Part 1

Despite knowing that you may be at risk (family history, a bit overweight, too much of the wrong foods, etc.) and despite knowing what the symptoms of a heart attack are (foremost among them being chest pain) – when the heart attack appears at your doorstep, it’s still, well, unexpected. Stepping out of the shower Sunday night, December 4 (it was about 9:00 p.m.), I experienced chest pain across my chest; not incapacitating, but significant. My first thought was, “Really – could this actually be a heart attack?” I dried off carefully, got dressed, and then sat quietly in my studio chair waiting to see … well, you know, “maybe it will go away.” I know, I know, this is not the right thing to do if you’re having these symptoms … but I confess, I did it anyway. I popped eight baby aspirin (in lieu of two regular ones, which I couldn’t find), remembering that aspirin (not acetaminophen) thins the blood if the heart is in trouble.

When your Child Can’t Breathe

by Hatzalah of Baltimore

“It was 2 a.m. I woke up to a barking noise and ran to my child’s room, where I found my three-year-old awake and having trouble breathing. She had had a cold for a few days, but this was new. I took her into the bathroom and ran the hot water from the shower to make steam. That seemed to help a little. I was hesitant to call Hatzalah in the middle of the night, but I was really worried and decided to go ahead. Two guys arrived within minutes and started treatment.”

There is a truism in Israeli politics. It relates in particular to the past 40 years since the rightwing Likud party came into power during the great upheaval of 1977 that ended the Socialist Labor party’s hegemony: “Israeli voters vote Right and receive Left.”

As truisms go, there has been a lot of truth to this one. As the country has been growing more religious and more rightwing, its politicians have remained middle of the road. The Israeli voter always wants more religion and more fearless, principled politics than its politicians are willing to provide.

The roots of this story are grounded in the backyard of my childhood home – literally. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, in the region called the Mid-South, known for its slow-paced living and temperate climate. Life seemed more leisurely then, less pressured than today. Maybe it’s just the difference between an adult’s and a child’s perspective, but it seemed that people had time to work and time to relax and recharge. The relaxation component is something that’s touted today as essential to our well-being. It even has a name – work-life balance – and nowadays, people actually have to schedule downtime to make sure that it happens.

When I was in college, we were required to read the literary classic 1984, by George Orwell. If you are not familiar with Orwell’s stunning work, here’s a summary: A country called Oceania is governed by the all-controlling Party, which has brainwashed the population into unthinking obedience to its leader, Big Brother. The Party has created a propagandistic language known as Newspeak, which is designed to limit free thought while promoting Party doctrine. The Party maintains control through the Thought Police and is continuously snooping on its citizens. People who dare to think differently are carefully monitored and eventually arrested on bogus charges, and then sent to special “rehabilitation” facilities, until they submit to corrected thought. 

When Sara (Gerstenfeld) Strobel, founder of the girls’ performance program Ratzon, was growing up, large groups of unaffiliated Jews often experienced Shabbos for the first time at the Gerstenfeld home. Sara describes her musically talented family to be “an under the radar family of creative and giving parents.” She adds, “Growing up in my parents’ home showed me that there is something in everyone I can appreciate and that created a larger openness in me to all kinds of people.” It was this home that inspired Sara to identify community needs and attend to them, leading to her latest endeavor, Elevate, a new organization for women.

What does one do when the lights and heat go out on one of the darkest and coldest days of the year – and on erev Shabbos, no less! The responses of community members to the blackout of Shabbos Chanukah, 5783, showed ingenuity and resilience. Here are their stories:

The week of Parshas Vayechi, Dor Yeshorim launched an advertising campaign to promote its new hearing loss panel. As “coincidence” would have it, the bar mitzva of our son, who was born with significant hearing loss in both ears, took place on Parshas Vayechi two years ago. In his pshetl (speech), the first half of which is available on YouTube under the title “Vayechi Bar Mitzva Speech – Deafness,” he notes, based on Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz’s Sichos Mussar, how Chushim’s deafness worked to his advantage, and he was the person who killed Eisav, because he didn’t get sucked into the back-and-forth legal argument that the brothers engaged in with Eisav and was therefore able to perceive the situation more clearly.

My husband and I found some dining room chairs at a lovely consignment store. We were looking to replace our own dining room chairs, which we had found several years ago in a similar shop. We spotted these “new” chairs after debating long and hard about another set of chairs we had discovered in another display close by. Those other chairs were in mint condition but unfortunately had a hefty price to go along with them. It was while we were debating whether to buy them that we stumbled across this other set. These chairs were more in keeping with my husband’s and my taste, and the price was less than a third of the other ones. It was almost a no-brainer, and before we knew it, they were sitting in our dining room.

For most people, a home construction project is a major undertaking. It’s not something you do often, it’s expensive, and the average person does not know much about it. I thought it might be helpful and interesting to hear from the experts about mistakes that homeowners often make so that readers can avoid those issues when planning their own projects. Nobody knows as much about home improvements as the contractors, the people who spend their days doing this work. Here is what they have to say: