Our living room sofas all face the same way. Mood lighting--- orange bulbed yahrtzeits. I serve mac and cheese in the milchig kitchen.
Rotisserie chicken upstairs in the fancy fleyshig caterers kitchen. I use the
coatroom to dry my black dresses. The kids scooter around a room with 40 foot
stained glass windows. I sneak down the hall in my towel to the shower.
Sometimes I run into the president of the board. Or the “prophet.” Sruli and I
have midnight dates in the Rabbi’s Study. Tonight we are working on our
computers and having tea and kichels.
We are living in a shul and Sruli is the Rabbi and I am the
Rebbetzin and our kids are “The Rabbi’s sons and daughters.” To say that life
has changed is…a ridiculous understatement. To say that my life is ridiculous
is…not an understatement.
This past summer we were busy enough, what with the camp,
shlepping to the camp, running the camp-- weekend gigs that got us home at 2 in
the morning and we had to shlep to camp the next day—but who’s complaining?---
and 5 kids, 2 of them three. Camp was glorious—we love the new space in the East Village Upper West Side .
Also Ilana was dealing with the last moans of craziness,
which thankfully for all of us, is, after six insane years, amazingly over. She
got out all her stuff (and I mean ALL—boxes and boxes and boxes and you can’t
believe) but she marched into NYU a totally free young woman with a glorious
future. Apparently, the night Sruli helped her move in, the elevator doors
opened and there was a floor meeting already going on. Everyone stopped to
stare at the new girl and Sruli smiled and said, loudly: Hi guys, I want you to
meet my mother—and everyone cracked up. He’s great like that.
Of course the reason she moved in late was because we had
just driven straight home from KlezKanada. Which was uniquely glorious this
year. That lake—that lake! The carnival! Zachary’s Teenagers in Lvov ! The Tish! Our
KlezKids singing in Yiddish and little Johnny Xylo ringing his purple bell at
just the right time in the hand-bell choir! It seems like a dream and it seems
like it happened so long ago.
And then, the very next day it started—six weeks of
hellacious hell—MOVING. Packing,
throwing out, boxing, shlepping and loading it all into the car. Driving here to the shul. Unloading,
shlepping and putting all these goddam boxes out of sight and into the tiny rooms
here so they would be out of everyone’s way.
Two or more trips a day. Pack, load, drive, unload. We would fall into
bed at three-in-the-morning ache-y and kvetch-y and miserable. I don’t
understand how we got to own so much goddamned stuff. I did this every single
day—every single day—for six weeks—except when we had gigs—that was like a
vacation—with my heel-spur, yet, constantly killing me and my nerves completely
raw. The only bright side is that my arms, while not Michelle Obamaesque, are
nicer and a bisl ripped.
So now, here we are. Rabbi and Rebbetzin. It’s a riot. And I
have to say, Sruli is a revelation. He was born for this. It’s like he has the
best of the Talmud at the tip of his tongue, easily rolling off anecdotes,
facts, halachic traditions. His sermons are smart, really smart—poignant, funny
and filled with new thinking, modern thinking— he makes you forget sometimes
that the Torah is over 3000 years old. He gets everybody singing. He is modest
and gentle. He is welcoming. He blessed a seeing-eye-dog right from the Bima. (Coco BAS Menucha!) He dealt with a fight in the middle of
Kabbalat Shabbat one time between the self-styled “prophet” and another,
beloved congregant. He did a brilliant
job during the marathon that is the Hi-Ho’s—a trifecta of constant davening,
sermons and fund raising. Tashlikh was magical. He held court at the parties in
the Sukkah every afternoon and evening.
We did a kick-ass Simchat Torah with dancing for over an hour in the
streets while he played and the disco lights flashed. He gets all the children
to sing Adon Olam. He is always working now, always thinking about the shul,
always preparing for Shabbos, for his conversion classes, his Judaism classes.
We are starting a Klezmer Band next week, and hopefully soon—a Hebrew School
And it’s cute the way he flips and re-flips his tallis over
each shoulder constantly as he davens. The congregation eats him up and so do
I.
Of course I am right there—making spaghetti dinners EVERY
Friday night for everybody, arranging kiddushes, apple dippings, Dinners in the
Sukkah. We perform a bit every Friday night. I am the children’s program
director and resident storyteller and I meet and make sure to talk to everyone.
I am also very much responsible for trying to grow the shul and the Hebrew School
We are also playing Bar and Bat Mitzvah’s pretty much every
Saturday afternoon and I (and, Thank God, Zachary) rush to get there first and
set up so that Sruli can come as late as possible. Every day is an adventure.
The twins, by the way, think they are the luckiest children
in the world. They live in a toy room.
There isn’t much privacy but then we’ve never been very
private people. Our friends come to visit us and laugh. Even my parents laugh.
Thank goodness.
I’m trying to calm down. I am trying to take care of myself.
My stupid foot. I am trying to rid myself of unwanted belly fat. I am trying to
toilet train the twins. I am trying to write.
I am trying to start work on next summer’s camp. I am trying to find yet
another new home for Teddy, my beloved and gorgeous Pomeranian, who, barky
barky, is not welcome here and who I need to find foster care for, ‘til Zachary
gets an apartment next May.
I am trying to exult in this new, very weird, phase of our
life.
I am the Old Woman who lives in a Shul.
Are all your dresses black, or just the ones drying at the moment? You seem more like a bright happy-colors dress person.
ReplyDelete