The saga of the refrigerator

Has it been four visits or five? I forget. That's how many times a refrigerator repairman has come to our apartment to fix our new fridge. He came again last week. And the verdict is in. We need a new fridge because this one that we purchased a year ago is leaking freon, or gaz as the repair guy called it. Fixing it might not even fix it for good, and the cost will approach that of a new fridge.

So I return again to Rabbi Hershel Schachter and his confident remarks that Israel has all the latest inventions and is not lacking in anything.

I'm researching for new fridges, and part of that research is going to various fridges around town and checking their level of cold. I'm finding that many of them are warm. One was sufficiently cold, but most have not been.

So I asked around with the following question. "Is your fridge at home cold? The one in my office is warm and it seems that the food in there is spoiled. The cheese is warm. I have the same problem at home. I have seen this with many fridges in Israel. They don't seem to work."

Here's the first reply so far. "Yeah ive had that problem alot in Israel."

Next reply from a woman who lives in Florida but has numerous Israeli friends and has been here numerous times. "My fridge is fine. I think that's an Israeli thing."

Nice to know it isn't just me. Or maybe it's not nice to know.

Has RHS checked out any actual refrigerators, or does he just assume that since in his view geulah has arrived that the refrigerators work just fine? I'll bet the one in his million dollar apartment in Manhattan is swell. 

What he's trying to do is what many aliyaniks try to do which is to say that Israel is the same as America so you are required to move there since it's a mitzvah. But it isn't the same. It's not even close. He's making up stories. Nefesh b'Nefesh does this too. I remember at one of their events a tall thin guy telling us how he got a medical procedure in Israel and it only cost him 10 shekel. He held up his medical card as some kind of physical demonstration of the truth of his statement.

That's called a prop. If you lie with a prop, people think you told the truth. Medical procedures do cost money here. We have been billed hundreds of dollars. And besides that, you wait six months for the procedure and they use outdated methods. Many times they can't do the procedure at all. I know a family that flew an infant to a hospital in America to do a procedure. It is not even a famous hospital, but one in a minor city in the South. 

Health is serious business. And refrigerators are also serious business. At my office yesterday, we had to throw away one hundred dollars in food because it all spoiled. At my house, people have become sick from spoiled food. The food wasn't old. It was in a new fridge that didn't work because Israel does not have the latest inventions. It doesn't necessarily have inventions that work at all because my fridge in America worked fifty years ago. This is a junky place and you better know that before moving here.