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
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Moussaka and Shofar --A New York Evening

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