"To weep is to make less the depth of grief." - William Shakespeare

.

“The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,

-- Exodus 34:6-7

The above passage is recited on most Jewish fast days.

It’s also known as the 13 attributes of God, repeated on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

It’s also what I recited for an hour the night before climbing Massada 10 years ago, as I stood alone in the darkness of the desert, repeating these words as a mantra, meditating/praying/just immersed in a religious kind of zone.

It’s also the first prayer that leapt to mind 6 days ago when I experienced turbulence at 30,000 feet (who needs a gremlin on the wing, just a little shaking is scary enough).

Flying from New York to California was a bit… terrifying!
… for 30 seconds.

And those are the words that came to me, possibly because the first two words (in Hebrew) are “GOD! GOD!”



Okay, it’s been a few weeks since I last wrote.

In the words of Steve Martin: well, excuuuuuuuuse me!

Good, now moving on…

A lot has changed since my last entry. I am no longer living in Jerusalem, but rather, New York… so the Jew quotient is about the same.
I am working at a Jewish summer camp with the missus.
A few days ago I got to see my parents and brothers together for the first time since last summer.
I visited California for a wedding.

I saw Toy Story 3.

… Also, my grandma died.

What’s that you say?

Oh, yes, the movie was amazing…

Sigh.


Okay, let’s get into it.

Why am I compelled to write at this juncture?
Is there something wrong with me… simply because I shed more tears over the potential demise of the animated Buzz and Woody (and all the other toys!)… than I did over the actual demise over my own flesh and blood?

Perhaps.
But the older I get, the more cynical I get, and the only times I tend to allow true fear and sadness to take me over is in a darkened room, surrounded by strangers (plus my wife) when I can escape reality through some fictional folks on the big screen.

“Lose yourself in the music, the moment, you own it, blah blah whatever…”
-- Eminem, “One shot”

"Let your tears come. Let them water your soul." - Eileen Mayhew

“Field of Dreams,” “Finding Nemo,” even parts of "The Blind Side" (embarrassing, though true)… they’ve made me cry.

Yes, I have cried.
So what?
I’m still a man.
I could shoot a gun, or kill an elk or throw a football…
… or go to a heavily-wooded area, find an elk, then throw a football that has a gun duct-taped to it, which I have somehow rigged to shoot at just the right moment while the football is in mid-air, thereby killing said elk.

But I don’t have any duct tape… so scratch that idea.

But those forms of entertainment make me cry, whereas deaths, familial strife and turmoil, operations and surgeries… no tears.

Toy Story 3 is all about trying to cling to the past while moving on, growing up, and losing the things and people that we love…
And that’s something EVERYONE has to deal… sometimes in one weeknd.

This past weekend was a complicated time for my family.
We flew out to California on Thursday for a wedding on Saturday,
On Sunday they took my grandma off the breathing machine.
On Monday she died.

She was 83.
We called her Bubby (rhymes with “hubby”, not “could be”).

I was thinking about her yesterday, Tuesday. It was a minor fast day for observant Jews (the 17th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, commemorating the Romans breaching the walls of Jerusalem before the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE… so no eating, of course!... sometimes it feels like Jews LOOK for reasons not to eat—“Oh, this is the day when Moses found a hair in his soup… we should skip lunch”).

But if there was one thing my Bubby loved to do it was feed her family. Tons of food… obscene amounts of food… “For me, please. Eat, eat, please.” And she wasn’t some babushka-wearing immigrant… maybe it’s a grandmother thing, or for people who lived through the great Depression… but in her eyes, you could never eat enough. If you visited, you were leaving with a loosened belt and an ulcer.

Most of it was not kosher, since my Bubby was a devout atheist, and it really upset her when my brothers and I reached high school age and began following stricter Jewish dietary laws—it meant we would no longer eat her food. No bacon-wrapped shrimp for us!
(Not kidding… cooked shrimp wrapped in fried bacon… kinda like kryptonite to us Jews… but it was a specialty of hers… and I hear it was a-MAZING… to each their own).
She gave out so much candy to trick-or-treaters each Halloween… I’m sure childhood diabetes has increased because of her turgid Ziploc bags literally bursting with full-size Snickers and Milky Ways… it was awesome.

“… come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price… eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”
-Isaiah 55:1-2

So… juxtaposition.
A family reunion, a wedding, a hospital, a death, a fast… then Toy Story 3.

Why not?

Sadness is just as much a part of living as joy…

You can’t have one without the other.
Joy is a feeling, and so is sadness, which makes way for eventual acceptance and happiness once again.

Peaks and valleys.
Rain can cause flooding and destruction… but it also helps everything grow again.

The following is read on all Jewish Fast Days (besides Yom Kippur):

“For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater…For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace:

- Isaiah 55:10, 12


“Oh come on, that's funny….You laugh. I'm not saying I don't cry, but in between I laugh.”
-- “Garden State,” 2004, screenplay by Zach Braff
.

.