Tevye’s dream isn’t real but given my experiences with Jewish mysticism and things that happened when I was quite little it jumped out at me.
I have a vague memory of sitting in Hebrew school when I was around seven and being told the veil between worlds is thinner around Rosh Hashanah.
But that is not the only part of it, because I remember being younger and listening to my dad and grandfather talk about going to Yizkor but that is still not all of it.
Because I remember other moments in which I was around survivors of the camps and you could feel the anguish coming from some of them even if you didn’t know the full story and you never knew that.
Some of them wept silently but their bodies shook and others mourned in other ways, but I remember.
And so it came to be that as I closed my eyes during the first night of Rosh Hashanah 5783 I remembered and wondered if my father would visit me in my sleep.
A Passport Won’t Help
Even if there is a world to come and the veil between is thin and it allowed us to speak with those on the other side it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
You could have a basic conversation, ask for advice and guidance but it wouldn’t matter because the living make the choices and deal with the outcome and or consequences.
Might make you feel better to talk it out, but it doesn’t really matter. A passport won’t help get you to where you really want to be.
You just have to roll with what comes and make like Tevye when he accepts some of the changes that come with life.
Sometimes you push back and sometimes you…submit.
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It is a funny place in time…this moment of change and changes.
The children are in places where they are very much beginning to stretch their wings and explore the world in a different way…with less guidance and influence.
Not a bad thing, but different and sometimes hard.
Mom has an unexpected surgery coming up that impacts some of my plans and because the children are in the places they are I have the freedom to respond differently than I once would have.
I don’t have to struggle to figure out how to make sure their needs are covered. Now the focus is different and the echoes of my father’s request come through in a different way.
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My own blood work has come back and looks better than I had thought it might be. It is not where it needs to be yet, but better reassures me that what I have been doing works.
Better says that it is one more item on the lists of things I know that is falling into place.
Haven’t been back in the gym long enough to say the time there has impacted it but by the time I go back to see the doc in ’23 it will be part of it.
Health is part mental and the positive impact of the weights, machines and sweat is impossible to ignore.
I feel stronger and more fit and excited about the progress yet to come.
