Thursday, November 19, 2015

Waiting For Winter


I hate Autumn.

Can't wait for Winter, really.

This cunning mild weather kills me. I love when it's Summer and hot, or Winter and freezing. I hate in-between stuff, you know.

Snow, come soon, love!!!

Thursday, August 20, 2015

I Will Try To Like You


I want to like people.
I've always been saying that I love people, but sometimes I don't.
And I judge others a lot. Not aloud obviously, but just for myself.
I judge and label people by the way they talk, dress, walk... I judge their education, their manners... I even snob people, who seem to be shallow and stupid.
Who am I to judge though? Why?

Then I realise, probably others judge me too. People probably dislike the way I talk, laugh, dress, wrap my head, express my opinions...
And then it gets easier :-D
I mean, we're all human. All we can do is to strive to become better person.
Once you don't take yourself very seriously and laugh at some traits you have, you stop judging others and begin to accept them the way they are (or just ignore them?).

You don't have to change the world, but yourself and the world will change eventually. I am not the first to say this, but it feels good I came to this at some point.

So, friends and foes, haha, don't get too nervous about yourselves! I still like you (or not much) no matter what. I will try not to judge you, I will, bezrat Hashem, because I do not know what is going on in your hearts and what struggle you are having.

I will just focus to improve my myself.

May this be a little step forward for this month of Elul and elevating for Rosh Hashanah.

Love,

Sophie

Friday, July 24, 2015

When You Don't Need Any Title Here

This blog used to have a subtitle: Girl With Post Soviet Trauma if you remember.

I am still that girl (rather big strong woman like on this picture).



I am tired.
I mean, really tired emotionally. I want to hug my babies and sleep, sleep, sleep until the world is a better place.
So childish, I know, it even makes me little sick, but I am being very honest.

I miss my friends, I miss my country and the feeling of a motherland.
Not Home though. My Home is where my family is, but the land, I was born, grew up, lived, loved, learned is so very far from me, not only in distance, but mentally too.
I have less and less common with my Georgia, with my friends and relatives there. All I have left is the love for the old memories, I guess. My mum says, it's fine and once you have your own family, you cannot keep up with your old life.

I cannot indeed.

Does it make me sad? Not really.

I am just tired.
And I wish I had a homeland - calm, stable and welcoming back its people.

I am not one of its people anymore, and probably never was either.

You'd tell me, hey, there's your Eretz Yisroel (intentionally writing in an Ashkenazic manner), don't you adore it?
I DO!!! That's where my soul belongs to, that's where my heart and roots are, but it's hard, when I've never lived there, I don't speak Yivrit as fluently as Georgian obviously, and my childhood was spent not there.

Yes, childhood - that must be it.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

This Easy Tuesday When I Went And Wore an almost Hijab


I usually don't like posting photos, but this one is going to be an exception. I felt so good today in this clothes, especially the scarf (bough at "Strauss" last Summer). I wore it a little "almost liberal hijab style" and definitely got many looks, some suspicious, some - complimenting, some - hateful and some - indifferent.
I have very long hands, I know (although I am only 165 cm, my limbs are really long and most people have optical illusion of me being quite tall, which is very nice to hear). And my hand palms have become quite rough and large as well since I've got family and do all the household stuff.
When I was young, I probably would've looked down on someone who had rough hands, or wrinkles, or grey hair. Not that I was ageist or something, no I was a very normal young person, who thought she'd be as young and carefree forever as she was then. Now looking at this photo of mine, I realise how I have changed, how my opinions have been transformed into something else, and baruch Hashem, I have become more tolerant, more understanding and more respectful to those, who work hard, especially for their family.

So here's to those strong women, who make the world/family go round. The real eshet chayils, who work day and night, who defeat their egos and put their husbands, children, parents, in-laws first.
I am still working, trying hard not to be selfish, not to get upset when I don't get what I want, because that only makes me stronger (but no-one realises that at the first place, does it?).

Western culture and today's world are so focused on oneself, shoving their ideas on us: be yourself, do what you want, you deserve the best, you are the best, be who you are, do what you want...
Scary. Do you understand how dangerous those slogans are? What does "be yourself" and "do what you want" mean? Then they bomb us with advertisements, man made images, false ideas and ideals, wrong role models, and still "wish we were ourselves".
No, I don't want that!

I want to be better tomorrow than I am today, which will be different myself and this means, I can't be myself all the time, only fools can be.

I won't do what I want either, because I may want to eat all that 500 grams of Ben & Jerry's ice cream with caramel filled chocolate chips (pure temptation), which I could do in a blink of an eye without even sharing with anyone, but I will not. It's not okay. Let alone it's not okay to eat so much sugar, it's all about managing your desires, your weaknesses and directing it in a way that would be proper. Children, plus sharing is caring, really.

I hope and wish I get more will power and strength to fight my weaknesses, get over my fears and let myself be the better self as possible. Amen!

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

1% of Me

I've been messing blogging since 2009 I guess and this poor old blog has seen a lot.

I hoped I'd homeschool, but I don't. I unschool though. Because I hate school rules, I don't like putting all the children in a same row. And I hate educational system of the world. Yes, of the whole world.
The best education child can receive is home: loving, warm, caring and comfortable home, where parents pay attention to children, never scold them, only rebuke a bit for their own sake. Mostly praise and motivate them to do good. And it works: child is and will be exactly what its parents say to that child. If you keep telling your child how stubborn and/or aggressive he is, be sure he will be that way. When you mostly focus on his positive middos, cherish his determination and direct it to the way of love, you won't go wrong. 
This is our parenting or schooling, whatever you may call, in a nutshell.

Since I don't put my children's photos on internet and try to write only general stuff about them, I realised, this blog is not and cannot be a mum blog. Because I don't want to.

Yes, I am mum 99%, but the 1% that is left, that 1% of Sophie, who loves to look around and see the sun, read books and people, learn languages and cultures, explore lives and loves, wants this blog to be her getaway place.
I want this blog to be little quiet place, where I'll come and ramble not about the things I do, but what I think too.

I hope you don't mind, do you? :-)


Monday, May 11, 2015

מזל טוב, עזרא!!!




My firstborn is 3 since Pessach. It's such an emotional age for me. I feel as if I had him yesterday, little baby with long fingers and thin legs. My first baby, who rocked my world and changed me for good.
My Ezra - little helper with big heart and mind.
My Ezra, the one and only Ezra in the world (for me of course)!!!

Baruch Hashem for him, baruch Hashem for my second born too. Baruch Hashem for everything. Thank You, G-d! Be our guide as always!
May there be peace and joy in the world. May no child experiences pain or loss, may children be happy and carefree knowing there are their mums and dads waiting for them, never letting them down.

I wish health to my big boy, then will power to overcome yetzer hara and never stop developing his good midos (character traits). May you be as great as your namesake Ezra and take us out of galus with your dear brother Aaron, who has this lovely name not by coincidence at all :-)
אמן!!!

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Fresh Re-Start

I haven't been blogging quite a while. I have been doing some thinking and analysing to where I want to take this blog. Do I really need it at all? Does it make any sense and does anyone need to read it?
Funnily, I answered to all questions with almost NO.

And today I figured out I want to make some changes. I've changed this old blog's URL, as well as title and I hope I could write more from now on.
I am thinking of making podcasts and video posts every once in a while. All I have to do is to order my Blue Microphone, wrap a lovely tichel around my head and get down to work.

I hope it goes well.

For the new start I shall re-introduce myself:
I am Sophie, mum of two boys, living in Europe, where it's cold, and hostile to people of my faith.
I've studied Journalism and Social Psychology. Worked on the radio, wrote some crap for papers, did translations, even touristic business got me once and then, one day, right after I turned 25, I realised only thing I longed was family. 
Because I had never felt like home anywhere before, never cared for somebody enough to cover my hair and learn how to knead a dough. Never believed in any particular religion, but The Creator.
But I always liked children and they liked me back a lot.

So one brought another, and another, and another,
and here I am:

Mama Sophie - sunny, funny, witty Hausfrau of 30, homeschooling, bread baking, hat knitting, who strongly believes we should never compare our life to others' because we all have what we can handle.


Since I claim to be a homeschooling mum, I'll cover it a little bit too.
My sons are almost 3 and 1 years old, which qualify them mostly for Kindergarten, but I do not like any children institution, I am sorry, I believe they measure everyone same and never really pay attention individually. So I stay home with them and am being a mum like any other one.
I wish I could homeschool longer, but it is not allowed in the country we live, I only get to keep my babies under my wing until they have to go to school (3-5 years to go).
Until then, I hope to instill strong will in my children, so they can resist the system that tries to fit everyone in the same box.

My very homeschooling is all about playing, singing, drawing, baking and running :-D because nobody runs as much as mothers do all day long.


Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Rock On, Mamas!!!


Thursday, January 29, 2015

Shipping...


What if life is an optical illusion at its best?..

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

NOT OBEYING IMMORAL ORDERS

This article is written by the chief Rabbi of England, Lord Jonathan Sacks, who is a great man and a real gentleman indeed.

Friend of mine shared it and I thought it is worth for other people to read, because it is so universal and not from only Jewish point of view definitely.

ENJOY and be rebellious! :-)


On Not Obeying Immoral Orders

By Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

The opening chapters of Exodus plunge us into the midst of epic events. Almost at a stroke the Israelites are transformed from protected minority to slaves. Moses passes from prince of Egypt to Midianite shepherd to leader of the Israelites through a history-changing encounter at the burning bush. Yet it is one small episode that deserves to be seen as a turning point in the history of humanity. Its heroines are two remarkable women, Shifra and Puah.

We do not know who they were. The Torah gives us no further information about them than that they were midwives, instructed by Pharaoh:  ‘When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live’ (Ex. 1: 16). The Hebrew description of the two women as ha-meyaldot ha-ivriyot, is ambiguous. It could mean “the Hebrew midwives.” So most translations and commentaries read it. But it could equally mean, “the midwives to the Hebrews,” in which case they may have been Egyptian. That is how Josephus,[1] Abrabanel and Samuel David Luzzatto understand it, arguing that it is simply implausible to suppose that Hebrew women would have been party to an act of genocide against their own people.

What we do know, however, is that they refused to carry out the order: “The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live” (1: 17). This is the first recorded instance in history of civil disobedience: refusing to obey an order, given by the most powerful man in the most powerful empire of the ancient world, simply because it was immoral, unethical, inhuman.

The Torah suggests that they did so without fuss or drama. Summoned by Pharaoh to explain their behaviour, they simply replied: “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive” (1: 19). To this, Pharaoh had no reply. The matter-of-factness of the entire incident reminds us of one of the most salient findings about the courage of those who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. They had little in common except for the fact that they saw nothing remarkable in what they did.[2] Often the mark of real moral heroes is that they do not see themselves as moral heroes. They do what they do because that is what a human being is supposed to do. That is probably the meaning of the statement that they “feared God.” It is the Torah’s generic description of those who have a moral sense.[3]

It took more than three thousand years for what the midwives did to become enshrined in international law. In 1946 the Nazi war criminals on trial at Nuremberg all offered the defence that they were merely obeying orders, given by a duly constituted and democratically elected government. Under the doctrine of national sovereignty every government has the right to issue its own laws and order its own affairs. It took a new legal concept, namely a crime against humanity, to establish the guilt of the architects and administrators of genocide.

The Nuremberg principle gave legal substance to what the midwives instinctively understood: that there are orders that should not be obeyed, because they are immoral. Moral law transcends and may override the law of the state. As the Talmud puts it: “If there is a conflict between the words of the master (God) and the words of a disciple (a human being), the words of the master must prevail.”[4]

The Nuremberg trials were not the first occasion on which the story of the midwives had a significant impact on history. Throughout the Middle Ages the Church, knowing that knowledge is power and therefore best kept in the hands of the priesthood, had forbidden vernacular translations of the Bible. In the course of the sixteenth century, three developments changed this irrevocably. First was the Reformation, with its maxim Sola scriptura, “By Scripture alone,” placing the Bible centre-stage in the religious life. Second was the invention, in the mid-fifteenth century, of printing. Lutherans were convinced that this was Divine providence. God had sent the printing press so that the doctrines of the Reformed church could be spread worldwide.

Third was the fact that some people, regardless of the ban, had translated the Bible anyway. John Wycliffe and his followers had done so in the fourteenth century, but the most influential was William Tyndale, whose translation of the New Testament, begun in 1525 became the first printed Bible in English. He paid for this with his life.

When Mary I took the Church of England back to Catholicism, many English Protestants fled to Calvin’s Geneva, where they produced a new translation, based on Tyndale, called the Geneva Bible. Produced in a small, affordable edition, it was smuggled into England in large numbers.

Able to read the Bible by themselves for the first time, people soon discovered that it was, as far as monarchy is concerned, a highly seditious document. It tells of how God told Samuel that in seeking to appoint a king, the Israelites were rejecting Him as their only sovereign. It describes graphically how the prophets were unafraid to challenge kings, which they did with the authority of God Himself. And it told the story of the midwives who refused to carry out pharaoh’s order. On this, in a marginal note, the Geneva Bible endorsed their refusal, criticising only the fact that, explaining their behaviour, they told a lie. The note said, “Their disobedience herein was lawful, but their dissembling evil.” King James understood clearly the dire implication of that one sentence. It meant that a king could be disobeyed on the authority of God Himself: a clear and categorical refutation of the idea of the Divine right of kings.[5]

Eventually, unable to stop the spread of Bibles in translation, King James decided to commission his own version which appeared in 1611. But by then the damage had been done and the seeds of what became the English revolution had been planted. Throughout the seventeenth century by far the most influential force in English politics was the Hebrew Bible as understood by the Puritans, and it was the Pilgrim Fathers who took this faith with them in their journey to what would eventually become the United States of America.

A century and a half later, it was the work of another English radical, Thomas Paine, that made a decisive impact on the American revolution. His pamphlet Common Sense was published in America in January 1776, and became an immediate best seller, selling 100,000 copies. Its impact was huge, and because of it he became known as “the father of the American Revolution.” Despite the fact that Paine was an atheist, the opening pages of Common Sense, justifying rebellion against a tyrannical king, are entirely based on citations from the Hebrew Bible. In the same spirit, that summer Benjamin Franklin drew as his design for the Great Seal of America, a picture of the Egyptians (i.e. the English) drowning in the Red Sea (i.e. the Atlantic), with the caption, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Thomas Jefferson was so struck by the sentence that he recommended it to be used on the Great Seal of Virginia and later incorporated it in his personal seal.

 The story of the midwives belongs to a larger vision implicit throughout the Torah and Tanakh as a whole: that right is sovereign over might, and that even God Himself can be called to account in the name of justice, as He expressly mandates Abraham to do. Sovereignty ultimately belongs to God, so any human act or order that transgresses the will of God is by that fact alone ultra vires. These revolutionary ideas are intrinsic to the biblical vision of politics and the use of power.

In the end, though, it was the courage of two remarkable women that created the precedent later taken up by the American writer Thoreau[6] in his classic essay Civil Disobedience (1849) that in turn inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the twentieth century. Their story also ends with a lovely touch. The text says: “So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them houses” (1: 20-21).

Luzzatto interpreted this last phrase to mean that He gave them families of their own. Often, he wrote, midwives are women who are unable to have children. In this case, God blessed Shifra and Puah by giving them children, as he had done for Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel.

This too is a not unimportant point. The closest Greek literature comes to the idea of civil disobedience is the story of Antigone who insisted on giving her brother Polynices a burial despite the fact that king Creon had refused to permit it, regarding him as a traitor to Thebes. Sophocles’ Antigone is a tragedy: the heroine must die because of her loyalty to her brother and her disobedience to the king. The Hebrew Bible is not a tragedy. In fact biblical Hebrew has no word meaning “tragedy” in the Greek sense. Good is rewarded, not punished, because the universe, God’s work of art, is a world in which moral behaviour is blessed and evil, briefly in the ascendant, is ultimately defeated.

Shifra and Puah are two of the great heroines of world literature, the first to teach humanity the moral limits of power.  

Thursday, January 15, 2015

"Me" in Scandinavia


Social media is not as bad as I thought :-D
I stumbled on one Swedish girl's profile on Instagram, who is so like me, really.

She's feminist, has red hair and covers it with colourful tichels. She has two little children, wears glasses and loves Astrid Lindgren's books.

And - she is CAPRICORN!!! I can't believe it. I mean, it couldn't be otherwise, only Capricorn could be that smart and witty, and really positive and nice.

Now, tell me, have I always been crazy to have this extraordinary feeling that I belonged to Scandinavia?

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

No Racism! Or Integration without assimilation



My student neighbours are big supporters of #NoPegida. What can I say, I was student too and I also had idealistic dreams of living in a tolerant and free world. My student neighbours claim that the World should be Bunt (colourful). I agree with them. I have always believed that every man has a right to live wherever he wants to and that is why I live here too. Because this is the place where I feel comfortable.

This means, that I should make others feel comfortable too, especially people who this land belong to. As they received me, accepted me and let me live here and have benefits, so I have to respect it.
I have to respect this country, its people, its culture, its religion and try to integrate.

I am not going to discuss, who is right or wrong. I won't say who's enemy and who's not, because it is just politics. I hate politics, politicians and provocative mass media. 
I don't like caricaturists, because if they mocked Islam yesterday, they will mock Jews tomorrow; and they have done it many times in the near past, you can google the Dreyfus case and see.

Although it doesn't mean, if somebody mocks your religion, you go and blow them up. Only insecure people do that. If you are a true believer and you are sure that nobody can harm your faith, no stupid media can abuse your sacraments, you will just feel pity about those G-dless people and walk away.
Or not.
Better educate yourself and your nation, take care of your country, care more about your people and nourish them instead of sending them to death.

I mentioned integration above. We had a talk about integration with my friends of different faith, and we all came to conclusion that integration does not mean assimilation. We should be faithful to our religion, don't forget the language, traditions, avoid intermarriages, but not shove all this on other people.

It is Europe after all with its own traditions whether we like it or not.

I wish there was peace and everyone lived happily and securely in its home country, because nobody would've left its home for a strange land...