Cholent

It wasn't like Memorial Day wasn't memorable; it was. We had the dedication of my aunt's stone at the cemetery. And then there was Iron Man.

Iron Man! The kids surprised us, picked us up to go out with them. It's great entertainment, especially if you want to become an engineer. It's a movie that illustrates the symbiotic relationship between energy and creativity. And Gwyneth never takes off her heels.

But we pay for those short weeks, taking off for Monday holidays.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday killed me. I know I beat on this subject, but when people spend too much time with their dysfunctional families, they feel it and we therapy docs take the fall out. I'm not complaining, just restating the obvious, and Memorial Day, especially, is no joke.

And then there's the opposite, too, not having enough time with anyone on a holiday, having no family around. Your friends are with their families and you're stuck with time, too much alone.

So we're all happy when things get back to normal. Yesterday I went to shul in a pretty good mood and heard the rabbi talk about how people should recognize their flag, should go out and work their strengths, do it before it's too late. Contribute to the world. Be someone. Put your best stuff out there, whatever it is. (I think this is what he meant)

You bloggers and people who comment do that. The Rav does it differently, plays a different field.

Anyway, I sit in the balcony of my synagogue and gaze down at the sea of taleisim, men in prayer shawls. In the balcony the women aren't really very far removed from them, not by a long shot. It's been engineered so that we don't have to climb a million stairs to get to our section. In fact, the men are downstairs, and we're on the main floor. We have the better seats. It's really very nice.

We get to see the little kids playing in the aisles below. Orthodox synagogues aren't usually stuffy places. The decorum, some might say, leaves much to be desired. There's no organ, no choir, nobody even to tell you what page you should be on. You never know who's going to lead the prayers or what tunes they're going to use.

Yesterday the tunes were really good.

As much as the shakers and movers in Orthodox Jewish synagogues would like to keep the kids out of the sanctuaries (they can pay handsomely for youth group leaders and babysitters), we really don't mind them running around a little. We like them to see the Torah, we like them to touch it then kiss their hands. There's always a candy man or a candy woman passing out chocolates. We want them to experience what we experience, just a little awe.

And they learn the liturgy this way, too, just listening, hanging around and bouncing super balls, reading picture books, occasionally checking in with their dads.

So I'm upstairs, front row, looking down. Three of the cutest little guys, all between three and five, wearing blue shirts and over-sized yalmukas are strutting around during the cantor's repetition, poking at one another.

It made me miss my grandsons in the worst way. I really tanked.

Pretty soon the service ended and I asked my mother-in-law if she was coming over for lunch. She said no, but she wanted to stop by the house for a minute. She also wanted to stay in shul for the kiddish, the herring, the shnaps and cake, the cholent (cholent is a hot dish of potatoes, beans, meat and unidentifiable vegetables).

It's soul food.

I said, "I'll wait for you outside."

Feeling this bad is irrational, of course, because I'm going to be visiting the kids this week. In a few more days I'll get on an airplane and they'll run full speed into my arms and it'll all be good.

Outside I found a comfortable spot in the sun to wait and to warm up. It's always too hot or too cold in shul, and today it was too cold. So there I am, soaking up the sun, and who should almost pass me by?

Tante Fela.

She stopped to ask me something, some after-thought that you ask a stranger, and suddenly she realized it was me.

Tante Fela is as short as I am tall, meaning she's about two feet shorter than me. She's a Holocaust survivor in her eighties and we paired up on a Jewish holiday for services and have been best buds ever since. (You can read those stories at the links below*. But I never see her, hardly ever.

"How are you?" she cries out. "I never see you!"

I bend down and give her a kiss on the cheek. "I know, I know. I sit on the opposite side of the shul."

"You should sit by me!"

"I know, I know. But my mother-in-law is on that side, and you know how it is. She would be insulted."

A friend of mine sees me and comes over, interrupts. She wants to know why I'm wearing a jacket when it's so hot outside. I ask her, "What do you think, why do you think I'm wearing a jacket?"(Last time it was, Why the earmuffs?). Then immediately I am sorry for beating on her and apologize. She laughs.

Tante Fela is ready to move on. "Good Shabbas," she says to me sincerely, "See you soon, okay?"

"I sure hope so."


copyright 2008, therapydoc

Edits and Out-takes from Cholent:

My mother-in-law joins me with another friend and the three of us are walking towards my house. While those two talk, I trance out a little and wonder, What is it exactly, that so gets to me about Tante Fela? Most people get to me, but this is something else.

And I think, It's being in it, in the relationship that begs relativism, that's what I love about it.

Maybe it's the only way that relativism actually works, a person has to be in the comparison, feel the comparison. If there are six degrees of separation from troubles, who cares?

But it's different when you're looking into the eyes of someone like Tante Fela. They're not six degrees away at all. You can read them.

She has lost most of her family, seen terrific atrocities, woken from a nightmare that she can't forget. It's different when the person has became someone and something from nothing, the stuff Jerry Springer's mother talked about on that trip from Nazi Germany to the United States. Ayn tat alles.

Someone like Tante Fela loses her spouse after sixty-five years and she's alone, but you don't hear her talking about joining him. She only has one child, and he doesn't live all that close, but she's so grateful she has him.

She saw people tossed around with pitchforks like hay.

Yet she's still happy to see the light of sun reflect off the grass, to make new friends.

You say to yourself, to be like this! You should, no question, have cholent with a person like this before the entire generation is gone and forgotten and can't repeat it anymore, all that stuff about man's inhumanity to man. Even if you generally avoid cholent, can't stand cholent, perhaps you make an exception, just for the zchus (merit) of having had cholent with a survivor.

And barring that, take out Paper Clips or KinderTrain or Schindler's List at Blockbuster.

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Tante Fela posts started in 2006 with Yom Kippur

Then One Year Later

Self-denial and fasting

and now this one.

Self-denial and Fasting

Remember those days when I said that I wouldn't talk about my religion? And yet,

All over the world readers are asking,

How did you break your fast after Yom Kippur, TherapyDoc? Please tell us what you ate. We know how health conscious you are.

Ah, breaking the fast. We just completed a powerful day at the synagogue, a 25 hour fast, no food, no drink. All to atone for our sins and everybody else's (Meaning all Jews are in it together. It's one of our enmeshed things we do, atone as a people).

But it's still a lot of sins, no matter how you cut it. I hear, by the way, that the Catholic priests are sending letters home to members of their congregation to come back to confession. Is this because therapy's not working? Is it working for us ethnics? Ya' have to wonder.

Back to the fast. At first I thought I'd title tonight's post Self-Denial. But then I thought, no, you don't deny "self" when you don't eat or drink. If anything, it's all you've got.

Then I thought, perhaps Self-Deprivation. That made more sense. But I asked FD, just to be sure, and he said, "Well actually, it's about resting from food. We take a break from the physical stuff. Oh, and it's about afflicting the body by not eating/drinking." Those are the reasons the Torah gives us for the commandment to refrain from these things on the 10th day of the 7th month. (Don't ask me to explain our calendar).

Right.

So we give it a rest, always a good thing. And at the end of the day, we say, It was worth it. The fast is worth standing all day, praising the Old Mighty, hoping He'll look askance at who we really are. The fast makes us tired, but not so tired. We roll our eyes at one another and point to our watches, feeling pretty bad until it's about to end, then we perk up.

We think about life, and how it hasn't been easy for us. We figure it out that easy isn't what it's all about, probably. Probably people who think that life is about making it easy or just being happy needs to rethink the concept.

We're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it will for everyone. The other shoe drops eventually. It HAS to. It's suspended on a thread up there somewhere, getting heavier and heavier until. . .

Kabam!

But even though life's not about being happy, I still hold by the idea that Happy Is Better and that's what we have to shoot for. That's what I keep telling all of the depressed people in the blogosphere. Let that lighter part of the brain reign as often and intensely as possible.

But it's still a sometime thing, like all emotional states. We aim for it daily, but like that song, that Porgy and Bess song, A Woman is a Sometime Thing, Being Happy is a sometime thing.

Anyway, back to the fast and After the Fast and food. Self-deprivation (you can try to relabel it as rest, but come on, really, we're stretching here) self deprivation is good for the character. It's another one of those, What doesn't kill you makes you stronger things (another TherapyDoc world view under the condition that you get therapy to work out the what didn't kill you).

Self-deprivation is the way to feeling grateful. Take away what you've got, take away your usual physically pleasuring comfort-props like food, water, AND sex, and Wow, Are We Ever Grateful To Merely eat, drink, and you know.

But the fast of Yom Kippur is really about atonement, which you do better when you're resting. The fast helps us atone, become more self-reflective. We get a wider lens by fasting, ironically, we think about bigger pictures.

And we regret regrettable deeds of the past year, and self-adjure for incredible laziness and lack of ambition, for not doing the things we'd promised we'd do at this time the year before. The apologizing to others thing can be brutal. But yes, we have a built in Fifth Step into this religion. (12-steppers know what I'm talking about). If we hurt someone, we have to make amends before Yom Kippur. He doesn't forgive us if we haven't tried to get forgiveness from people who matter.

People matter.

Anyway, at the end of the fast the prayers at the synagogue are so loud, so powerful, so full of emotion and meaning, they probably put Gospel meetings to shame. But ours are only once a year.

And as my son said, "And everyone is actually happy those last few minutes of the holiday, looking forward to food."

Chammie turned to me in the middle of the fast and said, "I could go for nachos."

Not skipping a beat, I added, "With the sourcream, avacado, green onions and tomato, right? Maybe add a pinto bean dip?" (People wanted to shush us, but you could tell they also wanted to tell us what they wanted to eat).

She wasn't so sure about the onions and brought up yellow toffee. Anyway, I have no idea what Cham ate after the fast (see, we're not enmeshed, okay?), but FD made me pancakes and I squirted real whipped cream from a can on the rest of a banana cream pie, and am now feeling no pain.

What was that about self-deprivation again?

Moving right along, a quick update on Tante Fela.

If you recall, last year she sat next to me for the High Holidays, a total stranger, a Holocaust survivor. We made friends, enjoyed being connected. I like meeting new people. And she had prayed, with fervor, Al tashichaini. Don't throw me away. (The root of that word, for those of you who are interested, is tashlich/to throw, the very same as in the ceremony some perform on Rosh Hashana, throwing symbolic sins into a river using bread crumbs or stones).

So this year (yes, she sat next to me, it was arranged) I listened to her and heard her emphasize, Al tashlichaini b'ais ziknah

Which means, Don't throw me away in my old age.

I turned to her and said, You? You're not old. She nodded and said, "I'm old, I'm old."

But both of us had kvetched about our backs hurting, so I said, Maybe not so old. And she smiled.

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