Barukh Dayan Ha Emet

When I gave birth to my oldest there was a bunch of us all having babies at the same time. Some of the group were first time mothers, like me.

Most of the group were pregnant their second child. One of the great thing about having your first while hanging around with more experienced mothers is that you learn how to be a mother from some really good teachers.

One of the women in that group was Susan. Susan is the sort of person who was Color War captain in summer camp. She’s enthusiastic, she is a trooper.

Susan and Michael’s first child, Eric had a rare blood disorder that made him often very, very sick. Their second child Rebecca was just younger than my daughter. The two girls used to hang out together in synagogue, as did that whole batch of babies until Susan and Michael moved to the burbs.

When my oldest was quite small, Susan told me that when Eric was small she took him to the park every day. He was so sick that he couldn’t get out of the stroller to play like the other kids. So every day Eric would come home from the park perfectly clean. Day after day Eric sat in the stroller and watched the other kids play.

Susan said that the first day Eric came home dirty she was so happy, because that meant that he was healthy enough to play like the other kids. When Susan told me this story my oldest was too little to get dirty in the playground. But I thought about the gift of getting dirty, and all that it means to have a child who is healthy enough to get dirty.

So from then on, whenever I would leave any of my kids I would say to them “Have fun, play hard and get dirty.” This was our going away mantra. My oldest said it to me when I went to give birth to her brother. I said “ Have fun play hard and get dirty.” when they went to day care, when they went to school and to summer camp.

Every once in a while we would see Eric and his family. Sometimes his face was swollen from medications. Sometimes we heard news that things were grave in deed. But we also heard that Eric went to summer camp. We heard that his bar mitzvah was incredible, because it was a miracle that he lived to see that day.

We saw Eric during his time in college. Eric had a job. There were times that he was sick, and times that he wasn’t sick.

Yesterday I ran into one of the women who was part of that group that was pregnant together twenty six years ago. She told me that Eric died last week. He was thirty years old.

Clearly each day Eric lived past babyhood was a miracle. But I also know that each day that he is no longer alive is just such a heart break.

ברוך דין האמת

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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