Happy Third Birthday, My Asher.

This week's parshah (Torah portion) is Vayechi, and it involves Yaakov (Jacob) blessing his sons, the 12 tribes of Israel, of which Asher is one. As Yaakov prepares to die, he provides a unique blessing for each of the tribes, assigning the tribe of Asher the role of olive growers. The olive branch symbolizes peace, and, if anything, my beautiful boy is a peace maker. He goes out of his way to make sure everyone is happy and okay, and he'll bend over backwards to help his little sister or his friends, just to put a smile on their face.

What is the significance here? Well, Sunday is Asher Yitzhak's Hebrew birthday, marking his third birthday and his entrance into Jewish responsibility. I can't believe he's already three, but I'm so excited to see the little man he'll grow into.  He's a stubborn monkey, still refusing to even think about starting to use the potty, but his imagination astounds me with froggies stuck in trees and bunnies needing help and fires popping up everywhere that need to be put out. This morning he used my sleep mask and a bag of monster bowling pins as a wrecking ball to knock down the infestation of ... pineapples. Yes, there were pineapples. Everywhere!

Last night, after the baby was in bed and Mr. T and his parents had headed out for haircuts and errands, I popped in to check on him to see if he was asleep yet. He was awake, so I went in to give him kisses and say the shema. I squished him and told him I was flattening him like a pancake because I was hungry! He giggled and squirmed and smiled and said, "Mommy, can you stay here forever?"

For all of the moments that he makes me want to pull my hair out, moments like that make me both happy and sad. Happy that my boy is so beautiful and happy and healthy and mine, but sad that I don't have more time or energy to devote to him. 

"Mommy has work to do, my love, but I'll see you in the morning," I responded. As I went to close the door, he said, "I love you Mommy" and blew me a kiss. 

These are the days. 

Before we left the house this morning, Asher gave me a light stick turned necklace and asked me to put it on. "You're a beautiful lady!" he said. 

Oh my boy, I'll eat you up, I love you so. 

Happy Birthday Mr. T!

Asher was such a grumpy-looking baby
two years ago, wasn't he?

Three years ago, we'd known each other fewer than two months, were engaged, and were less than a month away from getting married. I spent Mr. T's birthday sick as a dog on his couch, with him making me chicken soup and honey-lemon-ginger drinks by the gallon. His thoughts on the experience of me being sick on his birthday, "Love is not caring about snot."

Two years ago, we celebrated twice, once at our favorite restaurant in Israel, Bodega (yes, there's now Mexican food in Israel) in Efrat, sparklers and all. Then I made his favorite soup, Salmon Chowder, and a chocolate cake for his birthday at home.

One year ago, he was a million miles away and we spent his birthday apart. I sent a card, and I think I sent a Metal Earth for him to build (he loves those things), but it was just another lonely day apart.

This year, I gave him the most hilarious of books, and he's going to spend the morning checking the eruv, the late morning and early afternoon doing some work on someone's house, and then going into the deli for the evening. It's not perfect, and we won't see much of each other, but it's better than a million miles.

Happy birthday to the kindest, most genuine, and most giving person I've ever known. Mr. T would bend over backwards to find a way to help someone -- emotionally, financially, you name it. And I'm happy to report that Asher is following 100 percent in his father's footsteps, and I couldn't be more proud.

Here's to as many more as we can manage, Mr. T.

I'm 31 Today

Yea, verily, today I am 31 years old. I have been on this earth for 31 intensely perplexing, often stressful and emotionally exhausting, years.

I started my birthday with a 9-month-old pretending I was some mighty mountain to be conquered while spouting "Bahhhh" sounds and a notification that my bank account was overdrawn.

Then I got dressed in my birthday outfit (thanks inlaws!) and took off to Comcast (aka Xfinity), where I've been now three times over the past several days because some stranger managed to cancel our cable and internet over Rosh HaShanah. "We really don't know what happened," they continue to tell me.

And then? Then I went into my former place of employment and picked up my things and stuff and said "see ya!" That was both awkward, super awkward, and depressing.

Now we're trying to plan for -- G-d forbid -- the worst as Mr. T's grandmother appears to not be doing very well back in the UK, which means a nightmare of immigration problems as we are still, still, still waiting for his green card, travel documents, and work permit to come through. If we leave the country without getting approval, then the paperwork is canceled and we start again from scratch. Yay!

But hey. There's an ice cream cake in my future, a gift card to Old Navy to be spent, and, who knows, maybe I'll land an amazing job in the next few days or so. Unfortunately KISSmetrics was a bust (killed me, it was the perfect job).

Do I sound kvetchy? I am. Maybe Aimee Mann said it best in "31 Today." Minus the Guiness, of course.

"I thought my life would be different somehow."

Chaviva 3.0

I have to give a huge nod to Ronit for her mad skills at coming up with the quirky title of this post. I hadn't yet had the boost of creative juice to realize that today, my 30th birthday, is a new version of me.

I'm not really sure why or when the 20th, 30th, 40th, etc. birthdays became such a big deal, but the reality is that after 21, you don't have many other major milestone "something happens" birthdays (if you're born in the U.S. anyway).

• Ten was a step toward the teens.
• Fourteen was getting a job (technically I started two months before my 14th birthday). 
• Sixteen was a driver's license.
• Eighteen was the right to vote. 
• Twenty-one was the right to (legally) drink. 

And then? Well, I guess 25 meant that I didn't have to pay up the wazoo on rental cars, but other than that, not much happens. I haven't gotten gifts in years (this year was the first in many for receiving gifts, thanks to my most awesome MIL), and the attempts at attempting a birthday party simply didn't happen.

So my 30th has mostly come and gone without much fanfare. My Hebrew birthday was last week, and after a nice dinner out with Mr. T I got violently ill (glutened?) and have been under the weather ever since (bummed that we spent the money when I just regurgitated it all). Today was a work meeting, a visit to emergency care (again), and stressing over finances (again, as we're paying rent in two locations for the second month in a row with money we don't really have).

Perhaps, then, too much value is placed on birthdays. There are many in the Jewish world who believe that celebrating birthdays is a no-no, something in the vein of what pagans once did and something that Jews aren't meant to (in the Bible, the one birthday mentioned is that of Pharaoh, believe it or not). I joked with Mr. T today that henceforth, mommies count time in the days of their childrens' lives.

Time to spend the few hours left of this Chaviva 3.0 upgrade mumbling like a madwoman in HaShem's general direction. All I want for my birthday is peace, strength, patience, and a healthy, happy, curious child.

What do you think about birthdays in the Jewish world? Was 30 a big one for you or did it float by without any recognition? 

FYI: Sukkot was amazing. We spent time in the north with friends in Ma'alot minutes from the border with Lebanon where we ate delicious chili and chatted the night away in the sukkah. We spent the next day driving back home with a detour past a winery that I visited ages ago that just wasn't the same, but I got to see some beautiful landscapes of Israel that reminded me of Colorado with their greenery. Check out some of the pictures over on Flickr!

Another Year, Another Number

So ... it's my Gregorian, crawled-from-the-womb-of-my-mother birthday. I'm 29 years old today. That means next year I'll be 30, and that's an age I've always longed for. Why? I can't say exactly. I just feel like it's some kind of prized accomplishment to hit 30. Twenty-nine, it seems, is not so exciting. But at least I remembered my birthday this year.

I slept in, went and got a massage thanks to a gift credit from an awesome coworkers, bought myself a birthday cake to take to a friend's sukkah tonight, and am now sitting outside of a Whole Foods still greased up from my massage drinking something called RUNA that advertises itself as "focused energy." Only 50 calories per bottle! Hoo-rah!

So what is my wisdom? What is my grand statement of day of birth clarity?

I honestly don't have one. Birthdays, it seems, are irrelevant at this age. I don't get gifts anymore, and the only in-the-mail card I got was from the stellar Tenzin (thank you!). It's another day, and that's okay.

If you look back to Tanakh, the only birthday ever mentioned was Pharoah's, and he was no friend to the Israelities -- so why do we even celebrate birthdays? Age, it seems, was only important at the point someone died or something major happened.

Perhaps someday a biography will state, "At age 29, Chaviva moved to Israel." And then it will skip forward to the next age-significant moment in my life's chronology.

When I was in kindergarten I had a bowling party. After that I think it was mostly sleepovers. My 16th birthday involved miniature gummies that were shaped like hamburgers. When I turned 21, I met my (mostly) underage friends for dinner at Old Chicago and then went bar hopping with my newspaper coworkers and imbibed quite a lot of Bomb Pops (perhaps the most delicious girly beverage on the face of the earth). After that? Birthdays stopped being fun and started being obligatory. Two years ago, I got my first ever surprise "party" on Shabbat when my ex-husband took me out while sick to a friend's apartment where there were mini-festivities as I sniffed and coughed and felt like utter hell.

So there we are. It's 2012, I'm 29 years old, and it's really nothing special. I'm crazy stoked for Sukkot, but I'm realizing that leggings or tights or something warmer than what I currently seem to have in my wardrobe might be necessary.

Here's to another year. And celebratory birthday leggings. Chag sameach, everyone!

What is a Jewish Birthday?

All of the goodness in this blog post comes from the amazing book that is Bnei Avraham Ahuvecha: Gerim in Chassidic Thought by the illustrious and wonderful Dov ben Avraham.

I was born on September 30, 1983 || 23 Tishrei 5744.
I was born Reform-Jewishly on April 28, 2006 || 30 Nissan 5766.
I became a halachic Jew on January 1, 2010 || 15 Tevet 5770.

So, what do I celebrate?

I get excited every year when we're nearing Simchat Torah because that's my birthday! The actual day that I was born day. The day that I crawled out of the womb of a non-Jew into a big world that was just waiting for me to realize my neshama. I like to think of it as HaShem knowing that I'd someday give in to the Jewishness and thus forced me out into the world on the day that we dance around and celebrate the completion of the cycle of Torah. It's celebrating coming full circle. Thus every year I really feel like my birthday and Simchat Torah really offer a unique experience.

But the truth is this: Even though my my actual date of birth remains the same (halachically speaking), I should be celebrating my spiritual birth as a Jew. Even though when a person completes geirus (conversion) it is a rebirth, the ger emerges as a gadol (a fully halachic adult).

In Tosafot Rosh HaShanah 27a, Rabbeinu Tam writes that G-d's ...

"desire for the world began in the month that would eventually become Tishrei, while the physical creation of the world happened in the month of Nissan. The physical creation of the world, however, is not emphasized or celebrated. Instead, we commemorate God's desire for a world which would benefit from His goodness. The date of a ger's physical creation, his biological birth date, is not the tachlis (the purpose) of his being. Rather, his purpose, what God ultimately desires of him, is found in his spiritual birth via becoming a Jew." ("Some Halachic Aspects of Geirus" by Rabbi Avraham Chaim Bloomenstiel in Bnei Avraham Ahuvecha)

Thus it's most appropriate for the convert to celebrate the spiritual creation rather than the physical creation.

That being said, there's nothing outright wrong with celebrating your Gregorian/physical date of birth. In fact, after so many years of doing so, it seems strange to switching to just my spiritual birthday. Celebrating both, on the other hand, seems right up my alley.

I do think it's interesting to consider, however, that a born Jew -- whether they're religious or not -- technically has their "spiritual awakening" at birth, no matter how spiritual. It's automatic.

Then again, I suppose that there is not date and time that a born Jew becomes a ba'al teshuva, right? Or can you pinpoint the moment you returned to religious observance (if you're a BT)? And if you're a convert, what birthday do you celebrate?

Names.Vocabulary to Know

• Rabbeinu Tam was a leading 12th-century halachic authority. 
• Tosafists were medieval rabbis from France and Germany who are among those known in Talmudic scholarship as rishonim that created critical and explanatory questions, notes, interpretations, rulings, and sources on the Talmud.

Links to Visit

• Find your Hebrew birthday and make your own certificate here: http://www.chabad.org/calendar/birthday_cdo/aid/6228/jewish/When.htm