A good cry

Feeling so empty inside
got no where to hide
the lights ablaze
please let me hide my face
from you.

Guy on the train
talking about whats-his-name
tries to hand me a page passing through,
I say no thanks I'm a Jew
he asks 'do you know what that means'.

Stumped for words
my speech slurs
couldn't keep my mouth closed
while he's so composed
talks about the bible and stuff.

My brain on alert
my gaze I avert
look away
wonder what you'd say
if you knew my thoughts.

I want to say, I'm a Jew! I'm a Jew! And settle the matter. But he keeps talking. The ride is almost over, the train is pulling in, he's still talking. I wonder what I started, and where I was when we learned that class called 'know what to say.

They say I'm smart, my mother calls me brilliant, now I know that isn't true. I can't say that I'm dumb, but I feel lacking at times, like some people got an extra gene that I must have missed, called 'the comeback'. I'm not good at rapid fire debates. Give me Google any day and I'm all set. 10 page research papers are easy for me, time to prepare what I have to say. But on the spot I'm no good.

In the classroom I come up with a theory regarding the story we are reading, I have points to back it up. No one concluded the same that I did, my teacher sounds skeptical. I try, I try, but with everyone seemingly against you, it's hard. One student attempts to side with me, but it was weak. My teacher asks me to back up my theory, and I cannot. I grasp for outside references but nothing comes to mind. They seem to know it all. My mind is blank.

Some people call it a bad day, or a bad week. Perhaps a bad state of being. It is laughable, to be in a school filled with and surrounded by people who together make up so much knowledge, and to feel that you know nothing. Grades mean nothing if you leave knowing no more than when you entered.

I was looking for that paper, the one with my goals. A few years ago I wrote down five goals that I wanted to accomplish, and at the time I did not believe I could do them. I thought about it over the years, but forgot about that paper. I went digging for it tonight, and to my delight I can now say I have accomplished all five of those goals. My problem is that sometimes I don't have the confidence to recognize my own accomplishments.

A velvet bag stuck out of an envelope with a card. What is that? I pull it out. And open it up. My face lights up. The card, it reads, "I smile because you're my sister...(open it up) I laugh because there's nothing you can do about it."

I am crying now as I open the velvet bag. Inside are beautiful heart shaped earrings, sparkling blue. He didn't realize that I can't wear earrings, I feel bad that I ever told him. I want so badly to pierce my own ears just to wear the precious gift he gave me.

I call my little brother, hoping he won't realize I'm crying. I get his voicemail, leaving a tearful message telling him how much I love him and miss him. I matter to someone, though at times I forget that.

Sometimes a good cry is all it takes to feel better.

Frailty the name is woman

Pain

Discomfort hinders your abilities
your face in a permanent wince
as you sit, stand, walk, sleep.
You start to anticipate your next dosage of pills
and wonder how bad it would be to overdose.

I've had a pretty rough week. I hurt my back on Sunday, right before I babysat three cute toddlers. I swallowed some pills, swallowed the pain, and took them for ice cream. I couldn't get to the doctor until Thursday. My friend Google informed me that indeed I could take ibuprofen and acetaminophen together. The days were okay, except sitting hurt and standing hurt because of the sitting. The nights were bad, not being able to find a comfortable position, and the excruciating pain of standing up in the morning.

Today I went to the doctor. I am beginning to feel better. He gave me a shot for the pain. It's helping somewhat.

I claim to have a pretty high threshold for pain. I barely flinch at shots, or giving blood. But when your body is in pain, it shuts down. Suddenly every task that used to be so simple, like walking up the stairs, is agony. You just want to wrap yourself in a blanket and drown out the world. You want the pain to go away. You move slower. I'm usually a fast walker, but every step sent a shooting pain down my leg. I was cold. I wore a sweater when it was hot out.

B"H it is getting better. Hopefully by next week I will be back to normal. It is hard having physical limitations.

I know I am probably way late in the game, but thanks to modern technology, I downloaded a siddur app on my phone, as well as a tehillim and the chabad.org chittas app. (I kind of wondered how it works if you bring your phone into the bathroom. I suppose if the app is not open then it's not a problem.)

This might make me sound lazy, but in my life I do things by convenience. If it's not hard, then why not. I recently made a hachlata to begin saying the daily portion of tehillim every day. Then I kind of added on chumash and tanya, making it the complete portion of daily chittas. Since I have the siddur app, I figured why not daven on the train on my way to work, since I have free time. I realized that I have free time in my life when I make the time, and it is so easy to work spirituality into your life if you just try.

My high school alumni made a tehillim group for the safety of Israel. I took some tehillim upon myself, and my tehillim app has a setting where I can save 'my chapters' so it is easier to say. Feel free to join the group, round 2 is already filling up.

The title of this post is in reference to Hamlet. If you have never read Hamlet, (I don't blame you), Hamlet says this line about his mother and he is basically saying that he thinks she is a weak person and she has no backbone. (That's as much context as I can give without summarizing the whole play.) I find is kind of rude that he assigns the word frail to an entire gender. I am here to say that women are not frail. Sometimes we choose to be weak. That doesn't make us weak. You must find it within yourself to be strong. And you will be strong.

I can find the time for prayer even in the midst of pain. And when I say even, I should add that that is the most important time to pray. Do you see the irony of saying, I'm in pain so I don't feel like davening right now? Rather, daven so that the pain will go away.

If this doesn't make sense, I blame the shot my doctor gave me. No idea what was in it.

Steven, Joseph, Michael

With names like
Steven, Joseph, Michael,
the kippah is the first thing I see,
But the names,
the names they get to me.

Teacher says to (other) Michael,
do you wear a yalmuka,
He tilts his head in response,
displays his bare head.

I know he's Jewish too,
but them,
the ones who look like
frum Yidden
with names like
Steven, Joseph, Michael,
what are they trying to hide?

I Hair You

D says, "Let's talk about our alliance, or our disagreements." Then he catches himself. "Sorry, I didn't mean to say our, I mean, we not the one's who been fighting. I got no beef with you". I laugh when he says that. We are discussing the Crown Heights riots and the history of Jews and blacks in the united States. Every time my teacher sees us two talking and laughing, he says, "It's great that you two are getting along and bonding, but it's time to be quiet now." Ya, it's funny. But it's also a bit racist.

I wasn't there during the riots of 1991. My family moved to Crown Heights shortly after. Seems like an insane move for that time. The blacks were saying that all the Hasidim were moving out, disappearing. And here my family moves, from a quiet suburb in Massachusetts. I always wondered what would have happened if we would have stayed there. We might be a nice Modern Orthodox family right now.

We read Anna Deaver Smith's play, Fires in the Mirror. She acts it out here. I like how she interviewed people on both sides of the dispute, and then laid their words side by side, so that instead of seeing how very different they are, you get to see how they are somehow the same.

My teacher told us to bring our "work in progress" to class, and we would discuss it and help each other. The paper is due on Tuesday. I submitted a proposal for the final paper, to which my teacher replied, "Regarding your well-written proposal: Instead of thinking about your final paper as a research paper that traces the origins of the Crown Heights Riots in Jewish/Black relations in the U.S., I'd like to encourage you to foreground Anna Deavere Smith's play and write a more argumentative paper that engages deeply with the text. Use context where it matters, but do examine how the text deals with particular aspects of the relationship you are interested in." I thought about it and came up blank.

When he said "the relationship you are interested in" my mind immediately went to the Jews struggle, as the weak and helpless protagonist, and the black rioters as the antagonistic bullies. I told my professor that I feel too close to the dispute, and that I will undoubtedly side with the Jews. He told me to try to look at it objectively, not as a horrible incident that occurred where two people were killed, rather as two cultures colliding. He suggested I write about hair, and I thought he was nuts.

(Anna Smith interviews reverend Al Sharpton. Reverend Sharpton's hair is in the style of James Brown's hair.)

"James Brown raised me.
Uh ...
I never had a father.
My father left when I was ten .
James Brown took me to the beauty parlor one day
and made my hair like his.
And made me promise
to wear it like that
'til I die.
It's a personal family thing
between me and James Brown.

there's nothing wrong with me doing
that with James.
It's, it's, us.
I mean in the fifties it was a slick.
It was acting like White folks. '.
But today
people don't wear their hair like that.
James and I the only ones out there doing that.
So it's certainlih not
a reaction to Whites.
It's me and James's thing."

~~~~~~

An interview with a Hassidic woman about wigs.

(Early afternoon. Spring. The kitchen of an apartment in
Crown Heights. A very pretty Lubavitcher woman, with clear
eyes and a direct gaze, wearing a wig and a knit sweater,
that looks as though it might be hand knit. A round
wooden table. Coffee mug. Sounds of children playing in
the street are outside. A neighbor, a Lubavitcher woman
with light blond hair who no longer wears the wig, observes
the interview at the table.)

Your hair-
It only has to be
there's different,
uhm,
customs in different
Hasidic groups.
Lubavitch
the system is
it should be two inches
long.
It's-
some groups
have
the custom
to shave their
heads.
There's-
the reason is,
when you go to the mikvah [bath]
you may, maybe,
it's better if it's short
because of what you-
the preparation
that's involved
and that
you have to go under the water.
The hair has a tendency to float
and you have to be completely submerged
including your hair.
So ...
And I got married
when I was a little older,
and I really wanted to be married
and I really wanted to, um . . .
In some ways I was eager to cover my head.
Now if I had grown up in a Lubavitch household
and then had to cut it,
I don't know what that would be like.
I really don't.
But now that I'm wearing the wig,
you see,
with my hair I can keep it very simple
and I can change it all the time.
So with a wig you have to have like five wigs if you want to
      do that.
But I, uh,
I feel somehow like it's fake,
I feel like it's not me.
I try to be as much myself as I can,
and it just
bothers me
that I'm kind of fooling the world.
I used to go to work.
People ...
and I would wear a different wig,
and they'd say I like your new haircut
and I'd say it's not mine!
You know,
and it was very hard for me to say it
and
it became very difficult.
I mean, I've gone through a lot with wearing wigs and not
wearing
wigs.
It's been a big issue for me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~


I stayed after class cuz I didn't want to leave. It's always hard leaving on the last day. We took a group picture. I asked D if I could take a picture with him. We took a pic together, both doing the two fingered 'peace' or 'what up!' symbol. Of course we got photo bombed. I'm gonna miss him. On the first day of class when we all barely knew each other, we were discussing the stereotypes regarding African American's. D said, a co-worker told him that he doesn't look very threatening, but that she is sometimes afraid of other black guys in the street. He replied and said, "If you see me at midnight in a dark ally wearing a hoodie and I come up to you and say, "scuse me, you got the time?" you'd run the other way. We all assured him that we would never do that. He demonstrated with the hoodie and a deep gravelly voice, and we all laughed. He said, now that you know me, don't run screaming.

I stood chatting with two girls in my class about hair, wigs and weaves. I asked about dreadlocks and braids. I mentioned Chris Rock's documentary, "Good Hair" (2009). I remember watching an interview with him on the Tyra Banks show. She says the movie discusses emotional, psychological, political, and chemical issues with their hair. My classmate said, "You get up in the morning and have to style your hair, but me, I get up and I'm good to go. This hairstyle will last me 6 weeks."

To many people, hair is an identity. My hair has it's good days and bad days. I've gone through curly phases, and straightening crazes, and frizziness. I ran out of mousse and decided to go au naturale, and my hair surprised me with it's own natural volume. Whenever I think about wearing a shaitel, I start to feel a little bit claustrophobic. I barely ever wear hats in the winter because I hate things on my head. I feel stifled. I can't imagine shaving my head, I'm happy that Lubavitch doesn't have that custom. I can't even fathom having it "two fingers" short. I spent a long time growing out my hair, and I will miss it when I have to cover it.

I told these girls, for them it's a choice, for us it's a commandment. For them, it's a deep rooted part of their identity. Many black women in professional careers feel the need to relax their hair to appear less African American. I don't think I will understand it. But the one thing we have in common is wigs. While they do it cosmetically, and we do it halachically, we are both covering up a part of ourselves. We are taught that by one covering her hair, she brings down many blessings from heaven.

This class has taught me appreciation for diversity. In the classroom, it doesn't matter that I am Jewish and D is "African American", or J who has Asian features and is from California and speaks with a Spanish accent, or J who is Italian and Jewish, (who has tattoos but claims she was told she could still be buried in a Jewish cemetery). Our features are not what define us. When you look past the labels to the person inside, you find a personality. Humor, and wit, and sensitivity, and timidity, and shyness. You find motherly pride on a 5 year old daughter's graduation from preschool, and a father proud of his little girl who only smiles at his girlfriend (who incidentally is not the kid's mother). You find an older brother who feels the responsibility of having to act a certain way because his siblings look up to him. You find a professor who refuses to tell us where he's from because he doesn't want you to think about him a certain way.

In this classroom, we discard the labels and our differences. We learn to find common ground. We argue respectfully. We expose each other's differences, only to try and look for similarities. To me, the Crown Heights riots will always be a tragedy, an explosion of sorts between two vastly different ethnic groups with so many glaring differences which stood in the way of much needed unity.

D snapped the pic and said, we just ended the riots right there. 

Moments

It is dark when I leave campus, like everyone has already gone home for the night. I feel rather than see people moving by. I want to talk to someone, connect with them. But I left all connections back in the classroom. The frustration they call a discussion. We get a grade for participation. My hand hangs limply. It shoots up every time a voice stops talking. But no one sees me. My frustration mounts. Let me talk! By the time it gets to me, all the good stuff has been said already. It's no wonder I don't feel like talking in class.

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My hair hangs down around my face, like a curtain. The benefits of having long hair. Duck down behind it and pretend that I am invisible.

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I wait after class to have a private word with him. Seems like I'm not the only one. I'm tired. I pretend that I don't understand so he will keep talking. His eyes focus intently on mine. He has an accent, lending an allure to the way he talks.

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He says no phones allowed in the classroom. I ask how we will know the time, there's no clock in here. I get a secret thrill when he throws his watch to me. I feel like a groupie.

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He sees me in the hall going in the opposite direction of the classroom. He tells me that I better not be leaving. I can't help smiling as I say, don't worry I'll be right back. He says, you better come back. I try not to let the feeling that he wants me there go to my head.

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The movie is violent and I wish he would skip over the bad parts. Instead, we watch a second time as the black guy is killed by the cops. It's not a good night for me to see this. I never like violent films, but this is truly depressing. He tells me to cover my eyes, but nothing will make me unsee that image.

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I look down and fiddle with my pen during the love-scene. Call me a prude. When I was little we always covered our eyes during the kissing parts. And this, in a college classroom. Ugh.

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He's not from here. He tells us he thinks everyone in NY has guns. He looks at me and says he'd be particularly worried if I had a gun. I'm not sure to be insulted or take that as a damn fine compliment. How big is the line between tough and gangsta?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I didn't wear my Magen Dovid that day. She comes in, that girl who said she's Italian and Jewish. I see a small Jewish star hanging around her neck. I can't help feeling proud, and like it was because of me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Her, with the mickey mouse pen, who looks like she's 12, with a wedding ring on her finger. She keeps repeating her name back to him, because he keeps saying it wrong. But really, who cares?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He, who talks about the disadvantage of blacks in NYC, how the lucky ones go to college, and the rest go to prison. He says it's important to him to make it in life. He shows me a pic of his daughter. Huh. He looks too young to have a kid.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The accent, I wonder where it's from. I ask him, since he seems to want to know all about us. He says it's a long story, and that's all he will say. I do a little stalking online. Germany. I hear it now. I wonder why he refrained from sharing that information.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The song is stuck in my head. It's the music that gets to me. The lyrics play on repeat:

I know you're tired of loving,
With nobody to love.
Just grab somebody, no leaving this party
With nobody to love.

I try to interpret that. I hear desperation in the song. Yet here I am not sleeping, listening to it over and over. I wonder where the line is between desire and desperation. I'm the last single one, after all, in my high school class. I don't think about it, until I see that last girl who got married. I can't help noticing her baby bump.

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The letter 'Aleph' is painted on a beautiful background of brilliant vivid color. The artist is quite talented. But I won't see that painting, or the artist again. We could say, hey this didn't work out, but let's be friends. But that's just not how it works.

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I wish I knew how to translate music into words. I wonder what my song would be.

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Those lonely nights when you feel like going back to your 'safe haven', only to discover that your haven has moved on.

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My hands tense around the pen, breaking it in half. The ink pours into my hands. I watch it stain, and wonder if it will be with me forever.