Grandma Helen… We will miss you…

The three of us are back in Seattle on vacation and for the Goldstein-Roberts wedding.  On the way here we stopped off in Michigan to pay our last respects to our Grandma Helen.  We love her very much and she will be missed.  This was the first time I officiated at a funeral for a family member.  Here is the eulogy:

Eulogy for (Grandma) Helen Apsel

חנה בת אברהם ופרלה

We have a tradition that Reb Zusia taught the following: "When I will face the heavenly court after my demise, I am not afraid that they are going to ask me, Why were you not Moses, or the other great ancestors? I have no such fear for I am sure that they will not ask me these questions. However, I am afraid that I will be asked, Why weren't you Zusia, the Zusia that you could have been, the Zusia that we had planned for you to be through the talents, abilities, time and opportunities that were granted to you. That is what scares me,"

Fear is a very powerful emotion. Fear is what keeps people up at night worrying about everything under the sun. What is at the root of fear? The answer is mortality and the unknown. We are scared of things because we feel like they might end our lives or alter them in some way that we might be unable to cope with. We are fearful of things because we have no idea what they will lead to and thus they are scary. Thus it should be, and indeed it is, death is the single greatest feared thing in the world… Almost everyone has a great fear of their own deaths and the deaths of those around them. And then there was Grandma Helen. I will call her Grandma Helen throughout this eulogy because from the moment Carrie and I began dating she would never allow me to call her anything else, she was my grandma. (In fact although she only had five “grandchildren:” Paul, Laura, Eric, Carrie, Dayna, she had so many more. There were those of us who married into the family, myself, Likivi and Isaac, and we all knew her as grandma Helen.

Today is the most prepared funeral I have ever officiated. Grandma Helen would often turn to me when other people were napping in her apartment and tell me, “when I go, it is all arranged, I have it all setup with Dorfman. It is all paid for and everything.” We would talk about it because nobody else wanted to hear her talk about it. The truth was that she knew that life was wonderful, that life was a gift and that nothing that was wonderful could remain wonderful forever and no gift truly ever came without strings. Grandma Helen left us with a legacy so large and so incredible it is hard to imagine where to begin. Clearly today is not a day of celebration but we are celebrating a life. What more could Grandma Helen have asked from her life? Lived to see 100, to see grandchildren and great-grandchildren (almost to see yet another one). She lived in a world that changed a great deal over time. She knew enough was enough and so she let go, she released her grip and embraced the unknown that caused her no fear at all, and so she lived and so she died a woman without fears because her mortality was of no fear to her and neither was the unknown.

If we were to go and visit McDonald Towers today (the place that Grandma Helen called home for some 30 odd years and if we were to look in their library we would find the letters H.A. in nearly every (if not every) large print book. Especially ever book by Louis L’Amore. Grandma Helen was a voracious reader, it is a love that was instilled in her at a very early age by her father, Earl Thum, and her mother, Pearl Thum. She recalled to us many times how her father would in the evenings sit down with her and her brother and read a book to them as a family. They would snack on apples (I never saw her eat apples but I am sure if we dipped an apple in chocolate she would have eaten it). (Of course all of this reading took place when she was not playing in the streets of Brooklyn and her mother would lower a sandwich down to her for lunch.) Her brother used to get into trouble for trying to continue to read after bedtime. Reading was who she was. In fact, would it be such a stretch to say that Grandma Helen was a book? A book has an exposition/beginning, rising action, climax, falling action and a denouement/conclusion. Grandma Helen had all of the same in her life story as well.

And Grandma Helen’s story is one that she told to us herself over time. I think that Grandma Helen was a storyteller. We have a tradition of storytelling in the Jewish tradition. The storyteller was called the מגיד, but as Grandma Helen was a woman lets feminize that role and call her our מגידה. It just so happens that the numeric value of the word מגידה is 62. Grandma Helen’s name in Hebrew was חנה and the numeric value of her name was 63. Where is the extra one? Every storyteller needs an audience to hear their stories and so that is where the extra number one comes from… It is all of us… We were what enabled Grandma Helen to narrate her stories. We were her audience and like every great מגידה her stories will always live on in the lives of her audience.

So Grandma Helen’s story: The beginning: Imagine the world that Grandma Helen was born into… How different it is from today. When she was born, ice was delivered to houses to have people be able to keep things cold in ice-boxes. When she was a child most furnaces were heated through burning coal. The Model T was rolling off the assembly lines. Grandma Helen once pulled me aside and told me she had some silver dollars and would like me to have one. She sat there polishing it and I took one look at it, and saw the date: 1880. This coin has seen a great deal, it has been part of our great world for 130 years. It arrived on the scene 29 years prior to Grandma Helen. Imagine the world in which this coin was minted, imagine how out of place it is today. Today we have refrigerators that have televisions, many people have multiple refrigerators in their houses. We have much cleaner methods of heating our houses. And of course today we are beginning to see cars that require no gasoline at all. Somewhere in the midst of all of this Grandma Helen lived her life and experienced our wondrous world. So what is the exposition of this life? December 4, 1909 in Brooklyn Pearl and Earl Thum welcomed their daughter into their lives. She would spend her childhood in New York and in Pontiac, MI. After graduating from high school she went to Michigan State Normal College where she earned a teaching degree. It was in college that she met Velma Lenaker who had never met a Jew before. Grandma Helen would often tell us of this friendship as a paradigm for how we should relate to all people. She worked as a substitute teacher for some time here in Michigan.

But her life would bring her back to New York when she met and married Paul Friedman. They lived there until his untimely death one day. Grandma Helen’s first two children: Peter and Norma were born there. After Paul died she found her way back to Michigan as that was where her family lived. She would eventually meet Nathan Apsel and the two were married and would remain married for over forty years. When we get married we begin a second life and thus it was at this point that the rising action would begin in Grandma Helen’s story. Grandma Helen loved two men in her life. Paul and Nate. And they loved her as well. The enjoyed spending time together. In fact Norma and Kenny told me yesterday that their parents were always happy to send the kids to summer camp as they would travel the world during the summer… Sounds good. But this is not to say that Grandma Helen didn’t enjoy her family. No quite the opposite. While they took some huge trips without the kids, they included them on other road trips in the US. Peter told me that he will never forget how his mom and dad enriched his life through exposing him to the arts on a regular basis. They would take him to symphonies, to plays, to all sorts of cultural experiences… even the rodeo… Grandma Helen grew during the rising action of her life because it was her family that made her the person she was. Her greatest joys were her children and then her grandchildren and eventually the great-grandchildren.

So what of the climax, the greatest part of her life story? Her grandkids. So many people have remarked that the reason they had kids was in order to be grandparents. If this is the case, Grandma Helen lived this out with style and glee. Sitting here today are seven of her eight grandchildren. We all benefited from her experiences and we all had the pleasure of watching her as she taught us so much. Ask any of us what we learned from her and we will have a story to tell. Dayna and Erik both reflected on their trips down to the creek near her apartment. Others have reflected on her great love of nature and her love of birds. Carrie said she adored Canadian geese and could always identify them by the V they flew in. Laura remembers her saying if you can laugh at yourself then you will always have something to laugh at. Paul remembers reading with her and memorizing the entire book so much so that he could recite the book back to her.

But there is another climax: Grandma Helen answered that question for us herself. Volunteering. Grandma Helen was a life member of Temple Israel. Let me say that differently, she was an extremely proud member of Temple Israel. She was a Charter member, she was active on the Sisterhood, and she sang in the choral group for 40 years, and she always said that the greatest part of her life was when she was there. It was her involvement there that led her to a path of service to other people. Dayna and Carrie mentioned to me yesterday that the delicious, incredible, great chocolate chip cookies. The cookies that had their own special recipe (pretty sure the recipe was similar to the toll-house recipe) , the recipe involved a special seat on which she sat and stirred the batter. Well anyways those cookies… turns out she never ate a single one of them. She made them for other people because she enjoyed helping others. Her incredible apple sauce that always found its way to every family get together… never consumed by Grandma Helen… Too healthy. But she always made it for others and the list goes on. Grandma Helen never had Parkinson’s, and yet she helped to lead a Parkinson’s support group for years in her building. There was also her eye support group. Grandma Helen provided so many people with a listening ear, an ear that would not stop listening until the person stopped talking, and then she would begin… And we never knew what to expect. She told us last year at the end of a video interview for Ayelet, “I don’t like that name.” She knew what she believed in, and she knew what was what and so she made it known. Her vision of volunteerism was shaped in part by Rabbi Syme ז''ל, who taught her to do simple things to help other people each day. She managed to fulfill the words of פרקי אבות, לא עליך המלכה לגמור ולא אתה בן חורין להבטל ממנה… you are not responsible to complete the work, but you are not free to stop trying. Grandma Helen spent her life living these words. Ellen said she was an incredible mother-in-law and was always there to volunteer to watch the grandkids when she had to work. Aunt Linda mentioned that cooking with her was a treat because she always volunteered to clean up. Big or small, her impact was always great. She always managed to improve our small family world, her larger community and the entire humankind.

You can always sense when a story is drawing to a close. You can always feel when the מגיד or the מגידה in our case has had enough of the story and is trying to draw it to a close. Those were Grandma Helen’s last 10 or so years. When her eyes were getting worse and worse. When her hearing was getting worse and worse. When the things she loved to do were being taken from her. When her independence that she clung to was being wrestled from her grip. She maintained her dignity and her spirit. She kept her sense of humor and was delighted to have reached the century milestone. When she came to family get-togethers it was with a little less bounce in her step and with less ability to converse in large groups. But she held her own. She would not go quietly and she would not allow age to define her. I mean this was a woman who only gave up driving in her 80s when her car was stolen. She gave up line dancing in her 90s because she said she was tired, but perhaps her partners couldn’t keep up with her. Yes her falling action was made up by her last years not when she was dying but was living and thriving in a world she loved.

The end of Grandma Helen’s story happened on 10/09/2010. It was on that day Grandma Helen left her earthly form and left us feeling a deep void. She died not of any disease but of a content disposition that she had seen and done all that she needed to. The void that we all feel is one that we will never fill. You do not replace people. But the gift of every good story and of every good storyteller is that you can always live with them in your inner-self and thus Grandma Helen’s story will provide with immortality.

"When I will face the heavenly court after my demise, I am not afraid that they are going to ask me, Why were you not Moses or somebody else great? I have no such fear for I am sure that they will not ask me these questions. However, I am afraid that I will be asked, Why weren't you you? That is what scares me," Grandma Helen, if this is true, has already met that heavenly court and has answered that she was Helen. That she was the best Helen Apsel she could be and she did her best.

Grandma Helen left this world on שבת, it is said in our tradition that when a person dies on שבת it is with a kiss from God. But the שבת on which she died was not an ordinary שבת, it was ראש חודש as well. And it was the beginning of the month of חשון. We have a tradition of calling the month of חשון – מרחשון because it is a bitter month as it has no holidays and comes just as we commemorated all of the fall festivals. These holidays run one after the other and it is a very hectic and jam packed time of the Jewish year. But then ראש חודש comes and suddenly we have a rest. Suddenly we can breathe a little. It is when we reach a place of solace, a place of security and relief. After all of those holidays we now have a month off, we have the time to reflect on the beauty that was our holidays. Grandma Helen celebrated life. She was always an active participant and always a lover of living. At a certain point in time living became more a burden than a privilege. Grandma Helen was aware that she had gotten everything out of this life that she could and she had given her all. She had earned her חשון, her new month without the burdens. She had made it past the holidays and was now ready to embrace her next steps… Her חשון.

On that ראש חודש, on that שבת, we were reading פרשת נח. We were learning of the destruction of all of creation. We saw that it fell upon נח and his family to restart and continue that which had been already started by those who came before them. And so it is with us today. We witnessed the ending of the world of Grandma Helen. We witnessed the end of her story. And now it falls on us to pick up where she left off. We are the next steps in her story. We are the continuation.

תהי נשמתה צרורה בצרור החיים
May her soul be bound up in the bond of life and let us say: אמן

We are officially in New York.

You know what’s incredible… When we think of New York, we think of Manhattan, Long Island, Westchester, the Bronx… And yet there are all of these other places (anything not in the Metropolitan area) in New York that we overlook or do not respect nearly enough.  Just my though for the day.

Now for the deep stuff…

A couple of shabbats ago Ayelet fell down the stairs and got an enormous bump on her head.  She sat in Carrie’s lap, I kissed her keppy to make it better, we tried ice.  We were her world, and we continue to be her world.  I cannot recall for a moment when she got this way.  It happened before our eyes, and yet we have no idea when or how.  I have not been able to figure out when her hair grew, when she started to walk more and more, when her use of sign language became so good, when we began to actually communicate, it seems she has always done this.  I cannot recall life from before Ayelet.  I have no recollection of my life without her and I have no doubt my life is better with her.

Ayelet sits on our laps, and looks at us.  When I return home from work she is so giddy with joy to see me… It is inconceivable that she will someday be in college without us or having her own children.  I cannot comprehend that at some point in time I was my parent’s baby, and that at some point in time I left that role and became my own person.  It is unbelievable that at some point in time I did not cross a street without my hand in theirs.  I did not put on a shirt without their help.  I was a baby and now I am me.  How is that?  My daughter, my little one, my baby will, God willing, one day walk down an aisle and I will be by her side, and I will be a source of embarrassment for her.  Right now we are her world, and later on we will be secondary to so many other things.  Maybe what this means is that we need to learn to be thankful for our parents and all that they offer us.  Maybe what this means is that we need to grow to accept our fate as animals in that we progress and age.  Nothing can ever stay the same in this world, everything changes.  It is our responsibility to try to change things for the better.

Father’s Day 5770 – Moving Day 2010

Today was a curious day in my family’s life.  We were supposed to be celebrating my having been an אבא, which is to say celebrating the gift that is Ayelet.  But at the same time we have this cloud hanging over our heads, our departure from our homes.  And so tonight I am in the midst of so many emotions…

What is my job as an אבא?  What role do I play?  Our job is to partner with our spouses and to carve out a roadmap for our families.  In the days of patriarchy we would be tough and believe that bringing home the money and keeping our families safe is our own mission.  But now we have grown from Neanderthals and now we understand that we have many more roles to play and those roles are so sacred.  We go shopping, we cook, we feed, we tuck in and get dressed. We do many different things and we try our hardest to be good at them.  But in the end we still are very much in-tune with our Neanderthal inside us. We feel like we are responsible for security and for assuring our future and theirs.  I will admit I feel that way quite often. When Carrie was pregnant, I took my role as the non-pregnant parent to be very seriously.  I would never let her do anything that could jeopardize her security and the baby’s.  To be a little more clear, I was the safety police.  I have been vigilant about the car seat, about the baby-proofing, about everything.  I check Ayelet’s crib every night before I go to bed.  I take my job seriously and believe I am doing all I can to keep her safe.

But now I am torn, my career has caused me to have to uproot her from the only home she has ever known.  All of her adult and kid friends, I am taking her from.  I am removing her from the safest domain that has ever existed in her world.  Does that make me a bad person, removing her from all of this?  I hope not… I want her to be happy and I want her to have all of the opportunities in the world.  I pray with all of my heart that she will be as happy in our new home as she is here.  I pray with all of my heart that Ayelet will weather this big change as well as she has weathered all other events in the past.  I need to be a good אבא and I need to be a good Neanderthal.  I need to have a career and that means we need to move.  I want Ayelet and Carrie to know that I will do my best to do all I can to keep us going and to keep us moving forward.

In the words of Steve Miller:  Goodbye to all my friends at home, goodbye to people I’ve trusted.  I’ve got to go out and make my way, I might get rich I might get busted.

We will not miss Seattle, we will miss the people and the community.  We will miss our friends and we will miss our comfort zone.  Please know that we are forever indebted to all of you here in the Pacific Northwest and we will always treasure our time here and all that each and everyone of you has done for us.

Please keep in touch…

Thank You Seattle (Mercer Island) and HNT for three great years…

Yesterday was our big going away brunch at HNT.  Over 220 people showed up to send us off.  Special thanks goes to our close friend Jennifer Weinstein for organizing the event.  And to all of the people who helped contribute to it.  We also wanted to thank Purple Beat Catering for the yummy food.

Here is the speech that I gave at the event:

Goodbye Speech

I would like to begin by thanking Jennifer Weinstein and everybody who helped work on this and contributed to it.

Well here we are. The time has come, and to be perfectly honest, it has come a little too soon. When we come to a community we do not see ourselves departing that community. We join a community to have a home, to have support and to have a life. We join a community because as humans that is what we do. In July of 2007 we drove up here from Los Angeles, caravan style, and we were so excited. I remember just outside of Tukwilla there was some accident, and we were all too anxious to get on with it, as it was the morning and we wanted to begin our new lives. I remember as traffic picked up again we sped along and got to the transfer from the 5 to the 405 and soon enough on our left we saw the most splendid of images, we saw lake Washington, and then we saw Mercer Island. I remember radioing over to Carrie and her friend who was driving with her: “We’re going home.” We didn’t even know what our house looked like, or where it was located. And so when we arrived and found the key under the doormat at HNT and I looked up and I pointed to Carrie, that the yellow house just around the hedges was ours.

We were blank slates at that time, our lives were much different than they are today. Not everybody gets their first pick in this world, but I was happy then and I am happy now to say that we got ours. HNT stood out above all of the other synagogues that we looked at. We were so excited to begin our time here, I remember Nadine kicking me out of my office as I had not started yet and so she was trying to explain to me that I should probably enjoy myself and not be stuck in some office. She told me to go and see the area, get to know our new home… I wish I had listened more, because we are leaving in a week and we never once went to visit Mt. Ranier.

We made many incredible friends here and I will not attempt to list them, because you all know what trouble that could be. We met wonderful people and were embraced with open arms by many. This community provided Ayelet with her first home. People in this room held her before even her grandparents had the opportunity… You have all been a big part of her life and although she will not likely remember much as she is still so young, she will always know that her birthplace was Seattle, Washington and that she started her life in Mercer Island.

At the end of the תורה we read about God having משה ascend a mountain in what is modern day Jordan, and he showed him the Promised Land. But He showed him something that he would never have the opportunity to set foot in… He showed משה where his people whom he had led would move onto without him. I am no משה but I am a leader. And so the pain of moving away from my community is one that I relate to משה through. The sadness and heartbreak of leaving behind so many familiar faces, so many friendships, so many wonderful people. The sadness of not having finished that which I started is what I am filled with right now. I do feel like a leader who has unfinished business. I do feel like a person who is leaving his people while they will continue on without his presence. In the words of the Beatles: Obla Di Bla Da… Life will continue here without us, and that is too hard to put my head around right now. It is hard to believe that when we visit here in October this will be a building where I no longer work, this will be a building that at one point in time I was like one of the couches in that I was a fixture here. And when we visit that will no longer be the case.

I am proud of the time that I spent here. I believe that we accomplished a great deal together. I believe that I am leaving a better community than the one I found. I believe that I made a mark and that is all I can ask for is to have made an impression, to have changed a single life. That is proof enough that I was once here. That mark was made with all of your help and with all of your guidance: thank you. I would be remised if I did not thank the three presidents who I worked with: Susan Matt, Bruce Gladner and Glenn Rothenberg. Along with all of the board members I have worked with I thank each and every one of you. I want to thank all of the staff for their hard work and for all that they do for HNT daily. Thank you Rabbi Rosenbaum and Cantor Kurland for working with me and guiding me along this path. I have already thanked each of the staff members individually in my last HaKol article, and so I will not go into that again today. I do want to specifically thank Carrie and Ayelet. I never wanted to be the husband who had to choose between his wife and work. I never wanted to be the husband that didn’t need second chance after second chance… I always wanted to be an ever present spouse and partner. The same goes for the father I always dreamed of being. I never wanted to miss a single bedtime. I never wanted to have to ask somebody else what my own child needed. I wanted to be the father who was always there for every single thing. But what I have discovered through these past three years is that such a husband and father does not jive well with the rabbinic role I play. I have had to miss classes for Ayelet, I have canceled date nights, I have been away three nights in a row, I have had to balance and try my hardest. And through all of this both of you have stood by my side, and have not made feel like a failure for not living up to what I wanted to be. I would not have been able to be a rabbi without Carrie, I would not have made it through Rabbinical School without her support, and I would have given up my career had it not been for her strength and courage. This past year was not an easy one, working full time and searching for a job in such a terrible economy. While I was near the breaking point, Carrie was strong and carried us through the darkness. Being the spouse of a rabbi must not be fun, but Carrie, you have done an incredible job at it and I am so thankful for your love. Ayelet, you have enabled me to keep things in perspective and you have brightened up my hardest of days. I am pretty sure that a good number of people are going to miss you more than me or your אמא.

Moving is tough work. Boxing up a life and transporting it to a new location. But we can’t take everything in a box with us. We cannot transport our world here… We cannot take all of you with us to New York. You cannot put relationships and experiences into boxes. But maybe the reality is that we are not forced to box those up because they can still be part and one with us no matter where we are. Our experiences go with us our whole life, and our friends and communities are there so long as we make an effort to keep them there.

On John Lennon’s collection album Wonsaponatime, published in 1998, there is a home recording of a song called “You don’t know what you got.” The words are something like: You don’t know what you got ‘til you lose it. You don’t know what you have ‘til its gone.” I have found myself singing this song over and over these past weeks while I was packing. Because I believe it is something that we need to learn to overcome. When we were preparing to leave LA we were walking around our neighborhood and we realized what we were giving up to have a career. We had always bad talked LA, and suddenly we were sad to leave. I never realized how much we cared about Seattle until this past month. There is so much that we will miss, there is so much that will be lost for us when we leave next week. And the thing that we will miss the most is the people. It is all of you. Forget the job, forget the synagogue… It is our community that we will be missing and longing to be part of. That is what we will be losing, and that is what we will need to find a way to remain tied to. It is for this reason that we pray that just as you will all always be a part of our circle of friends and community, we hope that we will always be in your circle of friends and community at the same time. Distance cannot take that from us.

Thank you again for three great years.

We really need to get better at doing this more often…

It has been far too long since the last time that we wrote to all of you on our blog.  Part of this long delay has been because of a life transition that we are going through and that we chose not to be soooo public with it. 

As many of you know, but not all of you, the Hearshens of Mercer Island are becoming the Hearshens of Long Island. We are moving to beautiful community in Syosset, NY where I am assuming the role of Associate Rabbi of Midway Jewish Center.  This is a very exciting move for our family, but it is a scary one and a very involved one.  While it is always exciting to embrace new possibilities and to explore new parts of the world.  It is hard to leave behind a community and to not see the work that we started here completed.  We are sad to leave so many great friends and wonderful people behind.  Carrie loves her job at the JCC and is sad to be leaving that… And I must say she is awesome at her job and has received a great deal of accolades for all of her work.  Ayelet has made friends.  It is so cool to see these people who are at each others weddings and can say that they met in pre-school… I hope my career has not erased all possibilities of this pleasure for our children.  I have become quite comfortable in my role at HNT, and will miss all that I do there.

Bu the show must go on, and so we must get ready to leave.  Packing up three years of life, including 18 months as a family of three, is no easy undertaking.  But it is worth while because my new job is going to be incredible and I am very excited to begin there. 

I would like to promise more posts in the near future… I will try.

For now, here are some Mother’s Day Videos of Ayelet at the Zoo.

 

 

In the words of Tigger: TTFN Ta Ta For Now

Apologies about the delay in postings…

The Hearshens are in a place of transition at this time.  And transitions are tough, they are really tough.  Well, here goes nothing:

We learn in the מכילתא that “כל התחלות קשות, All Beginnings are Tough.” This is a puzzling statement and one that we all can relate to. Beginnings are tough, but doesn’t this statement stink of pessimism? The מהר''ל מפראג shined some light on this by explaining that “All beginnings are tough and that is because they are a change.”  So now for my rabbinic insight… Can I flip the meaning?  All changes are tough because they are beginnings??? The transition that we are embarking on is very tough but on the good side, it is a new beginning.  We are now starting over.  We do not know where, and we do not know when, but we will be starting afresh somewhere else.  I think that it is safe to say that all changes are tough, but all changes are beginnings, and so we should begin to look at this change not as the end of something, but the beginning of something new.

 

Ayelet update time:  She walks, she feeds herself, and yes she has a molar growing in.  She is 14 months old at this time.  She began to walk 2 weeks ago, and it is quite different.  Everyday she improves.  At this point in time Ayelet has been on the following plane trips:

2/2009 – SEA to JFK

2/2009 JFK to Tel Aviv

2/2009 Tel Aviv to Newark

2/2009 Newark to SEA

5/2009 SEA to LAX

5/2009 LAX to SEA

7/2009 SEA to Dallas

7/2009 Dallas to Detroit

7/2009  Detroit to Dallas

7/2009 Dallas to SEA

12/2009 SEA to LAX

1/2010 LAX to SEA

1/2010 SEA to LAX

2/2010 LAX to SEA

And this weekend will be another two planes, which brings her total to 16, and she can’t get miles for them.

Here is a picture of her on a Horizon airlines plane down to LAX this past December:

 

 

 

But I know most of you are more excited about the whole walking thing and so with out further ado…

 

We’ll try to be better next time…

נס גדול

Miracles… That is what we are about to celebrate.  Tonight is the 24th of the Hebrew month of Kislev, which means that tomorrow night will not only be Shabbat, but also the beginning of the holiday of חנכה.  I recently wrote an article about this holiday and feel free to read it.  Let me know what you think.

Anyways, at this time of the year we are thinking about the idea of miracles.  On our dreidles we find the letters נ, ס, ג, ש and these correspond to the Hebrew phrase: נס גדול היה שם, a great miracle happened there.  In Israel the dreidles do not use the letter ש, for the word שם (there), they use the letter פ, for the word פה (here), because that is where the miracle happened.  But I think we would be doing this holiday a little disservice if we did not try to find the miracle here as well.  We all observe miracles everyday, but for one reason or another we opt to ignore them.  For the holiday of חנכה lets choose to not ignore them.  Lets choose to see them and embrace them.  Every breath we take is a miracle and every thing we do is a miracle.  When we see things in this way we find that we must be thankful for all of these miracles.  I know that I am immensely thankful for all of the miracles in my life, and I hope that more of us can be as well.

Happy second חנכה to the greatest miracle of them all: our daughter Ayelet.

 

חג אורים שמח

The Hearshens

 

Enjoy some videos from Ayelet’s trip to the Museum