Gam zuh l'tova

Barak's aunt and uncle have a CD for Jewish children that they were playing in the car the last time they were here, over Succos. I don't remember which CD it was--I think it was the Marvelous Middos Machine, but I'm not sure--but there is one song on it that I really liked, about the idea of gam zuh l'tova. Literally, it means "also this is for the good," and it expresses the idea that everything is part of a divine plan, and therefore good, even though it may not seem that way at the time. The song is sort of like the book "Alexander's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day," where everything bad happens--except throughout the song you hear the refrain, "Gam zuh l'tova."

So, MHH's box of books? This is a story of gam zuh l'tova.

But first, back to the beginning.

As I may have mentioned, MHH is a non-traveler in a family of non-travelers. His family do not even speak of traveling. They speak of shlepping. Travel is, at best, a necessary evil. It is not recreational. It is not fun. You only do it if you absolutely have to, and often not even then.

So when MHH's sister made aliyah, about two and a half years ago, and I said, "Well, we'll have to go visit," I don't think he really thought I was serious. Even though he saw my passport, with its extra pages put in where I'd run out of room, and even though we agreed before we got married that I wouldn't make him travel as long as he didn't try to stop me from traveling, I don't think he quite anticipated that yes, I did have every intention of piling him on a plane and getting us all to the Holy Land. I tried the first winter that we were married, and was foiled--he kept not deciding whether or not he was willing to do it, until Travelocity decided for us by pushing fares up above a thousand dollars. The next time we had enough money to go, he didn't have any vacation; then when we had vacation, we didn't have the money. But this past summer, I said, this is it: Barak will be two in the spring, we'll have to buy three tickets to go then, and that's just dumb. We're going in December, and I'm buying the tickets. And he said okay.

But even though he did want to go, in theory, he couldn't quite bring himself to believe he'd enjoy it, because who enjoys traveling? So I laid on the wifely psychology. As I am to yarn, MHH is to seforim (Jewish books). I love yarn because I love using it, but I also love acquiring it and decorating my home with it. So, too, MHH with his holy books. So I said, look, you've started doing this morning kollel that has a small stipend. Let's put aside some of that money for a book buying budget, so you can really go seforim shopping when we're in Israel. I saw him perk up. "How much were you thinking?" he asked. "I don't know, a couple hundred dollars," I said. He perked up more. So in the months to come, whenever I started hearing "I'm going to get airsick, I'll get sick from the water, I'll be jetlagged, Barak won't sleep, but it's a mitzva to go to Israel, right?" I reminded him that he was going to the Land of Falafel and Seforim, and what was he planning on doing with those two hundred dollars, again?

The trip there, as I don't think I've chronicled, was kind of nightmarish, beginning with a flight that was cancelled without anyone bothering to let us know and going downhill from there. When we arrived, there was no luggage waiting for us, and I could see all of MHH's convictions about travel being upheld. However, we discovered that El Al (generous that they are) was going to give us $75 each for our inconvenience. "It's to buy new clothes," I told MHH. "But I packed you a change of clothes in my carryon. So I guess you have some more seforim money now."

Perk, perk. "Hmm. Maybe I'll get..."

So, the whole ten days we were there, MHH was really on one prolonged book shopping trip. There was not a seforim shop we passed that we didn't go into, and I tried my best to make sure that he had all the time he wanted. He went seforim shopping by himself a few times, and once just with his BIL. He found something almost every day, and he'd come out of the store with his eyes glowing, saying, "Look at this print! Look how clear this print is! And look, it explains..."
and I'd nod and say hmm kind of the way he does when I rhapsodize about mitten gussets.

In the end, he had about twenty books, many of them impossible to obtain here, many hard to find even in Israel. I found a sturdy cardboard box, wrapped each book in a heavy plastic bag, packed them carefully with t-shirts and yarn as padding, wrote his name and our address on the side in permanent marker, and wrapped the whole thing in miles of strapping tape.

It was too heavy to check with the rest of our luggage, so at the airport we had to take it to a special oversized freight elevator. We put it on the elevator, and we waved bye-bye.

And bye-bye it went. It wasn't there when we arrived at our destination. And it didn't come the next day. Or the next. Or the next. Every day I called the number they'd given us, even though it only seemed to work on prime-numbered days when there was a full moon and a low tide. And sometimes not even then. And when you did get through, you got through to people who didn't speak English well enough to know what a stroller was when I told them I'd lost one. We got home on Thursday, and Sunday morning dawned with still no bags, no stroller--and no box. But they told us that we'd be compensated, at 58 Euros per person per day. So I bought a new stroller, and some new clothes, and some other things. And I sent MHH to the local seforim store with a mandate to buy some books, which he did. Sunday afternoon, the bags showed up. The stroller showed up, missing a big chunk of metal and a wheel.

But no box.

MHH tried to take this well. He tried. But there was no getting around it. He was very, very sad. He'd sit there glumly at dinner and reminisce about how nice the type was in this book, and how this book printed an attack on itself at the end of it, and how this book had a haskama that was a real haskama. He'd sigh. At work, he'd call me a few times every day. "Did you get through? Did they find it?" Alas, the answer was always no.

The following Sunday, I called as usual, and was told, as usual (after forty minutes on hold), that they had no idea where my box was, that I should call back in 24 hours, and that "that airport"--i.e., Ben Gurion-- was very slow to send luggage. (Funny, they were an awful lot better at dealing with it when you lost it in that direction...) MHH sighed again, and was about to head off to school to grade some art projects that were too big to carry home. I said, "Did you try that segulah? You know, the one on the magnet on the fridge?" He hadn't, so he put some money in the charity box, said it, and trudged sadly off to work, weeping bitterly (okay, not really, but he was really, really sad.)

I put Barak down for his nap, which didn't go terribly smoothly. And just when I had gotten him almost asleep--the doorbell rang. Argh! You'll wake up my kid! So I kicked off my shoes and ran to get it in my stocking feet before they rang again.

And it was the man from the airport. With the box. Or at least, what was left of it. Wrapped in miles of orange security tape, in a large plastic garbage bag.

I have never seen such a thoroughly smashed box. I'm not sure what they did to it, but it must have involved throwing it directly from the cargo hold of the plane to the tarmac, with enthusiasm, multiple times. It had labels on it from Madrid, Dublin, and New York. (We don't live in or anywhere near any of these places.) Our formerly sturdy cardboard box was reduced to wood pulp. And, inasmuch as it could still be said to contain anything, it now contained, mysteriously, two equally throughly smashed (but still wrapped in bubble wrap, with every bubble popped) pieces of tile painted with something very strange that I won't get into.

Of our own stuff, almost everything was there, although the books were pretty banged up--one out of its binding almost completely, some other ones scraped and bent. And one five-volume set was missing entirely, but fortunately it was one that you can get here if you are willing to spend the money on it (which we are, since we are getting reimbursed for it.) MHH hadn't taken his cell phone with him, so I couldn't call with the joyous news, but when he did call me on his way home, and I got to tell him that it came, I could literally hear the sounds of his feet in the background as he danced a jig in the empty office.

So, the gam zeh l'tova? He still got his books. He will now appreciate his books even more. And not only that, he got a whole bunch of extra books, courtesy of Iberia Airlines. Along with new socks, new undershirts, new underwear, and a new stroller for Barak.

If they ever actually send us the check. Stay tuned.

What I made for dinner last night.

It was spectacularly delicious if I do say so.

First I made this, using two cups of whole wheat flour and one of white (I didn't have any semolina, and MHH prefers whole wheat). You really hardly have to knead it at all--a minute in the bowl is plenty. When the dough was done rising and resting (and yes, they are right, the resting part is key), I divided it in not-quite-equal halves, stretched the bigger one into a circle, and put it on a parchment-covered pizza pan and into the 500-degree oven for four minutes. Then I put, on top of that, about a pound of spinach (frozen, thawed under hot water and squeezed out) mixed with feta, mozzarella, one big sauteed onion, two eggs, and black pepper. Then I rolled out the rest of the dough, put that on top of everything, brushed it with beaten egg, sprinkled it with sesame seeds and put it all back in the oven. And oh, my goodness me. I certainly plan to be doing that again soon.

Total work time was actually really minimal. Mixing and kneading the dough took ten minutes with almost no cleanup. The only vegetable prep was the one onion--everything else just went in the bowl. And it was so, so yummy--much better than I'd expected. Mmmm.

In the interest of full disclosure

I should probably point out that just because I tend to blog about Barak doing things that are, in my eyes anyway, really sweet or really amazing, it doesn't mean that he doesn't, with reasonable regularity, scream, kvetch, misbehave, and drive me crazy in general. I just don't tend to blog about it, because--well, maybe because it seems sort of lashon hara-ey (very loosely translated, libelous), and maybe because I don't remember it once he's asleep and I'm at my computer, and maybe because it seems like normal toddlerdom that doesn't need to be documented. The unintended consequence, though, is that he comes across in this blog as a paragon of saintly toddlerhood, which, well, he's not, really--misty-eyed maternal takes on things notwithstanding.

For the record, then, let me state that when I took Barak to a Chinese auction tonight, benefiting the local bais yaakov, he a) sneaked a cookie, after I had given him one and told him he couldn't have two, b) refused point-blank to hold my hand and did the boneless toddler routine to avoid it, c) ran away from me more than once, and d) threw a major fit when it was time to leave. Yes, he was tired, and it was late, and he had been good all day (well, okay, we had two diaper-changing incidents), so it wasn't really such a big deal.

But I just thought I should let you know.

And no, I don't know if I won anything at the auction yet--for those unacquainted with these things, a Chinese auction is just a lot of raffles. You buy your tickets and put them in the boxes next to the things you want to win. Because I'm boring, I put my tickets in the boxes next to a lot of dishes and housewares and gift certificates to bookstores. Everything's donated, so even if you don't win anything you've just given some money to the school, which is something I do fairly regularly anyway by way of the pushka in the bakery. Still, it would be fun to score the food processor. I'll keep you posted.

Bits and bobs

There are so many things I've been meaning to blog about, and haven't had time to blog about, that I spent Shabbos mentally composing a number of blog posts that, well, I'm probably never going to write. But here are the topics, at least, in a nutshell:

1. Most important: the friend I've been asking you all to daven for went home from the hospital, in a good way, last week. This was not a foregone conclusion even two weeks ago, so we're all really, really happy about this in the Uberimma household. Thanks for your tefilla, everybody. But please don't stop. This is just one battle--the war is still ongoing.

2. The sock binge continues unabated. I finished the orange socks and am on sock #2 of a toe-up pair in rainbow sherbet-colored Regia Nomotta (I think), at 7.5 sts/inch. And I'm really enjoying it. I picked up a set of size 7s tonight to show a friend how to do something, and it felt like knitting with broomsticks. I kind of like knitting with 1s. Okay, I know, I know...

3. Barak is being really fun these days. Lately, if you ask him if he's poopy, he'll tell you, with maybe 90% accuracy. Sometimes he'll even come up to me, put his hands on his tummy, look up at me with an expression of great seriousness and concern, and announce, "Poop." Of course, then I ask him if I should change his diaper, and his expression changes to one of great alarm, he says "no!" and runs away. He hasn't quite figured that causative link...

4. And on the subject of Barak (okay, the next few entries on this list will probably also be on the subject of Barak, if we're honest) he came out with his first two-word sentences this week, if you don't count phrases he learned whole (like "Abba's book" or "open it.") We were on our way home from a shopping trip, I thought I caught a whiff of something, and I asked him if he was poopy ( a recurring theme around here, as you may have noticed.) He shook his head and said, "No poop." Wow.

5. We paid a shiva call last week, all three of us. The mother of one of MHH's kids died, very unexpectedly--I would say more about that, which was obviously a big part of our week, but I don't want to get more identifying, so I'll leave it there. MHH had gone over to the shiva house for mincha, and since he had reported the previous day that there wasn't a whole lot of food, Barak and I came over later with a big pan of still-warm chocolate chip cookies. Barak walked the whole two long blocks with me very nicely, and when we got there was not only very well behaved, but somehow, mysteriously, knew exactly who needed a cuddle. Someone gave him a few board books, and he went straight over to MHH's student, climbed on the couch next to him, handed him the books, leaned on his arm and looked at him expectantly. He never does that with strangers. And over the next hour or two that we were there, he kept coming back to MHH's kid, just being cute and getting him to smile, and making him feel good. How did he know?

6. And today, on a happier note, we went to an aufruf, which of course meant a very big kiddush (lots of cookies and other goodies.) Barak knew that there were going to be cookies, because I told him as we were getting ready to leave the house that we were going to kiddush, and he immediately perked up and submitted to getting dressed with zero protest (not his usual these days--getting dressed usually involves a lot of howling and "no no no!") And he was so patient while they were setting up. He saw all this good stuff coming out--cookies and crackers and pastry and cholent and all of it--and when I told him he had to wait for kiddush, he did, even though there were other kids who weren't waiting. No screaming, no complaining, no sneaky attempts at underhanded cookie acquisition. He just watched all the cookies come out with great interest, accepted my "not yet" with reasonable good grace, and waited until I gave him one. Which, of course, as soon as kiddush was made, I did. (And then MHH took him over to the men's side, and gave him a brownie, and then he got another rugelach because I didn't know he'd had a brownie, and, um, let's just say the behavior went downhill from there--sugar is really not good for his middos or his naptimes. Which is why he only gets it on Shabbos, and then only in very limited quantities.)

7. And he's getting bigger. His American tanta (as opposed to his Israeli tanta) brought him three outfits when she visited (well, she brought more than that, but I'm thinking of three in particular) that were size 2T. Just so you know, Barak is 21 months old and was in the single-digit height and weight percentiles until not too long ago. Two of the outfits he outgrew while we were in Israel; his Shabbos outfit still fits him, but only if I put a sweater on top--the shirt doesn't quite cover the top of his pants anymore. He's just getting taller and taller. And he is wearing size 7 shoes. Wow.

I think that's it. It's late, it's motzai shabbos, the kitchen is clean and I've got a sock I've been knitting that I want to get back to. There were probably other things that I wanted to blog about, but I'm not feeling so inspired right now--I just wanted to get those things down, before I forgot about them.

This morning

Barak woke up early. He's been waking up early almost every morning since we got back, despite going to sleep late, well, pretty much every night since we got back. However, a new development is that he will now go back to sleep if he gets to come into Abba and Imma's bed. I've tried this trick before, only when very desperate, and it has never ever worked. His usual response is, woohoo! score! playtime with Abba and Imma in the middle of the night!

However, lately, now that he's been a lot clingier and a lot cuddlier than usual, if you ask him if he wants to come shluffy (sleep) with Abba and Imma, the response is a heartfelt "Yeah!" And--get this--he will usually actually go to sleep in our bed, pretty much instantly. Pretty neat.

So, this morning, I pushed my luck a little. He woke up early, but only about fifteen minutes earlier than usual. Ordinarily I would just go get him and call it morning. But I was so, so tired, and so not ready to get up. I thought I'd be sneaky. I went in to his room and said, softly, as though it were indeed the middle of the night and not 6:40 am, "Barak, it's too early to get up. You need to shluffy some more. Do you want to come shluffy with Abba and Imma?"

Barak, who is nobody's fool, says, "Hungy! Befuss!"

Imma tries again. "It's not time for breakfast yet, sweetheart. Come shluffy with Imma."

Barak decides to be amenable to this. So I got back into bed--blessed bed--and tucked him in next to me. Barak hung out there for a minute or two, playing with his blanket, rolling around on his pillow. Then he decided that his pillow was substandard to the task of pillowhood, and that my face would be a much better pillow.

"Barak! Imma doesn't like that."

Imma attempts futile rearrangement of child, while not quite awake herself. And then goes back to sleep. And Barak does not.

I'm not sure how long I was asleep for, but I woke up to the distinct feeling of someone playing This Little Piggy with my toes. I lifted my head about an inch and saw Barak, from the nose up, looking expectantly at me from the foot of the bed.

"Hungy! Hungy!"

"Barak, it's not time for breakfast yet."

Barak, insistently. "Hungy!"

Pause. "Hungy PEESS!"

We had pancakes for breakfast.

Oh, and...

If you are someone who knows me, please send me an email so I can give you my new phone number. Both MHH and I have new cell phones with local numbers, and the old numbers don't give a recorded message with the new ones.

Sock update: sock #1 is done, and sock #2 is up to the cuff (toe-first socks, so this means that all the fiddly parts are done). I think I'll save that for tomorrow's bus knitting, since it's portable and simple, and start something more interesting now.

Knitting

I'm starting to seriously get in the mood. I haven't been knitting all that much lately. I did a pair of socks and a Meg Swansen spiral yoke sweater, with Uberimma variations, for my SIL prior to our trip. For travel knitting, I brought two balls of Sandnes Smart sock yarn (not machine washable, alas--I did not pay close enough attention to the label) to make a pair of enormoous socks on size 0 (=very very small) needles for a friend with very very wide feet. A tactical error on my part. The first sock took almost the entire trip--I came home with only that and the toe of sock #2. I put those in the mail this past Tuesday and immediately cast on for a pair of socks at a more sane gauge (on 2s) for another friend. And now I'm feeling a very great urge to knit.

Before I was pregnant with Barak, I had been in a major knitting lull. I'd done almost nothing since I got engaged. But when I was about four months along, I discovered the Squares Obsession. I'd only ever done one afghan in my life, and that was my Knitting into the Void Afghan--I cast on a gazillion stitches on size 8s and knit forever (well, two and a half years, off and on) until it was done. But one day at work, I happened across a pattern on the internet (while working very very hard, mind you) for Lincoln Log squares. The pattern was beguiling in both its simplicity and its stash-busting potential. Cast on ten stitches and knit twenty rows. Change color. Knit another twenty rows. Change color. Cast on along the edge of the rectangle you've just created, and knit another twenty rows. Continue ad infinitum, creating either one tremendous square or multiple smaller squares.

I was so taken by this that I went home by way of the yarn store, buying a new set of needles and two balls of yarn so I could start a square on my commute. And I squared almost nonstop from then until the week before Barak was born, knitting two complete afghans for two different friends. Each square took four hours on average, and each afghan had thirty squares. And then you had to weave in all the ends, knit them all together, put on a border, etc. It took for-ever. But ooh, they were gorgeous.

After Barak was born, needless to say, the productivity slowed quite dramatically. It took me more than a year to make him a blanket (a smaller version of the squares afghan, with fewer color changes and therefore fewer ends to weave in)--I only finished it this past fall. MHH still only has one handmade sweater to his name, which is sort of shameful on my part. And it's a Lopi, which is about the fastest sweater you can knit. I made myself a very simple sweater, finished a couple that were mostly done and in bags, designed and knit a sweater for my friend Sarah, and made a few little sweaters for Barak--nothing fancy. I made one for my MIL that looks, in the immortal words of MHH, like something an Imperial Warrior would wear. Still haven't fixed that one. But I haven't really been in the Knitting Groove.

Now, at five months and change, the pregnancy knitting bug is back full blast. It's not quite what it was last time, becuase I have a toddler keeping me busy and I don't have a miserable job to distract myself from. But I'm now plotting multiple projects, carrying knitting around everywhere and--most tellingly--buying yarn, which I've been remarkably good about not doing for months and months. No more.

Mmm. Knitting.

And on that note, I think I have about an hour left on Barak's nap. Quality knitting time, not to be wasted!

a little cyber bikur cholim

Motzai shabbos, and a friend of mine is about to take me on a Target run. Since I have a long list of things I need from Target, this is very exciting, and takes precedence over my regularly scheduled activity of Saturday-night blogging.

So, since you came here thinking you'd spend a minute or two, please spend it here instead, writing a quick get-well note for a favorite fellow blogger. It doesn't matter you don't know her--we're all friends in blogland, right? Thanks, and tizku l' mitzvos.

Homeward bound

So, if you are trying to buy three tickets (well, 2.5 tickets really--even if you carry an under-two child on your lap, they make you pay, though it isn't much) to Israel, and you're trying to keep things cheap, and your dates aren't flexible, you are going to find yourself having to bite some bullets. I bought these tickets back in August, figuring that if we paid for them at the same time we paid for the apartment, we wouldn't notice as much (what's another couple thousand dollars?)

I had hoped to fly El Al, but quickly realized that was beyond our budget. I nixed the really scary airlines--I do not fly Tarom, Lot, or Aeroflot, thank you very much. I would have been okay with Turkish, but I couldn't buy tickets with them more than 90 days in advance, for some strange reason. I wanted to keep it to one connection, to minimize risks of missing flights (ha) and losing luggage (double ha). Our doughty travel agent managed all of this. However, there was one catch: our return flight left at 6:20 am.

This was pretty seriously inconvenient. We stayed in Jerusalem, and Ben Gurion Airport is in Tel Aviv. Any time you are flying out of Ben Gurion, you are well advised to arrive at least three hours in advance. Allowing time for the airport van to pick up other travelers, and a little extra for just in case, that meant that we had to schedule our pickup for 2 am. Me, MHH, and Barak, the Baby Who Does Not Need to Sleep.

Since I didn't mind if he was tired--we were going to be airborne for 15 hours, and I wanted him sleepy--I decided on a course of action. We'd vacate the apartment we rented the day before our flight, take our stuff over to my SIL's, and let Barak play until he collapsed. Then we'd leave from there, and just let him have unfettered access to his pluggie (=pacifier in the Uberimma household) and blanket, and let him hang out in the stroller/carseat.

Barak was more than happy to demonstrate to me what he's been trying to tell me all along--that he really doesn't need to go to bed. He was up, happily playing, until about 11 pm. Then he more or less got in my lap and fell asleep. I thought I would move him into his cousin's crib, and he woke up, reached for a nearby banana, and went back to sleep.

Fast-forward to 2 am. We dragged all our stuff back down the four flights of stairs and caught the Nesher van, which was right on time, and took us safely to Ben Gurion. You're driving along the highway, with familiar green highway signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Then you get to security at the edge of the airport. These security barriers are not plywood painted red. They mean business, and after those, there are the kind of barriers embedded in the road that, when raised, will rip your tires to shreds. The van stopped, and someone got on the van, walked through the van, checked us all out, and got off. We drove up to security, got a luggage cart, got our stuff, our stroller and our kid out of the van, and headed off to check in.

It's 3 am, but the place is as brightly lit and as crowded as if it were 3 in the afternoon. We got in line, and about halfway through an employee came up to us and asked for our tickets and passports. "Someone will be with you soon." With us? Okay.

Everyone in line, it turned out, got their personal tour guide through security. Ours came up to us, took our passports, and started asking questions. She started with the usual. Did you pack your own bags? Have they been with you the whole time since you packed them? Did anyone give you anything to carry? It could be a bomb. Where did you stay? Did anyone give you any gifts during your stay? Who? What were they? Where are they packed? What did you buy on this trip? Where? And why did you visit? Whom did you stay with? What was your address? How many nights did you stay there? It's your sister who lives here? What's her name? What's her address? Does she have children? How old are they? How long have they lived in Israel? Is she your sister or yours? And then I realized that she was asking some of the questions twice, in slightly different ways, to see if she got the same answers. It was friendly, and chatty, and deadly serious all at the same time.

She had us put our bags through the scanner, and they came out with bar codes on them. Then we went up to another security desk, where our bags were opened. But not just opened. Each security person had a screen in front of them, and when they scanned the barcodes on the bags, the screens showed the X-rays of our bags--so that they could see what looked suspicious and check it out more thoroughly. We got another personal security guy. He introduced himself. He asked us to put our bags on the counter. He opened our biggest bag, a purple rolling duffel.

And then they found Frum Chucky.

(Let's backtrack a little. In grad school, I got very friendly with a Torah mi Tzion family--the rabbi, his wife, and their kids. At the end of their two years, they went back to Israel, and one of the first things we did when we visited was get together with them at the Jerusalem Zoo. They had a present for Barak--a cheery-looking, extremely Ashkenazi doll with blond payos, a red satin suit, and a kippa, which, when pressed (doll, not kippa) says Modeh Ani in the frighteningly deep voice of an old Iraqi Jew with, it sounded like, a major cigarette habit. Barak loves it. He dances with it. MHH, after a day or two, started calling it Frum Chucky.)

Our friendly secular Israeli airline security guy saw some electronics on his screen. He plunged his gloved hand into the bag to investigate. And he heard, from the depths of the bag, in a distinctively gravelly electronic voice,

"Mode ani lifonecha, melech chai v'kayam..."

Oh dear.

We explained, he laughed, he showed the rest of the security people, and they laughed. Phew.

The search continued. He pulled out a big supermarket package of Elite dark chocolate. (I really love that stuff.) "Did you buy this?" Yes.

Next item: big supermarket package of strawberry Mentos. Elite chocolate, fine--that's Israeli. But Mentos? This is plastique, right? "Did you buy these?" Yes.

He kept looking at me. "They're not kosher in America." Oh-kay, I can see him thinking. We clearly have some nut cases on our hands...

His hand went into the other side of the bag, and then I remembered--the size 0 double-pointed sock needles! "Um, sir? Could you watch your hand, please? There are some very sharp knitting needles in there, and I don't want you to get stabbed..."

Needless to say, we were at security for a while. They also had to open MHH's (late lamented--we still don't have it) box of seforim, for which we had prudently brought along a roll of packing tape just in case. But eventually they decided we were okay, if slightly nutty, and sent us on our way. And might I point out that El Al security, unquestionably the most thorough airline security folks in the world, did not make me remove my child from his stroller, which every American airport has made me do, no matter how much he screamed before he finally fell asleep two minutes before the airline security line. (This time, he was awake.)

It's 4 am. We're all a little punchy. We're all a little tired. Nobody's slept at all except for Barak, and he has only had three hours of sleep. And he's wide awake now. We head through passport control. And we see... a kosher McDonald's. Now, I didn't grow up religious, and I know all about Big Macs. They're tasty. They're usually treif. I haven't had one in... fourteen years. I'm pregnant. I don't care that it's 4 am. I smell those greasy burgers with their special sauce. And I want one. NOW. And MHH WILL NOT LET ME HAVE ONE. Why? Some nonsense about an unreliable hashgacha. I do not take this well. I start to mutter. "You just do whatever Frum Chucky tells you to do. Frum Chucky wants you to oppress your wife. Frum Chucky probably wants me to wear an abaya. I think you need to, um..." and here I run out of steam, because I haven't actually seen any of the Chucky movies, and I don't know how to kill Chucky. Oh well. Barak would be sad if we did away with Frum Chucky anyway.

In the end, we got on the plane, with Barak still wide awake and happy after an hour or two of climbing on, under, and around the departure lounge seats. He was amazingly good the whole way home, thanks to being tired in the first place (he slept at least half of the way) and major parental bribery (a big bag full of carefully doled out wrapped presents, mostly from the dollar store). No hysterics, almost no crying, the entire fifteen hours. He only really melted down when we got off the second flight, and there was no stroller, and he was so, so tired, and our luggage wasn't there, and we had to wait in the lost luggage line, and Imma had to deal with the lost luggage man and Barak wanted Imma, NOT ABBA NO NO NO, and, well, let's just say that we resorted to chocolate. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

In the end, though, we made it. And we got home to a mazal tov--we acquired a new nephew while we were away. Welcome to the world, Ephraim!

blogging lameness

Sorry not to have done much in the way of a travelogue. There's been a lot going on around here, and I've been kind of distracted.

Luggage update is that our two bags arrived, but not MHH's precious box of seforim, which he is mourning quietly and sadly. I still maintain that it will arrive eventually. I hope it will; a monetary compensation from the airline would be meaningless, because while it's technically about a couple hundred dollars' worth of books, the actual value of the box is the plane ticket to Israel. Most of what he bought can't be found where we live. Well, we'll keep hoping.

In an unsurprising continuation of the stroller curse narrative, our stroller, which went missing in Madrid, appeared at our doorstep the other night, minus part of the frame and a wheel. It looked like it had been dropped from the cargo hold to the tarmac--I could not have snapped that frame like that no matter how hard I tried, not even with a pickaxe. I've been told to buy a new one and they'll reimburse me; I bought a new one, because I had to, but I'll believe in the reimbursement when I see it. For those of you keeping track, this is stroller number five, for kid number one. I'm starting to think of the rhyme for the wives of Henry VI--you know, "divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived." Only ours goes "stolen, squirrels, smashed,"--so far. Right now we have the el cheapo jogging stroller, which constantly veers left, and the new fancy umbrella stroller with a way too small basket and wheels that are useless in snow, which I bought because it was the only one at Target that I could carry up the back stairs in one hand.

So far, this has all been pretty unimpressive on the airline's part--everything from their canceling our flight without bothering to tell us to giving us a lost-luggage number (which rings in Madrid, over a terrible internet connection) that works only every three days, and even then the people who pick up the phone don't really speak English. (For example, they don't know what a stroller is.) Next time, bli neder, we are going El Al, even though it costs a whole heck of a lot more.

I really do want to blog about Ben Gurion, and why the security folks found the contents of our luggage so entertaining. But there are lunches to pack and a kitchen to clean, and a little boy in the other room who is still waking up every night at 2 am ready to play. So I probably should move my evening in a course progressing to an early bedtime.

...and we're back

... safe and sound, though without any of our luggage or our stroller. It was a very visity visit, not a very touristy one, so if you're wondering if we saw site X, unless it was the kotel or the Jerusalem Zoo, the answer is no. The high points of the visit so far as Barak was concerned were the playgrounds of Jerusalem, and the made-in-China plastic dog and cat we bought him at the zoo. He behaved himself amazingly well on the flights, if I do say so, and at the Kotel, where I went to pray for a friend and bribed him into a mincha and several tehillim's worth of quiet with six chocolate Kedem tea biscuits. He now, unfortunately, is all too familiar with the concept of "cookie" and requests one regularly. (He is regularly disappointed.)

We stayed in Geula, in an apartment right on the line between Geula and Mea Shearim, which was pretty much perfect for us--it was about half an hour's walk from my SIL, who lives in Sanhedria, and two minutes from just about everything we needed, including a minyan factory next to a seforim store, lots of falafel, some very delicious pizza, a grocery store and so on. Such a pleasure to be able to walk into any eating establishment and just assume it's kosher, because in that neighborhood it wouldn't stay in business otherwise. We did eat well. Motzai Shabbos was still Chanuka, and we found ourselves without matches to light the menora with, so I walked the two minutes to Kikar Shabbos in search of some--and found Ya'aleh, the very lovely bakery, open, empty of baked goods but full of people patiently holding bakery bags and boxes. Since you don't often see a bunch of Jews waiting for food so willingly, I decided to get my own paper bag, and was shortly rewarded when pans and pans of hot chocolate ruggelach emerged from what was literally a hole in the wall.

What else to blog about--the unfortunate tamari incident, my continuing ill luck with strollers, Frum Chucky, El Al security, why you should never fly Iberia, Barak's enjoyment of bran flakes out of the laundry tub, his successful climb up almost all the nine million stone steps up from the kotel, my successful navigation out of the Old City, two sweaters that fit their recipients, the lost luggage and phantom boarding passes, our nephews and niece and their increasingly Israeli-sounding English, hills and more hills, taking buses in Israel and why it's still safer than driving, seeing old friends, having people ask me for directions in the most religious neighborhood in Jerusalem, MHH and his tour of the seforim stores and falafel stands of the Holy Land, my tour of the tichel shops of the Holy Land, Barak's tour of the playgrounds of the Holy Land... all this in time, I guess. In the meanwhile, although none of us seemed to have any jet lag on the way there, Barak is having a very rough time with it now, and none of us is getting much sleep, so that's about it for tonight's post.

We're off

to the Holy Land, so no new posts for the next two weeks. IY"H I'll post the travelogue when I get back.

In the meantime, please keep the tefilla coming. My friend continues to need it.

Tefilla please

If you'll have a few minutes for tehillim this shabbos, please say them for a refua shleima for Rachmana Sarah Yitzchaki bas Hinda Chaya. If you've got a man in the house (or are one yourself) please make a misheberach. Whatever your gender, please remember her in your shemona esrei.

And if you don't have any idea what I just said, please say a prayer for my friend, who is sick and needs a break.

Thanks.

We're baaaack.

And really, it wasn't bad. It was at a Jewish summer camp/resort kind of place, off an unmarked dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Inside, it was a cross between a dorm and a hotel (the kids' rooms were much more dormy), but we, and the other teachers, had a nice room with our own bathroom, two more beds than we needed, and a pack and play already set up for Barak.

So that was Shabbos--me, MHH, Barak, five or six other staff families and one hundred and fifty teenage boys.

Barak, of course, had a blast. He was an excellent traveler both ways, with minimal kvetching--the only real hysterical wailing coming when mean old Imma took away the crayon he was trying to draw on the car door with. Considering it was three and a half hours each way, and the way up was in the middle of the day, I think that's pretty good (and devoutly hope that this bodes well for next week's much more major excursion).

But oh, the amount of sugar he consumed while we were there... urgh. There was just nothing I could do to keep him away from it, and I've never seen him so hyped up. The worst was when, Shabbos morning before lunch, he found a full, unopened can of cherry Coke on a table and picked it up. It looked unopened, anyway, and felt full, and I knew he couldn't open an unopened can, so I let him play with it. He picked it up and pretended he was drinking it. Fine. Then I realized he was pretending a little too authentically, walking around with it held tight in both hands, completely upended over his mouth, head tipped all the way back. He looked, frankly, just a little too happy with the whole situation. I grabbed the can, and realized that it was, in fact, just slightly cracked open, so he was getting a perfect little trickle of flat cherry Coke and had drunk a good half the can. (I think what must have happened was that someone put it outside to get it cold, left it too long, it froze, and they brought it in to thaw--at which point the tab had come just slightly open.)

Great. Not only has he drunk half a can of sugary carbonated water, he's drunk half a can of sugary carbonated water WITH CAFFEINE. (Don't tell Zayde!) On top of all the cookies the kids handed him all morning, and the stuff he picked up from the floor in the dining hall, etc. He is a lot closer to the floor than I am, and sometimes I just can't grab things out of his hands fast enough.

Oh, and the Froot Loops. I don't consider myself a health nut, and yes, we do have sugar in the house, and yes, I do let Barak have cookies at kiddush and other reasonably special occasions, and I give him (diluted) orange juice and Yobabies and that kind of thing, but I definitely don't believe in gratuitously adding refined sugar in quantity to the diet of anyone not yet old enough to brush his own teeth. And so when the Froot Loops were put out at breakfast, I drew the line. You are getting Cheerios and cantaloupe, little boy, and you will like it.

And oh my, you would have thought I'd taken his blanket, his pacifier, and all of his toys, and thrown them out the window into the frozen lake beyond. I was the MEANEST IMMA EVER EVER EVER and Barak threw himself down on the floor and screamed himself purple to aid me in realizing this. Imma, however, continued to be mean, did not recognize that he was truly in desperate need of said Froot Loops, and not only wouldn't give them this essential breakfast product but kept pulling them out of his hands ever time he found one more tempting blue morsel stuck to the floor. Yecch.

So, along comes naptime. Now, we all know that Barak has a nap-resistant streak. But usually he registers his protest by, you know, protesting--crying, or complaining, or something, um, negative. Not this time. I put him in his crib, lay down on the bed, and listened while he sang, chatted, danced, and literally bounced himself off the sides of his crib for Two. Solid. Hours. He sang the ABC song ("A, B, B, B, B! A, B, B, B, B! Emanemobeee! Emanemobee!") pointed out things in the ether ("Diss! Diss! Diss!") and imitated animals ("Ruff! Ruff! Da ga! Daga! Baby!") Every so often, I'd look to see what he was doing, and see him standing up looking at me and waving happily.

Needless to say, today he didn't get so much as a Yobaby--there were a lot of vegetables and whole wheat products in his diet. He didn't actually seem to mind.

Houston, we have pronouns

For a couple of months now, if you ask Barak his name, he's answered, "Barak!" I find this a lot of fun--people will ask me his name, I'll tell them to ask him, they do, and he'll tell them.

Today, Barak was playing in his room, and, just because I like hearing him say his name, I said, "What's your name?" He said, "Barak!" On a whim, not because I thought I'd get an answer, I said, "What's my name?"

And he said, "Amma!"

Chills!

This afternoon was fun. I had to work a little bit late, because--oh, I haven't mentioned this yet. Well, this weekend is my husband's school's annual retreat. It's a Shabbaton at a Jewish conference center a few hours' drive from here. And spouses are enthusiastically invited--nay, encouraged--to attend. So we're all going. I'll report back on this next week, assuming we survive. Did I mention it's going to be all boys? Teenage boys? About a hundred and fifty of them? No?

Anyway...

I was working late today, because I need to take Friday off for traveling, and Barak was missing me--so as I walked up to our building, I saw his head in the living room window, waiting for me to come up the street. I waved madly, he waved madly, and I got some nice hugs when I got in. He was all cuddly this afternoon--kept climbing into my lap with books, which I love. I made macaroni and cheese with spinach, and he was in his high chair eating dinner when... the doorbell rang.

Who could that be?

It was the UPS man, delivering something from Amazon I had totally forgotten I'd ordered. Namely, a toy stroller from Graco, which I got with a gift card I got from our credit card points. Barak loves pushing things around the house, and on the occasions when he's had access to some other child's toy stroller, he's always gone bonkers. So, I got him a stroller. Macaroni and cheese? "All done! Out! Out! Out!" And he pushed the stroller from the kitchen to the living room, back down the long hall to the kitchen, in and out of both bathrooms and bedrooms, up and down the hall again, over and over, for the next hour. He put things in the stroller. He took things out of the stroller. He put things in the stroller basket. And then, just when he was ready to look at something else, he realized... that the stroller had come in a Very Big Box. Which had to be climbed into. And out of. And into. And out of. And then he had to sit in the box, and lie down in the box, and turn the box over, and...

Like I said, it was a very exciting afternoon.

Another update I don't think has made it into the blog is our planned trip to Israel in a little less than two weeks, to visit MHH's sister and some friends of mine. We're leaving on Christmas night--prime Jewish travel time. And we're planning on being there for almost two weeks, so expect a blog hiatus.

Anyone who's ever taken a 20-month-old on fifteen hours of air travel--without a seat for said child--and lived to tell the tale, please share your secrets. As long as they didn't involve tranquilizer darts.

Word of the Day

Barak's new word today: "Poop!" To mark the occasion, he managed three poopy diapers in one day. I'm not complaining that he's decided to start eating vegetables, but it is a little gross to see them in more or less their original form surrounded by brown guck the day after being eaten. Kind of like those anti-smoking campaigns that showed cigarettes ground into all kinds of disgusting things.

Oh, and on the subject of Barak and vegetables--remember all those 80s ads about, "It's better with butter?" Apparently they were right. After many dozens of failed attempts at feeding Barak any vegetable that wasn't a) corn or b) grated up and mixed into macaroni and cheese, I tried melting a very generous pat of butter on top of some green beans and carrots. He snarfed the entire bowl and asked for more. Well then.

Not much new to report. There's a lot of snow out, but until Barak's new boots show up he's not going to be taking much advantage of it. Every room in our house is sparkling clean, thanks to Marika neni's afternoon visit and the cleaning binge I went on on Sunday, so I'm feeling a lovely feeling of contentment along with a slight dizzy sensation from all the PineSol. Dinner is on the stove, and I'm waiting for MHH to get back from a late evening obligation.

Who needs excitement? I'm going to go knit.

In appreciation of pedestrian-friendly shopping

MHH and I got married when we were both living in New York. It'll be three years at Purim. The summer after we got married, we both moved somewhere we'd never lived before, because we both had found good one-year positions--him teaching, me writing. His job also came with an offer to live in a very tiny, very elderly Jewish community that was perilously close to extinction. There was one shul where there had once been several, and although they had plenty of guys during the week, most of them came in a van from a nursing home--ergo, they had trouble getting a minyan on Shabbos. So the offer was a year of heavily subsidized rent in turn for MHH showing up regularly for minyan--we were allowed to go away one Shabbos a month and on holidays, but otherwise we were expected to be there. Money was tight and rents were high, so we took it.

It was a good decision in many ways. MHH and I both liked the feeling of really contributing to a community, and we made some good friends. But in many ways, it was really hard. There was no eruv, so you couldn't carry on Shabbos, meaning once Barak was born I couldn't leave the house. There was only one place to buy food--the enormous supermarket about a mile away. They had all the things a normal supermarket has, but no kosher meat, no kosher cheese, and very expensive (and not very good) produce. Plus they were a mile away, and we didn't have a car, so all through the winter and all through my pregnancy everything we ate got hauled in a backpack through the ice and snow. Oh, and my feet had swollen so much my boots didn't fit, so I didn't have boots, either. The only other way to get food was to take a train an hour and a half to the nearest kosher grocery, the only source of things like cheese, fish sticks, and pareve chocolate.

At the time it didn't seem that terrible, but it wasn't easy. It meant that serious Shabbos planning had to start on Monday. For most of the year, there were only two families that we could eat by, so unless we had an invitation, everything had to be cooked from scratch--no running out for deli on Friday afternoon. We had to know exactly who was coming by Tuesday, because I had to shop on Wednesday to be able to cook on Thursday, because on Friday I walked in the door literally 20 minutes before candlelighting. All other days of the week, I got home at around 6:30 or later, depending on my commute. It was dark, it was cold, and my kitchen was a bat cave--tiny, with no window, no ventilation, and, for about five months, no light, because it stopped working and the super never got around to fixing it. Oh, and all of the food had to be vegetarian, because our kitchen did not have room for two sets of dishes and we only had dairy ones out. (Vegetarian food requiring, of course, many more fresh ingredients and much more time and care.)

In January sometime, when I was pretty big, it was phenomenally cold, and we had one family coming to us for Shabbos almost every week, I discovered Peapod. It helped, but their webpage didn't have everything I needed (no barley for cholent!) and you had to have ordered everything by noon on Tuesday, AND they didn't guarantee the delivery time, so if you were unlucky you might find yourself beginning your Shabbos preparations at 9 pm Thursday.

Contrast this to where we live now. Yesterday, it was about five degrees when I got home from work at 1:45. We needed food. So I bundled up Barak, loaded him in the stroller, and set off on the two-block walk to our nearest shopping street. I went to the kosher grocery, where not only do they know me and my son, but they address me as Mrs. ----. We asked if they could deliver, and the store owner, who was in the middle of a conversation in Yiddish, looked at his watch, checked that the van was there, and said sure. We parked the stroller, I put Barak in the cart, and we bought everything heavy--tomato sauce, seltzer, all the things I wouldn't want to cart home in the stroller basket. If something wasn't glass, I handed it to Barak in the shopping cart seat and he'd turn around and deposit it carefully in the growing pile in back. When we got to the checkout, we reversed this--I handed him everything from the cart and he set it carefully on the counter. And then we got the stroller back from where we'd left it in the back of the store.

Meanwhile, one of the store employees was looking us up in the local community directory--not the phone book, the Jewish version. "What time should I expect you?" I asked. He looked at the clock. "After I daven, and mincha's around 4:15." He knew that I would know from that what time to expect him, and I did. (This, by the way, is the same kosher grocery where they answered my plea to bring back the Hungarian pickles they'd stopped stocking by ordering not only the pickles, but also Hungarian pickled beets, red cabbage, and cherry peppers. Bliss...)

And if I'd needed groceries late on Thursday night, the kosher grocery is open until midnight. In extremis, I could even call them and tell them what I needed, and they'd bring it to me. And if you buy a certain amount, which is sort of flexible, they don't charge for the trip.

After we finished at the grocery, we did the rest of our rounds. And oh, I love shopping on our street! The checkout ladies in the grocery know us and speak Russian to Barak. The checkout ladies in the produce store know us and speak Serbian and Urdu to Barak. The ladies in the bakery know and love Barak and not only speak to him in Aramaic but give him bagels (they'd give him cookies if I let them) and prompt him to say thank you. The fish man knows us and lets Barak turn his TV on and off. Even the man who cleans the tables and mops the floor in the pizza store knows us and addresses Barak as "my friend," even though Barak undoubtedly adds to his floor-mopping duties. Contrast all this convenience and community to last year, where we made one reluctant trip a week to one stark and sterile grocery store where everything seemed shrink-wrapped and fluorescent, none of the vegetables seemed to ever have come in contact with dirt, and we never saw the same checkout person twice.

I know that a lot of people think that we must lead such difficult lives with no car, but honestly, I wouldn't want it any other way. I love that I have to shop multiple times in a week (although I know that I would probably feel differently with five kids). I love that the man who owns the grocery store davens with my husband. And I love that I can buy my challah warm on Friday afternoon and be wished a good Shabbos five times on the way home.

Have a good Shabbos, everyone.

Apples and almas

Yesterday, Barak was sitting in his high chair playing idly with his breakfast cereal, in which he did not appear terribly interested. I was eating spaghetti, which, um, I really like to have for breakfast. The cereal was obviously not going over well. "Do you want some spaghetti?" I asked, in English. "No," he said. "Apple." A reasonable request at breakfast time. I got up and cut him some pieces of apple. "Is this what you want?" I asked him, in Hungarian this time. "Yeah!" he said. "Alma!"

Right you are.

And this morning, I was telling our babysitter something that happened last week. My aunt was visiting, and Barak impressed her mightily with his Hungarian comprehension. While she was watching, I asked Barak, in Hungarian, if he wanted a pickle (uborka). "Yeah! Abawa!" "Okay, then, go over there and sit on the big chair, and when you're sitting nicely I'll give you a pickle." He went over to the chair, but didn't get up on it. "No, I didn't say go stand next to it, I said climb up on the chair and sit down," I told him, also in Hungarian, being careful not to point or give any nonverbal indication of what I wanted him to do. Up he climbed, and he got his uborka, and we were all tickled. So I was telling this to the babysitter this morning, all in English, and when I got to the word "pickle" Barak gave a big grin and said "Yeah! Abawa!"

Well, there's three words he knows in both languages. Pickle, apple, and no. He's got the essentials down.

leaps and bounds

For the last month or so, Barak has been repeating, or trying to repeat, just about anything I try to get him to say, in English, Hungarian or Hebrew. If I say, "Can you say 'truck'?" he'll say, "chuck!" If I say, "Azt tudod mondoni hogy 'alma'?" he'll say, "awa!" He'll also say words he knows with a little prompting--for example, if I give him something hot to eat and say, "Be careful, it's hot!" he'll say "Hot!" and blow on it. If I ask him if he wants a banana, he'll say "nana!" And so on.

Today, though, for the first time, he said an appropriate word on his own. We went to get pizza at the pizza shop--something we do maybe every week or two. I put him in his high chair when the pizza was ready, then asked him to wait while I put the (hot) pizza on the table. I handed him his plate, started cutting, and heard him saying, meditatively, "Hot. Hot. Whooo!"

After we had our pizza, we went and ran a few of our usual errands: the fruit and vegetable shop (celery, carrots, potatoes, broccoli and cream cheese); the drugstore (diapers); the bakery (bread and bagels); and the kosher grocery (chicken, fish sticks, rolls, yogurt, pickles, cheese, tomato sauce, carrot juice and whatever else I don't remember). It's cold where we live and he's very bundled in the stroller, and by the last errand he had sort of had it. He wasn't fussing, exactly, but he was looking pretty bored. On our way out the door, I heard him say, hopefully, "Ohm? Ohm?" What, is he meditating? Then it hit me. "Do you want to go home?" "Yeah!"

And home we went.

There's that pesky question again.

This past Shabbos, we hosted a family consisting of an intermarried couple (Jewish mother, non-Jewish father) and their five kids. They are interested in becoming more observant, and wanted to try the full Shabbos experience. We didn't really know them--she is the daughter of someone I work with and know only casually--but we're into kiruv and so we invited them, all seven of them, to stay with us for Shabbos.

It wasn't a total wash, although the parents summarily piled four of the five into their minivan at 9 am on Saturday because the kids were just too off the wall with no TV. Their daughter, who is eleven and a delight, decided to stay, and we had a nice morning with the two of us and Barak. There was an aufruf at a nearby shul that we decided to go to, and she was shocked and delighted to discover that the bag of candy she was handed upon entry was supposed to be HURLED ACROSS THE SHUL DIRECTLY AT THE GUY READING FROM THE TORAH. ("I'm supposed to throw it?" she asked incredulously. "Not just allowed, but we're supposed to throw candy in temple?" Yep.) We came home, put Barak down for his nap, read Harry Potter companionably on the couch for an hour or so, ate lunch, ate brownies, went to a friend's, ate more brownies, and it was time for Havdala. She wants to come back, and it's fine with us.

Friday night (backing up a little), after the kids had gone to bed, the four adults sat in the kitchen talking. It's always a little odd having non-religious Jews or non-Jews in the house on Shabbos--not in a bad way, but there are so many things that we take for granted that they just didn't know. They got the "don't touch the lights" business, and I taped the switches just to be safe. But I wasn't quite expecting to be asked, innocently, in front of two grown men, "Do you go to the mikva?" Ummm. Can we talk about that later?

She also asked me a question that I haven't heard in a long time, just because most of the people I know these days either have known me for years, are religious Jews, or don't know that I was ever anything but a religious Jew. She asked, "What made you decide to become religious?"

I always find it strange that so many people feel so free to ask me that question. To me, it's so personal--something like asking "What did you find so attractive about your husband that you decided to marry him?" It's not something that I would ever ask a stranger or even a casual acquaintance. Actually, I wouldn't ask it of anybody. But I've been asked it a lot, over the last ten years or so.

The short answer is, "It just happened." For me, there was never any real deciding involved. It was like taking off a pair of too-tight heels and sliding your abused feet into slippers. What made you decide to take off the shoes? Your feet hurt--it didn't take a lot of thought. Or being hungry, and eating. What made you decide to eat? Um, hunger. You didn't sit and think, hmm, I'm hungry, what should I do about this? You saw the thing you needed, and never thought twice.

The years that I spent being an atheist were more of a reaction to what I saw of religion (and the lack thereof) growing up. A lot of hypocrisy, a lot of treating other people badly, a lot of all kinds of things I was told we weren't supposed to do. I hated it. I poked my nose into a few different religions, and never found anything that felt right. This was in my late teens or somewhere around there. By the time I got to college, I had decided that organized religion was not much more than a good means of social control, and ditched the whole idea.

But, well, that never really felt right either. And so, over the course of a number of years, I found myself moving back to Yiddishkeit, from reform to conservative to orthodox shuls, and eventually to where I am now, in a community full of men in black hats and women who wear long sleeves and stockings in August. And it's the happiest and most comfortable I've ever been.

There are lots of perfectly good religions out there--for other people. But I'm a Jew, and being anything other than a Jew who tries just didn't feel right. I've been accused of using religion as a "crutch," which is something that orthodox Jews pretty much roll their eyes at, because of the total lack of understanding it demonstrates. Being a religious Jew makes life so much more of a challenge. It doesn't make your life any easier. It forces you to think. It forces you to work at being a better person. It forces you to keep God front and center in everything you do. For me, that makes life so much more worthwhile.

For me, this was a way of life that just fit. I liked the values. I liked the sense of community. I liked the fact that the guys I met on dates didn't even consider laying a hand on me, and that nobody thought I was freakish for not having or wanting a TV, and that the families I met were, overwhelmingly if not without exception, happy, close, and loving. I got a look inside that world, a world of people who were an awful lot like what I wanted to be, and I thought, "Why do I need to look for anything else? This is me. This is who I am. This is what I'm supposed to be."

No, it hasn't all been easy or without compromises. My own family was, to put it mildly, not happy with the way I moved religiously, and that was (and remains) hard. It isn't easy to not be able to eat in the homes of my non-Jewish friends, especially when I've traveled a long way to see them and the last thing I want is to hurt anyone's feelings. And I know that my boss, who is fabulous in pretty much all respects, thinks that I'm oppressed, and that grates. But it's never even crossed my mind to wonder if I made the right choice. I never even thought to wonder what my life would be like if I'd chosen differently. Because I don't think I ever chose at all.