All Grown Up

I've started watching The Kominsky Method, as I've currently exhausted Grace and Frankie and need to get my elderly kicks somewhere. In general, I like older people—there's often, oddly, less baggage, less insecurity, less bushwa. Who's got time for that anymore? 

I'm not far in, maybe the third episode, but a sentiment has come up more than once. A millennial ascribes their behavior to their childhood, and either Alan Arkin (87) or Michael Douglas (76) tiredly responds, "You're not a kid anymore."

When you're in your 70s and 80s, does childhood really matter anymore? Plenty of people think so. It does leave its mark. But so much more would have happened in the interim. 

I look to my childhood. Who doesn't? But heck, it was so long ago. Does it really matter anymore in terms who I am now and who I want to be in the future? Do I want to be the person crying on the therapist's couch that I can't move forward in my life because I didn't feel validated by authority figures when I was 10? 

When Arkin and Douglas say that line, it sort of highlights a tendency to whine in the current generation, an unhealthy focus on the imperfections of the past when such effort would be better applied trying to improve the future.

Contemplations of Anti-Semitism, Continued

 I'm not a big fan of Sarah Silverman's comedy. She tends, in my opinion, to rely too much on shock and cuss, rather than the nuance of comedy. 

A.O. Scott is one of my favorite movie reviewers—he doesn't stand on intellectualism when it comes to, say, a Marvel film. Is it a good movie? Yes? No? He'll tell you, simply. 

Silverman made a film called "Jesus is Magic" in 2005, Scott did not like it, and Silverman felt that critique keenly. Silverman and Scott were brought together (eons later, puh-leez) to discuss. 

There was one excerpt from their conversation that I was surprised by:  

SILVERMAN [Reading from the review] “Like many … Jewish comedians, Silverman falls back on her ethnic identity as a way of claiming ready-made outsider status.” Would you say that today, or would you ever say that about any other minority?

SCOTT You know as a Jewish person, I would say that because it’s sort of an internal argument, but I don’t think I would say it that way. I don’t think I would say it again without including myself in it.

SILVERMAN Listen, obviously, I agree, and I partake — as so many Jewish comedians do — in this self-deprecation that is Judaism. But as “a false way to claim outsider status” is the actual problem with this gas in the air that is anti-Semitism, especially on, I hate to say it, the left. It’s assuming that Jews are not to be worried about and do not merit allyship. Racism is defined by racists, not liberals, and they don’t like Jews. So, when people say Jews are white, I’m as white as you can be, but if you ask a white person, they’ll disagree.

Continue reading the main story

SCOTT All right. Point taken.

SILVERMAN Sorry, I get passionate.

SCOTT No, I think that’s fair.

SILVERMAN You would never say that about another culture, who also in comedy uses their culture as a way in with — — 

Scott is Jewish (Wiki confirmed through his mother) and yet he himself believed that for Jews to consider themselves outsiders was a bit much. 

Yes, I will admit, that as a Jewish woman I don't really excite much anti-Semitism. It's not like I have a stereotypical hooked nose, cackling over a money sack. But there have been times when I was identified as Jewish, and some unpleasant interactions followed. And I was frightened. 

Even someone who holds few things sacred, like Silverman, knows this. But there are plenty of Jews who refuse to acknowledge the hatred, perhaps in a misguided belief that they are accepted, and from a desire not to be an outsider.

That's what we failed to learn from German "assimilation."   

"True to Me"

I was delighted to read this piece in Mishpacha Magazine by Avigail Stern, especially when it echoed my sentiments exactly. 

Stern describes her experience as an "older single," and when she finally reached her limit of "pretzel twisting." 

As a single, one is bombarded with "advice," and she was no different. She initially listened to it all, dutifully following their suggestions, until she realized that she was no longer dating as herself. 

She worked to rediscover what she needed, what she wanted, what her values were. She realized that hishtadlus doesn't mean doing everything and anything possible. 

She was discerning when it came to single events. She stopped sending out photos of herself, a step that she had disliked intensely (as did I, but my parents didn't let me). 

The experience of meeting her husband sounded so familiar: 

And at the end of our . . . first date, I walked back into my friend’s house shocked and confused. I liked him. And he liked me back. How did that happen? Wasn’t that weird? That’s not how this dating game usually plays out!

I’d been dating for 20 years. I knew how this was supposed to go. But apparently, the rules can change at any time, when Hashem wills it.

. . .  I knew I’d met someone unlike anyone I’d met before. I called my rebbetzin after that second date, just to make sure something wasn’t wrong with me. Is it normal to just like someone? To feel we connected so easily? To not have any doubts or worries about him as a person? Maybe I was missing something ominous that I just didn’t see?

She laughed and said this was a gift from Hashem called clarity. Barely four weeks later, still shocked but no longer confused, we drank a l’chayim. It had been the easiest, smoothest, calmest dating experience I ever had.

When I came home from my first date with Han, I remember walking through my door and thinking, "I like him!" Usually, it would be, "Well, he has this, this, and this going for him, but that, that, and that isn't really ok with me. People would say that it's not important. I guess I should go out again? But I don't want to . . ." 

Those "advisors" would have us think that choosing a spouse is merely a matter of tallying pros and cons. But it's more than that. I think of that scene in Fill the Void when they go to consult the rebbe, and he asks her what she feels about it. She briskly replies, "It's not a matter of feeling," but the rebbe begs to differ, that it is very much about feeling. 

It doesn't have to be about forcing yourself to become someone else. It doesn't have to be about ignoring your gut just because someone is good "on paper." It doesn't have to be analyzed to death. We meet the right people in our lives at the appointed times. 

Hindsight is 20/20, but I regret how nervous I was in those years, how I believed that "trying" meant being on active alert 24/7. It was exhausting, while the ending would be the same. I'm still a worrier, though. That hasn't changed. Work in progress.  

They Hate Us. Get Used To It.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a favorite of mine. That became even truer after reading her book review of the novel, "The Netenyahus." 

Yes, the book is a novel of Bibi's father, Bentzion, during his time as a professor in the US. The review begins in a typical fashion, about the actual book, and then Brodesser-Akner goes on a different track. It goes on a bit, but it is very, very worth it: 

. . . this was a great book for me to read during the weeks after it was assigned to me, as tensions between Israel and Gaza raged and there was nothing to say about the matter but to text a few people I’m in touch with when these things go on and share my distress and also my inability to share that distress wider. This was a good book to read while tensions escalated further, and friends reached out to me who were just “wondering” what my point of view was on it, in argument stance, and people I didn’t know tweeted at me to see where my support for an oppressed people was, and my peers — who know full well the constraints of my job’s policy on tweeting about politics — liked those tweets, as though being Jewish meant I had to answer for Israel or its government, which I did not elect.

This was a good book to read as I searched in my mind for other times that we cheer on terrorism except for when it’s happening to the Jews. This was a good book to read as the meme of asserting that the “questioning” of Israel’s policies is not anti-Semitism morphed into something that was, by some parties, actually yes quite gleeful and strenuous anti-Semitism, until finally my sisters in Crown Heights began to beseech their male children to cover their yarmulkes with baseball caps and the world around me was heartbreakingly silent as Jews were cornered and threatened here in America for something going on very far away. This was a good book to read as my Jewish friends texted me that this would stop if we could just get Bibi out of power, and I wondered what they texted each other in 1935 as the streets in Europe overheated with pogrom energy and there was no Bibi and no Israel to blame.

Yes, this book was a good place to turn to swallow my opinions, which are fungible and not really worth knowing, while smart people I know shared the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict as cherry-picked by an Instagram influencer or by a tweet thread that had similarly squishy origins. It was good to actually know the history of the Jews and the founding of Israel, and learn about the infighting of it even more intimately from this book, as the noise around me got louder and I began to sympathize with Benzion’s point of view not of everything, but of the fact that it must be that Jews were doomed to this particular torture: to remain polite and quiet as this goes on. I began to have Benzion Netanyahu’s old dogmatic thought that this kind of hatred had to be preordained by someone. A thing they didn’t prepare me for in my own cheder — or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear it — was that the unique sadness and terror of anti-Semitism for the Jews lies not just in its violence, but in the people around you pretending that the violence doesn’t even exist. . . 

I finished writing this as the rhetoric against Israel that had parlayed itself into violent attacks on Jews in the streets of America quieted down, and the online conversation on anti-Semitism chastened itself and receded into its safest places, a place we all agree upon, where a gentile author was bullied into removing an innocuous Anne Frank reference and we Jews all broke our necks nodding in defense of an author being able to make an innocuous Anne Frank reference — and there we American Jews were again, going out of our way to promise we won’t be any trouble if you just leave us alone. Yes, make jokes about that poor dead girl, just please don’t kill us!

In the house I grew up in, a family descended from survivors, we have a pragmatic approach to anti-semitism: It exists, and there is nothing we can do about it. My brothers had always been told, if out for the day in Manhattan, to wear a baseball cap and tuck their tzitzis into their pocket. Nothing new there.

Han, who is from a similar home, becomes upset when he reads obviously slanted news in favor of the oppressor, but I shrug. The world hates us, this I know, no matter how they try to couch that dislike into rejection on moral or warranted grounds. 

Do Not Do Unto Others

I was once reading a book review by TaraShea Nesbit about the Mayflower and this line jumped at me: 

If, for the first time in your life, somebody appears to be below you in the pecking order, make hay: Peck them all you will. You might never get the chance again.

I used to wonder how those who married "late" could easily turn around and airily call other singles "picky." Or how someone who was bullied could turn around and bully others. Or how someone who once walked into a room alone and felt isolated could turn around and ignore another who walks into a room alone.

 

I've tried to be careful myself. Han has a few single friends, and I've made a couple of attempts to set them up, to no avail. I tell Han to be sure to tell them that I won't be insulted, and that they should feel no pressure, because I certainly do not want to do to others what which was done to me. 

 

But sometimes I'm not so careful, because the situation is not comparable, and I succumb to my baser urges. I find myself saying something in an obvious attempt to assuage my insecurities, and after I cannot believe I have done that. 

 

The other morning, while getting dressed, my brain went into a pathetic feedback loop about, embarrassingly, my high school principal who really did not get me. I was on a smug, internal rant, until I accidentally stabbed myself in the eye with the mascara wand. Initially I was irritated, but then I realized I had it coming. Do I need to try to mentally change the balance 20 years after I saw the woman last? She's no more the same person than I am. 

 

To be self aware is so freakin' hard. 

Shidduch Myth: All Girls Are Amaaaaazing

In a prior post, I addressed the concept of "good ones being taken," and I would like to expound further. 

This statement is usually uttered by women. Accomplished, capable, bedazzled women sparkling with carefully applied highlighter. Many women, you see, push themselves to be the best, while men . . . well, plenty aren't up to their full potential. 

I've even heard something along the lines of "all girls are good, while men—eh." 

As someone who barely survived high school, I can say that not all girls are "good," whatever "good" means. Does "good" mean presentable and career-oriented? Or does "good" mean getting voted "Never made another girl cry in the bathroom"? 

I've heard tales. One example: One of Han's dates ordered the most expensive steak on the menu, specifying "well done" (I don't even eat red meat, and I know that's a no-no). She barely ate half, and when the waiter asked if she wanted to take home the leftovers, she declined (Han wanted to take it home, considering it was his $85 going into the garbage). 

What about "good" meaning considerate? 

I've met a number of women who are really, on paper, fabulous. But in person, um, er, *cough.* 

I'm not saying that if a guy isn't yet all who he can be he shouldn't pull himself up by his bootstraps. I just tend to socialize more with women than men, so I cannot give many observations about them. 

Here's my take: We're all supposed to be striving to do better, no matter where we are in life. So even if one has the "good job" and "good wardrobe" boxes ticked off, that doesn't mean that he/she is good to go. 

I recall in my single days, when I would be mesmerized at the description of some snazzy lawyer, excitedly wait for a date, only to be sneered and snarled at by some obnoxious specimen. 

So if you've got the work/appearance thing down pat, maybe you could sit down with yourself to see how you could improve further, between yourself and humankind and God. 

One of the positive aspects of being single is that there usually is the time available to self-improve. Believe me, that time vanishes once offspring roll around. Sleep deprivation doesn't leave much time for deep thoughts (think too deeply, you pass out).

So while a shadchan may hawk someone as being amazing because they are professionally accomplished and gorgeous, those criteria do not necessarily mean they are a "good one." 

To be "good"—you gotta do good. Like not talk to your date as though she is an idiot, or max out his credit card.

Thank You For Your Service

I've been reading online nowadays a lot of hate on Gilmore Girls. Which I find surprising. 

Sure, nowadays if there was a show in that vein, Rory would be biracial, at least. 

But it premiered 20 years ago, and that doesn't seem so long ago to invoke "it was a different time." OK, yeah, there are lots of white people, and some are even privileged white people, but I still don't see how that is problematic. 

Han watched it for the first time recently, and through his observations I'm remembering how frustrating it was to see Rory's unspooling through various bad choices. First was handing in the good boyfriend for the jerk boyfriend, then having an affair with good boyfriend, allowing one unpleasant interview to completely undo her self-confidence and send her over the edge, then getting together with maybe not a 100% jerk, but he's still pretty irritating. 

Maybe that was the point. I've seen this sort of thing in real life, albeit not to such an extreme: Girl puts lots of pressure on herself to be perfect, and burns out by the time she's 21. But Rory becomes really unlikable and she doesn't improve in the follow up, A Year in the Life. 

But I found her more believable than her early goody-goodiness. Lorelai was usually the screw-up, and Rory was the adult in the relationship, until she decided to finally have a belated hedonistic teenagehood, which is not a good look on an actual adult. 

Han was complaining about Emily when he first began. "You'll see," I told him, "she'll become your favorite character." And she did. Some people on the forums grump that Lorelai was always saying how horrible her childhood was, but with no details; as I understand it, she could have simply felt "unseen" and misunderstood by her parents. That can be a lonely place to be. 

As we know in real life, sometimes two okay people can have such a bad dynamic that it can be toxic. It doesn't mean one is wrong and the other right. It just means that it's better if they don't spend a lot of time together. 

So, no, I'm not going to hate on Gilmore Girls now, the way a lot of other people are. It served its purpose in its time, and maybe it has become obsolete. In 20 years, lots of our current favorites will be burned at the stake, too.

Chick Lit Musings

Abby Jimenez's Life's Too Short was a pleasant shake-up from typical chick lit. I mean, it's totally chick-lit, but not the usual plot. Oh, there's the inevitable disagreement and the inevitable, dramatic reunion, but it was a less irritating version that usually occurs since the stakes are higher. 

There were a couple of quotes that spoke to me: 

 . . . maybe being a father was just like this. Just being there and doing what needed to be done, one small task at a time until they added up to something good.

Most good meaningful things in life are not one-and-dones. Change occurs over time, all part of countless choices that add up to elevation. Isn't that what Rosh HaShana is about? As long as the majority of choices are the right one, they are the ones that matter, not the minority. 

And: 

I wondered how long the ripple effects lasted after someone died. Maybe until everyone who knew them was dead too? Or was it something that went on for generation after generation because the damage was handed down, touching each new person and changing them, even if they didn't know why? 

Something told me it was that one. 

Obviously, that one made me think. Not just in my own case, but regarding my grandparents, who lost a lot more people than I did. Even before the war—Babi's father died when she was four months old, her mother when she was in her 20s. Everyone else lost their own parents as well as siblings and kinfauna. That doesn't even count further relatives and friends.  

A college professor believed that such damage was visited upon the descendants, such as myself. I wonder if that's why I freak out a little whenever Ta or Han don't answer their phones, and believe me, I did that before Ma died (not Han, obviously, but Ma).

It made me think of the story in the Gemara, of the woman who could not stop weeping for the loss of her child, and she was warned to stop. She could not, and eventually all her children died. 

There is grief, yes, which is considered warranted. But is the damage from focusing only on grief? On the inability to see beyond it, to let it overtake any possible joy?

The narrator was contemplating her family's devolvement following a death. But that doesn't have to be the only option. There is a difference between carrying pain and letting it taint all aspects of life. My grandparents experienced happiness following their agonies, some more than others. 

As Jews, we're pretty familiar with pain. But also resilience.

Don't Panic.

Cosmetics can be brutal. After spending sweat, blood, and tears trying to find the right product, it can be discontinued *finger snap* like that. 

That used to terrify me. So when I came across something I really liked, I would wait for the 20% Sephora sales and HOARD. 

Ma would tell me not to. "Something else always comes along," she insisted, but I refused to believe her. 

Now that HOARD has come to bite me in the keester. 

Back in, ahem, 2012 *cringe* I was smitten with The Sephora Collection Mineral Foundation Compact. So when it was heavily reduced in price, meaning it would be soon saying "adios," I quickly pounced and amassed a stockpile. 

Which I no longer have any use for. 

Because the IT Cosmetics CC+ Cream blows everything else out of the water! With the compact, I would have to apply sunscreen underneath, and then it would be a struggle to powder in the foundation on top—the application would be uneven and would pill. Then it wears off in alarming patches. (This I relearned after trying it again recently.) 

The IT has EVERYTHING. SPF. Coverage. Just the right level of moisturizing (not too much and not too little). If I set it with powder, I don't get greasy. It's beautiful. 

So now I'm sitting on a pile of fool's gold. 

When Han freaks that a product might get discontinued and we must HOARD, I hide his credit card. I have learned my lesson.

"All things are mortal but the Jews"

When I began reading The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild, I chuckled to myself. 

The book is narrated by Tiglath, the son of Sannecherib King of Ashur.

I found it funny that unless one is a major in ancient history, only frum schoolchildren will recognize that name. My mind automatically piped, "The one who sent the 10 tribes into exile." 

The book does not deal with that detail at all. It dismisses the Hebrews as an inconsequential blip in the grand rule of Sannecherib. 

The author is scrupulous in how he writes from the point of view of an ancient Assyrian; in one amusing scene, the narrator meets with a nation of nomadic horsemen, and describes the odd garments they wear while never using the word "pants." 

And so, when he describes what time of year certain incidents occur, he uses the Assyrian months of the year: Nisan, Iyyar, Siban, Tammuz, Ab, Tisri, Marcheshwan, Kisleb, Tebet, Shebat. As a frum Jew, I knew what time of year he meant, even if he didn't necessarily clarify. 

The capitol city of Ashur is Niniveh. We know that one, too. 

Apparently, "Assyria" is the Greek name for Ashur, as there is no "sh" in that language. So the author always refers to the nation as "Ashur" in the book, not "Assyria." 

The book itself has its fallacies; the women, for instance, are all very disappointing depictions. The only lovely female is the narrator's mother, while the rest are manipulating, plotting, oversexed harpies. I expected better of a book written in 1987. 

However, the rest of the tome overcomes that lack. It's over 500 pages, and I can't believe I managed to finish it. And there's a sequel. 

The book says—and Google backs it up—that Sannecherib died at the hands of his own sons. Not a pleasant end. 

But what I marveled at is how no one today is familiar with the ancient empire of Ashur. They are barely aware of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Hellenization, and Rome. 

Yet Jews are. Jews are one of the few continuous threads throughout the ancient world—that while we were dismissed as a nothing people of barely any consequence in the grand scheme of great conquests, we are still freakin' here. 

We sing Maos Tzur, listing all of our oppressors, and we are the only ones who remember them. We remember them because how else can we marvel at our survival? We are here. They are not. No other nation/religion can claim our longevity. 

*Mind blown*