Susan's Musings

Time Out

When your life revolves around the Jewish calendar, certain periods in the year overwhelm time. Passover is one of those occasions which take up so much mental and physical space that there is no attention left for most other things. Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman; Obama and Romney; even Iran and nuclear armament recede into the background.

In those years when my husband and I host Passover observances for our family and friends, preparations for the holiday completely overpower the rest of life. (See 50 Pounds of Potatoes) This year, however, we had the delightful experience of being guests of our daughter and son-in-law at a Passover Conference for about 600 Jews at a Bahamian resort. They arranged for my husband to be engaged as a scholar-in-residence, teaching through the week. The added inducement of spending the week with granddaughter, Aliza, made it an offer we couldn’t refuse. While my husband was busy teaching for the program, I had few demands on my time. 

The holiday and the setting worked its magic. While I am grateful for the many blessings in our lives over the past few years, including weddings, babies and a growing publishing business, there hasn’t been a lot of down time. Having abundant food with no cooking or clean-up in an absolutely stunning setting was incredible. The prayer services were lovely and our fellow participants were congenial and fun to meet. We even got to visit a pirate museum on one day, which delighted my husband as he appreciates knowing that there are alternate career options available. (He has long been quite fascinated with the many Jewish pirates (o.k., privateers) in the 17^th century.)

I am having a hard time getting back to everyday life. This is to say that despite numerous faulty starts, I simply couldn’t order my brain to deal with anything substantive in time to write this Musing. See you next week!

 

 

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.

 

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.

Virtual Baking

 It is easy to feel out of it when I don’t recognize the stars gracing the magazine covers in the supermarket check-out line. It is easy to feel like a recent immigrant from another planet when I still prefer to receive my news from a print newspaper rather than online or from the host of a comedy show.

 One more trend that I simply do not understand is people spending real money to buy virtual gifts online. But in an effort to move with the times, I have decided to do virtual holiday cooking for this year’s Jewish high holy days.

 I don’t know whether I am actually busier than I have ever been, but I think I can do two of the following three things:  getting my daughter’s wedding invitations out before the actual wedding date; preparing for October’s presentation of Holy Hebrew! before standing up to teach it in Dallas; or cooking my annual batch of mandlen in time to mail it to far-flung children. Guess which item is being dropped?

Since my eldest two girls spent their first Rosh HaShanah (Jewish New Year) away from home, I have baked these traditional soup nuts (which bear no resemblance to their supermarket counterparts) and shipped them to whichever children who would not be joining us in person for holiday meals. At this point with sons-in-law and grandchildren expanding the ranks, the necessary quantity has increased while my cooking time has shrunk.

 Modernity to the rescue! There is no longer a need to purchase ingredients and spend time kneading the dough and pre-heating the oil. No longer do I need to find packing containers or stand in line at the post office. All I need is a tech-savvy ten year old and I am able to send virtual mandlen not only to my children but to thousands of my closest friends.

 So, it is with great relief that I cross one item off my to-do list which, quite frankly, gives me a fighting chance of meeting the other deadlines. Unfortunately, I know that it’s a cop-out and that the love and family tradition which the mandlen represent don’t easily fly through cyberspace. I’m going to optimistically pencil mandlen baking in before Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) but, for starters, I’ll add a prayer to my Rosh HaShana entreaties for another mandlen baking opportunity next year.

 

Religious Discrimination?

A few people who read that my son and his classmates were going to be penalized in their medical school grades for missing so many days while fully observing the fall Jewish holidays, wrote me that they saw this as religious discrimination.  I disagree.

As a mother, I was certainly unhappy to hear that my son’s hard work was going to be automatically downgraded, but I am intensely wary of throwing around the “D” word. Our society’s movement from being one of obligations and gratitude towards a culture built on rights and entitlements has gone hand in hand with an increase in litigious behavior. The word “discrimination” has become a loaded gun, and one which in my mind often blows up in the face of those who wield it.  Certainly, a society needs a legal system to thrive, but I believe that as more laws trying to combat discrimination get put on the books, one consequence is the shattering of human relationships replaced by an increase in suspicion and hostility.

We can (and have) outlawed employer’s asking all sorts of questions or refusing to hire someone based on all sorts of criteria, but do we honestly think that those laws don’t come with a price? I know too many truly unprejudiced people who hired an employee and then were blindsided when the new hire proved incompetent or worse. They found that because the employee fit into a “protected” group firing that person was an expensive, legal nightmare.  Among other things, can we truly proclaim that our minority youth unemployment rate is divorced from the speed with which the legal and media communities exploit the words “bigotry” and “discrimination”?

There was a time through much of the twentieth century when Jews were frequently excluded from jobs and schools solely because of being Jewish, as determined by their having Jewish names or appearances. This discrimination (in this case a proper use of the word) ended as people got to know their Jewish neighbors. If your child was sick were you not going to use the Jewish doctor with the excellent reputation and wonderful bedside manner? And having come to love him would you agitate for his son to be excluded from your alma mater? Would you rather see your business do less well than your competitor’s by refusing to hire the Jewish CPA? Would you rather remain unemployed than take a job in a Jewish-owned company? Were you really going to insist on not hiring your neighbor and friend?  Like many other immigrant and minority groups, through hard work and good citizenship, that prejudice diminished as Jews gained a reputation and established relationships.

What does this have to do with my son today? A small minority of America’s Jewish population today adheres to Jewish law regarding things like Sabbath and holiday observances and kosher food. For those of us who believe that God spoke to Moses on Sinai, giving him rules by which the Jewish people should live and that those rules were faithfully handed down through the generations, it is a privilege to be part of that chain of transmission.

As part of that choice we know that certain activities, ranging from community baseball leagues with practices on Saturday to local youth drama groups with performances on Friday night are ones in which we, and our children, cannot participate. We cannot ignore the Sabbath and holidays any more than we can run into the neighborhood (unkosher) fast food restaurant.  But in a free society, such as America, that is a voluntary choice we make and as with all choices, we need to accept the consequences.

Whether attending college or professional school or working, we know that needing to be home by 4 p.m. on winter Friday afternoons for the Sabbath (whose beginning is connected to sunset) or not being able to work on Saturday no matter how urgent the business emergency, will most likely be alien to the culture of most schools and offices. We recognize that it is not necessarily discriminatory if those in positions of responsibility don’t automatically concede, “No problem. Of course I’ll change my expectations to make things work for you.”  There are four ways for Jews to deal with this. The first is to establish one’s own businesses and schools, which partially explains Jewish entrepreneurship in the last century but does have its limitations. The second way is to enclose ourselves in a secluded enclave, studying and working only within the confines of the Orthodox Jewish community. The third is to bring lawsuits or otherwise try to bludgeon others to accommodate us. (That method means that we must demand the same accommodations for members of all other religious groups as well, whose unintended consequences in my mind will lead to a lessening of America’s Christian nature and her subsequently being a less hospitable place for Jews.) The last method is to earn respect and forge relationships, refusing to see ourselves as victims.

The Jewish students in my son’s class who don’t observe the holy days and will be attending class rather than synagogue used words like, “discrimination” and “offended.” However, the six religious students whose grades were to be impacted were disappointed but accepting. They appreciate the overtures the school has made to them, for example going out of their way to provide kosher food at functions, and see the reality of lower grades simply as a willing price they pay for their loyalty to God’s commandments. They each could have chosen to go to medical school in Israel and instead chose to attend this particular school in America.

They responded to the news that class attendance was mandatory and a major part of the grading by accepting that they would have to work twice as hard to do as well as their classmates. They also decided to send a polite letter to the administration clarifying what their religious obligations were. They understood that since the members of the administration probably all had Jewish friends who were adamant about their Jewish identity at the same time as they ate pork, worked on the Sabbath and treated the Jewish holidays as little more than nice times for family get-togethers with perhaps an optional appearance at synagogue, those in charge might understandably be confused by the religious students’ position.

As it turned out, as they were composing this letter, they received an email informing them that the administration was considering changing their position. What happened? I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that someone in the administration spoke about the issue with a Jewish friend or colleague who explained the students’ stance. Since the attendance policy was not implemented as a tool of prejudice and no defensive front was erected as happens when one is accused of being a bigot, the issue is being resolved without threats and with harmony, each side respectful of and appreciating the other.  Which leaves this Jewish mother proud of her son and grateful for living in this wonderful country.

Thirty-two Hours and Twenty-Five Years

The younger children in our family occasionally went on “run-aways”. Their second oldest sister, Rena, would take them out, one at a time for a few hours, boarding a bus for our small city’s four-block downtown area. There, they would wander around carefree, leaving chores and schoolwork behind. Each journey included a stop at the ice cream shop and bead store; other venues were optional. As the afternoon ended the girls would return home ready to get back to their responsibilities.

My husband and I just went on our own “run-away”. For thirty-two hours we left work entirely behind and drove to Vancouver, British Columbia. Our first trip to Vancouver was back in 1986, when our eldest child was five and we had not yet met our youngest few children. That summer boating trip established the coastal waters of British Columbia and the Canadian Gulf Islands as our vacation destination of choice. Whenever we could, we returned, often spending Shabbat plus a few more days in Vancouver. For those lucky Vancouverites, life probably has its normal worries and stresses, but for us, the city is wrapped in an escapist glow

Recently with barely more than a day at our disposal, my husband and I were attracted to the city as powerfully as a child is to the first ice cream truck coming down the street in summer. Arriving late at night, we eagerly anticipated what we knew had to be the next morning’s first activity. Biking around the Stanley Park seawall beckoned. Renting bicycles for two seemed ridiculously easy compared to all those years when we rented twelve for our own family and the single friends accompanying us on our trip. As we eased onto the park’s path, my husband and I began two hours of cycling which spanned twenty-five years of memories.

Vancouver’s physical beauty is awe-inspiring. Blue water and majestic tree-filled mountains proclaim God’s creative powers and recalled our thrill as parents sharing these blessing with our children. Each landmark we passed - the 10 o’clock cannon, the beaches peeking out as the tide withdrew, the children’s water park complete with a kids’ dryer – evoked memories of years past. Riding under Lion’s Gate Bridge reminded us of many a Friday when we timed our boat’s arrival to coincide with slack tide at the narrow entrance to Vancouver Harbour, dough for the Shabbat challah rising in the galley.

We passed the turn-off to the aquarium where our family had participated in an after-hours’ sleepover, dozing feet away from the killer whales’ whooshing circuits.  Our children grew along with the belugas, otters and seals, many of whom they greeted with recognition as we pre-paid admission on Friday so that we could spend long Shabbat afternoon hours in their presence.

Beyond the harbor lay cities, bays and islands whose names stir up countless joyous memories. Ganges, Keats Island, Plumper Cove, Telegraph Harbour, Tod Inlet…these were the places where our children learned to sail and swim, to gaze transfixed at huge starfish, to thrill at the sight of a wild orca. Here they grew to feel capable and competent as they navigated the waters, reading charts and coping with tidal variations, currents and the ever occurring unexpected. Here is where concentrated and isolated time in a small, floating space cemented our family bonds.

As we continued biking, leaving the park and heading to False Creek, the two of us were accompanied not only by recollections of our children, but of the several single young women from our synagogue who used to sail with us, providing much needed extra pairs of hands and eyes.  We spent long summer evenings discussing marriage and family with these girls.  One has just welcomed a second grandchild with the husband whose visit on board we orchestrated hoping that romance would blossom, and the other, along with her own husband and seven children, was hosting our youngest as she settled into a new job in Southern California.

Sometimes, life’s to-do lists seem overwhelming. I am overflowing with gratitude to God for my thirty-two hour “run-away” with my husband during which we recalled so many blessings He has granted us over the years, not least of which are blissful surroundings He created that nourish our souls.

 

 

How About an Ignorance Tax?

How is Memorial Day different from Presidents Day? How does each differ from Veterans Day? These aren’t variations on a riddle, but my idea for raising taxes. In my opinion we should forget about sin taxes on cigarettes or junk food; reduce business and income taxes and make up the difference with an ignorance tax.

Decoration Day, Memorial Day’s previous incarnation, began being widely observed by northern states after the Civil War and then by all Americans when it expanded to include 20^th century wars. Notice the use of the word ‘observed.’ That is completely different from the word celebrate which would be appropriate for July 4^th.  Yet fewer people each year actually know the difference between these unique days. Even fewer can distinguish between Veterans Day and Memorial Day.  Congress eased the way to ignorance by passing the National Holiday Act, moving most Federal holidays to Monday, thereby placing the focus on a three day weekend instead of the event itself. (And while this might be slightly off topic, who decided that the apostrophes were unnecessary after the words ‘Veterans’ and ‘Presidents’?)

Since these days have become prime shopping days, my idea is that every consumer should take a quiz based on the day’s specific theme. Sales tax for that day should be levied based on how well one does on the quiz.  Score high and pay little; score low and pay a lot. Rather than going into government coffers the money should be matched with a recipient charity which exemplifies the day’s focus. Those with perfect scores get to choose the charity.

If you want to bone up on some facts in anticipation of the test, or more importantly wish to spend a few minutes experiencing a minute bit of what every American should have felt on Memorial Day, I recommend watching this video. Each grave represents not only a soldier, but also a family to whom we all owe heartfelt gratitude.

 

 

 

 

Glamour Girls - originally published on February 24, 2010

The Purim holiday, as described in the Book of Esther, is only a few days away. A truly joyous day, Purim festivities include a strong tradition of dressing up in costumes. For very young girls Purim has routinely been the day when they can glop on lipstick, blush and eye shadow, don their mother’s discarded dresses and totter in Mommy’s high heels (until they actually need to move around). A crown on the head, preferably bejeweled, completes the sartorial splendor and the miniature Queen Esthers are ready for the day’s activities. 

This masquerade is based on an essential message of the day – things are not as they seem on the surface. The elegant Queen Esther is really the Jewish girl Hadassah; the man who saves King Achashverosh from a plot against his life is Hadassah’s relative Mordechai; a day prepared for the slaughter of the Jewish people turns into a day of victory. It is not a coincidence that the name Esther means hidden while the Hebrew name for Scroll, Megila, means reveal.  Thus the real name for the Book of Esther or The Scroll of Esther is “Revealing the Hidden.” 

Something that is uniquely hidden in this scroll is mention of God.  Esther is the only book in the Jewish Bible or Tanach which contains no overt mention of God.  His name and His presence are hidden, though easily discerned by those who look. 

But, I admit that as a little girl, I was less interested in the theological implications and more enamored with the parentally authorized make-up. While teens and adults dress up as well, sometimes in incredibly clever concoctions, the allure of pretending to be grown-up and gorgeous presents an irresistible tug for the just post-toddler set.

Which is why I was distressed to read that some shoe manufacturers are marketing shoes with heels aimed at the early elementary crowd. While Matthew Dairman, a spokesman for the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons, sees heels on five year old feet as a physical problem -- which it certainly is -- surely there is a less visible issue as well. Purim masquerades are only fun because they are masquerades –limited to a finite time and place and easily recognized as a caricature. 

Little girls see Queen Esther through a haze of fantasy; a sort of Cinderella. As they grow and mature they realize that the orphaned Esther was forcibly taken from her home and community, married to a man who didn’t by any means measure up to Prince Charming standards and saved her people only through a sacrifice of her own chances for a fulfilling and happy life. Not quite the “happily ever after” fairy tale. But internal growth and maturity can be stunted if external growth and maturity is accelerated. If our society moves in the direction where heels and cosmetics become a standard part of six-year-olds’ repertoire (even for “only special occasions”), I can’t help thinking that the chances of producing authentic heroines like Queen Esther unfortunately diminish.  

thnx 4 gr8 time - originally posted May 7, 2009

A few weeks ago while expressing my reservations about Twitter I mentioned that I encouraged my children to write handwritten notes of thanks or sympathy. One reader wrote in asking why. In her words:

What's wrong with an email? Both take time to write isn't one just a modern form of the other?

That got me thinking. On occasion (I wish I could say rare occasion but that wouldn’t be truthful) my children oh so delicately suggest that I often pretend that a lot of the modern world doesn’t exist. They might say this when I insist that the movie rating system has a typo and PG13 is actually PG31 or when I advocate the usage of the phrase “dearie me” when they need to articulate a particularly strong emotional response.

So, I stopped to take a second look at the issue. Do handwritten notes intrinsically have greater value than email or am I urging the equivalent of writing with a quill vs. using a ball point pen. I think I need to argue for the first view.

Email is wonderful in many ways. It is immediate, inexpensive, and easy to disseminate. Like so many things in life, its strong points are the same as its weak points. Sending an email birthday card to someone is as simple as clicking a link and I think it is fine to respond to an instant card with an instant response. But surely if someone takes the time to go to a store, purchase a card and mail it, let alone if he sends a present, he deserves a response that shows some hint of effort.

Because emails can be written and sent so spontaneously, they tend to be full of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and potential double meaning. The whole point is to write and click, not to read over, examine and analyze. We’ve all had the frustrating experience of needing to rewrite a handwritten letter when we see errors in it. This is exactly one of the reasons that we pay more attention when we receive snail mail. By definition, someone spent time and energy composing it.

My husband and I recently received a beautifully written card from a 21 year old friend of our daughter who had spent a few days with us over Passover. That card will be kept and re-read, not deleted. The care taken over it even led me to call the girl’s mother and share it, so that she could take pride in her daughter’s good manners. My son recently visited a friend’s home where the mother showed him how she had framed a thank you he had written her after she had offered him hospitality years ago. Would email notes evoke the same response? I don’t think so.

I love email. But when something meaningful needs to be said, email seems to be the equivalent of serving a microwave meal rather than a home cooked dinner. It may fill the basic requirements, but it doesn’t quite do the job.

Eat, Pray, Eat, Love, Eat

That may not be the most original title, but it pretty much sums up my recent trip to Jerusalem. Arriving just a few days before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, meant starting off with an intense prayer experience. Yom Kippur is an annual occurrence, and unfortunately, it is often wrongly perceived by many Jews and presented in many synagogues as an ordeal – 25 hours to endure, spending most of those hours in synagogue as prayers drone on, with no food or drink for either sustenance or distraction. That is a perversion of the holyday, keeping the externals while missing the soul.  In Jerusalem, at our children’s synagogue, the day was meaningful and exhilarating. Rather than feeling drained as nighttime ended the observances, the atmosphere around us was uplifting and invigorating. It was precisely what a day which allows us to start our relationship with God anew, clear of the past year’s sins, should be.

Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, followed with its own special prayers and activities. This is a holyday ideally meant to be observed in Israel, especially in Jerusalem, and each day was precious. The entire country was bathed in a festive mood and as we reconnected with long-time friends and family whom we rarely get to see, the week of celebration unfolded joyously. We had the privilege of joining my aunt and uncle for his eightieth birthday celebration, re-connecting with cousins and meeting their children and grandchildren. An added bonus during our visit was the opportunity to attend thought-provoking and inspiring. shiurim – Torah classes.

As for love, it permeated the entire trip. For starters, I was sharing stimulating days and evenings with my husband, surrounded by family and friends. Even more, there was the opportunity to step into our daughter and son-in-law’s lives, seeing how their relationship has grown. The piece-de-resistance, of course, was the arrival of their first child, our new grandson. I had reluctantly missed the early days of our most recent two granddaughters’ lives. Waiting for their appearances I helped with older children, allowing my daughters to head into labor rested. But the babies each delayed coming until I was no longer able to stay. My help was appreciated, but I was absent for the miracle of birth and those first irreplaceable days.

This time I shared in a long, arduous labor, marveling how my daughter stayed focused and calm throughout and at my son-in-law’s unwavering support. I heard the first breaths of a new life and participated over the next ten days as mother, father and son eased into being a family. I was re-introduced to the feel, smell and blessing of newborn being. I had the added gift of watching my own child emerge as a loving, competent and entranced mother.

Throughout it all, as the title suggests, food was an overwhelming presence. We enjoyed numerous top-rate meals in private homes. But, in addition to that, there were dozens of kosher cafes and restaurants within walking distance of us. So many, that despite prodigious effort, we were not able to try them all. Since we do not live in an area which provides much opportunity for kosher eating out, dining in Jerusalem was an incredibly fun activity. It wove its way around each of the other more important happenings, accompanying us back to the States in the form of an extra pound or two as a physical reminder of a trip which overflowed with spiritual and emotional bounty.