A Year of Kaddish

“Sounds like you’re having an affair!” We were sitting at Starbucks. I was telling a friend my dilemma when he interrupted to offer his take. We were not talking about another woman. We were talking about another shul.

As many of my friends know, I’ve long been fascinated with other shuls and independent minyanim. Even before I began saying kaddish. I was curious how others do it, and by that I mean, how they pray and create spiritual space on Shabbat or any hectic weekday.

Trying to balance home life, work life and my obligation to say kaddish daily offers its own set of challenges. My synagogue, Beth El Temple, holds weekday services at 7 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. It’s 2.2 miles away, according to Google Maps, and takes about five minutes by car. But what was I to do on a night, for example, when I had another evening engagement? Sometime last fall, I discovered, a way to meet both commitments. Beth David Synagogue.

At least to date, when the sun still sets earlier, especially during the autumn and winter months, I have been able to attend services much before 7:30 p.m., because Beth David provides a full mincha service just minutes before sunset. It’s followed immediately by the evening or ma’ariv service. The synagogue is three blocks from my home, where I also work. I can get there in a minute; in nice weather, I can ride my bike, walk or jog over there. In the middle of winter, when services were starting around 4:30 or so, it provided a nice break from my desk.

My friend laughed, shaking his head. “Classic stuff. You’re trying to justify why you’re cheating on Beth El. What about on the days when they need you for a minyan? Don’t you feel bad?”

“Believe me, “ I said, “I feel the guilt. Jewish guilt, ” I said. “But there’s more,” I said.

I like the services at Beth David. I like walking there and back home on Friday evenings, as Shabbat arrives. I like walking back there late Saturday afternoon for their seudah shleshit, a traditional third meal between mincha and ma’ariv, when a couple hauntingly lovely z’mirot or songs are sung, as Shabbat is about to depart and the new week is about to begin. I like the more complete repertoire of Psalms chanted in the mornings during Pesukei’ D’Zimrah.

On the other hand, I still go to Beth El. I go every Shabbat morning.  I go two or three other mornings a week, and an evening or two.

But then, I told my friend, something happened about a month ago that really changed the relationship.
He leaned in closer. Took a sip of his coffee, wondering what the juicy details could be.

They asked me if I wanted to daven. To lead part of the service. Since I’m an avel, a mourner. By then, I had been going to services at Beth David enough that I was able to confidently say yes. And from my experience leading at the Orthodox shul in Oakland last winter, I knew I could do it. I did it a few times during the afternoon and evening services and parts of the morning service as well.

“Jeeze,” my friend said. “You’re in deep.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “It’s stressful. I feel like they both expect me to show up.”

He laughed again. “Who would have thunk? You’re quite the catch.”

Today would have marked my parents’ 59th wedding anniversary. They made it to 58-1/2 years. “Not bad,” as my mother, who had a knack for the understatement, might have said. Or “pretty good, don’t you think?”

I’ve heard the story of how they met and got married hundreds of times, and it got told a lot last August after the funeral and during shivah to the delight of everyone, not the least my father who relishes its telling.

My dad was a Holocaust survivor. He and his brother, Don, were the only survivors in his family. When the war ended, they made their way to America from Poland or what is now the former Soviet republic of Belarus. Their destination was San Francisco, where Auntie Katie and Uncle Reuben Ungar lived. Katie was my paternal grandmother’s sister. She had immigrated between World War I and World War II, and my father remembers hearing his mother saying she hoped to get more members of the family out of Poland during those interwar years. But U.S. immigration quotas of Polish citizens were low and the number who wanted out was high.

When my father arrived in San Francisco, he got a job selling Watkins products and later plastics, as in plastic table clothes, house to house. When other opportunities knocked on his proverbial door, he traveled north to Petaluma, Calif., where he peddled his wares from ranch to ranch and to a nickel-and-dime store. One thing led to another. Before long, he was selling in Portland, Oregon.

Portland was good to him. After first taking a room at the YMCA, he found a room to rent in a Jewish family’s home, when one day his life changed for good, though he didn’t know it at the time. Another Jewish family, the Sliffmans, across the street invited him to the wedding of their daughter, Shirley, on Christmas Eve 1950. And who knew?  Maybe he might meet a nice Jewish girl at the wedding.

The groom was a nice Jewish boy named Ben Benson from Toronto, Canada. Also at the wedding were Ben’s parents, Rose and Joe Benson, and his sister, Pearl, who had planned to spend the week in Portland before returning East to her job in Toronto.

That night at the wedding Stan met Pearl. “Would you like me to show you around town while you’re here?” Stan offered. “Sure,” she said. “That would be lovely.” They went out once. And then again and again and again.

A week later, New Year’s Eve, Stan proposed. In some ways, it was a perfect match. Stan was an immigrant to America. Pearl had grown up speaking Yiddish at home. And in a sense Pearl served as a bridge to this new land for Stan. As his Aunt Katie in San Francisco said, “Canadians are half European and half American.”

Six weeks later, on February 11, 1951, they got married in Vancouver, British Columbia at the home of one of Pearl’s aunt’s, Ann Cohen.

The newlyweds settled in Seattle, where I was born along with my two brothers. Seven years later, in 1958, we packed our station wagon and moved to California and the San Francisco Bay Area.

And as they say, the rest is history.

I know the blog has been quiet of late. Weekly posts instead of the earlier pace of three times a week. Part of the reason may stem from the ritual I’ve come to adopt. How much can one write about going to shul daily, morning and late afternoon or evening without repeating one’s self?

But another reason stems from how busy we’ve been over the past month. Around the same time that a new girl arrived into the Felson family, that being our niece, Ayala Pearl, the one born in Jerusalem Dec. 4, Julia and I were on our way back from an overnight trip to Rochester, N.Y., where we picked up a 14-month Wheaton Terrier named Darla. It turns out she and our six-year-old Wheaton, Sammy, have the same father, Abe, so they’re siblings. I had managed to scout out shuls before hand, and the timing worked out perfectly. Well, for me, not for Julia and our new pup, who sat in the car for too long while I said Kaddish at Congregation Beth Hakneses Hachodosh.

Then a couple weeks later, our middle-son, David, 23, arrived home, after spending the last year working in Washington, D.C. at various internships – unpaid and then paid – and at a Farmer’s Market, where he worked as market manager one day a week. Like many his age, it’s been a tough year to find full-time work. But he’s landed a job through a D.C.-based organization -– actually, a paid year-long fellowship in Bolivia of all places. He leaves this Friday.

A few days after David arrived home, our son, Ben, 20, returned home from a semester abroad, coincidentally, also in Bolivia. The story gets even more bizarre. Until Ben left for Bolivia late last summer, none of us had ever heard of the city he was studying in, Cochabamba, though it boasts a population of more than 500,000. Now it turns out David will be stationed in – yep, you guessed it – Cochabamba as well.

The same day, Ben flew into JFK from South America, our daughter, Rachel, 27, was flying East from Boulder, Colorado, where she had just completed an 18-month program to become a certified Rolfer. She came home to spend a few weeks with all of us before flying back to the Rocky Mountains. Yesterday she packed all her belongings into her Subaru wagon and embarked on the next chapter in her life: Moving to San Francisco to live and start her new Rolfing practice. [By the way, she’s still looking for a name for the practice and her soon-to-be announced website.]

Ben returned to college before New Year’s Day – he too flew back to the Rocky Mountains, as he’s a junior at Colorado College. So this past Friday night, among those sitting at our Shabbat table were Rachel and David. We sang Shalom Aleichem, chanted Kiddush over the wine, said the blessing over two loaves of home-baked challah and then dug into a lovely vegetarian meal: Moroccan Yellow Split Pea Soup, Israeli Couscous with Curried Vegetables, and Butternut Squash with Cranberries, Toasted Walnuts and Maple Syrup.

The next morning as I was walking to shul, it came to me what was missing. There’s a tradition on Shabbat Evening for the parents to bless their children. I have to admit, we usually don’t do it, not because we don’t wish them a life full of blessings, but because it’s just a tradition and ritual which with neither Julia or I grew up.

But as I was walking last Saturday in below-freezing temperatures, the sun shining on the frozen snow, I was regretting not having bestowed blessings on both of them on their latest journeys in life.

Besides saying the traditional blessing, I would have said something like: May you live this new chapter in your lives fully. May you feel the courage to do what might feel frightening. May you be open to what unfolds. May you remain curious. May you take risks, but be careful. May you feel joy. And stay in touch..

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.

“Why are you doing this?” Julia asked me again yesterday. She didn’t mean it in a way that questioned why I was saying kaddish. She understood that the best reason I’d offered so far was that I felt compelled: to honor the obligation, the mitzvah, and my mother’s memory. What she was really asking was whether there was more to it than fulfilling an obligation? More than just showing up and reciting the prayer daily, morning, afternoon and evening.

“Yes,” I thought to myself.  “There’s more to it than that.” I knew there was. I knew there had to be.

“So what is it?” she asked, a question I could see coming like a Mack truck barreling toward me.

I thought some more. I’d heard and read that the kaddish was not a prayer about the dead. It’s a prayer about God. I’d also heard and read that saying the kaddish helps guarantee or aid the departed soul reach heaven. But I didn’t say any of that because, quite frankly, I’m still trying to grasp what both those explanations really mean. And so the truth is neither of those fully resonate within me yet.

Which is not to say I deny them. I just haven’t digested them yet. So I’m vowing today, three months after my mother’s passing, that in the next month, I’ll explore, wrestle and dance with why else I’m doing this besides feeling compelled or obligated.

Like with any new adopted discipline, I’ve already learned one small lesson. Perseverence is crucial, that just showing up does have its virtue. Because without it, you’re unlikely to reap the benefits or epiphany. I got that lesson in a small way this morning, as I ventured back to Youngstown, Ohio for morning services.

 On my way out of the morning darkness of Sharon, with directions in hand, I made what I thought was my first left turn, the same place I’d turned yesterday. But it was difficult to see the street signs, and when I saw a man standing outside his pickup truck, I stopped and asked.

“Is this Stambaugh Street?”

“No,” he said. “You want to turn around. Go to your third traffic light and then turn left. That’s Stambaugh.”

I laughed to myself that I could have been that far off. But that too I took as a lesson in this year-long process: Ask for help along the way. Acknowledge your uncertainty. It’s so much more rewarding.

For all its ideals and challenges, Judaism can be such a practical religion. That morning last August when Rabbi Judah Dardik gathered us around the kitchen table to explain the customs of mourning, I asked him about the appropriateness of going on a planned vacation in the Adirondacks three weeks into the future.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to find a minyan,” I said. He pulled out his Treo to look up the name and number of someone at Yeshiva University, explaining that for a donation to the school, he could put my mother’s name on a list so that I would be “covered” whenever I couldn’t say kaddish. In my stead, a yeshiva student would say the prayer in my mother’s memory. It seemed like an easy way out. For a few bucks, or whatever price I put on this kaddish service, I would be covered? I wondered: could I get someone to go my dentist’s appointments as well? As it turned out, and somewhat amazingly, I found a minyan in the Adirondacks, the Lake George Summer Minyan, a 30-minute drive from where I was staying, which every time I attended felt like being transplanted into a Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood that had moved to the mountains.

Read more �

“Do you want to davven Musaf?” It was the question one of the old-timers asked me one day several years ago at Shabbos services in the cozy basement chapel in western Pennsylvania where we were visiting my in-laws.  Musaf is the last part of the morning Sabbath service and Leonard Rosenberg, an insurance salesman during the week who ran the chapel service, used the Yiddish word, davven, instead of “pray,” but he was really asking if  I would  lead the congregation down the homestretch.

The building housed a Reform temple, the main synagogue in Sharon, Pa., a  community that once bustled as one of the many steel towns between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, but which, like much of the Rust Belt, had seen better days.  In the downstairs chapel, a small group — mostly men — and most in their 70s or 80s met Saturday mornings for traditional Orthodox services, all lay-led. Herring, challah, a few cookies and shots of schnapps or Crow Royal were served afterwards in the library across the hall. They always were glad to see me because most times that I visited, I made the tenth and the minyan. Read more �

My mom.

My mother, Pearl Felson, died early the morning of August 6 in her sleep in her bed in the home where she had raised me and my two brothers. My dad, Stan, was asleep next to her, when the caregiver woke him to say she thought my mother had stopped breathing. As deaths go, I guess it doesn’t get much better than that.

She was 87. Five months earlier, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,  which, her oncologist told us, is one of those diseases that’s detected too late to beat. I won’t go into all the details except to say that we all visited her as often as we could. Those close by like my brother, Jeff and his family, as well as my cousins who live nearby in the San Francisco Bay Area; and those of us who live farther away, like me and my family on the East Coast, and my brother, Howard, and his wife, who live in Jerusalem.

But this blog isn’t about my mother’s death or life. Not directly. It’s about what happened, what happens, after. The day of the graveside funeral, that morning, the rabbi stopped by the house and gathered us around the kitchen table to talk about the funeral and explain the Jewish laws and customs of mourning. He mentioned that according to halacha, or Jewish law, a spouse is obligated to say Kaddish daily for one month; when a parent dies, the children say it for eleven months. (Why it’s not a year is another issue for another day). Thus, among observant Jews who are mourning a parent who has died, Kaddish, an Aramaic prayer more than two thousand years old, is said at least three times daily during the morning, afternoon and evening services.

It’s hard to describe where I am on the Jewish spectrum of observance. From where many of my religiously liberal-to-secular Jewish friends stand, I’m this close to being a black-hatted haredi, which is meant to mean I am in their eyes too rigid and religious. I belong to a Conservative shul; I feel comfortable in an Orthodox one. But it is, as I say, all relative. Yet, and here’s the point I’m trying to make, after we buried my mom and during that first week sitting shiva (the seven-day period of mourning), I felt compelled to say Kaddish daily at morning, afternoon and evening services. When I returned home to the Northeast, during the sholoshim, or 30-day period of mourning that comes next, I continued to go to shul nearly every morning and evening (many synagogues hold afternoon and evening services back-to-back for practical reasons). And the next month as well. I’m now into the third month, still getting up to make the 7 a.m. morning service; still returning in the early evening.

My idea is to blog about this new phenomenon in my life; how it affects me and those around me. The prayer services are almost all in Hebrew, and the truth is because many who attend morning services need to get to work afterwards and those who attend evening services want to get home, we davven or pray fairly quickly. That doesn’t leave much time for reflection. For wondering how this process is helping me mourn my loss or feel more spiritual or closer to God. I’m hoping this virtual space will give me that opportunity to explore and sit with those questions. I also welcome your comments and your stories. Like any journey, it’s the experiences and people you encounter along the way that touch you. I’m hoping that will be the case here as well.