Beshert | Sitting in the Nosebleed Section
It was February 1, 1993. I had just finished shooting a video in Israel for a corporate client. I was an American living in London, separated...
Beshert | A Mensch with an Edge
We met through a friend on July 4th, 1996. My friend Sheryl asked me to fireworks; her friend Cliff was saving spaces at Gasworks Park,...
Beshert | “I Get It.”
I’ve always been super confident in most things but faltered when it came to dating and love. I was looking for ease and perfection. And,...
Beshert | Finding My Own Kind
My Grandma Phyllis always told me to “Stick to your own kind” when it came to dating. But to her disappointment, I’d never dated another...
Beshert | Pot, Meet Cover
“For every pot, there’s a cover.” That’s what my grandmother of blessed memory always said, never giving up her hope for me. But I was...
Beshert | A Face in the Crowd Led Me Home
At 26, I was coming off a traumatic divorce that led me to distrust everything I knew to be true in this world. Desperate to...
Beshert | Shabbat-a-Bing-Bada-Boom!
“Someday,” my boyfriend David said to me dreamily, “we’ll have Shabbat dinners at our house.”
“Yeah right,” I guffawed. “I guess you’ll have to marry someone...
Beshert | The Song of Our Lives
Then I saw her. Across the crowded room. Dancing alone in a red dress. It wasn’t just her beauty. It was a spirit emanating from her being. I approached her and we talked a bit. I found out her name was Rusti. Enchanting. But she was swarmed by other boys—she was beautiful, talented and smart.
Nevertheless, when I returned to my fraternity house that night, I told my brothers that I would marry her. It was love at first sight.
Beshert | Once Upon a Time in Montevideo…
I met my husband in a hotel lobby in Montevideo, Uruguay on my 27th birthday. We were browsing the lobby stores because the hotel’s only...
Beshert | He Had Me At Lunch
The man had just eaten the lunch of Jewish champions. There went my heart quandary; he embodied the simplest and best parts of being Jewish. With that one “lunch,” I realized he was the perfect Jew for me.
Beshert | Bonded by the Bard
“Was that your friend Bill Shakespeare?” my youngest son, Alex, then six, asks after my husband, Steve, hangs up the phone.
If that seems like a crazy question from a child, it was par for the course in my household, because it was words that wooed me, words that won me, and words that keep us – the entire family – in thrall.
From the very beginning, in fact.
Beshert | Really Glad We Didn’t Skip That Party
That we met on February 22, my Grandma Clara’s birthday, my parents’ wedding day and my Bar Mitzvah day on my mom’s and dad’s 22nd anniversary, must be pure coincidence, right? We chose our wedding day, June 10th, randomly; it turned out to be my grandparents’ wedding day nearly 70 years earlier. Another coincidence… unless one accepts that beshert operates in strange and mysterious ways.