The thing about tragedy is that, almost by definition, it completely takes us by surprise. Life has very few rules we all feel apply both personally and globally, but one of them is, or should be, that people outlive their parents. And live long enough to perhaps become parents themselves. Tragedy takes these basic assumptions, assumptions we need to make in order to thrive, and in one awful moment tells us: Don’t bet on it.

And although we all know (in theory) that life’s natural order is disrupted in catastrophic, seemingly random ways every day for someone, when the rules are broken right in front of us we are – aside from simply being bereft – also caught completely, brutally off-guard. Otherwise, were we to always anticipate tragedy, we could not live normally the rest of the time.

And really, who could have anticipated, in their most desolate nightmare, what happened to one of our families last week?

Last Wednesday morning, our close-knit community in Bet Shemesh woke up to collective wailing: We had just lost two sisters, two daughters, two friends. Racheli and Rikki Menora, 14 and 16, daughters to our friends and friends to our daughters, went on an adventure with their cousin, Sara, 17, and their grandfather, Moshe, which will never end for them, but which ended – so very suddenly – for the rest of us, when their light aircraft went down in Michigan.

I cannot tell you how many times last Wednesday and Thursday the Menoras’ friends and neighbors, trying to go about the day, stopped, grabbed their heads, and said: “What?!?!” It was news that refused, still refuses, to sink in, even for those of us who did not really know the kids.

Rikki and Racheli’s brother Yossi, who prior to his US vacation had a permanent socializing spot on the park bench on the corner of my street (which – note this, Yossi – is being saved for his return) not only survived the crash, but is a survivor, in the best and truest sense of the word. The kid seems to have started digitally corresponding with friends the minute he opened his eyes in the burn unit, so very far from home.

As I have found to be the case in these untenable situations, Yossi and his mother, Sima, an outdoorsy, athletic jewelry artist, really cool mom and friend, and unsinkable woman, have ended up bringing comfort to their community in almost equal measure to the comfort their community is providing them.

In the hospital with her son during her daughters’ double funeral, a situation still too impossible to imagine even though we were all there to witness it, Sima phoned in to say a few words about her beautiful girls, after their father, Shalom’s, heartbreaking eulogy.

She did not hide out in Ann Arbor, behind the Great Lakes of tears, somehow grateful for the shade provided by maternal duty and miles, like so many of us might have done. No. Sima attended. She sounded sad, but she sounded like Sima, and she was talking to us from her new reality, in a way we were able to understand.

Do not underestimate the stuff it takes to proceed in this manner, to feel communal responsibility – to be able to produce the defiant, hopeful light held in your very family name, Menora – in your own darkest hour.

Let it be said here that the response in Bet Shemesh has been, as is characteristic of this place, rapid, all-encompassing, awe-inspiring. Say what you want about smothering religious suburbia, but it’s where you want to be in a crisis. Within hours, the older Menora boys, Ben and Yehuda, combat soldiers in the IDF, were surrounded in their home by dozens upon dozens of their friends who showed up to sit with them during those awful in-between days, when there was nothing to do but wait and cry. And by streams of Sima’s friends, who wasted no time in trying to feed all of them.

The press also showed up, of course, and the still teenaged Yehuda dealt with their predictably inappropriate, quote- digging questions with a tremendous amount of patience and grace. And faith. Both he and Sima – and Shalom, and Shalom’s mother – when asked by interviewers over the last several days how their status as believers related to their personal devastation, responded by saying that we do not understand God’s ways or plans. Every one of them expressed this sentiment. I suspect that to a secular ear this sounds deluded, opium-of-the-masses-like.

What it sounds like to me is this: We might be of the West, but, as also espoused by the Eastern philosophy so beloved by secular society, at a certain point believers relinquish control to a Greater Power, and this is in turn empowering.

In the western world we are both handicapped by and enriched by our enduring love of life, and our proclivity to guard it; further it at any cost; fear for its loss; and mourn it. This applies to believers and non-believers both – - only believers seem, upon hitting bottom, to be comforted by their own ultimate powerlessness. From there, it is perhaps clearer to see what it is we are able to change about the world in the face of tragedy, instead of alternately escaping the pain or lingering on it too long.

So when the press persists in asking the bereaved: “Don’t you ask ‘Why?’,” I am reminded of Victor Frankl, who famously observed that this question was far less useful than this one: What now?

What now, in Bet Shemesh: Prayer meetings are still being held in several synagogues around the city daily for Yossi’s recovery; Rikki and Racheli’s friends have set up a Facebook memorial group, which already has thousands of members; The neighborhood got resources together to facilitate the trip of Sima’s closest friends to sit Shiva with her in the hospital in Michigan; Community leaders, rabbis, and mental health professionals have been organizing public meeting all week to help the bereft teen community and their parents somehow come to grips with the gaping hole in their social circle. To perhaps make some meaning of this tragedy.

Still. There are multiple problems for us limited human beings when the rules are broken. For those directly affected, the immediate problem is how to wake up in the morning to a destroyed personal world. How to relate to people who mean well, but have no clue. How to set boundaries on grief, hopefully channel pain into something more life affirming. How to flip fortune the finger and still give love to a world that has taken everything.

For those of us who are a bit more removed: How to provide comfort and support to the sufferers. And also: How to reconcile what has happened with belief in a Just God, or faith in an ordered Universe. Or perhaps: How to let one’s children out of the house and believe they will come back, despite pressing recent evidence to the contrary just up the street. What is a worried mother to do when the very worst has just happened to her friend?

For the rest, for those who glance at the headline and are momentarily unable to move their eyes from the page, the shiver is followed by questions of philosophy, on the suffering of innocents, on cruel randomness in a world where actions should determine outcome, but sadly do not.

My very smart friend Cheryl wrote a solid pop-philosophy book on suffering which sheds some light on the matter, in which she does a really effective riff on the Book of Job, and comes up with lots of questions, and fewer answers, like any good Jew and philosopher ought to.

And my friend Sherri wrote a memoir about this, too, after her son Koby, not yet 14, was viciously murdered, with his friend Yosef, by a terrorist in the Spring of 2001. They had ditched school for an impromptu picnic. I was on my way to meet Sherri that day for a lecture, and in the end met her later among weeping women in her bedroom, in the hours before her son’s funeral.

That was a day that was followed by a year which was followed by another year, and before long, Koby’s friends still showed up to his annual memorial service, only they were men. And Koby isn’t. The world is out of order.

But here’s what Koby is: A foundation, opened by Sherri and Seth Mandell, which has to date helped hundreds of children and parents cope with tragedy. Sherri and Seth are still bereaved, but they still laugh – in fact, a comedy tour is one of the organization’s main fundraisers. And Camp Koby is one of the most sought after counselor positions for teens in this country. This is the way people make sense of things, and this is the only way.

So goes the great dialectic reality we call the human condition: Live as if today is your last, while assuming you will be around to witness the ramifications of your actions for another 100 years. Love as if there’s no tomorrow, and as if you have forever. Treat tragedy as a challenge, and use it to build. Survive with style.

We see that other cultures do other things with tragedy, like stay angry forever and stew in violence, or throw all caution to the wind and party. Neither of these build the world or move us forward as a human race.

This Tisha B’Av, as if history hasn’t provided us with enough reasons to cry, and then to reflect, and then to triumph, the Menora family has our tears, in buckets, and also, our pledge to help them rebuild their lives and improve our collective world however they see fit, and whenever they are ready.

To paraphrase T.S. Elliot: This is the way the world goes on, this is the way the world goes on. Not with a whimper, but with a strut.

(This post also appears on the JPost website.)

My best childhood memories are from summer trips “down the ocean” in Maryland with my parents and brother, flying a kite on the breezy beach at sunset, full of deli sandwiches and smelling like Noxzema. (This was, at the time, the best solution for being burnt to a crisp by the afternoon sun, which kids were allowed to do in the early 80’s. And my dad is a pediatrician.)

Summer is when I learned to canoe on rapids, make hospital corners on a bed, and keep real feelings (and other secrets) from mean girls. Summer is when we went cross-country on a train and I learned that much of America was actually farmland. For miles and days. Who knew?

Summer is when I learned to file, back when patient files were made of paper, and when I also learned to save drowning people and tie them to a backboard, which I never, thankfully, had to do. I did, however, watch excellent swimmers slice through the water 100 times (exactly) in a row, my whistle ready for rope fouls, and that job most certainly beat filing.

I had all my short-lived dalliances as a teen in Summer. I could never be relied upon to stay in love for more than three months or so. (Consider this a formal apology, if any of you are reading this.) Thankfully, that’s something I outgrew by the time my lifeguard certification expired.

Not just about nostalgia for me, Summer is also when my life seems to shift in huge ways. I got married in Summer and then, a week later, moved overseas forever – EXACTLY 17 years ago today. I found (and eventually lost) my favorite job ever so far in the Summer. I lost an almost-baby in the Summer/. Strangely, none of my four kids were born in Summer – though they are represented by every single other season.

Summer is when I sent a husband off to war and very nearly didn’t get him back. Here’s a poem I wrote then:

At Swimming Lessons: A Prayer
To D in his APC in Lebanon
To me the sexiest man at the pool
as I wait here
for our (so small!) son – -
is the old guy with his trunks pulled way
up over his belly,
approaching his sagging, snowy-furry chest,
and is still not fat.
He is 75 at least and walks slowly, but straight,
and smiles at the lifeguard when he stops to chat.
To me he is a promise
that some men come home from war,
grow old,
and go swim.

Please God:
Let that be him.

—
For me, then, Summer is a strange mix of adrenaline and Zen.

I wrote this in Summer:

…Summer has no obligations. Only desire – - the low buzz of something you want to happen.
Summer takes us back to what is most basic, what we need to do to be truly whole. Summer is poetry without criticism.
So vacation isn’t what I’d call it. It’s a hovering, a plumbing of the depths. Sit in one place, but swing there…. Read More

…And also this:

…Every summer, right in the hot, soft belly of July/August, I’m hit with it in the head, like the skillet of an angry housewife: the urge to play Alan Jackson loud with the windows of my minivan rolled down (ain’t got no truck, just my luck), hang back on my porch at sundown, and go out drinking with the girls. You guessed that right, son – Redneck Fever….” Read More

Now I’m too busy to even think about what Summer means to me, since this Summer, my career seems to have taken a leap into the deep end of very busy, and some of my kids are around a good deal. Suburbia might be half-empty and moving like thick liquid, but that’s not my experience inside my little home office, where longing and plans have turned into determination and action, between which I am making people lunch.

My friend Vicki wrote this excellent post about Summer.

Please use the comments to tell me what summer means to YOU.

1. (…Dammit, I missed the Thanksgiving post. What a bum. Time is not my friend….) Which brings me to this:
2. Do I want to grow old if I will not be sound of mind / functioning with dignity? After some difficult family stuff this month (and occasional mundane confrontations with my own apparent mortality…may not be a vampire after all…damn…), I’m not sure how I feel about letting only God say when I go, even though I hope I have at least half a century before I really have to think about this. (But by then, I may not be able to think…) How wrong is it to write: “If I revert to toddlerhood, please take me back even further” in your will? I know it’s not the religious thing to do. I’m just wondering about what the options are. (Way in advance, as usual.) Which brings me to two very old people who are the very opposite of helpless….
3. Shameless plug #1: Stay tuned to this space for my post on a conversation between this man and my grandma, two nonagenarians with a lot on their minds. When I read Estes’s letter to Obama, (forwarded in an email chain to me and a million other people), it struck me as something my grandmother would have written, and I got an idea… After a few minutes of Google snooping and an e-mail, I found the guys to whom Estes dictated the letter (he’s too old to write with his own hand) and asked them to set up a call with my grandmother. These are two WWII heroes (from the opposite ends of that dreadful war) who are devastated by an America they feel has let them down. I thought they should “meet” to commiserate…and they did…Which brings me to this:
4. This Time Magazine article about the Decade from Hell really got me in the mood for New Years, and toasting to better beginnings. I think back to where I was when we rang in the new millennium – where we all were – and I can’t believe it’s only been ten years. The world looks insanely different. Which brings me to Web 2.0.
5. Seriously, to rephrase the old Twitter question: What are we doing? Some days I am on the computer for 8 long hours, working…I think. Writing, consulting on the right turn of phrase, Facebooking for fun and profit, *networking*, developing new leads, blablablah. …And finally quit way after dark, wondering what exactly I did all day and why. (Sometimes I get paid.) Are we just busy fools in our cyberofficespace? Or are we going somewhere with this? Sometimes I really want to be a farmer planting 140 stalks of corn instead. Which brings me to Dorothy Gale.
6. I just finished reading a great and entertaining memoir by Lisa Fineberg Cook, a self-aware, spoiled, very smart and funny Jewish girl from LA who marries a world-traveling educator / adventurer and spends two years in Japan, completely out of her element. The better to introspect, my dear. The new bride ends up shedding many of her J.A.P.py notions, and learning a thing or two about how being a citizen of the world (and a wife) requires one to step into another’s shoes, regularly. (And that borrowing your best friend’s Manolos doesn’t count in this regard.) I will be writing an entire column on the book, and doing a Q+A with the author, sometime in the next month (Shameless plug #2), but what I want to say now is this: I once had the privilege to edit an excellent partial manuscript for someone whose journey took him in somewhat of the opposite direction…From a Zen, secular life in the US, to a bike tour through Europe and to Lebanon, to meet his wife’s Christian Arab family, and, ultimately, to Israel, where he ended up adopting religious Judaism. (As did she.) The writing was superb and the adventure completely unique, but he could not find a publisher anywhere. I ask anyone who will answer me: Will the Manhattan book establishment not even entertain the possibility that growth can also take one from the assimilated to the culturally particular? Is it a given that to be a “journey” it not only has to end in self-awareness and spiritual expansion, but in adopting something foreign? What if there’s no place like home? Would Dorothy Gale get published in 2009, having seen the other side of the rainbow, and choosing churchy Kansas because that’s where her heart was? Which brings me to Hanukah:
7. Would I have been a Maccabee or a Hellenist? I ask this quite sincerely since I’m pretty sure Mattathias Cohen and Sons were more Judean Hilltop and less Tel Aviv Café…not even suburban Modern Orthodox. While we live (and my kids learn) in an Orthodox environment, Jewish-centered and centric, I can not claim to have taken secular culture out of our house – pretty much the opposite is true. Is it only living in Israel that allows us the luxury of consuming Hollywood and being broadly cultural, and not worrying for a minute about our identity or continuity? I’m thinking probably…yes… in the US I might have been a bit more of a protective / defensive Frumom. (Reason #687 for Aliyah!) I’m also thinking that the Hasmonean Dynasty in the Second Commonwealth didn’t do so well at the end of the day, once they grew cozier with Rome…but that I’m not canceling cable. Which brings me to:
8. Happy Hanukah… (That is the holiday message between programming on my cable channels. Just saying. )

Apparently, he’s been chewing over part of the contents of that e-mail for a long time. Here’s what I got from Earl last week (posted here with his permission):

“…I have one question about a statement you wrote:
Anyway – suburbia is no picnic either sometimes, ditto organized religion, and I am not a tremendous fan of either one. Why do you stay in Orthodox Judaism then? Do you not yearn to be free? To not be bound by laws and restrictions that at the end of the day you cannot wholly prove actually come from God, and more likely come from man? Don’t you want to just eat a cheeseburger with your hair down in public, a nice pair of hot, tight jeans and a cute, sexy shirt on and do what you want, when you want with no feelings of having to be doing things at a pre-ordained time because that’s that the rules say? Maybe feel the thrill of catching the eyes of other men who think, “Man, she’s hot”? etc., etc.
If you’re not a tremendous fan of either, why do you stay in them? You could still be a wife, a mom and a Jewish woman and not be bound by those things. I mean what would happen if you said to your husband: “This Friday night I want to get a babysitter and take you into Tel Aviv to go dancing and have a few drinks and then stay in hotel room and [suggested recreational activity removed]“? Would David say, “F— yeah. Let’s do it” or is there no way that would happen?
I am curious. I don’t want to imagine a life bound in that way. I am too much a free spirit as is [Joy]. It’s why we work so well together.
- ‘Earl’ “

Well. Earl. Where do I begin?

Thank you for your vote of confidence in my ability to look hot in tight jeans?

…And for volunteering to explain to our 15.5-year-old son why our potential drunken partying is so much more responsible and acceptable than the potential same activity of his peers?

Although: Why on earth do David and I need to go to a club and a hotel on Shabbat when we have a bedroom, a booze cabinet, a large music collection, and another 6 days of the week?

How about: I wouldn’t eat a cheeseburger if it was made by the OU and blessed by Rav Ovadia because my arteries are my friends… and there are those tight jeans to slide into…?

…However, I think all these things are somewhat beside the point.

As Rachel Menken once said to Don Draper: You didn’t think this through.

Earl, you (understandably) misunderstood: I sometimes dislike suburbia because it can be boring, conformist, and nosy, and Orthodoxy because (like most organized religion) I feel it has become stagnant and irresponsible, on the verge of losing the creative spirit that has kept it alive until now. (And going into detail here would involve a MUCH longer post, but I am happy to expand upon request.) But my lack of fandom is NOT because Orthodoxy / suburbia are both restrictive. Not because I don’t want to feel bound by anything or anyone.

My objections have to do with the contemporary wisdom of some of the rules in those structures and their method of adjudication, or their lack of compassion, but I have no doubt that some rules are in fact necessary for a functional, productive life. I have no doubt that requiring hard things of people is overall a good policy, because people tend to step up then, when they are being required of.

Surely, you have some rules for yourself, Earl, or you couldn’t have accomplished all that you have. I do not “yearn to be free”; I am, thankfully, in a relationship and in a community that allows me to be, within reason, free. I yearn to be lazy, sometimes, or asleep, or surprised by fabulousness, my own or that of others. But what’s missing for me isn’t freedom. When something is missing, that thing is novelty, or maybe, lightning-speed forward movement. But I digress.

Being part of a family and / or a community and / or a belief system (religious or otherwise) has its disadvantages, to be sure. You hit the main one: You are no longer simply your own agent. There are meetings, happenings, causes, responsibilities, loyalties, and rules. You need to bake for people at “pre-ordained times,” like after childbirth or during shiva. You need to be with people when all you want to do is be alone. You need to smile when you hate humanity; but you don’t really. Just today. Forget religion for a moment. What person anywhere wants to get out of their sweatpants on a Tuesday night and attend a fundraiser? (And Holy Crap, am I raising my hand to volunteer for the XYZ committee? Really? Again?)

Throwing God and / or His earthly agents into the mix adds an extra few levels of commitment and an extra unplugged day of the week (which, by the way, I couldn’t and wouldn’t live without – think: a no e-mail or phone Sabbatical! Divine.), but it is along the same continuum: There is Something Larger Than Yourself that you belong to and that you must answer to. That Something Larger in many cases is a tiny cross-section of the world’s people and cultures. There’s your paradox.

It seems that you view my lifestyle as a battle of the Him (God / Law) or the Them (Society / Rules) vs. the I (My Needs and Wants.) But I view it more as a choice of We (family, community, spirituality) over Me Me Me.

The perks: You are never alone; there are people looking out for you; you are part of something; you are consistently loved and asked to keep yourself open, consistently giving love; you are responsible for enriching your community; you must be disciplined and hold yourself to real, firm standards because there are eyes and ears (Divine and otherwise) everywhere. The downside: Same.

We all know there is no having it all. Stability by nature demands putting some freedoms in check. It’s a tradeoff of the collective versus the individual, pro and con alike. So back to your question: Do I feel buried and repressed? Missing out on life? No. Bored and restless? Resentful? Sameness? Sometimes. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities I’ve chosen to carry? Often. Are tight jeans and a treif burger, a hot bar and a hotter dance party, the ability to do anything I want when I want, the answers I seek to what occasionally ails me about this life?

Not by a mile. You with your big connections Earl, I’ll tell you what to do if you want to help me with my Suburbadox Malaise: Get me a meeting with Matthew Weiner. Whatever they serve for lunch, whatever I wear there, whether the hot guard checks me out when I walk in the door or not…I’ll feel much, much better about everything if I get to work on a high quality, life-changing project with a deep, brilliant writer, to the benefit of millions of culture consumers. That would be a novelty and a huge leap forward all at once.

You and Joy can take the hotel in Tel Aviv. David and I left most of the mini-bar. Help yourselves.

Photo by: Avi Eisen

Sukkot in Israel is a hiker and camper’s festival. God wasn’t kidding when he asked people to walk to Jerusalem in Temple times on this holiday. I’m not sure if He cared about the ten young bulls, two rams, and 12 lambs (well-done). But I’m pretty sure He wanted people to walk the land in what constitutes autumn here, which is this: moderation (as opposed to colorful.)

He made a damn fine Holy Land, too, and I’m guessing He wanted people to enjoy it when the moon was full and hung low in the sky like a huge piece of fruit, when the nights were cool and the sands were walkable barefoot, when the sun was strong but pleasant, when the breeze was always blowing but never hot or cold.

The National Park Service and assorted field schools make it really easy this time of year to see every corner of the country. (Note to Park Services: You rock up north and down south. Can you send more of your fine people, and garbage bins, to the Center??) (And citizens: Can you possibly help them by USING the bins?)

Our family took full advantage of the outdoors this holiday (and we all have the redneck tan to prove it.) My husband and oldest went on a sunrise bike ride through Ein Karem. Our extended family met for a picnic / Frisbee game in a great undiscovered park somewhere near Bet Shemesh. *More on undiscovered places below.*

We hiked through the mountains of Judea (I wore flip flops because I thought it was going to be a brief stroll. Can someone explain why I thought I could wear flip flops on a hike in Gush Etzion?) and enjoyed the Science by the Sea festival put on by the Kfar Ruppin Marine Biology College on Hof Mikhmoret. The little kids watched chemistry experiments and saw sea turtles, the big kids and husband went kayaking, I got a neck and shoulder massage, and we all enjoyed a concert at sunset. What could be bad?

But our favorite part was sleeping on the beach. I will not tell you what beach, because it was perfect and clean (lots of garbage cans!) and empty and quiet and has good bathrooms, a nice kiosk, a playground, and lots of parking, and I want it to stay that way.

We loved sleeping to the sound of the waves (and the guitar-playing of my oldest.) We just put our big mat down and got into our sleeping bags and were out in minutes in the perfect cool dark. The best part was waking up and being where we wanted to be. 6 a.m. and the kids were on the playground, by 7 they were building sand castles, by 8 they were swimming and playing paddle ball (we also got coffee at aforementioned kiosk), by 10 the wind picked up enough to fly a kite, and we were loading the car at 11, before the real heat.

Two great discoveries: 1. Camp on the beach! Beats the woods if you can handle sand. No bugs or small animals, very accessible, no tent really necessary. 2. Go away from lots of people and it’s much easier to handle small kids outdoors, especially near water. Drive a bit farther and reap your rewards.

And now…a word from Mother Nature:

A major personal understanding: My era of hibernation at home with toddlers is over. The littles are now big enough to come out into society, which unties me from the hearth. So Yay!

A deeply personal understanding, because the beach never fails to knock me down, drag me out, and wash me back up, cleaner: The big kids don’t know the real me at all. I’m not sure if that’s because I (or mothers in general) am not totally myself with them, or if kids will never really try to get to know their mothers as pre/teens (or if just mine won’t.) The “uptight” mother things I feel I must do and say to keep people safe (You are out too deep! No rafts in the ocean! Etc.) and moderately responsible / productive (Do have any homework over this vacation? Can you please help me with this since you have time? Etc…) take a huge toll on my ability to be (or be perceived as) rolling with things, creative, nice, cool, etc.

And maybe having kids makes you be less of those things in the first place. Demeter – Mother Nature in Greek mythology – is the prototype for organic beauty turned uptight by progeny. When her daughter went missing (kidnapped by her uncle, the God of the underworld…really, a long story…) she became enraged and insane, wandering the earth like a bag lady to find her; the seasons were thought to be a result of a joint custody arrangement Demeter ultimately worked out with Hades.

I think this fear of ultimate loss takes away a piece of yourself, even if it the loss never actually comes to pass. I am not sure if fathers experience this in quite the same way, but I’d like to hear from any of you who feel it, as well.

In any event, I think the greatest sacrifice mothers make is not the years they spend putting family before career or self. It is the years they spend not being seen, not being fully real, for what they feel to be the greater good.

Is it really the greater good? The answer is blowing in the cool evening wind.

The New Year’s wishes fill my inbox (tomorrow, the Jewish Year 5770 begins…) and the apple crumble is cooling, but I’m not that ready, and I’m not that into it.

A time for introspection, repentance, and resolutions?
A day of judgment, talking to God, and mild religious / spiritual anxiety?
A lot of shopping, cooking, hosting, gifting, family?
Why is this day different than all the other days? (Oops. That last one. Wrong holiday.)

I’m not sure how we got from May to September, the summer having melted against the back of my neck as I worked. Somehow for years I’ve felt like I am never DONE, always crossing off something undone and moving it to another crowded day only to move it again… And before you know it, it’s three months (or three years) later, but there is a continuous feeling to that time because those tasks are STILL undone, still brought forward in the filofax. Familiar friends. As if it was yesterday. (It occurs to me that perhaps this is why I leave stuff undone…. But I digress.)

That feeling of being new and renewed, of trembling before a power larger than yourself, of acknowledging that everything and everyone you have is a gift and hoping that you’ve earned those again, of deciding what it is you will do different….Those are things that are continuous, as well. Shoving them all into two days and then moving on with life after the holidays is not my style. Compartmentalizing angst would be cool, but I can’t do it, any more than I can compartmentalize the chores of running a home that hosts family and friends regularly on weekends.

So no, I’m not ready and I’m not done and I’m not inspired. Any more than I always or never am. That may be because I’m hanging on to yesterday, or because time scares the crap out of me in general, or because I’m just a super aware spiritual chic, or because I don’t like sudden shifts in schedule, but whatever the reason – the New Year is making me nervous because I am not even remotely finished with the old one.

Can I save this one in the package and open it when I’m ready? Ya’ll go ahead without me.

photo by: crash.

It’s not that the well has been dry; au contraire, my friends. I have simply fallen in.

June – which I have some illusion as being just last week – was the month of end-of-the-year school / preschool parties. A blur of cute children and little chairs. Also lots of Bar and Bat Mitzvas. And birthday / anniversary celebrations – mine, and others. And conferences. And meetings. Upshot: I got dressed to go out at all times of day and night way too many times in June. My computer would wait up for me, but I said I was too tired and went up to bed. That’s when the trouble started.

Then came July. (See below.)

It’s been more than a month (closer to two) since I’ve blogged. The reason can be distilled into one intense truth:

I will never have more time than I have…right…NOW. (Or, as my brother likes to say, later is later.)

…OK, two intense truths:

Energy is finite (yes, even yours) and what you choose to focus on is itself a powerful statement, with broad implications on the objects of both you attention and your inattention.

Or, if you will, a Carrie Bradshaw question: When you multitask, are you doing everything, or are you doing nothing?

Here’s a little bit of what’s been keeping me too busy to blog….

1. Freelancing means you spend A LOT of time in administration and niggling project management tasks for which you can not (or at least I don’t) charge. And in business development. This is a fancy way of saying chasing leads and going to meetings that sometimes don’t even turn into real projects, because lots of people just like to have meetings. They collect them, like rocks or stamps. Then the work you already have takes over all the rest of your time, and blogging (and housework) gets shunted aside. Do you see where this math takes us? I’m doing something wrong – time and money-wise. Advice most welcome.

2. July: Some kids are home. Around. This brings even more kids. Right now there are teenagers in my den. I didn’t count how many. Before that they were playing cards right near me while I was typing. I said, welcome to my office. They said, hey. The hint was lost, it seems. Dining room table office losing its appeal and fast.

3. Suburbia means that when your neighbor itches, you scratch. Especially Orthodox suburbia, where scratching thy neighbor’s itch is a high art and at times (and for some), a calling. There have been lots of needs in our community this month, none of them too good, some of them actually terribly tragic. (Who believes in bad energy clusters? Raise your hand.) To the point of calling for special communal prayer, where the synagogue was half full on a regular weeknight to say psalms for the ill. Prayer and food. What else can you do?

Sometimes, honestly, I resent all the communal responsibility for the other, which is vastly time consuming and erodes privacy in the extreme. The fact that I blog (selectively telling everyone what I choose to tell you) doesn’t mean I’m not also intensely private; I hate that everyone here knows who has what.

Caring and nosiness gently lap on these safe shores in a constant tide. In fact, some of the people who are on the ill side of the equation struggle with the whole “do I ask for help or do I keep this private” thing, and several have chosen the latter. Another woman, on the other hand, recently told me that she has no idea why anyone would want to keep illness to herself, and has felt so embraced by her friends during her struggle with early stage breast cancer that she can’t even imagine going through it without that amount of support. Most find a balance that is right for their comfort level, but invariably some people end up feeling both grateful for the kindness and overexposed.

Most of the time I’m really glad to know 200 people have my back (and not only talk behind it.) It’s for real: There’s strength in a village. So I happily make soup and am just intensely grateful I can be on the giving end. It’s a blessing, and I know it, having in the past been a grateful and overexposed recipient. (But damn it, my cabin on a rocky Maine beach awaits me in my mind.)

4. Speaking of which: I’m not sure how many people realize that middle class Orthodox Jews basically make Thanksgiving dinner every week. When I read about the stress levels going up around the holidays, and the amount of guests / menus / budget responsible for said stress, I say: We cook that for Shabbat. Most weeks. This, too, seriously cuts into productivity. And savings. I always knew this but somehow lately have felt it more acutely.

In any event, I now have a full plate of projects (meetings paid off….) and a full plate at home, but I am going to be a productivity pig and insist on filling this plate, too.

More entries soon. Seriously.

I have always been a fan of the top ten list. I suppose it started with Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 (Yes. I was around and not in nursery school at the time. OK?), the cleverest marketing device the pre-digital music world ever came up with. After which I graduated to Letterman, who used (uses?) the top ten list as a cool comedic framing device, which I enjoyed even more. Kids, this was all before Amazon’s Listmania was even an executive web dream.

Of course, the top ten format is as old as the hills, actually, one specific hill called Sinai, where, tradition has it, God’s Top Ten was revealed amidst much noisy weather, on this, the Shavuot festival. Whether He intended it as marketing or humor will depend, I suppose, on your general outlook.

Why those ten? Here’s a pretty good analysis, although it only scratches the surface of the rabbinic literature which abounds on this question.

In any event, I have my own top ten, an ethical will of sorts in case I cook till I literally drop today, which seems like a distinct possibility. It’s not at all funny, and as far as I can tell, I’m not trying to market anything, although it’s hard to tell on the internet. It’s just all serious and mom-ish. It happens.

Here’s what I would’ve handed down if it was my mountain:

1. Take responsibility: Be active in your life and community. Make lots of friends by giving. (Caveat: Share responsibility, know how to take; monopolizing and refusing help puts you and others in impossible positions.) (I suck at the Caveat.)
2. Be spiritual in a way that speaks to you; Even if you are an atheist there has to be Something Larger than yourself and your own needs and urges that brings you meaning. (I think this was also, approximately, God’s #2.)
3. Make the best of things; Perspective, circumspection, ingenuity, friendship, positive assumptions, SENSE OF HUMOR, and hope beat victimhood and anger every time. It’s your choices, stupid.
4. Expect a lot of yourself and try not to expect too much of others (unless they are your kids in which case, expect the hell out of them, as per each child’s abilities.) No one owes you anything. (Except this one guy whose book I edited….never mind.)
5. Help the people who can not do 1-4. They will make you angry and crazy and you may need to unplug from some of them. But those are the people who need your help, so when you can, you must.
6. Do not lie to yourself. This is the source of all of the world’s ills, as far as I am concerned. Honesty with yourself makes 1 – 5 possible.
7. Do not blame. (See #’s 1,3 and 4. But it bears repeating.) Rider to this clause, as the traits generally co-habit: Do not be overly sensitive when criticized. Try to use it, or forget it.
8. Do not be Wasteful. Water, talent, friendship, energy, time, words. All of it: Conserve. (I sometimes suck at this. I wonder if God ever sucked at any of His commandments.)
9. Do not confuse anxiety and control with any of the following: love, competency, self-confidence, help, thoroughness, creativity, parenting. (I sometimes suck at this, too.)
10. Do not spend time or effort on jealousy and comparing yourself to others; it leads to the abominable sin of knocking others down to build yourself up. (Actually, I think this was also God’s #10.)

(Notable good ones that didn’t make it into my cannon: Take care of yourself; Don’t pay attention to what others think; Be realistic; Think before you act. I figured I’d let someone who actually practices those put them in their own top ten.)

Now it’s time to bake and cook a whole lot b/c I hyper-excel at #4.

While I sweat in the kitchen, I would love for you to write about YOUR top ten in the comments section. WWYHDTM? (What Would You Hand Down The Mountain?)

Marketing, comedic, serious, or otherwise. Will be reading after weekend (since God’s #4, I also do. It happens.)

Hag Sameach (Happy Holiday)!

Illustration: Dali's Melting Clocks

I have always been troubled by what my mother calls time management. I’m sure other people call it that, too, but I heard it first when I was twelve, trying to get ready for school but repeatedly getting sidetracked for reasons hair-related. “Boy, do you have a problem with managing time,” she would say. I had no idea what she meant, of course, because time, as I knew, could not be managed, only experienced, or – perhaps – tamed and ridden, like a horse, or a wave.

One of us was missing the point entirely.

My relationship with time has only gotten more intense over the years, although what suffers now is not my productivity – which is actually quite impressive given my life stats (although not necessarily in pecuniary terms) – but the amount of time I sleep, or do anything much outside of “have to.”

I am also usually either 10 minutes late or about to be running 20 minutes late, or doing something way too close to the deadline, or almost just past it, or doing what my father calls “shitting around,” which is basically self-explanatory. (Or else I’m giving a child a bath or tucking another one into bed. THAT, somehow, I manage to do right on time.)

It is not that I am at odds with structure, and actually find much satisfaction and competency in routine. I am, in fact, Queen of the List. Super Organized and Neat. Almost…A Jewish Bree Van de Kamp…Well, not really.

But still: RUSHED. Late. Preoccupied with what I’m not doing. Making new lists to compensate for what wasn’t done…..

I don’t want to disregard time. Really. I’m just 1. probably unrealistic as to how many hours a day has (what was the number again? ); 2. powerless, it would seem, to control time the way schedule-y people talk about doing.

It will blow on without my permission, manipulations, and illusions of punctuality. I’d simply like to be its friend, if it will have me. Harness it, and allow it to gallop freely, and hope I don’t fall off.

Because despite what the Clairol, Loreal, and Filofax people will tell you, time has a mind of its own, and we need to just be partners with it. Relatives will call to talk; special invitations pop-up unexpectedly; friends drop by to visit; a community or school function is at the worst time, but…; the need for kindness or hosting arises suddenly… in short: life happens. And saying no to some of these things on account of managing time really robs life of too much texture, too much love, too much opportunity.

Of course, saying yes to all of them is suicidal. My stay at home mom friends already know (after a few times of being actually kicked out by me when they showed up at my door…so sorry!!!) that I don’t do daytime chats, because despite all evidence to the contrary, I’m not REALLY home.

Also, the line between riding opportunity / diving into life and drowning completely in your own inefficiency or sleep deprivation or inability to say no is VERY thin. In my case I’d say, thin as a single hair. (Which no longer takes up any of my time, by the way. Ponytails and Headbands R Us.)

Those of us in creative fields are especially wary of this say YES! / say NO! dialectic, as web surfing / reading / social networking / blog commenting (all within reason) is not “shitting around” but actually part of creating and doing business. (Right?! Right?!)

Two of my colleagues, Marc and Sean, wrote excellent posts recently on their own blogs, variations on the theme of being a writer worthy of the title, managing to earn a living, gaining inspiration, and living with time, all in the same dimension. In fact, Marc wrote his in response to my distressed Twitter plea. Hats off, gentlemen.

But wristwatches: On.

Today is Mother’s Day in the US. That there is no Mother’s Day in Israel – only something called “Family Day,” celebrated around when Americans mark Groundhog Day at the end of winter – is a matter for another discussion entirely: On consumerism and cultural expressions of appreciation for the role of motherhood. But seriously, I can’t get into now, so don’t make me. Let me just say that in Israel, there is no Mother’s Day, but paid maternity leave is 3 months long and you can generally get an additional 6 months unpaid, where they will hold your job for you. But I digress.

On Israeli Family Day, mothers receive cute poems from nursery school, usually adorned with a picture of the child (often taken by the teacher on the day you put him in the last shirt before laundry day), but there is none of the Hallmark Holiday feel that you have in the US…. And, sadly, no breakfast in bed, unless you happen to have just given birth and are actually IN the maternity ward. So…where I sit, today is May 10th.

This past Friday was another kind of Mother’s Day: The flip side, the dark side, the impossible side, the side that haunts every mother’s quiet moments until she chases the demons away. Friday was the “yahrzeit,” or anniversary of death, of Koby Mandell. You may remember Koby from the news, because the story is a hard one to forget. Koby was the 8th grader who, along with his friend, had cut school one beautiful day in May, 2001, as the second Intifada was heating up, to go explore the valley and caves near their home in Tekoa, a West Bank settlement not far from Efrat. They were found in the pre-dawn hours the next day, bludgeoned to death with large rocks, mangled to the point of having to be positively identified by dental records. Koby was going to turn 14 a few weeks later, in June.

The story struck the world dumb for a few minutes, before it moved on as usual. Me, it took a bit longer. The morning the boys were discovered in one of the Haritun caves, I was on the way to meet Sherri Mandell, Koby’s mother, at a lecture in Jerusalem. Sherri and I were friends from our days working as part of the content team of a promising Jerusalem startup, and, in the months after its inevitable collapse during the first market crash in the fall of 2000, used to meet for coffee along with our other ex-office mates next to the unemployment office.

I was in the car on the way to the lecture when I heard the news update: two boys had been found a few hours before murdered near Tekoa. One was from an American family. Immediately I called Sherri, to see if she knew the family, which I assumed she did: Tekoa is a tiny place. I figured our “date” was a no-go. But Sherri did not answer. A neighbor did. In a whisper. And told me the worst news I have ever heard in my life. I turned around and went home and started calling our mutual friends, and then got on my way to the funeral.

Of course, although it took a while to go on as usual, I did (other than being a little extra-neurotic, still, when it comes to my bigger kids going places on their own.) But going on as normal is a privilege Sherri didn’t, doesn’t, have. For her it is a daily nightmare, long after the news cycle spit the item out, long after many hundreds of “new” Israeli deaths – in four years of terror and eight years of rocket attacks and two wars – have come to replace it there.

But what Sherri and her husband, Seth Mandell, have done with the tragedy is astounding. Because while they can not go on as normal, they have most certainly gone on. First of all, Sherri wrote a book, The Blessings of a Broken Heart. It is a beautiful work, not just because Sherri is a writer of unblinking humor and sly depth and jolting clarity, but also because she is a human being of unparalleled morality. There is no raging for revenge, there is no extremist political fomenting.

Sherri is a mother who lost her son to terror – and she is a “settler,” as the media was quick to point out – and she does not indulge in hate or bigotry, or call for anyone’s blood. It is worth noting that at the entrance to the Shiva there was a sign: ‘We are here to mourn the death of our son. Please do not engage in political discussions.’ The Mandells have again and again redefined grace and humanity for anyone who meets them.

Second, the Mandells launched and continue to run the Koby Mandell Foundation, an organization formed to provide support to families – especially mothers and children – who have lost loved ones to terror. The foundation runs workshops and retreats and summer camps, all subsidized, to bring some joy and empathy into the lives of people who live daily with the pain of having had a loved one disappear in mid-sentence in a cloud of smoke and hatred. Despite their grief – with their grief – they seek only to help others heal. The Mandells are nothing short of an inspiration of the highest order.

In any event, every year, on the anniversary of Koby’s death, friends gather at the graveside for a memorial service. And every year, I am stunned by Koby’s friends: First they got taller. Then they grew facial hair and back muscles, while Koby was still not-yet-14. I thought to myself, in 2004, who are these teenagers and why are they here? Until I realized they were Koby’s classmates, and my heart sunk, for Sherri and Seth, and for the world, in general, that produces the kind of cruelty that makes going on and living sometimes a great blow. Then the friends got drafted and showed up in fatigues.

This past Friday, on Koby’s eighth yahrzeit, they were young men and women, 22 years old. The gathered friends of Seth and Sherri, who are from different places and stages in the Mandells’ life and often only see each other at this event, progress in time, as well. Especially the boys’ 8th grade teacher, the young rabbi who was clearly completely devastated by the event, and who is not quite so young anymore, and continues to show up every year and recite Psalms. Koby’s yahrzeit has become a measure of time for the assembled, and maybe also, as one speaker at the services this year pointed out, a measure of self: Where am I now that I wasn’t last year or the year before? Where should I be that I’m not?

This year, Sherri, in her characteristic way of being funny while she is in agony, wrote a poem – We Are Tired of Your Grave – that made me cry for a long time. Her son, Daniel, now almost 20 (He was not yet 12 at the time of the murder, and was called home from a school trip to sit Shiva) also wrote a poem, for his mother – This Is What She Does – which made me cry for even longer. Sherri and Daniel: The two of you owe me a tube of mascara.

Please do read them. I think they are the Mother’s Day poems of the ages.

At least here, where it never and always is Mother’s Day.