.

By Yael Lavie



There was really not much else I could do with my life. Not with the name they gave me. From birth my parents assigned me a life-long vocation by calling me “Yael”. During my early years I did not really grasp the full meaning of my existence. Indeed it was slightly odd when in first grade, as I was introduced to the class, all the young boys shrieked and fled to the bathroom. It was only a year or so later when my full reading skills kicked in that I mustered the courage to approach mom and dad and inquire what in God’s name possessed them when they named me after the first murdering bitch in the Old Testament.

“Wear it with pride,” they said over dinner that night (well, mom did).

“Huh?” I was baffled while chewing on my fish sticks.

“Listen, she was a great hero – saved her people. She took Sisra, the commander of an army that was about to destroy the Israelites, and killed him. It completely demoralized his forces and the Israelites prevailed,” my mother patted me on the head.

“Umm..Yeah, but first she slept with him, then drugged him with the equivalent of some biblical valium and stuck a tent peg and a mallet through his temple,” I shot back.

“Exactly,” my mom smiled. Dad was just eating his food whilst looking into his plate as if his life depended on it.

“She was a whore! You named me after a whore!” I lamented, flipping the peas on my plate with my fork/peg.

“Well, that’s one way to look at it, Yaeli, but in essence she was a woman with a purpose and agenda,” mom comforted me.

“Well fine, but I am not eating my peas then, that is my purpose for tonight,” I sulked, even though my whole agenda was to avoid eating the peas to begin with – which proved successful hence I accepted my faith right there and then.

If Yael – then Yael all the way. Clearly I had a purpose in life and by the age of 18, I was rounded up with all the other “Yaels” of my generation to accept my namesake birth right: Sleep with the enemy, no matter how gruesome, idiotic, or incredibly gullible he proved to be. That is what “Yaels” do. It’s their national obligation for love of country (at the time God was not mentioned as the country did not decree it by law, but all of us Yaels were too young to question it, so we were yet to claim our rights…)

Initially back in the day, training was pretty easy. No “pre-practice” as the undercover chief Yael, with years of “peg for agenda”, taught us the rules in a crash course:

1. Just laugh at every joke the enemy makes.

2. Don’t EVER speak your mind, no matter how hard it is not to do so.

3. Compliment the enemy constantly. And by that I mean CONSTANTLY.

4. Try to do it while barefoot.

In the beginning it was so easy to reel the enemy in that it was almost a shame to kill him. For the sake of “wanna-be-Yael” under covers, what I can share from experience is that the enemy does not need you to wear a low cut dress, be six feet tall and/or look like a model. The enemy just needs you to succumb to his every whim and ever so often make believe you’re his mother. Quite easy: Just bend your head to the right and tell him “everything will be alright and everything you want is right on the money”. From there the way to the biblical valium/peg in the temples is about 5 seconds away.

But I digress. Years of serving my namesake and society’s agenda – I and some other “Yaels” began to ponder. We wondered ‘Hold on, so we do all this for love of country – but what the hell about God? No really, it was his book that decreed us. Can we get anything back? I mean, a ‘Thank You’ note would be nice once in a while, a T-shirt… Something! Or alternatively – legitimize us in some holy way, as we do live in the age of religion, fueled by tea parties, Halacha law and burkas. So, can we get some respect please?”

The Dubai assassination was the straw that broke our camel’s back. Seriously, we go on camera…well, OK, 17 cameras to be exact, in a so called ‘clandestine’ operation – we honeybee the target whilst wearing awful wigs, and all that comes out of it is the debate about the use of foreign passports – on international media outlets no less.

That sparked our suffrage battle – it had to be done as God is witnessing whilst we have to suffer all these fools. We decided to forgo the “Thank you” notes and simply ask for a “card blanche” to heaven. The Judaic doctrine justification allowing women to literally sleep with the enemy is that, according to the Talmud (oh, just Google it), women are passive in the act of intercourse. There are rabbinical opinions that say this does not apply if the woman initiates the act; BUT there are schools of rabbinical thought fueled by hours of discussion and study by men of course, with some very good “material” that claim the original Yael’s acts were justified, because she saved the Jewish people. However, forbidden sexual relations are not justified when they save only one, or a few, lives.

Well, hell – we banded together and proved that between all of us “Yaels” whether fruitful or not we slept with enough members of the enemy to save an entire continent if not the globe and some outer planets.

It worked. As of this year we undercover Jewish female agents, infiltrating the enemy lines, are not only allowed to do so, but as the rabbi decreed – we are doing a mitzvah, a good deed equivalent to sublime charity. All “Yaels” are going to heaven.

The celebration amongst our Yael suffrage group was immense. We congratulated each other and drank, drank, drank – until the fifth vodka, when the chief Yael pointed us all to the fact that according to Judaism, there is no heaven.

Screwed again.