the bus I'd missed, and expressed their sympathy with the bus driver's refusal to open up. The baby's name is Binyamin Chaim. The rest of the daylight was spent travelling back to Seth's house and working.

I've officially had it with GNU Mailman. Not only is its interface hopelessly cluttered with a bajillion cryptic options, it's just downright flaky. It usually works just fine, but whenever it suddenly decides to not work, it gives no warning whatsoever nor any feedback on what went wrong, and the only available remedy is to attempt random voodoo with the above-mentioned cryptic options. The truth is that Mailman is just not designed for what I want it to do. By default, the lists created with Mailman are discussion-style lists where all members are expected to participate by posting messages to the list. But for RCBMP, I need to provide an announce-only mailing list, where only one person sends messages and all the normal subscribers only receive the messages. I've had to twist Mailman's arm viciously to get it to behave as an announce-only list, and I'm sure I've screwed up something stupid that's buried somewhere under that huge pile of poorly documented and mysteriously interacting configuration directives.

So I've decided to switch the RCBMP mailing list to Dada Mail, which provides announce-only mailing lists by default. I've installed it already, and I only have to import the subscriber list and archives from the Mailman installation before I can flip over to the new list manager. I expect Dada to be a much better fit for my needs.