A Year of Kaddish

Here’s an important article on end-of-life issues in The New Yorker’s August 2 issue. Many of the issues discussed came up for our family last year.

And so I returned to say Kaddish last night, the yahrzeit or anniversary of my mother’s passing a year ago. On the English calendar, her death came August 6, but the date on the Hebrew calendar was the 16th of Av, and not wanting to mix metaphors or symbols, I am choosing to observe the Jewish ritual according to the Jewish calendar, which began at sunset Monday night.

It’s an interesting drama that unfolds over a year of mourning. My obligation, according to Tradition, was to say Kaddish for 11 months, not a year.  Why not a year? The reason goes like this: the soul spends some time purifying itself before entering the World to Come. The maximum time required is 12 months for the most evil person, but to recite Kaddish for the year would imply your parent needed a full 12 months of purification. To avoid that implication, the Sages decreed that one should recite the prayer for only 11 months.

So last month, I finished saying Kaddish, but the year of mourning had not ended, and restrictions remained, like not going to concerts, including the free summer jazz series Monday nights in Hartford’s Bushnell Park. The last one, which I plan to attend, is next Monday. (Anyone want to join us?)

I continued to go to Shabbat services, but my twice-daily attendance at weekday minyans dropped to a morning here, an evening service there, and when I went, I refrained from saying Kaddish.

This morning, after davening Shacharit, Rabbi Adler approached me.

“A lot different saying Kaddish today than the first time?”

“A lot,” I said, nodding. In fact, I had thought about that very question while leading the service. For starters, though I had felt sad heading off to shul last evening – even noticed a hint of a tear in my right eye as I rode down the driveway onto Fern Street, it wasn’t the same kind of sorrow or sense of loss I felt a year ago.

I thought about how fluently I was able to daven today compared to a year ago, and the comfort I got from having that oversized Art Scroll siddur in front of me as shaliach tzibbur or prayer leader. And I thought about some of the other repercussions the year offered, like the question I’m exploring this summer about whether to switch my synagogue membership from the Conservative Beth El, where I’ve been for more than a decade, to the Orthodox Beth David, which has in many ways become my new spiritual home.

My mother, Pearl Felson, was not a very religious woman, not in the Torah-observant sense, at any rate. Indeed, one of the last times we went out to dinner – for my birthday a year ago May in Oakland’s Jack London Square – she ordered a cheeseburger, though she only bought kosher meat at home. Her real value was family and she kvelled over the lives of her three sons, their families, her nieces and nephews and their families, and all the other relatives and friends scattered across the globe. Mostly, she stayed in touch with all of us during long, meandering phone calls. I thought about that too, as I rode my bike home last night. This past year and how we’ve all honored her memory – she would have been proud of us. She’s probably kvelling to all the other departed loved ones up there in the World to Come. Her mother, her father, her brother, her aunts and uncles, her cousins, her friends. She’s no doubt the one with the apron wrapped around her waist, pouring tea around the kitchen table.

The first day of summer was a warm one here, and it felt good to ride to shul a little after 6 this morning in short sleeves.

“Your 11 months of saying Kaddish is up soon isn’t it?” a fellow davener asked me yesterday afternoon as we were walking in for mincha.

He was right. Today, or actually, Sunday, marked my last week of the 11 months. This evening at services, I observed the poetry of those in attendance. A couple teenagers, done with school for the year, but happy to make part of the minyan. And a 90-something year old who doesn’t speak English, just Yiddish and Russian, and of course, prays in Hebrew. He had a yarhzeit tonight, so I davened mincha and he followed with the ma’ariv service.

It was still warm when we walked out about a quarter to nine tonight. Ahh, summer in the Northeast. When it’s not humid, and it wasn’t too bad today, it’s lovely.

There are two kinds of Jews: those who like their matzah brei with salt and pepper and those who eat it with cinnamon and sugar. I am a proud member of  the former camp. I made my first batch this morning and it was gooood.

It wasn’t my mother who taught me to make it, however. It was my mother’s mother. Baba (accent on the first syllable), as my brothers and cousins called her. She left Romania as a young girl, maybe even as a teenager, and settled in Toronto, where she met her future husband, Joseph, a new immigrant from Kiev in the Ukraine.

By the time I was growing up, she and my grandfather – we called him Zaida — were living in Fresno, Calif., not far from their son, Ben, his wife, Shirley, and their three daughters, Lynda, Susy and Dana.

I can close my eyes and see Baba in her kitchen, making fried matzah; we never called it matzah brei. As a kettle of water boiled, she would break up several sheets of matzah and scramble a couple eggs into a bowl. She’d pour the boiling water on the matzah, let it soak, then drain it and add the eggs to the wet matzah.

Then – and here’s what made it so tasty, so memorable – she would add into a hot frying pan a spoonful of schmaltz, good old-fashioned chicken fat. Fry that up, add salt and pepper, and oh, what a taste. It’s that memory that sticks to my ribs, if I may mix metaphors, every time I eat fried matzah.

It’s come to counting the days, as we clean and get ready for Monday evening and the first night of Pesach, or Passover (a poor English translation, but the subject for another day).

There will be 12 of us at our Seder table and I’m looking forward to it, as I work at meaningful ways to underscore why this night is different from all others. How we can focus on what it means to leave the Mitzrayim of narrowed perspectives that enslave us in 2010.

Still, memories of this time last year punctuate my here and now. By this time last year, we had all heard the diagnosis of my mother’s health – pancreatic cancer – and that little could be done, except for some chemo treatments aimed at extending her remaining time in this world.

Julia and I decided to go West for what we assumed would be my mom’s last Seder. A houseful of relatives and friends gathered at my brother’s and sister-in-law’s home for a beautiful and poignant night. We laughed. We ate well. We read the Haggadah and told stories. My mom looked good that week, and indeed for a few more months after that. But as I go through this year of mourning, it’s that time frame one year ago that feels like the real start of the end for her.

It was then that we started talking to our kids on the phone, suggesting they ought to look at their calendars and figure out when they could visit Baba and Zaida. Because time was running out for her. Others from out of town also began planning visits: her dear cousin, Dorothy, from Toronto; and her nieces from Portland, Ore., and Richmond, Va.  My flights across the country became  monthly, and then even more frequent by mid-summer.

It’s said that we all feel the loss of our loved ones who’ve departed around the holidays. I know I do.

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.

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.

For a variety of reasons, I decided to go to the 4:10 minyan this afternoon at Beth David. There was a risk, however. There might not be a minyan. It was raining. It was a Monday. Their track record the past week had been spotty at best for getting 10 men to show up for a weekday service just after 4 in the afternoon.

I opened the chapel door and quickly scanned the room. As my kids would have said when they were learning elementary math and how to approximate, “I estimated about eight men in the room.” That was a good sign. We had about five minutes before the service was to begin. A few more men walked in, then the rabbi, and all I knew was that we had more than the required ten.

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The invitation was tempting: a night in New York, a party featuring the 2009 vintage of Beaujolais Nouveau, and overnight accommodations at our friend’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Then I began to reconsider. Our host expected about 30 or 40 friends. Wine, hors d’oeuvres, lots of people — it sounded like a celebration, certainly a party, and during this year of mourning, Jewish custom says mourners are to avoid parties and celebrations. There are exceptions. You may not attend a wedding reception, for example, unless it’s of a close relative. “What’s a celebration?” one rabbi said, seeking a definition. “In the Jewish world, it usually means food and a lot of people. But if you’re at a ball game with your son? There’s food. There are a lot of people. But you’re not really with all 40,000 other fans. You’re there with your son.”

Also, I’d heard, if you have a job to perform at a party, you can attend. So we called our friend and told her I needed a job. “No problem, “ she said. “Leonard can pour the wine.” And so it was. I poured glasses of Beaujolais and offered it to guests as they arrived. Yes, I schmoozed too, but primarily I was the wine pourer.

A few hours before the party, I realized that I needed to find a minyan. Fortunately we were in New York and a Google search uncovered several options, the closest being at Kehilath Jeshurun, a prominent Orthodox shul on the Upper East Side, only four or five blocks from the party and where we were staying overnight. I made it there in time for the 4:20 p.m. service. I returned the next morning for the 7:15 a.m. service, noticing the nearly 40 daveners mostly decked out in New York business suits.

As I walked to services early that morning, my tallis bag in hand, I saw the sights of New York from a different vantage point. And as I returned to my home away from home 45 minutes later, Manhattan’s increased bustle closer to 8 o’clock took on more of a frenzy. The traffic already jammed up at the corner of Lexington and E. 85th. The parents walking hand in hand with their kids to school. Construction workers sipping their coffee as they craned their necks upward to their job site. I took it all in, walking back with a sense of calm.

I couldn’t make the evening minyan at Beth El a couple of nights this week. As a writer on the hunt for my next story, I had conflicts.

Last night I went to Hartford Seminary, where three religious scholars – one Jewish, one Christian and one Islamic — gathered to talk about spirituality within the three Abrahamic religions.

The night before, I went to Real Art Ways, where Connecticut Public Radio was taping a production of its program, “Where We Live.” The show featured a discussion about how cities foster a culture of creativity and innovation.

So instead of the 7:30 p.m. service I often go to, I decided to go to a much earlier service at Beth David, a shul in my neighborhood. The advantage for me was that Beth David’s custom is to begin mincha, the afternoon service, before shkiah (or sunset), which this week was 4:27 p.m. But it’s also difficult to guarantee a minyan at 4:27 in the afternoon. When I walked into the chapel, only four or five men were there. A minute before sunset, we still did not have a minyan, and so those who were there davvened mincha indivdually. Because we had no minyan, I did not say kaddish.

On may way out, someone mentioned that another shul, Young Israel, had an evening minyan at 9 p.m. Who knew? Not me, and so after I finished at Real Art Ways, I decided to try Young Israel’s minyan. I was turning into the synagogue driveway, expecting to see a few cars in the rear parking lot. Instead I was surprised to see cars lining the side of the driveway. I drove into the rear and was surprised again to see the lot full. When I walked into the Orthodox sanctuary a couple minutes before nine, I saw a brightly lit room of about 30 people – men and women – listening to the rabbi’s shiur or talk on preparing meals for Shabbat. His talk ended, and as people left the sanctuary, a minyan gathered quickly for ma’ariv, the evening service.

“Who you saying kaddish for?” one of the men asked me afterwards.
“My mother,” I said. “How about you?”
“My mother,” he said
“You visiting?” he asked. “No,” I said, explaining how I fit into the community in 30 seconds. As I walked through the entry hall to leave, two women, who were kibitzing, stopped to welcome me and also ask if I was visiting. Again, I explained.

I laughed in amazement as I left. Thirty years living here and tonight I happen on another community –another synagogue I knew about, but had never actually visited. And another option when it came to finding a minyan.