Another year

We had a wonderful start of Passover with three of our five grandchildren; the other two were with their other grandparents. Every year we conduct the same Sedarim using the same text and singing the same melodies with the same core group. But no two years are ever completely alike, particularly with young children who can change so much in one year’s time.

The first night went especially well: Joshua and Ella read a lot of the Seder, with Ella adding many commentaries she had learned in school. Even Julia had a good time – she surprised us all by staying awake and quite engaged until past 10 pm! Dina had invited friends for lunch each of the days so we were surrounded by children running around and having a great time. The second Seder was quieter, and Julia went to sleep long before we even got started.

We are in the process of trying to clean up the cooperative apartment that Barry’s parents (may they rest in peace) had owned. They had wood dining room and bedroom furniture that, although old, was in excellent condition and we wanted to keep. Yesterday it was all moved over to our house, so rooms that seemed somewhat under-furnished no longer appear so. Of course it is extremely dusty but the woman who cleans for us will be here tomorrow and I do not feel guilty giving her all that “extra” work since most weeks the house is nearly pristine with just the two of us here. There are now only a few pieces of furniture, made by Barry’s grandfather years ago when he worked as an upholsterer, sitting in our garage waiting for Barry’s cousin to pick up. Lastly, we have (hopefully) identified someone to take the old piano, now sitting in the kitchen of the apartment while the hardwood floors are being refinished.

Thanks to my friend Joanne for sending a link to a recently released documentary that we have not yet seen: “Persona Non Grata.” The film tells the story of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese consul in Lithuania who issued travel visas to thousands of European Jews allowing them to leave Europe through Japan. In 1985, the Israel Holocaust Memorial Authority, Yad Vashem, named him one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”  We will keep our eyes open for a chance to see what looks like a fascinating film.

How my grandmother’s chutzpah helped Japan’s consul save thousands of Jews: The story of Rachel Sternheim may answer a long-unsolved mystery surrounding the rescue of 6,000 Lithuanian Jews from the Nazis

Hopefully the weather will continue to improve and we are even talking about going to a Mets game next Sunday afternoon!

Love,

Rebecca

Ready or not....

A few months ago, a very dear friend told us about a pillow she had bought from Brookstone: the Memory Foam Wedge Pillow. I bought one and could see that Barry liked it, too, so now we have two of them. They are terrific for reading or watching television in bed.

I quickly discovered that I could write or draw pictures on the plush cover of the pillow, and it became a challenge each day to come up with something clever. Early on Barry started pulling out his iPhone and snapping pictures of my daily quips. They are not anything all that profound, but they are a nice way to jump start my brain for the morning.

Here is my message for today:

חַג כָּשֵׁר וְשָׂמֵחַ

Love,

Rebecca

If you could not read the message, it says

READY OR NOT

PESACH IS HERE

The meaning of traditions

When I was a girl, my grandmother told me that whenever her mother would prepare a brisket, she would cut a piece off the end and cook it separately. My grandmother thought it was simply a part of the preparation of a traditional Sabbath meal. Years later, when my grandmother was married with her own home, she found herself doing the same thing. It seemed a curious tradition, so she asked her mother,” why do you always cut that piece off the brisket?” To which my great-grandmother replied, “the butcher always gives me a piece of brisket that is too big for the pot I have!”

Lest any of my vegetarian friends become nervous, I am not cooking any briskets for Passover. But I was reminded of this story yesterday as I began to do some baking for the holiday. I always start with a lemon sponge cake that Barry likes.

When her sponge cake was done in the oven, my mother would invert the pan over a wine bottle (Manischewitz Concord Grape is what they always had) so it could fully cool without the cake collapsing. For the 30 odd years I have been making sponge cakes, I have done the same.  Over those years, my sponge cake pan had become rather sad, all bent and a bit leaky. This year I finally purchased a new one.

I have to say that coming out of the oven that lemon sponge cake was a vision of loveliness. I had the wine bottle (it was a kosher dry red) on the ready, but suddenly I could not seem to get the cake onto the wine bottle. Coming straight out of the oven, the cake was a bit hard to manage. Making a long story short, the bottle fell over and I nearly dropped the pan. I grabbed it with my oven mitts and managed to stand it upright on the little “legs” it has.

Ah, the little legs. My old one had these, too, but I never relied on them because of the family tradition to invert the cake over a wine bottle. When the cake pan was emptied and clean, I took the wine bottle and quickly confirmed that the diameter of the neck of the wine bottle was larger than the diameter of the hole in the sponge cake pan.

I think I was able to salvage the cake minus one small section. But I did pick up some more lemons and eggs and if I have the energy maybe I will try again. Sponge cake #2, the chocolate one that cooled in the inverted pan sitting on the counter, looks perfect.

Is there a lesson here? Try as we might, we will sometimes mess things up. We are just not perfect beings. The challenge is to accept our imperfections, do our best to correct them, and move on. My memories here are mundane examples of the charge to us on this most exhausting but richest holiday on the Jewish calendar.  

חַג כָּשֵׁר וְשָׂמֵחַ

Love,

Rebecca

Recognition

For many months now I have spent most Wednesday mornings attending a wonderful class given by one of the professional staff members of our synagogue. She has all of the knowledge of a Rabbi, but because traditional Jewish law limits the roles of men and women in some ways, she and her colleagues cannot be called “Rabbis.” Rather, Rabbi Avi Weiss, long-time rabbi of the synagogue (who is now in partial retirement and has taken the title “Rabbi in Residence”) who initiated the program to train women for such positions, has come up with the term “Rabba.”

Learning with Rabba Anat on Wednesday mornings has become a highlight of my week. She adds so much to the texts we learn. The class meets at Moss Café, a funky little restaurant a couple of blocks away from our house (close enough that I can zip over there on my scooter) that opened last summer. They serve healthy alternatives to the typical American diet, lots of whole grains and fruits and vegetables that our daughters and their friends call “crunchy granola” fare. The group and the setting are a perfect match.

It is fascinating to see what sort of customers come in to Moss Café on a typical weekday morning between 9 and 10:30 am. Almost every week I will see at least one person having breakfast there (not having anything to do with the class) that I know or recognize from the neighborhood. I think that these sorts of places are what make New Yorkers feel so attached to their neighborhoods, and you can see why. At this point, the wait staff at Moss Café all recognize me (again, that oxygen does help in this process) and they all know that I always like my hot chocolate very hot with low fat milk. I really do look forward to this outing each week.

Last week, I arrived a bit on the early side, ordered my food, and sat down where we usually gather. Another participant came in, someone I have known here for many years since our daughters were students together in junior high school here. Then a third woman walked in, someone who lived here, had moved away, and has now been back for a couple of years. It has been a bit odd that although I have chatted with her husband I have not interacted with her since they have been back. There were one or two times when I felt she was walking up to me or looking at me but she never said a word. I know that some people have a very tough time seeing that oxygen, but I was disappointed to think that she might be one of those people. She came up to my friend and had a big hello, and I felt that I just needed to see what her story was; maybe she just did not remember me. So when they were finished chatting, I greeted her with “I’m not sure if you remember me…”, and told her my name and that we have two daughters and had lived here for a long time. She lit up and smiled and said “Oh, my, of course Rebecca I remember you!” She went on to explain that she suffers from an inability to recognize faces, and that unless she knows someone very well or sees them quite frequently she will often not recall who they are without identifying information. She told me that her sister has an even more extreme case than hers.

So I typed “inability to recognize faces” into my browser, and found that there is a condition called prosopagnosia, also known as “face blindness.

Prosopognasia is a cognitive disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize familiar faces, including one's own face (self-recognition), is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision making) remain intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage (acquired prosopagnosia), but a congenital or developmental form of the disorder also exists, which may affect up to 2.5% of the population. [Wikipedia]

We saw a new film called “Eye in the Sky” which stars Helen Mirren. This is one of those films I usually do not like to see: very intense and frightening. I did have to close my eyes a couple of times, but for the most part it was really very good. It really brought to light some of the difficult decisions about how to fight terrorism and terrorists, particularly when their home bases are interspersed in the midst of family homes. This movie, by focusing on one such family who are truly innocent bystanders to this incident, brings this point to light. How do you weigh the life of one innocent person versus the lives of tens or hundreds of others that may be lost if the raid is not carried out?

And last, to put life back into balance, our little Maya is still painting.

Love,

Rebecca