dear masa: thank you for the $6500 that made it possible for me to come to israel for the year. yours, shana

My supervisor in the dining hall left town for a few days last week, and as resident hot lunch lady I was put in charge of the cheder ochel from Wednesday through Friday. First order of business: bringing back a second scrambled egg day Thursday morning. I mean, obviously. Do you even know me?
But this was to be no ordinary Egg Day, but rather, Super Sweet Egg Feast Day Summer 2k7! I arrived in the kitchen droopy-eyed and morning-monsterish at the ripe hour of 5:30AM to start latrofing those betzim on the industrial-sized heating pan while my accomplice sliced onions and peppers for the return of fabulous sautéed vegetables, which have been nonexistent since my former boss quit his job last month. After cooking up four pans of the most delectable scrambled eggs you’ll ever taste outside of the Terrace cafeteria (or perhaps Pete’s Grille), I manned the portable stove in the dining hall so that my patrons could watch me cook their breakfast fresh to order. I was just throwing another pitcher of newly cracked eggs onto the grill when I heard a scratchy, rotten-sounding voice behind me:
“Now that’s the way to ruin scrambled eggs.”
Excuse me? Did I miss the memo on scrambled eggs? Do my instincts deceive me? Is there a wrong way to mix things up in a frying pan? Do all eggs not bleed the same yolk and oozy insides? Is there a better way to crack the shell to lessen the amount of pain imposed on the unfertilized being? Really? Are you actually criticizing me, queen of the dining hall, the twice-dubbed kitchen Nazi, the legendary egg-making superstar?
My thoughts were interrupted by yet another declaration:
“Honestly, every time you put a lot of Jews in a room, someone’s gonna start complaining about something.”
At that point I had too many matters to chew over to I asked Annabel to take over the fryer, while I sat down for a much needed meal of eggs, Israeli salad, and six or seven cups of coffee. And so I pondered, does the infamous stereotype hold true? In reality, are Jews as a people big enough complainers to warrant being pigeonholed as such?

That night also happened to be our second run-in with my financial savior, Masa, at the 2007 Masa Gala Event in Jerusalem. The pestival had all the ingredients to make any 18-year old from some youth movement in the States or England happy: mimes, tight-rope walkers, trumpet-players on stilts, a drum band with corresponding laser light show, and keynote speakers including the mayor of Jerusalem, the head of the Jewish Agency, and Ehud Olmert himself. Wait. Seriously? No free food, no free crap, and no open exits because of the unnecessarily tight security. The worst was right before the presentations when they had this flock of 12-year-olds lip-syncing to what is evidently the Masa theme song while doing some kind of lazily choreographed dance routine. The best was catching those random kids who got a little too ambitious with their hip thrusts and finger solutes, thus missing the beat on when to transition into a side-step disco shimmy and throwing off the whole group of preteens in matching jean and white shirt getups. God, these losers clearly weren’t hired for their singing abilities OR their dancing skills, so why the hell did I have to sit through them prancing around a stage for twenty minutes – and in the rain, mind you!
But the real question is, am I justified in my griping? Or are my complaints stemming from the fact that I’m Jewish? Am I fulfilling the prophecy of being an annoyingly clamorous Jew? Am I nothing more than a spoiled Jap from American suburbia with standards too high for my daddy’s credit card limit? Please! I come from a broken home.
Let’s look at the facts. The travel time between my kibbutz and Jerusalem amounted to longer than the duration of the entire Masa event itself, and that’s including the hour-and-a-half we passed moping in the lobby of the David Citadel Hotel drinking cold water and taking advantage of their clean bathroom with soap and flushing toilets. I spent the majority of the evening sitting on soggy grass with Jenn as far from all the noise and crowds as possible with disgruntled scowls across our faces. And let me just say, it’s a damn good thing I live on a socialist kibbutz with a free-for-all dining hall so that I could bring my own packed dinner of cucumbers, tomatoes, and a shnitzel sandwich. Like hell I’m gonna waste my Otzma stipend on overpriced, unidentifiable fried meat at an event I didn’t even want to go to in the first place.
But I’ll give Masa a little credit – they tried their best and got big-name speakers. Never mind the fact that the main messages we got from the speeches were: “Not if, but when, you make aliyah, we’ll be here for you” (head of Jewish Agency); “Blah blah blah blah big words in Hebrew” (mayor of J-Ru); and “I’m a douchebag who has no right to be treated like a celebrity right now” (Olmert). If it means anything, the all-women’s section of long-skirted yeshiva girls won the spirit award for cheering loudest after the prime minister's speech. I’ll admit that maybe if the average age hadn’t been 18, or if the entertainment hadn’t been barely appropriate for the elementary school age group, or even if I had been given something for free - an oversized t-shirt, a passport holder, a crappy pen, hell, even a tuna sandwich, just something to make my journey worthwhile - then maybe I wouldn’t whine so much.
Oh wait. I got a free cell phone charm. I take it all back.