Rosh Hashanah and the Single Person

Among the Jewish holidays, Pesach and Rosh Hashanah are the hardest for those who have suffered a loss or have no family. If we have to rank the two, I feel that Rosh Hashanah is somewhat harder. While in our part of the world, Pesach is celebrated in the spring, time of hope and new beginnings, the mood of self-examination which characterizes the High Holidays is augmented by the innate melancholy of the fall. The fact that Rosh Hashanah lasts two days and is only the beginning of a whole month full with awe-inspiring festivities, is an additional reason for its being such a burden.

There were other times as well, actually Rosh Hashanah used to be my favorite holiday, but once my husband passed away I started to experience first hand the problematic aspects of the holidays.

In recent years Facebook keeps providing new and unexpected anxieties connected to the holidays. Some "friends" show off their talent as hosts and post, ahead of time, photos of a decorated table. Others demonstrate their good fortune by posting, in real time, pictures of their happy family sitting around the Rosh Hashanah table,

I wouldn’t want to be invited for holiday dinner to the home of one of those happy Facebook families. As someone who suffered a loss, even seeing the pictures is a painful reminder of what I no longer have, and perhaps it is best not to look at Facebook during the holiday season.

Israel is a family-centered society and, in order to escape the holiday stress, it has become a national tradition for many single people to be abroad during the Jewish holiday season.

But for the few who stay in Israel and decline the dinner invitations of friends and relatives, there are other options. My way of coping with the holiday was to revive a family tradition that we started when we lived in the US.

Since we wanted our young daughters to get to know the Jewish holidays and to remember them, we decided to have a festive and meaningful event. So my husband and I always had young people over for Rosh Hashanah and Pesach. They were usually Jewish students from the university who were happy to come to someone’s home for the holiday meal. They often asked to bring over a friend or two.

The same thing happened last night as well, most of the guests around the table were students who came over with their friends. Around the table we had Americans who study at international programs at the university, new immigrants from Russia and some Israelis. From the questions of the new comers about the holiday customs and about Israeli society it was clear that they had not been invited to many Israeli homes.

Without friends or relatives, it was a different kind of holiday, but it was easy and full of good will, just like the holidays that we used to have back in the US. I’d forgotten how hungry students could be and was really glad that I made enough food.

Happy New Year.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/rosh-hashanah-and-the-single-person/

Those Who Are Absent From The Seder Table

In recent years, just before Pesach, together with anticipation I also experience a feeling of loss. I am already sad thinking of those who would be absent from my Seder Table. The list is getting longer every year: it includes my parents and my husband who are no longer alive, my daughters who are abroad, and my only brother who will celebrate the holiday with his family.

People complain about spending the holidays with their family, and psychological studies have proven and quantified the existence of a particular holiday stress. In Israel, a family-centered society, it is common that unmarried people flee the country, regardless of the destination, just not to be around when every one else is with the family.

Since we spent many years in the US away from Israel, not being here during the holiday is not a good solution. On the other hand, at the risk of appearing Scrooge-like, it dosn't work for me to spend the holiday with a lucky family that doesn’t have a list of those who are missing from the table.

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel 

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/those-who-are-absent-from-the-seder-table/

Transcending Private Loss

MAR.07.2013 

 When we lose a loved one we constantly need to feel his presence in our life, and at the same time we worry that with time we won’t remember everything about him. I know a widow whose urge to keep her husband near her was so strong that she chose to eternalize him in a life-size oil portrait. This is an example of a private way of remembrance; it emphasizes what was important to that bereaved woman at the time. Some people use the cemetery as a venue where they express their grief, and realize their wish to be close to their loved one. Thus they go there often, talk to the deceased and tend the grounds-- cleaning and planting flowers.

While this way of remembering helps the bereaved to stay close to her loved one (and  keeps the grave beautiful), it does not transcend personal sorrow. But if, for example, she was to use that urge to tend the grounds and grow, in another plot of land, herbs and vegetables for everyone to enjoy, then the remembrance becomes public. It could benefit the community and at the same time commemorate the private person--the one that she has lost.

Some families choose a more public way of remembrance: they donate money to an institute, or to a cause which reflects the beliefs of the deceased, other give away a sum of money to start a scholarship fund. These are worthy deeds and by doing them the family members feel that, in some way, they continue the life-work of their loved ones.

To my mind the disadvantage here is that the connection between the giver and the receiver is limited, we often don’t really know what the money is used for, and in the case of the scholarship this act benefits only a few.

My late husband Tzvi was a professor in Tel Aviv University and the founder of a large professional organization in Israel. In his last months, when we talked about his legacy he said that he didn't wish  us to do anything. Like many people in his situation, he argued that it was enough that we, his family, remembered him, and that he stayed alive in our hearts. So we respected his wish.

But when I got an invitation from that organization to an annual conference in his honor, I felt that we were given our plot of land.  It has been five years since Tzvi's passing and I and my daughters still miss him very much. We grieve our loss privately, but in this case, his students and colleagues chose to commemorate him through an active way of learning, one which benefits his community. By doing so the gain has been extended to many.

One Day In May

Shavouot (Feast of Weeks or Pentecost) came early in 1994, right in the middle of May. It wasn’t as though in the diaspora, especially in Texas, such minor Jewish occasions were even noticed. But on that morning before my husband Tzvi left for work, we had made plans to take the girls to celebrate the holiday in the nearest synagogue.

Two hours later Tzvi was back; when he stood at the doorway, his ashen face made it clear that something was very wrong. He told me that he had just lost his job at IBM. It came as a shock; I was aware of of the problems at his lab. Still somehow I believed that he was needed and that his job was secure, and never even imagined a moment like that. 

We didn’t go to services that night, instead we talked with our daughters about future plans; there was a lot to discuss. I remember that one of our daughters said in dismay “I didn’t think that people like my father could lose their jobs,” neither did I.

It was all very sudden and confusing and we were not sure what to do: there was an option of transferring to another IBM plant in the west coast. But those were very hard times for the company, and from what Tzvi had seen in his own lab he was pessimistic about the future of the company (he was wrong). He didn’t want to take the risk of moving the family just to face another wave of layoffs. Also, there was another, very Israeli, reason, being in California meant being even farther away from home.

In contrast, 1994 was a wonderful year for Israel: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had just signed a peace agreement with Jordan and people were hopeful. The economy boomed and we heard encouraging accounts from our family and friends. Even the skeptic Israeli newspapers sounded unusually enthusiastic.

It took us only few hours to make up our mind, we were moving back to Israel.

Four years earlier when we had been transferred from Beer Sheva Israel to Dallas Texas, Tzvi had a job waiting, IBM took care of our relocation, and paid for the expensive transatlantic move. This time it was different,  nothing waited for us in Israel and we had to pay for everything ourselves.

Still we were  lucky that we had a place to go back to, and felt  especially fortunate to be part of the new optimism in Israel. After November 1995 when Rabin was assassinated Israel has greatly changed and I am not sure that we would have returned.

Although the day when Tzvi was laid off was one of the hardest in our family history, it brought about new life and different opportunities for all of us. That relatively minor loss, which required swift and flexible change of plans, also prepared me for the real tragedy of losing Tzvi. It may sound strange but at the time of his illness I often thought how much harder it must be to be away from home when bad things happen.

Every year around this time I am reminded of that morning in May, but then another, more cheerful, memory comes to mind. I see myself waking up the following day thinking “my world, as I know it, has come to an end," and then another thought: “but it is not really the end of the world." Next I get up and start making the necessary arrangements for the move.

One Day in May: Walking Away from The House

I once heard from a friend in Iowa City that during the farm crisis in the early 1980s they “had walked away from their house.” I was unfamiliar with the expression, and she explained that as no one would buy or even rent their home, in the northern part of the state, they had no choice but “to give the house back to the bank.” I learnt that the two expressions were euphemisms for losing the house due to inability to make the mortgage payments. My friend told me the story sadly, and in confidence; for her it was a shameful secret.

Although I sympathized with her, at the time those kind of troubles seemed entirely disconnected from my world. Life was good: Tzvi, my husband, got tenure and we owned a small house in an area of town where most of the neighbors were people like us: young families associated with the university.

Then several years later in another part of the continent, in Texas, we too were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Few days ago I wrote a post "One day in May," about the day when Tzvi was fired from IBM. And now I would like to focus on one of the least pleasant consequences of that event.

When we moved to Texas Tzvi wanted to buy a house with a swimming pool, I objected. It seemed to me highly inappropriate, even immoral, to waste so much water while Israel suffers from such an acute shortage (we were always taught to conserve water). Tzvi reminded me that this was the US, and came up with a winning argument: it would help our daughters make friends in the new place; I gave in. Still, athough some kids did come to play in our pool, apparently many parents subscribed to Tzvi's position and their kids stayed in their own backyard pool.

Once Tzvi lost his job, we had to sell the house right away. However, the same realtor, who 4 years earlier had assured us that our lovely house in the very good good neighborhood was a great investment, said that since it was “an older” home (13 year old) it would be hard to sell (all the more due to its, already, dated pool). Sadly with so many new houses on the market, nobody wanted to even look at ours.

Even prior to that plight, I had no faith in American houses. While in my country houses are made out of concrete and are meant to last forever, many American houses, even the most impressive mansions, are made of wood. Why would I trust a wooden house which could be blown away by a huff or a puff, and surely by an ordinary tornado, within seconds? Indeed our house proved to be not only a broken reed, but a liability.

 It always surprised me, that the “brick houses," in the new developments of our little town in Texas had brick tiles pasted on top of the wood frame. Those tiles were there only for aesthetic reason and contributed nothing to support the structure of the house. In a way, those flimsy short-term, yet sturdy looking, houses were a good metaphor for our condition. Once Tzvi lost his job our own structure collapsed, and there was nothing that could support it and keep us from falling.

Back in Israel we couldn't make the mortgage payments, and after a while, like my friend in Iowa we had to "walk away from our house.” But her loss was the result of a larger economic crisis in her part of the country, ours was just an unfortunate outcome of a local housing surplus. And since it was not an excusable reason, our loss was especially difficult to understand, and almost impossible to come to terms with.

About six years later, we received a legal letter from a law firm concerning our debt to the bank. We responded by offering a modest monthly payment, it was declined.

Unfortunately, there was neither a happy ending, nor a great lesson to be learnt from the whole affair. We didn׳t get a chance to remove that stain from our record, and we never restored our pride: at least it has served as an on-going reminder about our limitations.