Backpacking or Traveling with a Baby or Infant: Getting Over Jet Lag

No matter which way you slice it, jet lag sucks.  No matter how tired you are, you find yourself awake in the middle of the night… then you find yourself falling asleep at the table when you sit down for lunch.  But when you’re dealing not only with your own jet lag, but with your baby’s jet lag, too… Well, that is a much greater challenge!

Jet lag is never fun, and with a baby it is even less so. But some determination and a few simple tricks will have your baby back on schedule in no time!

Babies under the age of 3 months generally don’t have a problem with jet lag.  Their circadian rhythm is not yet fully developed and they are not on such a fixed schedule.  Usually very young babies adapt quite well to travel changes.  But once your baby hits that developmental mark where he/she has developed a circadian rhythm, you are going to have to deal with their jet lag as well as your own.

The fastest way to acclimatize a baby to a new time zone is to keep their schedule in tact, come hell and high water.  No matter what, try your best not to deviate.  If bubba goes down for a nap at noon and sleeps 3 hours, then put him down for a nap at noon and only let him sleep 3 hours.  Try to keep them awake until their appointed bedtime.  Sometimes this may not be possible (they might just fall asleep where they are sitting and no amount of prodding will wake them) but try your very best, even if it is hard.

The harder part is the middle of the night, when your baby will wake up and cry to come out, thinking it must be daytime.  Older babies may understand an explanation of showing them through the window that the sun is asleep and they should be, too.  With younger babies, you may just have no choice but to spend time trying to put them back to sleep as best you can.

When your baby is awake during the daytime, try to do things outside to get their circadian rhythm back in sync.  Remember, circadian rhythm is determined by sunlight, so if you can keep your baby in the sun their brain will automatically associate it with being daytime and they will (hopefully) reset to the new time zone much more quickly.

If you do these simple tricks, there is a good chance that your baby will adjust even faster than you do!  Usually it only takes a couple of days (it took me a week to get Akiva back on schedule when we went from the US to Australia, but that’s as extreme as it gets – completely reversed sunlight hours!).

Good luck!

Scientific Proof That Keeping Kosher Can Increase Your Happiness

There are a lot of reasons for keeping kosher.  Of course the best reason to keep kosher is because G-d said to, because it’s written in the Torah.  We could do it because it’s a mitzvah (and who doesn’t need to get some extra merit in the world to come?!).  Some people who aren’t even Jewish keep kosher because it’s healthier – yes, even today, with all the FDA regulations (FDA regulations really don’t mean much, to tell you the truth).  But here’s another reason to keep kosher: IT CAN ACTUALLY MAKE YOU HAPPIER.

HAPPIER.

Yes, as in more joyful, more smiley, less depressed.  Happier. Why? How?

Well, in my last post I spoke about the power of choice.  Choice is undeniably a good thing – up to a point.  As with all good things, it is fantastic in moderation, but dangerous in too-high doses.  In fact, too much choice can be paralyzing.  It can cause you not to choose anything at all.

Another side effect of choice is making the wrong choice.  If you only have 3 choices and you’re not thrilled with the one you pick, you can always shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, it was the best of the bunch!”  But if you have 3 dozen or 300 choices, suddenly if the one you choose isn’t the best, you end up blaming yourself. Surely ONE of those choices must have been the perfect choice!

The result is that although we have more choices and we may choose something that is objectively better than what we would have chosen previously, we are LESS HAPPY with our choice.

Here’s where keeping kosher comes in.  When you keep kosher, you inherently have fewer choices.  Even if you live in Israel, where entire supermarkets are kosher, there will always be some things off-limits to you.  You can’t buy pork chops, you can’t have calamari, and even if you can put cheese on a soy burger, it never tastes quite like the real thing.  If you live, as we do, in a community where there are far fewer kosher options than, say, Jerusalem or Monsey, your choice is restricted even further.  I can still buy pickles, but I don’t have to choose among 20 different versions: Instead, I have 3 to choose from. This applies across the board.

And you know what? The same thing can apply to other areas of Judaism as well.  Dressing modestly means mini-skirts and skimpy tank tops are out of the running, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other options you can use to express yourself.  But if there are 200 tops in the department store and only 20 are tznius and of these only 2 suit you, then after choosing between them you will be happier than you would if you did not keep tzniut and had to choose one out of 20 tops that suit you.

And there is scientific proof to back this up.  If you don’t believe me, just check out this TED video! Enjoy and happy kosher keeping!

Parshas Re’eh: The Power of Choice

The ability to choose is a very powerful thing.  Our choices demonstrate to the world who we are: what do we choose to wear; how do we choose to speak to others?  To many of us, choice is the equivalent of freedom.  If we cannot choose, then we de not really feel free: prisoners have no choice as to where they can go or even what they can eat.

Yet on the other hand, too much choice can be too much of a good thing.  As humans, we crave stability and direction.  We want the ability to choose, but we also want it to be clear what the best choice is.  A few years ago, there was a trend of selling colorful kitchen appliances.  A visit to the store would reveal entire shelves of identical mixers – except that each was in a different color.  Not so anymore. Today you will find often two or three colors available – but rarely more.  Companies did studies and determined that when given up to three choices, people were very happy to pick the one they liked best.  But when given more than three choices, people were paralyzed and often ended up buying nothing at all.

This is one of the beauties of Judaism.  Some faiths restrict choices so much that their adherents are constrained.  They all look the same, act the same, do the same things at the same times, and even eat the same food (think of monks in a monastery or nuns in an abbey).  Other belief systems don’t seem to restrict anything at all.  Almost anything is permissible.  Yet, most people find such a system unfulfilling and they search for rules and guidance (restrictions, in other words) from other sources, such as the government, philosophy, or society.

Judaism is neither of these extremes.  Judaism provides a delicate balance between rules and choices.  Take for instance one of the laws included in this week’s Torah portion.  The Torah lays out the laws for determining kosher animals, but it does not say, “you must eat;” it says, “you may eat.”  True, not all animals are permitted, but neither are they all forbidden.  Some are allowed and others not.  And you have the choice of whether or not you want to eat those that are permissible.

The Torah is like this in most of its restrictions.  Sure, there are guidelines and rules we have to follow, but they are not so restrictive that we have no freedom to choose for ourselves.  That is why there is so much variety among Jews today: be they Ashkenazi or Sephardi, Chassidish or Yeshivish, or even vegetarian or meat-eating, they are all Jews.  So feel free to be yourself! The Torah has space for every individual.

Shabbat shalom!

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Parshas Va’eschanan: I Repeat, I Repeat, I Repeat Myself

Okay okay, I know I repeat myself sometimes.  There are times when I sit down to write my dvar Torah for the week and the theme I want to address seems glaringly obvious – even though I’ve spoken about it on the blog before.  I guess we all have one-track minds from time to time, and we definitely each have our own interests and themes we want to push to the forefront in our conversations and in our lives.

You see, we all repeat ourselves from time to time.  Sometimes it’s out of habit and sometimes we just forget that we’ve told that story or joke before.  But when the Torah repeats itself, there is always a deeper reason.  The Torah never, ever wastes a word (a lesson we should also learn for our own speech).

In the book of Devarim, which we are reading now, there are 199 mitzvot listed – and only 70 of them are new.  That means there are 129 mitzvot repeated!  Why?

At this point the Jews are about to enter the land of Israel and confront the 7 nations living there.  While they were living in the desert, there were many commandments they were not tempted to break.  They were living in a world where G-d was so intimately involved with their daily lives that He provided all their food and even made sure their clothes never wore out!  They certainly were not living in a world of temptation… but when they entered the land of Canaan, they would be faced with temptation on all sides.

The laws we are reviewing now are primarily focused on preparing us for life in the real world.  It’s sort of like a father preparing his sheltered son for university: there is a lot of important advice to impart.  In this week’s parsha, for instance, Moses warns about the dangers of prosperity and assimilation – concerns the Jews did not have in the desert, but which we definitely face today.

So if I repeat myself, I hope you’ll forgive me.  After all, I am a rebbetzin and it is my job to follow in the footsteps of the Torah.  And if it’s important enough for Moses to repeat some stories and some laws over and over again, well, I guess it’s important enough for me, too!

Shabbat shalom!

Read more on Parshas Va’eschanan: Shabbat Nachamu – Finding Comfort in Unlikely Places

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Parshas Devarim: The Importance of History

A month or two ago, a friend of Rabbi Ben’s let him know about a meeting of a local genealogy society and asked if he’d like to attend.  Because the subject was old photographs and I love photography, Rabbi Ben offered for me to go instead.  The talk was interesting to me as an artist and photography enthusiast, but the best part was all the people I met there.  I was by far the youngest attendee, which to me meant the opportunity to hear interesting things from the more experienced people around me.

I did have a bit of an interesting debate with one man I met.  We were debating the importance of knowing the true history of an event.  As they say, history is written by the victors.  For example, most people I know believe the American civil war was fought over slavery – the North wanted to free the slaves while the South wanted to oppress them.  Growing up in the South, I learned a different version of the story, one that actually sounds much more believable and makes a lot more sense.  The South was the agricultural producer and the North processed the cotton, tobacco, and other products into goods that could be consumed or worn.  Of course, processed goods can be sold for a much higher price than raw materials, so the North was economically doing very well while the South was just scraping by (hence their need for slaves).  The South wanted to build their own factories but the North blocked them from doing so.  The American Civil War, which in the South is known as The War of Northern Aggression (the name alone tells you something), was started, as many wars are, for economic reasons.

But which story is the real one? Does it even matter?  The man I was discussing this with said that he thought it didn’t really matter what the true facts or history were – the victor’s history is sufficient.  I disagreed; I think it’s the true history that teaches us so we can learn for the future.  If we don’t know what really happened, how can we make it never happen again? How can we prevent something if we don’t know how it really came about? A government can learn from the lesson of the American Civil War by knowing never to allow one region (such as the agricultural sector) to become too impoverished while other regions flourish.  Either mass migration from the poor to the wealthy sector will result (as has happened in Mexico) or a rebellion will eventuate.

So, too, we Jews must learn from our history.  This week we begin the book of Devarim, the final book of the Torah.  The entire fifth book of the Torah is a summary of the Jewish history that has gone before.  But although the Jews are the main protagonists of the story, they are not cast in such a wonderful light.  Usually the victors who write the story make themselves look as good and as right as possible, but the Torah was not written by the Jews – it was written for the Jews by G-d Himself.  And G-d made sure to get the history as accurate as possible.

In fact, we reiterate this history of the Jews particularly so that was can learn from it.  And the only way we can learn from it is if we know what really happened, gory details and all.  We can learn from the story of the spies (read more about this story here, here, and here) not to doubt G-d’s plan for us, but to have faith in Him, to have emunah and bitachon.  We read about the story of the golden calf so that we should never ever repeat it.  We read and learn about what we did wrong precisely so that we learn never to do it again.

Shabbat shalom!

Read more about Parshas Devarim: To Sum It All Up, Just Have Faith

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