I’m trying to think of a word or a phrase or a way to describe the arc of a certain kind of relationship, a relationship a person has with a place. I want to describe what it is like to be in a place where I didn’t grow up. It’s a verb that I’m looking …
From my tiny rooftop apartment in the colonia Coyoacuán I see the sun rise blood-orange red fading into hot orange and then silvery white and blue. On the horizon the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl come into focus. I see the stunning main library on the UNAM campus. I am fascinated with this building designed by painter …
The klaf (scroll) is the mezuzah. I make mezuzah cases but the mezuzah is actually the scroll inside the case. It has beautiful prayers that are central to Judaism. Many Jews believe that the mezuzah should not be used by Gentiles. After all it contains our most important prayer, the Shema. Furthermore, it is used …
Eucalyptus Eucalyptus globulus When I was attending woodworking school in Northern California in the mid 1980’s I’d pass a grove of eucalyptus trees on my way to class each day. I still remember the trees’ wonderful aroma in the fog and rain and the way they shed their blueish bark in long strips. Recently my …
The Living Room My father wore suits his father had made on a treadle sewing machine. His first language was Yiddish. My mother was born on the run, her parents fleeing the overthrowing of the Ottoman Empire and the ensuing anti-Jewish oppression. Her father was a coppersmith. She typed seventy words a minute on her …
Here is the beginning of the cabinet, a single plank of European pear wood, almost twenty inches wide, two inches thick and ten feet long. Sawed near the center of the log it retains the full diameter of the tree. The truck driver and I unload the plank onto saw horses under the portal. It …
Some of the mezuzahs I make come to you with the bark attached and others arrive bark free. But why? In the winter, when the tree is dormant, there is no activity in the cambium, an area one cell thick right below the bark. The sap is not yet rising. But during the rest of …
As a very young child, I adopted a sapling and named it George. It is not uncommon for children and adults to form close relationships with trees. We think of them as people, not to take away their “treeness” but to have them as our relatives and equals. The mulberry tree in this story never …
There’s no Shin!In fact there’s nothing on the outside to identify the mezuzah as Jewish. The Jewish is on the inside, unseen. The Queen Esther Mezuzah holds the scroll on your doorpost secretly. In order to save her people, Queen Esther kept her true identity secret, and for that reason she has been called “the …
In late October of this year I was contacted by a man living in Chicago named Ezra. He had purchased one of my mezuzah cases in 2013. Now he had a special request. He mentioned a recent rough spot in his life. “It was difficult, but I thought about my Bubbie who was stripped of …
