The first articles of this series traced the Israelites through the desert on their way to making aliyah. The clothes they wore when they left Egypt lasted throughout their trek. Our ancestors taught us about aliyah. The clothes on today's Israelites also last longer than those we wore when we were in the States. We learned to make other things last longer, too.
On paper, we don't earn enough to survive. As a result, you, our parents, may feel that we don't make enough money, that our standard of living has been curtailed, and that we cannot afford all the wonderful things money can buy. That's true. But not entirely so.
The Israeli economy is, er, less than ideal. If I made excuses, you wouldn't believe them. After all, you read the papers, you get letters, and you're pretty bright, right? But nonetheless, we manage. How?
Certainly not with budgets. Nobody knows what bill will arrive tomorrow. Expenses seem to be created and retracted by governmental and political whim. But there's also no way of knowing when money will fall in our laps. We'll suddenly be credited with a vacation or clothes allowance, or another goody. Like any other miracle, we didn't ask for it, we didn't expect it. It just comes.
You probably think we manage on a salary. Wrong. We find it more realistic to depend on special survival techniques which have saved the Jewish people for thousands of years. Those techniques are called miracles.
The word "salary" comes from the word "salt." People were once paid part of their salary in salt. Today we use less salt, because we use our noodles. Really. Here's how:
We receive a salary in the form of a luksh. The "bottom line" - our take-home pay - is listed on the left side. That should be obvious, since we read from right to left, and there's nothing to hold the luksh in the air horizontally.
That luksh is a long strip of paper that is torn from the bookkeeper's ledger book. It lists payments, taxes, loans to the government (really!), deductions, and more deductions.
The illegible and faded carbon copy is your luksch. The salary listed on it is deducted from the negative bank balance.
Why is it called a luksch?
Well, remember Friday night's delicious chicken soup? It came with a nice helping of lukschen, right? Grab the end of one of those noodles, pull out the knots, scribble it up with a lot of incomprehensible deductions (did I mention them already?), and tear it off.
Did you say that a luksh is too thin to write on? Now you're beginning to understand the first reason why we don't bother worrying about our salaries.
Today, most people receive computerized salary statements. They are presented on a tlush, which means something that is torn off. Yes, it's a printout, but we still pay honor to the torn-off strip of noodle that we cherished in the past.
The numbers on our pay slips are the same as in the States. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. There are two minor differences.
More articles about salaries
Read about Israeli forums
Read about Jewish and Hebrew forums
Are you required to read this webpage for a course? Do NOT print out the article. It is copyrighted.
Your exercise for this article is as follows:
Copyright © David Grossman. World rights reserved. This article may not be printed, forwarded, reproduced, or copied in any way or in any medium without written permission from David Grossman.
