Tag Archives: Judaism

In Praise of White Fish: Everday Magic, Day 423

Posted on October 11, 2011 | 2 Comments

The past is blurry, but you can see that I was happier holding the white fish than sitting on the cement turtle

Last night I sat around a small table with four other Jews, all of us rhapsodizing on the wonders of white fish as we ate it. “I was weaned on this stuff,” I tell them. “Rachel loved it as a baby,” Liz says. “It’s great,” Steve says. “I still love white fish,” Rachel adds. Then we talked about how our non-Jewish friends often raise their eyes and back away from talk of or the eating of actual white fish. We collectively shrug.

A few weeks earlier, doing Taslich at the river, I was in a conversation with other friends about white fish. “Ah! White fish,” said Cheryl. “With the beautiful golden skin,” added Sharyn, her eyes lighting up. That’s when I discovered an amazing secret: the Community Mercantile sells white fish on occasion, which explains why we were eating it last night.

What is it about white fish? Well, first of all, it’s smoked, so it’s like smoked salmon (or lox), but better. It’s flufflier and moister, and it just tastes incredible. It’s a food many of us ate around the same time we tasted our first bagel (or even beforehand), so there’s that infant imprinting on white fish that many of us carry in our taste buds. It’s also just friggin’ delicious. Add to this that it’s rare in these parts, and it becomes something we crave even more so. And yes, it’s healthier than a lot of other foods I ate as a young child (bowls of sour cream and bananas, for instance).

Now that I’ve eaten white fish, after many years without, I’m very happy, and I plan to eat a lot more of it. If you haven’t tried it, you might consider it, or maybe it’s like lukefish for Norwegians: if you haven’t grown up with it, you just can’t stomach trying it. No problem though — that just leaves more white fish for those of us who dream of it.

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Sing the Misheberech for Debbie Friedman: Everyday Magic, Day 174

Posted on January 8, 2011 | 5 Comments

Debbie Friedman is in an Orange County hospital on a respirator and in a medically-induced coma, and so people around the world are singing for her what she’s given us for decades: the Misheberech (another version here, with words), the Hebrew prayer for healing which Friedman, the most important voice in Jewish music in the last 30 years, wrote into a song of vital importance to thousands of people.

I’m one of those people. Through my breast cancer, surgeries and chemotherapy for 14 months, every Friday night at the Lawrence Jewish Community Center as well as some other synagogues, people sang the Misherech for me. If I was there, friends would reach out to my shoulder or lean into me and smile as they sang. If I wasn’t, they would still call out my name as well as the names of others needing healing.

My connection with Friedman’s music began decades earlier, back at Camp Kutz, the NFTY (National Federation of Temple Youth — a huge organization for reform Jewish teens) headquarters in upstate New York where song leaders such as Friedman led us in their original interpretations of prayer, often mixing Hebrew and English. I sang out with my all my heart, even if off-tune, on “Not by Might and Not by Power,” “Sing Unto God” and many other Friedman songs, and it’s likely I even met her at one point. I played my compilation of Friedman and other song leaders’ music  day and night through my late teens, and still, when faced with a challenging situation, will find myself humming or singing these songs, the talismans of my life.

Now I’m thinking of Debbie Friedman’s life, of how much she not only wrote and created, but performed at camps, concert halls, conferences and synagogues. I’m thinking of teens breaking through their usual self-consciousness to sing with abandon, and what a gift such an experience is, and how lucky I was to receive that gift. I’m singing the Misheberich for Debbie Friedman, and asking you to sing it too, even if you don’t know the words. Just sing whatever your heart tells you is a prayer for healing. To learn more, visit her website, where she writes:

It is a strange thing that pain creates beauty and potential for healing.  It is hard to imagine that it can provide a foundation for beautiful moments to arise.  We attempt to find a way to manage survival from one minute to the next, as pain becomes the overriding force. When we are experiencing emotional discomfort, we need to find a safe place to express our grief and loss.

The willingness to both offer and receive blessings of healing and well-being allows one who is wounded to transform and unravel their pain. Our pain need not bury us, instead it may elevate us to the point of healing – if we choose to allow it.

It is with this concept in mind that the Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, which is a concise English translation of the traditional prayer, is now available for you to download. For those who know it and use it, use it in good health. Use it for yourselves, for others, and for those in your lives who do not know it, but may need it.

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Have Torah, Will Travel: Everyday Magic, Day 65

Posted on September 19, 2010 | Comments Off

If you’re a Northern Exposure fan, you might remember an episode where Joel Fleishman, the only Jew for hundreds of miles around in a small Alaskan town, dreams about Jews coming to say Kaddish with me (prayer for the death of a loved one) on horseback, a little like the Magnificent Seven, led by a Native Alaskan in full gear and costume who tells Joel, “Have torah, will travel.”

Yesterday at Yom Kippur services I had the honor of holding the torah for the second time in my life (aside from brief passings of the torah during my kids’ Bar or Bat Mitzvahs), the first time being at Rosh Hashannah. This time, however, I had practiced (and thankfully, a few people showed me how to do this best) winding the torah together, gently but firmly pulling it down on toward me, bending my knees, and using all my arm muscles (so it seemed) to lift it up. Then I turned around, unwinding the scroll some, when we all sang our prayers, and then turned slowly and sat so my friend could dress the torah.

If it sounds like a lot of precise ways of moving and holding, it was, and that’s because the torah is both outrageously heavy and holy (not to mention expensive too). Sitting in the chair, holding the torah against me, was like holding a large toddler who refused to relax into me and go to sleep. Yet it also felt so wonderful, even as I shifted it from one shoulder to another, because of how sacred this text in, and it — along with our community and good deeds and right action in the world — is the cornerstone of Judaism.

I didn’t travel far while holding and carrying the torah, and at the same time, I went a long way to a place I cannot even name but felt breathing through me. I love how, in Judaism, we have hundreds of names for God based on the premise that you can’t really name God, only circle around God like you would circle around a fire. Holding the torah felt like another way to name the unameable, to hold and carry something ancient and still alive, holy and right at hand, mysterious and ready to open and invite us in. It was an honor that rings me through long after the torah was put away.

Pictures: Obviously Northern Exposure, someone (obviously not me) holding torah, me ready to go haul torah.

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Days of Awe: Everyday Magic, Day 63

Posted on September 16, 2010 | Comments Off

Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are the ten days of awe, a time when Jews are supposed to make right anything that’s wrong between them and their fellow beings on this planet. This calling is based on the premise that while we can mend our relationship with god through prayer, we need to take action for any rents in our social fabric. Of course, this leads to apologies for big and little things, recognitions of past hurts inflicted by accident or not, and a whole lot of contemplation.

Last year I received a phone call during this time from someone I only saw every few years but with whom I had a conflict. He called to say he heard about the Days of Awe from a Jewish friend, and was sorry and wanted to make amends. We talked about how we unintentionally stepped all over each other’s stuff, and I asked him to forgive me too. By the time I hung up, I was inspired to call someone I had hurt and begin the hard process of making amends, speaking truthfully on painful subjects, taking responsibility and listening carefully.

A year later, I have nothing so dramatic to report — some small apologies for small things, but mostly a larger sense that this time of transition from one Jewish year to another, summer to fall, celebration to repentance, is wider and deeper the older I get. Struggling with a respiratory infection, it’s also a little hard to get all contemplative and generous, and yet I’m watching my thoughts move in that direction. I will follow those thoughts with phone calls and emails, little talks in person and private wishes for those I love because I know these days of awe teach me more about living a life of awe.

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Israeli Dancing in the Parking Lot: Everyday Magic, Day 62

Posted on September 15, 2010 | 1 Comment

The other day, when we went to the Lawrence Jewish Community Center to do some Israeli dancing, we were met with the vast amount of perfectly arranged chairs for the High Holidays. What to do? It was dust, clear and warm with a cool breeze, and the parking lot was mostly flat. So we brought the inside activity outside, which worked very well for running steps and grapevines, but not so well for fast turns. We ended the evening dancing “Erev Ba,” a lovely flowing circle dance we did at sunset, fittingly since “Erev Ba” means “Evening has come.”

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Tashlich: Take Me to the River: Everyday Magic, Day 57

Posted on September 10, 2010 | 1 Comment

Yesterday, I did what I’ve been doing for years on the first day of Rosh Hashana, going down to a body of water with people from our congregation so that we can perform Tashlich, a ritual based on throwing our sins, or whatever we want to release from our lives, into the water. Actually, we throw bits of bread into the water, letting it represent what we’re ready to live without.

The word Tashlich literally means “casting off,” and so I remind myself to consider what I’m ready to cast away. Most years, it’s simply any self-defeating behaviors that keep me from affirming health, joy and community in my life. This year, standing as usual next to my friend Reva, we found the high wind made it hard to throw down to the river below our sins. We ended up having to ball up small bits of bread and throw hard, watching them land and make little rushing ripple that the river took forward, out of sight and around the bend.

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What a Difference a Hat Makes: Everyday Magic, Day 56

Posted on September 10, 2010 | Comments Off

At Rosh Hashana services last night and this morning, I was moved by many things: the ancient chants that run through the well-worn tracks of my memory, the affection between us in this community, the way so many of us rock lightly when we stand and pray, and of course, the hats some of the women wore. Thanks to my friend Sharyn, who carries herself with such grace and humor that I can’t help but fall in love with her each time we talk, I learned more about what a difference a hat makes.

For Jews, head coverings are old hat (so to speak), and in many Orthodox and some Conservative synagogues, widely visible at the High Holidays. Sharyn told me hats have that meaning for her, and also they connote a certain kind of making separate and special the occasion. But for her, wearing a hat such as any of these puts her head (literally) in a certain state of being, one that connects us with loved ones and friends in other countries where hats on the High Holidays reign communally.

To me, the hats are our own pre-Christian way of doing the Easter Parade. They herald a new season, a time of greater lightness and freedom, and obviously, a tad more style and substance at once. The hat says that it’s good and beautiful, fitting and sacred, light and free to be alive, so why not celebrate that life?

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“I Like Your Necklace”: Everyday Magic, Day Two

Posted on July 15, 2010 | Comments Off

This morning at Z’s Divine Espresso, just about to coffee-up for the day, I was standing over a tableunpacking this computer when I felt something like feathers float over my ankles. I turned quickly to see the back of a young woman wearing a long white dress that I realized has just skimmed over my feet when she passed. She seemed familiar, even from the back so I looked at her as I plugged in the computer, trying to figure out if and how I knew her. She turned and was looking at me too, and so I tried not to look like I was looking as I quickly sat down and opened up the computer and put on my headphones.

“I like your necklace,” someone said to me, and so I looked up, and here was this woman. She smiled. I smiled. Then she went to the counter to order a latte.

What most people might not know is that she was speaking in code to me, and both of us know this code. It was code for “I’m Jewish too,” and in the largely Christian Midwest, this kind of transmission stands out for those of us of faiths largely invisible in the mainstream. My necklace, the same one I’ve worn since my mother gave it to me in the middle of my cancer treatment in 2002, is simply a gold C’hai, the Hebrew symbol for life, and with that, luck, and also the number 18 and the letter C’hai. Growing up in Brooklyn and then central New Jersey, wearing a C’hai was as ordinary as wearing a cross. People knew it was a Jewish thing, and a common one at that. But in Kansas, I’m asked often what the symbol is around my neck.

A few weeks ago, walking down Massachusetts Street (our main street in Lawrence), I passed by a young man with shaved head, worn cut-offs and lots of piercings, only to be surprised when he called after me, in an Israeli accent, ‘I like your necklace.” We smiled at each other. Transmission successful. Likewise, when I see people wearing C’hais, I tend to compliment them or just hold up my own.

One of the most moving exchanges happened with someone not Jewish — a woman who’s attended workshops I’ve offered over the years who, last spring, I noticed was wearing a C’hai. When I asked her about it, she told me that after reading in my memoir, The Sky Begins At Your Feet, how my mother gave me my C’hai, she realized that the C’hai was the symbol for her life too, so she looked long and hard (which a C’hai seeker needs to be in this part of the world) to find her own.

What we C’hai decoders are saying to each other is something like ”I follow a faith that is largely invisible or misunderstood by most of the general public, not so much out of animosity but simply out of a lack of exposure, and I’m in solidarity with you not just as Jew but as anyone carrying in their hearts something other than what’s expected.” In many ways, this “other than what’s expected” would likely apply to all of us in one way or other, so here’s another way of saying all this that’s more in spirit with the C’hai: “To life!”

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Bar Mitzvahed!

Posted on May 4, 2009 | Comments Off

The weekend was a wheel of people and joy turning through our time. We began with a pie-making party Thursday night — the Weedle Caviness Memorial Pie-Making Party — to try to replace what can’t be replaced: Weedle’s amazing pies she made for Daniel’s and Natalie’s Bar Mitzvahs. The joy, however, and humor were there in full-force as about a dozen friends and family came over to mix and roll dough, cut fruit, and gingerly lift the pie crusts into the pans.

On Friday night, we had regular Friday night services at the Lawrence Jewish Community Center with a twist. Instead of just doing the normal candle-lighting prayer, Ken called up six other men important in Forest’s life — his uncles, Mark and Brian; family friends, Jerry, Jack, Herb; and his brother Daniel — to join Ken in honoring Forest’s crossing over into adulthood. Each man lit a dark green candle in a blue glass candle holder and said his wish for Forest as a man. It was moving, gentle, strong and beautiful.

Saturday was Bar Mitzvah central — the actual event began at 10 a.m. at the LJCC, filled with over 130 of our friends and family. So much was moving about the ceremony, but what stands out for me and what others told me they loved include the blessings of both his Grandmothers, Alice and Barbara; our family carrying around the torah while all of us singing; Forest’s wonderful speech about the importance of kindness and listening when it comes to living a holy life; Ken and my talks (mine is below); the gorgeous duet sung by Susan Elkins and Natalie, our daughter; the throwing of the candy and how, just beforehand, Daniel and the torah scooted off to one side of the Bema and the rabbi to the other side to miss the onslaught of Tootsie Rolls.

In the evening, about 80 friends and family came out here for a pie party — 15 pizza pies and 16 fruit pies, plus all the other dishes people brought. People spilled out onto the newly-finished front porch, and the back deck, in the drive and throughout the house, visiting, laughing, eating, telling stories. About 9ish I got suddenly tired and actually took a 10 minute nap, then found myself rejuvenated until 11 when the last people, dear friends we had a blast visiting with, left.

Now it’s quiet and peaceful as I type this on the front porch, all the cats and the dog out here with me, focused on the singing of a bird nearby.
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Dear Forest,

Here it is the night before your Bar Mitzvah, and I can’t help thinking of the night before your birth. It was a windy, rainy May night as I sat in your grandfather’s heated car at 2 a.m. while your dad ran back and forth from house to car to load up everything, including the other kids. Throughout contractions and the all-too-short-space between, I was held in the most beautiful choral music playing on the radio, women’s voices entwined in multiple harmonies that poured through me like the wind poured through the trees I watched in the dark.

The next afternoon, you were born, and the first look on your face – just like the first look of total intensity on Daniel’s face and total joy on Natalie’s – conveyed your temperament. You simply looked around casually and seemed to shrug. If you could have talked, I think you would have said, “So this is life? Oh, well.” You were present, accepting and interested in all your encountered.

Since that time, you’ve brought the most amazing enthusiasm and whimsical curiosity to whatever you find – whether it’s basketball follies, the economic crisis’ latest flurry of bankruptcies, or the cat sleeping in a basket. When I pick you up from school or downtown, you always both ask me about the news – “Mom, what happened with the Dow today?” and your trademark question, “What’s the plan?” You follow music, film, news, sports, and all manner of quirky information widely and deeply, telling me something you found on The Washington Post site or Rotten Tomatoes. You listen to radio, television, read papers and magazines, updating your acute sense of where we are as a country. This world is interesting to you, and you bring to it a wonderful ability to take it all in, apply critical thinking to evaluate and integrate what you really believe, and then tell us about it.

You’ve also brought your big heart, always present and always accepting, to all you encounter, which over your life, has been full of fierce challenges – the car accident you survived, in part due to the love and support of this community; my cancer; and some difficult-to-shake illnesses you’re enduring – and heartbreaking losses, mostly in the last year, of both your grandfathers, your namesake, and a good friend. In all of this, you’ve shown up – in all senses of that term – to learn, mourn, find, and carry on as well as to share your wide pool of kindness with whoever else is hurting. You know well what it is to just be with someone going through a hard time, how to listen, and how to listen for what would really help. It’s no suprise that the words you wrote in your speech about how to live a holy life came so easy to you – they are words you live everyday.

What’s the plan? The plan – I hope and believe – is for you to simply keep being who you are. For all of us who know you, you’re a shining light of all these qualities: kindness, presence, curiousity, enthusiam, patience, earnestness, and many times, joy. For a long time, I’ve believed we become more of who we always were as we grow older, but you were born that way, and already, you live guided by your desire – besides to play the wii and watch countless episodes of “The Simpsons” – to help others and celebrate the amazing gift of life.

That night, nearly 14 years ago, before your birth, I was about to receive one of the greatest gifts of my life. Of course I’m proud of you for all you’ve done at this Bar Mitzvah, but I’m even more proud of you everyday for how you live. I love you with all my heart forever.
Love, Mom

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