No one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him (1 Thessalonians 4:6)

The first word you learn in Hebrew is "balagan," which means chaos. A close second is "frier," which means sucker or pushover. Whereas the former is acceptable, said in witty jest, the latter is unacceptable, spoken as a staid insult. This reveals a lot about Israeli culture: They can deal with progressing amid chaos, but not being taken advantage of or taken for granted. Some natives have told me that the obsession with not being a frier comes from persecution in the past, especially the resignation during the Holocaust and the prorogation of the Israeli state, two things Jewish people have vowed to never let happen again.

However, the manifestations of the frier mentality seem much more banal. Not being a frier means weaving through lanes of heavy traffic just to get two car spaces ahead. Not being a frier means leaving your stuff on the checkout counter to keep your place while you finish shopping. Not being a frier means refusing to put up with foreigners' feeble attempts to speak Hebrew. Me, I'm a frier. I am not aggressive enough to nose up so another car can't merge in, to hold my spot with a gallon of milk, to continue to speak stilted Hebrew even when people respond in English.

Despite how hard the frier mentality is to cope with sometimes, I can accept most of these displays as the cultural differences they are. However, I find it hard to deal with others assuming that an honest mistake is an attempt to make someone look the frier. For example, my landlady has accused our dog of pooping on her lawn (which is really our lawn), even though he has never done so (and her mutt has). Just recently, she told Tim to make sure the newspaper was delivered on our driveway, not hers. We never had any intention of soiling her yard with turds or her driveway with ink, but she still issued a pre-emptive anti-frier strike. She wanted to win a battle of wills that we didn't even plan to enter.

I hate being accused of bad deeds I never even imagined (especially when true allegations of my villainy can be levied). I feel the two possible responses -- confrontation or oblivion -- are confining. I can barely call to order pizza, much tell someone face-to-face that their dog is the defecator, so confrontation is out. And unfortunately, my racing brain won't let me remain oblivious; seriously, I've lost sleep thinking about how I would have to call newspaper customer service (egad, a phone call!) to change the delivery location. So a third response, insecurity, results, sparking off a viscious circle of frierity (yes, I just made that word up).

Case in point, the other night, my landlady's boyfriend woke me up to move my car, which was blocking a neighbor from opening the gate to her driveway. I had no way of knowing that my car was in the way; there was no sign and therefore certainly no malintent. But after I backed up my car three inches so she could get in, she shouted from her car window: "Aren't you going to apologize?" Startled, I could only reply with a lame, "I'm sorry," sealing myself as the frier in this situation.

As with many similar cases, I later thought of better comebacks that would have made her the frier, and strangely, I wanted to seek some revenge so I could end up with the "win." Because I knew the former was impossible and the latter was immature, I vowed to not let the next person get the best of me. It was then I realized: My neighbor's insecurity about losing her last dispute had migrated to me, and I would pass the torch when I tried to win my next showdown; I was only a single stop in the spread of the frier mentality. And so it goes.