Becoming the lady who weeps

On the first day of Rosh HaShanah a friend mentioned that last Rosh Hashanah she was weeping throughout the service because a dear friend was dying. The weeping reminded her of something her late father used to say about "The old lady who cries all through the High Holiday services."

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My friend said" I think I have become that lady." She wasn't feeling as devastated this year, but she was feeling sad, remembering her loss from last year and also thinking about our mutual friend whose father is now actively dying.

My conversation with my friend, but more than that just living through this season brings back the memories of hard high holiday seasons. The hardest of all was the year our friends child in a perfect storm of a genetic flaw and a fall was in the middle of what felt like a real life episode of the medical mystery show House.

House always had the same dramatic arc during the hour long show. Usually at about the 42 minute point Dr House would figure out exactly what was wrong. and in nearly every episode despite being close to death several times in the previous 42 minutes, the patient would be saved.

Real life is unfortunately not TV and the crisis did not unfold over an hour but over three weeks. By Rosh HaShanah the situation had gone from terrible to dire. Our friend's son was engaged to be married. I am not generally a big believer in magical amuletical thinking. I told the bride though that I would buy her veiling to make into a wedding veil as an amulet, a prayer that she would be able to marry her beloved.

On Yom Kippur the hospital called for all of us who have escorted a loved one from this life to the next know, "the family meeting".

Well, magical thinking did about as much good as the smartest doctors in the world. Our friend's son died the day after Yom Kippur.

Each year I relive the events of that terrible year. The following Yom Kippur we were waiting for my father in law to draw his last breaths.

So you might wonder what I did with that veiling.

My youngest had decided to spend some of his bar-mitzvah money on something he really wanted. He bought himself a banana suit. When it arrived in the mail just before Yom Kippur while our friend's child was dying the suit came with instructions that the top and bottom of the banana needed to be stuffed with fabric.

I realized that the magical thinking was just not going to work. I gave my son the veiling to stuff into the banana suit.

I knew it wasn't going to be worn by the bride.

The funeral was five hours away. We left early in the morning. We came home late that night. I had been away to bury my friend's child. When I came home I went into my son's room to give him a kiss. He was asleep and wearing that banana suit stuffed with the veiling.

In the intervening years my son has achieved some measure of fame while wearing that banana suit enhanced with the veiling. Today on Facebook I had an intense conversation with that bride.

She was oddly comforted by the veil's use.

As I get older, I realize that each one of us becomes the lady who weeps on the High Holidays.

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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