Moussaka and Shofar --A New York Evening

9/12/2013

The weather was gorgeous. Of course it was.

We were sitting up front in the Mykonos restaurant in Great Neck. The windows were out so patrons could enjoy the traditional glorious weather of the holy days.

The Lubavitchers were walking to their Chabad, the men in suits, some of them tropical white, the women in dresses. This was a week ago, the second evening of Rosh Hashanah.

A cluster of young people, boys and girls, stopped in front of our table. A young man, maybe 12 or 13, surveyed our table of four and asked the classic question, often posed by proselytizing men in the city: “You Jewish?”

We glanced at Mike, our DH (Designated Hebrew, to use Ron Blomberg’s felicitous book title.)

“Have you heard the shofar yet today?” the young man asked.

(The shofar is the ram’s horn, blown all over the world at the Jewish new year.)

Mike had been to temple in New York, but he was not about to spoil a good scene.

No, we all said.

The one adult in the group, I am assuming a rabbi, began to blow on the horn, for two or three minutes, his notes undoubtedly reaching the shopping mall across the street.

Then he led Mike in a Rosh Hashanah prayer, as all four of us joined in.

They wished us not only a good Rosh Hashanah but a sweet Rosh Hashanah. A good Rosh Hashanah could sound like a root canal, the rabbi said. But Rosh Hashanah should also be sweet. The young people smiled sweetly and we thanked them, and then they were gone.

The manager brought our dinner, just perfect, like New York weather at the holy days.

Ed Martin

9/12/2013 07:47:46 am

Mazeltov, and Good New Year.

Thor A. Larsen

9/12/2013 01:33:35 pm

As we made our many calls to our Jewish friends during these holidays, we feel especially blessed for having grown up in the New York City area and developed close friendships in our teenage years that have remained very strong even after living Upstate NY for the last 50 years. May we also add that we especially share with the Jewsih people these Holy Days the hope of LONG-TERM PEACE SOON between Israel and it neighbors in the Middle East.

George Vecsey

9/14/2013 03:32:02 am

Thor, remember how quiet it was on the holy days at Jamaica High?
GV

Thor A Larsen

9/14/2013 04:10:07 am

George,

I certainly remember well those quiet Jewish Holidays at Jamaica High, George. That was when I focused real hard to try to catch up or briefly pass those very bright students !!

Charlie Accetta

9/13/2013 12:48:18 pm

My grandfather was a young immigrant Italian, a tailor. His first jobs were in the Lower East Side, working for Jewish employers. They taught him, as well as many others, their particular brand of English. It is a vestigial dialect that he carried with him to the Bronx and to his eventual brood and it remains a part of our heritage in this, his adopted country. I join the crowd in wishing a sweet New Year to all of our friends.

George Vecsey

9/14/2013 03:30:32 am

Charlie, I delivered newspapers for a Russian guy who had picked up a few Italian phrases for emphasis. Capisce? Then again, what New Yorker doesn't pick up the perfect Yiddish words?
GV

Alan Rubin link

9/16/2013 07:42:05 am

George—I can relate to your quite classes during the High Holy days. My mother was always concerned about what others thought.

The five years that we lived in Washington Heights, she made my sister and I go to PS 187 on the second day of Rosh Hashanah so that people would think that we were taking advantage (don’t ask why because I never received a satisfactory explanation)

So, each year I would sit in class with three catholic friends who could not figure out why I was there.

Charlie—My maternal grandparents were from a small shetle near the Russian-Poland border, which was always moving. He was tailor who also worked in the Lower East Side. They lived in a section of the Bronx that was mostly a Jewish-Italian mix.

They told stories of how their Italian co-workers and neighbors often helped each other. I learned these stories through very broken English and my mother’s translation of Yiddish. However, it was very clear how people cared for each other.

There might be more compassion in our country if less people lived insular lives.

George Vecsey

9/16/2013 08:03:14 am

Alan, I totally agree with you. We pop back into Baysiee, Queens, for lunch now and then -- get reconnected with roots.
(plus ethnic food)
At junior high in Rego Park, the SP class had four kids on the holy days -- O'Grady, McDermott, Lorraine, and me, as I remember.
GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
"Among the things that have long fascinated people about Jesus and explain his enduring appeal is his method of dialogue and teaching. "He asked a lot of questions and told a lot of stories in the form of parables. In fact, parables form about a third of Jesus’ recorded teachings. The Gospels were written decades after he died, so his questions and parables clearly left a deep impression on those who bore testimony to him....
"Some of Jesus’ questions were rhetorical; others were meant to challenge or even provoke. In some cases, Jesus used questions to parry attacks by religious authorities who set traps for him. In others, he used questions to enter more fully into the lives of others and to help people look at the state of their hearts. He asked people about their fears and their faith. Jesus used questions to free a woman caught in adultery from condemnation and to inquire whether people considered him to be the Messiah. He probed deeply into questions not many had asked before him, like “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
---(Peter Wehner, long-time White House consultant and writer, in the NYT last week about Jesus Christ’s method of teaching by asking questions.)

"Would that I could mention all the illuminating details in this biography, for example, why Wells praised Black Americans so highly, saying, 'I took a mighty liking to these gentle, human, dark-skinned people,' and 'Whatever America has to show in heroic living today, I doubt if she can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast efforts hundreds of black and colored men are making today to live blamelessly, honorably and patiently, getting by themselves what scraps of refinement, beauty and learning they may, keeping their hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied.''
-- "How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century," Charles Johnson, NYT Book Review, Nov. 19, 2021. ***".

...the monsters arrive."
"They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts.
"Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry."

---The great Margaret Renkl, from Nashville, one of my favorite NYT bylines, Oct. 26, 2021.
(She describes our Long Island enclave to every decibel, every stink.)
lwww.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/opinion/leaf-blowers-california-emissions.html
---

Moussaka and Shofar --A New York Evening

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