derekh shiksa: part one

To kvetch or not to kvetch

That will never be my option

I admit to being one of those ethnically Christian gals who professed a love of matza.  And while I'm being honest here, I'll also confess to being so excited for Pesach that I couldn't even wait until Passover to open the Kosher for Passover Cheerios.  I've since learned the dread, not exuberance, is a more common sentiment among those observant. 

The night before the holiday began, a time when you're supposed to be rooting out those last morsels of chametz with a feather and a candle, I was watching the Daily Show and happily chomping on my first bowl of kosher cereal.  So what if it had the texture of corrugated cardboard and flavor of a manilla folder, my kitchen was already sterile enough for surgery, let holidays begin!

But after 8 days of chametzlessness, I realize I should have been more specific.

I love matza when it's 3am, I've 2 or 3 too many scotches and only after I've eating everything else not nailed down in my beau's kitchen.   

But before you pleasejudge yourself away, remember it was my first attempt to go unleavened.  This was my first Passover.  I may be, at least physically and legally an adult, but in all things Jewish, I am like an adult kindegartener.  There is a joy in starting from scratch, make no mistake.  Reading, writing, and speaking a new language, especially such a bitchy one like Hebrew, is full of small triumphs.  A holiday is still exciting for me.

One last goyish admission, I tried to make a matza bread house, or tenement I called it.  I learned, something everyone else figured out pre- bat mitzvah, matza is not a structurally sound building material.

In the end, I was successful in my matzaness, but now slightly bloated and not quite as psyched for the next 15th of Nissan, a few miscellaneous thoughts.

1. I understand the symbolism of eating matza.  It's a very tactile way of connecting with history.  It's the tradition, so who I am to argue with 2,000 plus years of it.  However, and I know this from many many years of expensive Upper East therapy, a traumatic event in childhood is often repeated throughout the course of one's life.  As a gentleman pointed out at my first night seder, one who has an especially strong disdain for the holiday, "We made the bread correctly.  We were waiting for it to rise!!!"  Again, I understand Passover won't change but aren't we retraumatizing ourselves?

2. I will never be able to genuinely kvetch.  This is the derekh shiksa, or way of the ethnic Christian, one who chooses a Jewish life.  Choosing is a powerful and empowering thing, but it doesn't leave much room for complaining.  But I think I've found a loophole: to kvetch about not being able to kvetch.

3. The most important realization: The seder I attended this year was hosted by an obviously brilliant, genuinely funny and hugely gracious gay couple in New Haven.  It may be the first positive thing that has ever happened to me in Connecticut.  I was nervous, mostly because of my ineptitude even after 1 1/2 of study, but also because the feast was to be vegan.  What would we eat?  With no meat, dairy, eggs or fish, I imagined noshing on tinfoil, parsley and charoset.  

The meal turned out to be excellent- the traditional lamb shank bone on the seder plate replaced by a flower, a special kiddie Haggadah for me and showtunes that marvelously accommodated the word, Halachic.  It was like no other seder I had ever attended. I was thrilled to be included at the "big kids" table.   

But more, as I sat, laughing, reclining, retelling the story of Exodus with all these folks; one, a molecular biologist, atheist and Sondheim lover, his polyglot gourmet chef partner, who let me light the special holiday candlesticks, the Rav Tastic, a writer, bgirl, my Hebrew teacher and friend, who stood up on her chair to deliver part of the four questions and the very drunk woman sat across from me, who confided with a wink in her voice, "I just don't get on with non-Jewish women, do you know what I mean?"

that there are a lot of ways to be Jewish.  

And that I will find my own way.

PEEP SHOW

Because I know you love a little interfaith humor

Shkhin

Plague 6: boils

Ever wondered what happens when you type in PEEPS and PESACH into google?   Well, I did.  

The search results exceeded all expectations.   For the many manifestations of marshmallow stricken with the 10 plagues of Egypt, click here.

Chag Pesach Sameach!

Two Easters and Pesach

Growing up my family celebrated Easter twice a year.  One was a WASPy amalgam of ham, Cadbury eggs, and the Easter bunny.  It didn't occur to me the absolute lunacy of a human sized rabbit breaking into my house at night and eating half a carrot and sugar cookies.  Or maybe it did, but I suspended my disbelief for the day-glo Peeps and plastic woven drugstore baskets teeming with equally not-biodegradable synthetic grass left in it's wake.  In retrospect, breaking and entering is a common theme of Christian holidays.

The second, usually the following week, was a Byzantine blend of lamb stew, eggs dyed a uniform deep crimson and sweet loaves of braided bread with a lucky coin inside.  This always struck me as dangerous.  We pulled out the big dining room table for these affairs to accommodate the massive meal.  And of course,  all the Greeks and an equally colossal set of personalities; two Yia Yias (grandmothers), a Thea (aunt), uncles and cousins.  Competing conversations, which inevitably devolved into screaming matches, were held in Greek and English over spanokopita, lamb, pilafi, and of course Greek salad.  I marvel at my mother's ability to cook such an "ethnic" feast- one not native to her New Hampshire Episcopalian upbringing.  My job was to arrange the fruit bowl, which I made a painstaking task, naturally.  

Neither had anything to do with Jesus.  

I knew that essentially the holiday had to do with a dead guy rising from the dead and, after repeated questioning of what the hell that meant, let the subject drop.

"It's a metaphor, Elizabeth."

20 years later, I celebrate another metaphor, Pesach.  It makes sense for me.  No questioning is dropped.  My brother, the father, Adam, who is studying to be priest in Peru, is in his busy season.  And as different as he and I are, we do share a love of Jewish men (albeit from different millenniums).

My journey was inspired by a man, without question, but it is the tradition itself that has sustained it.  It takes something more powerful than affection to attempt to learn Hebrew.  As for my brother, I admit, I don't get it.  I'd blame it on my parents, but at 30 years old the statute of limitations on bad parenting is decidedly up.

But we do share the experience, nonetheless, of  those dual Easters of childhood.  And admittedly, where I do not miss the esoteric metaphor of Ressurection, I feel sad that he and I have so little now in common.

Sure, the G20 is important but

As I mentioned in a prior post, Michelle Obama: Fashion Fantasia, following the victory over the dark lords/kings of comedy of the Bush Administration last November, one of the things I most looked forward to was Lady M. catwalking us back into glory.   I anticipated and hoped she would restore dignity to the post of First Accessory, I mean, Lady.

Another thing I hoped for was that she would give France's First Femme Fatale/Nico-in-training, a run for her Euro. 

Well, here it is, as reported (and I use that word loosely) on the Huffington Post.  Or HuffPo, for those too hip to waste the breath on all those syllables.   What can I say, I'm a sucker for a slideshow.

Bon Appetit!

Josef Fritz and Bernie Madoff: A Solution

Undoubtedly, you've heard of Josef Fritz, the Austrian uber-sadist, recently convicted of crimes so beyond heinous against his daughter, no punishment will ever fit the scope of the crime. 

And without question, you've caught wind of Bernie Madoff, who was also recently convicted of crimes of very very different nature, but again with a prison sentence that will never be adequate for the damage he caused and the lives he ruined.

The question becomes: what would be/is a proper way to punish them?  And even then, if we tarred, feathered, and whatever else horrible things we could think to do, would it ever be enough?

Elie Wiesel suggested Madoff should be forced to watch a constant scroll of victims images for the rest of his life.  I like this idea, except that for the punishment to be successful, you must first have a conscious.

I don't know what the Austrian people believe should be done with Fritz, but I imagine they have no shortage of ideas and ways to torture him.  Culturally speaking, if you'll excuse the generalization, they seem to be good at that.

My solution:

I propose that Mr. Fritz and Mr. Madoff should be confined together.  However different their crimes may be, they share acts so beyond the pale (and wives who most certainly knew what they were doing) that they deserve each other.  Let them share an 8x10 cell and spend the rest of their days out together.

My cellphone (Z"L) or How I almost died from Hebrew

Last night, I almost died from Hebrew.  Learning it, that is.  

There have been moments over the past couple months, as I struggled to learn a whole new alphabet and read it backwards, that I believed I might die of it.  But never did I think my tendency towards ancient Greek hyperbole would almost become an Upper West Side modern Jewish reality.  

As I mentioned before, dying an ironic death is among my worst fears and surely this would qualify.  And to make it doubly ironic, I have many times mused out loud, publicly, brazenly, smugly and without knocking on wood, that I could not conceive how someone could fall onto subway tracks (barring drunkenness).  "Ridiculous!"  said I.

Well, I very nearly became a NY Post Police Blotter snippet for tempting the fates so.

The setting: A crowded subway platform  on west 103rd street.

The players: Me, Various Disinterested Commuters and One Good Samaritan

The action: Waiting for the 1 train.

Me, a flurry of multitasking; busily texting, reading a book called, "Hebrew Talk: 101 Hebrew Roots and the Stories They Tell" and pulling two pieces of my favorite sugar-free gum Cool Colada out of my bag.  I could hear the train coming down the pike.  I could feel that hot subterranean breeze of an impending train.  I was savoring that synthetic Miami-in-your-Mouth taste that is Cool Colada.  I was learning about the power of the Hebrew word, elef.  

Then it gets a little hazy.  I know I dropped my phone.  I know I could now see the fuzzy halo of a headlight in the tunnel.  I remember watching the phone bounce across the yellow do-not-cross-idiot line painted on the tiled floor.  

Then like an urban lunatic possessed, one who cannot conceive of getting a new phone, let alone lose all those phone numbers, I inched towards the yellow line.  My bag, which was heavy with a day's worth of city living, shifted forward as I bent down and I lost my balance.  Not like, "Oopsy- should've worn more sensible shoes", but like, " Oh fuck.  I'm the girl who dies under the IRT."

But then a man, an angel really, grabbed me firmly around the waist from behind as I teetered.  If it had been any other circumstance, I would classify his grasp as borderline erotic.  But he was saving me.  Being saved is kind of erotic, actually. 

Anyway, now slightly shaken but alive, I thanked the man and the subway doors slid open.  He and the Various Disinterested Commuters boarded the train unfazed.  There was a kind of New York crisis averted and now get on with your life feeling, almost like this big dramatic thing hadn't happened.

And there I was, alone on the platform, and had a very eerie feeling.  As strange as it may seem, I started to panic that I had actually died.  "Omigod," I thought, "I've died and this is what happens.  The afterlife is going to be roaming the 7th avenue subway platform for eternity."  

It's not logical, I know, but see how you feel after almost dying by subway car.  My only solution was to run up the stairs to street level and have my existence verified by someone.  Anyone.

And there stood my perpetual port in the storm, the frozen dessert Oasis, Tasti D Lite.  I went in, my existence was acknowledged, praise Allah and I ordered.  I was alive and had 12 ounces of Peanut Butter Tasti to prove it.

My Hebrew teacher, the Rav Tastic Dvora, thinks I shouldn't take it as Greek omen to stop learning the Alef Beis, as I interpreted it, but perhaps I should now study only sitting down.