Alef: The NEXT Conversation
The Set Up
By Ari Averbach
The funniest, most inherently Jewish joke that I have ever heard is one that was never intended to be funny. It stems from deep within our Jewish roots, from a place we all know and feel. And we only laugh at the joke because our only other option is to cry at our loneliness and the humiliation of being set up with another complete mismatch. Here’s the classic joke. The line that kills every time. The epitome of modern Jewish humor – “I know the perfect person for you.”
Being 26 and single (like REALLY single) is fine. Not ideal, but fine. I work with all Jewish women, I make regular guest appearances at my mom’s school where all the teachers are Jewish women, and I’m very involved in my community. You could only imagine the harassment I get. I take in stride, I take it as a compliment. Sometimes, the one setting me up says such nice things about me that I find myself interested in meeting this version of me. But the truth is that I’m nice, I do lots of charity work, I have some good qualities. Super. Everyone assumes that since I am single I am looking to be set up. (Well, until someone brings up the Richard Simmons story and then they think I’m gay, which is also fine but not true and even then they have someone for me.)
Just this week, I got a call from a teacher at my mom’s school. “Ari, will you do me a favor?” Mind you, I have never met this teacher before in my life, but that’s okay.
“Sure. What do you need?”
She then explained the favor – something humiliating but fun involving a cape, a mask and her kindergarten class.
“Yeah, that sounds like fun.”
Here it comes. I can feel it.
“Great. See you Thursday. Oh, and I have a daughter. She’s gorgeous. I’ll show you a picture. She’s single. She’s in college. She’s a real knock-out. She’s perfect for you.”
Choke. Wow. Really?
“Great. I’ll see you Thursday.”
(Side note: Never saw a picture of the daughter. I’ll be okay.)
The last time someone set me up with “the perfect person for me.” I could tell it would end poorly before it even began. But how can I turn down a “she’s perfect for you” when I’m single? Then I’ll get barraged with, “this could have been the one and you turned her down because you didn’t like her Facebook profile? This is why you’re single.”
I have been set up with girls who are married, lesbians, shomer neggiah, and live thousands of miles away. All of them were “a perfect match.” I think since the days of the shadchan being the center of a Jewish society, matchmaking has been an art form that everyone thinks they have. It’s somehow engrained in us. But this is the divine comedy. While some of these shidduchs turn out well, most just make for great stories with friends.
I’ll end with my favorite one.
“Ari, I have the perfect girl for you,” two separate people told me.
Fine, I’ll meet her. Why not?
During our (already awkward) first encounter, one of our matchmakers lets out this gem: “By the way, did you know that you two are cousins?”
Forget Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Mel Brooks – anyone else that we consider a Jewish comedian. This is the real hilarity.
Photo by emanuxa, licensed under Creative Commons
Read more posts from Issue 09: “What’s So Funny.”
To Mom With Love
By Ruth Bregman
My mom, Margie, was in her forties when I was born, very unusual for those times. So she was much older than all of my friends’ mothers. I clearly remember when she began to be forgetful. It happened shortly after my father died – they had adored each other and she just couldn’t deal well with living alone.
The forgetfulness started when she was in her late eighties. At first it was an occasional lapse, but gradually became more pronounced. Finally, my mom’s doctor made it a reality. He diagnosed her with dementia, probably Alzheimer’s.
I was forced to face the truth and deal with the many problems that followed. Almost immediately, she began a long stay in the hospital due to a serious lapse of memory, her decreasing ability to deal well with reality, occasional hallucinations, and her need to begin medication and to have it regulated properly. But when the time came for her to leave the hospital, I had to argue with the hospital social work staff and administrators who insisted that she belonged in a nursing home. I refused because I knew she wouldn’t do well in a nursing home, and I had also promised my dad never to allow that to happen.
I won that fight and was able to take her back to her apartment on the Lower East Side, but it meant hiring 24-hour aides to “ensure her safety.” My mom adjusted to the aides, and had a complete personality change which often comes with this disease. She became extremely attached to me and also more demonstrative as the dementia increased. This was not what I’d been accustomed to growing up, and proved to require a big adjustment on my part. However, it also proved to be an unexpectedly positive change. It was actually very nice to be hugged and kissed whenever I came over to visit.
Watching over her was a big responsibility. I had to check up on her and the aides every day at first, gradually cutting back to three to four times per week, and eventually (at the insistence of my friends) two to three times per week. Before I realized what was happening, my life consisted of full-time work, telephone calls to mom twice a day, and visits to her, which seemed to make her happy. Then there were trips to the cleaners, laundry to be done, grocery shopping, picking up prescriptions and distributing them in weekly dose containers, and all the other tasks that needed to be taken care of for her.
Mom’s health deteriorated with time, and after three more years at home she passed away in her own apartment. It was not unexpected, but still a shock. The funeral was small, with only the rabbi, family, and her aides (who had grown to love her) attending. In her nineties, when she died, she didn’t have many friends who were still alive and well enough to come to the graveside burial.
It took over two months for me to stop picking up the telephone to call my mom to say hello. And it took almost as long for me to feel comfortable planning outings with my friends and family after being unavailable for such a lengthy time. But it always made me feel gratified to have done the best I could for my mom in her final years, and to have been able to fulfill my promise to my dad not to put her into a nursing home. Maybe best of all, I had been the recipient of her outpouring of warmth and love over her last few years.
Finally, although it’s become much more common nowadays than it was when I was born, it makes me smile to think about the negative feelings many people have regarding “older people” who have babies and never live long enough to see them grow up. Boy, did my mom prove that theory wrong! She was able to see her only daughter and her two grandchildren become productive and happy adults.
Grave Recollection
By Isaac Shalev
CRUNCH.
“Shit!”
“Have some respect!”
“It’s not like they can hear me.”
It was late in the morning on Friday, I was driving in a graveyard, and I had just rammed my car into what I desperately hoped was not a tombstone, especially not anyone’s I knew. My wife, knitting quietly in passenger seat, was not amused by either our predicament or my remark. We had departed from the eulogy service for a relative of mine – a 90+ year-old, short, white-haired, gruff man named Shaya. He was my grandfather’s uncle, or maybe my grandfather was his uncle, or they were cousins once- or twice-removed. My grandmother had explained the genealogy to me countless times, but the relationships between all those faceless ghosts from Warsaw and Lublin was ephemeral, and I never remembered them. I always knew Shaya as the old man who used to talk to my dad in Yiddish and who was the patriarch of the only American relatives my Israeli immigrant family had in the United States. Whenever we met, he showed me the faded blue numbers burned into his arm and asked if I still remembered what they meant. I never forgot.
The only reason I’d even hit anything was because we had gotten separated from the funeral procession. I had no idea where we were going, and between fumbling with my phone, bluetooth, GPS, and looking every which way at once to try and find a burial party in the sprawling Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, I whacked what turned out to be a low white stone, one of many lining the paths between the graves. At least it wasn’t a tombstone.
I finally made it to the right spot, to the smell of fresh dirt on a spring day, and the finality of a hole, a pine box, and a shovel.
This is how we say goodbye.
When the last spadeful had been added to the mound that now rose up where a hole once was, when the last “Amen” of the Kaddish had been recited by Shaya’s daughter, and the last tear had been shed by his grandchildren, my father and I raised up our eyes and saw, not a stone’s throw away, the Ohel – the burial site of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. We paid a short visit, recited a quick Psalm, and returned to our cars. Even on a Friday, now past noon, pious Chabad Hassidim gathered in prayer and supplication. My family was not Lubavitch, and my father had never taken me to the Rebbe while he was alive to get a blessing and a dollar bill. But the Ohel was right there, right near Shaya’s grave, so that visiting the Rebbe just seemed like the thing to do. That Shaya, a Jew who never forgave God for the Holocaust, would find himself buried so close to the Rebbe, in a plot probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) to the Rebbe’s followers, felt oddly meaningful, but I can’t say I understood exactly what it meant.
I got back to my car, and noticed, at last, the dent. It was in the the rear door on the driver’s side, and the corner of the door had bent into the frame of the car. It was a pretty nasty dent, but I felt strangely calm about it. Going to the funeral, honoring the dead, placing a rock on the headstone, these felt like important things to do, even if I didn’t feel it while I was doing them. If God wanted me to do a little body work to earn my role in the ancient rite, that was okay with me. I knew at the moment of impact that there was going to be a dent. I just didn’t know where I’d been hit.
…
Photo by Isaac Shalev.
Italian-Jewish for the Holidays
By Jake W-M
The beauty of having an Italian father is being born into a giant, very localized, Roman-Catholic family in the New Haven area of Connecticut. Most people think the big fight in New Haven is over which pizza is better – Sally’s or Pepe’s – but local guidos like us know there are a dozen other places to go. Growing up, I spent more time with my father’s side of the family than my mother’s; the fact of the matter is, the Italian side was always larger than the Jewish side, so much so that they easily outnumbered my mother’s family at the bnei-mitzvot of my sister and me.
Having an appreciation for religion, my father’s family has been very supportive of my Jewish observance and background, though perhaps occasionally confused or frustrated by my inconsistent practices and the subsequent complications. To this day, when I visit for Christmas celebrations, they greet me with a “Happy Hanukkah!” even though it is not usually the reason I’m there (and in spite of my insistence that, in the holiday rankings, Christmas is really a few steps higher). My aunt has even taken to making a vegetarian lasagna just for my sister and I (the traditional version is loaded with delicious treif). I kvell every time! And I’ll never forget the Christmas dinner, when after saying grace–in Latin AND English–my Nonni (Grandmother) turned to me and excitedly told me to “Do it in Jewish!” After the initial confusion over what I was being asked to do, I had the presence of mind to say hamotzi in English as best as I could. Perhaps not in the moment, but in retrospect, I realized that it was such a heartfelt gesture that my grandmother, in her own way, wanted to include my Jewish practices in the family celebration.
For years I had made up reasons in my head for why I should play down the Jewish thing, but it just wasn’t necessary. Sure there were bumps in the road, and maybe some baggage that predated my own existence, but really I feel blessed to have a family that accepts and supports me the way they do, especially having heard stories where that’s not the case. Just like mishpocha is mishpocha, famiglia is famiglia, and I wouldn’t trade mine for anything.
Chag Hanukkah Sameach and Buon Natale!
Photo by Maggie Hoffman, licensed under Creative Commons.
The Jew Who Loved Christmas
By Briana Goldman
In the words of Andy Williams, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year.” Each year as the air turns crisp, the leaves change color, and the light throw-blankets turn into heavy duvet covers, I turn into a Jew obsessed. A Jew obsessed with Christmas, that is. I become fixated on roasting chestnuts and ice skating–I even recently downloaded the Elf soundtrack. This may seem a bit at odds with my Jewish background, my fellowship at a Jewish organization, and my amazing ability to consume gelt in large quantities. However, I’ve never embraced Chanukah as fully as I’ve embraced Christmas. Chanukah has never had the same universal appeal to me. Hardly anyone knows the complete lyrics to “I had a little dreidel,” and Judah “the Hammer” Maccabi sounds like the name of a pro-wrestler. Needless to say, our marketing has never spoken to me in the same way that nutcrackers and sugarplum fairies have.
My friends constantly question my enthusiasm for candy canes and stockings, with askance ranging from, “do you even celebrate Christmas,” to “do I have to buy you a present?” My parents think I’m misguided and wonder if they could have served me more latkes growing up, or shipped me off to an Orthodox boarding school. By way of explanation, I now offer this: it truly is the most wonderful time of the year, no matter what religion you practice or what holiday you choose to celebrate. I celebrate the parts of the season that echo the core tenets of Jewish spirit.
To me, the season means not just celebrating Christmas or Chanukah, but celebrating the holidays (or the pieces of each holiday) that bring families closer together, volunteering at your local soup kitchen, or hanging out with the elderly (even if that just means Grandma and Grandpa). The best part about the holidays is that the time when you normally come home, throw your jacket on the ground, shove some food in your mouth, and then go to bed, gets put into slow motion. During the holidays you can come home, hug or kiss whomever may be waiting, sit down and talk with them over a hot meal, sing, laugh, and tell stories about winters past. You go to bed with a smile on your face. This is the stuff that the holidays, and Jewish culture, are built from and made of.
Judaism is built on celebrations with your friends and family. From the fun to somber (Chanukah to Yom Kippur), we gather everywhere from our living rooms to the synagogue to worship as a group, and the holiday season embodies this celebratory reunion. By trying to convince my parents to watch Miracle on 34th Street, making a fruitcake for Grandma, or serving soup on Christmas day, I am celebrating Christmas. But, by embracing the traditions of Christmas as fully as the rest of my family has embraced Chanukah, I’m embracing the foundations of Judaism.
Photo by Laurenatclemson, licensed under Creative Commons.
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