A Year of Kaddish

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.