Bubby has left us

 Last month. Barely six weeks ago. It doesn’t seem possible, but that’s when my oldest son got up at his Purim bar mitzva celebration to give his speech.

Thank you to everyone for coming to celebrate my becoming a bar mitzva. I want to wish Happy Birthday to Bubby (whose name is Esther!), who will be turning 98 next week, bli ayin hara, and is with Aunt Norma in New York tonight…

Shortly after, the world ended, and when it will restart is anyone’s guess. But it will be without our Bubby, my mother’s mother, who left us just before Shabbat started.

Me, Bubby and the bar mitzva boy, exactly thirteen years ago

I was Bubby’s oldest grandchild, and she was my last connection to the Greatest Generation, a generation which lived through the Depression, World War II and the Holocaust to see the founding of the State of Israel and the rebirth of Judaism.

I will never forget the food, the love, the fierce devotion to her family, to her faith, to the Jewish people and the Jewish State. My love for books and language started with her day job at Shulsinger Press. I remember being wowed by her Hebrew typewriter.

But the phrase I think I will never forget is “Bubby, sit down!” Because whenever you went to her home, on Haven Avenue or Overlook Terrace in Washington Heights, she was constantly on her feet. What could she get you? What did you need? Were you done with that; good, she’ll go get the next course. Because with Bubby, it was never about herself, it was about her family, her loved ones, her community.

Bubby deserves a funeral with ten thousand attendees, but of course there will be barely ten. Amid a global lockdown, most of her family and friends will not be able to pay her this final honor. They will not be able to receive the dozens, the hundreds, who would normally come to their homes for shiva. Kaddish will be said for her in bizarre, outdoor ad hoc prayer services.

And this would not bother Bubby in the slightest. Perhaps her neshama, her soul, decided to slip away and return to its Maker precisely at a time when we would be preoccupied with a global crisis. But we who remember her will never forget that she deserved so much more.

Jewish Countess

 Today is Day 32, which is four weeks and four days, of our lockdown/ quarantine/ isolation, since Israel’s schools shut down; but we are also on Day 4 of a new calculus, that of the seven weeks from Pesach to Shavuot, counting the Omer. Unfortunately, unlike the ban on weddings and haircuts (mourning the students of Rabbi Akiva who died en masse during this season) which ends with Day 33 of the Omer, our contemporary restrictions seem to be getting more stringent.

Now, there are some good things about this stay-at-home era. For Orthodox Jews, prayer is not usually a family affair; but when the synagogues are closed, you get a chance for a service that is truly egalitarian. The experience can be sincerely uplifting, assuming your younger children can stop fighting for 10 minutes. Or maybe even if they cannot.

Still, in our home, we started counting the Omer together long before we had heard of the coronavirus. Appending this biblically-rooted mitzva to the evening service and effectively excluding women from it seemed disingenuous to me. After all, Rav Yosef Karo in the Code of Jewish Law (OH 493:4) mentions only one custom which applies throughout this period:

The women are accustomed not to perform any labor between Pesach and Shavuot, from sunset onward.

He gives no explanation for why women specifically should refrain from working in the Omer eventide, but he gets this idea from the Tur, who cites a general custom to refrain from labor at this hour because that is when the students of Rabbi Akiva were buried; but then the Tur specifically mentions the custom for women to take it easy, comparing this to the counting of the years by the court for the jubilee cycle, both referred to in the Torah as “seven sabbaths.” Just as in the sabbatical year, (agricultural) labor is forbidden, so too during the time to count the omer, labor is forbidden. But what does that have to do with women in particular?

It is notable that while Maimonides explicitly limits the obligation to count the Omer to men, Rav Yosef Karo does not. Some commentators argue that while women should be technically exempt, as they generally are from time-bound positive commandments, “nevertheless, they have accepted it upon themselves as an obligation” (MA 489:1).

Others go further, such as Nahmanides, who argues that counting the omer is not a time-bound mitzva, comparing it to other commandments such as the firstfruits. Yes, they may come at a specific season, but that is not a reflection of some arbitrary clock or calendar, but rather the natural course of the year. Passover is the first day of spring, and when it ends, we begin counting seven weeks until Shavuot, until “the day of the firstfruits,” until we receive the Torah. Indeed, it is the women who are addressed first at Sinai, according to the Mekhilta: “‘So shall you say to the house of Jacob’ (Exod. 19:3) — these are the women; ‘and speak to the sons of Israel’ — these are the men.”

The notion that women cannot be trusted to keep the Omer count seems ludicrous when we consider that the first mitzva of counting seven is the exclusive domain of women–the counting of seven clean days to maintain family purity: “And she shall count for herself seven days, and then she shall be purified” (Lev. 15:28).

The sabbatical year count, carried out by the Jewish court, is indeed a masculine affair (because of Adam’s curse to work the ground?). It is formal and officious, though the sabbatical year is binding for everyone. In parallel, we may see the feminine side of the Omer count towards Shavuot, which is carried out in the home, by the family, while the women of the house refrain from labor.

This year, at least, we should be able to appreciate the unique power of women to bring us to Sinai.