Birthdays: A Jewish Approach

Today my baby turns 24. She is not a baby anymore. She is a capable, competent, confident adult. She is enjoying her emerging life in Los Angeles and I am enjoying watching her. She is full of enthusiasm and optimism. She can conquer the world. She has dreams and aspirations. She has plans for an apartment, for pursuing her acting career, for a new business of her own. She is training hard for the Disney Princess Half Marathon and ran 10 miles today on the elliptical. Far too cold here in Chicago to run outside today!

Yet she still has that child-like wonder and amazement. She can see the beauty hidden in the world. Today we ventured out to see the movie Frozen. It is visually stunning with great music. Listening to her sing, “Do you want to build a snowman,” my own heart melts. An act of true love will melt a frozen heart. But that act doesn’t have to come from a knight in shining armor. In this case, it could be a sister or a smelly iceman, but I don’t want to ruin the plot. It was the perfect way to celebrate her birthday on the coldest day in Chicagoland history. We then had a princess high tea complete with radish sandwiches and hot chocolate (her choice!) and an elegant dinner of duck a l’orange and chocolate soufflés that she cooked. Then a heated game of boggle. Which she won. Of course. I used to be able to beat her but not for several years. And that is the way it should be.

So even with bitterly cold, dangerous conditions, we managed to make her birthday special, joyous, magical. And that is the point. Some people think that celebrating birthdays is a not a Jewish thing. It seems some Jews think to call attention to someone on their birthday might attract the evil eye. Seriously? Yes, seriously. Some even would rather not because the only person in the Torah who celebrates a birthday is Pharaoh. They would rather celebrate the anniversary of starting school, their Bar Mitzvah, their marriage. Or the yahrzeit of a loved one. However, even Chabad http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/481087/jewish/How-Do-Jews-Celebrate-Birthdays.htm  has ways that birthdays can be celebrated in Judaism. And yes, Jews like cake and ice cream (or soufflés and gelato) too!

Giving tzedakah. Davening and giving thanks for your life. Finding a new fruit to experience and saying Shechiaianu. Learning the Psalm of your year. The number of the Psalm plus one (so for my daughter that would be Psalm 25. Use it as a mini-retreat and contemplate your past year and where you want to go. Study Torah. Teach some Torah. Do a good deed. Take on a new mitzvah. Have an aliyah in the synagogue either on the SHabbat before or after or on the day itself if it is a Torah reading day. Celebrate your birthday on the Hebrew calendar. Mine falls on Tu B’shevat. So I do something with trees or ecology or the environment.

My list includes remember and honor your parents. They created you. They created you in love. My mother, after my father died, used to go to one of my favorite restaurants on my birthday, and toast me with one of her friends. I never knew until after she died that she had this tradition.

Chabad says it this way: “Your birthday commemorates the day on which G-d said to you: ‘You, as an individual, are unique and irreplaceable. No person alive, no person who has ever lived, and no person who shall ever live, can fulfill the specific role in My creation I have entrusted to you…'”

Psalm 139 says “You know my sitting down and rising up. You understand my thoughts from afar. You measure my going about and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. There is not a word on my tongue that You O Lord knows it all….You have made my reins; You have knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks unto You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are Your works and that my soul knows that right well.” That is the spirit in which I celebrate birthdays. You do not have to be Moses, or David, or even the Biblical Sarah. You need to be you because you are you.

That is exactly why birthdays are important. Because you are you. So Sarah, my baby, my love, my partner in crime. We celebrate you. Because you are you. We love the person you are becoming. We are proud of you. We love you. We love you for no other reason than because you are you. We look forward to many, many (and maybe warmer!) birthdays.

So have your cake and your ice cream too. Have your champagne. Give tzedakah. Make the world a better place. Wonder and marvel at the world.  L’chaim.

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