As the planet spins like a lopsided blue dreidel towards the darkest day of the year this Sunday, I must admit I feel like I’m taking a bath in the blackness. When you’ve got crazy assholes with guns and bombs attacking cities and shitbags like Bernie still on the loose and, oh – the astonishing ridonkulousness that people actually name their children Adolf Hitler and then cry First Amendment rights when a shopkeeper refuses to decorate the kid’s birthday cake with swastikas (the retard parents did finally get their Nazi cake – courtesy of Wal-Mart, who else?) – plus your usual mass rapings and killings in Africa and child sex slaves in Asia, well, humanity just sorta adds up to a really fucked-up mess.

And yet somehow, we power on, with our hope and our love and our creativity that it might just get better tomorrow. The faithful folks at Aish.com have posted a sweet, one-minute movie to remind us that this season celebrates actual living proof that the weak can overcome the mighty and that miracles do happen.

Some sage once said it was better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, so here we go now, Jews and Christians and pagans alike, lighting up millions of candles and burning miles of flourescent light bulbs as a sparkling paean to hope. All those menorahs in windows and pretty blinking trees and yes, even the freakishly life-sized manger scene in Habersham Woods (I almost took baby Jesus out for a joyride last night, but the cow scared me away) are better than Prozac-laced eggnog, and I plan on drinking in a big dose.

Thank you, dear readers, for continuing to patronize this blog with your eyes and comments. Hearty Chanukah (do not deny the back-of-the-throat pronunciation of the almighty Chet!) greetings from the Yenta, and for the goyishe among ye, wonderful wishes for whatever the Solstice-based, banishing-the-darkness celebration of your choice.

I will not deny that I am more than a little vain. I happily wear undergarments that make my tushy look smooth as glass, and thanks to my mother’s scolding wisdom, I have been using eye cream since I was 11.

But I have limits on what I will do to preserve my delicate Polish beauty (mostly because I am cheap and lazy, hence my campaign to bring prematurely gray hair and quick-bitten fingernails into high style) and I definitely draw the line at injecting diseases that kill entire African villages into my laugh lines.

Now that the FDA has approved pig collagen shots as the latest way to play on America’s obsession over growing old ungracefully, I can just play the trayf card, nu?

Thanks to Adam S. for the tip! ~

God bless them, my parents have taken the “tire” out of “retirement” and thrown it off a bridge somewhere. I’ve kvelled continously over my mother’s literary accomplishments and generosity over the years (The Most Energetic Woman Alive just passed through town to smooch the grandkids and buy us new livingroom drapes on her way to realize a long-lived dream of hanging out in Paris for a month) but now it’s Dad’s turn:

After decades mired in the medical world as a surgeon, he closed his practice. For awhile, he played a lot of golf and cooked chicken parmagiana from scratch and drove my mother nuts.
He also began honing his photography hobby into something serious.

A few years ago, missing the adrenaline of cutting people open, he began volunteering his surgical services in fun, sun-filled places like Pakistan and parts of Africa so poor no one’s even heard of them. Last summer Dr. Skip (his favorite sobriquet these days – it’s chummy, easy to pronounce and ambiguously non-ethnic, which is convenient for Jews visiting countries where radical Muslims like to hole up) went to a small village in Tanzania, where he removed goiters and repaired appedixes and generally saved people’s lives with nothing more than a butter knife under a single light bulb. (Ok, I’m exaggerating about the butter knife. But the lighting part is true.)

His sporadic emails were full of appalling details about how little the villagers have (and heartening stories of how sweet and lovely they are) and as soon as he returned he started collecting medical equipment and materials to take back, filling two huge suitcases.

He’s there now, and this time he’s got a blog!

It’s great to get the daily updates, but it doesn’t seem like things at the tiny hospital have improved in the past year:

This one case points up so much of what’s wrong here. The equipment problem has gotten worse. Things like NG tubes , suction equipment and funtioning, reliable lights should be available. They don’t cost that much but nobody cares enough to see that they are on hand. It’s easy to blame the administrative personnel but I accuse the doctors. There is one cardiogram machine in the hospital and it is in the office of the physician/administrator who never sees a patient. The excuse you hear over and over is ‘Well, this is Africa. Things will get better poli-poli (little by little.)’ Well, people, poli-poli isn’t cutting it. I’ve been away from here over a year and from what I see things have gotten worse.They’ve gone from an occasional power outage to four or five a day with no improvement or even deterioration of back-up capacity. The conditions in the wards are dreadful. Most even lack a place to wash your hands … They have allocated a fortune to build a new surgical unit which will be beautiful but how can they use it when they lack the ability to supply the unit they already have? When built it will be a showplace to display to visitng dignitaries who have no idea that it is an empty shell providing the same crappy care as the old one.

It sounds so frusturating, but he keeps doing what he came to do, seeing patients, performing surgery, one stitch at a time. I’m so proud of him.

Maimonides categorized how we give of ourselves into Eight Degrees of Tzedakah – I wonder where Rambam would place continuing to give of one’s time, energy and skills even when the lights keep going out and there’s no antibacterial soap.

You might think this post is about how Yenta Boy has been singing “Jesus Christ Superstar” non-stop since Carly Smithson rocked it hard on American Idol last week (song choice aside, Carly was the most talented of the bunch and shouldn’t have been eliminated) but you’d be wrong. No, it gets much, much worse.

A few weeks ago we brought home one of YB’s friends from Shalom School, a darling kid with fine manners and a wicked whiffleball swing. We headed out the beach for an afternoon of shark-tooth hunting and as the light began to get low, everyone’s stomachs began to grumble. Hungry children are whiny children, and my patience was not going to last through the drive back to town, so we decided to stop off at a local restaurant.

Now I knew that YB’s friend’s family keeps a kosher home, and El Yenta Man and I commended ourselves for ordering passably-parve fried grouper and french fries all around. The waitress was just walking away whenYenta Boy made a sound like a dying whale, which I, a linguistic expert in Whinese, translated “Can’t we order an appetizer?”

I shrugged, which is Mothering Sign Languange for “I don’t f*cking care, just shut that child up or I will pull someone’s hair, even if it has to be my own.”

So El Yenta Man added another dish to our order. Five minutes later, a steaming, savory-smelling basket arrived at the table and was promptly devoured by the kids like monkeys attacking a banana Moon-Pie. Our meal followed, and it wasn’t until we were driving along Highway 80 admiring the marsh at sunset that we heard Yenta Boy ask his friend, “So, did you like the calamari?”

EYM and I looked at each other and dropped our jaws simultaneously. “Oh, sh*t.”

There has never been a Walk of Shanda like the one we made up to our friends’ door that evening. I mean, is there any tactful way to say “I’m so sorry we trayfed up your son”?

Thank Our Benevolent Creator, instead of forbidding their child to ever come near our heathen, shellfish-scarfing family again, the kid’s parents laughed at our oversight and were as sweet and forgiving as could be. True Blue Jews, these folks. Though you can bet I’ll check my kashrut rule book should they ever invite us over for another potluck Shabbat.

And, of course, there is a Talmudic ending to this story: It really helped shrug* it off when another mom gave Little Yenta Girl a PB&J on white bread last week during Passover.

*In this case, the shrug can be translated as “we all make mistakes with other people’s children; if it didn’t cause bleeding or conversion, let it go.”

In spite of being a proud Person of the Book, I do not like to full price for them. But I was recently blessed to receive a gift card to Barnes & Noble and decided to splurge on an unthinkable luxury: A first edition hardcover.

It’s kind of a no-brainer that Geraldine Brooks‘ latest novel should receive the highest honor this Yenta can bestow: First of all, she won the Pulitzer Prize for March. And it’s got a Jewishy title and its on the NY Times bestseller list, which means there are people other than Jews are reading it. And it’s a thriller about books, which just appeals to my nerdy little heart.

The mystery surrounds the origin of one book in particular, the Sarajevo Haggadah, a real manuscript written in Spain in 1350. If you know a little about Sephardic history, you know Spain was not a great place to be a Jewish book, or a Jew for that matter, soon after that time, so the fact that the haggadah survived the raging fires of the Inquisition is a miracle in itself. The story of its survival – all true and documented – takes it from Spain to Italy to Austria and finally to Bosnia, where it was hidden from the Nazis by a Muslim librarian. It stayed in Sarajevo, and was brandished at a community seder in 1995 after the Bosnian government was accused of selling it to buy weapons.

Have I mentioned that this Haggadah is one of the few Jewish illuminated manuscripts in existence since Jews back then considered artistic representation of godly ideas to be idolatry? It’s simply stunning – just the pictures take my breath away.

But back to the novel on my nightstand. Over the course of its travels, the Haggadah came into contact with real people, and it is their stories that Brooks weaves together as the main character, Hannah Heath, an Aussie and professional book restorer, examines each hair, partial butterfly wing and wine stain for clues.

I’m no critic, thank goodness, because I might have to be more cynical about the absolute majesty of this story, kind of like Yvonne Zipp, writing for the Christian Science Monitor:

As the book goes further back in time, allowing for greater imaginative license, Brooks tries just a little too hard to build connections between religions. But that’s not to take away from her abilities. In the hands of a lesser writer, it’s easy to imagine the Haggadah having become a gilded Forrest Gump.

Feh, lady, life’s like an old Haggadah – everyone, if you go back far enough, eventually shares the same story.

I’m not finished with People of the Book yet, savoring each chapter because books this delicious don’t come along every day (certainly not brand new, with a book jacket.) But I’m recommending it to all of you anyway because I know you appreciate good fiction based on even better reality.