Page 128 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
mastery of the language, this time they will be unobscured by either vowels or tropes.
• My Torah portion was Vayeira (taken from its first word, which means, “And He appeared”), the story of the binding and inter- rupted intended sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham. I consider the portion to be the most meaningful story in the Pentateuch, in that it addresses the ultimate question of faith under extremely vivid circumstances. (As I learned in college, so did Søren Kierkegaard— who did not attend East Midwood Jewish Center’s Beyt Sefer.) When my older son, Daniel, was bar mitzvahed, he had the same Torah portion to chant (Vayeira) and, accordingly, the same haftorah portion from the Prophets. As I discovered to my amazement when Danny’s bar mitzvah was being planned, although he and I have different November birthdays (the sixteenth and the third), he and I have the same birthday on the Hebrew calendar. Rachel was born on October 22, but through the miraculous workings of the lunar cal- endar and, more likely, through Phyllis’s close relationship with the rabbi, she too would chant the haftorah to Vayeira at her bat mitzvah. (Don’t worry that my son, Peter, has been left out; he was happy to have had a haftorah that would be chanted long after October or November: in the spring because, as he was delighted to put it, November 17 to April 19 constituted “Peter’s birthday season.”) My younger stepson, David, has the same birthday as I do in the Grego- rian calendar. But that is a digression, and, as I would learn, the proper place to practice digressing is at the Seder table.
There are, of course, a fair number of other things that I would learn along the way. We studied all of the holidays and learned that some of them were not as much fun as Chanukah, when you eat potato pancakes and applesauce; Rosh Hashanah, when you eat apples and honey; Sha- vuot, when you eat blintzes; Passover, when you eat matzohs; Simchat Torah, when you throw apples (!); and Shemini Atzeret, when you pick up the apples that you threw on the day before, Simchat Torah. On many
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