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Bassoon Song By Alizah Teitelbaum bs"d A songstress’s dough Sours for hours in snow. She seldom sounds, And counts And bangs with a frown the notes and the tones of a score Taps out time one foot on the floor The sourdough Bubbles in a pickling jar And the passionate notes on the orchestral score Can’t blow anymore So she folds salt into the water and flour. bs"d By Alizah Teitelbaum My youngest son is still hiding out from the army. Manny is not a left-wing activist. He is not even haredi. Some might call him “Artful Dodger”. He has always dodged what people thought of him. At the Tipat Chalav where babies get weighed, the doctor noticed he was skinny. I said, “Honestly, doesn’t he look strong?” And he was. Fast-forward 12 years. Manny sat in the kitchen, read a chapter of the Bible and Ethics of the Fathers in Hebrew and translated it all into English--for example, "at 18, the wedding canopy". He read the Code of Jewish Law. Then he read The Path of the Righteous, and so on. What boy does this? Just before Rosh HaShanah his brother-in-law from the Golani Brigade offered to take him to Uman. We thought, now something big will happen. Well it did, but not what we thought. In fact, nobody knows what happened in Uman, but Manny changed. A short walk from our house in the Negev Desert is a yeshiva high school, and Manny enrolled. He slept at home, but the menahel said no, you must sleep at the yeshiva. Manny walked there with his blanket, and a few hours later returned and slept in his own bed. The counselor, the teacher, and the menahel called. Manny said okay, and then slept in his own bed. Somehow Manny got through four years of yeshiva without going. He did go out for walks in the desert, though. His rabbi spoke to him alone for five hours, but Manny stayed the same. When the army recruited him, Manny’s commanders, one after another, came to our house. Right before Passover they arrived with a box of matzah and other items. They gave us a microwave oven, a clothes cabinet, and lots of canned food. Why? Manny was doing well, or something. Still we got a sinking feeling, and thought we’d better tell the commanders: if Manny wants something, nothing can stop him. If he doesn’t want, nothing can make him do it. They can’t make him and even we can’t. No one knows in advance. He doesn’t talk; he just does it. We gave them the key to Manny, and they didn’t pick up. It had to happen sooner or later: The 28th of Tammuz happened to be the-Yismach-Moshe’s yahrtzeit. An ancestor of his. On that day, Manny fell asleep during guard duty and was ordered on base for Shabbat. Manny left base anyway, on the 29th of Tammuz, which happened to be the Holy Rashi's yahrtzeit. Another ancestor. How did he know the yahrzeits? He didn’t; we didn’t know either. There must have been a subconscious spiritual connection when hiking alone in the desert each night. Manny called the base and said he’ll come back, but he didn’t. The commanders called five times a day. Manny eventually gave himself up and did time in jail. He played shesh-besh with the other inmates and got some tips for next time. Next time Manny sat in the back seat while the commander drove him to jail and inevitably braked at a traffic light, Manny ran all the way home. Lesson: If people would just get married at 18, before joining the army (as it says in Ethics of the Fathers), we might have some peace and quiet around here. Let me set the scene for you: A farm, frozen over, pipes clogged with ice. Eight children, one for each day of Chanukah, five of them from your first marriage in Brooklyn. Their ages: from one year to 16. The school bus to the nearest Hebrew day school won’t take them there; you live too far. You diligently drive the children to school yourself: one hour there, one hour back. The baby sits in the car seat both ways. At home you feed the baby and eat breakfast, and then it is time to drive back to the school and bring the younger kids home. You don’t want to make yet another trip at four o’clock, so you hang around a few hours until closing time. Next morning you start again. All your kids are in the car, you drive past Ellenville, and before you reach South Fallsburg a tree has collapsed under the snow and it’s blocking your way. There is no one to call, and anyway regular people didn’t have cell phones back then. Your husband works at IBM in Poughkeepsie; he’s busy and there’s no use asking. What else is there to do? You swing the car around slowly, slowly over the ice and crawl back to the farm with all the kids. You would like to cook some vegetable soup or at least boil water for tea, but remember the pipes are frozen. So, you do the only reasonable, responsible thing and call social services for help. What do you tell them? There’s no water; the pipes are frozen. The worker at the other end of the line says yeah, we all have that. You persist: we have 8 children here! Depending how you look at it, that little speech is a big mistake…or the starting point of a miracle. You understand how an American government agency sees what’s happening: Here is a family of strangers, sidelocks and skullcaps included, shacked up on an isolated farm, and none of the kids are in school. Don’t start telling the story of the bus that won’t come and the ice and the tree and the frozen pipes—it will only make things worse. How do big disasters happen? Like everything in the world: one mistake that—excuse the expression—snowballs into something humongous. One Friday, the children somehow make it to school and, since you expect a baby, your husband drives you to the clinic. On the way, you ask him for some kombu-seaweed and he says flat out no. NO! He doesn’t have the money. And then you are shaking with rage because he won’t buy you the stupid seaweed when you’re expecting a baby. In the clinic, you remember a man in a hat and longish coat, passing by from Boro Park, who had taken note of the kids with long dresses and long peyos living out in the boondocks. You have his number in case you need something. You’re still shaking with rage, which is not an excuse, but you call him on the doctor’s phone. This very religious, respectable man picks you up at the clinic before your husband gets there. You sit in the back seat, since that’s the proper way, and then the man from Boro Park drives you to the day school to pick up the kids. And things start to snowball: He drives all of you to Boro Park. You are going to hate me for this: Just because of some lousy seaweed you leave your husband to make Shabbos alone in the middle of winter, with no clue where to find his wife and children. Okay, half come from your first marriage, but still he is going crazy. To be fair, you ask the man from Boro Park to arrange for your still clueless husband to spend Shabbos with the Ellenville rabbi. The man says yes, he called your husband; it’s all arranged. And you find out after Shabbos it was a lie. He never called your husband. And so much happens then, that I can hardly tell it—but first I’ll tell you what day it is: It’s Friday night, the first night of Chanukah, and you don’t know it. You arrive two hours before Shabbos at a house in Boro Park; the children are sent to neighbors. You keep track of the names and phone numbers. The driver warns you not to call your husband, or else. You don’t like the sound of that, so you call your mother, who happens to be visiting in Manhattan. There’s no way to get the kids, but this is Boro Park, a holy city--what could go wrong? You certainly could use a rest, so without thinking you call all the numbers and tell them where you’ll be, and Mom of blessed memory drives you to your sister’s house, where you make kiddush on a peanut butter sandwich. You are still not aware that it’s Chanukah. Then you call your husband, stay one more night by your sister, and at three in the morning the telephone rings. It’s one of the women hosting your kids in Boro Park, and she’s hysterical. The police had just taken the kids away, even the one-year-old. Let’s call for a moment of silence, since nothing we say can describe the horror. Foolishness follows: endless telephone calls to the police, to the man, to the ladies, and back around to the police, and no one knows anything. Of course, they don’t. And you know what I’m going to say: Call G-d; forget the telephone. It is still Chanukah, and you don’t know it. But the scene starts to shift: your husband comes to your sister’s house. You drive together to your husband’s cousin in Williamsburg. You set up headquarters and start praying. That night your husband lights candles at the entrance. A social services worker calls me to her office, and G-d puts a stop to that nonsense by sending a monster storm that disables all the roads in Brooklyn. You go on praying. And then: Your husband’s sister just happens to be friends with a family court judge in Brooklyn who happens to know a lawyer who happens to know the social services organization that kidnapped your children because they used to pay him a retainer, so he knows their tricks. And now, inexplicably, he has jumped to your side. It’s the seventh day of Chanukah and it’s Friday again. You arrive at family court 1:00 in the afternoon for a habeus corpus. That means bring the body. At 3:00 the kidnappers bring your kids. It’s hot in the courthouse. One of your kids holds onto his coat for dear life and won’t let go. Another kid trains his eyes on a game boy and won’t let go. One hugs your husband. The others look dazed. You squeeze into the elevator and then drive at breakneck speed to Williamsburg, where the eight Chanukah candles are waiting for the eight kids. You can’t make up stories like this. The miracle doesn’t stop there. The lawyer sends you an attorney who sues the social services kidnapping organization for money. The children get most of the money in separate trust funds, and the rest you use to cut out of there and move your family to a place in Israel called Chashmonaim, right next to Modiin, a short distance from a village called Maccabim, not far from Mattisyahu, just in case you don’t get the hint. Bs”d I’m One of Them! By Alizah Teitelbaum My family was falling apart. We had one kid in the Far East, and one in America, one on a farm and one in the high-tech center, one in Jerusalem and one in Beer Sheva. We hardly saw each other. We got too busy and too far away; we had no time and no space for each other. I needed a quick fix or the peace and friendship back in Alligerville would be gone. I needed a miracle, a big one, and that meant the special type of personal prayer that moves mountains: the six-hour personal prayer (In Forest Fields, p. 319). So, remember this was Yom Kippur, a great day for the six-hour fix. I would have nothing to distract me since I couldn’t eat, cook, work, or take a bath. And I said oh G-d, you can’t want to break us apart. Poor G-d! Your House is burnt and broken. We felt so bad for each other and prayed for the same kind of things all day, and straight away, after Yom Kippur, bunches of family members showed up for Shabbat at our home in the Negev and we didn’t argue even once. That was a miracle. But hang on a minute! Speaking of peace and family reunions, wild things happened right after Yom Kippur: I got a mysterious email from a rebbetzin in Toronto, Canada: her grandparents came from the same Ukrainian town as mine, and her mother had the same first and last name as my mother (may she rest in peace). Then she explained things that had puzzled me since childhood. To illustrate:
Well, that explained why I felt drawn to Breslevers. Another puzzle: Two grandparents from each side of my family, in two separate towns, decided to marry the brothers or sisters of their brother or sister-in-law, against the rabbi’s advice, and both times one of them was killed. I asked, why? What was the halacha? Every rabbi I asked didn’t know. Right after Yom Kippur, along came my rebbetzin-cousin. She said the advice came from Sefer ha Chasidim, and it's not a halacha. Then my cousin asked: how did you know that favorite saying of the Sokolifkeniks? Huh? What favorite saying? This: What was a Jew anyway? Something the Cossacks killed in Sokolivka. That blew my mind; I thought I had made it up myself for a Breslev article, and here the Sokolifkans have been saying it for a hundred years. Knowing this, I thought, I’m one of them! It’s like the ugly duckling became a swan. Now I want to know why, after Yom Kippur, I got this email about a lady with the same name as my mother a”h? I don’t know, kids, but it brought tears to my face, because I just finished talking 6 hours with G-d about finding my family. Alizah Teitelbaum has been an actress, an assistant editor at Random House, and a columnist at the Jewish Times of Johannesburg. Her stories have appeared in Ami, Mishpacha, The Jewish Press, and other places. She edits fiction and poetry for https://sassonmag.com/ blogs at http://alizahteitelbaum.weebly.com/blog . Alizah is writing a graphic novel for kids and lives in the Negev Desert. Write to her at [email protected] bs"d School days! It was first grade in public school 163, and there I sat, drawing a grounded bird, with all those boring books on the desk and ahead of me more of the same, year after year. I wanted so badly to fly out the window, and all I could do was gaze at the sky when the teacher didn’t see.
Let’s skip all that stuff and fast forward fifty-odd years, five and a half thousand miles away. I walked around on my front porch in the Negev, talking to G-d, looking at the big sky and the stars, talking into the wind whooshing in from the Mediterranean. At that moment I felt sure I could surf on the wind and get all the secrets from Creation to now. For that dizzying moment I believed I could fly but the next moment…ugh. What if I couldn’t keep it up; I sensed that one fleeting thought of emuna couldn’t hack it; I could lose concentration and crash. And so, the magical moment passed. But get this! Three of my boys believed they could fly too. Time and again, it was amazing! Two jumped out of a moving airplane with only a flimsy parachute. One jumped off a cliff in Nepal with only a bungee rope. Two boys on two separate occasions dive-bombed into the sky, two and a half miles above the earth, and flew in the sky like a Superman. For all the 60 seconds in free fall their belief held steady and never did they crash. Okay, they had a parachute. Still I wouldn’t have done it, even if they pushed me out of the plane by force. But some people have no parachute and they fly anyway: Rabbi Abuchatzeira did it in Egypt, and the holy Baal Shem Tov flew across a river without even a rope. So, there I was when the Breslevers dropped me under a tree in the desert and told me to talk for an hour. If you’re not a seasoned marathon prayer master, you’re gonna think twice before you even stand for the 18-blessing prayer in the siddur, let alone a whole hour of personal prayer. But if you are a seasoned marathon prayer master, you can talk to G-d for 24 hours straight without batting an eyelash (In Forest Fields, p. 345). It’s like jumping into the sky and you don’t know how long you can take the fear without a heart attack and you can’t just stop before the end. The thing about that marathon 6-hour hitbodedut is you get a category-5 157- miles-per-hour hurricane of answers-from-Heaven so fast you don’t even notice them until you dry yourself off, change your clothes and get a chance to think about what just happened. To illustrate: on the fast of Tisha b’Av I couldn’t eat or cook for anyone anyway; no one wanted to talk; everyone was miserable. I had no dishes to wash, I couldn’t wash the clothes, and I doubted I could write a story without coffee, so there was nothing to do but talk to G-d. I focused on my son who was still crying from heartbreak over his divorce. So, I started walking wherever my feet would take me, talking to HaShem all the while. When I got tired of that I stood still, and then I sat down, and then lay down on the couch, and kept on talking, giving thanks for my own divorce long ago, and all my stupid mistakes, and my son, and the arguments, and then his divorce, and what a mess it all was. Please don’t ask me to fix it because I couldn’t in a million years. Then I sat on the swing outside. Show me how, G-d, and I’ll fix it. After a while I really got into it, though I can’t remember what I said. It’s like jogging long distance; it’s hard in the beginning, and then you hit a stride and don’t feel the pain because you just keep going. And after Tisha b’Av nothing happened, so I forgot about it. A month passed. Soon it was going to be Yom Kippur, another great day for hitbodedut…Then I remembered Tisha b’Av, and realized that somewhere in between the two days my son had gotten engaged to a fantastic girl and the wedding was coming up soon, but when did that first meeting happen? I checked my emails and what I found there blew my mind. It happened 18 days after six hours of prayer on Tisha b’Av. And since that next epic 6-hour prayer session on Yom Kippur, the miracles are blowing in so furious I can't write fast enough to keep up. It feels like a miracle tsunami! Bs”d Superman Is a Marathon Prayer Master School days! It was first grade in public school 163, and there I sat, drawing a grounded bird, with all those boring books on the desk and ahead of me more of the same, year after year. I wanted so badly to fly out the window, and all I could do was gaze at the sky when the teacher didn’t see. Let’s skip all that stuff and fast forward fifty-odd years, five and a half thousand miles away. I walked around on my front porch in the Negev, talking to G-d, looking at the big sky and the stars, talking into the wind whooshing in from the Mediterranean. At that moment I felt sure I could surf on the wind and get all the secrets from Creation to now. For that dizzying moment I believed I could fly but the next moment…ugh. What if I couldn’t keep it up; I sensed that one fleeting thought of emuna couldn’t hack it; I could lose concentration and crash. And so, the magical moment passed. But get this! Three of my boys believed they could fly too. Time and again, it was amazing! Two jumped out of a moving airplane with only a flimsy parachute. One jumped off a cliff in Nepal with only a bungee rope. Two boys on two separate occasions dive-bombed into the sky, two and a half miles above the earth, and flew in the sky like a Superman. For all the 60 seconds in free fall their belief held steady and never did they crash. Okay, they had a parachute. Still I wouldn’t have done it, even if they pushed me out of the plane by force. But some people have no parachute and they fly anyway: Rabbi Abuchatzeira did it in Egypt, and the holy Baal Shem Tov flew across a river without even a rope. So, there I was when the Breslevers dropped me under a tree in the desert and told me to talk for an hour. If you’re not a seasoned marathon prayer master, you’re gonna think twice before you even stand for the 18-blessing prayer in the siddur, let alone a whole hour of personal prayer. But if you are a seasoned marathon prayer master, you can talk to G-d for 24 hours straight without batting an eyelash (In Forest Fields, p. 345). It’s like jumping into the sky and you don’t know how long you can take the fear without a heart attack and you can’t just stop before the end. The thing about that marathon 6-hour hitbodedut is you get a category-5 157- miles-per-hour hurricane of answers-from-Heaven so fast you don’t even notice them until you dry yourself off, change your clothes and get a chance to think about what just happened. To illustrate: on the fast of Tisha b’Av I couldn’t eat or cook for anyone anyway; no one wanted to talk; everyone was miserable. I had no dishes to wash, I couldn’t wash the clothes, and I doubted I could write a story without coffee, so there was nothing to do but talk to G-d. I focused on my son who was still crying from heartbreak over his divorce. So, I started walking wherever my feet would take me, talking to HaShem all the while. When I got tired of that I stood still, and then I sat down, and then lay down on the couch, and kept on talking, giving thanks for my own divorce long ago, and all my stupid mistakes, and my son, and the arguments, and then his divorce, and what a mess it all was. Please don’t ask me to fix it because I couldn’t in a million years. Then I sat on the swing outside. Show me how, G-d, and I’ll fix it. After a while I really got into it, though I can’t remember what I said. It’s like jogging long distance; it’s hard in the beginning, and then you hit a stride and don’t feel the pain because you just keep going. And after Tisha b’Av nothing happened, so I forgot about it. A month passed. Soon it was going to be Yom Kippur, another great day for hitbodedut…Then I remembered Tisha b’Av, and realized that somewhere in between the two days my son had gotten engaged to a fantastic girl and the wedding was coming up soon, but when did that first meeting happen? I checked my emails and what I found there blew my mind. It happened 18 days after six hours of prayer on Tisha b’Av. And since that next epic 6-hour prayer session on Yom Kippur, the miracles are blowing in so furious I can't write fast enough to keep up. It feels like a miracle tsunami! |