A Year of Kaddish

Beth El’s gabbi, or ritual director, Rabbi Howard Sowalsky, gave me a Christmas present this morning. Not intentionally. More accurately, he gave me an honor: He asked me if I would lead the second part of the Shacharit service, the heart of the service, and a section I have never done before. Not true, I did it once before on a snowy morning earlier this month when we couldn’t muster a minyan – I think we had seven or eight brave souls that morning.

So this marked the second time I’d led, but the first time surrounded by a minyan. I had been practicing in spare moments at home, but I was still nervous when I began because several of the prayers contain – for me, at least – enough tricky Hebrew phrases that it felt like traversing an obstacle course. But I made it through that section unscathed so by the time we arrived at the Shemoneh Esrei, I took a deep breath of relief and relaxed.

Asking to lead and being able to say yes connected me back to that time in Sharon, Pennsylvania when one of the old-timers at the traditional minyan asked me to lead. That day I had to defer, knowing I hadn’t yet mastered all the prayer language or the nusach, the special melody used to signify different parts of the service and whether it’s a weekday, Shabbat or Festival.

But it goes deeper than that. We all have our own set of wants, desires, expectations, hopes and visions about how we want to live our lives. How we want to parent, how we want to show up with our life-partners; what careers we choose and how and what kind of work we perform from 9 to 5 or whenever we go to work; how we bring joy into our lives and how we express honestly the whole range of other emotions we feel in the course of a lifetime.

Leading my community in prayer just happens to be one of those things I’ve always imagined doing. And today I accepted a new challenge. I knew it was a stretch because for a moment, after being asked to lead, I felt dred. But I also believe we only grow when we stretch ourselves, even if our default reaction is to resist and stay in our comfort zone.

It’s been a busy week on the Jewish calendar and at shul.

Everyone surely knows we’ve been observing Chanukah, which ends at sunset tomorrow. Besides lighting candles after sundown (except for tonight, when the candles are lit before Shabbat), we’ve also been reading or leyning (to use the Yiddish term for chanting) special portions of Torah each morning corresponding with the days of the festival. And because it’s a festival, there’s another special set of psalms known as Hallel that have been chanted as well. Which explained why I was always coming home later than normal every morning most of the week. [In the aftermath of the Tiger Woods affair, it’s hard to imagine a better explanation for your whereabouts than saying special Torah readings and Hallel delayed your return.]

If that weren’t enough, yesterday and today marked the beginning of a new month on the Hebrew calendar, Tevet, and that too called for special Torah readings as well as additional prayers known as Musaf.

I, however, missed out on all of that. As it happens, I may have heard the call from God, but I also got a call from one of my best corporate clients, and they wanted to know if I was available from 6 to 8 a.m. Thursday and Friday to edit and bring live their Intranet (or internal Internet) home page. I could get into a long explanation of the conflict I felt between making the minyan and saying Kaddish and the need to meet the requests of my clients, whether they be corporate communications departments or magazine editors.

But the sun is almost setting and I’m off to Kabbalat Shabbat, arriving shortly.
Shabbat Shalom & Chag Sameach Chanukah.

My dad talked the other day about going over to the Berkeley JCC for a Chanukah event last Sunday afternoon.

“Good for you,” I thought. “Get out of the house. Enjoy the festival.” He was even planning on taking BART, the Bay Area rapid transit system instead of driving. This by a man in his 80s.

By all accounts, he’s doing well. Keeping busy. Going to dinner at my brother’s and sister-in-laws on occasion or to one of his nephew and nieces who live nearby. Baking his salmon in the toaster oven. Having Nelly, the Peruvian cleaning lady, cook a few things for him on the day she comes to clean the house.

Still, I was more than a little surprised when I got an email from my brother with this link that features my dad lighting the menorah at the JCC festival. Apparently the event was also honoring Holocaust survivors, of which my dad is one. But now he’s also a veritable local TV celebrity. Well, for 19 seconds. There’s a short promo in advance of the very short news clip. That’s my dad wearing the cap lighting the menorah: http://cbs5.com/video/?id=59238@kpix.dayport.com

A year ago last September, just before Rosh Hashanah 5769, we all traveled to Jerusalem for my brother’s wedding. We all have friends, siblings or other relatives who for one reason or another just never got married or waited years beyond what stands as normal for getting married. In his early 50s, my brother Howard was the one in our family who was still single.

Until he met Efrat, an Israeli native from Jerusalem, who in her 30s was the one in her family still unmarried. The wedding occurred against the stunning backdrop of the Old City, the ancient Jerusalem stone and slowly setting sun silhouetting the kallah and chatan, the bride and groom.

My mother, of blessed memory, and father were there. It was not an easy trip for them, and as is their custom, they went back and forth several times over whether to go or not go. In retrospect, they were glad they went. A week ago, we got the good news, that Efrat gave birth to a baby girl shortly after sunrise Dec. 4, the 17th of Kislev on the Hebrew calendar, a week before Chanukah, which celebrates ancient miracles.

About a week before she died last summer, my mother had called Howard, who had just returned to Israel from California. Efrat, who was five months pregnant, had gone with him to visit our then-ailing mother. (Of course, at the time, we had no idea she only had a week left.)

“Can you come back?” my mother had asked him. “I’m not long for this world,” she said. Then she added in what was her most candid admission of her condition, “I’m dying,” the first time I’d ever heard her use those words.

She rambled on about going on a journey and about traveling north to Seattle, where my brothers and I were born. Then she asked in what I took to be an effect of her morphine-induced state: “How’s the little one?” I could imagine the perplexed look in my brother’s face on the other end of the call. But perhaps she was just asking the question she would have asked this week had she still been with us. Maybe she was time-traveling into the future.

The baby looks beautiful. We know that from talking to the new mother and father on Skype earlier this week and seeing the three of them via video.

The birth came almost four months after my mom’s passing.  Tonight, Jews around the world begin the eight-day observance of Chanukah. Given the years it took for Howard and Efrat to find each other, you could say this baby girl marks one of the modern miracles of this Chanukah. They’ll announce her name tomorrow amidst their community in Jerusalem over Shabbat.

What also echoes for me so poignantly is the famous passage from another ancient time in Ecclesiastes 3, the Greek translation of Kohelet, the book in the Hebrew Bible: “A time to be born, and a time to die.” Or in our case, a time to die and a time to be born.

After my mother’s funeral, after sitting shivah that week in August, I returned home to Connecticut. I remember the first morning back; Still on Pacific Time, I woke up, observing Eastern Daylight Savings Time, to make morning services by 7 o’clock. By mid-afternoon, I was exhausted and I decided to take a nap. But first I called my dad to check in and see how he was doing.

He wasn’t home when I called. Instead the voice mail kicked in.

“Hello. We can’t answer the phone. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back as soon as possible.” Nothing unusual about that.

Except the voice on the message was still my mom’s. It was at once unsettling and welcoming. I left a message and then fell asleep. In the middle of my nap, I heard the phone ring. I answered it. I started talking. It was my mom. Midway through the conversation, it dawned on me. Something’s not right here. Her voice grew faint. Then I realized I was dreaming. I woke up, shook my head and smiled.

But over the last four months, when I’ve called out to California and got the answering machine, I’ve gone from hanging up because it just felt too weird to looking forward to her message before saying, “Hi Dad. Just thought I’d call to see what’s up. Call me when you get a chance.”

Tonight, after returning from minyan, I called. My dad’s been doing all right, all things considered. He’s learning how to use the computer, send emails, and talk on Skype, all modern tasks he’d left to my mom before her passing. The phone rang tonight. It was 5 o’clock in the West. It rang enough that I knew I’d get the voice mail recording. When it came, I was surprised. The voice was my dad’s.

“Please leave a message.” He had figured out how to re-record the voice-mail greeting. I wondered: had someone told him he ought to change it? Had he decided on his own that four months was long enough to have his wife, of blessed memory, still answering the phone?

I’ll ask him when he calls back. I must admit, a part of me was disappointed that she’s no longer screening calls. But then, all things must pass, right?