Hi! This past Shabbat our kids made us a surprise party in honor of our 40th wedding anniversary! I am still in mourning for my father; our youngest daughter is getting married G-d willing, next month; we figured we would make a party when the smoke cleared. Our daughter Ayalah had other ideas! She is the House Mother at the Maale Levona Girls High School. Part of her job is organizing Shabbat hospitality in their dorms, which consist of nice new, well-designed caravans kind of trailers without wheels. She contacted all her brothers and sisters (they are 8 in all) to come with their spouses and kids. She ordered food from the schools caterer. She made a schedule which included games, speeches, kids activity, and of course meals and some rest. They made us a beautiful photo-montage. They did it all without telling us! Ayalah told us she was having a housewarming; she had just remodeled some rooms in her house. There would be a small party Saturday night; she wants us to come Shabbat so we wont have to rush to get there! Her husband Uriel drove us up to the school, saying that Ayalah was there just before Shabbat to get stuff ready.... I figured, Wow! Shes really organized, to be able to host us as well as have the girls all there for Shabbat.... I walked into the dining room, and there they were! All our kids, and their families, singing Siman Tov u-Mazal Tov! I figured it was another engagement celebration for Rachel... I turned toward her and started singing too.... The Jokes on Me! We were the Guests of Honor, not Rachel! Our marriage was 40 years ago; hers is next month! Rachels hatan (future husband) Neria Ben-Pazi is the oldest kid in his family of 10 kids. His parents are both the oldest kids of THEIR siblings. This is the first wedding of his generation in his family. With us its the opposite way around: Rachel is our youngest kid. I am only about a year younger than Nerias maternal grandmother. His mother is younger than our son Shalom. I love how the generations are blending here... Rachel will be the first of our children to marry neighbors from Kochav HaShachar. They are planning, at least for the beginning, to live in one of the caravans in Maale Shlomo, the satellite neighborhood up the hill from Kochav HaShachar. Remember the old expression youre not losing a daughter; youre gaining a son-in-law? Well thats how we felt about all our kids getting married; each kid found the perfect spouse who was just right for them! But this time they are not even going far away! That makes it even cuter, if that is possible! Rav Kook wrote that in the time just before the Messiah comes, all kinds of things that used to be considered automatic and unconscious will become difficult to think out and very conscious. We are definitely seeing that process happening now! Throughout human history, people ate traditional food from their locale; and what constitutes the perfect diet for human beings was not a question that anybody even thought to ask. Plato considered cooking to be an instinct, not a skill. Now there are hundreds of cook books urging people of both genders to follow their directions, and also to improvise their own ideas, to create menus which are interesting, creative varied and exciting! Cooks and nutritionists have methods of meal planning, ranging from Vegan (completely vegetable-based) to Paleo (highly meat-centered, and no gluten). Each method claims to be the ideal human diet! The resultant confusion makes some people uncomfortable. What IS the perfect food for humans?! Others, myself included, say hey! Thank G-d we have such bounty that we can choose what we want to eat! Marriage and children have also become a matter of choice, whereas in former generations, it was considered automatic. When Mom and Dad got married, most people were married. Single people were pitied. If anybody stayed that way by choice they would not admit it. Physical intimacy outside of the marriage framework was considered shameful, a sin, even by people (both Jews and non-Jews) who were not considered to be extremely religious. It was considered an instinct, just normal moral behaviour, to expect young people to get married. There was a song: Love and Marriage; Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage! The divorce rate was low. Divorce was considered a tragedy, or even shameful. Children reared with only one parent were pitied; and when parents divorced it was called a Broken Home The only truly reliable method of avoiding pregnancy was abstainence. Besides, people wanted children! Children were a blessing! Every child brings his own luck! so the saying went. The desire for children was considered, even by psychologists (who were of course, modern!) to be an instinct. Mothers had a Mothers Instinct; and Fathers needed a woman to make them a home. The ability to form a family was considered automatic. There were no books, classes, or counselors to teach people how to have a happy and stable marriage, or how to best rear their kids! In the 1960s the Birth Control Pill enabled my generation to separate between physical pleasures and procreation. Many people took the opportunity to have lots of fun and never to get married. Others got married but had no kids, or very few. The birth rate went down, all over the western world. People wanted freedom from the burden of children. The general feeling was that we could do what we Wanted; we had Choices! Women waited to have children till they were ready career-wise; financially; in their personal development; or with their partners. Sometimes, by the time they were ready for a baby, they found out that it was a lot more difficult to concieve a child than their mothers had warned them, especially after the age of 35 or 40! For these women, examining all their options kind of backfired on them! Those who did have children also had lots of choices! There were schools of thought in medical/hygiene practices: bottle feeding or breast feeding? pacifiers or none? feeding on demand or schedueling? innoculations are vital/innoculations are poison? is hitting a child a legitimate form of discipline or is it abuse? should baby shoes with strong support be purchased as early as possible or should a child go barefoot as late as possible? do baby walkers help a kid walk earlier and better, or do they distort a babys posture? and of course, as Baby gets bigger, the questions become more complex too! Who does the new parent consult? Thats also a choice! My own mother did not own a copy of Dr. Spock! (nor of any other child-care book)! She believed that mothers had an instinct which enabled them to bring up their kids Right! I, in contrast, spent enormous amount of time, thought, energy, and consulting with other mothers and teachers (and of course my husband!) in effort to make wise choices. What used to be automatic has become conscious! There were few choices in religious practice either. Virtually everybody stayed in the faith tradition in which they were raised. Catholics generally stayed Catholic; Protestants generally stayed Protestant (sometimes changing to a slightly different variation if they moved to a new town), and Jews stayed Jews. Today, 30% of Americans are in a different church affiliation than that in which they were born. Is all this picking and choosing good? Whether its good or bad, it is here now! Society is in flux! Our Jewish tradition forsaw these trends. Rabbis in the Talmud wrote about how traumatic the Messianic process will be, describing a world in which change would be so rapid that folks will not be able to keep up... Some of them expressed relief/hope that they will not be the ones to live through it! I am proud of my children for choosing marriage and family; making wise choices of partners; being modest and loyal to their spouses; believing in G-d and the Torah; devoting themselves to building the Land of Israel; and being hard-working, honest and upright! I am glad that they are surpassing me and my husband, each in their own special ways. I, for one, consider it an honor and a privilege to live in such times, in a universe ablaze with changes! May we all, in the coming year, be worthy to choose well!
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 02:10:05 +0000
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