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?
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.
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.
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.
One of the effects of saying Kaddish daily or going to shul regularly to pray is that you can’t escape the rhythm of the spiritual calendar or in my case, the Jewish calendar.
What that means practically is additional prayers and special Torah reading designated for any new month.
It also got me thinking that while Thanksgiving may well be next Thursday if you live in the U.S. – I know Canadians celebrated Thanksgiving last month — the fact that we are now in the month of Kislev also means that Chanukah is not far behind. (The U.S. Postal Service has even issued a new stamp this year for Chanukah. In the secular world, there’s always talk about whether Chanukah arrives early or late, by which people mean around Christmas or way before; but according to the Jewish calendar, Chanukah always begins on the same date, the 25th of Kislev. Because the Jewish day, including holidays, begin at sunset, that means the first night of Chanukah is Dec. 11, a Friday evening.
But, to me, a larger point, is this whole notion of how we mark time. What does it mean to follow a spiritual calendar? Well, for starters, it means, to coin a well-worn but true phrase, we don’t just count our days, but we make our days count. And if it’s a spiritual calendar, then our days also must be infused with holiness. Put another way, to quote, author Dan Millman, “there are no ordinary moments.”
To live life realizing that any moment, indeed every moment, holds the potential to be a holy moment or an extraordinary moment is a radically different way to live life than I normally do, than I would say most of us usually do. But that is what we are asked to do, what in the Torah, we are commanded to do.
There’s a 2008 You Tube video called “Where the Hell is Matt?” making the rounds these days. My brother in Israel sent it to me the other day; my daughter in Boulder, Colorado sent it to me this morning. It’s lovely. Yet is it appropriate for a blog on the Kaddish? I wasn’t sure until I watched the very end and the credits. The music is adapted from a poem called “Stream of Life.” Watch it and let me know what you think.
I click on the cassette tape of Rabbi Alan Ullman’s 1994 class on kaddish. We had been talking about just the first few words of the prayer and how opening up to the feelings triggered by the loss of a loved one — pain, anger, whatever else you’re feeling — how allowing those feelings to penetrate our being can bring us to experience God as larger and more holy.
Rabbi Ullman moves ever so slowly to the next few words and he can’t help but explore them: May God’s great name grow and be more holy – and here Alan reads slowly to accent his next point: “…in the world that God created as God willed.”
The very next part of the verse is talking about God’s sovereignty “lest we forget whose world this really is,” says Ullman. “It’s the world of God’s own creation,” a concept that we moderns don’t always believe, or might we say don’t really believe.
To reinforce the words from the kaddish, Ullman quotes Torah. “Leviticus, Chapter 25, I believe,” and it turns out he’s right, although for reference purposes I double check today. If you want to look it up, you’ll find the quote in Lev. Chap 25, verse 23-24. “And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and settlers with Me.” In other words, the entire world is God’s creation, according to Torah and we are simply tenants. We’re not owners.
“The idea of ownership,” he adds, “somehow applies also to the way we view our lives. We own our lives. We’re in control. And we act as if death is somehow an aberration. “
But by saying kaddish “we are acknowledging and accepting God’s control at that most difficult of moments.
“If we say that God is in control and that death is a natural cycle, then our pain at loss is also a natural cycle. And yet all too often we view pain as unnatural, but I think that’s just part of the whole.”
My exploration of what these ancient words I say daily, at least three times a day, actually mean moved into a most unlikely place the other day. I rummaged through a shoebox packed with old cassette tapes of recordings I’d made over the years. Most of them are from classes I’d taken. The one I’m looking for, and find, is labeled simply: “Prayer/Kaddish.” It turns out to be from a class on the kaddish from 1994 taught by Alan Ullman, an itinerant New England rabbi, then from Worcester, Mass., now from outside Boston, who continues to teach Torah and other Jewish texts.
But that hardly captures what Rabbi Ullman, or Alan, as most of his students call him, brings to class. His specialty is digging deep into ancient texts and mining how the teachings speak to modern adults, Jewish or otherwise, who often are on their own spiritual quest for meaning. Some of his classes barely get beyond a passage, but in an hour or two, his students usually leave feeling they’ve explored a hidden world they never imagined was out there.
