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Angetevka: Bathrooms and Blessings

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My sister Liz calls to vent. In a conversation with a friend, Liz mentioned that she’s so busy she doesn’t have time to read a magazine. To this her friend responded, “Well, I just read when I’m in the bathroom. That’s where I do all my reading.”

Liz says to me, “Now, I just think this is too much information!”

Usually, even when I disagree with my siblings, I’ll pretend to agree – filial solidarity and all that. But this time, it would be such an obvious, blatant, bold lie and so I quietly confess, “Nothing is ever too much information for me.”

Doggedly, Liz keeps on with more potty talk. “Maybe because there were so many of us growing up, we couldn’t settle into the bathroom for a long time. There was always somebody beating at the door yelling, ‘Get off the Throne!’ And, you know, I read that if you sit for too long, you can get hemorrhoids.”

She is quite worked up over this, and we go back and forth about a)why people sit on the toilet and read (They need privacy, I suggest. Liz says, Then go to a library!) and b)why they like to share this information with others. I decide not to remind Liz that even if we didn’t dawdle over our doody as children, we were not exactly an anal retentive family. We took great pride in creating disgusting noises by violently pumping our hands under our armpits, we were quick to roll up windows in the car on hot summer days to torture other passengers, we made up interesting contests (I dare not be more explicit lest Liz accuse me of over-sharing) and to this day, I can find myself in the middle of a conversation with my brother Jim and, without a pause, he will stick his finger out and I will casually pull it for him while he keeps talking. He once walked over to one of my kids, pointed his finger and waited for my son to grab hold. My son, whom I have been remiss in training, had to be told what to do. Immediately, he raced over to me and in a shocked whisper said, “Jim just made me pull his finger!” Welcome to the family.

These bathroom peculiarities can not only reveal personal differences – how much to divulge, and how much to keep to yourself – but a friend of mine’s shaky marriage was pushed down the toilet recently because of her husband’s newfound religiosity, which entailed making the bathroom blessing when he finished his business. As sorry as I was to hear of the demise of her marriage (and I was), unlike my sister, I couldn’t get enough of the details. “Did you hear him say the blessing?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“When did he make the blessing?”

“When he was washing his hands.”

“He’d just mumble it in Hebrew?”

“Yes,” said tersely.

“Did you ever talk about it?”

“No. He said if I would do more reading, I would understand it better.

“Did you read about it?” I persisted.

“I don’t really care!” she was exasperated. “There’s a prayer for everything, I know. You see something pretty, you thank God for it. But I mean, thank you for letting me sit and smell this disgusting smell. It’s not me. I can’t.”

I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, to which she said, in a hard, tough tone, “There’s nothing really funny about it, I’m trying to tell you.”

Well, unlike Liz and my friend, I feel there’s no such thing as too much personal information or too many blessings. For observant Jews, blessings are tossed out regularly throughout the day, often by rote. But, and it took me a while to figure this out, the blessings are not the requests of my Christian upbringing - “Bless this food”; rather they are acknowledgments, “Blessed are you, Our God…” . In other words, we aren’t asking God for anything, or even thanking God, we’re simply recognizing God as the source of our blessings.

I like this. And I like to think that God appreciates it when we take a moment to verbally salute the Divine in both the miraculous and the mundane moments in our lives. Throne meets Throne.