Prayers from the Symphony

Last night I went to the symphony.

Doesn't that sound fine and fancy. It would probably be more accurate to say I went to the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal's Lang Lang concert. For those not in the know, (as I certainly was not beforehand), Lang Lang is one of the top pianists in the world. A native of China, Lang Lang began playing piano at age 3 and started his celebrated performance career at 17. Twelve years later, he has a Grammy, an honorary doctorate and a Sony recording contract.

We arrived at the hall in the nick of time. As the house darkened and Lang Lang began to play, the sadly boorish thought that went through my mind was, "How am I going to get through 2 1/2 hours without any  visual stimulus?" Does that demonstrate that I was a TV child (much as my folks tried to stop us)? Actually though, what I really wanted was pen and paper to doodle or write while I listened.

Being pen-less left me with an excellent opportunity to think. As I stared at his marvelous hands making magic on the keyboard and observed how his body seemed to absorb the emotions, I tried to focus on the feelings of both the composer and the pianist. Sadly, I was too unfamiliar to really understand it. On the other hand, from trying to understand the hidden meaning of the music I began to think about the relationship of prayer and music.

Let me take half a step back and share a slightly different train of thought. On our way to the concert, my husband turned on his new Sirius satellite radio to the all-Broadway channel (which he had programmed just for me). I used to love Broadway, and I still do, but I realized that I had long ago left the circle of real Broadway fans. I know many of the songs, but not the new ones and not the inside jokes. This lead me to later think about the people at the concert and how they were linked by a love of classical music...another circle into which I did not properly fit.

It would be wonderful if I could write here that I was transported by Lang Lang's incredible music to a euphoric state of communing with the Divine. It did not. But it did lead me to thinking about music and prayer, and how, several months ago, I told myself that I was going to try to pray more and that I was going to use my affinity for Broadway show tunes to do so. (Many years ago, I had found a profound connection between Les Miserables "Bring Him Home" and the situation of Nachshon Wachsman.)

Having resolved this line of thinking in my mind, my focus returned to Lang Lang. What process, I wondered, had gone into the development of the piano? What did the faces of the first people of the world look like when they pounded a hollow jar and heard a beautiful sound...and how had they gone from there to discovering the melodious vibrations of strings?

But the first instrument we ever had was the voices God gave us. The Torah has numerous references to song, most famously the song sung after the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. The Levites used to sing the Psalms in the Beis Hamikdash. Zemirot, the songs of the Shabbat table, are considered so essential that my son has a check box for whether or not he sang any at each of the Shabbat meals.

I can't play any instruments, and I am not very good with formal prayer. But I love to sing, so if you see me singing quietly in my yard, just remember that might be how I am praying.

Moldy Talk

Mold, yuck! Anyone who has suffered through mold issues will know my deep seated lament.

Our home in Montreal has three floors, but our problem was...our problem is...the basement. The inspector of the house noted that there was minor water damage in the spare bedroom in the basement. Wisely, we removed the carpeting that the previous owners had placed down there (with many speculations between us about why one would put carpeting in a room that sometimes gets water). Beneath the carpet was a beautiful hardwood floor, and it appeared to only be mildly damaged.

My husband, being the handy guy that he is, cut out and replaced the damaged wood. He sanded it and varnished it. He did a beautiful job.

Never having been homeowners, however, we were unfamiliar with the insidious nature of mold. The next summer, July brought forth torrential downpours...crazy storms that taught us exactly why there had been water damage. Both ourselves and the attached house suffered tremendous damage (although the neighbors had it far worse since they had not been home at the time of the rain and we had been unable to reach them so the water sat for 24 hours).

The saga of the basement was similar to my becoming Montrealers. Just as he did with his work fitting wood to the basement, he appeared to be finding ways to fit in to our new community. I was more like the warped wood that he removed. I had made a few friends, but I felt as if I would never quite fit in. Most of the mothers of my childrens' classsmates did not work. Many of those who lived here were from families deeply rooted in the community. Most of the women who were my age were making bar mitzvahs, my oldest was turning 4. But every time I felt as if I had made an inroad into the neighborhood, something would set me back and make me feel again like a stranger in a strange land. And of course, each time I would let my husband know all about my difficulties.

A year and a half after my husband’s incredibly hard labor, we realized that the floor would have to be pulled up. Mold inspectors told us what we needed to do. A huge chunk of change later, we were declared mold free. Our once lovely guest room was now a very spare room with a cold concrete floor. It took another year and a half (and the possibility of a border) for us to complete the room. Once again, my husband did a beautiful job.

In that time, I grew accostumed to the neighborhood. I joined a monthly learning group, and it opened up a new perspective on the women in my community. Some of the women, most of the women, in this group were women whom I had written off as those who would not befriend me. We may not be buddies, but I would say we are now friendly.  And now my husband has started attending a different synagogue, a synagogue about which I had said to my husband that the wives were those women who would never accept me.

This past Friday afternoon, my husband called me to the basement and pointed to a small tear in the wallpaper in the laundry-room. Beneath the paper, was mold. (It turns out that the condensation was leaking out of the dryer vent pipe.)

Ok, so perhaps you are bored now and wondering what possible connection I could make between mold and becoming part of a new community. This past Shabbas, the Torah portion was Tazria-Metzora, which is a lengthy discussion of a Biblical skin disease that afflicts more than just one’s skin. It also afflicts inanimate objects. According to tradition, these afflictions are the result of lashon Harah, speaking ill of others and gossiping. And so my holy husband said that perhaps our latest outbreak of mold being discovered during Tazria-Metzora is something that we should  keep in mind.

It was a lesson for me. A reminder that I had to judge more favorably those whom I felt were judging me.

The 49 Day Diet

Between the holiday of Passover and the holiday of Shavuot, there are exactly seven weeks. It is a fact we count every year for 49 days. It is exactly seven weeks from the feasting days of eggs, potatoes and meat (a total of at least eight festive meals) to the holiday best known for cheesecake. A foodies delight, a dieters nightmare.

A few weeks before Passover, my youngest child turned two. I can no longer attribute my extra cushioning to him. (He's even thinning out from his yummy baby purge.) On Passover, I therefore tried to be proactive. I challenged my mother that whn we saw each other next, in seven weeks, we would each have shed ten pounds.

Seven weeks in basically two months...no problem. After all, every dieter knows the first ten are usually the easiest.

But the seven weeks from seder to Shavuot are really six weeks between holidays, because the first week is still Passover and we were traveling, and, limited in our food choices, and guests in other people's homes...

And how can anyone diet that first week after Passover? We didn't make our house kosher for Passover, but I also stopped buying food a few weeks before the holiday to use up as much chametz as possible. We were still disorganized and thus "forced" to eat pizza and pasta.

I now face a five week deadline to shed ten pounds. But my eldest child's birthday is in a week, and thus there a celebrations with all different parts of our family, which means cake, cake and more cake.

Reflecting on my great rationalizations skill, I am struck by a real lesson within the mitzvah of counting the omer. Shavuot, the end of the country, is how we mark receiving the Torah from Hashem. The pinnacle of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. But how do I reach my own personal pinnacle.

Just as with my dieting practices, when I look at my spiritual goals, it is easy to find excuses. "I meant to." "I want to." "I'm going to."

But days, and then weeks, and then months, pass quickly. Before I know it, I've been making the same promise of change for years without putting it into effect.

I am certain that I am not alone. The omer reminds us that when we set a time period, the we face a deadline even by which point we must either consider ourselves successful...or not.

This morning, I declared to my family that I was ready to get serious on my diet. There will be no left-over pancakes for me when I return from my Sunday morning French class, where I now sit eating rice cakes and applesauce (on our break). And I almost wrote here one of my secret spiritual goals that has spent years as an empty promises...I almost declared that I would accomplish this too, before Shavuot. But I guess my hesitation proves my point, for already I worry that I will not succeed and therefore rationalize that it is better to avoid sharing it and not embarrassing myself.

And so I bid you "au revoir"... But if you see me between now and Shavuot, please don't offer me any cake, I may find a reason to eat it.

Ani Maamin, Never Again

Tonight is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, and since I have started a blog, it seems most appropriate to write on this topic.

Twenty years ago today, I was in Poland on the March of the Living. It was an incredible experience, a statement that will be upheld by every past participant. In my own life, this was a life altering experience, for in many ways it set me on the path to Orthodoxy.

Walking through the streets of Warsaw, I remember staring at every silver haired head and thinking, "Where were you? What did you do while my unknown relatives were murdered?" (Thankfully, all of my grandparents were either born in, or had arrived in, America before the Second World War.) I still remember the anger I felt at these living artifacts of nationalism gone terribly wrong. And then the organizers of the March privileged us with meeting a righteous gentile. He told us his story, how he had been taken to the concentration camps for helping Jews, and I was able to hope for the good in the elders we passed.

From that point on, I was better able to dwell on those who died rather than those who murdered them. When I thought about those who died, I began to contemplate what their deaths meant for me. These men, women and children went to their deaths because they were Jews, and they were Jews because, for hundreds of generations, their ancestors had remained faithful to our traditions. I was raised in a family that was not religious. My parents had not been taught about Judaism, but practiced Judaism as their parents before them had...observing the vestiges of a rich heritage diluted in the great "melting pot." But what had all these Jews died for other than that their should still be Jews.

When I returned home, I started eating what I would now call "kosher style." I cared. I wanted to do something to honor those victims. I wanted to thumb my nose at Hitler. And I did.

Twenty years later, I have four beautiful Jewish children who walk around the house singing Jewish songs. (Even my two year old sings Ashrei.)

My eldest child will soon be eight. He has seen, in passing, my photo album from the March of the Living. I have just called him in to ask him if he knows what the Holocaust was, and he told me only that he has heard the word and knows that it is something very bad. When he asked me why, I sent him to bed, telling him that it was, indeed, something very bad and not to be spoken of right before bed.

I try to think back to how I learned about the Holocaust, and, oddly for one who had no direct relatives who survived or perished, it feels like something that I always knew. I do, however, remember when the educational children's program "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" came to town. I remember being deeply moved by it, and understanding, without fully understanding, how tragic it truly was. I can still hear the opening and closing of the title poem, which was written in Terezin by Paval Freedman, a young man who was later killed in Auschwitz ("The last, the very last,/So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow./Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing/against a white stone. . . . Only I never saw another butterfly./That butterfly was the last one./Butterflies don't live in here,/in the ghetto.")

Growing up, I learned a beautiful and haunting version of Ani Maamin... "I believe, with complete faith, in the coming of the messiah." I was taught that this tune had been heart-wrenchingly sung by some Jews as they were led to the gas chamber. It is a song that has always haunted me.

My children believe with a faith far more perfect and complete than mine. When I teach them about the Holocaust, whether I do so tomorrow or in two years time, I know that they will have emuna shelaima, complete faith, that the Holocaust was part of the greater plan God has for our people - a horrible, terrible part of the plan, certainly - but part of the greater whole nevertheless. And every morning, when the 31 little girls in my daughter's class recite this same Ani Maamin (with a far happier tune), we claim our victory over Hitler.

Never again!

Lessons From My Daughter

Every baal teshuva gets asked the question, "Why did you become religious?" Depending on my audience, I have different answers (all of which are true). One of my primary answers is children. I wanted my children to have a stronger, more natural, emuna and bitachon (strength and trust in God).

Twenty years and four children later, I can honestly say that I believe I have laid the foundations. Two stories from this Pesach involving my six year old daughter confirm that I am heading in the right direction.

During the first days of the holiday, which we spent with my family, my mother took a walk with three of her grandchildren. During their walk, they played "build-a-story," a game in which each person adds a piece to the story. At the end of their creative tale, my mother asked each child for a conclusion. According to her, my six year old decided that the protagonist (my word, not hers) prayed to Hashem that his problems would be taken care of and the next day was able to solve all his problems. My mother was very impressed, not just with the answer, but with her sincerity.

The second story must be prefaced with the explanation that on Thursday of Chol Hamoed, my daughter tripped over a stump and landed on her face. Not only did she cut up her lip, but she knocked out her top front tooth, which had not yet even started to wiggle. On Friday morning, my poor princess did not want to leave the house because, as she put it, she looked like a duck. (Indeed, she was very swollen.) We convinced her that she was fine to go out in public. Later that day, after she struggled to eat properly through her bruises, my daughter quietly asked me, "If everything God does is for the good, what good was there in my losing my tooth?"

Our answer was fairly mundane...it was a serious enough incident to get the zoo to remove the stump. I was calm in my response, but inside my heart - or perhaps my soul - leaped for joy.

I have no doubt that this child often experiences profound thoughts. Sadly, I am often too busy with work, or laundry, or cooking, or her siblings, or etc., to sit down and have a chat. And the lack of that time was most poignantly pointed out to me by this very child when, her hand in mind, she held my hand (a few days before the accident) and told me that she loved long trips because we all spent time together.

When I went to sit down and write about my Pesach holiday, I thought about this last story and was going to wax poetic about the freedom I found this Passover. But I think that my daughter helped my get to the very heart of the entire freedom experience, which is allowing ourselves to have a beautiful and sincere relationship with Hashem.

The Driven Word

Why did I start a new blog? It's a question I've been asked several times now, and it's a legitimate question. After all, I spend most my day writing for my job -creating Jewish Treats, composing pieces to post on Huffington Post, etc. I even branched out recently and did a freelance piece. When people ask me what I do in my spare time, I all too often answer that I like to work. When they look at me with pity, I firmly explain that I love writing, particularly about Judaism.

To put it in its simplest form, I love words!

It's always been this way with me. I remember asking my elementary school teachers - I want to say as early as third grade - to read my stories. By the time I finished high school, I had drafted two fantasy novels. (One definitely unpublishably bad, the other might be something with a lot of editing.)

When I was twenty, I started observing Shabbat. In addition to all the other changes this brought to my life, I noticed an odd occurrences.  Each week on Shabbat I was filled with writing inspiration. All sorts of plot lines drifted through my head. If I was as religious as I one day hope to be (religious being a reference to having a deep spiritual connection), I might state that this was obviously my yetzer harah, my evil inclination, trying to lure me away from being shomer Shabbat. My more practical side might suggest that Shabbat was downtime for my brain from the everyday details of my life, although I can't imagine what was so pressing at that time in my life.

Several years after I completed university and even earned a Masters in secondary English education, I began working for the National Jewish Outreach Program. In time, my position became a dream job for me - writing about Judaism.  I spend my days immersed in words, researching and writing, and I remain the voracious reader that I always have been.  

While I no longer feel that overwhelming compulsion to write on Shabbat, I often feel it at other, shall we say, inappropriate times - like when I am suppossed to be spending time with my kids or cleaning the house.
And sometimes words, phrases, sentences...the whole writing process, seems to just perculate with in me.

Why did I start a blog? Because words keep me focused. Because being wrapped in words is the safest place for me because I know that here I can succeed. Because I am driven to write and a personal blog seems a beautiful place to unleash my unfettered voice.

My Feet Are Up, My Soul Is...

In one week it will be Passover, and, to be perfectly honest, I am uncertain what I am supposed to be "feeling" right now. All around me people are talking about cleaning and cooking, about not forgetting the meaning of the holiday amidst all that cleaning and cooking. As for me, well, let's just say that it's Friday afternoon and I am blogging. I don't clean or cook for the holiday. (A fact for which I am always grateful to my brother and sister-in-law, who have hosted the seder for over 15 years.)

The fact that I go to family for seder does not mean I have never cleaned or cooked for Pesach. Some years, in the past, I have had to be home for Chol Hamoed and the last days. However, this is the third year in a row that I have worked out a plan to be away.I can be perfectly honest and admit that visiting friends and relatives is my cover story. I don't like to clean, I never have and I never will. More than not liking to clean, I'm terrible at it. There's always something more interesting to distract me (like, say, writing this post).

Those of you making Pesach are reading this and rolling your eyes, perhaps even wondering if I am talking about cleaning just to join in the ranks of Jewish women everywhere...to be part of the holiday.

You may be right.

When people in my neighborhood ask me how my cleaning is going, I feel almost guilty mentioning that I am going away. I always quickly emphasize that we always go to my brother's and his family comes to us for Shavuot, and that it is an eight hour drive, and just how thoroughly thankful I am.

At the same time, a small part of me is regretful that I do not have that same Pesach cleaning furver going on. Every Jewish holiday has some sort of ritual that helps us to connect with the spiritual aspect of the holiday. Waving the lulav and estrog is a physical declaration of what is best express by our children as "Hashem is truly everywhere." The mitzvot of Purim remind us that it should not take the threat of annihilation to bring the Jewish people together.  One might even say that the very lack of rituals of Shavuot is rife with meaning in that it helps us connect to the fact that the foundation of it all is the gift of Torah.

I'll still have pesach, matzah and maror, the core of the Pesach seder. I'll still feast on my unleavened bread the whole week through. But the preparations for this holiday do serve as a catalyst to understand servitude and freedom (a whole other topic, of course), and, at the same time, to prepare ourselves to experience the deeper meanings of the seder.

Of course, I could just "pretend" and clean the house anyway. (I am doing one or two rooms, but not the tough ones.) That, however, is like "pretending" chocolate isn't kosher. It doesn't really work, at least not for me.

Because of the way the holiday falls out this year, on Friday night, and the way that we travel,  we might not even be able to do bedikatz chametz to its fullest extent. In fact, we might have to search the min-van as our bedikatz since we will already have sold the house and will be in hotel.

In a way, I feel awkward admitting that I feel stuck without the physical work. I shouldn't need a physical act to connect to the spiritual. But I do. That's part of who I am. It's part of why I have such challenges working out my spiritual "chametz" - my anger, my arrogance, my impatience, my need for acknowledgement (dont' forget to like this post).

For now, I can take a deep breath and tell myself, once again (so often again), that I will try harder. And I will, at least for an hour.