Synagogue Shopping Season

I was at my synagogue the other day with Daughter and since Daughter is now five feet one (I think she grew twelve inches in the last two years) one of the older ladies I know there asked me, "Have you booked her Bat Mitzvah date yet?"

I looked chagrined. Every good Jewish mother knows she's supposed to book the date with the synagogue at two years out and I'm at one year and nine months. What's the problem?

Is it that I'm afraid that instead of having a Bar Mitzvahzilla, like my son started morphing into around the time period of his Bar Mitzvah, I'll have quite the Bat Mitzvahzilla on my hands? Am I afraid I'll have to change the name of the blog? Or maybe that I'll have to start a new blog just to keep track of her varying demands (a kids' table shaped like an 'R'? Really? Her name in lights?)

Here's the real problem: I'm not sure my synagogue is going to exist in September of 2012.

There's this strange thing that happens in the Jewish community in Phoenix and, for all I know, in the Jewish communities all over this country: Sometime each summer the Jewish community goes synagogue shopping. Since synagogue dues are traditionally due before the high holidays which tend to fall in September and October, around August a synagogue fair is held to showcase new synagogues, old synagogues, and changed synagogues. 

In a community like Phoenix, where there are now fifty-five synagogues and many people who don't affilitate at all, sometimes it feels like, well, synagogue shopping season. Like there just might be a newer, more exciting place elsewhere, a younger, more exciting Rabbi, or lower dues. And, of course, there are valid reasons to leave a place of worship, like fees, like the Rabbi, like for spiritual fulfillment.

But what happened during this past summer was that a lot of people left the place that we belong to, threatening its existence.

Husband and I are a little dull-witted about this kind of stuff. It's not that we're massively spiritually fulfilled by our congregation, it's just that we have a relationship with them that, after thirteen years, feels right. It feels like home. And when we're there - even if we don't understand a word of the Hebrew - it reminds us of the services we grew up with and the Judaism of our parents.

I still live with this one nightmare from soon after our move to Arizona, when I was fourteen. My dad died suddenly at age 48 of a massive heart attack and we were unconnected to the Jewish community. We had no community to lean on for support nor a Rabbi to help us or to eulogize our father. The rabbi who showed up at his funeral - was he on a rotation list for the unaffiliated? - came and went swiftly, almost forgetting my dad's name in the middle of the service. That will never happen to my children and what happened to my father will never happen to my mother. The child of fourteen is now fifty and has changed all of that.

So I guess I'd better just have a little faith and book the Bat Mitzvah date. And get ready for Bat Mitzvahzilla.

Do you tend to change your house of worship frequently, if you go to one? Do you have any clear motivating reason why you do or don't belong to one? In your religion do you have a choice about where you worship? Ever had a kid grow this quickly?

Don't Rush Rosh Hashana

In the row behind us at Rosh Hashana services this year was a family with young children. It was like being transported in time, watching them panic over the antics of their younger child who had no idea he was in a High Holiday service or how that differed from, say, Peter Piper Pizza.

What a difference a few years makes. I remember sitting there (standing there, running there) with my kids and looking longingly at the families with older children, children the ages of mine now, Bar Mitzvahzilla fifteen and Daughter eleven. I mean, I enjoyed that whole baby thing, and what was really ever cuter than Daughter in a little dress crawling with matching pantaloon thingies on anyway? But still. Services.

Still, we never put our kids in the babysitting offered and dreaded the "children's service" since we couldn't hear ourselves think. And we felt sorry for the Rabbi who'd have to conduct the service over the din. And we - okay I - really think that kids have to learn how to stand still. Especially considering that they spend the rest of the time ripping our house to shreds, for example. I explain to them that it's not that Husband and I love being at services, but it's Rosh Hashana. It's kind of amazing that we're still Jewish thousands of years later. Not to mention the Holocaust.

Do they complain before we go? Yes. Do they ask questions about why we have to go? Yes. This year I got a double whammy from Daughter since the first day was her birthday. Wait just a minute. I have to go to services on my birthday? Lucky her, I explained, sharing a birthday with the birthday of the world! I swear, I can put a positive spin on anything.

She was born on a different Rosh Hashana, eleven years ago. Because of Bar Mitzvahzilla's preemie birth, she had to be delivered four weeks early, on 9-9-99, as a matter of fact. By Yom Kippur I was back in synagogue with my newborn in my arms and the congregation oohing and aahing over her. She's grown up there, whether she realizes it or not.

So don't rush my Rosh Hashana, kids. Some things take the time they take. Time to sit and time to stand. Time to think about the last year and the year to come. And time to both whisper and yell at the kids at the same time.

So relax and enjoy it. Because Yom Kippur is right around the corner.

How do you handle the inevitable protests of children not wanting to go to religious services? Do you have a long history at your house of worship? Can you think back to the different ages of your children on the same holiday over the years?
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I'm participating in the Global Day of Jewish Learning and write this post in anticipation of November 7, 2010, when Jews around the world will share a day of dialogue and exploration.

A Pintele Yid

My parents weren't very into Judaism while I was growing up. Because of the Holocaust, because of seeing things during the war that they felt were incompatible with the existence of any God, none of that was part of the Jewishness I grew up with. Food was, Yiddish was, and, of course, the Holocaust was. As a matter of fact, instead of my parents picking between Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Orthodox Judaism, they simply made up their own denomination: Holocaust Judaism. Our worship consisted mainly of repeating over and over again all of the horrors our parents lived through during the war, until we all ran shrieking from the house into the arms of non-Jewish spouses.

But I had a longing for more. I had a pintele yid - a little Jewish spark inside me.

In 1989, I got divorced from my first husband. There were a lot of reasons for this but they can be boiled down to the most important one: I was dying inside my marriage. That's all. My pintele yid reared its head hopefully. Could the little Jew come out again? I didn't know anyone in the Jewish community, I hadn't been to a synagogue in years - I'd been hiding in fact, believing I didn't belong. But I also believed one thing absolutely: if I had to start all over again I was going to get exactly the life I wanted.

This past Sunday was the Israel Independence Day Fair in Phoenix. Husband and I went and walked among all the tables and booths and I saw what my pintele yid and I had built in the twenty-one years since my divorce, and in the seventeen years since my second marriage.

I wasn't alone anymore; that little Jew inside of me has nothing to hanker for. My synagogue, my Rabbi, my kids' Preschool teachers, their Jewish Day School teachers and staff, their camp, my chavurah friends, the moms and dads I've met, the charities with which we've been involved, and so much more. A rich life. A life that at one time eluded me. From Holocaust Judaism back to Judaism, one step at a time.

The life I dreamed of the day I watched my ex-husband drive away, his car loaded with his belongings.

Did you ever have to start over? After a move, in college, as an adult? Did you ever have to start with nothing but your belief in a different life?

A Different Kind of Ish

Okay, I'm not Irish, I'll admit it. Each year when I wake up on St. Patrick's Day, I don't bounce out of bed thinking about it or about fields of four-leafed clovers. Of course, then I arrive at my exercise class and, duh, everyone is always wearing green and all of our routines for the day are Irish jigs.

The problem, of course, is that I'm a different kind of Ish - Jewish. There are several differences between being Irish and Jewish. Here's a short list of the Irish terms on the left with their Jewish equivalents on the right.

                      

Tiny Leprechauns = Shrunken Elderly relatives

Green Beer = Mogen David Wine

Green cookies = Matzah

Corned Beef and Cabbage = Corned Beef on Rye

Gaelic = Yiddish

Jaunty caps = Yarmulke

Red Hair = No Hair

Dancing a Jig = Dancing the Hora

Pot 'O Gold at the End of the Rainbow = Pot 'O Gold in the Bank

Not surprisingly, there's no Jewish equivalent for "The Luck of the Irish." 

It's just a different kind of Ish.

Got any Irish equivalents from your culture or religion? Does your life sometimes feel like it runs on a different calendar than the rest of the world? Do you do a big celebration for St. Patrick's Day or not?

Weight of the World

Yesterday was my father's Yahrzeit, which is the anniversary of his death. It's been thirty-five years since he died. And since I'm a very good Jewish girl, I know this. I get a letter from my synagogue. Heck, I belong to a synagogue. I buy Yahrzeit candles, I know how to spell "yahrzeit." I've been the daughter of a father who died, after all, thirty-five years ago.

But one of the great ironies of my life is that since I was raised by atheist/agnostic Holocaust Survivors, I was given no Jewish education. I did a pretty good job of raising myself Jewish, but I have to say that, not having come to my Hebrew education or my synagogue familiarity early, I always stand there like an idiot during certain rituals in Judaism.

So there I was at the tiny morning service at my synagogue at 7:30 AM, an idiot. Anything I know, I only know by memorization, so if a melody of a prayer is changed during the service, that's it, I don't know it anymore. Yesterday morning they changed a lot of melodies. It's crazy because I know Judaism backwards and forwards, philosophically, and the history, and in my heart. But stand me in a tiny synagogue with a bunch of seventy and eighty year old men and women and, guess what, I'm just an unnaturally tall brunette Jewess with a good purse. And by tall I mean I'm over five feet tall.

So I stood there, alone. Husband was driving the kids to work, though they had come with me the night before. Tears came to my eyes, and not exactly because of my dad dying. After thirty-five years, I'm used to that thought. It was the idea that, though one of seven, I'm alone.

I used to have a recurrent nightmare when I was a kid, distressing enough that I'd wake up terrified night after night in a cold sweat and run crying into my parents' room. It was always the same thing: I was alone somehow, and the weight of the world was on my back. 

At the service this morning I realized that the nightmare had come true: the weight of the world was on my back. Or at least the memorializing of my father, the carrying on of Judaism, and writing as a child of Survivors. That's all. There was no one there who would help me shoulder the responsibility of remembering my dad, to come stand beside me in this tiny, uncomfortable service in the morning one day in early March each year. 

But unlike that nightmare I used to have, the weight doesn't feel scary anymore, or unmanageable or burdensome. It feels like responsibility and, somehow, it feels just right.

Has your family split in religious observance? Do you have a special day each year to remember loved ones who have passed away? Do you feel at home in your faith's service or do you go even while feeling ignorant? Did you ever have recurrent nightmares as a child?  

Ten Things That Lead Me to Believe That I'm Jewish

Since I got the Sugar Doll Award from Big Little Wolf's Daily Plate of Crazy, I need to tell you ten things about myself that you may not know. So I thought I'd tell you ten things about me that have led me to believe, conclusively, that I just may be Jewish.

1) I'm married to a guy named Howard. Not only this, but when I was in Jewish Singles, all the guys were named Howard. I could only differentiate them by the adjectives I attached to their names - like Fat Howard, Thin Howard, Boring Howard, and Cheap Howard. Which one do you think I married? (Okay, all joking aside, I married Thin Howard.)

2) I have a Jewish wedding contract (a ketubah) that says that if we ever get divorced my husband has to give me a divorce settlement of eighteen cows. I'll have to check with my HOA, but I'm thinking we're not allowed to have livestock here.

3) I clean the house from top to bottom before a party, let everyone destroy the house at the party, and then I clean it again.

4) My eating disorder? Fat. My twelve years in Weight Watchers showed a net gain of twenty-five pounds rather than a loss.

5) My grandmothers' names? Goldie and Sosha. My grandfathers? Yaacov and Gershon.

6) My choice of my childrens' names was not based on what I or my husband liked, but by checking out the names of our dead relatives.

7) I crave smoked fish.

8) I will actually move from my house to a different house to make sure my son gets into the right high school.

9) I grew up not knowing exactly what I was eating - in English. I only knew the words in Yiddish. The base ingredient of every dish? Rendered fat. 


10) When it rains, my face disappears inside the exploding Jewfro that used to be my hair.

What is an undeniable fact that you are who you are, whether you're Catholic, Mormon or Baptist? What gives you away and is so apparent you can just forget about hiding it?

Thank you to Big Little Wolf for awarding me the Sugar Doll! Although she's way too smart for me, I try to make my my limited brain cells concentrate once a day and go visit her wonderful blog where she always makes me think and I always find a lively discussion.

The Sugar Doll is passed along to one or more terrific writers who connect, contribute, entertain, enlighten, and otherwise make our day. Each person who receives it may then choose one to ten others to whom it is given. The recipient is required to post “Ten things you don’t know about me.” I'm passing my Sugar Doll along to Chris at A Deliberate Life, whose honesty and  determination have taught me a lot since I began reading her blog, and to Kristen at Motherese, whose finely-tuned mind and fascinating conversations remind me that this motherhood journey is not for the faint-hearted.

Eight Greedy Nights

Well the eight days of Chanukah are over at sundown today.  It's been exhausting.

Because I had such a ludicrous Jewish upbringing, I've always tried to make my kids' Jewish holidays incredible, including Chanukah.

My Chanukah as a kid:  all the motley crew of cousins come over - there are the foolish cousins and the egghead cousins, the bucktoothed cousins and the Bryl creamed cousins.  Some of them are actually being raised Jewish and expect that there will be a lit menorah.  My mom is under pressure now.  She has to pretend she's raising us Jewish.  She has to find our menorah and candles. 

She snakes her arm into the cabinet above our stove and finds what passes for a menorah in our house:  a miserable, metal, tilting thing that Goodwill would throw out.  Then she snakes her arm up there again and finds a box of candles.  Since it's stored above the stove, the candles are melted together into one blob.  It's a candle brick now, and she has to snap off the candles that she needs, one by one. Broken candle shards.

My mother, being Old Country, is mystified by the idea of Hanukkah presents. When pressed, she enlists the aid of my grandfather.  He gets a great idea, laboriously rises on his diabetic legs and fishes around in a pocket so big it's like Mary Poppins' purse - I'm thinking he'll probably pull out a floor lamp. He comes up Eisenhower dollars all around. Chanukah gelt.

I go off to school very excited by this whole gigantic silver dollar thing, this whole Zayda as Mary Poppins thing, this whole mystery of the blessing over the candles thing. I'm confronted, however, by the children of non-immigrant families all showing up with presents identical to each others, like they had coordinated it or something.  They all have lovely Jewish stars on necklaces.

Flash forward to parenthood.  Flash forward to eight greedy nights.  The kids and I set up an elaborate eight-day calendar every year, Bar Mitzvahzilla on one line and Daughter on the other, the days of the week on the top. Then we assign themes. Not all are gift nights, one is tzedakah night, where we give to others, and another is menorah night, where we light just about every menorah in the house and start a veritable conflagration. Last night, the lighter not working, Husband helpfully lit a blow torch to help me light the menorahs.

Flash forward to a lifetime of lists now that are like a time capsule of my kids' lives:  Lego Day, Spiderman Day, Hello Kitty Day, High School Musical Day, and now, much to my chagrin, Xbox Day and Moshi Monster Day.
 
And flash forward to the thing I love the best:  my light up menorahs sitting on my front window sills lighting up our windows just a little, telling the world about the miracle of Chanukah.

Bat Mitzvahzilla Coming Up Fast

Daughter is turning 10 on Wednesday. This makes her, besides the all-important Double Digits, three years away from her Bat Mitzvah. She's already started telling me her preferences for her party just so that I, who apparently don't have anything better to do than spend three years planning her Bat Mitzvah, can get a head start.

Of course she wants the party to be wonderful like her brother's, where we invited everyone who we loved - and their kids - and watched everyone we adored adore each other in turn. Of course, she knows it's about the synagogue service, about starting to be responsible as an adult Jew for her religious observance. Of course, Mom! But, one little thing: can the tables on the kid side of the banquet room be arranged in a huge "R" for the first letter of her name?

I look at my budding Bat Mitzvahzilla and I tell her, "I just want you to know that I'm not changing the name of the blog, even when you say really nutty things like that."

She continues as if she hasn't heard me. "And what about huge glittery posters of my name on the wall all over the room?" I think in about a minute she'll ask me if I'm taking notes.

Planning my son's Bar Mitzvah party was pretty easy. All I had to do was avoid the horrors of every Bar and Bat Mitzvah party I went to in Skokie in the early 70s. First there were the stilted tables of 13-year-olds watching the grown-ups foxtrot. Then, when it was our time to dance -cued by the Mod music- there were the girls plastered against one wall and the boys, like one paralyzed massive iceberg, plastered against the other.

My definition of a good time was pretty loose back then. Running around the room or playing on the hotel elevator was good. Gossiping about the boys was good. Seeing a boy walk toward me as if to ask me to dance, but then chicken out, was good because then I could talk about that and micro-analyze it all night with the other girls who almost got asked to dance.

So, between what we did for Bar Mitzvahzilla's party and what I remember from when I was a kid, I figure I can handle this. I tell Daughter we'll have to talk about it when she's twelve. But she's pretty organized. She'll probably start a list now so she'll be ready.

Slave to a 13-Year-Old

My son just went to his last Bar Mitzvah of the year, at a hotel in Old Town Scottsdale where all the Hollywood stars hang out when they come here. Yes, a pack of 13-year-olds from a Jewish day school in North Phoenix, all hanging out at a hotel Beyonce stays at when she's here. The invitation was a bunch of playing cards with various parts of the invitation printed on each card. The theme? Las Vegas Night.

He's gone to a Bat Mitzvah with a mechanical bull, too many with "game trucks" to count, many with sports themes and one with a Winter Wonderland theme for a Bat Mitzvah in December. Hey, I know it must be hard to decorate around all those hotel Christmas trees, but a Bat Mitzvah with a Christmas theme?

I started this blog because I was planning my son's Bar Mitzvah and was kind of losing my mind as we came up on the event. It became a chronicle of a type. But one of the things I assumed going into the whole year - which for Jewish kids is kind of like debutante season - was that things would be pretty low-key because the school they go to is so low-key. I expected that there would be no themes, that people understood that the theme is the Bar Mitzvah.

But I guess I'm not running the world yet because I was wrong. There have been plenty of themes and no one yet has come up to me raving about my genius move of using the Bar Mitzvah itself as the theme. Oh well.

So after all these suits and dress shirts and shiny black shoes he's worn, my son, Bar Mitzvahzilla, has come away with a lot of new knowledge:

1) He now knows he can sit through services at any synagogue in town, uncomplainingly, for hours. He always knows to carry a kippah. (prayer cap)

2) He knows not to fight the hungry older people and try to get in line for food after services. He'll only get pushed out of the way.

3) He knows how to write "Mazel Tov - you did great!" on the cards I hand him and then wait for me to stick my check in.

4) He knows how to nag me to death to walk him into the services and the receptions, insisting he won't know anyone there and how will he find anyone there - working himself up into a lather about it - then, once I'm in there wearing, like, yoga pants, he spots his friends and ditches me instantly.

5) He knows to call me in a panic to come pick me up now, why aren't you here yet??? the second his first friend leaves an event, knowing it takes me half an hour to get anywhere.

6) He knows how to stalk me as I drive to get him, calling me every five minutes, breathing into the phone like a killer and then, once I'm there, popping into the car like a normal boy, cheerful and exuberant, saying, "So what'd you do while I was gone?" He knows this Jekyll and Hyde thing keeps me off balance.

The social schedule will resume in the fall. I (we) get the summer off, which is good because Bar Mitzvahzilla will soon be fourteen and he has grown. I need to go shopping. New dress pants, new clunky men's dress shoes, new dress shirts. Game truck clothes.

Dayenu

Since I turned 49, I've known that I need a cardiac work up. After all, when your father dies at 48 of a massive heart attack, there's a risk factor in the family, so I knew it was time I had an evaluation. Also, I haven't been breathing that great, even considering my routine asthma.

So my doctor not only agrees, he does an EKG, which was fine. Then he refers me for a CT Scan of my chest. After a week I got tired of waiting for the results so I picked them up. What I expected to find - "Normal chest CT" - wasn't there. Instead there was a report of two nodules, one 3 mm and one 7 mm. So I look up nodules on the Internet and find that they are almost always benign growths but if you have the following factors you could have lung cancer: age over 45, difficulty breathing.

I went into our seder not really knowing if I was living or dying, not that any of us really know that, but not knowing it in a more urgent way. Since having my brain tumor 8 years ago and having to deal with such a horrible, possibly fatal thing, it was amazing how quickly I slipped back into that - into the sadness of having to say goodbye to all this, the regrets of not having gotten everything done. I was a little grateful too that I had gotten that extra eight years. I mean, if I had died 8 years before, my daughter would have been a one-year-old, now she's nine. There was immediately the feeling of not being able to make any plans, of it being too late for everything. And then I thought - of course - I've had 8 years to write and write and still no published book? But maybe the purpose of my life wasn't writing a book, maybe it was something else, like the relationships I've built, or something else.

I managed to get the CT scan over to my pulmonary doctor on Thursday and got an appointment with her for that afternoon. First though, my husband, daughter, son and I had lunch at a restaurant where you order at the counter and are given a number to take to the table. It's just a big, jumbled pile of numbers and the cashier pulled out 18. And I don't mean to be all mystical and other-worldly here, but right then I had no idea if I was going to live or die and I didn't even notice the number at first. I was just carrying it and juggling my drink cup. Then I sat down at the table, looked at the number, and got quite a jolt. The number 18 is "chai" in Hebrew, which means life.

There's this part of the Passover seder where you sing a song called "Dayenu," which means that if God had given me only half of what he gave me, it would have been enough, but look how much more he gave me. In the seder it's applied to all the miracles that happened to the Israelites in the Passover story, but I've never read it without feeling that it's personally
applicable to me.

My doctor reaffirmed life. She said that because the nodules are round and smooth, she's 99.9% sure they're not cancer, most likely they're scar tissue from Valley Fever or a case of pneumonia I never knew I had, but the CT Scan has to be repeated every six months for 2 years to make sure the nodules don't grow. Of course, I'm used to that type of thing. I've been jumping between MRIs for 8 years now, trying to get my children grown. I just have to shrink down my time frame for a while, try to get them older in six month increments for a while.