l'chayim
Fri., September 16, 10:46 PM
I just feel a deep sadness. Helplessness, I guess – there is so much that needs to be done, and I can’t fix it. It just drags me down. (I thought it was just me, but I’m reading similar depression in several of my buddies. D’ya think it’s the days getting shorter?)
Whenever something bad happens, there is always room for blame and finger-pointing. I heard a quote from Hubert Humphrey:
I have no doubt that there’s plenty of room for second-guessing, but “woulda-coulda-shoulda” is useless. As I’m fond of saying, what-if in the past is fiction. While it may help us plan for another time, it doesn’t do the work that stands in front of us right now. What’s bothering me now is that I can’t help fix it.
Beyond the fact that I have donated as much money as I can this month and will have to wait to donate more, my first instinct is to volunteer – and I can’t. I’ve pretty well recovered from my sore muscles of July and August; nevertheless, that’s a sign that I can’t bend and stretch as I used to do, and it’s a good thing I found out before I volunteered to help sort items that were collected here in town.
Well, I could knit or crochet – blankets and sweaters are always useful, especially for those southerners who are transported to cooler climates… Oh, I forgot, I can’t do that either because I can’t focus on my work. I’ve been so irritated, frustrated, exasperated that even I was sick of it. (Watch a woman falling apart at the seams – that’s entertainment.) I decided to concentrate on something else.
You may have heard “l’chayim!” as a toast. There’s a song from Fiddler on the Roof: “To life, to life, l’chayim…” The root word is chai, as worn by our friend, the Purple Chai; it signifies life. It kind of looks like this:
The initial sound, incidentally, is the guttural H, although when I was looking for a picture of it, I kept finding all these references to tea. Just a philological accident.
Chai, life, is the basis of names, like Chaim for a boy (for example, Chaim Potok and Haim Ginott) and Chaya for a girl. That’s partly why I’m attracted to it; Chaya is my Hebrew name. We were all supposed to use our Hebrew names in Hebrew school, but I was the youngest in the class and the only girl. The teacher lady called me the diminutive “Chayala,” and so did the boys. Even after we were all promoted to a different class, the boys still called me Chayala; outside of class, they used my English name.
I’m always interested in how words change and develop. I’ve been told that, in modern Hebrew, chaya denotes an animal. When my three-year-old cousin visited from Israel, he knew no English, and he was told my name was Chaya. He thought about it for a while, and then he said, “Chayala.” (Look at that, he used the diminutive too.) And he went on in Hebrew, which I didn’t understand, and his mother laughed. She translated, “he wants to know if he can put reins on you.”
Anyhow, when I was a kid, most Jewish girls had lockets with a Magen David, or Jewish star. I wasn’t about to be given expensive jewelry at that time, so it was a bit of wishful thinking, but I thought I’d rather have a chai. You almost never saw them, but I was looking at collections of charms – no, I never had or wanted a charm bracelet – where I saw a charm I liked. My friend Gloria and her husband bought me one, which I’ve worn on a chain for almost forty years. The chains wear out, and I just replace them.
As I say, I was looking for a picture and, evidentally, chai lockets are more popular than they were back in the day. But no one is offering one like mine, which is an oval. This is the closest I could find.
Mine is a little taller than it is wide, a slightly redder gold. I generally wear it all the time.
Hope you all feel better. L'chayim!
