שַׁחַר אֲבַקֶּשְׁךָ צוּרִי וּמִשְׂגַּבִּי At dawn I seek You

This beautiful photo was sent to me this morning. Even if you didn't know that this photo was taken in Israel or who the young woman in the photo is or who made the tallit it would still be a photo that would make you stop for a moment to admire all of the glowing beauty in the image.

I met the young woman in the photo soon after she moved to New York as a little girl. There are some children who emerge from the womb with their personalities the same from the moment they are born until they die. Other kids are still as moldable as plasticine needing life to help form them. I saw Ella for the first time during High Holiday services when she was rushing up the aisle with some friends wearing a hat, carrying a messenger bag, and wearing sturdy shoes. She was a girl on a mission. She was stunningly completely her adult self inside the body of a child.

By the time it was time for Ella to get ready for her bat-mitzvah she and her parents and I were already friends. We met to design her tallit.

Together we came up with this

as the design for Ella's tallit. If you want, you can read the post describing our tallit designing meeting here.

While I make a tallit ( or anything else for that matter) my client and their various sets of needs both spoken and unspoken live with me during the weeks and months that I work on their project.

Once the tallit leaves my house it completely belongs to my client. I suppose that some of the bar and bat mitzvah kids I have worked with wear their tallitot once and then it gets shoved into the back of a drawer. Other kids wear their tallitot just on High Holidays. I have an intense relationship with my client while I am working for them and then the thing I have made goes off into the world.

I saw Ella nearly every Shabbat in our synagogue. She finished high school . She went on a gap-year program in Israel. Ella joined the Israeli army and had a fancy army job that included direct dealings with foreign diplomats. Ella would come home to visit her parents and come to synagogue and wear her tallit. Ella finished her army service and is now off on other adventures.

So here is a photo of as the Irish would charmingly say "our Ella" davening at sunrise in Israel wrapped in the tallit I had made for her---as completely herself as she was the first time I set eyes on her. I am moved nearly to tears that this tallit has accompanied her on her adult adventures.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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