(An Irrelevant, maybe Irreverent, Shabbat Offering)
This is one of those random-thought articles, Jewish only because of my profession and that the event about which I’m writing occurred on a Shabbat in 1993.
Looking out my window at the left-over snow and hoping this fifty+ degree weather will melt all of it, I realize how much I hate the stuff. The cold weather has never bothered me. While ice is my nemesis (“the bigger they are, the harder they fall”), having slipped one time too many, once suffering a mild concussion, it’s the snow that infuriates me. For heaven’s sake, they’ve come up with all kinds of inventions, why not put heaters underneath the streets to melt it right away (I’m sure I’m not the first to come up with that idea, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of money, that someone hasn’t invented it already).
Suzy and I considered living in Florida, being invited to be the rabbi at my first pulpit in the Sunshine State (now their Governor DeSantis has clouded even the sunniest Florida community!), but we like the changing seasons too much. When in my interview I asked the president of my congregation about Delaware weather, he was very descriptive…” Well, Rabbi, sometimes it moves in from the north and sweeps east into the ocean before it can wallop us. Sometimes it moves in from the south and sweeps east into the ocean before it can wallop us. Of course, sometimes we get it from the north and the south at the same time so it’s a double wallop,” the whole while using his hands like a television meteorologist (who get big bucks to be wrong). I guess we had to pray a lot that we didn’t get walloped.
Our first winter in Wilmington was the first time in history there was no measurable snow that fell. “This is fantastic, Suzy!” I exclaimed (who uses “exclaim” anymore?), and then the next winter and many after that made up for it. Of course, in the past few years there have been a number of winters in which it didn’t snow much at all. A few years ago, the only time we had snow was on Halloween! Last winter I cannot remember any snow…but there are a lot of things I cannot remember nowadays.
How many of us breathe a sigh of relief once February has passed? “It doesn’t snow in March!” Well, no one in my family will ever forget March 13, 1993. Suzy and our three kids joined my Associate at URJ’s Camp Harlam for a weekend retreat. I couldn’t join them because I had a Bat Mitzvah. March 12th was glorious; as Suzy said, “The stars were shining, not a cloud in the night sky.” You know the sound of falling snow? Well, at 3 a.m. that “silence” woke her up and staring out the window there were no stars, and had she been able to look between the big fat snowflakes she would have seen plenty of clouds!
My Shabbat service had to go on despite the quickly accumulating blanket of white. And wouldn’t you know it, this family didn’t live in Wilmington but well over a half-hour away in a small Delaware community. They showed up; the caterer put out a magnificent spread for the hundred or so they had invited; the videographer set up his equipment; the DJ couldn’t get out of his driveway, and twenty-four guests were sitting in the pews. Towards the end of the service, the father whispered to me, “Rabbi, I’m having a video party in June. If anyone I invited today says they can’t make it, that’ll be the end of our friendship.” Actually, that’s not what he said, but I cannot use the words that he did.
I had walked to the synagogue and walked back that morning twenty-eight years ago, and none of us ever forgot it. As a matter of fact my associate had T-shirts printed…” I survived the blizzard of ’93.” Oh, the bus couldn’t get through the accumulated snow in the Poconos, so they were delayed coming home by two days. Reason enough to despise snow.
And, by the way, some of the worst blizzards occur in March. The worst in history, the Blizzard of 1888, occurred on March 11th. Don’t be fooled by warmish weather…the forecast for this coming Monday into Tuesday is FROZEN MIX!