Our Gigantic Family #MicroblogMondays

Chagall_JW_Tables_Law_M374Two new little boys will enter our family before the end of September.  We’re excited, happy for our lovely sons and their wives and very happy too that our grandchildren have such wonderful people as parents.

There’s another thing, that (even though it is, of course, obvious) I hadn’t thought about in a long time: these children, while we can’t trace personal generations very far back because so many records and stories were lost in the Holocaust, have a family that goes back to Abraham and to Moses and Mt. Sinai and to Sarah and Rachel and Rebecca.  Of course, we all, biblically, begin with Adam and Eve but because I’ve always known I couldn’t trace our family, I didn’t let myself consider what we might never know – it was too painful.

I think that’s why the sudden recollection of this spectacular Jewish lineage became an almost new discovery even though the reality has always been part of our lives.  We, and our children, and theirs, are part of something well beyond ourselves.  I am grateful to be part of the tribe – and pray that our boys, and theirs – and their moms – travel safely as the world continues on its magnificent, scary and complicated trips around the sun.

Off the Grid – Torah and A Major Light Show

Cheesecake I'll be offline until Sunday celebrating a somewhat (and undeservedly) obscure Jewish holiday called Shavuot.*  It celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai – a story I love not only for its religious importance but also because it sounds like such a wild light show.

16. It
came to pass on the third day when it was morning, that there were thunder
claps and lightning flashes, and a thick cloud was upon the mountain, and a
very powerful blast of a shofar, and the entire nation that was in the camp
shuddered.
 

17.
Moses brought the people out toward God from the
camp, and they stood at the bottom of the mountain.
 

18.
And the entire Mount Sinai smoked because the
Lord had descended upon it in fire, and its smoke ascended like the smoke of
the kiln, and the entire mountain quaked violently
.
 

You know I'm not a Bible quoter but this is just so great and dramatic – isn't is?  Anyway I'll see you Sunday.    

*OH and the cheesecake is up there because this is a holiday that is, traditionally, heavy with dairy meals.