Part III

In our home, the mother tongue is English, because the mother, me, uses it exclusively. But almost all the kids choose to answer me in Hebrew, besides one older son who speaks to me from the yeshiva in English. I can hear the boys in the background imitating the English rolling off his tongue.

Be Our Guest Through Bnos Yehudis --
A New Shabbos Placement Gemach for Single Girls

The Family Section has, in the past, suggested to families to be aware of those singles/ widows/ loners in their neighborhood and to remember to invite them for Shabbos meals, early in the week or even a week in advance, and give them the security of having a warm home atmosphere for the coming Shabbos.

WHAT'S COOKING?
Parve Pizza
by Chana Cobin, Tzefas

What happens to all those slices of challa left over after Shabbos? Too much to use up in regular ways?

Poet's Corner
The Road to Exile
by Menucha Levin

A Tisha B'Av poem for every day that you can feel in your bones, down to your toes . . .

As we trudged along the east-bound road
In the blazing summer heat
The air filled with black smoke
And our eyes smarted with bitter tears.
Where were they taking us?
What was to be our fate?

They would not tell us, but we knew
They were tearing us away,
Exiled from the only city we'd ever known
Burning with grief, like the fire
That consumed our holy Temple
As our beloved Yerusholayim --

Bound to us as tightly as leather straps about the arm --
Grew more distant with each reluctant step.

I ached to turn around
Like Lot's wife, for one last look,
And yet I feared to view the devastation
Until a small sharp stone
Worked its way inside my sandal
Just one more indignity after all the others
A thorn-like pain too hard to bear.

So, as I paused for a moment to shake it loose,
I turned and saw my city, but not the one I knew,
Not wrapped in a shroud of dark smoke
That hid the bright blueness of the sky
Like a covered mirror in a house of mourning.
But, instead -- a different vision.

A vast white city filled the horizon
Shimmering in sunlight,
With strange tall towers in the distance
Unusual to my eyes.

The city, not as it was, but as it would be
In some far-off future time
A place my descendants would call home,
Yet, somehow, still Yerusholayim.

And the vision was strangely comforting,
Removing one tiny stone of pain from my heart,
As I resumed the anguished journey
Into our l-o-n-g exile.