Well, Mother's Day is over. I must say it's a bit of a disappointment, not because my own children's verbal "happy mother's day" wasn't enough. Not because here it was chilly and drizzly and dark out all day, and the rhododendrons that visit for just a week per year drooped with the heavy wetness, and the cherry blossoms sagged and seemed to blend into the monochrome scene. Or because I'd stayed up through the night working, to see the dawn before stealing three hours' sleep. That set the stage, though.
Actually, it was a somewhat sad day because I have no mother to celebrate. Both my own and my husband's mothers are gone. My friends are all mothers, yes, and we wish each other Happy Mother's Day with a true appreciation of how we need sincere and not perfunctory expressions.
In the last years of my mother's life, I would make her cards, as I always had, with poems that included recollections, and each year I would try with greater desperation to let her know how much her incessant cheerfulness and shyness and easy-goingness meant to me. Because I knew that as a mother, I was so inferior to her in those particular essences of constancy and security that give children the confidence and basis from which to fly.
When, as a pre-teen and teenager, I would be obstinate or eccentric, she would calmly rebut my behavior-- but I could be stubborn, and, exasperated, without raising her voice, her only recourse would be to say, "when you're a mother, you'll understand," or, "just wait till you're a mother, and YOUR child acts like that!"
Well, I never got it until her prophecy was fulfilled. Just as I wouldn't eat off the plates that had come from my grandmother's home, my own children had their own nonsensical quirks. Food that is good but within a month of it's stamped upcoming "due date" is rejected by one of my offspring. Another one leaves clothes and wet towels on the floor. Another child won't budge off the couch and demands to be served. One answers back; another often makes me verbally walk on eggshells...and as I try my insufficient best to instruct and not succumb and guide and provide support, now, from this angle, I see the complexities. Not that my children are bad--to the contrary, each is uniquely wonderful, and I am astoundingly blessed.
But I see that without knowing it, I must have caused my mother distress, and sadness, because now I'm on the other side, and...whattaya know--with all the joy, here it is.
And here Mother's Day escaped, and my kids are too old to have made me a seed-pod broach or painted necklace in school, the charming gifts that mean more than buying a balloon at the supermarket. I do lament that, but what I lament far more is that in the week before Mother's Day I had no one for whom to write MY poem.
When I went back to my parents' house after my Dad's passing to collect whatever I might stuff in a carry-on as my inheritance, I gathered all their old photo albums and old letters and a few printed table linens from the 30s...and found all my old hand-made Valentines and birthday cards and Mother's Day and Father's Day cards...so many, for so many years, some with yellowed scotch tape still on their backs, and others with thrumbtack holes.
It must be the weather that makes me melancholy. I think I just need a good dose of springtime sun.
It's modern Israel's 60th birthday. As every day, today is a miracle; even more so for Israel.
I grew up wondering what it was about Israel that had all my Jewish friends so reverent, so stalwart. Israel was one topic about which you did not joke, about which there was no dissent, a rare subject for a group of argumentative people. Most of my childhood friends were "very Reform," meaning they didn't even know, much less keep mitzvot. They ate "kosher style" bagels and sandwiches at Junior's Deli (on Westwood Blvd. near Pico in West L.A.). They went to services, usually at some overflow location, for the High Holidays; they lit menorahs. That was about it.
My family did none of it; my Jewish father had married a non-Jew and our home was basically devoid of religion, save for the Guideposts pamphlet-size magazine my mom got by subscription every month, the "God loves you" publication of Norman Vincent Peale. Though she kept each issue by her bed, she never spoke of it.
Though all my school friends were Jewish, there had been the interlude when at age ten a new friend moved onto the block--the daughter of an Episcopal priest, who made it a condition of our friendship that I attend their church in Beverly Hills. Dutifully, I tagged along with the "PK" and sincerely wanted some of the spiritual goodies that family lived by--but try as I might (and I did try, learning their liturgy and even becoming "confirmed" at age 12 along with my friend), that lightening bolt from heaven never struck, and when my friend moved away, so did any attachment to her brand of religion.
That left me back with all the Jews, just when they were having bar and bat 
mitzvahs. I had a great time attending those, but watching my friends give speeches about the arrival of their adulthood was more ludicrous than meaningful. In high school, along with my friends, I joined the George Gershwin chapter of the B'nai B'rith Girls (the Reform youth group, the goal of which is to insure that Jews date only Jews). This was before the Reform branch declared that lineage moves through the father as well as the mother, so I was the group's blond "ringer." I dated the Jewish guys, cozied in with my new best friend, whose family ate chocolate babka, and attended high holiday services, leaving the tedium with my cohort for acceptable breaks and then tip-toeing back to the endless prayers.
What does all this have to do with Israel? Even in such a non-spiritual Jewish world, Israel was sacred. It was understood that Israel was God's apology for the Holocaust. You gave tzadaka to Israel. You prayed for Israel. You planted trees in Israel. You evaluated political candidates on their support for Israel. Then you voted for the Democrat.
My family was conservative. My Jewish daddy, who never made any reference to his birth-faith, read US News and World Report at the dinner table. He voted for Nixon and in 1964 Goldwater--I still have a metallic gold campaign button that reads, "I'm an extremist, I love liberty!" written around Barry Goldwater's smiling, bespectacled face. But when it came to Israel--well, Israel was special and worth defending at all cost.
My first trip to Israel was 22 years ago, after my Orthodox conversion and much intense study. In order to make a phone call then, you had to deposit hexagonal silver tokens with holes in their centers into the pay phone--if you could find one. Then, you hoped there was an operator to put the call through. Sometimes people lined up waiting to use the public phones, since
many private citizens did not have their own. The traffic was sparse; the country had the feel of a third-world, developing nation where not everything worked as it should.
I have been to Israel many times since; this summer my husband and I will escort 200 tourists there again (taking our fourth tour), eager to amaze and awe them with the ruach so palpable there. Our daughter lived in Givat Shaul for a seminary year; close relatives have made Jerusalem their homes. Israel has emerged as a high-tech center for the world (the assonance nearly compelled me to write "a high tech mecca," but I just couldn't do it), where cell phones are ubiquitous and sophisticated. The pace is fast; cars squeeze through non-lanes and park on the sidewalks. And religiously, as the level of Jewish connection around the globe has grown, its fervency and urgency in observance at its source and center has burgeoned exponentially.
So, Happy Birthday, Israel! Sixty years is not a long time in the sweep of history, and only a blink after an exile of 2000 years. But the amount of change, advancement and strength that has gathered in that short span only confirms it as the Land wonder-fully blessed and unique.
Buy yourself a hummingbird feeder and marvel at the amazing delicacy of a creature of just one ounce.
It doesn't matter where you live, you can probably hang a hummingbird feeder, which costs just a few dollars at your local drug store, outside a window or on a nearby tree branch. In our case, we hung ours underneath a balcony. It's an inexpensive glass bottle with a red plastic cap and four screw on plastic perches. I fill it with a mixture of one-fourth sugar to three-fourths water, and color it with a few drops of red food coloring.
My reward is a shimmering green visitor with a needle beak that flits from our ornamental cherry tree to the perch, sips a minute or two, then flits back to his branch in the tree, about 15 feet away. His metallic green body is so luminescent, so beautiful, similar to the inside of an abalone shell. I hope he brings some friends.
This little fellow captivates me and all our guests, because the beauty, the flittering wings, the teeny beak is so small, yet so profound. Why would God make such a glorious creature? What could have been the Darwinistic superiority of this tiny bird that let it develop with so much showy intensity and yet remain but a sweet ounce?
Help me figure this out. But in the meantime, head to your nearest five-and-dime and buy a hummingbird feeder to revel in the astounding rebirth of spring.
Every year, our family makes the hour-and-ten-minute drive northward to Washington's Skagit Valley to see the annual Tulip Festival. It is the highlight of my year, signaling the advent of springtime, and renewing in me the exhilaration of the outdoors, as a gasp-worthy display of brilliant blooms undulates with the boggy terrain spread to the ends of a massive valley. If anything can revive a perfunctory relationship with God, it is this mega-dose of grandeur and beauty--stripes of intense reds, yellows, purples under a cerulean sky of lilting clouds.
My photographer's eye dances from one shot to its superior. My photographed children grimace. Eleven years ago, when we first made our tulip trek, they were cooperative, posing in the rows of flowers, their own fresh bloom happy and perfect. Over the years, however, they grew weary of this ritual, and ever more reluctant to smile while squatting in the mud. This was, of course, frustrating to me as I switched from film to digital, since now I could click unlimitedly, putting them to ever greater duress and torture.
This year, to my consternation, we missed the Tulip Festival entirely. The flowers came out two weeks late, I was deep into writing deadlines, and Passover inserted its 10-day interlude, when we were in Los Angeles, far from the swaying color-cups of the Skagit.
But--we grew tulips in pots on our patio! And one closeup of a tulip is as good as another! So, I took photos of the flowers. But, sigh, not of my squatting children, who now are much more assertive
about refusing to fulfill their mother's wish.
There is no way to capture the beauty of the the tulip fields, and no way to recapture the children who skipped through the dirt aisles picking up broken flowers, collecting them into a bouquet and presenting them to me. Come on, Mom, time to move on. Here's a glimpse of my patio...
Passover just ended--and this feels like liberation! We're now enveloped in the warm fuzzies of saying farewell to the many friends and renewed acquaintences we've enjoyed in this ten days at our Passover retreat.
I don't have much time now, as soon we'll go downstairs for the chumetz pizza and beer bash that concludes our holiday-- but I want to tell you about the Cohens. Mr. and Mrs. Cohen are an elderly couple, about four-feet-ten, he with a wisps of white hair and matching snowy beard, and she with a variety of brown sheitls. We saw them the first night at their table for two, conspicuous among the round tables for ten, and rectangles of gathered families of 20. The only little table for two--the couple hobbled to their seats, at first looking to us a bit pitiful, all alone. They chatted with each other a bit, but mostly sat quietly, dignified, munching their matza, sipping their wine, eating the courses we were all served, just the two of them, the miniature old couple that seemed so sweet and yet so apart.
Over the course of our ten days together, Mr. and Mrs. Cohen attended the lectures my husband and I gave to the crowd. They spoke in their thick European accents to our children. They got to know others and soon we saw them seated for meals, animatedly chatting, at a table of ten elders, the table for two gone. Mrs. Cohen approached me to comment approvingly after my lectures; she sat down after lunch at our table one time to say how she enjoyed watching our family so attentive and loving toward my father-in-law, 82, with us for the holiday from Jerusalem.
I now complete this post at home. By the end of our ten days at the Passover hotel, the Cohens were thoroughly embraced by most everyone. At our final night of celebration, eating our just-prepared gourmet pizza and pretzels with beer, the little couple were in demand for photos, and happy to oblige. They seemed to be beaming, and freely shared how delighted they were to have enjoyed this time with such a congenial and warm group.
Passover at a hotel may seem like an indulgence, but it offers many benefits beyond just avoiding the chores of cleaning and preparing. Families unite from around the globe, as ours did, and together, the joyous assemblage of so many people realizing the specialness of this time creates a camaraderie and
closeness difficult to duplicate. As the days dwindle, the desire to stay, to dwell in this pocket of unreality, increases. Here are people not just gathered for a good time, but to observe God's rules for these elevated days.
And then, after the pizza and the packing, the taxis line up for the parade to the airport and the matzah crumbs, photos and fables are all that remain. Perhaps we'll see Mr. and Mrs. Cohen next year in Jerusalem. If not there, at the same hotel at our table for lunch would be just fine.
My last post was about my difficulty with all the minutia that goes into preparation for Passover--and here I am writing on my laptop at a Passover Resort hotel. The sun is shining brightly outside and I just came back to my room from a wonderful outdoor buffet brunch, where the cheerful mosgiach made me the perfect omlet on one of those little gas flame burners, and in the background I heard the whirrr of the blenders making choose-your-ingredients smoothies. Matza brei and platters of cheeses and lox and fake bagels that look like the surface of the moon (and probably taste just as good) were on tables in the shaded patio, with crocks of hot porridge, bins of cool yoghurt and other comestibles embarrassingly abundant. So how can I continue to feel that many details of mitzvot are, um, unnecessary and weird?
Coincidentally (if there is such a thing), my 15-year-old son joined me sitting on a comfy couch in the sun this morning and we devoured our perfect omlettes together. He told me that he was up late moderating a heated discussion between a young fellow who is an atheist and only performs mitzvot to honor his parents, and one of the rabbis supervising the food prep here. The upshot was that the moshgiach used all the "why there has to be God" arguments and the disbeliever was unmoved.
Meanwhile, I had a fascinating conversation with a young seminary graduate who posits that halacha, every fastidious detail, is meant to further man's interaction with God. By applying logic to new issues, derived by a posek from the vast array of Torah thought, we bring otherwise staid and stale pronouncements into our personal realms on a daily basis. It is halacha, then, that actually forges our personal relationships with God. Whether or not to put tin foil on the shelves of one's refrigerator puts our efforts to conform to God's will foremost in our experience.
I can accept that to a point; my reaction is that we have choices even within the tight confines of halacha, and exactly HOW tight those confines are is a matter of which rabbi you follow or how some view went akimbo several hundred years ago, and just kept billowing further into ridiculousness--but now, entrenched as either minhag or halacha, cannot be retracted or rethought or revised.
An example: At the time electricity became available, I'm told, there was much discussion about its impact on Shabbat. Is turning on a light switch akin to opening a spigot? As water flows readily through pipes, electricity flows in an ongoing basis through a home's wires, and tapping into it for one's hot tray or electric blanket is no different from flushing the toilet to let the waiting water through.
It was decided that use of electricity was not similar to opening a spigot, and so Jews ended up with dark bathrooms and cold nighttime bodies and so many other inconveniences that arise from not being able to use electricity. One can say that this makes Shabbat special, if not more uncomfortable (which it certainly does) and that restraining from changing the world, which using electricity emphatically does, is the point of Shabbat, anyway.
OK, but let's say there's a new means of conveying energy that doesn't require electricity. I understand that in Israel, Jews can use the hot water from their faucets on Shabbat since the heating mechanism is solar, rather than via a gas tank that increases its flame when empty. Israeli Jews, then, regain the comfort of washing their faces on Shabbat with hot water--ahhh!--while I continue to shiver while spashing frigid water on my face. Is my experience of Shabbat somehow better because I have endured a throwback to discomfort?
Which takes me back to my disdain for halachic minutia. Yes, Torah is integrated with everything, every decision, every moment on our planet (and elsewhere!) But the amount of prescribed, mandatory behaviors is just toooooo encompassing, constricting and picayune. I contort my attitude with great duress to envision halacha as wondrous means to bind me to God. But, it's always my fault (God has none, of course) that I can't Pollyanna my way through many directives. In this religion, my view that many rules are over-the-top demanding and strange is by definition wrong, and it is my job to learn my way to seeing that fact.
Even as I write this, I am internally arguing the other side. That old yatzer ha ra is acting up, I tell myself! Also, being Jewish involves questions, so delving and questioning isn't so bad--as long as you keep following the rules. Still, there's that minutia. And then again--are we REALLY supposed to know why God tells us to so peculiarly celebrate matza, the bread of both freedom and affliction? Can we REALLY conceive why chumetz is such an anathema? And that's where I remain--stuck between reason and rebellion and acceptance.
So Rabbi Soloveitchik's "task of covenantal man" becomes a nearly impossible challenge:
“The Halakhah believes that there is only one world—not divisible into secular and hallowed sectors—which can either plunge into ugliness and hatefulness, or be roused to meaningful, redeeming activity, gathering up all latent powers into a state of holiness. Accordingly, the task of covenantal man is to be engaged not in dialectical surging forward and retreating, but in uniting the two communities into one community where man is both the creative, free agent, and the obedient servant of God.”
How do YOU solve this dilemma?
It's just a couple days before Passover, and no time to have a crisis of faith.
Most people I know are too busy pouring pots-full of boiling water on their c
ounters, perhaps with towels on the floor below waiting for the overflow. They're taking blowtorches designed for creme brulee to their stovetops. They're boiling pans of water in their microwaves. They're taping pieces of tin foil on the grates inside their refrigerators, being sure to poke holes for air circulation. They're cutting pieces of thick plastic or aluminum and using lots of sticky shelf paper. And they're wrapping up all their cereal, flour, cookies, and just about all their regular food--and completing a contract selling it to a non-Jew.
Is this crazy, or what? Hours and hours taking a toothbrush to the grout. Sorting through toys for a stray stub of granola bar. Flipping through the pages of books, shaking them upside down combing for crumbs. This is indeed insanity. Is this really what God wants us to be doing? I thought learning Torah was the most important thing--or maybe praying, or doing kindnesses for others, or visiting someone alone and sick. No, for a week--or several--Jews are overcome with a fear of specks of leavened products.
And the job falls almost exclusively to women. Unless a guy lives alone, in which case he'll only attack this job if he's too poor to hire somebody else to do it, men have women to obsess about this. How many guys do you know who are diligent and compulsive about Pesach cleaning?
The bottom line for me is that--I will confess--my faith is shaken. Frankly, I am
of the privileged few who are spared this entire weirdness as I am hired as a staff person at a lovely and luxurious Passover hotel getaway, and I have no right to complain about the work that once again, I need not do.
Still, enough of my friends ARE doing it, and my memory of the process is fresh enough that I do wonder how any clever God would come up with this as something beneficial to His creations. A test of faith, you may say--God provides this so He can reward our loyalty and our effort. Then why threaten us with being "cut off" from our people, ie the end of our eternal souls--if we snatch a slice of pizza over Passover's eight days? Or if we sell all our chumetz except the bag of tortilla chips?
We're taught that the inflation of flour by yeast represents the puffiness of our egos--i.e. arrogance. Arrogance is one of the two characteristics--midos--that we're told to eliminate from our personalities. And here, for eight days, is a means to symbolically eliminate this puffiness, both spiritually, as we relive Jews' transition from earthly bondage to spiritual bondage to the only worthy master, God--and physically by never taking any leavened products into our bodies.
This doesn't wash for me. (I'll skip the Urchatz pun). Why didn't God say we could eat non-leavened stuff like cookies? We can have cookies, but they have to be matza meal or potato starch based--I know, I know, you'll give me the stuff about flour having the potential to be leavened. But it's not about flour--or else we couldn't have matza, which is--flour and water. We know that the already-baked matza can't rise; it's had no more than 18 minutes to combine its ingredients. But the pre-baked cookies can't rise either.
All the permutations of this chumetz-restriction are so way out there as to make Jews look primitive and brainless. Gentiles who enter a Pesach-dik kitchen think we've gone to the moon. I don't really care what gentiles think; I want to do what God wants, and I trust He knows better than I do how to maximize my spiritual potential. But when you spend hundreds--usually THOUSANDS of dollars, and days, WEEKS of work to very indirectly and obliquely tamp down our 
egos--well, first off, I don't think it works any better than less intrusive means, and it just plain doesn't make sense. I know that God MADE "sense;" if He made everything, He can do whatever He likes. Still the "fences" around avoiding chumetz, and the complexities of it, and the potential punishment for NOT doing it, or doing it incompletely--is just too bizarre.
Tell me where I'm wrong. And in the meantime, have a Pesach kasher v sameach--if you ever get THROUGH kashering.
