Monday, March 30, 2009

Mommy's Kneidlach


I like to get the recipe straight from you each year Mommy. I'll share it right here on To Life! So far 22 guests at our seder table next Wednesday night. Latza Matza Balls. My theory is that there is really just one seder table, and it's very very very long. My theory is that we all sing Dayenu in one voice, all around the world, all across the time zones, all across the centuries.
Click on this picture to see it full screen, and see my beautiful Mommy.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Ein Gedi


A glorious weekend of song and splash under the waterfalls at Ein Gedi. For Randy, we are discovering Israel's Nature Conservation Parks (King David was here before us). For Susie, groves of date palms, and bowls of cool plump fresh dates at the breakfast buffet. And in the JanieNomi tradition, singing out loud and joyous under the waterfalls.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The World is Not Yet Completed


I am a Jew because, born of Israel and having lost her,

I have felt her live again in me, more living than myself.

I am a Jew because, born of Israel and having regained her,

I wish her to live after me, more living than in myself.

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel demands of me no abdication of the mind.

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel requires of me all the devotion of my heart.

I am a Jew because in every place where suffering weeps, the Jew weeps.

I am a Jew because at every time when despair cries out, the Jew hopes.

I am a Jew because the word of Israel is the oldest and the newest.

I am a Jew because the promise of Israel is the universal promise.

I am a Jew because, for Israel, the world is not yet completed; men are completing it.

I am a Jew because, above the nations and Israel, Israel places man and his Unity.

I am a Jew because above man, image of the divine Unity, Israel places the divine Unity, and its divinity.

(We know these words from the Baskin Hagaddah. Looking for them in Hebrew for this year's seder, I found the full article.)

Why I Am a Jew

by Edmond Fleg, 1927

(Translated from French. Excerpts from original as reprinted in The Zionist Idea; a Historical Analysis and Reader edited by Arthur Hertzberg)

People ask me why I am a Jew. It is to you that I want to answer, little unborn grandson. When will you be old enough to listen to me? My elder son is nineteen, the younger fourteen. When will you be born? Perhaps in ten years' time, perhaps in fifteen. When will you read what I am writing? In 1950 or thereabouts? In 1960? Will anybody be reading in 1960? What will the world look like then? Will the machine have killed the soul? Will the mind have created for itself a new universe? Will the problems that trouble me today mean anything to you? Will there still be Jews? I believe there will. They have survived the Pharaohs, Nebuchadnezzar, Constantine, Mohammed, the Inquisition, and assimilation; they will know how to survive the motorcar.

But you - will you feel yourself a Jew, my child? People say to me, "You are a Jew because you were born a Jew; you neither willed it nor can change it." Will this explanation satisfy you if, though born a Jew, you no longer feel one? When I was twenty I too had no lot, nor part in Israel; I was persuaded that Israel would disappear, and that in twenty years' time people would no longer speak of her. Twenty years have passed, and another twelve, and I have become a Jew again-so obviously, that I am asked, "Why are you a Jew?"

What has happened to me can happen to you, my child. If you believe that the flame of Israel is extinguished in you, watch and wait; one day, it will burn again. This is a very old story, repeated in every generation: A thousand times Israel it has seemed, must die, and a thousand times she has lived again. I want to tell you how she died and lived again in me, so that, if she dies in you, you in your turn can feel her born in you once more.

So I shall have brought Israel to you, and you shall bring her to others, if you will and can. And both of us, in our own way, will have preserved and handed on the divine commandment:
"Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul; and ye shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them to your children."

Since the beginning of the Dreyfus affair the Jewish question had seemed to me a reality; now it appeared tragic: "What is Judaism? - A danger, they say, for the society to which you belong. What danger?... But first, am I still a Jew?... I have abandoned the Jewish religion.... You are a Jew all the same.... How?... Why?... What ought I to do?... Must I kill myself because I am a Jew?"

At moments I envied the strong and narrow faith of my ancestors. Penned in their ghettos by contempt and hatred, they at least knew why. But I knew nothing. How could I learn?

Of Israel I was entirely ignorant. And I regretted all the years I had spent in the study of philosophy, of Germanic philogy, and of comparative literature. I ought to have learned Hebrew, to have studied my race, its origins, its beliefs, its role in history, its place among the human groups of today; I ought to have attached myself, through my race, to something that would be myself and more than myself, and to have continued, through her, something that others had begun and that others after me would continue.

And I told myself that if I made some other use of my life, if I devoted myself to some other study, if later I founded a family without being able to bequeath to my children some ancestral ideal, I should always experience an obscure remorse, the vague feeling of having failed in a duty. And I remembered my dead father, I reproached myself with not having understood that Jewish wisdom of which he talked to me and which lived in him - and with no longer finding, by my own fa ult, anything in common between Israel's past and my own empty soul.

It was then that, for the first time, I heard of Zionism. You cannot imagine what a light that was, my child! Remember that, at the period of which I am writing, this word Zionism had never yet been spoken in my presence. The anti-Semites accused the Jews of forming a nation within nations; but the Jews, or at any rate those whom I came across, denied it. And now here were the Jews declaring: "We are a people like other peoples; we have a country just as others have. Give us back our country."

I made inquiries: The Zionist idea, it appeared, had its origins far back in the days of the ancient prophets; the Bible promised the Jews of the dispersion that they should return to the Holy Land; during the whole of the Middle Ages only their faith in this promise kept them alive; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such great spirits as Maurice de Saxe, the Prince de Ligne, and Napoleon had caught a glimpse of the philanthropic, political, economic, religious, and moral advantages which a resettlement of the Jews in Palestine might offer; since 1873 colonies had been founded there and were developing; and now a new apostle, Theodor Herzl, was calling upon the Jews of the whole world to found the Jewish state. Was this the solution for which I was looking? It explained so many things. If the Jews really formed but a single nation, one began to understand why they were considered Jews even when they ceased to practice their religion, and it became credible, too, that a nation which had welcomed them should be able to accuse them of not always being devoted to its national interests. Then the Zionist idea moved me by its sublimity; I admired in these Jews, and would have wished to be able to admire in myself, this fidelity to the ancestral soil which still lived after two thousand years, and I trembled with emotion as I pictured the universal exodus which would bring them home, from their many exiles, to the unity that they had reconquered.

The Third Zionist Congress was about to open at Basel. I decided to attend it. My knowledge of German enabled me to follow the debates pretty closely.

I listened to it all; but, with even greater interest, I looked about me. What Jewish contrasts! A pale-faced Pole with high cheekbones, a German in spectacles, a Russian looking like an angel, a bearded Persian, a clean shaven American, an Egyptian in a fez, and, over there, that black phantom, towering up in his immense caftan, with his fur cap and pale curls falling from his temples. And in the presence of all these strange faces, the inevitable happened; I felt myself a Jew, very much a Jew,...

...What then, for me, was Zionism? It could enthrall me, it enthralls me still, this great miracle of Israel which concerns the whole of Israel: three million Jews will speak Hebrew, will live Hebrew on Hebrew soil! But, for the twelve million Jews who remain scattered throughout the world, for them and for me, the tragic question remained: What is Judaism? What ought a Jew to do? How be a Jew? Why be a Jew?

I am a Jew because, born of Israel and having lost her,

I have felt her live again in me, more living than myself.

I am a Jew because, born of Israel and having regained her,

I wish her to live after me, more living than in myself.

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel demands of me no abdication of the mind.

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel requires of me all the devotion of my heart.

I am a Jew because in every place where suffering weeps, the Jew weeps.

I am a Jew because at every time when despair cries out, the Jew hopes.

I am a Jew because the word of Israel is the oldest and the newest.

I am a Jew because the promise of Israel if the universal promise.

I am a Jew because, for Israel, the world is not yet completed; men are completing it.

I am a Jew because, above the nations and Israel, Israel places man and his Unity.

I am a Jew because above man, image of the divine Unity, Israel places the divine Unity, and its divinity.

Sometimes, my child, when I wander through a museum, and stand before all the pictures and statues and furniture and armor, the faience, the crystals, the mosaics, the garments and the finery, the coins and the jewels, gathered there, from every place and every age, to hang on the walls, to stand on the plinths, to line up behind the balustrades, to be classified, numbered, and ticketed in the glass cases, I think that one or other of my ancestors may have seen, touched, handled, or admired one or other of these things, in the very place where it was made, and at the very time when it was made, for the use, the labor, the pain, or the joy of men.

This door with the gray nails, between two poplars, in a gilded frame, this is the Geneva synagogue where my father went in to pray. And see this bridge of boats on the Rhone: my grandfather crossed the Rhine, at Huninger. And his grandfather, where did he live? Perhaps as he dreamily calculated the mystical numbers of the cabbala he saw, through his quiet window, this sledge slide over the snow of Germany or Poland? And the grandfather of his grandfather's grandfather? Perhaps he was this money-changer, in this Amsterdam ghetto, painted by Rembrandt...

...One of them drove this plow, tempered in the fire, through the plains of Sharon; one of them went up to them Temple to offer, in these plaited baskets, his tithe of figs...

...and this Sumerian idol, with spherical eyes and angular jaws, is perhaps the very one that Abraham broke when he left his Chaldean home to follow the call of his invisible G-d.

And I say to myself: From this remote father right up to my own father, all these fathers have handed on to me a truth which flowed in their blood, which flows in mine; and shall I not hand it on, with my blood, to those of my blood?

Will you take if from me, my child? Will you hand it on? Perhaps you will wish to abandon it. If so, let it be for a greater truth, if there is one. I shall not blame you. It will be my fault; I shall have failed to hand it on as I have received it.

But, whether you abandon it or whether you follow it, Israel will journey on to the end of days.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

What are you thankful for?

I described a comic strip that went something like this:
What are you thankful for?
This moment.
And what else are you thankful for?
This moment.
Daddy commented to me that he is thankful for THIS moment, and delighted in the synchronicity of it all. And suddenly, I "get" synchronicity. When two things happen at the same time (just this past Shabbat, two Staszow families coincidentally decided to buy ice cream cones at Zevulun Beach, the Flora Wolbromskis and us. Think about it. Two sons go their separate, brave ways, to two far continents. The grandchildren of Volv grow up in Canada, the grandchildren of Shimon grow up in Uruguay, don't meet for two generations, and they find themselves buying ice cream cones on the same beach. Beno and I were purely there because we went to the wrong beach, trying to meet our friends - we later went to the right beach. But the ice cream synchronicity was delicious (double-decker cone of pistachio and toasted coconut)). And I suddenly understand why we delight in these synchronicities: they are glimpses at what I'm calling tiny infinity, the very thought I'm trying to express these days, that infinity is not a vast expanse but a tiny, an infinitely tiny, still point. When we both actually stand at the same spot with the same flavour of ice cream at Zevulun Beach, we take a lick of that primal single still point. And it's yummy.

"Universe" means One Song


Imagine a medical school that embraces uncertainty.
This, from Deepak Chopra:
The word “universe” means one song. Your every intention or heart’s desire is like a melody in nature’s symphony; all you have to do is sing your song. A Rumi poem says, “I want to sing like birds sing, not worrying who listens or what they think.” If you can sing your song with that attitude, you are participating in the Law of Detachment, and nothing will be able to stop the force of your intentions.

• Practice detached involvement. Stay alert to the opportunity within every problem by letting go of your idea of how things should be.

• Accept uncertainty as an essential part of your experience. In your willingness to accept uncertainty, solutions will spontaneously appear.

• Remain open to all possibilities and enjoy every moment in the journey of your life—all the fun, mystery, and magic in the field of pure potentiality.

The Law of Detachment

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty . . . in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.

I will put the Law of Detachment into effect by making a commitment to take the following steps:The Law of Detachment

1. Today I will commit myself to detachment. I will allow myself and those around me the freedom to be as they are. I will not rigidly impose my idea of how things should be. I will not force solutions on problems, thereby creating new problems. I will participate in everything with detached involvement.

2. Today I will factor in uncertainty as an essential ingredient of my experience. In my willingness to accept uncertainty, solutions will spontaneously emerge out of the problem, out of the confusion, order and chaos. The more uncertain things seem to be, the more secure I will feel, because uncertainty is my path to freedom. Through the wisdom of uncertainty, I will find my security.

3. I will step into the field of all possibilities and anticipate the excitement that can occur when I remain open to an infinity of choices. When I step into the field of all possibilities, I will experience all the fun, adventure, magic and mystery of life.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

The Still Point

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
-t.s. eliot

How deeply this resonates with me, this thought of ayn sof, the infinite, the wholeness before all creation, not as some vast limitless expanse, but as a point, an infinitely tiny, still point

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Steer in the Direction of the Skid


I know. This picture does not illustrate the point. Where would I find icy road conditions to photograph, in Netanya? But Chana Weisberg was driving on ice when a thought came to her, which has been provocative, puzzling and illuminating to me since I heard it. As her car skidded out of control, a voice inside her chanted the mantra we learn, "Turn the wheel in the direction of the skid". Counterintuitive. Her kneejerk reaction was to fight it, steer in the direction she wanted to go. But she fought the instinct, and followed the mantra, with her goal clearly in mind: to get back on track. Chana contemplated the use of this idea when things slide out of control with our children or partners. You want to say, "No!", but first, steer in the direction of the skid. Follow your child's line of thinking to what led him to react that way. Feel your husband's frustration for just a moment. Find out how the slide began. So I've been trying on this metaphor for size in the last couple of days.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Be Still My Beating Heart





In my attempt to get certified as a Speech Language Pathologist (there is a huge need for me here in Israel!) I am busy contacting the people I worked with in my real life, before I entered this dreamspace which hasn't yet felt like solid ground to me. I was intrigued by my reaction upon hearing from Kathy Logan Dechavez that she is still in the office next to mine at the Glenrose in Edmonton, so many homes ago for me. I wrote to her about my tinge of jealousy at her stability, which I'll define as her "ability to stay put" but also mentioned our current life, to which she responded: "A beach house! Be still my beating heart".

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Giving is a Palindrome

It is better to give and to receive.
The powerful Torah-energy in Israel manifests itself in many ways. One is my weekly discovery that we have been talking the current Torah portion, without even knowing. Last night I happened to mention, regarding a particular gift, this teaching:
The direction of a gift is not necesssarily the direction in which the object passes: often the giver of a gift receives more than the person receiving the gift. What delight we feel, watching our guests enjoy a meal we have lovingly cooked for them. We receive far more naches and pleasure and self-satisfaction than the guests! Or, no, they're having a great time too! It's palindromic. Much to my surprise, I later read about the word in this week's parsha Ki Tisa, "v'natnu", and they shall give, vav nun taf nun vav. It reads the same, backwards and forwards. It says this week in the Torah: Giving is a palindrome!

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Enkins in Israel


Great supper at our house in Netanya tonight: Esther Enkin and her wonderful family, and Molly Ann and Henry Schwarcz. All through my birthday I was saying I was so tall, I danced this birthday with one snowboot in Canada and one sandal on the beach in Netanya. But today, having been with Esther both there and here, I question whether there is an ocean at all.
exist
dance

Monday, March 2, 2009

Shlomo Jack's Bar Mitzvah



Diamond sun dancing over white river ice, with patches of windy blue sunlit riverflow. A full floor-to-ceiling picture window brought ice and sun and river right into the Bar Mitzvah, the early Saturday morning as as we gathered for the event. We knew the room well by this time. The Friday night before, we had feasted together, and happily reunited, Jeremy and Simon from Boston, Janie, Justin, Shlomo Jack and Sunny from Winnipeg, me from Netanya, Susie from Hanover, and many many from Toronto and Kingston. How good it is for family to gather in joy. Shlomo Jack shone, that early morning, resplendent in colourful keepa and robe, smiling, ready, delighted. Family and guests chatted sweetly, until Janie's rich wordless nig'n filtered through our voices, and soon we were all singing this lively melody, and becoming one listener, ready to begin. Shlomo Jack welcomed us, and he, Sunny, Janie and Justin carried us, with such close and happy family synchrony through a whole Shabbat morning of thoughtful translations and new melodies for the ancient prayers. Harmonies filled that sunny room, as Janie's inventions, until that moment singing inside of her own mind's ear, took on real world glory. Randy, Simon, Daniel and Yoni provided rich bassline for Janie's tune. Sunny sometimes ran to sit on an auntylap or two, and then joined into leading the service again. Her reading was strong, confident. As Uncle Larry said the first blessings for the Torah reading, many of us remembered Larry holding Shlomo at his bris, 13 years before. Larry wrote Shlomo a letter back then, about how connected he felt to this wondrous person, so tiny at the time. Imagine how Larry felt, blessing Shlomo's first reading from the Torah. And Shlomo Jack chanted the Torah with interest, absorption, gumption, enthusiasm, the way Shlomo Jack does things. The Torah, the Haftorah and its blessings, all that candy and Siman Tov and Mazel Tov and we danced and we sang for the Torah and for Shabbat and for joy and for Silkenwine, a wonder and a blessing in our world. Randy lifted the Torah high, and then Susie and I had the honour of dressing the Torah, using the wimpel that we had made for him at his birth. What sweet delight, anticipated these thirteen years, to see that gorgeous fabric art, crafted with such love for a little baby we knew would grow to Torah and to curiosity and to lovingkindness towards this day. Shlomo Jack, named for Shlomo Carlebach and for Justin's father, may his memory inspire Shlomo to thought and to caring and to action. Janie and Justin placed their hands on Shlomo's head, and with admiration and such pleasure, blessed him. And through a sunlit Shabbat of feasting and swimming and storytelling and jamming and singing and talking and hugging and kissing, we tasted from a cup overflowing with sweetness, glimpsed a world of pure sunlit delight.
 
 
 
 
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