Skip to main content

Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet (or not)

I have a line I use on my children when they’re complaining that the house is too noisy to do their homework, work on a dvar Torah, sit and read… or whatever.  It is a terrible line.  It’s the kind of line you should really only say once and then never, ever again.

I tell them, “if they could ___ (whatever it is they’re complaining about) during the Shoah, then certainly you should be able to in our living room… even a noisy living room.”

See?  Isn’t it terrible?  I really don’t use it all that often, I promise.

Still, I wanted to use it today to say “take that, silly paintbrush-shaking man, coming out to tell me that my screaming baby – a boy, by the way, not a girl as you assume from his long, glamourous blonde tresses – is disturbing your art class.”

I stick by what I told him:  clearly he has never been or had a child, because children make noise and there’s sometimes nothing you can do. 

And I wanted to say, so THERE.  Because of the Shoah.  Isn’t that awful?  But I bet there were people on their way to the gas chamber who made better paintings than that man in the cushiony heated comfort of a studio in a recreation centre, who can’t concentrate because a BABY is making noise.

So go shake your silly little paintbrush somewhere else.

Sometimes obnoxious strangers do come bearing wisdom.  Like the time Gavriel Zev was a teeny baby and I took him to WalMart.  He was in his car seat, in the Snap n’ Go (which was not the brand, but it was the same kind of carseat carrier). 

I loved the carseat carrier, by the way:  it was my single-favourite baby purchase for Naomi Rivka, and even more than all the nice baby carriers (gasp!), made my life easier and happier every single day.  We were in cars a lot when Naomi was a new baby.

But this time, Gavriel Zev was in it, and I was in WalMart with Elisheva, and he was screaming, and my only thought was – “let’s just get through this.”  Let’s get in and out and home and just live with the screaming in the meantime.  If you live with Gavriel Zev, you learn to live with screaming pretty fast.

So there we were – maybe we were even shopping for Purim; I remember having that kind of obsessive focus, being in the craft section, needing a specific thing.  And he was screaming.

And a shop lady came, in her dowdy blue WalMart apron and said, “lady, khhhhug your baby.”  Hug him.  She showed me with a gesture, picking up an imaginary baby, before she walked off.

BOY was I mad!  Fuming, smoke pouring out ears, everything.  Who was she to tell me how to take care of my screamy baby???  I was ready to report her, have her fired, whatever it took to wipe her off the face of the earth.

But then I stopped.  Picked him up, held him.  Khhhhugged him.  Put the things that had been in my hands in the baby carrier, had Elisheva push the baby carrier, and I held the baby.

And he did stop crying, a little.  Not much.  Still whimpering occasionally, but quieter.  Still unhappy, but at least I didn’t have to wonder if holding him would have made things better.  And it definitely made me feel better, besides looking far more virtuous, and less negligent.

The woman in the apron was right.  But the man with the paintbrush, today, was wrong.

I guess what that means is you have to listen to strangers and sometimes you learn something.  And sometimes you don’t.  Sometimes strangers are messengers of truth.  But maybe sometimes they’re just dumb.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You,...

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful....

What do we tell our kids about Chabad and “Yechi”?

If I start by saying I really like Chabad, and adore the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, z"l, well... maybe you already know where I'm headed. Naomi Rivka has been asking lately what I think about Chabad.  She asks, in part, because she already knows how I feel.  She already knows I’m bothered, though to her, it’s mostly about “liking” and “not liking.”  I wish things were that simple. Our little neighbourhood in Israel has a significant Chabad presence, and Chabad conducts fairly significant outreach within the community.  Which sounds nice until you realize that this is a religious neighbourhood, closed on Shabbos, where some huge percentage of people are shomer mitzvos.  Sure, it’s mostly religious Zionist, and there are a range of observances, for sure, but we’re pretty much all religious here in some way or another. So at that point, this isn’t outreach but inreach .  Convincing people who are religious to be… what? A lot of Chabad’s efforts here are focused o...