relationships – Page 2

Girls funny, open and smart

Girls Gotta Eat co-hosts Rayna Greenberg, left, and Ashley Hesseltine have created careers they love. (photo from JFL NorthWest)

To say it’s a podcast about dating and relationships doesn’t begin to describe Girls Gotta Eat. Co-creators and co-hosts Rayna Greenberg and Ashley Hesseltine invite their guests to talk about pretty much anything, and pretty much as explicitly as they’d like. Recent topics include creating successful online businesses, avoiding toxic partners, managing depression, the health benefits of masturbation, and having sex with famous people – and that was on just one show.

Girls Gotta Eat celebrates its first anniversary this month, and Greenberg and Hesseltine will be in Vancouver for that milestone. The pair has two soldout performances at JFL NorthWest, which runs Feb. 14-23 (jflnorthwest.com). They were scheduled to do just one show initially, and the demand would have sold out a third, no doubt, and probably even a fourth. On Instagram, Girls Gotta Eat has garnered more than 69,900 followers in less than a year. (By the time you’re reading this article, that number will likely be more than 71,000, as the account gained 300-plus new followers in the space of two days last week.)

In addition to Girls Gotta Eat, Greenberg and Hesseltine each have other ventures on various platforms, including websites, Twitter and Facebook, but Instagram is where their celebrity status is most remarkable. At press time, Greenberg’s One Hungry Jew had more than 350,000 followers on Instagram; Hesseltine’s Bros Being Basic, more than 915,000, and her Fashion Dads, another 186,000. It is no wonder that a good chunk of time on the Girls Gotta Eat podcast is spent promoting advertisers’ products, mainly cosmetics and fashion. These women have worked hard to secure an enviable target market – their 30-something peers who have money to spend.

While Girls Gotta Eat generally focuses on one topic or guest, Greenberg and Hesseltine try to cover a range of topics and have different guests for the live version, as well as make the show an interactive experience for the audience.

“We typically try to have a guest that has already been on the podcast,” Greenberg told the Independent in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, where she and Hesseltine were performing.

“It’s rare,” she said, “that we go to a new city and invite somebody we’ve never had on the show. Just because our audience is so invested in the show and they love it, it’s so exciting for them to be able to also see another person that was on the show.”

The weekly podcast now averages well over an hour. In its first several months, it was about 45 minutes, the approximate length of a commute to work, said Greenberg.

“As we had more and more guests, the show just became really fun. We want guests to feel like they can cover a range of topics and we don’t want to truncate the show, something that’s great,” she explained. “We don’t want to hold ourselves to 45 minutes if it’s great content, so it’s just gotten a little longer. There was no day where we woke up and said, let’s do an hour-and-a-half. So, it just depends on the guests; some episodes are going to be 45, some are going to be an hour-and-a-half, we’ll see when the guests come in.”

For Greenberg, the podcast was a huge departure from what she had been doing before.

“I’ve worked in restaurants, I went to culinary school and then I really worked in tech startups for a long time,” she said.

The Girls Gotta Eat podcast was Hesseltine’s idea initially.

“She is a comedian herself and she really wanted to do a show about dating and relationships, and wanted to find somebody that would be open and honest about their own lives and also could be funny,” said Greenberg. “She and I met on a press trip because we both have very large Instagram influencer accounts, and we just really hit it off. We had a great time with each other, we became friends over the course of a few months, and then she asked me if I’d be interested in doing this.”

As soon as the idea came up, said Greenberg, “I decided, and she decided with me, that it wasn’t going to be a hobby or a side project, this could be what we do. So, we focused on it as a business: we built a website, we had professional photos taken, we devised a way to market this. From Day 1, there was definitely a strategy of let’s make this a business, let’s expand it.”

Greenberg had already monetized her food blog, One Hungry Jew, by doing ads for brands. “For example, a company like American Express will come to me if they’re looking to attract a younger audience that has money and they’ll say, OK, we want to create a campaign that is designed to encourage people to use our AmEx Travel and they’ll give me an idea of what they’re looking for and, obviously, a budget, a price, and it can be something like, hey, we want to encourage people to sign locally, so go to a restaurant, take a photo of yourself at the restaurant, write a caption, and they pay me for something like that. It’s clearly an ad, it says ad. That’s how, personally, I make money through social media.”

One Hungry Jew started “as a silly hobby,” said Greenberg. “I would never purposely have named a business One Hungry Jew…. I’ve always enjoyed food, I’d always worked in food, and I was in the tech startup world and I didn’t have much of a creative outlet, so I started taking photos of food with my cellphone. It’s something I always spent money on anyways, it’s what I enjoyed, and I just put them on Instagram because I wanted somewhere to put the photos. It’s just as simple as that.

“There weren’t a lot of food blogs back then…. I was one of the earlier people that started posting continuously. I had really good content, and it was really ‘right place, right time.’ It was certainly a time in the world where marketing and PR were shifting heavily to social media…. And I started getting invited to all these places for free, for a free meal in exchange for a photo.”

Working at Amazon at the time, Greenberg said she was splitting her focus between her job and the social media account. “I was obviously doing a bad job of both of them and I had to make a decision, so I chose. I left my job two-and-a-half years ago to pursue this full time and I worked really hard. I reached out to every single PR and advertising agency in the United States. I introduced myself, I said this is what I do, this is what makes me unique, I’d love to find time to meet. So, just like the podcast, I tried to make it into a business as opposed to a silly hobby.”

While not religious, Greenberg said, “I am exactly who I am because I was brought up in a Jewish family, I was brought up in a big Jewish community. A lot of my social activities as a child revolved around that, so I had a really nice upbringing because I was brought up in this Jewish community.”

Though her parents divorced when she was 4 years old, she said, “I have an incredibly supportive family from both sides.”

She could always talk about sex with her parents, and said her mom is a psychologist, so “we’ve always explored my feelings.”

“My mom bought me a book about puberty when I was like 11,” said Greenberg. “She wanted me to understand my body and what was happening.”

Nonetheless, she admitted to being a little nervous when she and Hesseltine started the podcast, as the pair does talk openly about their sex lives.

“It was a real struggle and a real choice that I wrestled with, how much do I talk about myself and how open am I going to be? And we both, Ashley and I, made the decision that, if we’re going to put ourselves in a public light, then we have to be honest and open about things in our life, and we both really are. And I think that’s what makes our show really good, is that people really feel like they know us, they really feel like they understand our pitfalls and our successes.”

Over the course of the year, Greenberg and Hesseltine have interviewed a wide variety of people. “We’ve had the founder of Hinge, which is a dating app, on the show; we’ve had a sex therapist; we’ve had a psychotherapist; we’ve had matchmakers; we’ve had comedians, actors and artists and all these different people. And everybody brings such a different, unique view of their own life and other people’s lives, and I feel so lucky to have amassed this huge knowledge of dating and what other people go through,” said Greenberg.

The podcast, she said, has “helped me be more calm and not so emotional, not take everything personally all the time. It’s helped me to realize that people are people and they make mistakes…. And I think that lots of people are looking for love and, just because you’re not the person they fall in love with, it’s not insulting, it’s not personal.

“It’s helped me to relax a little bit and be happy with my own life and realize that I should do other things besides focus on dating, which is funny because I do a show about dating. But, the advice I always give girls is focus on your job, focus on hobbies and friends and family and all these other things that bring so much joy your life, and that can be really fulfilling. And love will come and dating will come. And, if you’re a more whole person, it allows you to let in love in a really beautiful way.”

Our past prepares us for now

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last for which the first was made …” begins the poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra” by Robert Browning. Meanwhile, his wife, Elizabeth, immortalized their relationship in her poem, “How Do I Love Thee?” which is an exquisite expression of love, and how it can change a life.

The couple met when Elizabeth was 38 and Robert was 34. After a courtship carried on primarily through letters, they married secretly in 1846, and Elizabeth ran away with Robert to live with him in Italy. Her tyrannical father disowned her – the family was fabulously wealthy from Jamaican rum and slaveholdings, and he thought Robert was a gold digger. The Brownings had a son in 1848.

Elizabeth died in 1861 after a brilliant literary career that, for a time, eclipsed her husband’s – she was considered for the post of England’s poet laureate after the death of William Wordsworth. Robert died in 1889.

“Rabbi Ben Ezra” was published in the collection of poems Dramatis Personae in 1864. Very briefly, it says that, whatever has come before in our lives is but a prelude to what our lives are, and will be.

How many of us have had some event in our histories that we can point to as a crossroad, such as that the Brownings experienced? For most of us, it is hard to think of our past as merely leading us to something even more important. And yet, there is a germ of truth here, whatever our experiences.

For me, I have reason to find some contentment in what I assess are my accomplishments after a life spanning eight decades. And yet, and yet … I know that the things I cherish as worthwhile are known best only by me. There are no plaques or monuments, no citations, few remembrances of my name. The physical evidence of my passage lies in the offspring I contributed to bringing into being. They, every one of them, are self-made, the products of the sum total of their individual efforts to which I can make only a small claim.

Truly, for most of us still around to gaze at life’s battlefield, all we have is what we can make of the day that lies ahead. We can take pleasure in the comfort of a leisurely day in the sun. We can intervene in the life of someone near and dear, or even a stranger, and try to help. We can become active on an issue of public import that we have in the past supported in our minds alone. Given our life experience at any moment in time, we have appreciations and understandings we never could have had before that time, even though our past is what led us to where and who we are.

Like Robert Browning, I do have a momentous event in my life to announce from the rooftops. And I take full credit for being an important party to the life-changing event. Truly, for me, it was “the last for which the first was made.”

For most of us, the lives we arrange do not turn out as we hoped. For example, we all seek relationships in which we can love and be loved in return. Regardless of the positive outcomes that come from pursuing these relationships in good faith, our aspirations are not always fully met.

I was entranced by a creature of the opposite sex in my teenage years, but a lack of self-confidence and courage prevented me from advancing my offering. We both passed on to other partners, and I did not seriously develop a plan of action until I reached widowerhood at the age of 70, some 55 years later. Knowing my intended was also unattached, after planning my approach, almost a year later, I strongly pressed my case. It was my good fortune that I was accepted as a marriage partner.

One does not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear without a good deal of re-engineering. We have now been together for more than 12 years, a period of learning by both parties.

What’s happening at your house?

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Lifelong Jewish relationships

Awhile back, I was talking on the phone to my mom in Virginia. Oh, she said, your dad is busy. He’s out at the cemetery. It turned out that he had taken one of my brothers with him. The two of them used their fix-it skills to mend a broken gravestone. The next time I visited the Jewish cemetery in Alexandria, Va., my dad pointed out the neatly mended marker. The person had died 100 years before. Despite good records, they couldn’t find any surviving family to maintain the gravestone. So, my dad and brother stepped up to the job.

Reading the Torah portion for this Shabbat, Chayei Sarah (Sarah’s Life), Genesis 21:1-25:18, makes me think about this cemetery story. This week’s portion is full of family lifecycle events. Here’s a quick summary from the ReformJudaism.org website:

Abraham purchases the cave of Machpelah in order to bury his wife Sarah. (23:1-20)
Abraham sends his servant to find a bride for Isaac. (24:1-9)
Rebekah shows her kindness by offering to draw water for the servant’s camels at the well. (24:15-20)
The servant meets Rebekah’s family and then takes Rebekah to Isaac, who marries her. (24:23-67)
Abraham takes another wife, named Keturah. At the age of 175, Abraham dies, and Isaac and Ishmael bury him in the cave of Machpelah. (25:1-11)

There is so much in this portion that it’s lucky we reread it every year. The first thing I noticed is how the Hittites, who owned the land around Machpelah, honoured Abraham. They valued him so much that they tried to give him the burial land for free – but Abraham honoured them back, and made an effort to pay for it. This exchange reminded me of how careful we need to be in managing Jewish burial sites. My mom has often had the opportunity to help families who need a cemetery plot and don’t have one. “Real estate” in Jewish cemeteries can be expensive. Sometimes it’s hard to get a spot when there’s an unexpected family death. The bottom line? Nobody comes out of this alive, so let’s help each other when dealing with death.

Next issue: finding the right life partner. Abraham works hard to find Isaac the right wife. Although love matches are usual these days, your family’s opinion is often pretty useful in making such a big choice. Rebekah makes a good impression.

Abraham then remarries. Rashi indicates that Keturah is actually Hagar, although other commentators disagree. In any case, this brings up another issue. Some people vilify Hagar, but here it seems that some believe she and Abraham are actually a likely couple. They go on to have several more children. How does that work? When one marries again and has more children, does parenting differ? Do religious differences work themselves out? How is it that some people outlaw intermarriage, and refuse to incorporate kids from intermarried families, when it was clearly prevalent in the Bible?

When Abraham dies, Ishmael helps Isaac bury him. However, Isaac’s name is mentioned first. Why? Some rabbis indicate this is because Ishmael repented and acknowledged Isaac’s superiority, even though Ishmael is older. Others indicate that, since Sarah was Abraham’s wife, her son should go first, before Hagar’s. While this sort of discussion about whose name is first seems out of date, we need only look at the succession of the British (Commonwealth) monarchy to acknowledge that we still look at birth order with some importance. How has our view of this changed over time?

Also, if Ishmael is the father of Islam, was this an interfaith funeral? Or just two brothers who loved their father?

This week’s portion also relates to Remembrance Day. How do we dal with profound issues of life and death? How do we confront mortality, embrace issues of loyalty and honour, while embracing our family responsibilities to the living? What are our priorities? Why?

As my family walked through that old cemetery in Virginia, we passed familiar names on gravestones. My dad told stories about the different family friends he knew during their lives. My uncle, visiting from Boston, chimed in. The conversation continued. We also celebrated another important milestone in life with my uncle. He and his high school friend Don were celebrating 50 years of friendship this year, too.

Someone recently said that my newspaper columns are about relationships. I’d suggest that the primary relationship I explore here is with Judaism. Many of us associate our religion with other people, in a sort of club or tribe mentality. However, what if we saw it as a tool? Imagine Judaism as a tool that helps us navigate life’s events and how to behave with others.

If so, we can often use a Torah portion as a guide – just as we might do with other kinds of literature or non-fiction – on how to respectfully bury our dead, and maintain meaningful relationships with family members and also in the wider Jewish and non-Jewish communities. We can offer support, as the Hittites did, in a time of grief. We can build new or rekindle relationships, as Abraham did with Keturah.

Sometimes, doing the right thing might mean repairing a gravestone for someone who is long gone. Maintaining long relationships with friends or with communities takes a different kind of work – emotional as well as physical upkeep. Do we put the same amount of effort into our relationship with understanding Judaism as well?

Joanne Seiff writes regularly for CBC Manitoba and is a regular columnist for Winnipeg’s Jewish Post and News. She is the author of the book From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. See more about her at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Dramatic Fringe work

Jewish community membersGina Leon and Michael Germant co-star in Island Productions’ presentation of Gruesome Playground Injuries at the Vancouver Fringe Festival Sept. 8-17. (photo by Jayme Cowley)

Playwright Rajiv Joseph describes Gruesome Playground Injuries as being “about missed love, it’s about pain and regret. These are things that almost everyone in humanity has some experience with.”

Jewish community member Michael Germant, who co-stars in Island Productions’ presentation of Gruesome at the Vancouver Fringe Festival with fellow community member Gina Leon, also highlights the universal elements of Joseph’s play.

“Everyone has either wanted to be in, or has been in, or has come out of a relationship, therefore, there is something for everyone to relate to,” Germant told the Independent. “The show is rich in humour, empathy and tenderness. Internal and external pain are a measure of everything vulnerable when it comes to intimacy, timing and love.”

Gruesome Playground Injuries is part of the Fringe’s Dramatic Works Series celebrating playwrights of Asian descent. Germant said that he and Leon – who together produced and performed the play A Weekend Near Madison in the 2015 Fringe’s Dramatic Works Series – “had read Gruesome Playground Injuries a few years ago and I think it’s always been in the back of our minds to do it one day, and so this turned out to be the perfect opportunity.”

The press material calls the play “a harrowing and humorous story about love.” The description reads, “Over the course of 30 years, the lives of Kayleen and Doug intersect at the most bizarre intervals, leading the two childhood friends to compare scars and the physical calamities that keep drawing them together.”

It seems like pretty heavy fare for the Fringe, or is it?

“The foundation of the Fringe usually is to do experimental and challenging work,” said Germant. “Gruesome Playground Injuries’ non-linear structure, raw subject matter, and bloody and bruised characters – both figuratively and literally – we feel are representative of the aims of the festival. We chose the play because of the way we felt about this unique perspective of a love relationship. The play is realized through humour and drama.”

The humour, which is dark, “is expressed through the naivety of the characters and the comedy of misconnection,” he said.

In his remarks on Island Productions’ website, director Mel Tuck notes that the play “demanded much from the actors.”

“The demands of the play are numerous, reconnecting with a prism of memories,” Leon told the Independent. “What’s it like to be a child, a teenager, a young adult; how does one authentically play it? This part is close to the bone for me, and giving myself permission to be vulnerable – really vulnerable, and go to all the places I need to, to bring Kayleen to life – that’s scary and exciting.”

For Germant, “I’ve never experienced the physical injuries of Doug, but I do have emotional and psychological parallels. My challenge has been to open myself up to express these psychological and emotional injuries.”

Working on his character, said Germant, “has caused me to confront my own behaviour and address some of my foibles. I’ve learned to laugh at myself.”

Both Leon, who was born in Johannesburg, and Germant, who was born in Moscow, know what it is like to be an immigrant, to straddle more than one culture. They can relate to Gruesome’s theme of alienation.

“Growing up in Montreal as a Russian-Jewish immigrant, I realized very early how different and apart I was,” said Germant. “As such, I viscerally know alienation and separateness. Doug is experiencing being separate and alienated throughout the play – we play these characters from ages 8 to 38 – and he suffers from self-esteem issues because of it. He feels obligated to perform for approval, which, in his case, causes gruesome injuries.”

Gruesome Playground Injuries runs at the Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab Theatre Sept. 8-17. For tickets ($14) and the whole Fringe lineup, visit vancouverfringe.com.

Bittergirl is seriously funny

In Bittergirl, Cailin Stadnyk, Katrina Reynolds and Lauren Bowler play women who have just been dumped by their boyfriends – maybe they can get back their men if they lose some weight? (photo by Emily Cooper)

Have you ever taken part in an aerobics class and wondered how many of the women in it were trying to lose weight to get a boyfriend back? The sad truth is, there are probably many, eagerly trying anything to return to the way things were, even if the way things were wasn’t all that great.

Bittergirl: The Musical takes aim at countless breakup truisms from the perspectives of three different women, reminiscent of the sharp wit in Mom’s the Word and the relationship charades of Sex in the City. Their varied responses to being dumped are hilariously insightful.

The progress of the play loosely follows the five stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The stages of the breakups are denial (he made a mistake), second-guessing (I could have done something differently), manipulation (I’m going to make him love me), reflection (I should have seen the warning signs) and acceptance (I’m over him, I’ve moved on).

The three women – played by Lauren Bowler, Katrina Reynolds and Cailin Stadnyk – are known only as A, B and C, as though these trials and tribulations are those that belong to every woman, not a specific person. Jewish community member Josh Epstein plays D, all three of the dumpers – the husband who wants to join the RCMP, the live-in partner who just “has to go” and the boyfriend who’s lost his “magic.”

Epstein delivers the stereotypical reasons why he needs to get out of each relationship: “I feel trapped,” “I can’t give you what you want” and the ridiculous “We’ve got to be birds flying higher.”

The lame rationales elicit howls of laughter at the familiarity, especially when one of the women initially thinks that the “talk” her boyfriend wants to have will lead to a proposal.

Not surprisingly, the women stand there, stunned into silence, not demanding further explanation, but meekly mumbling things like, “I understand,” even though they don’t – another conventional reaction it is sadly not surprising to see depicted.

After their men leave, the women think about what they might have done differently to save their relationships – “Maybe if I wore plum eyeshadow,” “Maybe if I didn’t talk to my mother so much” and “Maybe if I worked out more.” This last statement segues into an hysterical scene of the three women working out with various gizmos and in different types of classes in a desperate bid to get in shape and win back their men.

photo - Katrina Reynolds and Josh Epstein in Bittergirl, at the Arts Club Granville Island Stage until July 29 — Katrina Reynolds and Josh Epstein in Bittergirl, at the Arts Club Granville Island Stage until July 29. *(photo by Emily Cooper)*

The women also reflect on the warnings signs they missed. He wears socks with sandals. He cries at Celine Dion songs. He growls during sex.

Especially comical is a scene where the women run into friends and they are forced to admit they were dumped. The standard, “You’re better off without him” or “If you guys couldn’t make it work, what chance do the rest of us have?” hit the mark on how insensitive people can be, much to the enjoyment of the audience. The rapid-fire delivery of the lines, the women playing off each other brilliantly, is a sight to see and hear.

As the musical progresses, classic girl-group songs of the 1960s and ’70s complement the dialogue. Thinking about their first dates leads into “And Then He Kissed Me.” The initial breakups prompt a rendition of “Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This.” When the women hope they’ll have a chance to renew the relationship, they sing “When Will I See You Again?” And who hasn’t felt the difficulty of moving on because there’s “Always Something There to Remind Me”?

The strength of the play is in how the writing spotlights those moments we all know so well and that sound so absurd when depicted one after the other. Being reminded of one’s own failed relationships, watching the play is like watching a good comedian – often funny and, despite being cringeworthy at times, you want to stay to the finale.

As with the different stages of death, the women finally accept their situations and move on with their lives, singing such lyrics as “you don’t really love me; you just keep me hanging on,” there are “too many fish in the sea” and “I will survive.”

Bittergirl is actually an autobiographical play written by three Toronto actresses who had, indeed, just gotten dumped by a husband, live-in boyfriend and short-term partner. The positive reaction to the play led to the 2005 book Bittergirl: Getting Over Getting Dumped. After that, the writers added the songs, accompanied by an all-female band onstage, and the musical was born.

Besides the sharp, insightful writing, these women (and Epstein) can all belt out a tune, making the performance a hit from the beginning to the (not so) bitter end.

Bittergirl runs at the Arts Club Granville Island Stage until July 29. For tickets and more information, visit artsclub.com.

Baila Lazarus is Vancouver-based writer and principal media strategist at phase2coaching.com.

Good relationships matter

My parents, married 52 years, have a long-standing joke. Sometimes, they would go out and everything would be a disaster. We’d be in the neighbourhood pizza joint and someone would throw up. Or, one kid would spill something sticky all over somebody else. There would be a fly in the soup. We’d have a fight. The car would break down. We’d have an encounter with a terribly nasty person. Then, my mom would turn to my dad, poke him, and say, “Listen, Seiff, if this were a first date, I’d never go out with you again!”

Sometimes we’d all laugh but, often, we’d turn away with a wry smile, because that was all we could manage. Later, we knew it would be funny, because we didn’t base everything on that one outing … but sometimes people do! How often does one bad (Jewish) encounter ruin a first date, a first visit to a new synagogue, a networking opportunity? How can we salvage these awful experiences?

In the Torah portion B’midbar (Numbers 1:1-4:20), which we read last month, there’s a lot of census-taking and numbers. This isn’t counting every person, but those who can fight when assembling a military. There’s order in this parashah, so we understand that a strong army, or even a strong society, needs to be well-organized and administered. We need leaders, as mentioned in Numbers 1:16. Rashi points out that the elected ones, the chieftains of their tribes – “These were those called of the congregation; those who were called upon for every matter of importance that happened in the congregation.” We read edah as a tribe, but it can also mean a social or ethnic group (Yemenite Israelis, for instance) or a congregation.

Numbers matter, and good administration matters – but it isn’t all that matters. When Dr. Ron Wolfson came to visit Winnipeg in April as the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue scholar-in-residence, he asked a group of lay leaders and Jewish professionals, “How many Jewish people live here?” Immediately, there was an undercurrent of talk. Indeed, how many of us are in Winnipeg? My next thought was – does it matter?

In the same Torah portion of B’midmar, Nadav and Abihu are mentioned, in Numbers 3:4. However, because they offered “alien fire” (an unacceptable sacrifice) in the Sinai, they were struck down. Others were counted in their place. Nadav and Abihu made one bad mistake. They had one bad encounter (one bad date?) with the Almighty. That’s all it took for them to be killed and knocked out of Judaism forever.

It takes many positive encounters to reinforce a relationship. So, a Jewish person needs repeated positive experiences in a Jewish community to keep coming back. Some shake off a bad experience or two with a smile, joke or laugh. However, it depends on the person, and what happened. It can take “one bad date” to be turned off forever.

Wolfson described how small things make a huge difference in how we relate to one another. Greeting someone with a smile, offering them a warm participatory musical experience, some honey cake or a hug can make all the difference. These things aren’t expensive. They aren’t hard to do – but for some reason, many congregations still resist any change at all, even if it’s an entirely positive community-building shift that costs little or nothing to implement.

A joke followed. What does it say above the ark, the aron hakodesh, at your congregation? At Shaarey Zedek, it says, “Know before whom you stand.” Wolfson said that all shuls probably should have a different tag line – “But we’ve always done it this way.”

If you are entirely satisfied with how things go in your Jewish community, by all means, don’t change a thing. Keep doing what you’re doing. However, if you’re not satisfied? If your children don’t want to join, or the membership is declining, or people aren’t volunteering or contributing to your organization in the way you’d like, you need to stop and ask if the way you’re doing things is really working. Is your approach still relevant? Is it inclusive? Does it create positive encounters that matter?

B’midbar teaches us that numbers and administration matter – but only if you have committed members or people to count. Negative experiences can strike us down (like Nadav and Abihu) or just be a bump in the road, if you have a healthy long-term relationship. I was struck, at the end of a whole weekend of this Jewish learning and enrichment, by how energized some participants were with many good ideas for the future.

At the same time, I encountered those who said, “Thank you, but …” and wanted to say how they disagreed, what was wrong and what wouldn’t work here. Have you ever found that kvetching – without offering solutions – makes positive change?

Ever read the children’s book Stone Soup? A motivated, positive community can feed many people with a stone, some old vegetables, and maybe a stewing hen. Throw in some donations of flour and yeast and you have bread. It’s not expensive. It’s not hard to do. Yet, one must consistently ignore the naysayers while doing it. Are we willing to step up and make suggestions for building good, long-term Jewish community relationships?

Good. Bring your old carrots and dried up root veggies. Our skills and Jewish congregations can make something delicious together. Inexpensive solutions, kindness, smiles and constructive suggestions welcome. Let’s build our numbers by welcoming folks to the table with what we’ve got. Even a humble soup tastes better, or a song sounds richer, when we make it and sing it ourselves.

Joanne Seiff, a regular columnist for Winnipeg’s Jewish Post and News, is the author of a new book, From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016. This collection of essays is available for digital download, or as a paperback from Amazon. See more about her on joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Living with prostate cancer

Sima Elizabeth Shefrin’s new book, Embroidered Cancer Comic, will be launched on Sept. 15 at the Roundhouse.

Cancer is a word often whispered. Sex is certainly not spoken of in polite company. Yet Sima Elizabeth Shefrin tackles both topics in her new book, Embroidered Cancer Comic (Singing Dragon, 2016), which receives its Vancouver launch on Sept. 15 at Roundhouse Community Centre.

The comic begins with Shefrin’s husband, Bob Bossin, coming home from the doctor with a diagnosis of high cholesterol. “Oh, he also said my PSA was up,” Bossin tells Shefrin. After some understandable delays, Bossin gets the needed biopsy. While the couple are enjoying a funny movie together, the call from the doctor comes: prostate cancer.

In a mere 30 pages, with text and illustrations by Shefrin, Embroidered Cancer Comic shows Bossin’s uncertainty over treatment options, his efforts to learn more about the cancer, the emotional stress on him and Shefrin, as well as the effects of the cancer and its treatments on the couple’s sex life.

“The strain of the prostate cancer journey on relationships cannot be overstated, yet patients and their partners are left to figure this out for themselves,” writes Dr. Peter Black of Vancouver Prostate Centre – Bossin’s surgeon – in a brief commentary at the end of the comic, where both Shefrin and Bossin also share more of their story.

Helping others was one of Shefrin’s goals.

“I’m hoping the book will help couples in this situation be able to communicate,” she told the Independent.

Already, it’s had an impact.

“I thought it had potential for being a major project, especially after I got the publishing contract,” said Shefrin. “But then, of course, you don’t leave that in the hands of the gods. Singing Dragon has been very good for getting publicity in Britain, in both the comic and the medical worlds. In Canada, I’ve done most of it myself.

“I believe that this book can do real good in the world,” she said, sharing that a man in Quebec had written her “about what a difference it had made to both him and his wife.”

She said, “That’s what I’m hoping to do. I believe in the comic, so I’m willing to do whatever pushing I need to, to get it out into the world.”

Shefrin is a noted fabric artist, her website name – stitchingforsocialchange.ca – perfectly describing the nature of her work.

“I have often used my art to work through life events and to create awareness and conversation about taboo or contentious subjects,” she writes at the end of the comic book. “But nothing has made me feel as vulnerable as the creation of this comic. At the same time, it has helped me realize that, when you’re there, cancer becomes a part of daily life, like buying groceries or washing dishes.”

It took Shefrin three years to sew the embroidered line drawings, which were then photographed for the book. When asked if she ever thought of creating the images in a more expedient way, Shefrin said, “Fabric is my medium. The books I illustrated are mostly paper collage, but even when I work in paper, I think like a fabric artist. I did drawings first and then embroidered them, and I always liked the embroidered result better than the original drawing.”

The book “started out as a piece of art,” she said. “I thought I might self-publish or maybe simply photocopy a kind of catalogue for a show. But, one day, I came across the Graphic Medicine site and realized that there was a whole world out there of people making comics about medical issues. I’d had no idea.

“So, I started looking at the site regularly as well as at their Facebook page. Occasionally, there would be postings for people looking for comic strips on this and that and, if it was vaguely relevant, I’d send out my work. I do this a lot and often it comes to nothing. But, a couple of months later, I got an email from Jessica Kingsley saying they might be interested in publishing my work. It took me about an hour to figure out who they were and how they found me. They published it through their imprint, Singing Dragon. After that, the focus shifted and became about creating the comic, a story with a beginning, middle and end, instead of an art series. Now that it’s in print, I’m back to creating the quilts for the art series.”

The book has received many very positive reviews, including one in the U.K. medical journal The Lancet – and, according to the book’s Facebook page, it earned “a lovely personal note from Judi Dench,” who is mentioned in the comic. Specifically, when Shefrin asks her husband, “Who really excites you?” his answer is Dench.

The most touching review of the book comes from Bossin. “And because you live with cancer, whoever you live with lives with it, too, as Elizabeth’s comic shows so tenderly,” he writes. “For me, there is no one I would rather live with cancer with. No one.”

Those curious about what Dame Judi said and other stories behind the comic’s creation can ask Shefrin and Bossin at the Sept. 15 launch, which starts at 7 p.m. The quilted original illustrations are on display at the Roundhouse’s Window Gallery until Oct. 30.