It's All How You Spin It

For all the country's technological advances, there are few things in Israel more complicated for new olim than cellphone plans.  I was kind of getting used to calling our cellphone provider every month to have them explain some aspect of our bill, which varied widely from month to month.  Like many olim, I always had a sneaking suspicion that we were paying too much.  So when the opportunity to work with an English-speaking cellphone broker came up, I grabbed it.

It's his job to call all three Israeli cellphone players and negotiate the best deal for us.  I speak to him in English, he speaks to them in Hebrew and we save hundreds of shekels a month.

Theoretically.

It's several weeks later, we've moved to a new cellphone provider and, due to compatibility and reception issues, in effect, we have close to zero cellphone service.  It's a long saga, and the final chapters are, as yet, unwritten.

But here's something I noticed.

If I think about it all the time, counting how many hours have passed since the last communication, worrying about what we're missing since we can't easily be in touch with one another during the day, kicking myself for messing with a system that was working, I basically burn a hole in my esophagus.

If I think about emuna instead, about believing that God runs that world and everything that happens to us is custom-designed and ultimately for the good, the hole in my esophagus begins to heal and my blood pressure returns to normal.

I'm doing all I can to solve the problem.  Eventually, we will have working cellphones.  In the meantime, we have electricity, no one in our family is ill or injured, we aren't sleeping in bomb shelters, we have food and enough money to refill the fridge when it empties, we have landlines at home and in our offices, so we're not totally cut off from one another all day, etc.

It's all in how you spin it.