I Can't Handle Love (#400 of Why I Don't Date Anymore:)

Another day and another well-intentioned “friend” trying to set me up with my future ex-husband.  Currently, I reside somewhere between Mrs. Robinson and a permanent move across the street to my local assisted living center. Apparently, I still have “it”, though I need reading glasses to see that I do.   At this juncture, I’m flattered that I’m thought of as a good catch, but the ones that want to catch me, usually suffer cardiac arrest way before they get there.  I’m not complaining, BUT, I still have all my hair, no belly and all my teeth, (well, not exactly ALL) so, why am I matched with guys with 15-year-old profile pics where they look like George Clooney, but IRL are George Washington, sans the wig and wooden dentures? A bit dramatic? Let me illustrate this point.

(Some details have been altered to protect the “guilty”-mostly me)

A few months ago, an acquaintance of mine reached out via FB messenger and told me she had a “great guy” for me to meet.  She had gone out with him a few years ago, but he had been too old for her.  That didn’t bother me, since she is a few years younger than I am.  However, when she said “He has a little bit of a stomach”, MY stomach reacted, strongly. This beautiful girl was happily remarried and was attempting to do something good, but you know what they say about “good intentions”.  I convinced myself that “dad bods” were all the rage and that it might be nice to feel skinny standing next to a portly fellow.  The perpetual optimist that I am, or at least pretend to be, won the mental coin toss.  I agreed to have him take me out to dinner.  The worst scenario would involve a “foodie” call, meaning, I would have a free meal at a nice establishment.

After an enlightening conversation with “Joe” on the phone, he chivalrously offers to pick me up, even though I suggest that we meet at the restaurant.  We are off to a great start since I sense a sweet, generous soul.  When he pulls up in a “souped-up” SUV, I see a tanned, attractive face peering out of the window with tufts of grey hair crowning his head.  I exhale.  It could have been worse.  The hair could be growing from his ears. Thank goodness, he is presentable.  I hop into the car (Yes, I still can) and we proceed to drive to a local kosher place a few minutes away.  The only issue is that he’s driving the wrong way.  I thought it was strange since he was born and raised in the neighborhood I live in.  He seems a bit flustered.

“Do you know where the restaurant is?”, I, politely, ask

“Of course I do!  I grew up here!”

“Um, then why are you going in the opposite direction’?

 He laughs.

“I guess I’m blown away by your beauty!”

Now, I would find this flattering if I was 13, but at  ** , it doesn’t sound too intelligent.  Yes, I’m a semi-intellectual snob.  I decide to just let it go and we finally reach our destination about 10 blocks away.

His phone rings in the car.  The Bluetooth is working and so must the BOSE speaker system because I hear an elderly woman talking in stereo.

“Hi, this is Mrs. Berger.  I need a ride to NJ tomorrow.  Can you take me?”

My first reaction was that he must, REALLY, be an amazing human being who helps the elderly and is active in community charities.  This was short-lived because he responds.

“It’s 100 dollars”.

I’m speechless.  We park the car and he tells me that he runs many businesses.  One of which he employs drivers and he, himself, chauffeurs VIPs.  Sort of the Orthodox Jewish Uber.  I respect anyone who makes an honest living, but that woman sounds like she doesn’t have too many trips left in this world.  I refrain from offering to drive her myself and reprimand myself (in my head).

I open the door and let myself out of the car.  I watch Joe descend from the SUV, in semi-horror.

From the neck down he looks like “Humpty Dumpty”.

I know I’m cruel, but he is significantly shorter than I am and carries all his weight in his tummy and it is “third trimester” large.  His legs and arms are perfect.  We sit at a table near the window and I breathe a sigh of relief when I see that he has a handsome face and a beautiful smile, but I realize that he is no cerebral giant when he says.

“You’re beautiful. I love women with “love handles”.

I may possess many things, including a severe case of sarcasm and verbal diarrhea but LOVE HANDLES?????

I glower at him “Love handles”???   He really doesn’t know what it means.

“Yes, you have a great body and you’re not too skinny”.  He continues to dig a hole that evening and I reward him by telling him his mom must have dropped him on his head when he was a kid.

Now you know why I just can’t date.  I'm impossible:)

Love Thy Neighbor (Except the Jews)

As a grandchild and child of Holocaust survivors growing up in a predominately Caribbean-American community, I forged alliances with many of my neighbors because we were victims of this “white privilege’ thing together.  In those days, it was not called “white privilege”, but “White Flight”. A period of attempted integration of the Urban ghetto of Crown Heights, which resulted in white people fleeing the inner-city enclaves for the greener grass (well, ANY grass) of the suburbs, which coincidentally occurred when the Jews and the Blacks moved into their turf. My neighbor Sandra and her family were from Haiti and were the sweetest souls I’d ever met and my friends and I would play “Double-Dutch” jump rope outside with the twin daughters of the local Baptist pastor, who lived a few doors away.  We all got along famously, except when we got tired of the twins always winning, even though I still insist that white girls CAN jump.  Nevertheless, we were respectful, understanding and always knew that we suffered very similar histories and discrimination throughout the world.   We felt lucky and blessed to be free to play on the streets, to practice our respective religions and most of all, the miraculous fact that our parents worked hard for us to live the dream they had never experienced.  We lived in two family private homes on a beautiful block and were like many “normal” American families.  We learned to blend our cultures into the rainbow mosaic of NYC.   Other than a few muggers, we felt safe.

Sure, there were many incidents of anti-semitism when I was growing up.  In fact, there wasn’t a week that some kid on a city bus who would see us parochial Jewish girls in our uniforms wouldn’t try to hit us, steal from us and call us “dirty Jews”.  It was just an accepted fact of life.  We didn’t report “hate crimes”.  We didn’t write articles, letters to the editors or post it on our walls.  We just took it and accepted it as something our people have been dealing with since the beginning of time.  At that period in NYC, crime was rampant.  No New Yorker was unscathed, so we let it slide, figuring it was part of living in the Big Apple.  After centuries of progroms and recent European extermination, this was nothing to protest.   Boy, were we wrong.

As I grew older, I began to understand the latent anti-semitism along with the overt type.  As a Shabbos observer, I needed to leave early on Fridays at every job I had, during the winter months, when Shabbos would come in at 4:30 pm.  Even in “Jewcentric” NYC,  I had a very hard time.  I was always a hard-worker, overly conscientious, always staying late to complete my work.  Working long after I needed to, but that wasn’t acknowledged.  What was “stressed” was the fact that I got to leave early and take off days for the “endless holidays you people have”.  Somehow, whenever I needed to leave on Friday, my boss would dump work on me right when he knew I had to go.  This was not a one-time occurrence, but rather a consistent obstacle that plagued me my entire life.  The fact that I couldn’t work on from Friday night to Saturday night constantly hindered me.  The worst part of it, was the discrimination I received from a good deal of my fellow secular Jews who thought it was outrageous to keep all these outdated traditions.  What they didn’t realize and were doomed to re-experience, was that during the Holocaust, no one cared if you were assimilated into the German culture, married to a German or couldn’t even recite the “Shema”, you were sent off to be gassed.   Just like the African-Americans who came from slaves and fought for their place in a society that afforded them equal rights, we never really felt that we belonged.   For when you are a Jew, you always have a genetic knot in your stomach, a visceral warning signal that things can revert, in a blink of an eye or in recent times, in a tweet, a protest and even worse a terrorist attack.  Because when you are a Jew, your life is NOT equal, regardless of what anyone says.  You deserve it, because you “funded the slave trade”, “run all the banks” and kill innocent Palestinians.   Today, it’s Palestinians, yesterday it was Gentile children to use their blood for Matzah and the day before that it was killing our fellow Jew, Jesus.  We are not “white Privilege”, but rather the universal scapegoat, since we were kicked out of our original home, Israel.  Even now, when we finally have a place of our own, we are ridiculed, boycotted and demonized.   Europe has once again been lost to anti-semitism.  It is dangerous to be a practicing Jew, to attend synagogue and Hebrew School wearing a yarmulke.  Every shul and school has armed guards.  Sound A little familiar?

I ask you. Where are the protests? The marches? The Bended Knees for the discrimination we face.  The fact that we couldn’t own anything in the America of the past.  That the Klan hung us along with the Blacks and other minorities?  Where are the Social Justice warriors when it comes to the rampant Jew hatred that is happening right now?

That’s right.  Nowhere.

I will never be silent as I watch our society descend into an age old destructive pattern of xenophobia.  I will stand beside all who are discriminated against, regardless of race, religion or political affiliation, but I refuse to throw my people under the bus for political correctness.  We are ALL the same.  I think people have truly forgotten that.

Karma Is A Hurricane

Whether you believe in the Almighty, a higher power or just plain Karma, the dramatic and catastrophic events hitting our globe are awesome and unfathomable.  From terrorism, tsunamis and hurricanes to constant spitefulness and viciousness between brothers, sisters and Facebook “friends”, our world is not the same.  What is happening?

I’m no scientist, meteorologist nor terrorism expert, but I do know one thing.  We are all responsible.  If you believe in climate change and racism or you believe in a vengeful, wrathful Creator and a “religious” war, there is no way you can ignore the cause and effect of what we are experiencing.  We can’t chock it up to random coincidences, but rather “synchronicity” and “Karma”.  Let me explain.

As a huge “Oprah” fan and a dabbler in the metaphysical, I have always appreciated the fact that this great humanitarian and public figure awakened many people to spirituality and the art of “doing good” and living a joyful life, despite challenges and traumas.  One of the most important lessons I learned from the many years of observing her mission in life (and it is a mission), is the fact that the universe responds to everything that we do.  I learned this when I was a teenager, studying “Kabbalah” in “Bais Rivkah,” which only confirmed and validated my very limited knowledge of the simplicity of cause and effect.  We are all part of a universal flow of energy, intertwined and interdependent.  What I do, affects you and vice versa.  Selfishness has contributed to the loss of “Loving thy neighbor as thyself”.  This basic tenet has gone the way of the rotary dial telephone and frankly, it has always scared me.   Being kind is limited to emojis and social media comments and only when there are disasters do we finally come together…Get it?

I remember watching one of Oprah’s shows where she explained that if you are going down the wrong path, you will constantly get signs from the Universe that you need to change direction.  The analogy was that first you get a gentle reminder from G-d to shift your gears in the form of several small mishaps that you blame on random events.  If you don’t heed the small “signs”, those signs will metastasize, like a deadly disease.  You will get a metaphorical “stick “thrown at you and if you still don’t change, you’ll get a “boulder” and tragically you can become incapacitated if you keep traveling down your toxic road.   This always resonated with me, personally.  Anytime I did something that I innately, knew was bad for me, I paid the price.   I, myself, believe in Hashem- my creator and father and I use the Torah to guide me and reign me in.  I try to be loving and see the good in people and realize that whatever challenges I face are either good for my soul’s growth or signs that I am not fulfilling my life’s purpose.    Today, I am blessed to be getting very positive signs that substantiate my current course in life.  As much as the personal catastrophes that I’ve faced in my existence were unyielding and damaging, the pure joy, light and calm waters that have arrived for me and my loved ones after the years of turbulence, prove that there is a calm AFTER the storm to look forward to.  First, we need to survive it, by changing our behavior and outlook. 

If we pollute our planet, our planet pollutes us.  To me, G-d is not an old man in heaven lashing out on us, but rather a loving parent who does not want his children to suffer, but gives them the free will to choose.  We choose and then suffer the consequences because of our choices.  If the world, as a complete body, commits human calamities by trying to destroy our fellow man, whether through war or through vicious words and actions, we pay the price.

G-d promised us that he would never destroy the world again, but I fear that we are destroying it all on our own.

Be kind and thoughtful.  Do good.  Don’t speak badly about your fellow man and LOVE will save our day.