Style & Living

I believe that most women, before they get married, have already identified a number of items that, when “corrected,” will greatly improve their husband. The average kallah walks down the aisle with a ten-point home-improvement policy, the focus of which is that fellow standing under the canopy—her husband-to-be. Look, he’s a great guy, but... First off, those shoes have got to go. And those ties, forget about them... Then there’s this coming late business…

Recap: Shoshana confronts Aviva and asks her why she’s ignoring her. Aviva says she can’t be friends as long as Shoshana is friends with Penina because of Penina’s sister. Shoshana is surprised and hurt and thinks Aviva is judgmental. When she gets home, she discovers her mother had to go on a business trip. She doesn’t want to stay alone so she asks Penina to come sleep over. During the sleepover, someone comes to the door and keeps knocking.

“She’s so advanced! I can’t believe she’s walking already!”

“I’m telling you - he’s got such a sense of humor! What a kibitzer!”

The books that came into my hands during my two-year stay at Ohr Somayach in Yerushalayim are regularly pulled off the shelves of my cerebral library. One, entitled The Grave Concern, was lent to me by Rabbi Meir Schuster zt”l, the soft-spoken, relentless man who pointed countless lost Jewish wayfarers back to the true path of their Jewish self-discovery. The word grave is used as an adjective, describing the dire situation of America’s Jewish landscape, which was being torn asunder by assimilation, and was illustrated by the cover, which featured an hourglass showing letters of the aleph-beis disintegrating into the sands of time. The book is a litany of personal chronicles of a journalist who tracked the stories of people he knew who had gotten lost in the shuffle of exile and had traded in their Yiddishkeit for the baubles of beckoning riches, leaving them unmindful of their precious legacy while they reveled in vacuous and valueless achievements that faded to black with the last closing of their disillusioned eyes.

By Sharon Marcus

Everything on land

Exists in the sea,

Two realms: One revealed,

Before Hashem created Chava, Hashem said, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make for him an ezer k’negdo—a helpmate opposite him.”