Still counting

We had a nice Passover holiday in Sharon. We spent a lot of time with Dina’s family for the first days, while Simmie and family were with her in-laws in Cedarhurst.

We managed to have a lot of fun with the children during the middle days. On Monday we took Ella and Maya (Dina, Julia, and Noah came along as well) shopping. We bought each of the girls three new Shabbat outfits and a bunch of other things. On Tuesday, we took Maya to see the movie “Penguins,” a beautifully done documentary. The last few minutes were especially fascinating as they showed scenes of the actual filming of the movie. On Wednesday, the weather cooperated and we met up with a large group of former Sharonites, friends of our daughters who were in town for the holiday, at the Roger Williams Zoo in Rhode Island. On Thursday Barry took Joshua to a PawSox game and then Eliana to see the movie “Shazam!” which she loved.

Before we knew it, the last days of the holiday came and went and on Saturday night we put our kitchen back to its regular state and headed home to New York on Sunday.

Today is the 9^th day of the Omer. For those of you not familiar, here is a brief definition from Wikipedia:

Counting of the Omer is an important verbal counting of each of the forty-nine days between the Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuot as stated in Leviticus 23:15–16.

I freely admit to being somewhat lax on many traditions, but for some reason over many years Barry and I have taken up this challenge. The Orthodox Union (the organization responsible for, among other things, the little circled U on a wide variety of food products that ensures the items are kosher) publishes a magazine that comes out before Passover that lists all the foods that they certify as “Kosher for Passover” and provides tips on preparing the kitchen. The last page is always an “Omer Calendar” which I dutifully cut out and tape to our bedroom door as a reminder each evening. Like so many Jewish activities, the count starts with a blessing, but there is a hitch: if you forget to count one day, you can keep counting but no longer say the blessing, so it loses something. Each evening when we count the omer we always “high five” to celebrate that we are still counting with the blessing.

This tradition probably seems sort of silly, but at this point, this year, having seen so many friends pass on, perhaps this counting is a good reminder that we are very fortunate to be here each and every day. We “introduced” two friends who had recently lost their husbands to cancer, one in Sharon and one here in Riverdale, and they managed to get together for lunch in New York on Sunday. They are grateful to have met each other but I wish we would have had better circumstances to get these two bright and compassionate women together.

It is almost May: warmer weather has to be ahead, right?

Love,

Rebecca

Leonard Cohen - A Crack in Everything

We went to see “Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything,” the new exhibit at The Jewish Museum. This amazing exhibit was inaugurated in November of 2017 at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (MAC) in late 2017, a year after Mr. Cohen’s passing. Over 315,000 visitors attended the exhibit, making it one of the most viewed in the Museum’s history.

There were so many fascinating pieces of the exhibit but the one we enjoyed most was a “Passing Through,” a lengthy, 360-degree video work drawing from fifty years of onstage moments throughout Mr. Cohen’s career. I remember the title song as part of the repertoire of songs we sang in the Jewish youth group in which I was quite active in high school. However, until today I had no idea that it had been written in 1948 by Richard (Dick) Cleveland Blakeslee (September 15, 1921 – April 7, 2000), a professor of English literature, and recorded by Leonard Cohen back in the early 1970s.

I saw Adam in the Garden with an apple in his hand.

I said “now you’re out, what are you gonna do?”

“Plant some crops and pray for rain,

Maybe raise a little Cain.

I’m an orphan now and I’m only passin’ through.”

Passin’ through, passin’ through,

Sometimes happy, sometimes blue,

Glad that I ran into you.

Tell the people that you saw me passin’ through.

There was another video installation, “The Offerings,” that looped clips of interviews in which Mr. Cohen talked about themes in his work.   

The exhibit will be on display at The Jewish Museum through September 8 of this year before moving to Copenhagen, Denmark and then on to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from September 17, 2020 through January 3, 2021. If you are going to be in New York over the next few months, try not to miss this one!

Love,

Rebecca

Why is this year different?

Because this year we learn about Passover through the music of “The Lion King.”

Enjoy!

Love,

Rebecca

Innovation 4 Inclusion

This past weekend turned out to be a special one to spend in Sharon. Yesterday, we attended the 2019 “Innovation 4 Inclusion Make-A-Thon” at NuVu The Innovation School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This event was inspired by Tikkun Olam (Hebrew for “repair of the world”) Makers Israel, an organization that works to create solutions to everyday challenges for people with disabilities. The program had been piloted at one school in 2017 and has now expanded to include eight Jewish day schools from across the greater Boston area.

Over the past year, each school was paired with a “Need Knower,” a person with a disability who experiences a challenge in need of a solution in order for the person to participate more fully in daily life. Although the program is primarily designed for junior high school age children, they made an exception to be able to include Striar Hebrew Academy of Sharon (SHAS), which includes children through the fifth grade, and where our granddaughter Maya is a student who was part of the team selected to participate on Sunday.

The SHAS team was paired with a young man named Ethan who has a disability called Spastic Paraplegia, a degenerative disease which effects the lower part of his body. The challenge that Ethan asked the students to try to solve is to improve the traction for his crutches on the snow and ice that are frequent during the Boston winters. The team came up with a product that screws retracting claws on to the bottom of his crutches, thereby adding support for him when the roads and sidewalks can be especially treacherous for a person with disabilities.

What a great program this is! The room was packed and the lighting required a much better camera, but Barry did manage to snap a quick picture of Maya during her presentation.

Kudos also to our daughter Dina, Director of Teaching and Learning at SHAS, who was instrumental in arranging for the students to participate in this exciting opportunity.

Love,

Rebecca

Opening day

Yesterday was opening day for the Mets at Citi Field. To the best of our recollection, neither of us had ever been to a game on opening day. What a scene it was! We left the house more than 2.5 hours before game time, but we had no idea just how horrible the traffic would be. It was quite a scene, with enormous and elaborate tailgate barbeques all over the place.

Interestingly, the crowd was primarily male. This was especially obvious in the bathrooms. The women’s rest rooms, which normally involve long lines, were virtually empty, while the men’s restrooms, where waits are seldom required, had long lines snaking out the doors. I am not quite sure why this was the case. Perhaps women have a harder time telling their bosses and coworkers that they are taking a day off work for opening day than men do.

The Mets had gotten off to a good start this season but yesterday did not go so well, and they lost 4-0 to the Washington Nationals. Truth was that it was a little on the chilly side, so by the third inning we found ourselves, along with many other fans, inside watching on one of the many television screens. By the end of the 7^th inning when it became clear that this was not a good day for our team, we decided to head home, and listened to the remainder of the game in the car. Even with that, the ride home was quite long. Overall, we spent about twice as much time in transit as we did at the actual game!

Lesson learned: overall, opening day is not worth it. One of the reasons we have enjoyed the Mets games these past few years is that it can be a very relaxing afternoon. Yesterday was anything but.

Have a great weekend.

Love,

Rebecca

The unthinkable

I earned my Ph.D. in Statistics in 1986 at Southern Methodist University under the mentorship of Randy Eubank, and we have remained friends through the more than thirty years since. Randy and his wife Lisa moved to Hawaii a few years back so we do not get to see them often. Randy has taken up scuba diving over these past years and as recently as early Sunday morning had sent a new batch of beautiful pictures from his most recent dive.

On Monday morning, I saw the following e-mail message which had appeared in my inbox late Sunday night:

Hi Rebecca,

This is Ana, Randy’s and Lisa’s friend. We met at your dive shop. 
I love Lisa and I’m very worried about Randy. 
If you see anything that one can do to help him please let me know. Dennis Young is coming on Tuesday

This note was a bit puzzling, and I later correctly determined that Ana had sent it to the wrong “Rebecca,” as Randy has a dive partner who shares my name. I figured I would wait until later that day, since Hawaii is six hours behind the east coast, and give Randy and Lisa a call. But Randy called me early that afternoon, and I knew the second I heard his voice that something was terribly wrong.

The unthinkable happened while they were out for a drive on Sunday morning, a horrible accident in which their car flipped over and Lisa was killed. I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around this. It just does not seem real.

If I wanted to sum up Lisa in just a few words, I would say that she was an amazingly warm and positive person, someone you felt you had known forever even after having just met her.

Dennis Young, who Ana mentions above, is a good friend of Randy’s, a statistician who spent much of his career at Arizona State University and now holds the title of Professor Emeritus there.  We had never had the pleasure of meeting, but as fellow friends of Randy our names were familiar to each other. It just happened that Dennis and his wife had planned to visit Randy and Lisa this week, and they flew there today. If only I were up to making that trip I surely would.

What more can I say?

Love,

Rebecca