Hat’s Off to My Wonderful Husband on Father’s Day

As Father’s Day approached this year, I had no fear. Unlike many years, when I had no clue what I could give my gift-averse husband, I thought I had the gift thing in the bag. This was no easy trick. Longtime readers will be familiar with the occasional column in which I work out my frustration at buying clothing for my husband, only to have to return the shirt/jacket/pants because the man insisted that “he didn’t need it” or found it not quite to his taste. I suppose it’s very nice to have such an unmaterialistic husband, one who sees the good in everyone and even in every item in his closet. This has forced me to point out frayed collars and shirts that have grown as sheer as flimsy gauze after thousands of washings.

Do you have any idea what sort of Herculean self-control it took for me not to chortle out loud and spit my seltzer across the room when my husband called to report that he had split his pants bending over at a job site? He had not outgrown the pants, but the pants had announced their retirement at an inopportune moment. I value my marriage too much to have said, “Serves you right!” but don’t think I wasn’t tempted. So what did he do? He untucked his shirt to cover up and kept working. Though frankly, I’m surprised that no one asked him where he bought the pants. Few things are more trendy today than brand new clothes that look like they’ve been through the shredder. They cost twice what clothes that are still materially intact cost. We are too old-fashioned to think giant air vents in our clothing are going to be a flattering look for either of us.

But it wasn’t pants I had in my sights; it was a hat. Jeff’s daily hat of choice, a once-elegant topper he got from a customer long ago, also had signs of terminal wear and tear. Voila! I ran out and bought him a new hat, saving it for Father’s Day. But two weeks before the big day, I couldn’t stand it any longer. Unable to contain my excitement, and wanting to lift his spirits after a terribly aggravating day at work, I presented him with the box. Even I had to admit the fit of the hat was a bit off. He promised me that on Father’s Day we’d exchange it at the hat store.

And then, the man who can’t stand shopping has the chutzpah to text me a photo of himself — Friday before Father’s Day — wearing a big smile and a new hat. He boasted that he bought not one, but two new hats at an outdoor kiosk. “Now we don’t have to go shopping!” he said, like that was a good thing.

My husband after an unexpected moment of retail therapy. My gift plans are foiled again!

Well, he may be hard to buy for (except books, so thank goodness for that!) but I salute my husband as one fantastic husband and father. In today’s world, where we read and hear of so many stories about absent fathers, uncaring fathers, fathers who walk out on their families, my husband is the old-fashioned kind of man, in the very best sense of the phrase. He is unstintingly dedicated, loving, patient, and hard-working. He has taught the kids through example that building a successful marriage, putting God and family before yourself, commitment to spiritual growth, and of course, relaxing with music and a glass of fine wine, are all keys to a happy and meaningful life. He’s taught them wise aphorisms such as “Work before play,” “Let’s keep the main thing, the main thing,” “Ask the Almighty to help give you clarity,” “Remember that we have so much more in common than what may divide us,” and, my personal favorite, “We’ll do whatever Mom says.”

So honey, this column’s for you. I forgive you for making me return yet another present. I guess we’ll fire up the grill, put some beers in the fridge, and have a barbeque.

Happy Father’s Day!

Hey, look what’s coming soon! Enter the giveaway on Goodreads to win a signed copy (Giveaway ends July 1). Pre-order now! Publication date is September 5.

“This marvelous book should connect with the widest possible readership – ferociously religious or fervently secular; Jewish, Christian or humanist; baby boomer, Gen X’er or millennial . . . Judy’s relationship with Judaism comes across as a serious romance, but one that raises as many new life questions as it settles. The call to ‘rules, rituals and restraint’ that she associates with Rabbi Daniel Lapin, her teacher (and mine), don’t bring an end to thinking and choosing but provide a means to think more deeply and choose more richly.” — Michael Medved, author of The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic

“Judy Gruen writes with down-to-earth warmth and humor about her personal spiritual journey. As she navigates family, friendship, love, loss, parenting, and community, you will root for her like you would cheer on a new best friend―someone who you just know somehow cares for and understands you, too.” —Lori Palatnik, founding director of the Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project

“Judy Gruen shares a message of sanity so vital today: you can be spiritual, sane and yourself in the modern world. She writes with delightful humor and depth about her unexpected path to a life of Jewish commitment.” — Rabbi David Aaron, author of The God-Powered Life

— Michael Medved, author of The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic

My Friend’s Amazing Recovery from Stage 4 Cancer

I was devastated when I learned that my dear friend Esther Chana had stage 4 ovarian cancer. She is one of my favorite people in the world, and I am in very good company; her fan club overflows with people from our community.

Whether in person, over the phone or even via email, you can feel Esther Chana’s full attention, caring, wisdom, humor and love focused on you. She is a therapist, and her psychological insights are so astute they are uncanny. Some years ago I confided a deeply troubling problem to her and we discussed it from time to time. She offered an utterly life-changing insight about my situation that no one whom I had taken into my confidence had thought of.

On her refrigerator she has a magnet that says, “As a matter of fact, I AM a rocket scientist!” because she did that too, before becoming a therapist.

When I first heard her news, I was angry at God. Hadn’t Esther Chana and her husband, Avraham, been through enough? Their trials were ongoing, sometimes numbing in their frequency. For years she had lived with chronic pain, the result of a serious car accident and the corrective surgeries that had left her with painful internal scar tissue. During the financial downturn beginning in 2009, her therapy practice was cut in half, and Avraham lost his job as well, entering a lengthy dry spell before he found adequate work again. Her aging parents had chronic health problems, and Esther Chana logged many hours with them in the emergency room. A few months before her diagnosis, they were flooded out of their apartment for many months.

And far worse than all of those things put together, Esther Chana had lost her only child, Avital, when the toddler was less than two years old.

“No, not Esther Chana!” I cried out. “God, You give her test after test and she never complains. Who survives stage 4 ovarian cancer? She doesn’t deserve this! It’s not fair!”

Because Esther Chana was part of the lifeblood of our community – hosting Shavuot-night learning in her home, keeping an open house most Shabbat afternoons for the singles who flock to her for friendship, dating advice and even matchmaking suggestions (she has made four successful matches so far), and hosting holiday meals for up to 30 at a time – the women in our community instantly rose to help with anything and everything needed.

Team Stryker Is Born

Perel Dena gave Esther Chana weekly massages to help with her muscle pain. For an entire year, Ellie cooked macrobiotic and organic meals for Shabbat and holidays. Sharon designed tee-shirts, shopping bags and mugs that read “TEAM STRYKER” for all of “the troops.” Avraham suggested the name after the Stryker armored combat tank used by the U.S. military. Stryker was also the brand name of the hospital bed where Esther Chana lay during her stays at the hospital. On the logo that Sharon designed, right above the tank were the last lines of Psalms 20, which is recited in times of distress.

Karin, another Team Stryker member, discovered a little article about ovarian cancer research in a magazine at a gym she had gone to on a whim. The information in that article led Esther Chana’s doctors to change her diagnosis from ovarian cancer to an undetermined type of cancer — still stage 4. The new type of cancer was even more aggressive than ovarian cancer, but thought to be more responsive to treatment.

Esther Chana and her husband are close with Rabbi Simcha Weinberg, and at Avraham’s request, Rabbi Weinberg convened a gathering for her friends, teaching us how to pray for a recovery. During the gathering, Rabbi Weinberg, who also has endured multiple, life-threatening medical challenges, asked us all to say why we felt we could not imagine life without Esther Chana. To my surprise, he suggested that we boldly “demand” that God heal her. Shmuel, a single man in his early 30’s who had converted to Judaism, offered, “Esther Chana and Avraham are my ‘Jewish parents,’ and I am counting on both of them to walk me down the aisle when I get married one day,” he said. This was one of the most powerful moments for me.

The surgery to remove Esther Chana’s cancer also removed half her stomach muscle. Her prognosis remained precarious. Still, she announced to her doctor, “When I get to my five-year mark clear of cancer, I’m going ice climbing in June Lake,” referring to a tiny mountain town in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains known for its skiing and where Esther Chana and Avraham loved to go each winter.

The doctor looked at her, paused, and then broke into a wide grin. “I think that’s fabulous!” he said.

“I know that suffering is supposed to be one way that God tells you He loves you,” Esther Chana once said to me. “I’m not angry and I’m not afraid, but I think I have enough love, thank you.”

She also told me, “One of the hardest things for me is having had to take so much from people when my impulse is to give all the time. This has been an important lesson for me.”

Climbing Ice

Slowly, slowly, Esther Chana healed. Cancer had wreaked havoc with her body but couldn’t touch her astounding optimism and steely resolve. Last year, she and Avraham walked Shmuel down the aisle at his wedding. As her five-year “clean” anniversary loomed in sight, she began training for her ice climb in June Lake. This, despite the heavy side effects from her surgery and aggressive chemotherapy, which included chronic pain from neuropathy, gout and diabetes. She went through four trainers before she settled on a Romanian athlete named Ciprian, who at first thought her goal was crazy. Seeing her determination, he, too, became a beliver in Esther Chana.

Climbing ice

Two weeks after her climb, Esther Chana hosted a seuda hodaah, a celebratory meal of thanks marking an occasion we had all barely dared to dream we would see: five years cancer-free. “I never asked myself, ‘Why me?’ but ‘Why cancer?’” she told us that night. “I believe that pain is prescriptive. Sometimes I got frustrated and started to push away from God. I had to learn to accept what God was prescribing to be close to Him and accept it with gratitude. I got to a point of zero anxiety and fear. Ultimately, I got to a point where I accepted that for some reason, I needed

“I never asked myself, ‘Why me?’ but ‘Why cancer?’” she told us that night. “I believe that pain is prescriptive. Sometimes I got frustrated and started to push away from God. I had to learn to accept what God was prescribing to be close to Him and accept it with gratitude. I got to a point of zero anxiety and fear. Ultimately, I got to a point where I accepted that for some reason, I needed the cancer to be close to Him.”

Avraham filmed his wife at the climb, and we watched it in their apartment that night. The snow was slushy from rain, making the climb that much more arduous. In her snow suit and boots, she was tethered by a harness to the belay rope, and smiled broadly at the camera as she looked up at the snowy heights. In her living room, along with most of the other members of Team Stryker, I watched her take the inverted ice axes that she used as trekking poles and determinedly plunge them, one after the other, as she made a nearly vertical ascent.

At Shmuel’s wedding

We all watched with tears of joy as we celebrated the remarkable recovery of a remarkable woman. Esther Chana, who hated the idea that she had become a taker and not a giver, may still not appreciate how much she continued to give all along. We witnessed her fortitude and willpower to heal, her steadfast commitment to grow and not become embittered, and her strengthened faith in the face of a nearly fatal illness.

Mazal Tov, Esther Chana. Team Stryker blesses you to live in good health till 120.

(This article originally appeared on Aish.com.)

Did you know my forthcoming memoir, The Skeptic and the Rabbi, is almost here? Please pre-order now from your local bookstore or online. I am so excited to share this book with you!

My Passover Redemption

It is 1:15 a.m. on Seder night. My fatigue is settling in, along with the brisket. It’s a good, satisfying fatigue, born of the hard work I have done—with the help of my children—to clean, shop, cook and make a Seder for family and friends. After twenty-two years of making Seders, I admit to occasional twinges of Passover resort envy, often triggered when friends call to wish me early holiday greetings before they jet off to their Passover program in Scotland, Italy or Costa Rica. This can be a bit much while I am going mano-a-mano with the business side of a scrubby sponge in the kitchen.

My husband and our kids insist that there’s no better place for Seders than at home. This is very satisfying for me, despite the labor, and I focus on making the holiday with simchah, happiness. And yet, every year, I start to get shpilkes around 1 a.m. on Seder night. Despite the joyous singing, I am distracted by the thought that the brisket still needs to be wrapped up and tucked into the fridge, and the other food put away. I head to the kitchen, hearing the echoes of “Avadim Hayinu” replaying in my head. I have an indescribable feeling of satisfaction because the Seder is the holiday that consecrates our birth as a nation.

More than ever before this year, I feel an irreducible, transcendent connection to my Jewish identity, to God and through my children, to the Jewish future.

That feeling lasts about thirty seconds. No sooner do I fling open the refrigerator door than I recoil in horror—the refrigerator light goes on. I forgot to set the holiday mode before the holiday began! For technical reasons, triggering lights to go on and off violates the laws of holiday observance. I let the door fall shut, and faster than you could shout “Dayeinu!” all that spiritual uplift I had basked in the moment before suddenly went pfft!, like air hissing out of a popped balloon.

Suddenly, I am resentful and mad: Does God really want me to have to throw out all this brisket, at $8.99 a pound? Where am I supposed to find a yom tov goy, a non-Jew to whom I could explain my predicament and who could rescue me by setting the holiday mode on the fridge, at nearly 1:30 a.m.? Why does this religion have so many rules? What am I supposed to feed my guests for the second Seder feast if I can’t store my food in the fridge? Tuna fish?

I announce the news at the table, complaining as bitterly as the maror we ate that any possible redemption in this situation is impossible.

“Don’t worry, Ma! It’s all going to be fine,” my eldest son says. I glower at him. How dare he display such faith at a time like this! His blithe disregard for my situation annoys me. We open our dining room shutters, looking for the absurdly implausible appearance of a non-Jew who just might be sauntering by in the middle of the night and who would be willing to listen to our crazy rules and offer to help us. Unbelievably, the rest of the family has the audacity to continue singing while I sit there feeling like a faithless flame-out.

I am ashamed of myself. What is my suffering compared to that of our ancestors, enslaved for hundreds of years? They had reason to complain! Yet the old “This too is for the good” Jewish philosophy refuses to kick in. What message is God sending me? All I had wanted was to make Passover with happiness and dedication!

At 1:40, my husband and one of our sons go outside to scan the street. All we see are Jews, Jews everywhere; the land is filled with them! Usually, it’s a comforting feeling to find a landsman in a time of trouble, but not in this case. We get excited for one moment seeing a couple heading toward a car, but unfortunately, they are Jews, too.

At 1:48, as I feel myself falling to the forty-ninth level of spiritual darkness, fighting tears of frustration and wondering how to elegantly serve canned tuna for second Seder, a car slowly pulls up and parks directly across the street from our house. Like a shot, my husband, one of our guests and our eldest son fly out the door. I fear that the sight of three grown men all wearing long white robes hurtling toward him might not just scare the heck out of the driver. I watch from the dining room, holding my breath. A conversation is taking place. To my utter amazement, I watch the driver get out of his car and enter my house.

My yom tov goy has arrived.

The sight of my “savior” renders me nearly speechless. But not quite. I blabber excessive “thank yous” and apologize for the intrusion.

“I realize you must think we’re very strange,” I offer, thinking, “Well, that’s an understatement!” But the young man holds up one hand to stop me—not that I blame him—explaining that he is a waiter at Shiloh’s, a kosher restaurant a few blocks away, where he just finished working at a Seder. “I know all about it,” he explains cheerfully.

In the kitchen, I show him how to set the holiday mode. And with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, the waiter from Shiloh’s sets the holiday mode, saving not only my brisket, but my sanity as well. I offer him some brisket as a thank you, but he declines. He comes and goes within three minutes, his appearance inexplicable. We asked him what made him park right across from our house, just three blocks from the restaurant. He had to make a phone call, he said. And he chose to make it right where we needed him.

That night, I gained a spiritual high, lost it in a moment, and then regained it in a much more profound way. As miracles go, I know that sending a yom tov goy is no great shakes compared to, say, splitting a sea or smiting the firstborns. But on that Seder night, it was the biggest miracle I could have asked for—a full redemption, and a reminder that God knows what we need and sends it when we need it.

We then all sang Hallel.

(This essay is adapted from its original form when it appeared in the in article was featured in the Spring 2013 issue of Jewish Action.)

Guess what’s coming September 5? My next book, The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love with Faith. Preorder now!

Three Cheers for the Delightful “The Women’s Balcony”

Israeli screenwriter Shlomit Nehama has done something pretty amazing: she has written a movie with a strong feminist voice about encroaching religious extremism that still respects Jewish religious traditions, has a sense of humor and a huge heart.

In Hebrew with English subtitles, “The Women’s Balcony” is a total delight and I urge my readers to see this film when you can. In fact, though the story focuses on a small Orthodox community in Jerusalem, its themes are timely and should resonate with people of all religions.

In the movie, a community begins to splinter apart when a fundamentalist rabbi takes advantage of their crisis: the women’s upstairs balcony in the synagogue has collapsed, the congregation is temporarily homeless and their injured rabbi is temporarily unable to lead. The new, younger and more dynamic rabbi begins to preach extremist views, including the theory that the balcony collapsed because the women didn’t dress modestly enough and did not cover their hair. A few of the women believe his fire-and-brimstone talks and start praying fervently with their hair covered. Marriages begin to fray as more of the men start seeing things the rabbi’s way, and women’s friendships, formerly tight-knit, also begin to unravel. The camp is divided.

When the congregants realize with a shock that the rabbi has repaired the damaged synagogue without the women’s balcony, relegating the women to a cell-like room adjacent to the building, the women finally rebel. This theme of growing religious fundamentalism is timely and universal. Good religion offers a sense of community, identity, purpose and transcendence. But done badly, without sense or heart, it can divide as it conquers, though the conquest will not last.

As someone who wrestled mightily with the structure of Jewish Orthodoxy before I signed on to it (I dislike the Orthodox label but use it as a reference point), the film touched a nerve with me by raising issues that are difficult for many observant Jewish women, such as covering hair for married women, sitting separately from men in shul, and the limits of rabbinic authority. These are the very same issues (among others) that I raise in my long-awaited memoir (long-awaited by me, anyway!), The Skeptic and the Rabbi, out September 5. I hope I did half as good a job as Shlomit Nehama and director Emil Ben-Shimon at adding humor into my story as they did in their film.

“The Women’s Balcony” offers viewers a feel-good, plausible, happy ending, where the bonds of community and the power of love, compassion and common sense overwhelm harsh religious zealotry.

We’ll Miss You, Mary Tyler Moore

One of the highlights of the week for me growing up was watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show with my mom. That show first aired in 1970 — the year my only brother, Allan, had died. Laughter was in very short supply in our home. Everything about the show was terrific, including the upbeat show’s music and lyrics (“Who can turn the world on with her smile?/Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?”) When Moore famously hurled her beret skyward, it was if she were saying, “Let’s give this a whirl! I’m game to see what happens!”

My mom and I would watch and laugh, and I learned that laughter was not just an escape, but also a lifesaver. Even at 10 years old, when the show began, I had set my sights on a writing life. Women’s roles were changing fast, and they had to work hard, usually harder than men, to earn their places in professions where previously only men had been hired. Watching the character of Mary Richards as a young news producer thrilled and inspired me. I wanted to be like Mary: warmhearted and smart; determined yet graceful; finding my way as a modern woman and deciding where and how to break the mold set by my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations.

I felt a pang of sadness when I heard that Moore had passed away. It’s striking that so many performers who were so gifted at comedy lived through so much sadness. Moore’s parents (just like those of comedienne Carol Burnett’s) were alcoholics, and Moore was raised by another relative. She lost her only son in a tragic gun accident, and she outlived both her siblings. She battled alcoholism and was divorced twice. Not an easy life.

The headline in the online version of the obituary in the New York Times stated that Mary Tyler Moore “incarnated the modern woman.” That’s a big claim, but in looking back, it seems largely true: Television was breaking all kinds of ground in the 1970s, and the MTM show was the first to showcase a single career woman not obsessed with getting married, who had an unapologetically active love life (at least sometimes — as her character said to her TV boss Lou Grant, “I’ve been around the block. Well, maybe not around the block, but nearby”). She wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself even in the face of belligerent and buffoonish men who often, in modern parlance, liked to indulge in “mansplaining.”

It’s impossible not to think about Mary Tyler Moore’s funny, understated strength, her humor and grace under pressure and feel the loss of this kind of role model for younger women today. Younger comediennes and actresses demonstrate their idea of women’s strength not with grace and cleverness but with foul language, the language of anger. Being angry and “nasty” has become something to boast of. How bizarre. Women are outpacing men educationally and have continued to prosper in nearly every field of endeavor. Why so much anger? They demean themselves and the very idea that women are “whole people” by their obsession with their reproductive organs. Many performers make what was meant to be privately powerful into the stuff of their comedy routines. At the recent women’s march in Washington DC to protest the election of the country’s new president, many found “inspiration” from this area of anatomy and fashioned the most disturbing and bizarre fashion accessory ever dreamed up in a gender studies department. Did nobody tell these women that this was a fashion faux pas of the highest order?

I hope that younger women — all women! — will now go back and enjoy old episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Laugh at the witty repartee between Mary and her friends and coworkers, and marvel that it wasn’t that long ago when a woman could prove her worth in our society without losing her grace, the force of her optimism and wisdom — in short, her very feminine strength.

RIP, Mary Tyler Moore.

Judy Gruen’s memoir, The Skeptic and the Rabbi, will be published in September by She Writes Press.

My Chanukah Miracle

As I pulled the seat belt across my shoulder and inserted the buckle, I felt my delicate gold chain falling off my neck. It was a dreadful feeling. If that chain had come loose, so had my small gold pendant. Perhaps it had already fallen off in the mall where I had just spent the last hour and a half. I undid the seatbelt, searching for my pendant in and under the seat and the floor. Nothing.

I had been Chanukah shopping, trooping up and down escalators, striding along the walkways from Nordstrom to Macy’s and back again, peeking in boutiques on different floors. The mall was nearly 870,000 square feet, and I gauged my chances of find my special pendant, less than one inch around, about as good as my winning the Pulitzer Prize.

I had bought this piece of jewelry on impulse years ago, smitten by the shimmering shades of green, red and burgundy cloisonné in a heart-within-a-heart motif. The tiniest of diamonds set in the middle added to the reflective quality. It wasn’t outrageously expensive, but it was surely a self-indulgence to buy it.

I rationalized my decision. Lots of women spent this much and much more on designer handbags every year or two, a habit I do not understand and could not afford. Toting home my new bauble, I felt guilty. My husband is a generous man. I should have told him about it and asked him to keep it in mind for a special occasion. But it was a limited edition, the artist’s name etched in gold on the back, and I knew it wouldn’t last. So I took material matters into my own hands and signed the credit card slip.

I loved wearing my colorful pendant. My husband also liked it and didn’t question where it came from or what it cost. But after a few years, it disappeared. I searched everywhere for it, but finally gave it up for lost. I was sad, but part of me felt it was payback. You shouldn’t have been so extravagant in the first place, I thought.

Fast forward three years. I had dumped out the contents of a dresser drawer to organize it. To my amazement, there was my pendant, winking at me amidst an island of ordinary athletic socks. I thanked God for returning my pendant to me. I figured He was telling me, “Knock it off already with the guilt trip. Just enjoy it and be careful.”

Given this history, you can imagine the awful déjà vu I experienced when I felt the chain slip off a few days ago. This can’t be happening again! I thought. This time, my beautiful pendant would not magically appear in a sock drawer back at home.

I felt heartsick. It’s just a thing, I lectured myself. Count your blessings. If it’s gone, it’s gone. Go home and make dinner.

And yet. . . even though it was a lost and tiny item in a huge mall, why not at least report it missing? The woman in the management office was sympathetic, took my information, but agreed it was long odds of getting it back. It was absurd to actually try to find my pendant, and I wondered what lesson there was in my having lost it not once, but twice. But Chanukah is a time of miracles. In the Chanukah story, something very small and valuable really did show up in a totally unexpected way. Why not at least look?

I retraced my steps as closely as possible. I went down the escalator to the last place I had been, a Hallmark shop. I kept my eye to the ground. Before heading to the aisle where I had picked the only item I purchased – a Chanukah card – I stopped to survey the area near the cash register where I had waited in line.

Tucked under a display of holiday mugs, my pendant, face up, glinted at me.

I was rooted to the spot, thunderstruck. I swooped down and grabbed it. Holding it in a vise-like grip, I ran back upstairs and in happy disbelief showed it to the lady in the management office. I think she was as stunned as I was.

When I shared this story with our guests at our Shabbat table, I said, “This really felt like my own little Chanukah miracle. But I still wonder if it means anything else?”

My niece Ali said, “I would not have gone back into the mall like you did. I would have been sure the pendant was gone for good. But you looked for it and you found it. I think that’s the lesson. Never give up, even when the odds seem so much against you.”

“There’s also another lesson,” my husband said. “For Chanukah, I’m going to buy you a better chain.”

(This article originally appeared on Aish.com.)

Want to read reviews of many of the books I read in 2016? Here is my “Year in Books” via Goodreads. I hope you find some books that attract your attention!

What I Learned from Writing a Memoir

I am writing this post late in the evening before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. This is a day when, among other responsibilities, we are meant to ask forgiveness from people whom we may have hurt, even inadvertently. I know that even my biggest fans manage to live full lives even without my columns, but I still do ask your forgiveness for having dropped out of sight for so many months, with nary a mirthful or meaningful post or any explanation.

A few of you even contacted me, wondering whether they accidentally got dropped from the email list, or asking why I’d gone all quiet on the Western front. Why wasn’t I writing?

Well, I had been writing. . . and writing. . . and writing. For a few years, in fits and starts, I had been working on a memoir about my unexpected, bumpy journey to Jewish Orthodox practice. (“Practicing” is the right word here, because there are still may things I have yet to get right.)

There are loads of myths about Orthodox Jews, how we live, why we do some of the things we do. Many people (including many Jews) just think that we are nuts, or simply hopelessly out of date. I used to think these things, too. One of my goals in writing my story was to try to share some of the beauty and meaning that I found, while also admitting some of the awkwardness, conflicts and funny stories I have encountered along the way. I wanted to tell a story about a serious topic in an entertaining, funny way, without compromising my message.

I hadn’t a clue when I started just how daunting a task this would be. Even after a tenth or fifteenth draft of the first chapters, which I was sure I had finally gotten right, one of my few trusted readers would hand the chapters back to me and essentially said, “Curb your enthusiasm. This isn’t your best work.” I ripped out the stitches I had laboriously woven and began again.

Over the period of about a year, I realized what was wrong: I had unconsciously used a different voice in my memoir than the voice my readers are used to seeing, the voice I have cultivated over a period of so many years. I was taking myself too seriously, and the writing paid the price.

When I began to trust my real voice, my writing improved. When I hired a series of book editors to help guide me, my pace quickened. But the book was still taking too long, especially since I am still a busy mom and now hands-on Nana to my two granddaughters, so several months ago I decided to stop nearly all other writing and editing projects and finish my book before my book finished me.

A few weeks ago, I really finished it, and I have sent it out into the world, seeking a publisher. Say a little prayer for me that The Skeptic and the Rabbi will have a smooth ride to a publishing date. You bet I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

It’s funny, but I now realize that my experience working on this book has a lot in common with how I experience Yom Kippur. Both demanded a great deal of introspection, sometimes, more than was comfortable. Both brought me to tears on a regular basis. I got so involved in writing that sometimes I even forgot to eat. Both have made prayer more natural, because there were times when I felt so stuck on how to write certain chapters that I was sure that only an act of God would help me get to the finish line. After a good Yom Kippur, when I felt connected to the prayers and the divine presence around me, I end up feeling transformed. And having wrestled with this project for these last few years, I also feel somehow transformed. It was hard work, but it has also been exhilarating to learn so much more about my craft, and work in a new genre.

So while you didn’t hear from me for a long time, I had a good excuse, don’t you think? But I missed writing to you and hearing from you. Thanks for being patient — and forgiving!

May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life this year, and inscribed as well for health, prosperity and peace.

Faith Takes Time

Yesterday I went to hear a speaker at synagogue, the wife of a prominent rabbi visiting from Jerusalem. She spoke about faith, and the rewards of keeping faith uppermost in our hearts, even in dark times. She spoke about prayer and its power, and shared a few miracle stories attesting to it.

Here’s one of them. An Israeli man had to rush one of his twin infants to the emergency room because the infant had displayed frightening symptoms. Alone in the waiting area, the man caught sight of a volume of Psalms, Tehillim in Hebrew. Based on the old adage that there are no atheists in a foxhole, the man, who was secular, spent the night reading through the entire book of Psalms, crying over his sick infant and praying for the child’s recovery.

By the morning, the doctor told him that every test they had run was negative. The child appeared completely healthy. In a “happily ever after” ending, the man became religious.

I have very mixed feelings about stories like this. On one hand, I know they are probably true, but I also suspect some of these stories get exaggerated in the process of retelling. It’s not that I doubt that God performs miracles. In fact, I believe we are surrounded by miracles each and every day, and I have experienced many “small miracles” in my life that have deepened my own faith. I’m sure that one reason we Jews are obligated to pray three times a day is to remind us of all that is actually going right in our lives, when it is so easy to focus on what we lack. And after giving thanks for our blessings, we can pour on the requests for help and redemption.

For the man in this story, true faith may well have sprouted overnight as he had been touched by a divine miracle. But most people need to develop faith over time, and I don’t like it when the quality of having such faith is presented as something that’s as easy as whipping up a pot of chicken soup. It isn’t! I grew up feeling very connected emotionally to my Jewish identity, but I lacked a substantial Jewish education, and had zero education in the art of prayer. It has been the work of my entire adult life to develop the kind of steadfast faith that I admire in others, to really believe that somehow, some way, everything that happens is for the good, even the inexplicably sad and tragic. There are many things we will never be able to understand in this lifetime.

I looked around the room yesterday and saw that several women who had come to hear this speaker were still rather new to this sort of talk, which assumes a certain level of spiritual background and backbone. When I was still new to Jewish observance, I know this sort of presentation would have left me disheartened. “She makes it sound so easy!” I would have thought. Years and years later, I know that this sort of faith is possible, but that, like most other things of value in life, it is the result of effort, focus, and desire. I wanted to speak up yesterday and say to all the women who might have also been disconcerted by her words, “It’s okay to feel the struggle in all of it. Keep on praying, keep on questioning, keep on trying to make the relationship real. The real faith will come, a little at a time.”

I know: this is a pretty different type of blog post than the sort I usually write, and I didn’t make you laugh! Maybe you are disappointed. But the reason I haven’t posted anything new for such a long time, and the reason this post is such a different tone, is because I’ve been focused very intently on finishing a memoir about my own reluctant path to observance. I’m not done yet, but finally I can see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. So because my faith-life is so much on my mind, I’ll probably be adapting my blog to reflect these thoughts. I’ll still share as much humor as I can, and may split the blog into two pages so I don’t confuse or disappoint readers who are looking forward to some light humor and get some kind of heavy column about prayer instead I don’t mean to be heavy; I still plan to offer both mirth and meaning, but they may not be in equal measures for a while.

Also, I have posted a few recent columns on topics more business-oriented, and you can see those on my Linked In page.

Finally, over the past year I have begun to offer writing coaching services, along with my non-fiction editing services. You can see some of my client testimonials here.

I’ll keep you posted on the status of my book, and will try to blog more frequently. If you enjoy this post, please forward to a friend!

My Beef with the Food Pyramid Scheme

Shhh! Don’t tell! Beef is really good for us!

I am a red meat fan. and come from a long line of hardened carnivores. In the early 1960s, when I was a little kid, the nutritional industrial complex convicted red meat of crimes against cholesterol and heart health. Red meat, for eons considered a staple of a healthy diet, was suddenly knocked off its nutritional pedestal. Overnight, if it once mooed, it was booed. My mother ramped up the chicken at the dinner table and tapered down the meat. My dad cried fowl.

I actually went vegetarian for about a dozen years, as part of my idealistic youth. One day, a friend offered me a delicate little chicken drumstick at her apartment. I had an epiphany: I had been a vegetarian fool. I sat down and ate the chicken and nearly chewed through the bone, never to return to the land of exclusively lacto-ovo vegetarianism. Still, I assumed that red meat was like a hunk of Devil’s food chocolate cake: delicious to be sure, but hostile to my health and to be parceled out in small portions on special occasions.

So imagine my joy when I read that red meat has been falsely accused for decades. That it was actually good for me! And for you! The article was from the Wall Street Journal and written by Nina Teicholz, based on her 2014 book, “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.” I had saved the article and came across it again this week, just when I was getting hungry for lunch and thinking, “Where’s the beef?”

Reading the story will probably make you ready to run out for a burger, if not the fries. Teicholz wrote that there was never (You hear that? Never!) solid evidence that animal fats cause the heart disease for which they were cruelly maligned. “We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias,” she wrote. Imagine that.

True, America suddenly faced a heart disease epidemic in the mid-1950’s. The government and scientists looked for a villain. Teichholz blames, in part, Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota, who “relentlessly champion[ed] the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.”

But Dr. Keys had an agenda to put red meat on the grill until it was charred to a crisp. And Keys’ study of nearly 13,000 men in the U.S., Japan and Europe was biased: He didn’t study men in countries where people still ate a lot of fat but had no widespread heart disease, such as France, Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. He did study peasants from Crete, “islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.”

Other scientists followed like sheep, designing studies poised to malign animal fats. But the studies didn’t always control for smoking and other factors, which made their results “unreliable at best.”

Now the fix was in, and the mighty and powerful in the worlds of science and politics convinced Americans that red meat and butter were the enemy. This led to the famous government-sponsored food pyramid where carbohydrates were king. As a young mother in the early 1990’s, I served and ate pasta dinners most nights believing it was “healthier” than meat. I then wondered why, despite chasing after four kids and going to the gym, I was still twenty pounds overweight.

And far from being a benign change in our diets, moving to carbs and margarine instead of meat and butter, as we were told to do, was harmful, Teicholz says. Carbohydrates break down into glucose and help store fat. Frankly, I have never needed help with fat-storing, thanks anyway. Worse, carbohydrates in excess can lead to obesity and potentially to Type 2 diabetes. These both contribute to heart disease. All those bowls of Grape-Nuts cereal, that frankly tasted like pulverized pine cone, may have been worse for me than had I eaten nice buttery eggs for breakfast! Who knew? Many scientists did, but wouldn’t tell.

The American Heart Association in 1961 proclaimed that shunning butter and lard for vegetable oil-based margarine and vegetable oil led to healthier hearts, yet Teichholz notes that “In early clinical trials, people on diets high in vegetable oil were found to suffer higher rates not only of cancer but also of gallstones. And, strikingly, they were more likely to die from violent accidents and suicides.” Gosh, could people have been so desperate for a steak that they killed themselves?

It was no pleasure to learn that after having ingested a bargeful of margarine in my life for a “healthier heart” that I may have damaged my liver in the process because of all the trans fats, and even raised my level of “bad” LDL cholesterol. This is “not remotely what Americans bargained for when they gave up butter and lard,” Teichholz wrote.

And who remembers that famous Framingham study on heart disease risk factors from 1971? Well, that study, whose results have never been questioned, revealed that women over 50 with high total cholesterol levels live longer, yet women are the ones who have been assiduously upping their fruit, vegetable and grain consumption, wondering why their “good” HDL cholesterol was dropping. Finally, women have achieved equality with men, at least in matching their death rates from heart disease.

Of course, there are many studies that have proven the health benefits of a nice juicy burger or lean steak, but they don’t get much attention. One study, whose results were published in the January 2012 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed that a group with high cholesterol following a mostly fruit, vegetable and whole grain lowered their “bad” LDL cholesterol by about 10 percent after adding up to 5.5 ounces of lean beef a day. What’s more, “bad” fat content—called triglycerides—decreased.

Another study of women in Australia who ate 1 to 2 ounces of beef or lamb a day were half as likely to have major depression or anxiety disorder compared to those who ate less than 1 ounce daily. One researcher guessed this was because the typically grass-fed beef and lamb in Australia is higher is higher in omega-3 fatty acids, which can protect against anxiety and depression. I say the answer is simpler: Most people simply enjoy meat. And frankly, if anyone allowed me only one ounce of meat as a serving, I might get depressed too.

So if cows are not to blame for our heart health woes, what is? After more than $1 billion spent trying to prove that animal fats were to blame, we don’t know. Too many people have built careers and egos on what might be junk science. The real evidence that meat is bad for you remains as slippery as an omelet sliding off a buttery grill and onto a plate with a side of hash browns.

Here’s to a fat, fresh burger, grilled with onions on top, medium rare. I’ll only eat half the bun.

Laughter is also good for you, and has zero cholesterol. Check out my funny books: Till We Eat Again: A Second Helping, The Women’s Daily Irony Supplement, and Carpool Tunnel Syndrome — a modern-day classic! If you enjoyed this Mirth & Meaning, please forward to a friend!

The Myth of the Empty Nest

by Judy Gruen

“So how’s the empty nest?” my neighbor June asked when we nearly bumped shopping carts at the market.

“How would I know?” I shrugged. “The married ones live in the neighborhood and pop over all the time, often when they’re hungry and their wives aren’t around. Our granddaughters are brought over a few times a week to play, riffle through all the cereals in the pantry, play with my bracelet collection, dump toys out on the living room floor, and then go home. Each kid’s room is still filled with so many of their own clothes, books and belongings I’m not sure what they wear or can possibly have in their apartments.”

My neighbor raised her eyebrows. “So I guess you’re not getting much more writing done now than when they were at home?”

I threw my head back and chortled in a manner I hoped was wryly amusing. “Hardly! They also text, email and call, usually during dinner. In desperation I announced that I was turning off my phone during set work hours, but they just emailed or waited at the door. Honestly, I got more done when they were teenagers and totally ignored me. Now they’re adults and realize that I actually know something, and they want in on my hard-won wisdom. The only way I’ll get an empty nest anytime soon is if I run away to a cabin in the mountains.”

“There must be an app for this,” she said. “I guess it’s nice to know that you’re still wanted,” she said.

“Oh, it is,” I answered, tossing a few extra boxes of cereal in the cart for the grandkids to eat and spill. “I don’t mean to complain. . . .it’s just, this so-called empty nest isn’t anything like I thought it would be, namely, empty. Now I understand why the most prolific writers in history were either men or childless women. There’s no retirement from Mom-dom.”

“And your husband probably wants some attention too,” she said, as we headed together amiably toward the produce section.

“Don’t get me started,” I said, demonstrating admirable restraint by not grabbing a box of Entenmann’s Danish but remembering that my husband likes Dijon mustard and we were all out. “I’m grateful to have kids who still need me, and provide so much material to write about. Now if only I could find the time to write it all down!”

If you enjoyed this Mirth & Meaning, please forward to a friend!

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