Feeding teenage boys healthy, homemade food is no joke. It\u2019s a marathon and not a sprint. Every time, I start with \u201cWhere did the leftovers go? Did you eat them all?\u201d and \u201cWhat else can I possibly throw together from the produce in the fridge and meat in the freezer?\u201d<\/p>\n
For anyone who is immersed in household routines, food production easily moves from creative enjoyment to drudgery. This morning, I pondered what to make for dinner, as I walked the dog. Just like the need to think up meals, the dog walk feels heavy, each step weighing me down. Then I hear a noise and look up to see Canada geese migrating home. It\u2019s a sign of spring and, after a long winter, a sign of joy.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re experiencing what looks like a failing ceasefire, ongoing wars and, in North America, ongoing antisemitic upheaval. I feel I have that sentence on repeat. The situations change but the worry about world conflicts and about friends and family remains. I\u2019m afraid to invest in commenting on today\u2019s news because tomorrow, we\u2019re still going to wrestle with these issues, but the specifics will change. I feel swamped by it, and I\u2019ll guess that I\u2019m not alone in that. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I continue to study Daf Yomi<\/i>, a page of Babylonian Talmud a day. Lately, I\u2019ve been trying to follow the rabbis in Menachot, as they cover the particulars of grain sacrifices and how they were carried out in the Temple. The Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed just under 2,000 years ago, and these rabbis were discussing this more than 1,500 years ago. On one hand, the rabbis\u2019 debate feels important \u2013 they worried that, should the Temple be rebuilt, they would need to understand and replicate these sacrifices. On the other hand, the incredible level of nuance in these discussions feels over the top. It\u2019s way past \u201cHow one loads the dishwasher\u201d and up there with \u201cHow do you clean out the sink drain?\u201d and \u201cDo you sort coffee grounds from tea leaves in your compost?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s between these extremes that a lot of spiritual discussion happens. It\u2019s something like \u201cWe are but a grain of sand on an endless beach\u201d and, at the same time, \u201cListen to your heartbeat, as its beat is the centre of the universe.\u201d As individuals, our lives are nothing in the eternal universe and, also, we are the centre of everything all at once.<\/p>\n I get mired in the minutiae, particularly when it comes to household management. Societally, this is common for middle-aged moms with kids at home. This past week, we bought our kids an old-fashioned clock radio, in hopes they would wake up on their own. Despite the clock, their dad goes in first to tell them to wake up. I come in 15 minutes later, to rouse them again. This morning, something occurred to me as I sang \u201cModeh Ani\u201d at high volume to my teenagers and then a little Paul Simon, \u201cOh, my momma, she loves me, she loves me, she gets down on her knees and hugs me, she loves me like a rock!\u201d (I can be annoyingly loud and cheery in the morning.) Maybe, even at 7:15, my boys like seeing us do this. Maybe these will be things they remember. Maybe this is how they are reminded that their parents love them.<\/p>\n Slogans that urge us onwards, to do \u201cgreat things,\u201d like \u201cHow we spend our days is how we spend our lives,\u201d can really rub me the wrong way. After the raucous wakeup, I was outside, dressed and walking the dog 15 minutes later, wondering if this meant that picking up dog poop or reminding a kid not to forget his lunch was indeed how I\u2019d spend my life. In a \u201cloud\u201d world full of people who boast of big world-changing endeavours, where does that leave me?<\/p>\n Some people I went to school with are, indeed, in big important positions in business or nonprofits, making change in the world, and that can make a person feel small and hopeless. The notion of tikkun olam<\/i>, or fixing the world, feels far off. This umbrella phrase is a concept consisting of many individual mitzvot <\/i>(commandments). It\u2019s misleading and too broad when the individual commandments (visit the sick, provide food for the poor in your community, etc.) are accessible. Example: I saw a new mom of twins feeling desperate online. I knew, from experience, how to help.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can do this,\u201d I wrote. \u201cTake it one feed, one diaper change, one snack and one nap at a time. Take all the help you are offered. Think forward but only to the next thing you have to do.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I was in the trenches, alone, with my twin infants, I felt furious when smiling people said, \u201cEnjoy it! It will all go by so quickly.\u201d It was painful and slow, like being a grain of sand on an endless beach. Now, though, as I jostle my teens off to school with their lunch bags, I\u2019m reminded that we can do big things, like raise a whole new generation, through these small details.<\/p>\n The rabbis spent a lot of energy trying to reconstitute what Temple sacrifice looked like. This seems a bit much to me until a kid loses his brand new, handknit mittens. Suddenly we\u2019re retracing our steps, calling the places where he might have left them, and getting into the nitty-gritty. These little steps, how we spend our days, are, I believe, how we find our humanity. The global conflicts and issues change, but, if we can just focus on doing these small tasks for others, we can make enormous change over time.<\/p>\n It\u2019s OK to be annoyed, bored and frustrated by all of life\u2019s mindless tasks. That\u2019s a real feeling that many of us share! It\u2019s legitimate. Now, though, I have to go make chicken meatballs, with onions and dill and matzah meal in them, for supper, which we\u2019ll have with potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets and a salad.<\/p>\n These endless details? They\u2019re about nothing. They mean everything.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Joanne Seiff <\/b>has written regularly for the Winnipeg Free Press and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including <\/i>From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner<\/a> or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Feeding teenage boys healthy, homemade food is no joke. It\u2019s a marathon and not a sprint. Every time, I start with \u201cWhere did the leftovers go? Did you eat them all?\u201d and \u201cWhat else can I possibly throw together from the produce in the fridge and meat in the freezer?\u201d For anyone who is immersed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[24824,218,8302,2231],"class_list":["post-48830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-coping","tag-judaism","tag-lifestyle","tag-talmud"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48830\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}