Nisht Geferlach = Not Dangerous

Midseason, with plenty of New England cold stretched ahead of us, our 12-year-old daughter, Birdy, lost her winter coat. This was not a tragedy. Things are only things, after all.

The Yiddish expression for this is nisht geferlach — no big deal or, more literally, “not dangerous,” which I love for the way it expresses the important distinction between matters of life and death and, well, everything else. (As my father likes to say, “There are very few geferlachs in life,” which is, I suppose, the Jewish equivalent of “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”)
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Back to the coat. Birdy, a vegetarian, had researched the down industry earlier in the year and concluded that it was not her ethical cuppa. Her father and I, in love with her and her principled self, offered to replace her old feather-filled jacket with a good-quality synthetic one, which we bought on Ebay and which, despite being “gently used,” cost approximately one million dollars. Now it was gone.

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The problem with parenting is that it’s a cross between diagnosing and fortunetelling, and it starts when they’re newborns. Everything’s a geferlach. Does this mucus look green and viscous? What does it mean? Does it mean the baby’s going to die? Run a meth lab? Go to M.I.T.?


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/the-gift-of-a-lost-coat/