Category Archives: Life, Death and Guilt In Between

Everyday posts that don’t fit into any other category

Bat Mitzvah Speech from a Feminist Jewish Mother

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Design by www.rubistudios.com

Oh, milestones! My dear daughter recently became a bat mitzvah, and I’ve received several requests to post the speech I gave to her.

Dearest daughter ~

My baby girl woman, this is amazing, to be with you on the bima for this special Shabbat.

As I’ve watched you prepare for this day, I’ve been thinking about what a marvel and miracle it is for you to accept the mantle of womanhood in front of our family and our community.

Your Torah portion, Vayeira, is also auspicious because it’s one of the few that focuses on a woman’s story and introduces Sarah’s role as the mother the Jewish people.

This concept of a Holy Mother is an important one but often hidden from in our regular worship. In our synagogue, we have moved to a neutral way of referring to our Creator, but in the rabbinic literature there remains the tradition of the Divine Feminine, also called the Shekinah. This sacred feminine aspect of God is represented in the symbol of the hamsa—the hand of God—a symbol that has seen spiritual and cultural resurgence in the past few years, and our guests will be seeing a lot of them this weekend in the decorations!

I have always been a faithful person, and when your brother made me a mother I was brought to my knees by the awesome honor and responsibility of passing on life.

But it wasn’t until I had a daughter that I truly understood the sacred power of the feminine.

When you were born, one of the nurses told me that little girls are born, they have all of their genetic material already inside them. (Without going into an anatomy lesson up here, let’s just say that this is not the case for the male members of the species.)

I looked at your tiny little face and blinky black eyes and realized that meant that part of you had always existed inside of me. That you were already there when I was born to my mother, Marcia, and me to her, and her to Bubbe Reggie, and likewise Reggie to Grandma Lillian, through all the mothers, all the way back to Sarah and the other matriarchs who we still honor every Shabbat.

This STILL BLOWS MY MIND when I stop to think about this direct and powerful lineage. Makes you wonder how we ever got distracted into patriarchy! [**side eye**]

Of course, your dear dad brought the rest of the beautiful pieces that have become you, and you carry the legacy of his mother, who was also named Marcia, and her mother, Ruth, whose name you share with my paternal grandmother Ruth Feinstein, who first introduced me to the symbol of the hamsa when I was a little girl. The influence of your dad’s paternal grandma, Florence, is in there, too.

You have inherited much strength, resilience and creativity from these women, and you are a unique, fortuitous composite of all the ways God creates and directs Life— as our people say, you are beshert, “meant to be.”

I’ve been overjoyed and humbled to celebrate and honor the Divine Feminine with you in some truly meaningful ways this year, from learning about the moon cycles in the Red Tent at the Women’s Herbal Conference to dunking ourselves in an ocean mikveh with the wonderful women of our congregation before Rosh Hashanah last month.

I will always remember you as the perfect little baby in my arms, as the hilarious little girl who bounced like a ball through the hallways and the kind, thoughtful, courageous, confident young person standing before us now, and I am so excited to watch and support the woman you are becoming.

As you step into this world that is full of challenges yet brimming eternally with beauty, grace and love, may you walk your own path, straight and tall.

And whether you choose to become a mother or channel the Divine power of creation in other ways, never doubt that everything you need is already inside you.

Custom hamsa design by rubistudios.com – isn’t it DIVINE?!

The Yenta Immortalized in Yarn and Sequins

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IMG_8484 (2)Fiber artist and SCAD MFA student Willian Nassu creates incredible textiles on a Jacquard loom. This Brazilian-born whiz marries old school technique with high-tech tools, fitting the 19th-century loom with a computer to project his designs.

For his thesis exhibition, this wondrous weaver chose 10 local “celebrities” to immortalize in colorful yarn and sparkly sequins, and I was quite honored to see my punim at the opening of the “Savannah Icons” show at the Andaz Hotel!

It’s quite a shock to see one’s face enlarged to three feet, but once I got past the weirdness of examining my own two-inch teeth, I marveled at the details of each thread and meticulously-placed sequin. In fact, the more I looked at it, the more abstract it became, and I finally had to go drink some wine before I fell into my own face.

Willian (yes, with an “n”) began the project using actual celebrities (check the Jake Gyllenhaal, yo!) but found that working with within Savannah’s local community was far more satisfying (funny, I feel the same way.)

“I’m not from the U.S. so it was a nice way to research the city and try to get to know people,” he told the Savannah Art Informer.

“I’ve been here for two years almost and I barely know anyone outside SCAD. At SCAD we stay in this very small world and this was an opportunity to break out of that.”

For the record, Willian chose this photo (an Instagram selfie from last summer) before he’d even met me. Now he knows what I dork I am, and I know what an incredible talent he is, so the cult of celebrity shall swing the other way!

Read the rest of SAI’s awesome interview here.

i-Shiva or i-Shanda?

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So I was lamenting the dearth of Rosh Hashanah parodies on Twitter recently (do you follow @yoyenta? Please do!) and lo and behold, my mother sends me a link to this.

While it has nothing to do with the Days of Awe, it does involve deli meat, loquacious yentas and bored hipsters, so ya know, it’s super Jewish. I guess it’s funny.

But I kind of also wonder who we’ve become when a shivah — a gathering of mourners where, yes, there is usually some delicious snacking because nothing assuages grief like stuffed cabbage — is lampooned as nothing more than a comedic drive-thru window.

I know, I’m just sensitive, probably because sitting shivah for someone you actually knew and cared about isn’t all that fun. Maybe I just have low-blood sugar.

Here, watch my favorite Fountainheads’ Rosh Hashanah parody from days of yore while I go get a corned beef sandwich.

Phoenix: A Holocaust Film For the Faint of Heart

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11191735_oriFor the most part, any movie about the Holocaust or its aftermath is a trigger for me.

I tend to shy away from them, not because I don’t think they’re important and that I want quash history, but because I usually end up hysterical for days, even if the ending is spun hopefully.

Though they are beautiful and finely wrought, films like The Pianist and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas tend to send me down the bad feeling hole, worry and guilt and panic bubbling under my skin.

I promise, I’m never gonna forget. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

My cinema-induced anxiety might be a scientific fact: For her next book, my mother, author Marcia Fine, has been researching epigenics, the study of how trauma can affect DNA. Demonstrating how horrorific events can affect future generations, Scientific American recently published a piece about altered stress hormone levels among descendants of Holocaust survivors.

So, suffice it say, the Holocaust doesn’t usually make it to my Netflix list. I don’t get a lot of time to watch movies at all, and when I do, I prefer to be entertained, not distressed.

But a respected friend recommended the German film Phoenix to El Yenta Man, and he insisted we go. I couldn’t remember the last time EYM invited me out for a movie, let alone one with subtitles, so I had to. Also, he promised I could have a whole XL box of Junior Mints to myself.

I knew my fragile countenance would be protected from the very first scene. A car pulls up to a Swiss checkpoint right after the war bearing two women. The head of the passenger is entirely wrapped, save a pair of haunting eyes. The driver tells the English-speaking soldier, “She was in the camps.”

The soldier demands that she unroll her bandages, but instead of being subjected to the usual American-style gore, we see only his reaction to her wounds.

What follows is a masterful psychological thriller in the vein of Hitchcock, each scene measured with a balance of exposition and suspense. We learn that the patient, Nelly (played with such harrowing delicacy by Nina Hoss,) is a Jewish chanteuse who has narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis, but her entire family is gone. Her friend Lene (Woman in Gold‘s Nina Kunzendorf; no I haven’t seen it) helps Nelly recover from facial reconstruction surgery, though she does not quite look like her past self. Lene tries to sell her on a move to Haifa or Tel Aviv with her inheritance, but Nelly’s greatest urge is find her husband, Johnny.

It’s clear that she cannot accept her new self until Johnny validates her. Thing is, Johnny may or may not have been the one who betrayed Nelly in the first place. She finds him, but instead of recognizing her, he sees her as a good enough substitution to claim her family’s money. He’s obviously a cad, but the nuanced performance by Ronald Zuerfeld keeps us guessing until almost the very end.

Writer/director Christian Petzold doubles down on the mystery, disguise and deception, but ultimately, this film is about a woman’s reclamation of her identity in love and life. And because I really like happy endings, I felt tremendous joy in this film’s last rising moments.

Hope you’ll enjoy its limited run in theaters over the next few weeks, and perhaps it will make it to the Jewish Film Festival circuit. And don’t be afraid to add it to your Netflix list, even if your heart is as faint as mine.

 

https://youtu.be/jUkS87R5spY

Time for (Local) Honeycakes from Savannah Bee Co.!

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A new improved honeycake for the Yenta? Photo by Jess Brannen for Joy of Kosher

Listen, we all know I have a honeycake burning problem.

Every Rosh Hashanah, my loaves of love turn into shriveled bricks of charcoal, in spite of nice organic ingredients, Sister Sadie’s recipe and a ton of good intentions.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out where I go wrong. When they’re baked goldeny beautiful brown, they’re still goopy in the middle. By the time the center sets up into something that doesn’t have the texture of snotty oatmeal, the top is a blackened sheet of death, which is a terrible way to bring in a new year.

Did I overgrease the pans? Undergrease? Too much baking powder? Is my convection oven anti-Semitic?

Whatever the case, 5776 is gonna be the year this yenta breaks the cycle of honeycake failure. I’m going to start with a new recipe, because even though Sister Sadie and I go way back, I have some serious suspicions that she may be a little senile.

I’m still about keeping it local, of course, so I’m delighted to have come across this recipe on the Joy of Kosher blog for Orange Blossom Spiced Honeycake, using honey from one of my favey local spots, the Savannah Bee Co. (Not local? Shop the site, or get the sticky goods from Modern Tribe.)

It’s a fabulous excuse to use my mother-in-law’s neglected copper bundt pan, plus it includes directions for a glaze to cover up any burnt spots.

Savannah Bee Co.’s food photog and recipe development balabusta Jess Brannen has been contributing some other wonderful recipes to Joy of Kosher, though I’m pretty sure these Pintrest-pretty apple rosette thingies are beyond my baking skill set.

Lemme stick to tradition for now. I’ll let y’all know how the cake turns out next week — although you can probably guess if you see smoke streaming from the porch.

Jewels of Elul: 10 Years of Inspiration from Craig ‘N Co

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jewels-xi-emailEvery year for the past decade, iconic musical leader and silver fox Craig Taubman has published a sweet little book of inspirations prior to the Jewish High Holy Days. Jewels of Elul is meant to help get us in the mindset of praying, giving and repenting during the extra-cleansing month before Rosh Hashanah, which I find super helpful because the whole New Year thing sort of sneaks up on me. (Maybe that’s why I always burn the honeycakes.)

I had the honor of writing a jewel for the very first book (linked here, or scroll to the bottom of this post) and have delighted ever since in the sweet shorts contributed by many wise souls, Jewish and not. (Hey there, Dalai Lama, hey…)

For round 11, Craig asked his legions of fans and followers to submit their favorites, a precious necklace of crowd-sourced gems, if you will: Jewels of Elul: Ten Years of Inspiration is available starting this Friday, Aug. 15, otherwise known as the first day of the Hebrew month of Elul, and will come right to your inbox if you like.

The 29 shorts feature Elie Weisel, Anita Diamant (The Red Tent, y’all!), a whole bunch of rabbis including David Wolpe and Rami Shapiro, Pastor Rick Warren, brilliant feminist filmmaker Jill Soloway, Mary J. Blige, Arnold Schwarzenegger…and me.

Floored, y’all. Just floored. I can barely believe anyone takes the time to read anything I write, and I’m so humbled and honored that this tiny piece of my family’s experience has touched so many:

Learning How to Dance by Jessica Leigh Lebos

My mother-in-law’s mind is full of holes. She spends most of the day in a placid fog, a place where there’s nothing left to do but walk the dog and wonder what’s for dinner. Every time it’s chicken, she rolls her eyes and kvetches, “We had this last night!” No one argues with her anymore.The situation is undeniably tragic. She’s only in her early 60’s, has already suffered through cancer and a mastectomy, and her dementia has been diagnosed incurable.

Yet, her disease has set into motion a certain regeneration: Both of her sons have returned to Savannah to help care for her and to assume their roles as men alongside their father, who is finally learning to treat them like the mensches she raised. Her grandchildren — my kids — sit beside her and sing with gusto while she plunks out the same damn Disney song on the piano: “The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the appleseed…”

Whenever there’s music, she remembers exactly what to do. She snaps, she swings her arms; she’s particularly fond of jazz hands. This is endearing when “Funkytown” comes on the radio and she shimmies around the living room, less so when we’re in line at the grocery store and she sashays off in the direction of someone’s cell phone. My husband and I have made a family pact to never let her dance alone. Often we resemble a circus without a tent, a multi-generational band of spastic merrymakers getting down to the sound of the garbage compactor. Helping someone keep her grace doesn’t always look graceful.

We hold faith that God loves us so, and yet still, still, life hurts. Sometimes healing comes from accepting what is. Hope is learning how to dance with it.

****

Reading this a decade later, I tear up all over again. My mother-in-law, bless her, still lives and breathes, but the dementia has rendered her bedridden and speechless now for many years.

May all of us dance as long as we possibly can, and may the New Year bring us peace.

Thank you, Craig and Co., and I hope y’all will cherish these jewels as we head into 5776.

 

The Yenta’s Wet Hot American Summer Comes to A Close

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10895024_oriSo, embarrassing fact: I just watched Wet Hot American Summer for the first time last week.

I KNOW. A movie about the last day of Jewish summer camp starring the favorite funny people of my generation has been streaming on Netflix for a decade and I’ve never once clicked there. A shonda if there ever was one.

A dear friend put it this way: “How is that even possible? You’re like, the Jewiest camper person ever. Plus you love Paul Rudd and will totally forgive him for Ant-Man.”

I dunno how this Jewish gem failed to hit my psyche in the last 14 years. Maybe because my kids were tiny needy dwarves when it came out, and it felt too weird to watch sexy teen movies while I was breastfeeding.

Or perhaps subconsciously, I did not want to revisit the social trauma of Jew camp, where I was the only girl did not possess a pair of Guess jeans.

All I know WHAS‘ status as a cult classic is fully deserved, and from now on when I don’t feel like having sex, I will tell El Yenta Man he tastes like a burger.

But I will tell you, I couldn’t even make it through a single episode of the new Netflix series. Am I the only one who thinks the asinine dialogue is boring and totally beneath this amazing cast of now-seasoned, highly successful comic geniuses? Apparently so.

Anyway, the most important part of this post is to note that tomorrow is MY kids’ last day of camp, and only the good Lord knows what kind of mishegoss they’ll get into because it’s pretty obvious no one will tell me unless there is blood or fire involved. (Though I’m anxious to see it Yenta Girl ends up being the camper that must be forced to shower.)

It’s also the tail end of adult-only time in Yentaland, a period that has been used to rip out the tile in the bathroom and sleep in the dust, eat popcorn for dinner and nothing for breakfast, let the dogs sleep in the bed and eat at the table, not reapply sunscreen, sleep naked because the dogs don’t care, drink three too many mojitos by 5pm and try to avoid the mobs following Adam Sandler around Tybee Island. (I’m not exactly sure what the concept of “The Do-Over” is, but I have great doubt that it will even be able to touch WHAS.)

It’s been awesome being able to dance in public without the kids around to tweet how disgusting we are, but I’m ready to have them home. I’m pretty sure they’ll make it back in one piece, unless of course, they are lepers.

Camp Care Packages: More Baggage than Bonus?

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1823lovedA couple of years back in a post called “Camp Care Packages or Parcels of Dysfunction,” I mused on the possible insane implications of overthinking a padded envelope of Mad Libs and temporary tattoos.

In the six summers my children have escaped the heat for three weeks of archery, Israeli dancing and hip-hop HaMotzi (OMG, what, where has the time gone?! Now they both now pack razors!) I’ve tried to keep the gift parcels cheap and under control.

I make them cheap and infrequent—two per session at most—and follow camp guidelines, no matter how much Yenta Girl tries to convince me that pulling out the stuffing in a teddy bear and replacing it with a Costco-sized bag of Sour Patch Kids then duct-taping it inside a tampon box is totally cool with her counselors.

I’ve resisted the parental peer pressure to up my care package game and shook my head at the wackadoodle Pintrest pins (gluing a vision board to the inside of the box? NOT GONNA DO IT.)

Last week, as we were getting the kids settled in (did I mention it was their sixth year? They basically threw their duffels out of the car while it was still moving and shouted “Bye love you OMG THERE’S SHOSHANA!!!”) I observed a whole new level of meshuggeh.

When I went to the camp office to check on their canteen balances (enough to buy them a lemonade at Tweetsie Railroad, but not so much cash that they buy out the souvenir shop) I saw several mothers hustling in giant shopping bags full of cardboard boxes and padded manila envelopes. Some had broken out a rainbow of Sharpies and were color-coding them with “Week 1” and “Please deliver before third Shabbat” or “Give only if she is still homesick by fourth day.”

Yes, in addition to making a fourth freaking trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods to buy the correct moisture-wicking underpants for the camping trip, these moms had planned, shopped and arranged three weeks of care packages in advance. AND PUT CUTE STICKERS ON THEM. Maybe I’m just jealous at their organizational skills, but this level of micromanagement seems just beyond healthy parenting parameters.

The kids hadn’t even dirtied a pair of socks yet, and already there was a huge, smothering wall of love piled up around the Gayle the Nice Office Lady’s desk. And what about spontaneity, or letting the kids let them know what they need in that first whiny letter their counselors make them write? It’s like buying next year’s Chanukah presents in February and finding out it October that they won’t be caught dead in a stupid Harry Styles t-shirt.

I self-righteously kvetched my thoughts on this to Gayle, who nodded sympathetically. Then she dropped the main reason these parents shlepped their care packages to camp:

“Well, it saves a lot on postage.”

Why didn’t I think of that? Woulda saved me the $20 I just spent to overnight pair of wool socks and some fake mustaches. Damn it.

Donate to JWI, Look Like A Mensch

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ECardPreviewImageMother’s Day is coming up fast, and while I kvell and kvetch about my own state of motherhood in this week’s Civil Society Column, I can’t forget to give props to the woman who birthed me.

I can’t give her a bouquet from my own garden because 1) we live 2000 miles apart and 2) the stupid chickens ate the zinnias and 3) my mother is allergic to certain flowers, but I can’t remember which ones.

So I continue my yearly tradition of the next best thing:

For half the price of some hothouse wax job, the Flower Project of Jewish Women’s International sends out an instant e-card to your favorite mama and uses the funds to bring fresh flowers to domestic women’s shelters all over the country.

Each $25 card shows your mom what a mensch you’ve become by thinking of others, and you still have plenty of time to get it done, in case you happen to be super busy.

It’s ingenious—all the flowers for Mom, but none of the sinus problems!

flowers2Enjoy, mom!

#ItWasNeverADress Creator and Former Yenta Youth Group Crony Demolishes Gender Stereotypes

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bathroom-sign-gender-equality-it-was-never-a-dress-tania-katan-1Hopefully by now you’ve caught a glimpse of the reworked universal symbol everyone is talking about:

This graphic whipped through the interwebs this weekend with mentions in the New York Times, BoredPanda, the Today Show, HuffPo and about eleventy billion tweets lauding its brilliance.

What better way to “shift perceptions and assumptions about women” than to reveal the ubiquitous bathroom lady as the superhero she was all along?

The campaign was launched last week by Arizona-based software company Axosoft as PR for its Girl in Tech Conference and to promote more female participation in Science, Tech, Engineering, Art and Math, which is always a good thing.

But here’s my favorite kicker: #ItWasNeverADress is the brainchild of a certain Tania Katan, author, activist and the reason why Temple Emanuel youth group meetings in the 1980s were so much fun. She recently left her post as Curator of Performing Arts at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art to become Creator of Code at Axosoft, a surprising switch that shows just how creative and exciting the STEAM world has become.

Super proud to know this woman and watch her genius shine!

Watch Tania ‘splain the campaign here.