Tag Archives: new traditions

February 7, 2022 · 7:30 am

A Brief History Of One Jew

by Gerard Sarnat (Portola Valley, CA)

15 years ago, we flew south to be around during our 1st grandchild’s birth, then stayed a decade which included our eldest’s #2.

5 years ago, my wife and I returned home up north that night #4, of eventually 6 grandsons, arrived at a nearby hospital.

Every Friday, when both family tree branches are in town, as well as friends, we now gather at our younger daughter’s welcoming house for Shabbos.

Although meditation may offer inklings or glimmers of some higher spirit, I am a hand-me-down true-blue once-hostile Stanford community atheist.

But since others seem at least sorta believers, it’s become much easier to hospitably sit back eyes closed while enjoying my Israeli son-in-law’s gorgeous chanting.

Perhaps particularly since those Hebrew words oy remain absolutely Greek to me. Plus who could ever get enough of multi-millennial traditions 

Such as three generations lighting candles, drinking from the grape, breaking bread, drumming together on this week’s most festive well-appointed table?

Gerard Sarnat won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award, plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for handfuls of 2021 and previous Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry’s work has appeared in numerous journals and publications, including Hong Kong Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Buddhist Poetry Review, Northampton Review, Texas Review, Vonnegut Journal, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Times, as well as in books published by university presses such as Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and University of Chicago. He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles, Disputes, 17s, and Melting the Ice King. Gerry is a Harvard-trained physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the marginalized, as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting his energy and resources to deal with climate justice, and serves on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons, and is looking forward to potential future granddaughters. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit his website: gerardsarnat.com

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November 1, 2021 · 6:30 am

Davening in the Dining Room (5782)

by Carol Blatter (Tucson, AZ)

This year there was an absence of the beautiful aromas which were usually emitted in our kitchen and throughout the house during Rosh Hashanah. There was no chicken soup, no matzah balls, no kugel, no brisket, and no honey cake. Why? I would be dishonest if I said that I had a good excuse. I didn’t.

I found myself less engaged in cooking this year. I wasn’t ready. After the deprivation of social contacts due to the Covid virus for more than fifteen months (and now with the Delta variant), I had lost my usual energy and enthusiasm for the start of this holiday. So we just had an ordinary meal. The sweet tastes on our tongues, the tasty, tangy flavors, and the familiar tastes of combinations of traditional foods we enjoyed with our parents and grandparents at this high holiday were absent.

***

Lights emanated from the two candles I lit just before sundown. With my husband at my side we said the high holiday prayers which ended with a traditional blessing for reaching this season:

Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, shehecheyanu, v’kiy’manu, v’higiyanu laz’man hazeh. Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season. 

Although our traditional holiday foods were absent this year, we kept our holiday, Rosh Hashanah, the day of remembrance, as it was meant to be observed. We remembered our traditions. We remembered to recite the blessings for wine and bread (challah) before the meal. We remembered to engage in prayer and song with kavanah, with intention, with our rabbi this year (again) virtually. We remembered to reflect on our blessings; we have many. One of our most important blessings is being together as proud, loving mates of fifty-two years.

***

Over the past two years we have learned to pray wherever we are. We have learned to create a holy space of our own here at home, not the holy space in synagogue which we would have preferred. Our dining room is very warm and attractive with traditional furnishings. We have a gold-framed picture of  a rabbi with a long gray beard, with his black head covering, and wearing his white tallit. We have many items of Judaica on the mantle of our fireplace including a unique menorah made in a form called potichomania, an eighteenth-century art form created by Leona M. Fine with reflective colors and designs of blue, greens and golds.

What we lacked was being present in our synagogue. Even wearing our prayer shawls and kippot and wearing dress-up clothes— I wore a very elegant white dress with white cut out designs all around the bottom and my husband in a long-sleeve, light blue shirt and tie with dark pants and a dark blue blazer — it was still difficult to re-create or imitate the aura, the ambiance, the awesome feeling of praying in a holy place, a space designated for prayer, a place of solace, a place of reverence, a place set aside for those moments in our lives when we need to be in touch with God. 

In synagogue we pray to the east facing Jerusalem so we prayed to the east in our home. If we were in synagogue we would have seen the Torah scroll rolled out onto the Torah table. We would have had an opportunity to be called for an aliyah, an honor, and ascended to the Torah using the fringes on our tallitot to touch the ancient words of our Torah’s teachings. 

****

With or without COVID, we will never forget who we are. We are Jews. We are the People of the Book. We are the Chosen People, chosen by God to be a light unto the nations. We are linked to thousands of years of Jews who came before us. We will continue to recite our prayers, to observe our customs and traditions, and hand them down to our granddaughter who we hope will hand them down to her children and then to their children and their grandchildren.

***

And together we prayed for a year of good health and peace in the new year 5782 for all Jews around the world. 

—

Carol J. Wechsler Blatter is a recently retired psychotherapist in private practice. She has contributed writings to Chaleur Press,Story Circle Network Journal and One Woman’s Day; stories in Writing it Real anthologies, Mishearing: Miseries, Mysteries, and Misbehaviors, Pleasure Taken In Our Dreams, Small Things, & Conversations,The Jewish Writing Project, and in101words.org; and poems in Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write,Growing/ Older, and Covenant of the Generations by Women of Reform Judaism She is a wife, mother, and grandmother of her very special granddaughter who already writes her own stories. 

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April 12, 2021 · 9:19 am

The Shabbatniks

by Rita Plush (New York, NY)

Covid-19 brought the life I knew skidding to a halt and no amount of phone calls, long walks, or scarfing down a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Salted Caramel Brownie could soothe my fears about it. But when my older daughter Rhonda, an occupational therapist in a rehab facility, became a front line worker, and my younger, Leslie, had to go through rounds of treatment for stage 4 breast cancer, my worries took on new meaning. My girls’ lives were at risk. Beside myself with worry, I didn’t know where to turn. And then for some reason, I turned to candles. 

When my mother died, I had been a twice a year Jew, showing up at temple on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But I wanted to honor her with the kaddish prayer, so I started going every day. I found comfort in that ancient ritual and a connection to my people who for centuries had recited those very same words in their own grief. Maybe candle-lighting, my mother’s ritual, would help ground me now.

I dug up her Lenox candlesticks and dusted them off, remembering my mother, her arms stretched out over the flickering lights, the circular motion of her hands toward her face as she recited the prayer. That Friday night when I lit the candles, to my surprise, I also remembered the blessing. “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.”  Blessed are you, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who hallows us with mitzvot [blessings], commanding us to kindle the light of Shabbat. It had lived in me. I had learned the prayer without knowing I had. 

The following week, I posed the question to my daughters: What do you say we all light candles via Facetime this Friday? (God bless technology!) Sure, they said. We came up with a time that would work for all of us.

My mother’s candlesticks at the ready, I made the call from Queens to Staten Island and then to Seattle. My daughters gathered their families around their screens. “Why are we doing this?!” said my grandson, as only a 16-year-old torn from his video game can ask.

“Because we’re Jewish. And that’s what Jews do!” said Rhonda, working her mom mojo.

We lit the candles and said the blessing; then, we blessed the wine: “…borei p’ri hagafen.” Rhonda had bought a challah, or what passes for challah in their Washington town with only two Jewish families, and we said the motzi: “…haMotzi lechem min haaretz.” Behind the burning flames, our FaceTime images smiled; we wished one another a Shabbat Shalom. My daughters and I remained on our phones while the rest of the family drifted away to their own interests.

          Work, friends, the dreaded virus, the minutiae of our lives — our talk was the same as our regular, day-to-day conversations. Yet there was something different. Something special had been added to our post candle-lighting chat. A kind of peace? A sense of hope? An overall feeling that it was going to be okay? (The it being Rhonda’s safety; Leslie’s health.) I can’t put a finger on it, but whatever it was, they must have felt it, too. Because when it was time to say goodbye, Leslie offered, “Let’s do this again next week.”

As the weeks went by, my sons-in-law, Andrew and Larry, remained on the call commenting here and there on the past week’s events, their thoughts about them, and whatever else came to mind. I was getting to know them in a way I hadn’t known them before. Friday night candle-lighting became an event we all looked forward to. Even my grandson came to the table sans gripe (well, most of the time).

I decided to download Zoom so we wouldn’t be confined to little squares on our phones. Big screen here we come. I opted for the free 40 minute deal and with a little help (a lot of help actually) from online tutorials I managed to set it up and send my daughters the link. 

The thick of Covid thinned in the rehab facility where Rhonda worked. Leslie was responding to her new treatment. My anxiety dimmed, but not my enthusiasm for our candle-lighting — or my daughters’ interest in it. “What time is Shabbat?” they texted me each Friday. It made me smile: I loved how religious they sounded, even though they were anything but.

Two months into our new tradition, I suggested we ask my brother, their Uncle Steven in Puerto Rico, to be our guest that Friday night. Sure, they said. 

My brother seemed not to know what to make of our get-together, the joking around we did, the talk of food and recipes after the prayers. He watched rather than join in, but his smile showed he was happy to be included. We asked him to be a regular. He was “honored.” Thinking he didn’t have candlesticks, I sent him a traveling set via Amazon. Now he was a full participant. That Friday he asked us a riddle: “How do they throw a party at NASA? They plan it and rent out a space.” Baddaboom! He fit right in. Our Shabbat candle-lighting had become a true pleasure, just as the Jewish elders wanted it.

Weeks later we asked my nephew Gary, Steven’s son in Brooklyn, to our little band of candle-lighters. He often logs-in bucking traffic on the LIE (Long Island Expressway) but he has not missed a Friday night.  

When Thanksgiving came, we decided to have a virtual holiday so we could all be together. We Zoomed about the dinners we’d had—food again, a biggie with us. Steven had sent a group text about gratitude and each of us spoke, not only about what we were grateful for, but what gratitude meant to us. A more introspective and serious conversation than our usual lighthearted chats followed, deepening our awareness of each other’s thoughts and feelings. 

We decided to name our group and had a rousing time one Friday night coming up with a proper appellation that expressed who we were. Nudnik, interrupternik—we’re always talking over each other (we’re Jewish aren’t we?)—and Shabbatnik were in the running. We decided on Shabbatniks, since it was Shabbat that had brought us together. 

On Chanukah we had a Latke Throwdown—Bobby Flay has nothing on us. We made latkes in all their permutations—sweet potato, zucchini, from a mix and from scratch—took a photo, sent it to all, and discussed our creations that Friday. 

We love the deep bond we have found in being together for 40 minutes every Friday night. Forty minutes that makes us feel good all week. What better way to celebrate that feeling than with a song. Homework: come up with a theme song for next week that typifies us. 

Mid-week I sent out an email reminding everyone that we would be having an awards night to pick the winner. Rhonda and Andrew dressed to the nines in evening gown and black tie. What a group! And their submission was a winner as well, done to the theme song of the Addams Family. All together now: “The Shabbatnicks’ family started/when writer Rita wanted/the children to be part of/the Shabbatnick Family.” Snap, snap.

We have come late to the ancient custom of candle-lighting, but that tradition has had an impact on my family that is beyond anything we could ever have imagined. Could Covid and the isolation and worry it has thrown us into have made our connection so sweet and meaningful? Probably, now that I think about it. But rediscovering my family has more to do with finding new meaning in lighting two candles on a Friday night than any virus could ever bring. 

Rita Plush is the author of the novels Lily Steps Out and Feminine Products, and the short story collection Alterations. She is the book reviewer for Fire Island News and teaches memoir at Queensborough Community College and the Fire Island School, Continuing Ed. Her stories and essays have been published in The Alaska Quarterly Review, MacGuffin, The Iconoclast, Art Times, The Sun, The Jewish Writing Project, The Jewish Literary Journal, Down in the Dirt, Potato Soup Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Backchannels, LochRaven, Kveller, and are forthcoming in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Broadkill Review, and Avalon Literary Review. http://www.ritaplush.com

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February 25, 2013 · 9:19 am

Passing Along a New Tradition

by Ferida Wolff (Cherry Hill, NJ)

I have paid many shiva calls, the Jewish visit of condolence, over the years so I’m aware of the general customs that prevail: enter the house without knocking, let the mourner initiate conversation, bring something edible to the shiva house. The traditions help mourners focus on their immediate loss and then segue into the stream of life again.

My sister and I were sitting shiva for our father at my house. People entered through the open front door without knocking, as is traditional, but then the traditions bent themselves somewhat to the circumstances. Some of the visitors were my sister’s friends and some were mine, but none were our father’s; they had never met him.

Dad had moved around a bit – from New York to New Jersey to Florida and back to New Jersey to be near us when he and our late mother needed extra care. Yet he always considered himself a New Yorker. He had no real connection to New Jersey in general or to the place where he spent his last years. Much of his family still lives in New York, his city of birth. When we made plans for his burial, there was no question as to where it would be; he was buried on Staten Island in the same cemetery as his mother, father, brothers, wife, and countless other relatives. After the burial, those attending services spread out to visit the familiar graves and to place stones on the plots as reminders that the loved ones have not been forgotten. We knew that the same custom would prevail whenever family members went to visit our father’s grave, too.

So my sister and I chose to mourn back home where we felt most comfortable.

That is where our friends came to pay respects to us, the sisters they knew, with the intention to console. Several of the visitors were not Jewish, unfamiliar with our traditions, but it did not matter to us. When they rang the bell, someone in the house answered. We were just glad they were there.

“I’m so sorry,” they each said in the way consolers do. It is hard to know what to say to mourners. Each person wants to make her friend feel better. Sometimes a hug is the only thing needed. And there were plenty of those.

They asked about our father so, in a tradition reversal instead of listening to stories, my sister and I told them. Some memories were difficult. Our childhood years were an erratic emotional mixture. There were some difficult times but there were also some fun times to offer: the annual (sort of) family picnics, huge Pesach dinners at our grandmother’s house with thirty-five people all trying to wash their hands at the same time, stories sprinkled with our father’s propensity to pun.

Shiva plates piled up: homemade cookies, muffins, mini-quiches, chocolate covered pretzels, tea sandwiches, all brought on dishes from our guests’ kitchens. Coffee and tea flowed and the conversation was a welcome consolation for us all.

After the mourning period was over, I started returning the platters to their owners. One of my friends, however, suggested that I keep the cut-glass dish her food came on. It was presented with love and blessings for both the mourners and my father’s spirit.

“Pass it on, if you like,” she said.

I thought that was a wonderful idea. When I made a shiva call some months after when my friend’s brother had died, I did exactly that. I filled the same dish with cakes and blessings and brought it with me. Later my friend wanted to return it, as I had, and I told her what my other friend had said to me. She smiled.

“Oh, how lovely,” she said. “I will.”

Her reaction made me realize that this small gesture of condolence carried a larger meaning. The caring that was transmitted with the platter affirmed our personal connection as well as an understanding that life continues and it is enhanced by friendship, compassion, and memory. It was like a holy embrace at a particularly hard emotional time. I knew that I would continue to do this in the future, passing on this new tradition.

And in giving my friend the plate, I experienced a sense of release from my own grieving which, for me, led to gratitude. I understand now the true value of the custom of shiva. It is the most comforting embrace of all.

Ferida Wolff’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Moment Magazine, Midstream, Horizons, and Woman’s World, among other periodicals. An author of seventeen books for children and three essay books for adults, she has also contributed stories to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and HCI’s Ultimate series, as well as online at www.grandparents.com and as a columnist for www.seniorwomen.com. You can visit her website for more information www.feridawolff.com or her blog at http://feridasbackyard.blogspot.com/ And you might enjoy her most recent book, Missed Perceptions: Challenge Your Thoughts Change Your Thinking (Pranava Books).

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