The Ultimate Jewish Curse
A Newsletter from Rabbi Jonathan Miller
I will let the French, the Italians and the Hawaiians work out among themselves which spoken language is the most beautiful and get back to me. But I assure you that no language is more expressive, clever or snarky as Yiddish, the medieval Eastern European Jewish vernacular. I can speak a little Yiddish, understand a little more than I can speak and because I am genetically programmed as such I think in Yiddish even if my mommeh loshen, my mother tongue is English.
I was thinking a lot about Yiddish curses, for reasons that will become clear if you read on.
Here are some juicy ones:
May you be so rich your widow’s husband never has to work a day.
May you grow like an onion—with your head in the ground.
May all your teeth fall out, but one, so that you may still get a toothache.
May your bones be broken as often as the Ten Commandments.
Clever and snarky, eh?
But the most direct Jewish curse that a person can utter against another is expressed in both Hebrew and Yiddish, “Y’mach shmo, May his/her name be erased from memory.”
In preparing for this newsletter, I assigned myself the grueling task of pruning through my email list. You are receiving this newsletter because you made the cut.
I exported 6400 contacts from my gmail list to an excel spreadsheet, and piece by piece over a month, I culled out names off the list. I now have a good start with about 3500 contacts. Unfortunately, I suspect that some of the addresses on my email list are no longer receiving mail from me, or anybody. I rather doubt that too many *.earthlink, *.comcast, *.bellsouth and *.rr addresses are still receiving email, but I will soon find out.
Sorting through the contact list was a chore. I removed all the airlines that I have ever flown. Air New Zealand, Korean Air, and Indian Airlines, among others—well they won’t be receiving Backwards and Forwards. But I lingered over each deletion remembering back to adventures I took over my lifetime. I stopped to remember the little trays of over-cooked food I ate cramped up in the back of the plane and the exhilaration I felt when I extricated myself from my economy seat at my new and exotic destination.
All of my old doctors and dentists, bless their hearts. They are the busiest people I know. And they put up with me, telling me year after year to lose weight, floss more, and get rid of the stress. I loved them all. They have enough to read with their medical journals and electronic medical records that they don’t need to see my name unless they are billing my insurance company. Backwards and Forwards might elicit a charge from their front office, so I didn’t want to risk it.
The handymen and fixers, financial folks and lawyers—all people that I turned to when I needed help. They were wonderful most of the time. I figured I no longer need my crew of tree trimmers, pest control officers, barbers and lawn companies now that I live four states away from where I once resided. They won’t be getting Backwards and Forwards in their email boxes.
Oh, and all the restaurants. As I deleted each one of them, I made a mental note of what I would order and with whom I would share the meal. I treasured the delicious food and the wonderful people who picked up my check, or who would let me host them for lunch. The restaurants will not receive Backwards and Forwards.
This was quite a task. I had to review every person, every contact, how everyone impacted me and made my life better (in most cases) or, well, didn’t. Forty years of memories, all bound up in 6400 contacts, now 3500 or so.
But most impactful to me was to review the names of people who died. They will not receive Backwards and Forwards. When they died, I didn’t have the heart to remove them from my contact list. As a rabbi, I buried many of them, standing by their graves in the heat or the cold. The weather at the cemetery is rarely just right. They were my friends and some of my family. With my child like wishful thinking, I did not want to consign them to oblivion or remove them from my memory. It was almost as though if I kept them on my email list, they would still kind of be alive. But they are not. And most times when I had to “D”elete them, I expunged a small piece of my life. Y’mach shmo, the curse of curses, may your name be erased from memory.
I still receive mail for my mother who died 6 years ago. How the mail followed her from Rochester to Birmingham to Bethesda, I cannot fathom. But I have not contacted the senders to tell them, “Hey folks, my mother is dead. Don’t send her any more mail.” I haven’t done that because I still feel that when I receive her mail, she is still somewhere, somehow even as I know she is nowhere and there is no way that I will lay eyes on her again.
Culling my list turned out to be a spiritually serious endeavor. And I began to think about myself and how many people might have deleted me from their lists. All of us, human beings, can expect to have the memories that we create remembered for only so long. Mortality beckons. And then if we are lucky, some generations of people might keep us in their contact list for some period of time. But as the day comes to an end, we all “D”elete and are “D”eleted. Let’s pray that there is a memory someplace beyond the cloud that preserves all the people that we loved, love and that will keep us each in mind- forever.
My next newsletter will venture into the title of my novel. Catch you then.
Please enjoy and stay tuned. Backwards and Forwards will appear, again, magically in your inbox in a few weeks.
In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note at backwardsforwards.newletter@gmail.com.
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Whether we are going backwards or forwards, none of us is standing still. And successful people can move both forwards and backwards at the same time.
Until next time, shalom,
Jonathan