…with Gary Moss

Last night was the first night of Passover. I’m wishing all my Jewish friends a ‘zissin’ Pesach.

No matter what your family’s religion or heritage, if you had parents who were steeped in their roots, it is more than likely that ‘outwardly’ you are either following in their footsteps or you are doing the opposite and rejecting it. But ‘inwardly’ we all remember their teachings and we express it in our behaviors when triggered by a thought, a song, an idea, a dream, a vision, or an interaction.

In homogenized America, it takes much more commitment to maintain the pure line of blood, ideology, and isms than it must have living in some isolated shtetls outside of Moscow in the 1800s.

My great-grandmother was one of the people who helped promote traditions of old. She was a ‘yenta,’ a match-maker. Any aspiring Jewish groom, with great-baubee’s help was able to find an aspiring Jewish bride. The two married and extended the line: blood and heritage.

An Aside: When my Zaydee was ready to marry (age 24), he payed a visit to the Yenta (my great-grandmother). She had several women in mind for him, from which to choose. But, sitting in the corner, he notice Chaya, the Yenta’s daughter, my grandmother-to-be (then 16), and said he would settle for no one else. And so it was.

In America in 2010, the options for marriage are generally not promoted by ‘yentas’. People are more likely to meet their marriage partner in a classroom, on the job, or living in the same neighborhood. Individuals choose their own partners based on the chemical reactions of their hormones.

The divorce rate for Yentas in 1885 was 3.2%. The divorce rate in the United States in 2010 is 56.5%.

Opposites attract but the glue is much, much, weaker.

Scrabble is a game that uses a given set of words. The ‘Word Committee’ is our yenta. The word committee tells us which words we can choose to have a legal play. Only about 3.2% of all words played in sanctioned games across the NASPA network are phoneys. (Interesting how that corresponds to the divorce rate for arranged marriages.) If we didn’t agree to use just a single dictionary, The OWL2, and played using a variety of word lists, scrabble wouldn’t be much of a game at all; it would be utter confusion.

The make up of OWL2 takes into account the different ethnic groups who have come into our circle, to play our game. The word committee uses 7 different world dictionaries as references to compile the list or words in the OWL2. When an newbie points to an entry in the OWL2 and says, “That is not a word,” he/she is obviously wrong. The word committee has the final word and has the final say.

Along the way during its development, the word committee must have had a number of Jewish members who placed more than 900 Yiddish words into the mix of 155,000+ words in the OWL2. But, there are also many words from other ethnic groups.

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