What Sticks

Rachael Lavon

I’m not sure where it comes from, this sudden need to manufacture memories, only that it nestles sometime before Rosh Hashanah, and it stays.

“Esti’s three. She’s going to remember this Rosh Hashanah,” I tell my husband while poring over cookbooks and menus. “The memory will live inside her! Forever!” I can sometimes be a tad dramatic.

“Just don’t stress,” he tells me, as if that’s the solution.

The problem is that I’m not just trying to give my kids a beautiful Yom Tov. I want to deposit something spectacular into their memory banks. I want their recollections of Rosh Hashanah to be vibrant and powerful.

A part of me wants them to have memories that match my own — moments sprinkled with gold glitter, autumn- painted maple leaves, twirly dresses, strawberry tapioca, a crystal dish of teiglach on my grandmother’s counter. The smell of bubbling soup that filled my grandparents’ massive home and the warm yeasty scent of love that washed over me as I stepped through the backdoor. Silver honey dishes and sliced apples, four floors, one million hiding spaces, and cousins. Lots of cousins.

Everyone needs memories like that.

My husband eyes the menus and the freezer and the paper goods while I frantically pluck out a million pomegranate seeds. “If I can’t give the kids Rosh Hashanah at their grandparents' house, at least I can give them individual cups of pomegranate seeds,” I explain.

There’s no default “memorable moment” setting for my children who live across the ocean from their grandparents. No “arriving at Bubby’s house before Yom Tov,” no “waiting for the cousins to come.” I love Yerushalayim, but Erev Rosh Hashanah all I can see is my parents’ table in Florida — my nieces and nephew and siblings crowded around singing, “Dip the apple in the honey….”

Here in Eretz Yisrael, my roots run so far below the earth, I can’t even find them. In this land, I’m untethered. And I think: If I make enough dessert, the table will look fuller, the hollow spaces where relatives should be less glaring, and my children will have happy memories.

So I scoop out pomegranate jewels and ice honey cake and top delicate individual trifles on Erev Yom Tov. But I make a sad mistake and forget all about nap time. When we sit down to the seudah, the three-year-old I was so desperate to inject memories into is fast asleep. No amount of cajoling wakes her up.

She comes to me in the middle of the night shaking, face wet with tears. “I missed the seudah,” she wails. And my heart breaks because I’ve failed to provide something utterly essential. There’s no redoing the first night of Rosh Hashanah. She missed it. I let her miss it.

I wake up the next morning determined. We’ll go to shul. We’ll hear the shofar. What could be more memorable than hearing the shofar?

As we the near the shul, we notice water. Malodorous water. As we get closer, the water rises until the street begins to look like a pond… no, not a pond. A cesspool. And then we spot the massive staircase beside the shul. It’s been transformed into a waterfall, a great, cascading, sewage-water waterfall.

Three-year-old is positively transfixed.

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 639)