The 10 Commandments and Me

It’s been about a week since Shavuot, but when I step on my scale, Shavuot seems to have decided to remain for good!

Are you one of those women who makes a huge deal about preparing the most eclectic mix of exotic and traditional dairy foods?

Although I do not personally ‘patchkeh around’ too much on the dairy side of the kitchen, I do enjoy receiving all the wonderfully strange ‘milchdig’ treasures that my friends and neighbors send my way for me to taste-test. (Or maybe they really don’t like me and just want me to get fat?!)

Either way, I’m glad this whole dairy business is only twice a year (the first 9 Days of Av are also meat-free).

Quiches and soufflés aside, the highlight of my yearly Shavuot experience is the enchanting Torah reading in shul of the 10 Commandments.

I like to imagine myself standing there at the foot of Mount Sinai along with about 2 million fellow Jews who had left Egypt less than two months earlier, listening intently to the original recitation of the 10 commandments…wow! Which of the commandments has the biggest impact on you?

I think my favorite is definitely Shabbat (or perhaps Honoring Parents, now that I’m a mother…!) In our busy busy busy technology-oriented modern day society, it’s nothing less than a G-d-send to have those precious 25 hours per week not to be connected on LinkedIn, liking on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter! Oh, the bliss of not hearing those incessant beeps and rings starting at sundown on Friday!

Now that my husband is working full-time as an app developer, he can also relate to loving having his mind cleared completely on Shabbat and refilled with Divrei Torah and cute conversations with the children.

Sometimes (ok, this happens almost every single week), my husband is in the middle of developing a key feature for a killer app on a Friday afternoon. His mind is bursting with ideas, calculation, algorithms, etc… Then I walk into his home office and announce “Shabbos in an hour!” Oh, the agony of pulling himself away from his Mac at that moment… But he has to admit that it’s all 100% worth it, when he reads fellow 30-something year old developers’ blogs about their burn-out at the age of 31 or 34. It’s quite simple- they don’t have Shabbat and keep working, developing, programming, till- boom… “Ein Co’ach!” My 3-year-old put it very well on Erev Shavuot. He burst in the door after a long hard day at Gan J and excitedly announced: “The Ganenet told us that G-d gave the Jews a Matana! (gift)” (He of course missed the point that the Matana is the Torah- he just thought it was pretty cool that G-d gave us a Matana…he’s really into Matanas!) But as an observant adult Jew, I can totally relate and am eternally grateful for this wonderful Matana that is the Torah!