Ron Newman

I had intended to go to the crafts fair at the Dulles Expo Center yesterday or today but was too busy trying to do things at home to manage that. And I have a commitment tomorrow, so no crafts fair for me this year. The Dulles Expo Center is closing so no more for that venue for me. (In case anybody wondered, it’s being replaced by an Ikea.) It’s not like I really need more jewelry and I’m well stocked up on local honey.

I did make it down to my condo complex holiday party tonight for a little while. They had the usual heavy hors d’oeuvres, which were okay. The best things they had were a decent malbec and lots of chocolate covered strawberries. It seemed less crowded than usual, but I had gone right at the beginning and didn’t stay long because i had a story swap to go to over zoom.

I told a brief Chanukah in Chelm story. Jane told “Prince Rooster,” which is a story I also tell. John told a story in India involving a young girl and a tiger. The highlight was (as usual for this time of year) Margaret telling “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas.

I said that my feelings about religion deserve their own entry, so here goes. In short, it’s complicated.

To start with my maternal grandfather had a rabbinic degree though he made his living as a watchmaker / jeweler. He was definitely a scholarly type and wore a yarmulke at home, though I don’t remember him wearing it in his store or on excursions to the zoo or the like. My uncle was sent to a Jewish day school but my mother went to public school and she just barely knew even the Hebrew alphabet. I believe that this sexism affected her interest (or lack thereof) in religious observance.

My paternal grandfather had a cantorial degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. My father’s religious education was pretty much entirely in Lithuania as a child. Both dad and grandpa were survivors of the Kovno ghetto and Dachau.

The key thing is that my parents were more concerned with community than with religion per se. That is, Mom went to shul (Yiddish for synagogue) pretty much only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, though she was active in Sisterhood. Dad, however, went regularly, largely to make sure they would have a minyan (the quorum of ten men required to perform certain parts of Jewish services. Back in those days, even Conservative synagogues only counted men, though nowadays most Conservative synagogues also count women.) Dad was also one of the key members of the building committee when our synagogue built an addition. And he edited the congregation’s newsletter for at least a few years. (There is a hereditary illness in my family that leads us to edit newsletters, but that’s a separate subject.)

But in strictly religious, versus cultural, terms, I grew up in the house of the holy dishes. That is, my parents kept a nominally kosher home but would go out to eat shrimp wrapped in bacon at a local Chinese restaurant. All of the summer camps I went to had some Jewish content. One of them had brief Friday night services for example. The most influential of those camps was Camp Ein Harod, the socialist Zionist camp I went to for two summers and the source of a couple of my most popular stories. And, well, let’s just say that the first Broadway musical I ever saw was Fiddler on the Roof and my cousin David sang “Sunrise, Sunset” at every family occasion. (And, by the way, every Jew has a cousin named David.)

Which pretty much meant that I was all set to follow in the tracks of my parents and be a typical American cultural (but not especially religious) Jew. Until I got very friendly with Debby in 10th grade. She had gone to the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County up to that point and was modern Orthodox. And, at some point, she persuaded me to go to a Shabbaton (basically, a weekend retreat, including Shabbat services and learning sessions and lots of singing) that was affiliated with Torah Leadership Seminar. Debby sold this to me as a good way to meet boys. (Hey, we were teenage girls. As my father once said, I had a one-track mind, but a lot of trains ran on that track.)

Anyway, I had a great time and went to other events, including Seminar itself (a weeklong retreat) a couple of times. And by the time I started college, I considered myself modern Orthodox. I kept kosher and kept shabbat fairly strictly, though I did eat vegetarian food and fish in non-kosher restaurants, which was not uncommon among Orthodox Jews in the late 1970’s but is more or less unheard of nowadays. I continued being pretty much observant for several years, through graduate school at least, though I did sometimes relax my shabbat observance somewhat when traveling.

So what changed? I can’t pinpoint one thing, but my relationship situation (aka the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling) was a factor, since he is not at all religious. But, more to the point, most Orthodox synagogues only interest in single women is getting them married off. (And not just Orthodox shuls for that matter. After my father died, my mother felt out of place at the shul she’d gone to for 20-something years.) Basically, once I was in a non-academic environment, I had a hard time finding a community that worked for me.

Now, I’m not entirely non-observant. I’m not about to start eating pork and shellfish. I pay attention to the Jewish holidays in planning travel and so on, though I don’t really go to shul regularly. I’ve found some other sources of community, largely via the storytelling world. And I have some Jewish connections, though more cultural than religious. I’m not really satisfied with that state of things, but I need to find a way to clarify what I really want so I can look for the right fit.

One thing I should clarify because people make assumptions, is that I am not an atheist. I have a definite personal vision of G-d. In short, I am not sure whether or not I believe in G-d, but I definitely believe in godliness, the power of people to behave in ways that do good in the world.

As I said to start with, it’s complicated.

I had a fairly busy day today. I needed to go to Trader Joe’s since I used the last of my vitamin tablets this morning. (TJ’s is the only place around here that sells chewable multivitamins that aren’t gummies.) I leveraged off that errand to see the movie Rental Family. Wednesday is senior citizen discount day, with $7 tickets all day. I knew very little about the movie beforehand, but found it quite enjoyable. The essential story has to do with an American actor in Japan (played by Brendan Fraser) who takes a job playing stand-in roles for strangers, e.g. acting as the groom at a wedding for a bride whose actual relationship is with another woman. It’s very funny at times, but it also raises interesting questions about the ethics of this business.

The evening involved a committee meeting for the Women’s Storytelling Festival, which will be in March. I stepped up to be the volunteer coordinator again, a job I did a couple of times, but had stepped back from the past two years. Expect to hear some shameless self-promotion over the next few months.

I am lacking ideas on what to write about today. Or, actually, I have ideas - just not interesting ones.

I had my semi-annual HVAC tune-up this morning. The guy showed up on time, at least. Inevitably, he suggested something non-essential that would cost a few hundred dollars but I am ignoring it for now.

I did make a little progress on cleaning out some email.

And I played games on-line with puzzle people for the first time in ages tonight.

Sorry, I’ll try to be more interesting tomorrow.

Getting back to normal life, here are my replies to the November blog prompts.

1. What was your high school's mascot or motto? Team colours? Our mascot was the ram. And our team colors were black and gold.

2. If your life was a reality TV show, what would be the hook that would draw viewers in? I think it would be a cross between Game of Wool and Hoarders.

3. What book setting would you like to visit, if you could? May I please move into a flat at 77 Scotland Street?

4. If you had to sacrifice one of your senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing), which would you choose and why? I think losing any of them would be horrible. I could probably survive best without a sense of taste, since smell contributes a lot to what we experience as taste.

5. What are you saving up for? I’m always saving up for the next trip.

6. What's your favorite place to escape from life temporarily? A park? A mall? Ideally, I’d be somewhere alongside an ocean. But that’s a long drive from where I live. Closer to home, we have some very nice botanical gardens.

7. Would you rather be rich and famous or just rich? Why? I’d rather just be rich. If one is also famous, they are inevitably surrounded by people who want something from them.

8. If you found treasure worth millions in your backyard, would you keep it a secret or would you tell the world? It depends on what the treasure is. If it were something of cultural / archeological significance (e.g. Sutton Hoo), I would tell the world. Or, more accurately, tell experts who could tell the world.

9. Have you ever been in a car wreck? How many? Whose fault was it? I’ve been in a few (fortunately minor) car accidents. When I was in high school, I was hit by a car while crossing the street on my way home from the school bus. That was obviously not my fault. I was lucky to be only bruised. Later on, I totaled my first car by skidding into a guard rail on a rainy day. That was obviously my fault.

10. Who is your all-time favorite sports player? It’s so hard to choose one. For sheer character and eccentricity, I’ll have to go with Bill “Spaceman” Lee. His love for baseball was (still is?) almost tangible.

11. Describe your best childhood friend. Kathy was my best friend starting about 4th grade. I knew her in school and her family moved down the block from me about then. We spent countless hours playing hopscotch, listening to music, and just hanging out.

12. Has religion played a role in your life? How? This is very complicated and probably deserves its own blog post.

13. What is something you are pessimistic about? The future of the United States given the current administration and, especially, the Supreme Court’s lack of respect for precedent.

14. What did you postpone that needs your immediate attention? Answering a bunch of emails.

15. How much water do you drink in a day? Probably on the order of 6 to 8 cups, depending on how much other stuff I drink.

16. What do you think is the least important body part or feature, and why? I can’t think of any body part I’d really want to do without, frankly.

17. If everyone in the world were vegan, would that persuade you to change your diet? Why? Why not? I suppose that would lead to a lack of availability of non-vegan food, so I’d more or less have to. But I wouldn’t be happy about that. While a lot of what I do eat is vegan (or, at least, vegetarian), I do also think of tuna as one of the key elements of what I consider Purina Miriam chow.

18. Describe a favourite piece of clothing - and why it is special to you I have a particularly spectacular little black dress. with elaborate folds. It goes perfectly with my feathered hat and feather boa for a very 1920’s look

19. Which decade of fashion was your favourite and least favourite? I remember liking the late 1980’s when we all wore shoulder pads, which did wonders for making me look like I had a waistline. As for least favorite, there was a different part of the 1980’s when I dressed a lot in very bright colors so I could be seen across a crowded room.

20. What’s something important that you’ve never forgotten? My father used to say that you should always try to do your best and nobody can ask more than that of you.

21. What made you smile today? There were some funny lines in a book I just started reading.

22. What is something you loved to do as a child but stopped doing? Would you like to pick it up again? I loved making music and really haven’t done that in a long time.

23. Waves are those things we face that cause movement to our inner balance. How do you approach waves? I approach those things the same way I approach ocean waves - jump straight into them.

24. What different hobbies and interests have you had throughout your life? There are various categories of hobbies and interests I’ve had. In terms of general categories, I’ve always been an avid reader. I’ve always loved music - both playing and listening - and, except for various injuries in more recent years, have done a lot of different types of dancing. Crafting (mostly with yarn and paper) has always been a big part of my life, too. I’ve also collected various things over the years, with dolls probably being the biggest category. (I am particularly fond of paper dolls, by the way.) And, of course, I always wanted to travel and have been fortunate to have been able to do so.

25. In light of the Internet, do we even need schools any more? The Internet is useful for looking up facts, though one needs to be careful about the reliability of sources. But it doesn’t take the place of mentorship in how to learn things.

26. Look out the door or window - what do you see? When I look out the sliding door in my living room, I see the courtyard of my condo complex. There are often birds or squirrels there, among the trees.

27. Who controls the TV remote control in your family? I live alone so it had better be me. But, frankly, I don’t really watch TV very much.

28. What were the top three lessons you had to learn the hard way? 1) I’m human, 2) Therefore, I make mistakes, and 3) Most mistakes can be remedied.

29. What is on your to-do list? Changing the linens, catching up on my book journal, buying tickets to various events.

30. What is stressing you out right now? What is the root cause of this stress? Trying to get control of my calendar.