Summer is over, but the memories are still fresh. As a grandmother of several campers, I have a sort of panoramic view of the contemporary camp landscape – a landscape that has changed quite a bit since we, or even our children, went to camp in the 1960s through the early 2000s. Some of my grandchildren ran their own camps, some worked with special needs children, some were regular campers, and one traveled to an exotic location. I will use pseudonyms so as not to embarrass my grandchildren. After all, it is quite a burden to have a grandmother who thinks every experience of theirs is an idea for an article!

Waitressing

Sora spent her summer in Migdal, a camp for special needs children. I remember from my teenage years that it was considered a privilege to go to a camp like that and work directly with children who are sick or who have special needs. I was curious what the draw is to be spending your summer doing this special work.

One morning, more than 30 years ago, when my baby was only four days old, a friend drove my carpool. She got into an accident on the corner of Taney and Cross Country, and all the occupants of the car were taken to the hospital. I rushed to the emergency room to be with my children. My father also came. B”H, no one was badly hurt, and my strongest memory of that whole event was how worried my father was that I was walking around. He remembered how new mothers were treated when he was growing up in England and was sure that a woman who had just given birth should not be walking around. I felt fine, but he urged me to go home.

Different Times

I asked Mrs. S, an elderly lady whom I used to visit, about childbirth in pre-war Czechoslovakia, where she grew up. “We children were very excited when we saw the midwife running through the street with her black bag; we knew that a new baby was coming. As a teenager, I was sent to a few of my aunts when they gave birth. Mothers were not allowed to get off the bed at all for two weeks, so I ran the house during that time. In fact, once, when two aunts were due at the same time, they fought over me since I was considered more helpful than their other nieces.”

Was there such a thing as postpartum depression? I asked her. Mrs. S. replied, “One of my aunts had a few girls and desperately wanted a boy. Wouldn’t you know: She gave birth to another girl. She didn’t want to look at the baby or nurse her. Maybe it was her hormones, although we didn’t know anything about that in those days. The father didn’t know what to do with his wife, so I said, ‘I’ll take her home with me.’ I was ready to do it, too, and named her after myself. It didn’t happen because, fortunately, by the time I left, the mother had recovered and decided to keep her little baby.”

Everyone who has children worries about chinuch (education). From the time a baby is born – and does nothing but sleep, eat, and cry – parents worry: Will the baby become spoiled if I pick him up the minute he cries? If I let her cry, am I teaching her that I don’t care? As the child grows older, the dilemmas just multiply, and of course, when he or she goes to school, chinuch becomes the teacher’s problem, too.

Are the children of our generation different from children 50 years ago? Probably. Each generation of children is affected by the surrounding society – as are parents and teachers. While we like to imagine that they used to just “know” how raise and educate children, whereas we have lost our way, maybe we are idealizing the past, and our confusion stems from today’s different social realities. Or maybe we are merely more aware of the complexity of the task. To get some insight on this very important topic, I surveyed parents, teachers, administrators, authors, and parenting instructors.

Today’s Children

Getting married? Weddings are a big deal, and most people have lots of questions beginning from the time of engagement through the day of the wedding. I sent some questions to local vendors to get tips on how to help the big event run smoothly and be less stressful. I also asked what the common norms are. As a friend told me, “I just want to be normal.” But when it comes to marrying off children, one doesn’t always know what normal is. I spoke to some of our advertisers, and here’s what they had to say. Hopefully these ideas will help.

Among the many Baltimoreans who made dramatic changes in their lives when they began to keep the mitzvos are two women who rejected the drama – literally. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Sheina Ettel Menda and Lindsay Feldman, both of whom were immersed in theater and headed for careers in that exciting field.

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Sheina Ettel Menda

Last winter, our many women participated in putting on a spectacular performance of Mary Poppins. One of the main actresses and singers was Sheina Ettel Menda, who gave up gave up a career in singing and acting to become a frum Jew.

Sheina Ettel comes from a very musical family. Her father played in a band, and her mother played the piano. Living in an upstate New York town called Schuylerville, she was part of the Child Community Theater and acted and sang in several musicals. She started voice lessons when she was eight and was always singing and acting from a very young age. In fact, she was in 50 musicals from age six to 21 and was the star in half of them.

Recently, my two brothers and I were reminiscing about our childhood years. My brothers started to sing some old songs; I noticed that almost all of them were Seder songs. My mind drifted back over the years to our family Sedarim. To my father, the Seder night was of supreme importance. In one of his recorded shiurim, he said:

As we sit around the magnificent table, we relive the birth of our nation together with our children. In the process, we impart to our children their spiritual genetic makeup. Everything that they will accomplish in life, the success of their individual missions in life, the people that they will grow into – everything! Everything depends upon the way that we transmit our mesorah to them.

But what is that “way”? How does the Seder transmit the mesorah? What do such lofty ideas as the “birth of our nation,” our “genetic makeup,” and our “mission in life” have to do with whether we use potatoes or celery for karpas? Whether we tip the cos or drip the wine with our finger?

Pesach is a holiday with many halachos but it is also, perhaps more than any other Yom Tov, replete with minhagim. They are the conduit through which the mesorah is passed down, the audiovisual/kinesthetic/culinary spectacle that makes the Seder memorable. Here are some memories of our family’s minhagim as well as those of the people I spoke to.