portrait of a shabbos table

there were about 15 people there, and some of us were such characters. in the cartoon-characterizable sort of way, that i just had to share. it reminded me of the feeling you get when you meet someone straight out of the boyfriend book. so here's the frum version of that very book, maybe...

1- the earnest baal teshuvah guy. he used to be a musician, until they told him it was bad for shabbos, so now he's in a band called "kol geulah" and had a scraggly beard. being a man, he gets to sit next to the baal habayis, and he waxes poetical about how important it is to have divrei torah at the shabbos table. sometimes he says things like "i don't know if you know..." to a table full of ffbs (pardon my french) about things that everyone who went to any frum high school knows, because to him its all new and esoteric. he likes to tell over things he's learned, not always perfectly, and everyone encourages him while smiling to each other at his endearing misrepresentations.

2- the self-righteous pseudo intellectual guy. he is smart enough to present a logical argument, but not smart enough to forsee, or even understand, its inevitable flaws. he makes claims that seem very wise to the earnest baal teshuvah guy, and seem patently false to me. (eg, we know from rashi that loshon hakodesh can have two letter roots, so this whole thing called hebrew grammar is really just a farce of the moderns.) while he can dispute something that e.b.t. guy says, you cannot dispute what he says. because he just doesn't know how to respond, except by ignoring you or repeating what he said before. he certainly does not expect that a woman might know something he doesn't.

3 - the straight-talking-no-nonsense-frum lady. (wife of #2) she's realtively intellectual in that she uses logic in ordinary conversation and sometimes uses big words. she too, in her own way, can't be argued with. her mother and some other women are talking about whether it makes sense to push off teaching reading until nearly all children are "reading ready" - about 6 or 7. parents are reluctant, but why rush things, leaving kids who are developmentally normal, but just not advanced, "behind?" lady #3 says "parents just don't want to deal with the fact that their kids aren't special" and that's the end of that. she, too, can't respond to an argument except by repeating her position more difinitively. she is not afraid to argue with her husband or remind him when he is talking about something un-shabbes-dik. and she is very organized.

4 - the beautiful young new wife girl. she's pretty. really pretty. and you know that she, unlike the rest of the women at the table, had equally nice hair before she got a wig. she's quiet bordering on meek, and she asks earnest advice about housekeeping and buying furniture, but only when she goes into the kitchen and can talk to the baalebuste alone. not that there's anything wrong with that. her taste in jewlery is poor (aka, very frum), but its ok. her husband is older than her and you keep wondering what's secretly special about him that he got such a "good" shidduch.

5 - the too litvish (or is it modern?) for her own good, but we'll show her yet girl (me). she forgets her shabbos clothes at home and is a bit underdressed. she seems clueless and leaves without lighting shabbos candles, but then comes out with phrases like lechem mishneh that make you think maybe she knows something, after all. she tries to talk about halachah during dinner, which one alternately humors for kiruv purposes or treats seriously because maybe she's heard of the problem with teflon pans, after all. every woman engages her in the requisite small talk about her hometown and her job, and she fails to produce any long-term conversation out of it all. she falls asleep at the shabbos table and is generally a nebach. and a vegetarian.*

6 - the serious, still on shlicus guy. he is softspoken and knows stuff. and very skinny. he sings with an intensity that seems to belong more to an 18 year old in yeshiva than to a father in his late 20s. he clearly needs everything to be meaningful. he gets very animated when discussing the details of a particular video of the rebbe - if you look closely, you can see that it's raining. (others disagree, but he insists. apparently, this matters a lot.)

7 - the shaliach's wife. sweet. benign. and with a very cute, pleasant child.


*actually, i had my first pareve chilent in a long time at this house - apparently they alway s make it that way. yay! ;)

there's something comforting and routine about finding these people everywhere. there is also something amazing about tables where people really just talk torah, even if one is forced to spectate from the back table. the end.