Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 26, 2021

My grandmother on my fathers side was a great believer in bashert, a Yiddish term that may be interpreted as meaning stuff that was meant to be. She was convinced it ran in our family. For example, it was bashert that she and my grandfather fled pogroms in Ukraine and ended up in Pittsburgh.Fast forward to Israel some 60 years later. Fleeing America amid the social upheaval of the Vietnam War, three assassinations, black liberation, womens liberation, and the liberation of Soviet Jewry, I chose a quieter life in Israel.Segue past a few wars and decades of marital bliss, and a different sort of challenge strikes in the form of a pandemic. The world enters a year of crisis and inconceivable and many needless deaths, but there are individual exceptions to the horrible year. This is due to the undeniable influence of the ever-present, yet inscrutable bashertian factor, a sort of Ashkenazi karma.As the only American Israeli journalist who has both undergone a kidney transplant and published a debut novel since the plague began, I could say dayenu and sheheheyanu and be satisfied. But just as my grandparents prospered beyond reasonable expectations in Pittsburgh, I have prospered in Jerusalem.How to get rich in Jerusalem I first came to the park in San Simon in 1968, a penniless college student hitchhiking through Israel on his first visit.Today I come to my neighborhood park with my 11 grandchildren.Actually, number 12, a girl, is expected in May. The bashertian year began with the birth of granddaughter number 5, about a week before I was blessed with my transplant. I held her in the delivery room for the first and last time until she was seven months old. Today, more than two weeks after my second inoculation, I can kiss and hug her, plague or no plague. We Zoomed tonight for the last time. Kisses and hugs must be delivered in person.No bashertian year would be complete without at least one verifiable miracle. Ours was the recovery of a loved one from a second bout of cancer, thank God.

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Read the original here:
Coming to terms with my year of Bashert - The Jerusalem Post

Category: Zionism
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