The Kabbalist on the Upper West Side

A few nights ago, a Kabbalist from Israel, a great Rabbi with a rep for miracles, praved at an apartment on West End Avenue—receiving hundreds of visitors apparently all in need of blessings.

A donation was expected.

The host, a 30ish sweet ortho, came by to exult after the Great Man left, and he was shaking and holding his little son, his face lit up like Charlton Heston’s after the burning bush when Yvonne De Carlo says “He has seen God.”

Amazing—he was rocking back and forth with the little son—that couple you saw, who couldn’t have a baby—not 20 minutes, not 20 minutes after they got home from his bracha they got a call from the fertility clinic—they’re pregnant!

And a Kollel boy who never worked a day in his life and suddenly his father-in-law dies and the money dries up and he has to get a job to support his family—right then-- he gets a call from a big Yeshiva with an offer!

I could not understand why modern doctors and lawyers and professors and… well that’s pretty much the entire spectrum of frum professionals, would allow themselves to go all hoo-ha about some bearded hypnotist wielding 17th century technology.

Jeremiah was roundly ignored in his own time. And do any of us stop for those The- End-of-Days-is-Next-Week guys in the white vans?

A few months back I was up too late and saw this guy on TV, Murdock. It was unbelievable and it made me freaky sick. I couldn’t stop talking about it, and here I am still talking about it.

This guy was an evangelist shyster of the highest order. Take out your wallets he murmurs to the poor African-American (this was in South Carolina) congregation. DON’T open them. I want to bless them. (I want to bless your wallets?!?)

And right there, on TV, these folks take out their wallets. They don’t open them. Murdock smiles small and spreads his hands. One thousand fold, he says. It will come back to you one thousand fold.

Perhaps you have a bank account that no one knows about, he says, real smooth. Maybe not even your wife. One thousand fold. Maybe you were saving for a new car, or a vacation, or your son’s college education. One thousand fold. What good is that thousand to you—one thousand barely matters these days—but send it to me and it will be repaid one thousand fold. The Lord himself has blessed me and I will bless you. A thousand thousands—now that’s real money.

Google this guy, seriously. Why should I be the only one sick from it?

Anyway, growing up Orthodox in Queens, NY, meant, to me, anyway, that knowledge was respected and Chassidus and Kabballah were not.

My dad had and still has a Gemorah Shiur, and all his fellow college professors who met every week around a table laden with Shabbos delights with the wives standing by to serve the tea, were renaissance men with degrees in sociology and science and mathematics and history. And they could read the Aramaic.

Better not delve into Kabballah until you’re forty, they would wink. Your eyes could fall out.

The synagogues were guitar-less, even the non-ortho ones, and there were no Tot-Shabbats, or synaplexes, or a Rabbi at my shul younger than 60--and I cannot remember one mystically laced sermon in all the years at all the Young Israels or, later, Beth Els or (gevalt!) Emanuels I ever went to.

(Sruli prodded me on this point during a general discussion about religion that we had—it’s his favorite topic bar none, oy--and got me to admit that yes, I did know one or two Queensniks who went to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, got their blessing and their dollar and put it right back in the pushke. But that was pretty much as far as mysticism went to my memory, and anyway, I don’t let Sruli read this blog.)

Things are way less stern now, of course. There was positively a country-club feel at the orthodox shul I belonged to in fancy Scarsdale. I hear to sponsor Kiddish there cost about 15 thousand dollars now. The chulent is really good, though.

And maybe that’s really what it’s all about. Not the chulent, the feeling lucky country-club thing.

It doesn’t explain the Murdock churchgoers—they are just victims of superior salesmanship— and he is an ugly crook who preys on desperation--and while I have experienced Rabbis’ sermons that make you cry in order to shell out more for the Kol Nidre appeal, there are no televangelist machinations in synagogues; Jews wouldn’t stand for it--they are too good a salesman themselves.

No, I think that people who feel lucky actually believe in luck. The God of Luck. And orthodox people with nice homes and fancy jobs and pretty wives and talented kids are the most superstitious of all.

So that sexy wow I don’t understand it, it’s bigger than me, it makes me warm and red all over just thinking about it, hey, it’s possible, maybe those mystics in Meron knew things—they weren’t just smoking hyssop leaves—and it all might be taken away at any minute, so get the blessing, pay off the Mekubal on the Upper West Side, and exult and feel humble in the real touch of ancient Jewry.

You’re gonna put a price on luck?

Princess Dreams

Thirty years ago, for the last Royal Wedding, Maurice, the boy who probably loved me more selflessly than any other boy ever will, shlepped into town, rented a tiny TV, magically rigged it up in the middle of his cabin, set it for 3 in the morning and came through the window of my bunk at Camp Hillel (where I was a counselor and he was a cook) and woke me up so that I could watch it.

This time around, I got up leisurely at 8, and CNN had the long version, the highlight version and the still version all awaiting my pleasure. And this time it was in color.

Of course, CNN did not do this especially for me.

Thirty years is an awfully long life-yardstick and plenty of time for even a much-loved girl to realize that she ain’t never going to be no princess.

So many of the smart and beautiful women who have let me into their lives and intimate thoughts have (was it Steinem who said it?) become the man they wanted to marry.

I have not.

Way, way back, when I was cute enough to collect a few, the proposals ranged from the family-spice-business suitor who informed me that I would, of course (OF COURSE!) not be able to work, but he would take care of me and our many kids in a beautiful house and give all of us everything we could possibly want. I said no thank you.

Another, a prominent Rabbi’s son, promised me that although we’d have to “hew” to his father’s orthodox regulations he would always get us really good weed. I said, no thank you, I don’t smoke.

A third was already supporting his parents and was already a rising banker and couldn’t take his eyes off me but I said, no thank you, and what I didn’t say was that I can’t even bear to kiss you let alone do anything else.

The man I actually married did not have that I will take care of you mentality nor does my current partner.

We women are on our own.

One of the business bloggers I read says that we are sold this fairy tale and that wanting to be taken care of means you are not dreaming big enough.

I am trying to dream big these days.

And Sruli and I rely on each other, in a modern Mom ‘n Pop shop kind of way.

So no glass carriage or convertible with the steering wheel on the wrong side for me. My waist will never be that tiny and I couldn’t possibly fit into all the requirements and protocols that the new Princess will have to “hew” to.

I hope her fairy tale has a continuously happy ending, unlike the one, nebikh, thirty years ago.

Meantime I am in the middle of creating my own tale, which has its magical moments, as well as some scary dragons.

I am not my own Prince, but my own Fairy Godmother, I guess.

I wonder if Maurice watched this time.

Un Bau Un Bau

Kinda been stuck wanting to write but not landing on a subject that could arouse the commitment.

But thanks to my crazy cousin who is now Israeli and who just now posted a very sweet reminiscence of his Passovers, I decided that, yes, my childhood Passovers too, are worth the reminiscences and I’d really like to share so here goes:

First, Pesach had it’s own smell.

Maybe it was the resurrected-like-Brigadoon dishes, maybe the new clothes from that frum place on Main Street with that creepy dressing room, maybe the beautiful blooming magnolia tree next door that belonged to the beautiful blooming girl next door; a tree whose leaves could be written on with toothpicks if u had a very short message.

Two whole weeks off from school and no more heavy jackets. The schlepping and schlepping from the basement. The shopping and shopping at Waldbaums. Shul, shul and more shul.

The way the table was set for Seder with those tiny silver spoons, bosom-round wine glasses and creative place cards —and the way we always went to Uncle Max and Aunt Jenny’s for the first one and we had the second one.

Aunt Jenny and Uncle Max. They filled up my childhood like giants in a puppet show. Forceful, funny and frankly frightening. They were rich, they were intellectuals, they were friendly with famous Rabbis. They were my parents-away-from-parents, and they had an outsized influence on my development.

Their seders were endless. The divrei torah—commentaries direct from Israeli boy-yeshivas brought home in reams by their son, the doctor. Their hilarious daughter-the-violinist whose faces made me giggle during –shh! shh!—Kiddish.

Uncle Max sang the German versions of EVERY song of the Haggadah. “Un bau un bau un Bau un BAU un B-A-U (!!!) dein Temple Shiloh.”

And sang in a voice of such tremendous teutonic timbre I swear Got in Himmel Himself could hear it.

Then, inexplicably, at the end of the seder—and I know it wasn’t the wine because Uncle Max NEVER lost control and anyway he only drank that icky sweet wine like we all did til I got married and brought a couple of bottles of cabernet to the seder for which I got verbally walloped for being a yuppie—Uncle Max would hang a spoon on his nose, and, magically—IT WOULD STAY THERE.

Every year. Chad Gadya and that spoon on Uncle Max’s nose.

Then the goodbyes and the this was the best seder ever—it was, every year—and then the walk home at 4 in the morning and once we even got a police escort (there really wasn’t much going on in Hillcrest those days…)

Second day came with Fox’s Ubet and Manischewitz chocochip cookies and matzoh and cherry jelly for breakfast and salmon croquettes when Bubby and Pop Pop Katz came (I miss them every day) and the most important taste of all: Daddy’s Charoset.

Daddy didn’t cook, or do much domestic stuff (he was European, after all) but for some reason, he took this on and no one, no one, no one else can make Charoset.

The apples, chopped not too fine. The mix of nuts, freshly shelled and chopped. The sweet Tokay wine that not one wine store in Englewood or indeed the world seems to have. The way he sat at the kitchen table, relaxed and working at the same time.

That was really the essence of Daddy.

You know, I feel better now. Just thinking about it and bringing it all back.

We’re gonna make our own second seder, Sruli and me, and I think this one is gonna be the best one ever so far.

The baby twins, 2, are primed to sing the Ma Nishtana—tho they might launch into If You’re Happy and You Know It, instead.

We have some old and new friends coming.

We are going to go through the Haggadah musically and Sruli is going to wax rabbinic in that sexy-smart way of his.

I’m not going to clean enough to make me crazy, and anyway, we still have that hole in the kitchen ceiling, so really how fancy can our house be?

And this year will be the last one that my stepdaughter is not a bat-chorin—next year in New Jersey…

And my beloved, and beautiful poopoopoo big boys will be there—Zachary fresh from his killer performance at The Bitter End and Aaron fresh from his starring role in Oklahoma. We’ve rehearsed a spiritual in four-part-harmony, a new old song for our family band.

And I will be making the Charoset. From apples and nuts and wine and memory.

Elmo Plates

I can’t even describe how frightened I have been feeling these last few weeks. I am cold and downcast and screaming inside with agita.

I can’t remember anything like this in my very nice and lucky life.

It’s like a squeezing weight coming from above and a freezing hole coming from inside.

Fear is ugly, and once you wake up at 5 in the morning and see it, you can’t get back to sleep.

I’m not sure why building this business is affecting me this way—lots of people get stressed while doing something new and very, very hard.

Maybe it’s the time pressure, maybe it’s the complete new world of it—maybe because I’ve just spent a week in Atlantic City with the titans of the industry and THEY are stressed to boiling point (although the nicest people in any business I’ve ever seen except Math professors) and no one has any answers.

Oh well—I’m trying not to let it get in the way of my day. Really.

We’ve been playing lots of concerts and simchas which has been wonderful and Purim was a highlight:

Sruli and I dressed as each other and went to his Shul where he is the High Holiday Cantor and substitute Rabbi. He in my long black dress and peacock feather hat from Zachary’s Bar Mitzvah and me in his Kittel, Tallis, and white cantorial yarmulke.

We stopped the place. There was a silence—then an eruption. Very cool.

The baby twins, of course, rocked as Thing One and Thing Two.

Purim day we played at this fabulous Jersey shul and then packed up our Crazy Caravan and schlepped to Chabad in the Berkshires. Great party, great original Megillah slide show (Ahmadinejad was Haman—or vice versa) and the Rabbi’s kids were whip smart.

Ok, so they only had dark meat chicken.

What’s really, really important is that my baby twins are going to be two on Sunday.

We’re delaying the party til the following week cos we have gigs and they won’t know the difference but I finally got to do something today that I had been looking forward to for over 2 weeks: bought the paper goods.

Just shopped, leisurely at the dollar store, with happy tears in my over-rubbed eyes.

Elmo plates. Matching cups and napkins. Big red tablecloth. I also got a Pin the tail on the donkey kit and those blow thingies.

And you should see the dress that little girl is going to wear. (He will wear artist’s black as usual, the little cherub, with his blond blond curls.)

I want to celebrate them because they have brought poopoopoo nothing but delight to everyone in our family, our community and all the strange, hilarious and nutso people we meet from Pathmark to Target.

Delight, like nakhes, every single minute.

And I think--Maybe all this pain is for them. I am old and they are very very young. I want to provide for them and power is slipping from my grasp. I don’t know if I will be able to protect them from everything I want to protect them from, including uncertainty, like money uncertainty.

It is almost unbearable. But then I think.

Even if I fail, it was still worth it.

I can’t even describe how frightened I have been feeling these last few weeks. I am cold and downcast and screaming inside with agita.
I can’t remember anything like this in my very nice and lucky life.
It’s like a squeezing weight coming from above and a freezing hole coming from inside.
Fear is ugly, and once you wake up at 5 in the morning and see it, you can’t get back to sleep.
I’m not sure why building this business is affecting me this way—lots of people get stressed while doing something new and very, very hard.
Maybe it’s the time pressure, maybe it’s the complete new world of it—maybe because I’ve just spent a week in Atlantic City with the titans of the industry and THEY are stressed to boiling point (although the nicest people in any business I’ve ever seen except Math professors) and no one has any answers.
Oh well—I’m trying not to let it get in the way of my day. Really.
We’ve been playing lots of concerts and simchas which has been wonderful and Purim was a highlight:
Sruli and I dressed as each other and went to his Shul where he is the High Holiday Cantor and substitute Rabbi. He in my long black dress and peacock feather hat from Zachary’s Bar Mitzvah and me in his Kittel, Tallis, and white cantorial yarmulke.
We stopped the place. There was a silence—then an eruption. Very cool.
The baby twins, of course, rocked as Thing One and Thing Two.
Purim day we played at this fabulous Jersey shul and then packed up our Crazy Caravan and schlepped to Chabad in the Berkshires. Great party, great original Megillah slide show (Ahamadinijad was Haman—or vice versa) and the Rabbi’s kids were whip smart.
Ok, so they only had dark meat chicken.


What’s really, really important is that my baby twins are going to be two on Sunday.
We’re delaying the party til the following week cos we have gigs and they won’t know the difference but I finally got to do something today that I had been looking forward to for over 2 weeks: bought the paper goods.
Just shopped, leisurely at the dollar store, with happy tears in my over-rubbed eyes.
Elmo plates. Matching cups and napkins. Big red tablecloth. I also got a Pin the tail on the donkey kit and those blow thingies.
And you should see the dress that little girl is going to wear. (He will wear artist’s black as usual, the little cherub, with his blond blond curls.)
I want to celebrate them because they have brought poopoopoo nothing but delight to everyone in our family, our community and all the strange, hilarious and nutso people we meet from Pathmark to Target.
Delight, like nakhes, every single minute.
And I think--Maybe all this pain is for them. I am old and they are very very young. I want to provide for them and power is slipping from my grasp. I don’t know if I will be able to protect them from everything I want to protect them from, including uncertainty, like money uncertainty.
It is almost unbearable. But then I think.
Even if I fail, it was still worth it.

Banded Together

Today an older lady said something to me that’s probably going to haunt me for the foreseeable future of my life.

First, though, I should back up.

I’ll start with last weekend. We were hired to play at the Dance Flurry—this HUGE dance gathering in Saratoga—5000 crazy contradancers crazily contradancing for hours.

We were the Jewish flavor and we were hired as a Family Band.

We did a Yiddish Jug Band, a grand Klezmer Concert, and played 2 huge dances for hundreds of people. Zachary wailed on that Baritone Sax and Aaron held down an amazing and complex rhythm on Keyboard. The whole thing passed like a beatific blur because THE definition of the Yiddish word “nakhes” is playing music with your children.

They got their own hotel room, the big boys. They danced with every pretty girl at the festival. They had ice cream every day and we all hot tubbed and swam. They were ogled and admired and fielded a million texts from those pretty girls on the car ride home.

Oh, the baby twins garnered their usual spectacle and had an enormously good time, too.

So, what’s with the older lady?

So we are doing a concert for her Yiddish group this weekend and she asked about the “kinderlakh” and I joked that by next year the baby twins will be in the band.

Oh, she said, mentioning 2 other Klezmer musicians we all know, “Well if they can exploit their children, I guess you can, too.”

I got me like you can’t believe.

When I was little I HATED playing my violin with my Dad—from whom I got my musical ability, the violin itself, lessons, and too many fiats to stop playing with my friends right now and come in and practice.

We played each year, as a Family Band, at what they used to call an old age home. I hated to practice but as you can imagine, I LOVED being on stage.

Sruli and I have met some family bands in our travels.

It’s a fascination: each kid playing a different instrument, the rivalry between them, the weird Mom/ Dad /Bandleader dynamic and of course the creepy feeling that maybe Mom and Dad ARE using these cuter, younger people to make a living.

Most people though, think its sweet.

Sruli, of course wants to drop everything, buy a circus trailer and travel the country as Hoot ‘n Annie and their Tappin’ Twins.

Meantime we are the Oy Vey Klezmer Family Band.

I asked the big boys if they like doing this with us, if they feel comfortable playing with Mom and Step-Dad, traveling around and shlepping to all these festivals, being on time for sound checks, and having to stop playing with their friends right now and come in and practice for a gig.

They looked at me, incredulous.

We LOVE it, Mom, they said.

Exploit, Shmexploit. So long as they’re happy.

To B or not to B?

My old friend Morris used to boast that he never had a job a day in his life. He is a rich man. He started as a shick yingl—a gofer—for some successful diamond merchant, just hanging around, making himself useful. Soon he found himself ferrying around (to me, hearing the story, alarmingly expensive) diamonds in those little tissue tufts, matching up buyers with sellers, and soon after that he had an office and a partner of his own.

Pretty much everyone I knew growing up had a job. Actually the same job, just at different places and of different strata—teaching.

My Dad is a professor, my mother was a Kindergarten teacher; all their friends and most of my relatives had some university or school connection.

I got a GREAT job soon after college at a fancy NY Advertising Agency—I had decided that a classroom was too small for my outsized sense of my own imagination. I enjoyed every minute of those 15 glamorous years.

And now, here I am with my own business, starting yet another one, and this afternoon, Sruli (ever so lovingly) looked down at me hunched over the computer and said: wow, you really have bags under your eyes.

We were dealt a really bad blow this week and we have been scrambling and stressing and struggling to survive.

Bags? Suitcases I have.

Anyway, he also said I was being remarkably resourceful, and takke I am, and this after I “bitched out” at him for a full four minutes because there is nothing like a setback to make you re-examine your entire life, work, philosophy, and husband.

My old friend Morris said he could never work for somebody else. I could, happily, and I was damn good at it. But I’d be lying if I also didn’t remember that ice-cold fright at being fired, when layoff season rolled around.

And not just being fired. Also explaining the Ortho-have-to-leave-early-on-Friday thing. Each time. Finessing the politics. Jockeying. And not being able to say with certainty that you can make it to a family dinner, or home before your little ones’ bedtime.

I remember furiously cursing the red lights on Queens Boulevard because they were robbing me of another few minutes of evening with my little Zachary and Aaron.

Makin’ the Boss happy.

I don’t have that kind of stress anymore (and I don’t have that kind of money anymore, ha!) but the new stress is frankly overwhelming and all my new own-ur-own business friends feel it.

I am my own Boss. And I don’t always make myself happy.

And I still don’t know if it’s “better” to be In Business for yourself or to work for someone else.

Whatever “better” means.

I’ll let you know when I find out.

Encumbered

Today I interviewed an artist for our new camp.

She was home painting apples—you know what I mean. Major art school graduate. She had been in the Peace Corps. In Indonesia. Teaching art to kids. She once moved to California just because she felt like it. She had had a nice job in a public school but felt the administration was getting in the way of her artistic connection to the kids. She busks in the street—setting up her easel on a random corner in NYC—paints for a while, sells to passersby, and then hangs out, enjoying the view.

She does whatever she feels like, every day.

She is unencumbered.

There is no one I ever met in my whole life who is that fancy free.

Of course we hired her.

Wow.

An old friend of mine once shocked me by not totally congratulating me on giving birth to my first son. She said, yeah—but now what do you do if you want to go to the movies?

Unencumbered.

When I was a little girl, I used to learn with my father on Shabbos mornings.

I made myself a thick slab of challah and peanut butter and a big glass of chocolate milk and Daddy got out the Pirkei Avos.

One of the best lines that stuck in my head like that Skippy to the roof of my mouth was: Marbeh nechasim, marbeh da’agah.

A phrase that will forever prevent me from buying a white sofa or (even if I could afford it) a Jaguar.

“The more you have, the more you have to worry about.”

You know, encumbered.

Oh, but I am encumbered in so many many other ways now—with 4 (and on good days, 5) kids and a husband-type who I actually work with all the time so there’s no fudging my hours, 2 honestly insane dogs, a 55 gallon fish tank, and a turtle. Plants. Cars.

A shack on the Jersey shore.

A new business.

Clients. Expectations.

And I went to the movies last week, so ha.

I am encumbered with worry about our future, about my musician son’s future, about my other son’s math tests, about the fact that I am an old mother with tiny twins.

I am encumbered with grief for what happened to my future stepdaughters.

I am encumbered with the rabid need for revenge.

I am encumbered with hope for my fellow artist friends that they will make it with enough to pay for rent and medical and dental.

I am encumbered with fear like we all are for the fate of freedom and for the planet

and, more often these days, with guilt for not doing anything much about it.

I am encumbered with about 40 extra pounds (STILL AFTER ALL THIS BLOGGING!) which frankly sucks and is frankly my own damn fault.

I asked that artist today if she loves her solitary life and her freedom.

Oh yes, she said. Mostly. Really looking forward to getting to know you.

Well my new friend—welcome to my encumbered life.

I am Lisa. Encumbered by love.