After breakfast on a Sunday morning, visiting in Lakewood, I spotted our teenage grandson working at a table in the corner of the kitchen. He was picking up tiny brown pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to complete the ground leading up to a nighttime picture of a country store. He started solving jigsaw puzzles at twelve years old. When I saw him easily find and connect a piece, I asked,“How do you do that?”
“It’s not so
hard,” he said. “Try it.”
“I’m not good
at jigsaw puzzles,” I told him. But he wouldn’t give up on me. He showed me how
he had separated the brown colors and found another piece that fit.
“You can do
it,” he urged.
So I tried and,
with his help, I also found a piece that fit! Unfortunately, that didn’t get me
interested in jigsaw puzzles. I believe I’m not good at doing them, and as most
of us know, once you believe you’re not good at something, it’s hard, although
not impossible, to change. In the past year, though, because I needed to
sharpen my mind, I developed an interest in solving crossword puzzles found in
a Sun Plus flier thrown on my lawn
each week. I began to wonder if other frum
Jews solve puzzles also and why?
Aviva Isbee, a
trustee of the Ahavas Yisrael Charity Fund, also retrieves the Sun Plus flier from her lawn and enjoys
doing Boggle. “It’s challenging
and keeps my mind sharp,” she says.
Asher Wildman
shares, “I tend to do crosswords and puzzles when I have brain fog.” As an IT
specialist with the federal government as well as helping others with their
computers, he needs the puzzles to clear his brain.
My neighbor,
Elaine Berkowitz, shares that she does Kakuro.
She started several years ago with
the popular number/logic puzzle, Sudoku,
but eventually discovered Kakuro and likes it better. “It’s a kind of crossword
puzzle using numbers instead of words,” she says. “It is strange that I am
doing a number puzzle since I am much better with words than with math. But I
find it mentally challenging. It also helps me relax.”
In my case, I
got started doing crossword puzzles one afternoon when I opened that plastic Sun Plus wrapper and looked more closely
at what was inside. Most of the contents contained colorful ads from
supermarkets no longer in our neighborhood. But the puzzles sparked my
interest. (I guess the puzzles were included as an incentive to read the food
ads!) They included Sudoku, Jumble,
Boggle, Word Find, and a TV crossword puzzle. Like Mrs. Isbee, I enjoy
Boggle. I also like to solve the Jumble, but I don’t know the names of shows
and characters on TV today, so after looking at a few of the clues, I decided
that this crossword puzzle wasn’t for me.
Then I glanced
at the Sun paper crossword. Hoping
that doing crossword puzzles would stimulate my brain, I started reading
the clues and filling in the white spaces across and down. Suddenly, I couldn’t
put down the paper! Over the past year, I’ve finished many of these puzzles and
felt my vocabulary improving. When I can’t figure out a word from its clue,
even after putting down the paper for a while, I glance at the answer I need. After
I fill in the word, I write the letter H, standing for helped,
next to it. My husband thinks that I should write a C for cheating! Since I’m not playing
against anyone else, I don’t consider it cheating at all.
Dr. Shoshana
Lewin, a Baltimore psychologist, likes the free New York Times mini-crossword puzzle online. She notes that this
crossword uses the word “reveal” when giving an answer. Like my getting help by
looking up an answer, once a word is revealed it becomes easier to solve more
of the crossword. This idea of revealing something to give us more answers is
like when we suddenly see a “hint” from Hashem revealing an answer that gives
us insight into a personal problem (lehavdil!).
Barbara Fisher,
an Atlanta artist who creates fabric Torah covers as well as challah covers,
likes Wordle. It’s a fairly new, fast-paced word game that she enjoys for five
minutes at a time. She also likes doing jigsaw puzzles, completing the frame or
corners first.
Downstairs in
Bill and Marcia Lerner’s home, I am amazed at the number of beautiful finished
jigsaw puzzles that adorn the walls. When I asked Mr. Lerner how long he has
been doing jigsaw puzzles, the retired meteorologist answered, “Forever! I
started as a kid.” He says that it forces him to look at color and shape. Like
Mrs. Fisher, he starts with the end pieces first. But with the more challenging
puzzles, he looks for the best place to begin, which could be in the middle.
“There’s a strategy to it,” he states. “It helps my brain.”
Mr. Lerner’s
wife Marcia gets involved close to finishing the puzzles. They both look for
interesting paintings. Mrs. Lerner prefers pictures of gardens or children
playing. Her husband likes nature views, such as the one he’s working on now of
a lake with two eagles and a nest with two eaglets. He says that a few puzzles
have Jewish themes, some of gedolim,
and suggests visiting the puzzle aisle at Seven Mile Market. As for helping him
learn Torah, he states that it’s more of a mind rest.
In the new
biography, Reb Dovid: The Life and Legacy of Rabbi Dovid Feinstein (ArtScroll), the author, Yisroel
Besser, writes, “Someone came to speak with [Reb Dovid] about a pressing issue.
Reb Dovid greeted him warmly but said he needed five more minutes to finish
something, and he resumed writing. The visiting talmid chacham peered at the paper and saw that it was not a teshuva that Reb Dovid was writing, nor
was it a halacha document: Reb Dovid was busy finishing a crossword puzzle, an
exercise he did to sharpen his mind....”
To Rabbi Besser,
thank you for including in your book that “endorsement” by a gadol for solving crossword puzzles! To
the grandson who helped me see that I could put a puzzle piece in place, thank
you. And most important, to Hakadosh
Baruch Hu, thank You for all the gifts You bestow upon us, including puzzles
to help us sharpen our minds!
