Jewish Musings Wednesday, January 17

[hollygail]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Frieda (hopefully)?
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you who stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!

[hollygail]

My parents married on January 17, 1932. I still wear the ring my dad bought for his new bride and inscribed inside his initials to her initials and the date (which has completely worn off, probably because of being on my finger). It's 18k white gold with ten teeny tiny diamond chips (possibly 1 point each, if that big) along the front. The scroll work on the band has also worn down so that I'm the only one who remembers what it used to look like...

I think about them every year on their wedding anniversary.

Back to 2024. One of the take-aways from this week's Torah portion can be that Jews seem to be a distinct people. Why? The first act of liberation for the Israelites was to sacrifice a lamb. The lamb was one of Egypt’s most important gods. Publicly slaughtering the lamb was how the Israelites could declare that they did not worship that god, and, by doing that, the Israelites had no choice but to leave Egypt.

Have you ever been in a position in life where you had no choice but to do something somewhat revolutionary? opposite of (or at least completely different from) what you might have expected? How did you make such a choice and what were the ramifications? (They don't have to be as major as the exodus was for our predecessors.)

[louise]

I promise to think about this difficult set of premises but for now I am writing to say that I am back!
I came back with a cold so I needed a couple of days to start to feel like myself.
Possibly somewhat related to the topic of the day I am just back from a country in the middle of a war. Many, certainly my family, thought for sure it would be a far better thing to go in the opposite direction.

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well, warm and SAFE! Please pray for Israel.

Re today's topic: I have made a few revolutionary changes in my life. Although disruptive, they helped make me who I am today.

For one thing, after college, when my dad was sick with Parkinson's disease, I told my parents that I couldn't return back to NY to help. I knew this would be difficult for them, but I just couldn't do it. I had a feeling that I would be stuck in NY for the rest of my life, never get married or have children, and generally be unhappy. I know it was selfish of me, but I just felt that I had to make this choice.

There are several others, but that was probably the major one.

Have a peaceful day, Lee

[gazelle18]

I was in an impossible, long term relationship with a boyfriend in college. I ended up in law school in Louisiana , rather than staying at U of Alabama for law school, just so I could permanently end the relationship. Not quite as dramatic as leaving the shtetl to escape a pogrom, but it definitely changed the course of my life.

[peachymom1]

I got pregnant unexpected during my first year of teaching high school in the inner city, five years sooner than DH and I had planned. Nearly everyone thought it was a bad idea to have a baby, including us. We had little money or stability, and neither of us had good parental examples growing up. But we had each other, and we wanted the baby, so we said what the heck, this is what's happening, and we're going to put our hearts and souls into learning how to be good parents. We fell so head over heels in love with DD35 that we wanted more children. Nearly everybody else thought that was a bad idea too, but we'd long learned not to listen to anybody but each other, and we were blessed with twins the second time around.

Maybe we were young and foolish, maybe the universe knew we'd be deliriously happy to have a family, only God knows. But every single person who used to think it was a bad idea has changed their mind. I'm glad of that for them, because I think people need to stop being so doggone judgmental about other people's choices. But I still don't much care what other people think I should or should not do, because they're not any more likely to be right than I am.