Chapter 7: The Jewish Martha Stewart, Part I

Comparing the sublime Charlene to Martha Stewart is, to paraphrase the Talmudic Sages, like comparing an angel to a mere human. But this is what Charlene’s friends called her. Because of the amazing parties, hosting, gardening, and the thousand other “domestic arts” that Charlene excelled at.

Charlene’s uniqueness, and the reason she was on a whole different level of consciousness than Martha, was much deeper than just the obvious differences. Yes, Charlene’s pristine and majestic character, beautiful and sweet personality, kind and generous nature, and loving and happy presence were levels above. Like the difference between a beautiful and sunny day and a dark and gloomy night. 

But the difference wasn’t just in incremental levels. It was a difference in fundamental type. It was because Charlene’s ability to create these events and lifestyle came from deep within and was completely natural, whereas, Martha was just selling the outward manifestation of this inner beauty.

The Japanese Tea Ceremony is a great example of what I mean. This ceremony is highly stylized and choreographed and there are devotees that study their whole life to be masters of the art. But what the ceremony is really channeling is an inner state of mind and being. Of balance, generosity, beauty, patience, peace. A oneness and alignment with nature’s pace and the universe. A oneness with God.

When one has perfected these internal qualities, it is automatically expressed in the perfect tea ceremony. The people practicing for years are compensating for their internal imbalances and will never perfect until they correct on the internal level. Many of their failures come because something unexpected happens during a ceremony and their practiced persona, their “mask” slips for a second as they react angrily or impatiently thereby “ruining” the ceremony. 

Whereas, the famous tea ceremony masters of the past, who had perfected their internal states of being, were most well-known specifically for how gracefully and naturally they reacted to unforeseen mishaps in the middle of their ceremonies. Because how they reacted in the moment  highlighted their internally balanced state.    

This is what I mean about Charlene. Her party making, gardening, and other skills were natural expressions of her inner state. She made awesome parties because she loved people, and she loved being happy and making people happy. And she made a wondrous garden paradise for us, her family, at Timber Trail because she loved us, nature, and the outdoors. 

And because Charlene was so creative, knowledgeable, talented, generous, hospitable, hard-working, industrious, active, and totally natural, with no pretension or ego, her parties, garden and everything else she did was always just beautifully perfect.

This is why Charlene was always so relaxed and enjoying herself before and during her parties. Because she wasn’t trying to accomplish an agenda or meet anyone’s expectations. There was nothing fake, she wasn’t trying to emulate a persona. She wasn’t under pressure. She was just doing it to have fun. Charlene was the Japanese Tea Ceremony Master of party making and gardening. And life.

Whereas Martha envisioned the ideal woman, wife, and mother, and the lifestyle this ideal woman would create, and then sold it. She sold the surface view. What was visible to the eye, because appearance was most important.

But when someone that bought the surface view made a party and the mask would slip you could see what lies beneath. You could see it in their stress before and during their parties. Even though they hired a caterer and party planner. The way they would overreact to anything going wrong. 

Martha's business was mimicking the ideal woman. Charlene was the ideal woman. Martha was selling an empty shell that had molded itself to the beautifully shaped Charlene. 

But, in a deliciously ironic form of the Talmudic saying “her disgrace is her praise”, although Martha was selling the shell on the surface, her appreciation for perfection in the externalities was unparalleled. Nobody presented a more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing dining table, garden or outfit. Nobody made a classier party. This was her calling card.

And in this way Martha and Charlene were alike. Charlene had impeccable taste in all things from architectural design and art to clothing and food. And although she was extremely understanding and non-judgemental of others, always making excuses for them, (myself included), and expecting nothing from them, (myself not included), she held herself to the highest standards of perfection and professionalism in everything she did, even when just putting on a small child’s birthday party.  

I don’t know any professional caterer more critical of their own dishes than Charlene, the volunteer caterer. She would always ask me after events or Kiddushes what I thought of the various dishes she had made. And I would always tell her the absolute truth because she was a professional in every sense of the word, (besides the main sense - getting paid), and I wouldn’t disrespect her by patronizing her. 

It didn’t hurt that the absolute truth was that her dishes were always amazing. It was very unusual for her to screw up a dish, and only when she was experimenting. But somehow, after every event, Charlene found something she could do better next time. And when we became a Kiddush team, we would usually have a post-Kiddush debrief at some point that day or the next, so we had weekly incremental improvement. Because we were both crazy that way. I was always looking to improve our processes and she was always looking to make everything prettier and tastier. 

I’ve been interested in architecture and design since I was very young, and read many books on the subject over the years. So I consider myself an expert on the topic, a geek even. And as a builder and developer by trade and psyche, and very creative myself, I can visually build and take apart a building in my head.

But I was in awe of Charlene’s visualization abilities and design sense. And artistry in sketching her and my ideas…Yes…Charlene was an artist too, a seriously good one, who drew beautiful sketches of people, nature, and architecture and had a great eye for proportion. We designed a few of our homes together over the years, some built, some renovated, others not. We would have a conversation about what we wanted a room to look like and she would just pull out pencil and paper and draw it.

Our youngest son Ari inherited this ability from her and is extremely artistic and creative. He draws his own comics, has amazing sketching abilities, (he drew the prototype of my company’s GoQube a few months ago - sadly a job Charlene would have done for me in the past), and had a youtube channel a few years ago for his animations that was quite popular before he outgrew it. 

Charlene and I hired a high-design type of architect to design a house for us before we made Aliya, and between Charlene giving him sketches of every single room, and all exterior elevations, and me giving him exact dimensions and materials, he had no design work to do, just construction drawings. He was very frustrated that we turned him into a draftsman.  

We loved to visit historic mansions, properties and museums together. And we would communicate in this visualization shorthand, almost in code. We were so in sync, and had been doing it together for so long, it was like creative-visualization-dancing. We would walk into a room and she would say “I like how they did this and that, I don’t like that, and they could have done that over there”. And I would fully understand what she meant and why she said it and what it would have looked like had they done what she described because we were communicating through a synced visualization in our heads.

And when the kids were young, after taking them to do fun things on Sunday, we would often spend a few hours driving around nice towns on our way home, looking at houses and critiquing them. We would park on the street out front of a particularly nice or interesting house and take it apart piece by piece. Details like the color and material of the window trim in relation to the roof or the scale of the awning over the door in proportion to the building. All while the kids would be watching Sesame Street in the back seat.

When we were first dating, and I was living in that one room studio in West Orange, I lived right next door to historic Llewellyn Park, the first gated community in America, established in the mid 1800s, and the location of the Edison Mansion, (now a museum), among other beautiful old mansions. I would often walk through its winding country roads (I couldn’t get my car through the gate but I was able to sneak in on foot). And once in a while Charlene would join me. 

This was when Charlene first experienced my habit of breaking into vacant houses, although the vacant mansions in Llewellyn Park always had at least one door or window unlocked, so it wasn't very challenging, (there was nothing to steal other than the building itself and its materials, and nobody was doing that in gated Llewellyn Park, it wasn’t Newark). Charlene was very nervous about entering but she came around eventually and even started to enjoy it. 

I remember particularly well one house that we "toured". A very stately Georgian, brick, manor, set back on top of a hill, with a heavy, hand-cut, slate and copper roof, and a beautiful glass, english conservatory. It had a giant, at least 200 person capacity, triple-height ballroom, with three huge chandeliers, and a long row of double-height, wide, arched, french doors opening onto the never ending brick and bluestone patio, which overlooked the acres of rolling front lawn where I half expected to see some of the master's sheep grazing.

With one of those french doors unlocked.

We were walking through the master bathroom and there was a square brass plate built into the beautiful, hand-cut, mosaic tile floor. As I stepped on this unusual plate, it was moving under tension within a brass frame. I couldn’t figure out what it was. I then noticed on the wall in front of it a big, brass dial, like a ship captain's brass wall clock. It was a built-in scale, something I'd never seen before or since.

Because we both loved doing this, we were always designing our next house together, whether in Israel or America. And through our constant discussions of what we liked and didn’t like, our tastes had evolved so much over the years, they almost merged into one. We shared the dream of building a house in Israel preferably on a Moshav but we were open to Raanana as well. 

Charlene had a few different ideas as to what style she wanted to go with. Beach-house, (we’ve biked to the beach from Raanana and we both loved the beach vibe), Tuscan/Mediterranean, Caribbean colonial, Indo-colonial. With each of them Charlene had painted a picture in my mind with her words and then sketched it with her hands. 

And then Charlene described what it felt like to live there. Hearing the pitter-patter sound and seeing the steam rising as the raindrops met the hot, sunny, standing seam metal roof of the beach-house. And feeling the breeze from the ceiling fans, while sitting on the deep porch of the Indo-colonial, drinking Charlene’s yummy, southern, sweet iced tea, all mahogany-framed palladian doors swung wide open, white curtains billowing. 

Charlene described what each house would feel like, and I wanted to live in every one. With my baby that brought them to life in front of my eyes through her pictures and words. My baby…Charlene was my everything, my baby, my wifey, my mother, my sister. Not in an unhealthy way, but in all of those ways. She relied on and trusted me like a baby, she loved and cared for me like a wife, she mothered me when I was sick or just needed maternal affection, she was my friend and confidant like a sister.     

Charlene designed model apartments for me when I was in real estate. She would ask me who the target audience is, what look I’m going for, and what the budget was and she would go to work. In one day, she’d have the whole apartment designed, and all furniture and decorative items ordered. From beds and linen, dining sets and settings, to curtains, rugs, lamps, couches, kids toys, and bathroom accessories. And then she would supervise the delivery and make sure it was all installed just the way she envisioned. Including the food and drinks on the counter and in the fridge for the open house.

Charlene always designed one room as a little girl’s room so after the house was sold Yali could come and pick whatever toys and decorative items she liked and wanted to keep. The room looked so real that Yali thought she was taking toys from a real girl and had to be convinced that it wasn’t a problem.

And the way Charlene dressed. She had been a model, had a fabulous figure, perfect posture, and athletic balance and poise, so even a garbage bag looked good on her. Especially a small one.

But she also had an innate understanding, just looking at an outfit, of how it would drape and look on her. One of her 32 jobs as a teenager and young adult was as a seamstress at Denim World, and she had an expert seamstress’s understanding of different fabrics, stitching styles, and seam placement and how it all related to her.

I loved to go shopping with her and watch as she tried on dresses. And she loved how attracted and into her I was. I would joke with her that I finally understood the appeal of playing with Barbie dolls but it wasn’t a joke.       

Putting looks together was so effortless for her. For Yael’s bat mitzvah, which we did at our property on Timber Trail, Charlene dressed like the ultimate 50’s trad-wife, (before it became internet popular), down to the petticoat, pearls and updo hairstyle. She looked like she had paid a stylist a lot of money to put it all together, and a hair and make-up artist to get her ready. Like a character in Mad Men.  

But then she paired the outfit with a pair of gold and clear heels that were definitely not 50’s because of the materials, but they went with the vibe of the outfit perfectly. Not clashing at all but bringing in a surprising twist on the theme that made it original and her own. Taking the outfit from being a period costume to a genuine representation of who she was and how she felt at that time.

Because how Charlene felt at that time was proud and totally happy and fulfilled in her role as a traditional wife and mother living in suburbia. Charlene was so happy celebrating her baby girl’s coming of age with family and friends, in the house and garden that she had lovingly created, and her mental imagery just picked up that look as the quintessential expression of how she felt.  

But it was really nothing for Charlene. Easy. Even her hairstyle, which looked complicated, (and was brand new for her - I had never seen her wear her hair that way before), she did herself, and  very quickly, after guests had already started arriving. Because, as the caterer and party planner, she had been supervising setting up the whole party, literally until it started.  

And for our first trip to Italy, an important business trip, she put together a look that told a whole story about her and probably closed the deal for us. Two months after making Aliya to Israel, before we even unpacked our 40’ shipping container from America in our new apartment, Charlene and I were on a plane to Italy to meet with a supplier. 

I had hit the ground running when we moved here and within a month had set up a retail automation business with a partner. I developed a relationship with an Italian smart vending manufacturer and had set up a visit to their factory with the goal of signing an exclusive supply agreement for Israel.

I set up the visit a few weeks in advance, and had arranged with my father to fly to Israel from America to watch our kids while Charlene and I handled business in Italy. At the time thinking that we would have moved into our apartment and unpacked long before the Italy trip, (for the first two months in Israel we were in a furnished AirBnb). Not knowing our container would be held up in customs and only released the day before our trip. 

We spent the whole day before our trip until midnight moving into the new apartment, and didn’t even unpack a box before hopping on a plane that next morning at 6am. I could have delayed the meeting and not gone just then but I don’t roll that way. Business gets handled when it’s on the table. You wait and it’s gone. 

And I could have had Charlene stay and not join me. But there was no way I was leaving my secret weapon at home when I had such a critically important meeting. I was going to ask an established Italian manufacturer for an exclusive supply agreement for Israel and had nothing to offer them and no track record. 

I just started the business a month earlier, with no customers, in a country I just moved to and whose language I did not speak. And I looked like an overweight, hippy, messianic Zionist settler, not the most credible look for this particular situation, although excellent if I was pursuing a career as a shepherd in Samaria. 

I had only two things going for me. I had great ideas, vision and attitude. And I had Charlene. If I didn’t bring Charlene on this trip I wouldn’t get to the point where they would listen to my ideas or take me seriously. They would take one look at me and move on. But I knew that once they saw and interacted with Charlene they would see me in a whole different light. She was my track record and credibility.

And boy was I right. They were bowled over by her. Italy is a magnificently beautiful country with happy and very fashionable people. And we were meeting in romantic Venice first before going to the factory. Charlene was dressed in a sporty, equestrian-inspired Ralph Lauren type of outfit, which was a pretty common look for her, being an actual equestrian. Jeans and riding style, calfskin, knee-high boots, and a red, zippered, sleeveless jacket, on top of a sport shirt. 

But then she topped this with a long, hand-made couture coat that we had bought in Manhattan a few years earlier that she hardly wore because it wasn’t very practical. It was very fitted at the waist and long and swinging below the knees. It was high-fashion and looked fabulous on her but was low utility and not very warm either.

And because there was some kind of Venetian festival going on at the time, they were selling these masks in the street and we bought one, which Charlene was wearing. When my Italian soon-to-be partners showed up, this is how they found us. They looked at Charlene and saw this model of a woman, a magnificent, Venetian-masked creature, dressed in a high-fashion, couture coat above riding inspired clothing and boots. 

And then Charlene took off the mask and blasted them with her 1000-watt smile that just lit up her face and everything and everyone around her. On the one hand, beautiful and fashionably glamorous, and on the other, totally unpretentious, happy and down to earth. And when they saw how calm and relaxed Charlene was after hearing that we left our kids in Israel with everything still in boxes they were just utterly charmed by her. 

Frankly, I don’t know how important it was that I had good ideas. I hope and tell myself it was relevant. But they were sold on me well before we even got to talking about my plans for the Israeli market. And Charlene and I flew home with a signed contract.

And her gardening! Pick up a copy of Good Housekeeping’s top 100 country/cottage gardens and you’ll see the level Charlene worked at. Serious gardeners work their whole lives to operate at that elite level and it’s their entire focus. I don’t mean professional landscapers, they don’t do this kind of work at all. I mean serious gardeners who spend their days in their garden and their years planning and building/growing it. But for Charlene it was just one more of the many things she was amazing at.

When we moved to Timber Trail, we were attracted by the two-acre property size, and woodsi-ness. And for Sabbath purposes, where we can’t ride in a car, it was walking distance both to our synagogue and the barn that Charlene rode at. Once we moved there, the kids, really all of us, loved to walk over to the barn on Sabbath afternoons to visit and feed the ponies carrots. 

The front yard was enormous and beautiful but a little too woodsy. With very little growing grass because it was so shaded. Charlene strategically chose a few trees to cut down that I hired a tree service to take care of. This opened the area to more light, allowed the grass to flourish, and immediately changed the whole look and feel from a natural forested woods, to something more park-like.

Charlene then had me bring tons of rocks (it certainly felt that way wheeling them in a wheelbarrow) from an abandoned rock wall in the immediately adjacent woods. (Monsey is in Rockland County, New York, named thus because of the rockiness of the terrain. It was very common going back hundreds of years to mark property boundaries with stacked rock walls and these walls can be seen all over the county, both abandoned in the woods and some still marking property lines).

Charlene placed a rock border around each of the remaining trees, proportionately sized to the diameter of each tree in a way that would satisfy Euclid himself. Charlene then planted shrubbery and flowers inside each of the borders. Turning every tree with its new colorful apron and petticoat into its own beautiful focal point. 

We had a very long, and very bare, stacked rock wall between the driveway and main part of the front lawn, one of those walls I told you about. Charlene placed stone borders on both sides of this wall and filled the entire space inside the borders with flowers and shrubs in a beautiful cottage style. Using the stone wall as a two-sided backdrop to a colorful and happy flower show that we drove past multiple times a day as we entered and left the driveway.

Charlene had what seemed to me to be encyclopedic knowledge of the flowers and shrubs she was using, how much sunlight or shade they needed, how much watering. What soil they needed. Charlene had bought all these reference books about northeastern plants that she was constantly consulting because she had grown up and was used to working with southeastern plants which were totally inappropriate for our weather and she was learning on the fly.

We had gone to a very large, local nursery to purchase all these plants where they gave me “contractor pricing”, 40% off, just assuming I was a landscape contractor. Solely based on Charlene’s demonstrated knowledge and expertise as she discussed and consulted with the nursery staff on her plans and layout (she always unpretentiously and without ego, listened to and evaluated expert advice before making her decisions) and the scope and huge scale of what she was buying.  

Then Charlene hung a hammock between two trees that looked like they had been planted for just that purpose, and on two of the biggest trees, she strung two giant rope swings with platforms to stand or sit on. She created a giant fire pit with more of those stones she had me wheeling around, and surrounded it with adirondack chairs. 

Charlene then placed circular “side-tables” between each set of chairs, made of sections of log turned on their end, (we had piles of logs from the trees we had cut down). She had us leave the stumps of the trees we had cut down in the ground because she used them as platforms for large wooden buckets overflowing with flowers, topped by metal and glass lanterns with pillar candles hanging from long poles sticking out of the baskets. 

She placed an arched trellis “entrance” to the garden from the street, near the mailbox, hung with beautiful flowers and vines. And mounted happy things in the trees like outdoor garden clocks and bird feeders, bringing the trees to life. Turning what was a large, dark, forested area into a beautiful, manicured, and alive, wood-land park.

Charlene then strung lights between the trees, and placed outdoor dining and living furniture in optimal spots. By day it was a beautiful, natural wonderland that the kids loved playing and swinging in and riding go-karts through, (Miles was a great driver since he was little and only hit a tree once). It was like a camp. 

In fact, it was a camp because Charlene ran a camp at Timber Trail for our kids and a couple of close family friends' kids for a couple of summers. Between the giant rope swings, go-karts, swimming pool, arts and crafts, and field games Charlene taught them, it was the best camp ever. And because Charlene was a professional in every sense but the main sense, getting paid, it wasn’t for money, just because she wanted her kids and their friends (and our friends) to have fun. 

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She had the kids plan their day’s activities in the morning, and had the local ice cream truck make our house a daily stop on his route for an afternoon ice cream break. She hired a lifeguard (which the other families chipped in for) to watch the kids during their daily 2-hour swimming “activity”. She set it up where she had very little direct work to do because the kids ran the whole thing themselves. She was really just there to supervise. 

Charlene spent hours a day watering and caring for our garden. I bought her a 300-foot long hose, (long enough to reach every flower bed from the spigot in front of our house), with a multi-function hand attachment, and she would just go flower bed to flower bed, caring for and studying each plant and talking to them as she watered. Always talking to her plants. Some were boys some were girls, I don’t know how she decided which were which; maybe she asked them for their pronouns, but she would refer to them as “he” and “she”. 

Charlene would say to me “she was very happy today” or “he didn’t look happy, I think he needs more sunlight”. Charlene’s garden was very happy. And very alive. You felt it the second you stepped foot into it. Even the squirrels that ate from her hand felt it.     

And by night our garden was the most romantic, softly lit, peaceful, natural space. It was a place where you would make an intimate wedding. And where we made our daughter Yael’s beautiful bat mitzvah. Charlene and I would often sit at the fire pit at night in the fall and just enjoy the beauty and peacefulness.

I’m writing this section about Charlene’s garden at Timber Trail a few hours before the festival of Shavuot, the holiday of flowers, is about to begin. This festival commemorates (and is the anniversary of) God’s giving us the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai 3,339 years ago. It’s customary nowadays for synagogues to decorate their sanctuary with flowers in honor of Shavuot because in the days immediately before the Ten Commandments were given, Mount Sinai, which up until then had been a very plain, barren, rocky mountain in a sandy desert, exploded with flowers and vegetation into a beautiful garden paradise.

I don’t believe writing about Charlene’s garden right now of all times is a coincidence. This garden that Charlene lovingly planted and watered and even babied, the Garden of Shoshannah, was the place where I experienced my spiritual transformation, the place which inspired the name of this book, my metaphor for our state of connected, loving, peace and happiness; our paradise, our Garden of Eden. 

The garden that Charlene planted was spiritually akin to the flowering on Mount Sinai because it came from the same place. Beauty, peace and happiness are God’s and when His Torah, in pure form, and uncorrupted by man, descended from on high and touched earth, that place exploded with flowers, life and natural beauty.

In the same way, my Charlene, my human manifestation of the divine Shechina, whose very being embodied the principles and inner spirit of the Torah, channeled her spiritual grandeur as she touched and lovingly worked our earth, transforming it into the most beautiful and alive garden paradise. 

And as Charlene’s Hebrew name, Shoshannah, means a rose, Charlene was the most spectacular flower and most beautiful part of our garden, its queen in both spirit and form. And as King Solomon compares the Shechina in exile to a rose among the thorns, so was Charlene, my beautiful rose, compared to all others. And in our garden, the Garden of Shoshannah, the Shechina was not in exile, it was home.