So the title isn’t really accurate.  But last night, as I tossed and turned in my bed, kept awake not only by the lightning and heavy rain but also by the fear that I wouldn’t wake up in time to get to the hospital in time for my echocardiogram at  7, I kept thinking about my granddaughter – who is dying to see the snow falling up north and in Jerusalem.  Her father has corona and Ezi has shingles and by the time I get through with the test and the dentist after, the snow will be gone.  By 6:30  I was ready to leave and the phone rang.  The secretary wanted to tell me that the doctor tested positive and my appointment was canceled.  Unfortunately, I turn my phone off until 7.   

And so the day continued.  I was bundled up as I have never been before in Israel – and the sun came out.  At home, Ezi reset the new computer and it worked fine, so he canceled the technician who was on his way over to change the motherboard.  Then the computer broke down again.  A new television was delivered and finally installed, but doesn’t work with our internet system.  The new broken vacuum cleaner, we are told, will not be fixed under warranty. 

But all these incidents I put down to Kappara, that is the small troubles that take the place of the big ones.  After all, today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and when I turn my mind to that from the pain of my granddaughter to thoughts of whether my grandmother knew that she was being injected with poison in the health clinic of Stutthopf, I pray that our lives will be filled with these little contretemps, and we will be able to get through them with a smile.

And that is why my favorite line in literature remains Nabokov’s praise of the mathematician Lobochevsky who discovered that “If parallel

lines do not meet it is not because meet they cannot but because they
have other things to do.”