Day 19 - Shabbat With The Boys

Different Folks, Different Strokes

You know how men are supposedly more introverted than women?  I totally get that.

This Shabbat Amiel and Avigail went to their cousins in Elad, and I was left with three boys, first, last, and middle child of those entrusted to my care this month.  Shabbat was pleasant, but low key.  Instead of having an engaging conversation at the table, Binyamin and Chanania preferred to engross themselves in various reading material, or at the very most engage in text study with me, in which engaging the text is much more essential than engaging the other person.

After being vegan for a few years, I could never bring
myself to drink straight cow's milk again.  That's soy milk
in the glass

In order not to catch Asperger's from these creatures, I arranged for us to join another family for Shabbat lunch.  There they both had age peers of the proper gender to interact with, and I was spared having to futilely try to interest them in some topic of discussion, while enjoying an hour of adult conversation myself.  Interestingly enough, in this particular household, a union of a man of proud Moroccan ethnicity with an outspoken Polish woman, they had both recently begun to consider taking a vegetarian or even vegan lifestyle.  Over the course of 30 minutes or so, we traversed together all the run-of-the-mill arguments for against vegetarianism, both from a secular and Jewish perspective: cruelty to animals, health issues, inefficient use and poor allocation of world resources as a result of a heavily meat-based diet in large parts of the world, the role of animal sacrifice in Judaism and the question of whether it's meant to return at some indeterminate point in time, R. Kook's famous treatise on the role of vegetarianism in humanity's journey to final enlightenment, etc., etc.  

For me, this was most entertaining.  I became vegetarian just before my 12th birthday, and vegan when I was 15.  I stopped keeping a vegan diet at age 22 when I started my army service (a stipulation I made in an effort not to starve to death), and started eating meat again 5 years later.  In the midst of all these dietary changes I was also undergoing religious and spiritual transformations, so these discussion were oh-so familiar to me.  I felt like I was back in youth group or in yeshiva, when I used to have to defend my dietary habits from friend and foe alike.  Okay, I guess it was really just friends...

A Personal Question

In two days, my parents arrive.  I've arranged an apartment for them to stay in, but it was missing a few essential pieces of furniture.  So tonight we dragged over a couch from our place so they'll have someplace comfy to sit.  I got a friend to help carry it (it's just about a block away), and Binyamin tagged along.  After we had deposited the couch, the friend continued on to his home, and Binyamin and I strolled back to ours, down the quiet alley in which the apartment is situated.  And then, out of the blue, Binyamin said something that made me stop in my tracks.  

Binyamin.  He gets along much better with the little ones than siblings he
could have more meaningful interactions with.

"Are you happy that Sabba and Savta are coming," he asked, Sabba and Savta being the Hebrew terms for Grandpa and Grandma, respectively, and the titles my parents are addressed by in our house, regardless of the language being used.  Two things surprised me in his question.  The first, his motivation for asking.  Was it not obvious that I was pleased to see my parents?  I would like to think that it is, but maybe haven't hyped up the visit this time as much as I usually do.  But that part didn't really shock me.  What made me stop and stare at him was the fact that he had asked me how I felt about something that was of no consequence to him.  This was the first time I'd ever seen him really reach outside of himself and take interest in another person's thoughts or feelings, as just that.  Someone else's experience.

Binyamin has always been extremely self-centered, unable to see anyone else's point of view (or at least not admit that he can see it), nor take other people's feelings, perceptions, or wants into consideration.  So it really hit me when he asked me this simple question, that he must be maturing, coming to appreciate that other people have their own perception of reality.  A step in the right direction!