I think we are related

Both my mother and father were born in St Louis and left behind many cousins when their families moved to Los Angeles. I visited there once years ago
but have not been back for years. Expect for the past
two years in which I bagged three visits. Most recently I helped surprise my cousin Donna (center bottom row) on her birthday. First her son showed up on Friday night, then her daughter+fiance on Saturday morning. I followed on Saturday afternoon, and her best friend capped the day when she arrived in time for dinner. 

The surprise continued the next day at a local winery. OK...call me a Cali girl...but I had no idea that there was wine in Missouri. 

I also had no idea how many ways I could be related to people in St Louis. OK...I have been discovering this over the past several years, but it still amazes me. 

It amazes me even more how similar we are. There are shared values and shared problems. We have different backgrounds, but in many ways similar experiences. We have started in different places and face different challenges, and even have made different choices, but there seems to be a connection. Perhaps simply the focus on those we love.

 And on fun. I am not sure how this wild mixture of
Jewish friends and family can laugh for hours and hours. 
 Even in the middle of a serious conversation there was laughter. I wonder it that is part of what has kept the Jewish people alive and connected...laughter in the face of all serious issues. 

The weekly parsha (torah reading) was about Korach, the man who lead a rebellion against Moses. The story captures the sense of heaviness that many of the Israelites must have felt as they camped in the desert. But I have to wonder...was everyone grumpy? How could they have survived?
Clearly somewhere in the crowd there had to be
a group of comics...a family that laughed over everything and made jokes with each other about the manna and the sand and the heat. Maybe these were vintners who carried grapes and manged to make wine while in camp. There had to be one family who through a party each week, complete with some sort of pot luck and group game.

And there had to be a few stand up comics, or playwrights who turn
the entire experience into a musical before Cecil B De Mill

 And I be some relative of mine wandered around with the shawl she have brought with her...her wedding shawl...and poised in the many picturesque locations. Perhaps an artist captured her image and wrote her story which was later told around the fires in the evening. I am sure that stories were told, songs were sung and jokes were made. I know because these were my very distant cousins and their bloodline is alive and well in my family. We were the jokers and jesters, singers and writers who kept everyone walking. And laughing and joking and playing Jewish geography and keeping the rest of the extended clan happy.

People do ask me if Jews are an ethnic group or a race, or what. The answer is that we are a family, one that creates events and opportunities for laughter.