Shvayg Shosh

He is tall and slender with a crooked nose, big eyes, full lips, a steady professional job, and a neatly button-down shirt. His ordinariness is so extradinary it makes my heart ache. He belly laughs at my goofy, well-timed joke. His wedding ring laughs at me when it bumps against the table. I am unsure what hurts more: the baby at the next table or him. Both of them hold someone else's joy and on another day, in another week, in another year, neither would grab my attention with such strangling unyielding force. And oddly, it's his force that pulls me more than the baby. Because, well, through all of this, my lack of a partner has left me emptier than I've ever known I could be. Even while pregnant, the loneliness grabbed me and pulled me down forcing the howl out of my throat. And don't tell me about the kind of loneliness you feel when your partner isn't really your partner. I know every nook and cranny. I know every sharp edge. But I can gather as many f...

A few months ago, my friend Jasmine posed on a question on her Facebook wall:  What makes you Howl?  Right now, the last thing I want to do is howl. Right now, all I want to numbness. Numbness and an empty head.  This, of course, is asking a lot from me... At the end of a long summer of unemployment and dating, I found myself still single, still unemployed, and newly pregnant.  After a moment of hesitation, a scan on one internet site on the abortion pill that after ten seconds left me in tears, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was having baby number three.  Unlike my other two children, this child would be mine and mine alone.  While the complications of my current life would make this a challenge, my parents, sister, and close group of supportive female friends allowed me to see that this task would not be impossible.  Secretly,I was delighted.  Secretly, because for the first time in my life, I was completely taken over by an ...

Last January, my friend Galit Breen published an article on Jews and Tattoos . I was lucky enough to be a part of it. Today, I've added more ink to my body. Like everything I do, my ink has everything to do with my Jewishness... I am a tattooed Jew. Most of my  tattoos define my Judaism.  I reject the prohibition against tattoos. I am not committing idolatry nor am I debasing my body by making it more beautiful. I am a Reform Jew. I am the mother of two children whose father is not a Jew. I am a Queer Jew. I am a Jew who loves, honors, respects, intellectualizes and questions my people and my religion every second of every day. My Jewishness is at the core of my very being, and my tattoos reflect my identity.  The tattoo on my leg is Eve, naked in front of a tree, holding an apple with a Torah scroll wrapped around her body. The words-  Etz Chaim - tree of life are above her head. Frankly, it’s a lot of information to unpack.  For me, Eve is the most impor...

I'm staring at the coffin, plain, wood, filled, when she walks into the sanctuary. I can feel her as her heels pad softly against the flat brown carpet. The weight of the air shifts. Particles gather around me, closing my throat. All I can smell is my wife on her clothes. It's as if their pheromones mixed together just to taunt me. My body heaves forward. I try in vain to blow out stale fearful air, but her presence suffocates me. The word lover whispers in my ear from some unknown voice as I tightly close my eyes. I'm sure the congregation thinks I'm holding back tears for her. I am. I'm not. I don't know. I've never felt jealous in my whole life. I've never understood the nights my wife would cry in our bed or on the floor because she felt I was keeping some dark secret. For her, jealousy lived just under the surface, a constant threat to our marriage. Her crying pissed me off so much; I fantasized about hitting her, just to shut her up. Every time I ...

This story was part of a writing challenge proposed by my American Jewish Lit professor in grad school. After reading Bernard Malamud's short story  from 1955, "The Angel Levine," about a Jewish black angel who saves an old Jewish tailor in order to get his wings.  The story looks deeply at Jewish identity, posing the question: what makes a Jew?  In turn, my professor asked, "where did this angel come from? What was his life when he was alive? Was he born Jewish?" Resurrecting Levine I grew up during the Harlem Renaissance, the son of an entrepreneur who made his money opening speakeasies in Jungle alley. Jazz musicians, homosexuals, bohemians, and upper class whites flocked to his establishments.  In 1926, when I was four-years-old, we moved to a Hamilton Heights brownstone. At the time (although much has changed) Hamilton heights was a desirable neighborhood for affluent whites, and my father’s success with his speakeasies sprinkled through...

For years, I taught Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir, Night , in my community college classroom. Night  is the story of Elie and his father's life inside the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps during the Holocaust. It is spare, heart-wrenching, and honest. He tells the tale of a people moved from humanity to degradation and the unraveling of relationships caused by such inhumanity. Many times, broken relationships were that of fathers and sons, but they were also broken relationships with G-d. Elie struggles to hold onto his relationship with his own father while, at the same time, despairs over the violent breakdown of his relationship with G-d. While teaching, my students and I found ourselves stopping at the same passage: A young boy is arrested and hanged by the Nazis for not giving up his superior who was planning a revolt. The entire camp stood helplessly by as they watched this young boy die slowly. While death surrounds them everyday, the boy's ...

The other night, I was putting the Great Rabbi to bed. He's a bit fearful of the dark, so I've put a rooster nightlight in his room. As he was climbing under the covers, he said that he wanted to talk about the Guardian rooster. So, I told him to tell me about it:  The rooster guides me through the dark shadows of the wicked. " Huh?" I thought. Did he really just say that. So, I asked him if he wanted me to write down what he had to say about his Animal Guardians. He asked me to share it on my blog. So, here it is word for word. It is unedited. I did not change any words. I did not write any of it. All I did was transcribe his words: My Dear Animal Guardian By The Great Rabbi The Rooster guides me through the dark shadows of the wicked. The Lion guards me from the medieval The mighty Whale will guide me through my dreams And my destiny. And the Dog will guide me through the cities, the states the countries the continents And t...