Today is my mother’s fifth yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death, and as usual, I like to impart a lesson from her. My mother was something of a Led Zeppelin fan. These days, it isn’t unusual to say, “my mother is a Led Zeppelin fan” because mothers today had the chance of growing up in the late 60′s or in the 70′s or 80′s. My mother grew up in the 40′s and 50′s and liked classical music. And Led Zeppelin. She was proud of the fact that she liked something hip with the young people and once corrected a student who mixed up Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in a picture. She told that story all the time; she loved that she was able to do that.

But she wasn’t really a metal or hard rock fan. She liked the Middle Eastern melodies and she liked Robert Plant’s lyrics. In fact, she started to build a lesson plan around Stairway to Heaven but never finished it, which is too bad, because that would have been this post. But it’s OK because I still have a something to say about what she taught me and have it relate to Led Zeppelin. You may have heard (and if you know me, you definitely have heard) that Jimmy Page is finally being sued by Jake Holmes over the song Dazed and Confused. Now, I should first say that I have always loved Zeppelin and that Dazed and Confused has always been one of my favorites of their songs. I liked LZ so much that I went to see The Firm in concert in the mid-80′s just so I could say I had seen Jimmy Page on stage. Wow, was he…. in concert. So you can imagine my dismay when in the age of the Internet I found that LZ had “borrowed” many of their songs from others, including lots of poor Folk and Blues musicians.

Several of them have sued and won and now appear on the credits of LZ’s songs. But I simply can’t begin to describe the chutzpah of taking someone’s music or lyrics, basing your song on it, and then simply putting your own name as the sole credit. And I think the most egregious example of this is the Jake Holmes one. Jake Holmes was a folk singer in the 60′s (and later a jingle writer – he came up with the “I’m A Pepper” and “Be All You Can Be” commercials) and when you listen to his version of Dazed and Confused, which came out a few years earlier, it’s clear that the LZ version is simply a copy with new lyrics, a different arrangement, and some instrumental additions. Further, he was the opening act for Jimmy Page’s previous band, the Yardbirds, who proceeded to do a cover of Dazed and Confused live with Jake Holmes’ original lyrics. Awkward! I am not sure why it took Holmes so long to sue. He has expressed bitterness and dismay over the years in interviews and said he attempted to contact Page to no avail. I hope he comes forward and explains but in the meantime, I am cheering for him.

Many people say that this was something artists of the 60′s did all the time: reference roots music in their songs. “Variations on a theme,” if you will. Not to mention, as Kohelet says in Ecclesiastes, there’s nothing new under the sun. All songs kind of sound like some other song. But here’s the important part: since I knew Kohelet said that and I know where it comes from, I began my sentence with “as Kohelet says….” Luckily, I don’t owe Kohelet any royalties. But this is something my mother taught me and it comes from Pirkei Avot, or “Ethics of the Fathers” in the Mishnah. The maxim goes, “whoever says something in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world.” We learn this from the Megillah of Esther (you remember that one from Purim, I’m sure) where Queen Esther tells the King in the name of Mordechai, that traitors are plotting against him.

My mother never quoted anyone else without saying, “I have to say this b’shem omro [in the name of the one who said it].” It was hugely important to her that the original writer or speaker got credit. Writing papers every week as I do, I constantly have to be aware of this and I wish Led Zeppelin had been, too. Because it’s OK to base our work on that of others; that’s how our society has always functioned. You just have to say so and let the world know who said it first.

Hear Jake Holmes’ Dazed and Confused on YouTube.
Hear Led Zeppelin’s Dazed and Confused on YouTube.

Title adapted from the Led Zeppelin version.

בזכות מרים נחמה בת הרב יצחק
זכרונה לברכה

Numbers are mostly arbitrary. I love the title of the Simpsons clip show, “The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular,” because really, just because we live in a base-ten society, does that mean there’s something so fantastic about numbers ending in zero? Numbers in Judaism really mean something but, as the Passover song, “Who Knows One?” shows you, there’s something special about pretty much every number. As promised, 613 is the number of mitzvot, or commandments, in the Torah. Now, you knew Jews had a lot of rules, but did you know how many? (Teachers guide says: 613). I like 613 mostly because it doesn’t really mean anything else. When I was a kid, I had a silver bracelet with three silver balls on it. I liked to think that they represented the members of the Police, about whom I obsessed all the livelong day. Clearly, they were a Christian symbol. Or a family. Or, you know, the whim of the jeweler. But when I see 613, I know that’s what it is.

No one can follow all 613 rules because some are for men and some are for women and some are for parents and some are for people with parents, etc. And even in the best of times, I never followed all that I could. But what I like about them is that they correspond to every aspect of your life. That is, with the smallest thing in your life, getting up in the morning or crossing the street, you could be doing those things in a way that benefits the universe and mankind. I know that seems heavy but I think it’s really a relief. Because one of the signs of growing up is that you start to search and think about what the meaning and purpose of your life and the world and all that exists is.

That could be the end of the post but just for fun, it’s actually the intro. I wanted to talk about growing up and random numbers because very soon, I’ll be hitting a round, base-ten number birthday. Not for a few months, but Summer break was when I always started thinking of myself as the next year older because I spent my summers as a child in the camp where my family worked and was surrounded by a different set of kids. Kids who had all had their birthdays in March and April. So in order to not seem a year younger than everyone else, I just pretended my Fall birthday had occurred in the Spring with the result that by the time my actual birthday rolled around, I had already mentally been that age for several months.

On my last zero-ending birthday, I spent a long time worrying about it. And then one day, for some reason I still am not sure about, that all vanished and I embraced it. I took a day off work, went to a spa, and had lunch with my parents and dinner with friends. Really a perfect, perfect day. But the day wasn’t that important in the scheme of things. The important part is that each decade has been better than the last. I mean, think about it. While new experiences are great, there’s something to be said about knowing what you’re doing and having the maturity and wisdom to handle everything that comes at you. I’m still not totally there but I wouldn’t trade the confidence I have now for any part of my “youth.” And I’m sure when I look back in ten or twenty years, I’ll laugh at how much I thought I knew at this age. Because that’s the way I look at my teens and twenties now. Excruciating. Don’t get me wrong, I miss the culture of my teens desperately (you may have noticed this) but not at all the awkwardness. And the wondering about what life would be. And the desperation of (gasp!) trying to find a guy to complete me. To be comfortable in your own skin is priceless, even if that skin isn’t as dewy fresh as it used to be.

A friend of mine from my youth, Molly Ringwald, just wrote a book for women of our age group, apparently. I doubt I’ll read it but I did like this one thing she said:

“When you’re a teenager, you’re forever thinking, ‘Do they like me?’ ” she writes. “When you’re a grown-up, as anyone over the age of 30 can attest, the question becomes, ‘Do I like them?’ ”

“I never thought I would be glad to be older,” she said, finishing her pinot grigio, “but it is kind of a relief.”

Amen. So in the end, I think numbers are really as meaningful as you want them to be. If you want to use a base-ten birthday to celebrate how far you’ve come and to be thankful for another year on this fine earth of ours, that’s all well and good. And if the 613th post on your blog reminds you to add meaning to all your actions, I’m sure that’s just what God and Al Gore intended when they invented the Internet. But I think every number is special.

Now, we all know the meaning of life is also a number: 42. But now that I’ve grown up a bit (and really, just a bit), I think I’ve come back around to my original view, that it’s about giving to others. And maybe this is the decade where I’ll really make that happen in the way I promised to in my high school yearbook. I’ve certainly gotten smart enough to have a better haircut. But of course, I’m no longer a person who needs to express who she is through her hairstyle, so that’s already a contribution to mankind.

Just as I was finishing this post, Postsecret appeared in my feed reader with this as its final (oops, not final… just where I stopped reading!) postcard:



I considered making it a whole other post but decided that it worked in this one. I sometimes think that my twenties were spent trying to relocate the life that had been sucked out of me by that place. All I can say to this person is that life is a journey and that your sacrifice made you the person you are… not your education. This person may be talking about an entirely different sacrifice, but for me, I never think about whether it was worth it. It happened, I got through it, I like who I am, and even though seeing this picture made me want to cry, it’s all good now. It will be good, I swear.

Lene Lovich – Lucky Number

In Hebrew it’s:
Esah einai el heharim,
me’ayin me’ayin yavo ezri
Esah einai el heharim,
me’ayin me’ayin yavo ezri

Ezri me’im Hashem,
Oseh shamayim va’aretz
Ezri me’im Hashem,
Oseh shamayim va’aretz

If you left your Book of Psalms in your other pants, it’s this one:
I lift up my eyes to the hills
From whence will come my help.

My help comes from the Lord
The maker of heaven and earth.

About two or three times around that song, I could pretty much forget he existed.

Today, my former co-worker who ended up with my job and is the son of a preacher and a very churchy guy himself, has this as his Facebook status message:

I am blessed even with all the problems I have to face. I stand strong! I am able to stand because my faith is solid. I look to the hill which cometh my help. I say to you, stand strong on your faith.

Now, Pious B is laughing at this because I like to send her this guy’s mangled inspirational status messages for fun. But I do NOT think this is a coincidence. Seriously, you need Psalm 121 to survive that job; it should be listed in the requirements.

Even Korean tourists to Israel love Esah Einai!

Now, I’ll get a couple of things out of the way here. While I reeeeally loathe those “Lord, I pray you take Obama in all caps” status messages on Facebook, the ones from my “friends” were all by Jews. Statistically, that’s about right since two thirds or more of my Facebook friends are Jewish. So I didn’t think of that as a particularly Christian thing. And OK, I’ll flat out admit it, as a Yid, people saying they are God-fearing Christians and yet not acting Jesusy has never been a particular concern of mine. I guess I’m just self-policing. I’ll let the Goyim handle that one, because I really couldn’t tell you what’s Jesusy or not.

No, in actuality, the thing that inflamed me most about the post was not hypocritical Christians at all but the fact that Jaron is Jewish. So the stuff about his church and his preacher and his Jesus, well, he doesn’t really have any of those. Or he’s not supposed to, one would think. For me, the issue wasn’t that a Christian wrote a hateful song; it was that he wasn’t a Christian at all! So why should I care that one Jewish guy wrote a song from a Christian point of view? Why was the central question in my mind, “what happened to Jaron????” This is the background.

A long time ago, Jaron and his twin brother had a band called, creatively, Evan and Jaron. If you are a religious Jew, that’s really the end of the explanation. For the rest of the world, they had a hit called “Crazy For This Girl.” But even before they had that hit, they were our band. When I was little, like most music-crazed kids, I wanted to be a rock star. Or marry a rock star. But it never occurred to me that that could ever happen because I was an Orthodox Jew and rock stars played shows on Friday nights and had TV appearances on Saturdays and traveled around to places with no Kosher food. More importantly, there just weren’t any, so you knew it wasn’t possible. Then we had Evan and Jaron who were Kosher and didn’t play shows on Shabbat. And I knew this earlier than most people because I worked at their first label (the one before the hit… but we did try hard).

And here’s the part where I take it really personally. When we were working Evan and Jaron, I think the person most excited about them in the whole entire world was my mother. Although not really a t-shirt person, she loved the “got shabbos?” tee we made to market them. She adored the list I showed her of Kosher restaurants staffers were given so they could take E&J out in any town. She was thrilled that the kids had a role model. I’m sort of glad she never got to hear Pray For You. I don’t think if she were alive I’d even tell her.

So I really, really wanted to know what happened to Jaron. Wikipedia has just a sentence about the new band (which is just Jaron, I think) and skips right from Evan and Jaron to that. I felt like there was a yawning gap there that needed to be addressed. The person who is always in the know about these things is Pious B, so I wrote her. She wasn’t sure but thought it was doubtful that he was no longer Jewish and that it was all just a reinvention. But it still bothered me so I called someone I know at his new label and this person said, “are you sure it’s the same guy?” I guess the Evan & Jaron backstory is not a huge piece of the marketing plan. Intriguing. I reported back to Pi to tell her I was still investigating, and she said, “I will be checking for a Jaron post. He may be a Jewish traitor but he’s still a hot bitch.” Indeed.

Later that day, I received this cryptic message:

From: Pious B
Subject: Add to Twitter

JaronATLRTL

Yee haw!
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

But I did not want to follow Jaron on Twitter. And yet… so I answered, “Oh, I don’t think so. But I’ll ask him if he’s still a yid.” Pi said, “I think he’s a MOT in name only. I always got the impression that the Evan portion of the duo was the religiously committed one, but you would know better than I.”

So I sent my own letter to Jaron, via Twitter. I asked him if he was still a practicing Jew. Now, I don’t for one minute think that account is actually Jaron. I assume it’s one of Jaron’s marketing people as it’s mostly retweets of people saying they like the song. And, in fact, after waiting a day and remarking that I still had no answer to my question, I finally got, “what question? Thanks for loving the song.” Well, I never said I loved the song and in fact I’ve never actually heard the song and don’t expect to. But I asked again. I said, “what’s a nice Jewish guy doing singing about church & preachers? Are you still a practicing Jew?” That was about as deep as I could get in 140 characters.

Finally, he answered.

I’d like to state, first and foremost, that Pi nailed it, as usual. Also, that whatever I think about Jaron’s decision to reinvent himself for the Country market, I respect this answer and the fact that he even answered at all. I’m not as religious as I was in 1998 either and would find it hard to respond to that in public, in fewer than 140 characters, and with a sense of humor. With regards to that reinvention, when I worked in the record store, for seven Christmases I had to listen to weeks of holiday music and a good portion of it was Jews singing Christmas songs. A Jew, as we all know, wrote White Christmas. I used to joke that I was going to put together a collection of these numbers and call it, “Shalom, it’s Christmas!” Let’s face it, it’s hard to make a living just marketing to MOT’s. But as I told Pi, I just wanted to know whether Jaron was doing a “Barbara Streisand sings Silent Night” thing or if it was a “Bob Dylan plays for Jesus’ team now” deal. Because it deeply matters to me and, I suspect, to a lot of girls who used to go to Evan and Jaron concerts in modest outfits.

The interesting thing, though, is that, as I said, I couldn’t tell you whether “Pray For You” is in the spirit of Jesus or not; that’s not my department. What I can say is that it’s actually a Jewish theme to wish these sorts of things on your enemies. Things like, “may you grow like an onion with your head in the ground.” Here it is on a cross stitch on Etsy. And here’s a list of some other traditional Yiddish curses. So it’s actually sort of a Mosesey thing. I once saw a documentary where someone said, “Christians never dreamed of white Christmases until Irving Berlin told them they should.” I’m truly happy to hear that Jaron still identifies as a Jew but maybe the Yiddish curses don’t translate as well. Still, I wish him well and much success on the new venture. And don’t forget, shuls rhymes with lulz. You can keep that one.

For those on Jesus’ team, MOT = member of the tribe = Jewish

Evan And Jaron – Crazy For This Girl

But it’s Passover and I miss my Chik’n nuggets and tangy BBQ sauce snack/quick meal. So I went to my local Kosher shop and just knew that they would have pre-made chicken nuggets and they did. But even if you are like me and are well aware that all the extra costs of cleaning for Passover are built into your food, you might not be prepared for the fact that they were selling four chicken fingers (maybe about the size of 1.5 nuggets each?) for $5.15. Seriously. The mind boggles. So instead I walked away with a package of chicken breast and a box of the Passover equivalent of Shake n’ Bake which is made of the ubiquitous mix of matzah meal (or matzah mel as my mother called it; I think that’s Yiddish), potato starch, and spices. Then I went home, cut up the chicken into nugget size, and proceeded to create some semblance of what we call chicken nuggets. And they tasted fab!

Hey, did you know that you can’t have dishes made with flour or corn, like breaded chicken nuggets, noodles, or corn flakes, on Passover? If so, then you are already ahead of the Pioneer Woman, everyone’s favorite Internet recipe sharer. Now, this is not to take an easy poke at Ree because God bless her for doing a Passover recipe when she’s not even Jewish and I doubt more than 5% of her readers are. For the record, here are her three mistakes:

1. A noodle kugel, and with corn flake topping, for Passover
2. Stating originally that a dairy recipe should be served with meat.
3. Correcting herself to state that the kugel isn’t Kosher for Passover because it’s dairy and the seder is a meat meal. In fact, you can easily have a dairy seder, but either way, serving dairy with meat isn’t not Kosher for Passover, it’s not Kosher, period.

But again, hurray to her for trying, and the inadvertently comical nature was kind of awesome. No, instead I’d like to pick a quibble with the commenters. I should state right off that it’s already my pet peeve when people ewewew others’ food choices (if I had to list my top ten reasons why I’m happy to no longer be at Big Ass Record Company, the guy who said “ew, that is so gross” every time I had fish for lunch would be way up there), but it’s somehow even more disturbing when it’s an ethnic or religious food item. Maybe I’m too politically correct but those “I could never eat that staple of life those people have been eating for forever” comments just rub me the wrong way. That’s all to say that, Ree, I forgive you for your totally wrong Noodle Kugel on Passover recipe and bringing a ham to someone’s seder (really!) but I just cannot forgive your commenters for:

“When I saw the word ‘Kugel,’ I thought you were giving us a recipe for Kegel exercises.”

“this is the first time I’ve questioned your recipe sanity. I twitched a little when you dumped the sugar in the noodles.”

“Well, I cringed when I saw the peaches.”

“Sorry this one does not look good to me at all. Peaches and noodles in the same dish. ??”

“I have a thing about mixing foods together that should not be. Noodles-Peaches- nuh-uh!”

“Umm.. This has got to be one of the most bizarre recipes… LOL… not sure I want to try it…”

“No… nope, nuh-uh, negative. You will NEVER convince me to eat noodles mixed with peaches and baked in milk… blargh”

“Nastiest crap EVER!”

One person even blogged about how this Jewish custom was an aberration of nature. Thanks!

So, a PSA for an Easter-Passover morning: Ashkenazic Jews eat something called kugel. The noodle kind often has bits of fruit in it. Get over it! Learn to live experimentally like this well-intentioned yet spellingly-challenged person:

“I would never think to combine egg noodles with fruit…so different, at least to me. I need a potlock dish, so maybe I’ll try this. Thanks for expanding my pallet.”

Indeed. Remember, we grew up on hummus before PW’s readers could tell it apart from spackling paste. And look at what’s the trendy food now. But even if you could never do that, how about, “I’ve never heard of such a dish, with noodles and peaches. Interesting. Very interesting.” Someone did say that, despite the fact that I didn’t put it in blockquotes. It messed up my unified paragraph. But see how you can say, “I would never eat that” without telling an entire culture that you think their customs are freakish?

Not to mention, realize that things you eat every day would seem gross in abstraction, you are just used to eating them. Dried out, processed grain cereal floating in cow’s milk….ew! A chicken’s unfertilized egg? Blech. Have you never traveled and tasted something that you’d never even considered a food but that tasted divine? No? You need to get out more. This is one of the reasons why Jamie Oliver thinks he needs to change Americans’ food habits. But as much as all that annoys me, mocking someone’s traditions is always off-limits to a well-brought-up person. I’m not trying to be an offense collector, I just think it’s sort of a rude thing to do. I always wanted to call that guy at work’s parents and tell them they missed an important piece of parenting.

But thanks, Pioneer Woman, for being inclusive, even if your audience isn’t quite ready to expand their, er, pallets. Just don’t bring a ham to my seder.

So although you hear a lot about how crazy Passover is and how hard the work is to create it, there will be an element of relaxation for me and I am looking forward to that. Hope everyone who is celebrating has a happy holiday and a happening seder!

Still no Napster substitute. Working on it!

1. Hamantaschen, of course. Three flavors, as always: raspberry, apricot, and Nutella. I am disappointed that my new discovery, Freezerves, will not arrive in time for the marathon. So I’ll have to use regular jam. And regular Nutella, but that was never a question. I’ve never actually tasted Freezerves but they sound awesome and I don’t want to tell you how much I paid for the sample.

2. In the all-important bar cookie spot will be Oatmeal Carmelitas. I would have made last year’s huge success, Paxilrose’s Chocolate Chip Crack (many of you know this excellent recipe), but because of #4 I had to go with something else. I love Oatmeal Carmelitas. Love.love.love. And I don’t get a chance to make these enough, because everyone wants chocolate. I actually like caramel more than chocolate. Don’t tell anyone.

3. In the easy-peasy category, Peanut Butter Cookies. I always have one regular “cookie jar” cookie. Maybe a little homely, maybe something everyone makes, but when it’s just 25% of the total, it’s perfect. It’s the filler cookie because it doesn’t need to be rolled, filled, frosted, sandwiched, or manipulated in any way. I don’t count that sugary cross-hatch that you make. And I’ve made these a million times, too, so there’s no worry about how they will turn out. Before you ask, no one on my list has any nut allergies!

4. Filling out the container in the “something new and interesting” slot are these, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Truffles. I’ve never made any kind of candy before but I use a similar recipe in my Cookie Dough Brownies so it seems a logical next step. Could these be as amazing as they look? We’ll find out!

Narrowly getting cut out of the novelty spot were Orange Spice Cookies but they had too much spice and when you are dealing with a small, confined container, spices and mint are out. Unless you want a lot of cookies which all look different but somehow all taste of spices or mint. I need an occasion to try those out, though. Someone please give me one.

And, of course, mishloach manot packages have to have foods from two different brachot, that is, foods that have two different blessings said over them. Cookies all come from the same category which is for things made of grain other than bread, so I need another. I usually stick a tea bag in there (the drink blessing), mostly because it’s easy, but also so you can make a dirty joke if you choose. This year I was at Target and briefly pondered raisins (the fruit blessing) but I hate raisins and whenever I get them in someone else’s package I’m dismayed. But they come in cute little boxes! So I was torn. And then I saw that they now have 100 calorie packs of Craisins. Mmmm, Craisins. So now it will be four kinds of cookies plus lil bags of craisins. Score!

I’ll let you know how it all turns out, hopefully with pictures. Only three baking days till Purim!

This song would have worked better if I were including cheap wine instead of the Craisins, but oh well.
Gang Of Four – To Hell With Poverty

But what are Tefillin and what special powers do they have to bring down planes? In English, Tefillin are known as phylacteries, although I have never heard anyone use this word in my life in conversation. It’s more for the English translation of books about Jews. Or blogs about Jews. But we’re going to use Tefillin here. The use of Tefillin stems from the Biblical commandment to “bind [my words] as a sign upon your arm, and they shall be as symbol between your eyes.” (Deuteronomy 6:8). Like most commandments, observant Jews take these sorts of things pretty literally and that’s exactly what is done. Essentially, Tefillin are two small leather boxes with attached leather straps and they are worn on and wrapped around the head and arm. Inside each of the boxes are parchment scrolls upon which are written the following Biblical verses: the first two sections of the essential prayer of faith, the Shma (which also includes the verse above), Deut. 6:4-9 and 11:13-21, and as well, Exodus 13:1-10, and 11-16 which also reference the reasons for wearing Tefillin.

These verses are a sort of instruction on to what extent one should adhere to God’s words. Take them to your heart. Tell them to your children. Say them when you’re at home and when you go out, when you lie down and when you get up. Wear them on your head and on your arm. Put them on your doorposts and gates (that’s the mezuzah part, in case you recognized it). By donning the Tefillin during prayer, one has God’s words smack against their skin and has their actions (the arm) and their mind devoted to God’s words.

There are elaborate instructions on how to wear Tefillin. I don’t know them because I’m a chick and I don’t have to (women are not required by Jewish law to do time-bound commandments) but apparently it pretty much becomes second nature. It’s a big deal when a Bar Mitzvah gets to wear them for the first time. Then, four years later he gets arrested on a plane.

Even my friend Pammy from Tulsa which is all the way in that state with the surreys with the fringes on top has seen Tefillin. Maybe you have too! They look like this:

And like this when they’re being worn:

Should you wish to reach your destination without a pit-stop in Philly (and who wants that? I kid!), please print these pictures out and show them to your local flight attendant.

Depeche Mode – Wrong

Hey! It’s a special month on the Jewish calendar and that month is called Adar. It’s awesome and special because you’re commanded to be happy the whole month. Yes, indeed, doomed to happiness for four plus weeks. The happiness thing is because Adar is the month with Purim, one of those holidays where the Jews were saved from certain death (well, almost certain, obviously) and that’s a giant excuse for a party. Tomorrow night begins Purim, the holiday where you give gifts of baked goods to your friends and it’s a mitzvah to get bombed off your ass. That might not be the exact language the Talmud uses, but that’s really the rule.

My Mom was a Jewish educator, as I’ve stated many times here, and she liked to wear a giant button on her coat at this time of year that embarrassed me beyond the limits of teenage humiliation. It said, “Be happy! It’s Adar!” in Hebrew and English. Oh Mom! When I was in college, my grandma died during that month and after that, it was terribly hard for my Mom to be happy then but she wore the big green button anyway. Sometimes commandments are hard. After she died, we found that my Mom had like ten of these buttons. Ha! I kept one but, you know, I don’t actually walk down the street with the thing on my coat.

Too cool. You know what’s even more cool? Someone wrote me based on this post and asked:

Hi! My son’s bar mitzvah is coming up (soon!!) on Rosh Chodesh Adar, and so “Be Happy, It’s Adar!” will be the theme. We’re thinking of giving out Adar/Purim kits containing a gragger, tzedakah box, bag for shalach manot, etc. I’d like to look into including a “Be Happy, It’s Adar!” button, though we might have to have them made up, as I don’t see any being sold online. Can you tell me more about what your mom’s button looked like, or what the Hebrew wording was? A photo would be really helpful, but anything you can tell me would be really appreciated!

JM

This.is.awesome. Could there be a better theme than this? In a world of Star Trek and Twilight themes, this.is.awesome. Kudos upon kudos. In case you had not surmised from this letter, it’s not yet Adar but it’s fast coming down the pike. So I went digging down into the mildewed basement to my storage space and between the little ceramic challah I made my Mom for Mother’s Day and her check cashing card to Seven Mile Market (come on, I had to save that) was the button. It’s nothing special, I have to say. But what struck me was the Hebrew on it which says, “Mishenichnas Adar, marbin b’simchah.” This does not literally mean “Be happy, it’s Adar.” It means, “When Adar begins, we increase in happiness.” So this made me wonder where this statement comes from and how it got translated into some kind of forceful command. Do it! Be happy!

Turns out it’s from a section of the Talmud called Ta’anit and it’s the second half of a statement which begins by talking about the saddest month of the Jewish calendar, Av. That’s the one where so many tragedies befell the Jewish people including the destruction of both Temples as well as the expulsion from Spain. Bear with me here, because I do not have the complete Talmud in my home and didn’t have time to run over to the Beit Hamidrash (house of study, but in this case, a room in my synagogue with lots o’holy books).

But supposedly, it goes like this. “Rav Yehuda the son of Shmuel the son of Shilat says in the name of Rav: Just as one is required to minimize happiness when the month of Av begins, so too when the month of Adar begins, we increase happiness.” (T.B. Ta’anit 29a)

And so, I’m really glad that I got asked this question so I could learn this. It makes it even more appropriate that my mother was able to get over her sadness to rejoice in Adar, because that’s apparently what it’s actually about, the time to be happy as opposed to the time to be sad. And maybe sad is the wrong word because it doesn’t say that; it says, “minimize” your happiness. Maybe that’s because we’re essentially a happy people. We don’t really need to be told to be happy, just when to lessen our happiness and when to increase it. Or maybe that’s the way it used to be and nowadays, we’re all too stressed and worried and we really do need that reminder, because happiness is not just a good thing, it’s required. So be happy, it’s Adar! (soon!)

Since a Bar Mitzvah exemplifies the future of the Jewish people, it is even more appropriate that it be held in Adar which is the flip side of Av, the month of destruction. I hope that your son’s Bar Mitzvah is a time of great joy for you, JM, and that through him you increase the happiness of all around you.

And, well, I hope you find a slightly more attractive button than this one. Mazal tov!

Doesn’t Andre look soulful? That’s because he knows I won’t have time to read this until my semester is over. Have faith, Zen Master.

I am Serious Chris Noth. Do not look at the sexy, I’m just here to catch perps. CHA-CHUNG!

Brownie pan! With lid! I have been looking for one for ages; tin foil on top of the 9×9 is just not my speed. Also shown, potholders to match new kitchen < Vanna White hand motion >.

Awwww! Isn’t it darling? It’s a mini crockpot which serves one to two. One is for when you’re not visiting me and I scarf down the whole thing. I mean, uh, leftovers.

Actually, I have one of these already but it finishes cooking in five hours and I like my crockpots like my… oh never mind, let’s just stick with “this one’s better.” Also, it says it’s great for party dips and I am nothing if not a party dip.


But (serious voice), I don’t want to get away from the real meaning of Hannukah. The hearkening back to a time when the brave Maccabees rid Israel of the scourge of people who sought to assimilate and take on the ways of the foreign conquerors. So now we celebrate their victory by watching eight days of Law & Order. CHA-CHUNG!

Or not. Sorry, I’m full of jelly doughnut.

Once upon a time, long long ago, this was my favorite song on earth, I kid you not. Scott Muni used to play it on “Things From England” on WNEW. Then Wham! became big and I pretended I never liked it.

Title comes from:
Wham! – Everything She Wants