Lightly Sacrilegious

A shout out to all my Jewish yogis:

If yoga had brought me out of the house and not shown me exercise - Dayenu, it would have been enough!
If yoga had shown me exercise and not strengthened all the muscles - Dayenu, it would have been enough!
If yoga had strengthened my muscles and not my mind - Dayenu, it would have been enough!
If yoga had strengthened my mind and not eased my eczema - Dayenu, it would have been enough!
If yoga had eased my eczema and not unburdened me of athsma - Dayenu, it would have been enough!
If yoga had unburdened me of athsma and not given me more self-confidence - Dayenu, it would have been enough!
If yoga had given me more self-confidence and not humbled me - Dayenu, it would have been enough!
If yoga had humbled me and not given me coping mechanisms for stress - Dayenu, it would have been enough!
If yoga had given me coping mechanisms and not shown me the way to find peace of mind - Dayenu, it would have been enough!

The way I was taught Judaism was to question everything* and, as illustrated above, to be grateful for everything. Many of us are atheist Jews in my family and I see nothing contradictory in this.

Growing up I loved singing Dayenu (the psalm that has been Weird Al Yankovic'ed above) loudly and off-key with my family. Dayenu has similar meaning to hallelujah. The song goes through all the wonderful miracles bestowed upon the Jews in their flight from Egypt citing that G*d could have done only one thing and it would have been a miracle but he kept going.

We were the proverbial weary traveler and G*d was the gracious hostess throwing piles of shrimp, oh wait, that's not really going with the Jewish theme now is it, um... latkes at us. Latkes really aren't as lavish as what I'm trying to get across here but you get the idea.

The moral of the story is that when a hostess gives you a latke, don't get all, "Where's my gefilte fish?" on her, be thankful for the latke and for the fork.

Although, honestly, you should never ask for gefilte fish. Just on principal.

There are a million things my yoga practice has given to me and I would have kept up with it had it only given me an arm muscle or two.  Had I received even the smallest bit of good, it would have been enough, yet look at how much has been piled on! Dayenu!

* Passover is the major holiday in our family. The service teaches you how to answer questions because questioning is important. My sister even put an orange on the sedar plate one year. When we asked "Why on earth is there an orange on our sedar plate?" she responded, "Why not, the service does not tell us not to put an orange on the plate. We should also question what is not in the service and why not." The idea being that a bunch of men wrote this stuff down and they might have been a wee skewed in their judgement of women. You know, a just smidge *massive eye-roll*.