Bish-a-lu-la

In 1970, I started attending a semi-exclusive youth club that was attached to a church near my primary school; this was where I used to be a cub scout. I write "semi-exclusive" as I was invited to join by someone who I had known in the Scouts; certainly the club did not advertise itself. The club's activities were listening to music (enter Abbey Road, ITCOTCK, early Pink Floyd, etc), playing table tennis (one year we even played in some local league) and in the first year, the occasional philosophical discussion (after all, this was technically a church youth club). 

At one of these discussions, I was talking with the vicar, who told me how much he admired the Jewish people. Somewhat surprised, I asked why and he said that although Judaism has formal services, it is celebrated mainly in the family; Christianity lacks this, he said. 

One example of such is called נתינה בסתר, "netina beseter" or "hidden giving". My parents used to do this, and so did I: for example, several years ago, one of our neighbours died, leaving a widow and a daughter. As by this time the kibbutz dining room had closed, I decided to cook for these neighbours their meal for Erev Shabbat (i.e. Friday night) as there is nothing worse than returning from a funeral to an empty home with nothing to eat. There was also a long running case of a family whose eldest daughter had some form of cancer - I used to cook for them every couple of weeks. The 'hidden' part of this is that the benefactors might not know who was providing the meals, but certainly the community at large did not know, and this was not something that one would broadcast (modesty).

A few years later, some one took it upon themselves to semi-formalise this arrangement: when a mother comes home after giving birth, people volunteer to cook meals for the coming week or more. Similarly, when someone dies, people volunteer to cook meals for the week of "shiv'a". So throughout this week, every day someone will prepare a hot meal for us. The tendency is to provide more than enough food, so I suspect that our fridge will be overloaded by the end of the week and there may not be a need to cook on Friday night (by which time we will have stopped formally receiving people).

We call this "bish-a-lu-la" (like "Bebop-a-lu-lu") although our daughter pointed out that it should really be pronounced "bishlu la" (בישלו לה), "they cooked for her", where "her" is the mother who has just given birth. As written Hebrew doesn't have vowels, sometimes a word can be mispronounced, especially as this word should really be two (in which case there would have been no problems in pronouncing it).