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.My grandparents on both sides wouldn’t have used a Yiddish expression if their lives had depended on it.Yiddish was vulgar—the language of rubes and rustics, of ignora-muses and nincompoops.It was an embarrassing reminder of who our people had once been, back in the European Diaspora: a whole race of weak, stateless, despised people, figures of fun, ignorant itinerant peasants and hapless farmers who froze to death in winter and were lucky to live into middle age.In our house, therefore, there were no oy veys, no schle-miels, no putzes.(It would take Leo Rosten, and the publication of his wildly popular The Joys of Yiddish in 1968, to begin to change American Jewish attitudes about Yiddish from shame to pride.) It wasn’t until she was well into her sixties, and fighting cancer, that my mother started saying things like, “What a schnook,” or “Your father, he’s really messhuggeneh.” 90Yet here I was, sitting next to my meshuggeneh father on a Romanian bus heading north to the Moldovian border to hear a Romanian youth choir sing old Yiddish songs to a handful of elderly Jews in towns so small that they were no longer on the map.And there, in freezing-cold wooden synagogues with fancifully restored, brightly painted interiors, the elderly survivors of wars, forced marches, death camps, famines, and Communism came in their ratty winter coats, wearing old woolen caps, to sit on hard wooden benches and listen.The choir stood before the haphazard congregations and belted out all the biggies from a time long gone, that time before World War Two, when the thousand-year-old European Jewish community still thought that in the end, love and reason would prevail over blood-lust and race hatred.“Ovnt Lid,” “Zayt Gezunt,” “Ver Es Hot,” “Ikh Shtey Unter a Bokserboym,” “Roumania,” “My Yiddishke Mama.” The music was solemn, sweet, joyous, and playful by turns, and though I couldn’t understand the lyrics, I could feel their meaning in my bones.Huddling together for warmth, visibly decrepit and seemingly ancient men and women wept openly, and next to me, on our wooden bench, the tears cascaded down my father’s face.Again with the tears! Only this time, I was crying too.I just didn’t want Dad to see me.The Ba’al Shem Tov didn’t write down his teachings; rather, he uttered them to disciples who in turn wrote them down.One of his disciples, Tanya, Shneur Zalman, wrote: “He alone is in the upper and lower worlds just as He was before the six days of Creation.when one reflects deeply on this, his heart will rejoice and his soul will be glad with joy and singing, with all his hearing and soul and might, in this superb faith, for this is the very experience and nearness of God.” Nachman of Bratslav said:“Through song and joy, one can ‘pour out his words like water in the presence of the Lord.’” And then there’s the Amida with its plea that God allow the worshipper to declare His glories.But I never could quite declare, let alone sing, His glory without feeling dumb.Please dear God let me sing.Please dear God let me sing.Please dear God I know it’s kind of stupid, I know that my genes are my genes, but since You’re God, and can do what You want to do, would You please help me out here, and put music in my mouth?91Dear God, get real—my voice sucks.Please give me a new one.Please, God, I know that You have bigger things on Your mind, but if I could, at the very least, carry a tune, I sure would appreciate it.Dear God, I am grateful to You for my manifold blessings, but if You could just add one more to the pile, and give me a singing voice, I will sing Your praises day and night, or at least when I remember to.And while You’re at it, Lord of All, would You please take the lump out of my chest, the one that holds all my envy and jealousy and sense that other people have it better? Because for God’s sake, God, even after years of therapy, I’m really not that different from my best friend in high school, who was beautiful and radiant and sunny and gifted, who looked like a cross between a gazelle and a supermodel, but who loved drugs so much that eventually she gave her whole life to them, extinguishing her inner flame, sacrificing everything for chemical ecstasy.Let’s face it, God and God of my Fathers, I’m a bit like that, only it’s not drugs I’m addicted to
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