Susan's Musings

Educated and Clueless

There are weeks when I want to grab my husband, children and grandchildren and sail off to an uncharted island, cocooning us away from the rest of the world. Needless to say this idea has serious downsides including that I have yet to effectively grow anything in a home garden and that this voyage would render my library card useless. I’m not even sure that Google Earth, let alone government satellites still allow for the existence of uncharted islands.

Nonetheless, the desire to block out a confused world remains strong. After hearing of the president’s “evolution” on same-sex marriage last week, one of my son’s friends told me that among his peers are those who have strong religious beliefs. They agree that following God’s word on organizing both families and society leads to more successful and long-lasting results.

But, and this is a big but, they also believe that if they vote according to those beliefs, they are not good citizens. Years of higher (mis)education have convinced them that a Marxist can take his views into the polling booth; an atheist can vote his convictions; someone who believes that his cactus tells him how to vote can follow his plants’ imagined conscience, but that the good citizenship forbids one to take religious beliefs into account when voting. These are intelligent, personable and well-intentioned young adults. They are also abysmally ignorant as to the foundations of America (while waving diplomas that inform them that they are superbly educated).

I would like to think my son’s friend misunderstood his peer’s comments.  I fear he did not. Years ago, a very bright graduate student told me how shocked she was to discover that the wording of the First Amendment to the Constitution, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” did not mean that Congress was forbidden to show any respect for religion.

If I had an island I could ban ideologically biased newspapers, manipulative books, TV shows or movies and teachers with an agenda.  In the real world, however, these influences are pervasive.  The onus is on each of us to articulate to our children ideas which are so fundamental that we assume they don’t need to be stated. Unless we make sure that our input is paramount we risk our children’s opinions being formed by other.

 

50 Pounds of Potatoes (April 2010)

At the end of the meal, after proclaiming in a loud voice, “Thank you HaShem (God); thank you Grandma,” three year old Eli noticed that everyone at the table was looking at him. He explained to the group, “I like to thank both those guys.”

This pretty much sums up our Passover. With God’s blessing, we had all our children and grandchildren around the holyday table for the first time in a number of years. While I spent many hours preparing the food for the seventeen to nineteen people at each meal of the eight day celebration (including ten festive meals), it truly was a labor of love.

This is not to say that it also wasn’t a lot of work. The planning started weeks in advance with a lot of unknowns. Would we have a very pregnant daughter at the table or a post-partum one? Or maybe the eagerly awaited family member would arrive during the festivities? Would we have a sparkling new and large kitchen to work in as well as extra bedrooms available or did the east coast winter snowstorms put another daughter’s planned move into a new home behind schedule?

Well, we are still waiting for the baby and about two weeks before Passover it became clear that a tiny kitchen would have to suffice and that we would need to impose on generous neighbors for beds. We rented an extra refrigerator, bought a counter top convection oven and moved the organizing/cleaning/shopping/cooking countdown into high gear.

Is Passover an easy holyday to make? No. But it is hard to think of anything that is worthwhile which doesn’t entail great effort. While this year had its specific complicating factors, other years have featured my own newborns, ovens and refrigerators that conked out, and a variety of other family and technical hurdles to overcome. Still, while I appreciate the times we have spent Passover at friends or relatives as well as the availability of hotel Passover programs, my favorite years are like this one, when we are blessed enough to have the strength and time to do all the preparations and gather our family around our own table. The “easy” Passovers, when others do the work, can be wonderful, but they always feel a bit “Passover style” to me rather than the real thing. Not only are the weeks of preparation an intrinsic part of the celebration, but while the food may be delicious elsewhere, it doesn’t include those items whose smell and taste trigger the explosion of Passover memory receptors.  And had anyone other than I done the cooking, I would have missed out on my grandson placing me in such illustrious company.

As my mother always said at the holyday’s end each year, “May the same hands that put the Passover dishes away this year take them out again next year.” Amen.

 

Barbie, Queen of the Prom

An article about over-provocative high school prom dresses in last week’s Wall Street Journal got me reminiscing. Not about my own prom or my children’s; proms are not a part of observant Jewish life. Instead, my memories are of a board game I played as a girl – Barbie, Queen of the Prom. The object of the game was to be the first player to collect everything your Barbie needed for the prom. My memory is a bit fuzzy on exactly what was required, though I do know a date and dress were two essentials. Four people could play and there was quite a bit of competition to get the best boy (Ken, of course – some poor white-haired lad named Poindexter was always last picked) and prettiest dress.

As a child playing the game with my friends, Barbie seemed very mature and sophisticated.  Surely, by the time you went to your high school prom, you were grown up! And indeed, when high school proms began to be popular in the 1930’s and1940’s, eighteen year old students were usually mature and responsible. High school prom was often engagement night, especially for young women. The earliest proms were akin to a debutante ball for those not in the upper social echelon; a way for middle-class families to mimic the debutante balls which introduced upper-class daughters to society as women of marriageable age. I may be confusing this with Victorian England, (I have a severely restricted research budget for this Musing) but in the college proms of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s men might have even worn gloves so as not to touch the skin of the young ladies.  Those same young men by age eighteen were already, or on the threshold of being, financially responsible for themselves.   So at a time when these formal dances were strictly structured and meant as an acknowledgment of one’s grown up status, the participants truly were standing at the entry to adult society.

That is quite different from what goes on today. Certainly, renting hotel rooms after the dance was over was not a feature of much earlier eras.  Nor was the expectation that marriage might be a decade, or more, in the future. Today, we take nubile girls and testosterone poisoned boys nowhere near emotional maturity and place them in a romantic milieu, after having immersed them with an education which insists that there is no absolute morality. To me the Journal article highlighting how some schools monitor dresses, even providing pictures showing what skin may be shown and what skin must be covered, seemed quaint. Certainly one can understand the desire of administrators to keep the evening from looking like auditions for Amsterdam’s red light district. But is a dress code anything more than providing a box of Band-Aids to victims of a horrific crash?

As I said, I have no emotional connection to prom. Perhaps I am viewing it through cynical and jaundiced eyes. Does the evening have a value which escapes me? I’d be curious to hear another view from those who still see high school proms as not just an exciting evening (tornadoes can be exciting as well), but also as a beneficial and constructive experience in their children’s lives.

 

 

 

What's Right with the Teenage Mind and Wrong with Society

Thinking “I told you so” is gratifying. Saying it might be crass, but thinking it  feels pretty good. Reading a Wall Street Journal article entitled, What’s Wrong with the Teenage Mind? I definitely underwent an “I told you so” moment.  My husband and I tried as best we could to structure our children’s upbringing according to 3,000 year old Torah principles rather than to the latest issue of Psychology Today. After all, when the newest fad passes you don’t get a chance to press “rewind”. For instance, if you teach your children to call you by your first name when the currently reigning psychologist explains how that will foster closeness, you will struggle to regain lost authority five years later when the most recently crowned psychologist rejects that reasoning. 

One commonly accepted view that my husband and I disregarded was a prevalent concept of “adolescence.” We did not accept it as an inevitable stage during which our teenagers would automatically behave recklessly because their prefrontal cortex wouldn’t fully develop until a few years later.  We certainly expected their judgment to improve as they matured, but we were never tempted to excuse destructive, impulsive behavior by blaming it on biology. We anticipated their making proper choices and overwhelmingly, they delivered.

The author of the WSJ article cites the latest studies showing that real life experiences drive the maturation of the impulse controlling parts of the brain. She mentions how cultural psychologist Barbara Rogoff studied Guatemalan Indians and found that their children could handle machetes quite competently. Yet western teenagers basically sit in classrooms, an activity which often starts when they are toddlers and continues for years on end. They may very well be acquiring information; they are not acquiring wisdom. Wisdom means understanding how the world really works. It comes from interacting with people and things, slowly developing a variety of skills. This is best achieved with a mentor who gradually accords his or her disciple greater independence. Information has potential value, but activating its potential means applying, practicing, testing, reassessing and utilizing the raw data.

As our children grew, we helped them develop skills. At tender years they worked in the kitchen, using the stove and sharp knives at ages which would have made Child Protective Services uneasy.  They learned to read charts and check the gauges in a boat’s engine room, to care for infants and toddlers, to do their own laundry and to earn money in ways which probably didn’t meet child labor laws. In varying degrees they learned to sew and work with wood and how to use public transportation and navigate bureaucracies. They studied as well, but book learning and safe, cocooned adult-directed activities didn’t consume their entire time. As they proved themselves capable of shouldering responsibility we gave them more freedom, and for the most part their teenage years were a delight.

While discussing the later arrival of impulse-control in today's times, the author of the above article also says, “…for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age.“ For those of you who don’t have time to wait for the next psychological revelation to explain the mysterious reasons for the earlier onset of puberty, let me suggest an important component.  I believe that just as our actions influence our brain development in the prefrontal cortex, they also influence our hormones.

As a society we now give our children less and less freedom to roam and ramble and to push their physical limits. We provide them with an increasing number of electronic gadgets keeping them entertained and isolated in the home rather than playing in the streets. We organize their sports, arts and learning rather than allowing them independence. We do this (in my opinion usually to a much greater degree than is necessary) in the name of protecting them from the dangers which lurk outside. But at the same time we expose them to levels of sexuality which would have ranked as pornography in earlier times. We dress five year old girls like tramps and think it’s cute when little boys learn to parrot lewd expressions. This past week I was in a hotel room and flipped through TV stations. Three minutes of a popular show aimed at pre-teenagers were so brazen that I couldn’t watch it.  We force our children to lose their innocence in sexual education classes and bombard them with too much information as mommy and daddy host a revolving door through which boyfriends and girlfriends pass. We force intimate, private actions onto a public stage and we push our children into front row seats.  Lacking a shared moral compass in our society we contribute to early puberty with premature and excessive exposure to sexuality.

There may be satisfaction in seeing the world come to accept something which I never doubted. But I would gladly give up that satisfaction and instead be part of a correct-thinking community. It is incredibly difficult to defy the downward gravity of a society bent on devolution. Those of us who believe in timeless truths rather than transitory trends have a hard path to hoe – preferably shoulder to shoulder with our children as we guide them along.

 

Real Controversy

Forget Gingrich vs. Romney; forget the Keystone pipeline and recess appointments without a recess – a truly controversial issue recently reared its head again. I speak, of course, about sixteen year old Laura Dekker’s successful solo circumnavigation, granting her the title as the youngest sailor to do so.

Well, actually the completion of her trip generated no controversy. Why not? The reason this wasn’t headline news was that her trip included no Maydays or other crises.  After winning a court battle with Dutch authorities who attempted to stop her because of her age, Laura headed out and finished her voyage in just about one year. While her exploit may not be standard fare for sixteen year olds, neither is she utterly unique. In June and July of 2010 I wrote two Musings (Outrage; Split Opinion) about sailor Abby Sunderland’s less successful attempt. Her trip did indeed become the main focus of outrage for a few days that summer when the media enjoyed ratcheting up suspense about her survival. Very few of my Musings have generated such a stormy response.

Few things arouse a good society’s passions more than children being hurt. In its essence, that is the motivating factor behind the pro-life movement. Those who favor abortion also want to protect children; they disagree on the definition of ‘child’; not that it is wrong to kill one. That is one of the reasons why as sonograms and science make it harder to dismiss a fetus as simply a clump of cells, fewer young people are staunch pro-choice advocates.

However, we can focus overly much on protecting our children’s bodies without gauging how much we are crippling their spirits. We live in a society where threats of law suits turn playgrounds into physically safe but infantilizing places and where school and government edicts intrude on the rights of parents to assess and make decisions for their individual children. I know many of my readers are appalled at the idea of a sixteen year old single-handedly piloting a sailboat. Why couldn’t she just play a simulated video game of an around the world trip?

While most people agree that the government should intervene where children’s well-being is threatened, that sentiment can be a dangerous one. There is general consensus that beating a child until he is unconscious is abusive while insisting on piano practice before computer time isn’t. However, it is harder to agree on the huge gray area between those extremes. Parents are imperfect beings; some more and others less so. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “No one pretends that parents are perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that parents are the worst people to raise children except for all those other choices that have been tried from time to time.” I, for one, am glad that the decision to let Laura sail was made by her parents rather than by the Dutch government. 

If you are in the Charlotte, N.C. area, I hope you can join us for one or our events there.  I'd love to meet you

I Didn't Mean to be a Witch

Most book titles mean something only if you are familiar with the contents of the book. There is nothing particularly descriptive about the words, Little Women or Tom Sawyer. The titles evoke a reaction only because the books are well known. More intriguing names like The Red Badge of Courage or The Scarlet Letter are also only meaningful after reading the book. Even a short plot synopsis doesn’t automatically let you know that this book will be one of those that becomes a classic and which you might find yourself reading over and over. Four sisters during the Civil War years go about their daily lives, maturing from girlhood to womanhood. Not terribly gripping, is it?

The above doesn’t apply to one of my favorite reads, I Didn’t Mean to be a Witch. This mother’s lament at not always measuring up to her image of what she should be, grabbed me at the title. The author, Linda Eyre, had previously written a best-selling book with her husband, Teach Your Children Values, which evolved into a series of books like Teach Your Children Joy, etc. That information was enough for me to know that this book wasn’t going to be sordid tale of drugs or promiscuity. Indeed, I Didn’t Mean to be a Witch echoed my internal cry when I didn’t live up to my own standards. I enjoyed the book, but the title stayed my favorite part through the years. Just looking at it on the shelf could make me laugh and buoy my spirits. The book still fills that purpose for one of my daughters who has “borrowed” it, finding it reassuring after a disappointing day.  

This is all to say that I truly appreciate a clever title. Especially after laboring over the chore of selecting titles for my husband and my books and audio CDs, I value the time, creativity and frequently the angst that accompanies naming a creation. So, rather than skipping over the name of a professor’s book, which was mentioned only as a means of establishing his credentials in a recent Good Housekeeping magazine, I took the extra second to read his book’s name. Unlike Linda Eyre’s book, where I paid for a copy just to have the title peeking out of my shelf with the contents being an added bonus, this book’s title convinced me not to even order it from the library. Having not read it, perhaps I am misjudging it, but if that is the case then the author and publisher made a really big marketing mistake.

What would you think is the message of a book called, You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10 to 25? To me it says that a fair number of my children, who are functioning perfectly well as adults, should still be treated as—and think of themselves— as adolescents. Why I would want to confer immaturity on them and added responsibility on me is beyond my comprehension.  In a tepid approximation of research (I have a rather limited time each week to devote to this blog), I did look the book up on the Amazon website . Guess what I found? This is a new and revised edition. The 1997 edition was titled, You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10 to 20. I don’t know how to write sounds of me shrieking in the background, but if I could, I would. Perhaps the comic book rendition, “AAARGH!” says it best.

In a world where I feel increasingly out of step with what are considered mainstream ideas I want to take this opportunity to thank you for making  me feel less alone. To those of you who, like me, think that adolescence as a concept should be severely limited; who believe that “old-fashioned” values never go out of fashion and who struggle to be not only better parents but also better spouses and citizens in a society which increasingly makes all of those undertakings difficult, here’s to making our voices heard in 2012.

P.S. I am alternately excited and hesitant about the debut of a new DVD in which I co-host four episodes of the Ancient Jewish Wisdom TV Show with my husband. You can read about it here.  I’d love to hear your feedback.

Life Isn't Fair

A short while ago, National Public Radio ran a piece entitled, “Many Women Underestimate Fertility Clock's Clang.” It related the results of a recent study showing that most women are ignorant of the young age at which one’s chances of easily conceiving begin rapidly falling. Women who heed the prevalent cry to concentrate on their careers or focus on fun in their twenties are often shocked and saddened when they find that they may have missed a fertility window.

I give credit to NPR (which is different than saying that I think NPR should be taxpayer funded, but that’s another matter) for covering this story. As they report, there was a “vicious backlash” by women’s rights groups to an ad campaign ten years ago which was designed to make women aware of their bodies’ timetable. It seems that some groups feel that vast efforts should be made to educate women about how much they can achieve professionally while keeping them ignorant of the possible price of that achievement.

All choices have consequence; “having it all” just isn’t always possible.  While feminism led to some positive and necessary changes, many of us would argue that it resulted in quite a number of negative ones as well.   The twin sirens of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ lead many into troubled waters brimming with unhappiness.

There was a period when one of our daughters would ask for a bowl of “Life Isn’t Fair” cereal. Not yet able to read the cereal box she heard her older siblings referring to it as “Life” and she recognized the opening word of a phrase my husband and I repeatedly used.

In a house full of young children, there was a lot that didn’t seem fair. Perhaps one child received an invitation to a birthday party while the others didn’t; perhaps the child at the birthday party missed a fun family outing. If one child outgrew her shoes more rapidly than a sibling, we felt no compunction about getting a new pair for only the growing child. While there was much that was equally shared – like chicken pox and hopefully, at the end of the day, love – there were seven children with individual talents, personalities and situations. This meant that each one sometimes got a little more and at other times a little less. The cry of “it’s not fair” might have precipitated some sympathy, but also the reply, “Life isn’t fair.” My husband and I thought that was an important life lesson to absorb; not as a call to be passive but in recognition that learning that certain realities are built into this world helps one live more successfully.

Yet the idea that life must be fair persists.  The NPR article quoted a woman who struggled to conceive for many years as saying, “The ticking biological clock is not a burden women should bear alone.”   In her view, men should be equally concerned. After all, that would be only fair.   After years of celebrating the separation of sex and reproduction and demanding that a woman’s body is entirely her own business, it seems a bit weak to yell, “It’s not fair,” when reality intrudes.

The impending Health Care legislation raises lots of questions of fairness. A great deal is unknown about the Health Care bill that passed in 2010, including whether it is constitutional and if the upcoming presidential election will completely change the rules. But meanwhile, there are a lot of ambiguities about how it will actually work. Nancy Pelosi’s infamous words that Congress needed to pass the bill so that we could find out what was in it were hardly reassuring. One could conclude that the bill is a Pandora’s Box.

Let’s posit a number of thirty-five year old women, who made different life choices. I may be drawing these virtual women in broad strokes, but I do think that the situations described aren’t out of bounds.

Amanda loved to travel and while she always pictured a husband and children in her life, she thought that both she and her future family would be happier if she satiated her wanderlust before settling down. Never motivated by money she combined volunteer work abroad with occasional short-term jobs that financed further travel. Confident that Mr. Right would be around once she was ready; she has been disappointed in the quality of men she has met since returning home. Deciding that she can raise a child on her own she is discovering that not only will child care be outrageously expensive, but even getting pregnant may come with a hefty price tag.

Casey got married during college, despite the protestations of her friends who thought she was much too young. She and her husband both wanted a large family and they now have six children ranging from thirteen down to two years old. Finances are always tight, particularly since the couple manages on one salary so that Casey can homeschool the children.

Brianna always knew that she wanted to be a doctor and met her husband in medical school. Having established their careers after years of study (and a great deal of student debt), they agree that it is time to begin their family. As older first-time parents, they are realistic about possibly needing invasive medical procedures to get pregnant and know that both the pregnancy and their children face a statistically higher chance of medical complications.

Marcy never went to college. She had her first baby at seventeen and her second by a different father, at nineteen. She was married for a short time during her twenties and had two more children. She thinks it’s ridiculous that minimum wage is so low and believes that companies should be required to provide day care. How else will she and her children have a chance to move forward in life?

Amanda, Brianna, Casey and Marcy had different opportunities and made different choices. But they are where they are. Do Casey and her husband need to pay higher taxes so that Amanda and Brianna can receive fertility treatments? Is it selfish for Casey and her husband to want lower tax rates so they can save money and travel once their children are older? Should Amanda not have been allowed to travel or choose her own employment since it delayed her becoming a taxpayer?  Is it unfair that Brianna and her husband have an income which will allow them access to all sorts of specialists which their prospective children might need, and is Marcy entitled to the same level of psychological and medical help for hers?

Life isn’t fair. Government’s utopian and futile attempts to make it so tend to backfire. In the real world, human beings cannot be equal precisely because they are human beings with differing needs, desires and choices. Equality before the law is American; equality of outcome as a policy is the opposite of the freedom to choose life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Eighteen and Pregnant

Shortly after hearing the news that four of our friends became great-grandparents, I came across a news item about an upcoming reality show. The producers are seeking women in their thirties who are grandmothers. Well, the daughter of one of our friends fits that description.

It seems though, that the grandmother in this case won’t meet the show’s criteria. Yes, she’s in her thirties, but she got married at eighteen and has, with her husband, built a beautiful, large family. Their daughter in turn, also got married at eighteen, and both her parents’ and the groom’s parents’ blessings accompanied the young couple down the aisle. The new baby’s arrival, about a year later, was anticipated and desired.

Not only is this new grandma’s family intact, a fact which makes it uninteresting to reality TV, but the family members’ lives are boring. Cameras placed in their home would show people working, living, loving and learning. Throw in some shooting hoops, piano practice and family meals and all in all there is little to engage the viewer. No hysterical quarrels with lots of profanity and violence; no dark secrets waiting to be revealed; not even a mid-life crisis on the horizon. There is certainly no thirty something woman appalled that her daughter is thrusting her back into infant care because the new mother is too immature to handle the baby herself. Not only is the family boring by TV standards, but they would never allow cameras into their home, understanding that the sanctity of a family deserves privacy.

Granted, very few eighteen year olds today are mature enough to marry and few couples as young as this are mature enough to begin families. Of course, more years don’t automatically add maturity and it is possible to spend those years destructively, doing things which add burdensome baggage to one’s life, making a healthy lifelong relationship less likely. Certainly, most girls who become single mothers in their teens are placing obstacles to success in their lives and the lives of their babies. Shows such as this potential new one or its predecessors, “Teen Mom” and “16 and Pregnant” may indeed show the difficulties young, unwed mothers face, but they also help to normalize those situations.  I think the overwhelming majority of girls who do get pregnant as teenagers would express disbelief that it is possible that girls close to their age could actually be mature enough to marry with reasonable expectations of having a long and happy marriage.  While they hopefully will discover that having a baby can propel one to maturity, they haven’t understood the equation that maturity should precede becoming a mother. They may have heard of women marrying young and establishing families back in the 18^th or 19^th centuries, but certainly not today. My friends’ families would baffle them.

I recently read the words of a highly successful woman who grew up in a home which was 180 degrees from that of my friends’ daughter, the new grandmother. Poverty, abuse, even child rape were this famous personality’s childhood companions. She wrote how watching the 1950 and 1960’s sitcoms which are derided today, like Leave it to Beaver or Father’s Knows Best showed her that her own shattered family wasn’t the only paradigm to follow. There were happy families in the world.

It may well be true that the old sitcoms didn’t depict the lives of all Americans. Certainly, many of the actors in the sitcoms were not privileged to have the wonderful homes they portrayed. But neither were these fantasy shows. There actually were and are homes where husbands and wives adore each other, where parents are respected and where children are brought up with both love and values.  There are families where a couple who has celebrated their own 50^th wedding anniversary can gaze at their newborn great-granddaughter filled with optimism and faith that her young parents are committed to her and to each other. 

The books that students read in school and the movies and shows they watch may well reflect contemporary realities. How sad that they don’t provide visions of marriages and of peaceful homes where one man and one woman dedicate their lives to each other and their children. By not giving glimpses of what is, even in today’s day and age still attainable, we are depriving those who have not been blessed to have such examples in their own lives of even imagining that such a thing is possible.

Generation to Generation

Many years ago when I was leaving to spend a year studying abroad, my grandmother asked me for a favor.  When I got to Israel, would I please go spend a Shabbat with a dear friend of hers? Pepi had escaped from Europe and arrived in Israel just before the Holocaust’s full fury unfolded.  As my grandmother told me of her friend, it became clear that my grandmother, who arrived in America prior to World War I, had never met this woman.

 Pepi came from the same town as my grandfather and was friends with his younger sister. While my grandfather didn’t remember her, she remembered how her friend’s older brother left for the United States before the First World War.  After the Holocaust, she tracked down his address and from her new home in Israel wrote to him with details about his parents’ and sister’s deaths. My grandmother responded and a friendship was born. My mother and aunt remember packing boxes of warm clothing to be sent overseas; a struggling American family helping out an even less comfortable Israeli one. When my grandmother told me about Pepi, I knew there was something special about this friendship.  Everyone else in my grandmother’s circle of friends addressed each other as “Mrs. So and So” despite years of acquaintance, yet this woman was to be known, even to me, by a diminutive of her first name.

 I admit to being apprehensive about visiting Pepi. A Shabbat visit would last for at least 25 hours, which could be interminable. Even my grandmother had never spoken with her; their interaction was entirely through the mail. Not only was she an unknown, elderly widow, but she didn’t speak any English. My Hebrew was pretty good, but what if I didn’t understand her or we had nothing to say? However, I adored my grandmother and would have done anything she asked. I duly called Pepi shortly after my arrival in Israel and arranged to travel north to her home.

My fears were allayed them moment she opened her apartment door. The pre-Shabbat aromas wafting into the hall transported me to my grandmother’s apartment. Her loving embrace did the same. Pepi’s daughters told me of their excitement when a package from America arrived and how the candies tucked into pockets of sweaters and jackets made them feel wealthy and privileged. I was instantly grafted into the four generations of their Israeli family.

 I came to adore my time with Pepi and regularly returned through the year. Each time I left her home I carried a package filled with food including a still warm kokosh cake that has never been equaled.  When I returned to the States I stayed in touch with Pepi and we both mourned when, shortly thereafter, my grandmother passed away. A few years later Pepi rejoiced with me when my husband and I gave our eldest child my grandmother’s name, Rivka Leah.

Ten years later, Pepi too was gone. When our youngest daughter was born, my husband and I gave her the middle name Penina – Pepi’s given name. I prayed that our Tamara Penina would have the unwavering faith in God, effervescent joy in life and heartwarming demeanor of her namesake.  

Since Tamara’s birth it has given me a particular thrill to see my eldest and youngest girls together. Their namesakes never got to experience that physical closeness, at least in this world. Almost ten years ago, Tamara helped me address invitations for her sister’s wedding and a few weeks ago my Rivka Leah and her husband opened their home to host a Shabbat wedding celebration for Tamara and her new husband.

There is a Hebrew word, nachat (sometimes pronounced nachas) which is impossible to translate into English. It is a combination of joy, pride and intense satisfaction among other emotions. It is what parents pray to receive from their children’s lives. That Shabbat, I experienced tremendous nachat, and I knew that my grandmother and her beloved friend, Pepi, rejoiced with me.

Worth Their Weight

It is entrapment, pure and simple. My local bookstore has beautiful, hard-cover, classic books for sale for under $5 (using my 30% off coupon).

Titles like Swiss Family Robinson and Little Women coquettishly peek from the shelf, enticing me to come closer. A quick calculation tells me that my eldest grandson won’t appreciate the Wyss father and son collaboration just yet and that my oldest granddaughter is at least eight years away from enjoying Louisa May Alcott.

Mustering immense self-control by picturing my husband’s response if I was to walk in with these purchases, I regretfully leave the volumes behind. Our latest marital agreement is to give away or throw out two books for each one we bring in to the house which has substantially crimped my impulse buying.

We travel a great deal and increasingly passengers in adjacent seats are reading on NOOKs, IPads, and Kindles. Perhaps one of those devices even has a place in my future. But as millions of parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents look for a gift to delight a child this December, I can’t help but hope that they opt to buy real books. There may be a cool factor in possessing an electronic reader, but a book with real pages to turn and a new book smell isn’t just an acquisition. One enters into a relationship with a book; it possesses you as much as you possess it.  A book that is read over and over looks and feels different than a new book. Like a well-worn pair of shoes, it exudes comfort and adjusts to the owner. Favorite pages are more worn than others; the book opens of its own accord to beloved sections.

There was a time when prognosticators envisioned the end of home-made bread. Not only did most people live within reach of a bakery, but sliced and wrapped loaves were easily accessible in supermarkets. Yet, over the past years there has been a resurgence of home baking. One type of bread is a food item, the other is an experience. Does anyone doubt which is more valuable?

I don’t think I am alone in pitying a child whose room isn’t full of books even if he can instantaneously access thousands of volumes electronically. Technology can be wonderful, but books feed the soul. The bargains in my bookstore may not have fit my immediate needs, but the hour I spent browsing reminded me of so many physical, tangible treasures I can’t wait to share.