It is What it Is

Hello dawlinks!  It's your Yenta again.  What would life be without your Yenta, eh?  So, I had a conversation with a friend about life and all it brings; the good, the bad, the questionable things that could go either way but this lead us into many different topics from libn (pronounced leeb-en and means love) and heyrat (marriage) to kindeleh (children - G-d willing) and ptire (death).  G-d does not give us what we can not handle, no?  Although sometimes, I'm not always so sure.

In my youth, what seems like last week sometimes, I had a difficult time figuring out why most of the world was in one year when the Jewish people were in another.  It took four Rabbis, five Cantors (the people that sing in the Temple), a few Presidents of the Temples and a couple of wisened women to explain it to me.  I was a bit farbisn (stubborn).  For instance, right now the Jewish people are in the year 5770 when we enter our Shul (Temple).  

And another interesting note for you, our calendar is lunar.  We follow the moon, not the sun, therefore it's 13 months long with 28 days per month.  My grandson was kind enough to point out that it's like a woman's cycle.  Now there's a conversation starter!  In that it's considered more accurate.  Go figure. 

If you want to see for yourself, go to a Jewish Cemetary and request a calendar from them; they usually give them out free of charge.  You can also look it up online.  Personally, I'd rather go online.  I'm getting a little too close to the cemetary age, farshteyn?  Oh, you might notice that some of my Yiddish spelling is different?  Ellen's son, Rubin, was kind enough to "hook me up" (his words) with a Yiddish dictionary website.

In the olden days heyrats were arranged by the parents.  Now of course, this is rarely done but for certain cultures.  Kindeleh never questioned their choices, daughters served their chosen husbands for better or for worse and there was no such thing as a get (divorce).  If the husband turned out to be a "no goodnik" the wife would put in her daily prayers to G-d... never mind, bubbelehs, you can figure that out.  If the husband was wonderful and the wife was shreklekh (awful) the husband could go to the Rabbi and ask for a Get. 

Men had all the rights back in the day.  As for having kindeleh, everyone wanted a yingl (boy).  If a meydl (girl) was born it was good too, don't get me wrong but it wasn't a yingl!  Yingls were educated, Bar Mitzvah, Confirmed, revered, became heads of things!  Meydls were supposed to be soft and dumb yet they cleaned the house, cooked, kept the farms, bared the kindeleh, mended the fences, the clothes, birthed the animals, planted the seeds for the crops... soft and dumb?  Shum! (NO!)

When the final stage of life came about, ptire, depending on what sect of religion you might be there are always choices to be made.  Grim as it may sound, my dawlinks, this is where reality becomes real.  What is, is.  A girlfriend of mine, a shikse (non Jewish girl) passed away not too long ago and her family opted to have her cremated.  They didn't know she had fake teeth nailed into her mouth and that these things wouldn't turn to ash.  So when the urn was given to the kindeleh (there are three of them) the mortician was kind enough to explain the teeth were taken out, put into a box separate from the rest and wrapped for them to take home.  Their plan was to spread their mother's ashes in the wind across the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, not to take home a box of teeth! 

So what's the point of all this?  Just an old lady rambling on?  You should be so lucky!  Underneath the surface of all you see, there is more to observe.  The iceberg that sank the Titanic only showed a little bit out of the water, the damaging mass laid beneath the surface and no one knew it; no one saw it; no one expected it.  There is something unexpected in you.  Something wonderous, wonderful, perhaps even wild.  Out of the simple come the magnificent.  Find what makes you.  It couldn't hurt!