Houses, big and small - The Jewish Standard

I spent many years working as a real estate broker at a large New Jersey company. Every Monday our sales staff would tour our office’s newest listings. My personal, private game at these visits was to see if I could tell which of the houses we visited were owned by Jews. It was actually very easy! We Jews put up an obvious marker on our houses. It’s called a mezuzah, and in all those years, there was hardly ever a Jewish home on our tour that didn’t have at least one on the front doorpost. Observant Jews also have multiple mezuzot in the interior, but even the most secular usually honor the tradition by hanging one at the entrance to the home.

Thus when my husband began drawing the plans for his latest construction project, tiny mezuzot were obviously included. He was building dollhouses for two of our great-granddaughters. The two houses are modest three-story colonials, each with one bath. They are simple, classic, and without a hint of gilt. One has an attached swing, per the request of the 2 1/2-year-old owner, who also requested that the exterior be a garish shade of purple, her favorite color. The other is also purple, since there was extra paint left over. Actually there may soon be a third, and there is enough paint left for it also to be painted purple. I encouraged my husband to put in a second bath, or at least a lavatory, but there’s simply no room. He did, however, add a second entrance on house two, instead of the swing. The wallpaper is plain and practical.

In each case the house will be only partially furnished, so the new owner can add personal selections. There is a vast overpriced variety of dollhouse furnishings available on the internet, and a significant market for them. Mostly they are for little girls, but in truth, there is nothing girlish about a dollhouse and we welcome requests from the young gentlemen in our crew. Are you listening, Lior, Elchanan, Nael, Jonah, and Gabriel?

Our simple little dollhouse construction project is a loving tribute to our progeny who live in various parts of America and Israel. Even though they are very young, we respect the input of the new owners of the houses. We consider their opinions in design and decor and try to work within the parameters that they choose. The houses are for them, their siblings, and their future siblings. They should be lovely and inviting, warm and homey, and always in good taste, except maybe for the purple paint jobs. They should be built with economy and serve the needs of their owners.

Contrast that to our White House, a house that we, the American people, cherish and call our own. It is a house of our history and we celebrate it, even though most of us will see it only in photos or on television. It’s a beautiful house, the scene of many dramatic events relevant to our America, a home and setting that brings all of us immense pride. It is with much regret that many of us feel that our special place is being usurped and tack-i-fied (def: to be made tacky, vulgar, tasteless) by the present resident, who has never learned the meaningful adage that less is more.

There have been so many dreadful shlocky abuses at our nation’s house and environs that it is increasingly difficult to cite them all. Many have been simply in the poorest taste. Many have been simply illegal. Nonetheless destruction continues, followed by construction, with costs always being excessive.

Our president, who should be focused on solving the preponderance of enormous threats and catastrophic world problems, many self-wrought, is instead most concerned with rebuilding and decorating a property in which he is thankfully merely a short term tenant. His modus operandi is to seek no serious consultations with the property owners or their legal representatives and to plunge forward until any attempt at ceasing and desisting is rendered meaningless by the advanced state of presidentially ordered unauthorized demolition. Certainly the landlords among us would wisely never seek such an occupant.

Hence the East Wing debacle, an enormously expensive fiasco where a building was demolished without permission, leaving in its stead a huge crater filled with debris on the sacred grounds of our nation’s house. If a terrorist, or an ordinary citizen, had come along and caused that level of damage, there is no doubt he or she would have spent innumerable years rotting in our country’s most vicious prison. Instead this act was perpetrated by the malevolent president, a person who causelessly glorifies himself and loves the sobriquet sir, who paid no price for the destruction and who will pay nothing for the creation of a gaudy, tasteless ballroom to match his gaudy tasteless decor in the attached house. Ladies and gentlemen, we may find the structure to be unacceptable in every way but know this: you and I will pay for it!

Also know that the idea to now represent this in the shades of national security is truly putting a blindfold on our citizenry. It’s actually an afterthought to justify the ballroom by fabricating it as a security structure. In other words, it’s a lie, from a man who lies constantly every day of his life, fooling practically no one. Donald wants a fancy ballroom and he will go to any lengths to have us build it for him. It is immaterial whether we want it or not and it is certainly immaterial whether it will serve our country in any beneficial way. He wants it, more than he wants an end to exorbitant gas prices, a peaceful resolution to a dreadful war, and soaring consumer prices. He wants what he wants when he wants it and the rest of the world be damned!

We all know this to be indubitably true. Donald’s excesses can be found throughout the District, from the gaudy gilt in the West Wing, to the tour de Trump, to the reimagined Rose Garden, reached via the embarrassing Presidential Walk of Fame with its evil depiction of President Biden as a pen, to the humiliating national disaster of what should have been the careful and legal repair and painting of a historic reflection pool that ended up with the false arrest of innocents, to the major damage to the WH lawn that is now also hunting for non-existent villains, we are in the hands of a man gone astray, a man gone awry, a man with advanced paranoia, a man who should never have sought public office due to his unsavory background and fabricated avoidance of military service, and his combination of enhanced chutzpah combined with total incompetence. Ladies and gentlemen, I present our president.

May he soon be evicted from our house!

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 12. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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