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My October Surprise
So. Last week I had to pop into Rami Levy’s to do some shopping. Rami Levy is, first of all, an important businessman in Israel, but “Rami Levy” refers to the chain of supermarkets he owns. They are popular for several reasons, notably lower prices on many goods, a quality house brand, and, although I know that tastes in coffee are rather personal, I find his coffee importer to know his (or her) stuff and Viva Italia! The stores also stock an enormous variety of products, keep the place very clean, and offer cell phone accounts, including “kosher phones” for those who want to avoid the internet.
The checkout lines were not too long, and I was soon loading my goods onto the conveyer. The cashier was a Muslim lady who once helped me retrieve my lost pin number. Rami Levy cashiers are an interesting lot — young women in hijabs, middle-aged Russian ladies, and a few middle-aged haredi men. Everyone is nice and pleasant, and sometimes joking around, sometimes obviously tired. Rami Levy stores on Friday mornings and the day before any holiday is usually a nightmare to be avoided, even if it means missing some last-minute item.
My stuff was moving along, and I was packing up with my usual stunning efficiency when things came to a halt. There were two bottles of beer. The cashier wanted me to pass them over the scanner. At first, I didn’t understand… but of course. She (or her husband) has become more religious, or raised the issue with management, or who knows what?? I put the bottles over the scanner, not wanting to make a fuss, but afterwards, I began to feel really, perhaps irrationally, annoyed.
As I got out of my car at home, I said hello to my Ethiopian friend Adamahon, and asked her if she had had the same thing happen. Sure, she said. It’s because they’re Arabs, or Muslims and aren’t supposed to handle alcohol.
“I know,” I said, “and on one hand, it’s not a big deal, but on the other…”
“It’s bad if you have a lot of beer and wine, though,” Adamahon admitted. “You think, why am I doing your job?”
This echoed my thoughts exactly.
“But,” she added, “Jews have a lot of shtick, too.”
Now there’s a word you won’t find in Amharic. Shtick is Yiddish. I’m not quite sure how to define it. It’s a way of doing things, but not in the sense of methodology. If your grandson is jumping up and down on the living room couch yelling at the top of his lungs, you tell him, “Stop doing shtick!” When I lived in California and went to the Berkeley Chabad House sometimes, I was always disconcerted by the fact that the rabbis, all born and bred in the New York yeshiva world, would turn their heads aside when speaking to me. They were invariably polite, interested in answering questions, kind and thoughtful — they just wouldn’t look directly at a woman. That’s one kind of Jewish shtick that Adadmahon meant.
But the issue is more complicated than shtick or Muslim customs. After all, the cashier didn’t bat an eye to pass through a bottle of alcohol from the cosmetic section, or the alco-gel. I don’t know if religious Muslims use alco-gel; I think there were some problems with it in American hospitals when the damned stuff was put out everywhere in the wards and public restrooms.
And if she’s so religious, why is she working? The one thing I agree with in the Quran is that husbands must support their families. Perhaps she is a widow? Not yet married? Hard to tell, but she certainly is young and was wearing what might be an engagement ring with a rather impressive stone. And of course, the Muslim/Arab world is changing rapidly and in some unexpected ways. How to balance religious commitment with a job in the world external to a purely Muslim society? Even Bedouin girls are going to school these days, after all. And such challenges are hardly unique to the Islamic world. Similar concerns have been vigorously debated throughout the Jewish world as well.
I wonder what the store policy is. I wonder if customers complain. I wonder if, being in Israel, and in a store that in this neighborhood caters to a large religious Jewish population in several towns, the customers just accept that if they have to pass certain products through the scanner for themselves, it’s only a matter of being accommodating and polite… and keeping the checkout line moving… I wonder if those who buy alcohol will shift to using the self-checkout more often, or whether Rami Levy will eventually stock fewer alcohol products.
Or whether, in the future, I’ll just get my wine and beer from the cute Russian guys at Yayin Be’ir downstairs from the supermarket. They already know I like Scotch and Gewürztraminer.
Published in Group Writing
I think this restriction is ridiculous–she’s not “handling” alcohol. She’s handling a bottle. Will she not handle a bottle of medicinal alcohol? I think the restriction is about drinking alcohol, and this is a way to virtue signal. And no one is impressed. Buy your alcohol from the cute guys downstairs.
I appreciate these glimpses into corners of religion/society that usually remain outside of my ken. Thanks, Little My. I hope you’ll post more of your insights into Judaism and Israeli society. By the way, my wife and I recently spent a couple of days exploring the sights inside Jerusalem’s Old City.
Jerusalem was the most fascinating city we’ve ever visited. We hope to go back someday.
Tzomet haGush?
This is a problem in the US in heavily Muslim areas, Minneapolis in particular but not uniquely. I’ve heard of check-out people refusing to handle bacon–in a package–on the scanner. Same thing with cabbies refusing to take people carrying bottles of liquor (visible in their duty-free bags). I’m with Susan on this one. It seems to be a way not only to “virtue” signal, but also not so subtly to make you bow to her religion. Buy the liquor elsewhere. If the check-out woman is unable to do her job, she should get one elsewhere.
Yeah. I think that’s a good idea.
But it would be a good idea to let at least the manager of that store, if not corporate HQ, know the reason why.
If they start to lessen their options for alcohol, it might be because they’re selling less of it, and they’ll think it’s because their customers just aren’t wanting it any more. But that would be a false impression.
I’m curious about this “kosher phone” tech…
This story of a supermarket surprise is part of our October Theme: October Surprise.
Our November theme is “Feast, Famine, Fast.” Stop by today to reserve a day. Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.
Cell phones that have limited capability to allow for basic phone use, perhaps some texting, Waze/weather… but either limited or nonexistent browsing. See here.
I was thinking someone made phones that turn off between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. But maybe just because it’s funny.
Nah. Observant Jews aren’t at all tempted to use our phones on Shabbos. But it is impossible to have a normal phone and never see things you really wish you had not.
Where do you live Little My? Is this in the US or Israel? I live in NYC. We have a broad mix of everyone. I do recall having a Muslim woman for a cashier once at my supermarket. And for some pork she had to pick up and scan, she put on rubber gloves. I thought that was unusual at the time, but I could understand. Now that would be a problem with Jewish people too. I don’t recall ever seeing Orthodox working at our supermarkets. And what about a Hindu and beef? Interesting issue. Thanks for writing about it.
The meats are already wrapped, how does “wrapping” their hands too, really improve on that?
Now that I think of it, there’s a couple of bagel places I go to that are owned by Muslims. I order a bacon and egg on a bagel frequently, and it’s prepared and sold. Now the cooks are not Muslim, I don’t think.
I also worked with a Muslim who told me he had a cousin who owned a bar. I asked him how that was possible, and he said they didn’t drink any alcohol but they didn’t have a problem selling it.
Sometimes blood spills out from the wrap. It’s not a perfect wrap. She wanted to make sure. Sounds reasonable.
Not sure how that comports with muslim taxi drivers who won’t even have it in their vehicles.
Obviously there’s a range of perspectives.
So the guy whose cousin owned a bar, was only referring to himself/his cousin, not muslims generally.
Actually, this is not quite so.
Jews can sell non-kosher food. We can touch it and handle it. But we cannot obtain any benefit (e.g. be paid) to handle combinations of meat and milk, such as a cheeseburger.
Gotcha. Thanks.
I don’t remember. Not everyone keeps the same disciplines. And I’m sure there are differences between different types of Muslims.
I shop at Rami Levy supermarket near Maaleh Adumim, where both the staff and the customers are consist of traditional Jews and traditional Arabs. And as at our hospitals, it works quite well. Once in awhile during Ramadan, one of the Arab checkers will ask us politely to move our beer or wine down the check-out counter, and having had one of them explain themselves to us, we have been quite happy to comply. It actually makes for a warm moment. We wish them Ramadan Karim (an elevated Ramadan), and the checker gives us what sure looks like a genuine smile.
But we don’t encounter this often, either the devout Moslems don’t work in checkout, or the ones that do have become so smooth at this that it’s totally imperceptible. And again, it’s only come up during Ramadan.
Our lives here are incredibly interesting at times.
When I saw Jon’s question I immediately thought it stays on all Saturday and self-answers and and self-hangs up, like elevators with doors that stay open and stop at every floor.
re: the phones, voice-mail basically takes care of that already.
I think all of that kind of stuff is cheating, really, but nobody cares what I think.
Meat departments at Rami Levy markets are staffed exclusively by Arabs. Lots of knives yet, to date, none of them have been used on Jewish customers.
It is not a foolish objection, but quite on topic: is a workaround somehow wrong?
The answer to my mind, depends on the reason for the rule in the first place. If the rule is there to make us cognizant of it, then a workaround is totally legit. If, on the other hand, the rule is there to be followed in both letter and spirit, then workarounds would be wrong.
But if the entire point of a law is to make us aware of its existence (and not a moral wrong), then a workaround is not necessarily cheating.
One example: Jews are not allowed to carry out of their space on Shabbos.
Jewish communities have a workaround: an “erev”. This workaround can only be possible if there is shared space within a community, and some token of common ownership. So when we use the workaround, we are NOT violating the rule by breaking it, we are instead expanding what “our space” means because we have a community,
I would argue that the purpose of that last thing you mentioned might have been for people to stay at home, with their families, reading the Torah or what-not, possibly by candle-light if they’re not supposed to use electricity. It’s supposed to be a kind of sacrifice and stuff, and a “workaround” that says someone else can turn on the electric lights FOR you, and you don’t have to stay at home with your family because someone thought running a string around a city block or several city blocks makes it all one “community,” is more or less spitting in God’s eye. What did God have to do, say “stay at home, and I mean STAY AT YOUR OWN HOME!” Does God have to say ‘NO WORKAROUNDS!”
LOL. Does he stop using four letter words on the sabbath?
If you are asking actual questions, it would do you well to listen to answers from people who know what they are talking about. If you just want to provoke and accuse…stop it. Perhaps you don’t mean to come across that way, but you often sound argumentative and unyielding, particularly when you don’t seem to know much about the topic and then you dig in and make matters worse. Are you asking an honest question for which you want a detailed and nuanced answer?
No, those were brought in from outside. I know of at least two knife attacks on Jews by Arabs in Rami Levy stores.