Avodah B'Simcha (Service In/With Joy) and Shaitels.

Almost every morning, when Rachel wakes up, I try to be the one to go in and get her from her room. I tell G that this is so that she can get a few extra minutes of sleep, but truthfully I'm greedy for the three or four minutes I get to spend with her while she's still a little groggy and very snuggl-able. She's also much more cooperative about getting her diaper changed (a) if she doesn't see her mother (a/k/a food!) when she's hungry and (b) when she's still kind of asleep.

We have a little morning ritual, Rachel and I. By the time she's made enough noise to wake us up, she's usually standing up in her crib, on the side of her crib near the door. We keep the door open a crack, held there by a burp cloth on top, so what I'll do is stick my fingers in the crack and wiggle them a little, which tips Rachel off that I'm there. She stops squeaking and I come in. We talk for a few seconds, mostly, "Good Morning! Did you have a good night!?" That kind of stuff. Then I pick her up, and as I say Modeh Ani I lift her, first to my eye level and then up above my head.

All of which is prelude. Rachel is, B'H (Baruch Hashem = Thank God), a healthy and wonderful baby girl, and being one of those, she's getting bigger every day. If I had to estimate her weight, I'd have to guess about 25 pounds. And getting bigger.

So G knows about this, and yesterday morning she watched us. And she joked that it was going to be harder to lift her up like that when she's older. I joked back that it would be really hard when she gets to be sixteen. It was funny.

But, as I am wont, I started thinking about it. As one friend of mine used to quote, "we laugh because it's funny, we laugh because it's true."

The fact is simple; Rachel will never get big enough that I won't be willing to carry her. Okay, that's not precisely true -- I'm sure that some hot summer walking around the city I'll be right there with all the other parents on the "no way am I carrying you, you can walk" conga line. But setting aside those moments of weakness, there's never going to come a time when Rachel needs me to carry her that I won't be willing to, or (I honestly believe) that I won't be able to. Even now, there are times when I'll have been carrying Rachel for a while and my arms (I'm not too proud to admit) will be getting tired.

But there's a sweetness to it. And I don't put her down not only because if I'm carrying her that long there's probably a reason, but also because of that sweetness.

She's getting heavy, sure, but it's the sweetest heaviness; a burden (of only the physical sort), but the sweetest burden.

If the point of these musings is to examine what it is that being a father is teaching me about being an Orthodox Jew, and what being an Orthodox Jew is teaching me about being a father, then this is a moment where each informs the other.

There is a moshol (parable) that I don't remember precisely, but it deals with two men carrying two equally weighted suitcases, one of whom thinks his suitcase is full of rocks and the other is aware that the suitcase is full of precious gems. At the end of the journey, the one with the rocks is exhausted, and throughout the journey he is always just this far from dropping the suitcase and quitting; the one with the jewels is just as physically exhausted, but feels it less, and is never close to quitting.

For anyone who hasn't heard about the whole sheitel (wig) controversy raging through the Orthodox Jewish world right now, this article or this one runs down the basics. If you don't want to read them, then here's the very distilled version: Married Orthodox Jewish women cover their hair. A very popular means of doing so is with wigs (a/k/a sheitels), some of which are made with human hair, much of which is collected in India, some of which is collected as a part of a Hindu religious process -- exactly which part of what process is the crux of the issue. If it's the wrong part of the wrong process the women in question (and their husbands) are not allowed to even have the hair in the house, let alone wear it. The community thought it had settled the issue (to the effect that the wigs were okay to wear) but recently it seems the research done some years ago might have been incorrectly premised and so. . . uncertainty.

A truly fabulous comprehensive review and discussion of the issue is ongoing at Frumteens (which is not just for teens). It's spun a little out of control, as is the way of the web, but the Moderator there does a good job of keeping things on point. It's also very long, but the first page alone is well worth reading.

In any event, there was (and continues to be) a minor hue and cry over the intricacies and implications of the whole sheitel question, and I'm not interested in getting into those details. I want to tell a story about my wife, G.

When the whole brouhaha started, a lot of people were really worried about a lot of things, including how much this was going to cost (sheitels can be fairly expensive) and how difficult it was going to be to go out in public with other forms of hair covering.

G, however, made a quick call to our Rabbi, made a few calls to the people from whom she bought her various head coverings, packed up a little box with one of her sheitels and a fall (a sort of half-sheitel for use with hats or headbands), and told me to throw them out. We didn't bother burning them, just put 'em in the dumpster and away they went.

As I was walking to the dumpster, I had the brocha of being conscious of the sanctity and beauty of my holy wife. A little while later I read this post by Cookie over at Heimishtown, where she writes, "I don't think the chance of possibly being party to idolatry is worth my vanity." That was pretty much my wife's thinking, too, and I felt really honored to be her husband at that moment.

I'm walking to the dumpster, knowing that replacing what I'm about to throw away will cost upwards of a thousand dollars.

And I started to dance. Just a little skip and jig kind of dance, not the big ole funky chicken, but still. . .

Carrying Rachel, carrying jewels, getting rid of a thousand dollars that I'm not supposed to have: All reasons to dance, all reasons for joy.

Burdens of a sort, but the sweetest burdens.

--FrumDad.