Curbing Anger, Switching to Decaf: Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day on the Jewish Calendar, begins tonight at sundown. It is a day of deep self-reflection and examination. Included in the liturgy of the day is a prayer we say over and over again throughout the 25-hour fast. The Al Cheyt prayer is a laundry list of sins and transgressions that we may have committed during the year. Most of them are not against Gd. The big sins listed are not: I played golf on Saturday instead of attending synagogue; or I ate a bacon double cheeseburger at McDonald’s ……
Most of the transgressions that are found within the prayers in Yom Kippur involve what fellow human beings do and think about one another. Most of the sins involve our ill behaviour. Most of the sins involve crimes of ill speech.
I asked my Hebrew school students what wrongdoings they see in their immediate lives. And from what they told me, we live in an angry society.
- One student, while waiting in line at Wegmans, overheard a customer yelling at a cashier that she had charged her too much for an item.
- Another student, again at Wegmans, witnessed one customer chasing another customer claiming that he had hit her shopping cart with his and had not apologized.
- One kid said his dad yelled way too much
- Another hand went up and a seventh grader confessed that his mom got mad because a food server at a Bruggers Bagels informed her that they did not have the exact flavor of bagel she had requested.
Road rage. Rage against stewardesses on airplanes. Angry Birds. Let’s face it, there is way too much anger in our society.
I am no innocent in this department.
This week my family experienced an onslaught of technical difficulties. My bottom freezer would not seal properly and there was a snowstorrm of frost accumulating. I quickly blamed this in my youngest son, who often puts all his weight (well, he is only in the fifth percentile of his age group for weight) on the freezer door when looking for an ice cream treat. The frostier my freezer became, the angrier I got at my son.
My computer, a Lenovo, which really turned out to be a Lemono, had to go back in the shop,for a third time. I was getting very angry at the business that sold me this computer.
As I spent the entire Monday morning waiting for the Sears repairman to come for my freezing freezer, I could feel my anger swelling. Where was he? Why did I have to reschedule my day and wait around from 8 a.m to 12 p.m. and here it was 12 and he still had not yet arrived?
When he did come, I did not greet him as warmly as I should. But he did to me. Mike the Sears repair guy shook my hand as he humbly apologized for being stuck at another call all morning fixing a tricky washing machine. He put on plastic booties over his shoes so he would not bring extra dirt into my already messy house.
He quickly pulled all the shelving out of my freezer. Got to the bottom of the problem: too much build-up of frost around the door. My son was off the hook. Mike also remarked that he had been here before and asked how my oven was doing.
He had been to my house to repair an oven I had long replaced. He remembered me.
After cleaning out my freezer, he apologized for getting melted ice on my floor as he replaced the freezer shelving. My anger melted.
“Really, it’s all okay.” I said.
God sends signs in funny ways to help us put life in perspective. Sometimes, it’s in the form of Mike the repairman.
This year, I will pray to try once again to stop myself from jumping to angry conclusions.
Maybe curbing my caffeine habit will help. At the very least, it will prevent a caffeine withdrawal headache that is bound to hit most of us fasters by 2 p.m. tomorrow.
May your Yom Kippur Fast be one that is meaningful and anger-free.
Yes, the Beatles are Immortal
In my crazy rushed day, my son added to the craziness by declaring that, yet again, his glasses were in desperate need of repair.
I didn’t get my workout in. I had a little over an hour before my Hebrew school class.
I was really stressed.
But my son’s nose, without the proper padding that had fallen off his glasses, was really scratched. So, I said I would take him to the Twelve Corners Optician only if we ran there. So we did. We ran because I knew that picking out another pair of glasses was going to take much more time than I had, and time was running short.
We were making good time, until we arrived at 12 Corners Plaza. A group of high school boys were slowly walking in front of us. Slowly, as if they had nowhere else in the world to be. And at 16 or 17, that’s the way one should look upon an after-school afternoon.
I started getting annoyed that they were in my way, until I heard one starting to sing.
This kid, born decades after the British Invasion, born two generations after the Beatles first landed at JFK International airport, was singing a Beatles tune. He wasn’t rapping or singing some horrid contemporary pop tune, but a song that was older than he and would outlast anything on the radio now.
Instantly I was calmed. And I couldn’t help but harmonize walking behind him, until his friends told him that he could NOT sing in the pizzeria.
Why my Lenovo should be renamed “Lemono”
After I write this post, I’m off to the computer store again. To have the computer geeks fix my computer. Again.
Did I mention to you that I’ve only had my brand new Lenovo ThinkPad for two months?
Am I writing to you from my new Lenovo laptop? No. I’ve had to wait my turn to get my hands on my kids’ laptop while they are in schoool. I’m trapped in my own parental-protection Netnanny web that I’ve set up on this computer – a Gateway. I’ve blocked myself from all inappropriate material on the web and I only have about 30 minutes of Internet time before Netnanny boots me off.
Why am I not writing on my own computer? Because my brand new computer crashed – again – two nights ago. After my very capable husband backed up and restored my overpriced paperweight only two nights ago, I fired up my Lenovo yesterday morning to find that it no longer has wireless Internet detection hardware.
Every time, and believe me, I tried all day, to create a new wireless connection, to enter in the ISP and password that Time Warner bestowed upon me, I got an
Error 737 message.
Of course, my computer failed to tell me what Error 737 means. Then, it offered me a chance to troubleshoot, but even that provided no solutions. And, as you can see, my childrens’ computer has no problems connecting to the web. So it must be my computer’s hard drive.
Did I mention that I just had the hard drive replaced on my brand new Lenovo less than one month ago? And it took Lenovo over a week to send my computer fix-it guy a new hard drive?
If you have a Lenovo, what problems, if any, have you had? I’m looking to get my money back for a different brand. What laptop would you suggest?
Eating my way through the CSA: Roasted Tomatillos
With the fall harvest approaching, my first year in subscribing to a local CSA, or community supported agriculture farm, is coming to a close. My family signed on to share a share with another family: good friends we have known through school, soccer games, and synagogue for over ten years. We decided to go in together in a CSA share as one brave experiment.
The very wet spring that gave way to a very dry hot summer created spotty conditions for the young farmers of the East Hill CSA. Buying into a CSA comes with its risks and rewards, as we were warned. But in the end, joining made me feel good that I am helping local, sustainable agriculture and like the farmers, I am taking a gamble on Mother Nature in hopes of bringing healthy food to my family’s table.
Highs of belonging to a CSA included (for us at least):
- The discovery of Kale and Kohlrabi that can be oven baked, salted and eaten like chips;
- Fresh herbs;
- A weekly sunflower or wildflower bouquet in midsummer;
- Patti pan squash;
- Bags of mixed greens for salad that include edible flowers like nasturtium
- Pints of home-grown grapes that really taste like grapes (my daughter proclaimed they tasted like grape candy). Delicious, if you can work your way around the seeds.
The lows
- Discovering that the weekly box of bounty is not all that bountiful for two families;
- Sharing one eggplant or two (very puny) sweet potatoes can be an exercise in tactical negotiations between two families (Weekly bartering included exchanges like: “You take the sweet potatoes, I insist!”; “Are you sure?”; “Yes, you take the sweet potatoes, but can I have the one cucumber”; “My kids don’t like Swiss Chard, really, you take the Swiss Chard this week …I’ll take the tomatoes…” and so on.);
- Beets. Though the beet offerings as of late are getting more plump, the tiny beets at the beginning of the season in my opinion were not worth the stained hands and countertops for their size;
But readers, as the headline of this blog post promised, this post is about Tomatillos. It’s also about using the blogosphere to find recipes for my CSA goodies.
Since I’ve been blogging, I have come to appreciate search engines. I find it interesting to learn from my blog stats what search terms draw people to my blog. For example, hundreds of people searching for “arugula” or “arugula leaf” have found their way to my blog. So, after my friends decided to bestow me with this week’s share of almost two dozen tomatillos, I returned the favor to the blogosphere by searching for Tomatillos on WordPress.
If you find that you have in your possession a lot of these late-season green, globular fruits with a papery shell, you may want to give this recipe a try for roasted tomatillo salsa that can be used for enchiladas. I found it on Angelinna’s Cottage Blog. Thank you Angelinna, whoever you are.
Will there ever be peace in the Middle East?
I thought about writing some long diatribe about how many times Israel holds out the olive branch and how the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity to make peace with Israel.
Then, this fell into my newly revamped Facebook feed. Enjoy. If it wasn’t so funny, it would be sad…
Goodbye, Summer. I’ll See You in my Freezer
During the long Rochester winters, what I miss most about the summer is my garden. One fall day in early October, when my older son was very small, he accompanied me into the garden as I pulled out the last annuals and put the soil to bed.
As I yanked out the last withering tomato plant, he burst into tears and cried:
“It’s really OVER!!”
One of the favorite dishes of summer for my family that smells as good as it tastes is Pesto.
Take one leaf of basil and rub it between your fingers. The powerful scent it gives off is the stuff of summer. Then, when it is crushed into a paste and mixed with pine nuts, olive oil and cheese, it makes any boring pasta meal a celebration.
To live without basil all winter would be too cruel a reality.
Sure, you can buy yourself some hydroponically-grown basil in the middle of January. One plant, that has about 20 good leaves on it, will cost about 2.99 these days at the supermarket.
Or…..
You can get out to your nearest public market, like the Rochester Public Market, one of the world’s greatest public spaces. Buy the biggest bunch of basil you can find for about $1.50. It will be waiting for you in a big bucket filled with water and if it’s fresh, will still have the roots attached, dirt and all.
Then, take this green bouquet home. It’s so pretty you may want to photograph it, like I did:
My Nikon camera has a setting for photographing food. Who knew?
It isn’t long before basil leaves wither. As harsh as it may seem, pick all those leaves off (I amassed 3 cups of basil leaves with this bunch), wash them well in a colander, and place them in a food processor.
I also put in three cloves of garlic that I roasted. Roasting the garlic cloves brings out their sweetness.
Add to this puree 1/3 cup of some very good olive oil and 1/4 cup of toasted pine nuts or walnuts. You can add 1/3 cup of Parmesan cheese here, but this can be added when you are ready to use your Pesto.
Then, pour the mixture into an ice-cube tray sprayed with cooking oil. (My children think this is very strange and have at times placed a pesto cube, in error, into their water. I don’t recommend this.)
Pesto cubes can be used in sauces, soups, or as Pesto in the dead of winter.
Finally the dreams have stopped
When I woke up the morning on 9/12, like everyone else, I wished the whole thing was a dream.
Then, at night, images of the World Trade Center entered my dreams at least twice a month, for the next nine years.
It’s no wonder I dreamed about these iconic buildings, buildings I grew up with, beamed with pride at.
But the last time I saw them was looking out at them from my grandmother’s hospital window. It was July of 2001. Though they passed away years later, my grandparent’s health in earnest began to fail that summer. As I held her hand,I said to her “Hey, at least you have a great view of downtown. Look at the Towers. Look how beautiful they are.”
And they were on that day, across the East River. So crisp a view.
And just a few weeks before September 11, my dad had a heart attack. He did survive, to teach, to live, to continue biking and traveling, and enjoying his grandchildren. But I think it was the attacks of 9/11 that truly broke his heart.
So, is it any wonder my brain created for years images of the World Trade Center?
Sometimes in my dreams I would be falling, floating up, up, up, past desks and cubicles and giant, narrow office windows.
Other times, I’d be in an elevator, thinking, I shouldn’t be here, I need to get out of here.
In some dreams, I’d be outside, and there they were, the Twin Towers, just there, like they were a backdrop in a movie.
Or, they would appear as ghost buildings with police barricades around them. I’d walk past them and yell at them. Go away. You are gone. You shouldn’t be here any more.
Upon wakening, I wouldn’t always remember that I dreamed right away. Of course, it would hit me in the middle of my day. I’d be in the cereal aisle at the supermarket, and I would stop dead. Cold. Oh, God. I dreamed about them. I dreamed about the Towers again.
But now, 10 years later, the dreams have stopped. They stopped when Osama bin Laden was finally, justly, wiped from the face of the earth. They stopped when finally, Ground Zero was no longer just an empty, gaping hole but the beginnings of the newly emerging Freedom Tower. New York is rising again.
I know that putting a building back up cannot bring back the souls lost on 9/11, but it is my hope that this new, so carefully thought out complex of buildings and memorials can help ease the dreams and memories of so many of the families from tomorrow and onward. I wish them only the sweetest of dreams.
Can 9/11 ever be just another day? And what will I tell my students?
Making the past relevant: students at a Jewish summer camp learning about one sad event, the destruction of the Holy Temple, through the tragedy of 9/11
What a challenging day to make a first impression. On the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, right around the time when the towers crumbled, I will be standing before my class of newly minted seventh graders. I will have to save face and cheerfully smile at my new students and welcome them to a new year of Jewish learning.
All the while, I know at this time I would usually be crying. All the while, I know, in truth, my students would rather be sleeping in on a Sunday morning. I’m wondering if any other Jewish educators of middle school aged children and older are feeling the way I do; about how to get through this first day.
Let’s hope I don’t lose it and get all teary-eyed in those first introductory moments about an event that happened when my new students were barely out of diapers. After all, ten years to a 13-year-old is a very long time.
I can hear the conversation in the Hebrew School carpool ride home tomorrow: “…..my new teacher, like, cried on the first day. Ewww.”
For better or worse, time does go on and obligations do not stop just because of a date. Over the years, the date of 9/11 shifted around the days of the week. There have been weddings and homecomings, meetings and business trips. Sometimes, the anniversary falls in the middle of the week. Sometimes it happens on a Tuesday, the very day of the attacks.
What do I usually do between 8:45 and 9:00 a.m. on the anniversary of 9/11? I’m usually alone. Everyone else in the family has left for school and work. I feel as I should watch the real-time replay of those horrible moments, as CNN plays it every year. Sometimes, I watch it. Most years, I hide in my laundry room in the basement and have a good cry. Then I get on with my day.
What do I usually do the first day of a new school year with my new kids? I go over expectations. Together, we make a list of class rules. I review classroom procedures and what we will be learning. Also, we have some ice breaker games to get acquainted.
Can we ignore the events of a decade ago and go on with business as usual? Talking about something as painful as 9/11 on our very first day will be a very difficult thing to do, but just as difficult to ignore. I don’t think crying in front of them, or showing the slightest tear will be an option. Not while we are still strangers.
It’s not that difficult subjects don’t arise in Hebrew school. In fact, it’s these really sensitive topics that have motivated my past students. They really open up and we have amazing conversations. (That’s what I love about the seventh grade, they never cease to surprise you on what they can handle.)
Kids in the seventh grade are ready to not to be kids anymore. After all, it’s the year of their B’nei Mitzvah, their coming of age. They want to talk and they told me last year that sheltering them does them a disservice anyway.
I remember last year, sitting on the floor with my seventh graders, discussing the Holocaust with them and how the lessons they learned from the Shoah still mean something to them today. But that discussion happened on one of the last days of school, not the first.
So, come Sunday, I’ll stick to my plan. Unless the plan needs to change. In the Talmud, the rabbis instruct to “go with the way a child wants to learn.”
So, if the topic comes up, I’ll share. I’ll tell them that a decade ago, I was in the middle of filling out my own Rosh Hashanah cards, wishing friends and family a happy New Year when the planes hit. I’ll tell them that I wrestled with the choice of sending those cards out at all, but in the end I did. Because that Rosh Hashanah, praying for the New Year seemed more important than ever before.
So if I have to scrap my whole lesson so we can gather on the floor, open up and talk about how to approach the madness and the sadness of this day, so be it.
Then, perhaps the next week, they will derive some meaning during Tefilot, or prayers.
They really will thank G-d for sustaining them and giving them the energy for waking to a new day.
They really will thank G-d for making them free and not a slave.
They really thank G-d for strenghening us with courage.
Brick by Brick
I remember as a kid going to the Statue of Liberty and learning that the base of the statue was funded by pennies collected by NYC schoolchildren. This week, I watched this four-part series of all the different people that are working together to rebuild the World Trade Center.
Rebuilding, on small and large projects, are ways for communities to come together. This september, as we remember the 9/11 attacks, and the destruction from Katrina and now Irene, let’s think of how we can help Americans rebuild from disaster. Here are are more examples I wrote about in my weekly colum
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