Passover 2024

 The Fourth Child

For Marcy, with love and gratitude…

April 2024

I returned from Israel just before Passover so sick that I had to skip Seder and order in from a deli that sent matzo ball soup without the ball. I had a terrible cold I couldn’t shake and was forced to stay home for over a week.  This, I assumed, was why no one was asking about my trip.  I was experiencing Rhinovirus isolation. But it turns out to be something different.  It turns out that I can see it on someone’s face when I say I’ve just returned from Israel and they don’t want to hear about it. I can see it on someone’s face if they don’t know how to feel, or if they do know how to feel and they’re pretty sure that they way they feel is not the way I feel. 

For the past seven months, I’ve worn a dog tag for the hostages every day, and a giant star of David every day, and an arm load of bracelets to remind myself that 133 souls are still in Gaza every day.  In lighter moments I joke that I am the Taylor Swift of war merch.  I can see why it might seem like, with all that Jew junk on, I’d have a narrow, judgmental, ideologically intransigent point of view about the world in this fraught moment.  But really, I’m desperate for conversation. Really I’m bursting for the opportunity to share the stories that I’ve heard, to unpack them and understand them in the context of a world that is not so much binary, as riddled with paradox that we can only wrap our hearts and minds around by discussing over and over and over again. There is not enough conversation. We can not talk about this trauma and this problem and this moment too much. To not be asked leaves me feeling alone and unseen. 

And so on Passover, alone and without so much as a matzoh ball, I found myself thinking a lot about the meaning of the holiday, particularly this year.  I thought about not just the four questions, but more importantly, the four children.  The wise, the simple, the wicked, and the one who does not know how to ask.  The fourth child is not the wise child who doesn’t ask because he knows.  Nor is he the simple child, who doesn’t ask because he lacks intelligence.  The fourth child is avoidant - either because he knows the answer but lacks spiritual connection or because he is afraid to ask, afraid to embarrass himself or engage in confrontation.  We are, it seems to me, a world filled with fourth children at the moment.  

So let me now speak to the fourth children - the incurious, the embarrassed, the afraid, the exhausted.  You could have asked, “what was it like to be in Israel when Iran attacked?”  I would describe a night sky filled with aircraft, planes flying overhead as I lay awake, doom scrolling the news and WhatsApp, waiting for sirens and constantly checking the newly downloaded Home Front Command app on my phone.  I did a hundred mental check lists of the contents of the backpack by the door (water, nuts, phone charger plus power pack, flashlight, aspirin), the location of my shoes (next to the bed), and reminded myself to grab a pillow and blanket off the bed on the way to the shelter.  Beside me, my husband snored.

Just a few short hours before, we’d been at the weekly rally in Hostage Square when my friend Rebecca whispered, “Go back to your hotel - they’re shutting down the city by 11pm.”  By 10pm we were at the hotel restaurant, having stopped at a mini-mart for bottled water, nuts, gum, anything I thought we’d need in an emergency.  My husband ate a hearty meal.  I had a martini. I then had another as our phones lit up with texts from worried friends.  We played shesh besh in the lobby, I had my third martini.  By midnight, we learned the airport was closing in half hour, airspace over Jordan and Lebanon had closed and that the bombs were drones and would take 6-8 hours to arrive.  My husband announced he was going to sleep.  “Sleep?!  I can’t sleep,” I cried.  “You can,” he said, “Take a pill and sleep.  This is what we do.”  

For perspective:  from where I’m staying in Jaffa to Khan Younis in Gaza is 56 miles.  That’s pretty much the distance from my house in Beverly Hills to Ventura.  Its a little closer than Ojai.  The West Bank is as far from me at this moment as West Covina is to me when I’m home. Lebanon is just a bit farther from me now than Santa Barbara is to my backyard.  You get the point.  This is a tiny, tiny country.  Going to bed at night knowing that you are surrounded by countries harboring proxies for enemies, willing to fire at any moment, watching WhatsApp channels filled with news of an impending military retaliation on a country whose leadership’s stated mission is the annihilation of the land on which you rest, isn’t exactly a recipe for a good night’s sleep. But by 3am, I drifted off and awoke at 5am to read that the rockets had all been intercepted - some had hit the north and south - a few over Jerusalem - but Tel Aviv was unscathed.  

The immediate threat was past.  But my seminar - the reason I’d come to Israel - was cancelled.  All El Al flights to LA were cancelled or full until Friday.  I’d come at the invitation of my brilliant, philanthropic friend who had put together an amazing group of women coming to Israel on a listening tour with a focus on combatting the denial of gender based violence on October 7th.  With a looming security threat and cancelled flights, the trip was postponed to a later date in May.  But I was here - on the ground - having lived through a direct attack from Israel’s greatest enemy.  And the sun was shining.   I sent a WhatsApp to my friend, “So, should we still go to Sheba today?”  We’d planned to visit wounded soldiers at the rehab center of the biggest hospital in Israel.

The Fourth Child might ask, “Why go visit wounded soldiers?  Wasn’t it hard to see them and why do they want to talk to you?”  Dar picked me up at a traffic circle near Sheba and we laughed in the car about her 2am stress-eating and waking up with Bamba in her hair and Oreos on her bed.  We made our way to the balcony of one of balcony of the rehabilitation center, which is really a place for families and friends to visit, a place for the injured to avoid their rehab appointments, share food, cigarettes, stories. There we met Didi and Ben and Shlomi and Mendel, each of them eager to tell their stories, the moment they fell recorded by body cams and played over and over on their phones.  Re-living the trauma, they tell me, is part of their therapy.  They range in age from 21 to 55.  Twenty-one year old Mendel, whose family made aliyah from Chicago when he was 7, shows off his scars and asks me if I think he could be a model.  He’s a handsome kid.  He could for sure, I tell him.  Ben was in the K9 unit.  A the lone soldier from South Africa, his gorgeous Dutch Shepherd was killed in Khan Younis, but saved all thirteen men in his unit with a warning bark.  Ben was injured later - shot seven times and nearly bled out.  He spent a month in an induced coma.  His recovery journey will be long and slow.  He says he has no hate in his heart.  And then tells me he wouldn’t think twice about killing the terrorist who almost killed him.  “That’s not hate,” he says, “its retribution.”  Didi has no feeling in his right inner thigh and left calf.  He fell ten feet from the vehicle his unit used to move refugees from Northern Gaza to the South.  His legs crushed as the truck backed over him.  “Like Pitas,” he tells me - both legs were flattened but somehow no bones were broken.  His ligaments and nerves were mixed like a bowl of spagetti.  He’s in a wheelchair, has no feeling in his left calf and right foot.  Every day brings something new.  Yesterday, after months in rehab, he lost feeling in his left forearm.  Shlomi is soft spoken, just out of a wheelchair and working hard for a future where he can walk unaided.  He tells me he’ll come to America next month to speak at a fundraiser.  His English is halting and I promise to help with his speech if he sends it to me.  Ben says he’s going too.  “I’ll help you, bru,” he says in heavy South African lilt.  

And then there’s Maya.  Maya Regev, whose story I know so well from months of hearing stories from family members of hostages.  Maya Regev, who was released as part of the first group of women and children who came home in late November.  Maya had been shot and her foot severed nearly off.  After eight days of heavy bleeding, her captors took her to a hospital where she received a botched surgery, her foot reattached at an angle from her leg.  The pain, she told me, was mitigated by her fear for her brother.  Small but fierce, Maya demanded of her captor that she get proof of life of her brother.  So she was allowed to write him a note.  And then she received a note back.  And in that way, the two communicated back and forth before their release.  Maya and Itay had gone to the Nova Festival with her best friend, Omer.  Omer Shem Tov, whose parents along with one other family started the Hostages and Missing Families Forum out of a desperate need to create order out of a chaos the government would not step into, to create action in a void.  Omer’s story I knew well from his brother, Amit, who was part of a delegation of families we worked with when they came to Los Angeles in December.  Omer with the piercing blue eyes.  Omer who took care of Itay, kept him calm while they were held together for the first 54 days.  Omer who still remains in Gaza and whose mother, Shelli, I met at the Forum headquarters.  Shelli walks through life shattered.  How could she not?  

“What was it like to go South,” a Fourth Child might inquire, “to be on one of those kibbutzes in the aftermath of October 7th?”  Two days after the attack by Iran, Rebecca and her husband, Gideon, picked me up.  I shared the backseat with Daniel Lifshitz who spent most of the drive on zooms, looking up only once when Gideon worried about a flat tire and Daniel said, “its the road - from the tanks.” We rolled on, towards Nir Oz, the kibbutz where Daniel was raised, the kibbutz his grandfather, Oded, founded; Oded, who fought for his country and then dedicated himself to taking care of others, including Palestinians in need of transportation from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for healthcare; Oded, who was shot and kidnapped on October 7th, at the age of 83, along with his beloved wife Yocheved, age 85.  Yochoved was released after 54 days as part of the first group of freed hostages.  Oded remains in Gaza, without his blood pressure medication, without his wife of so many years, without his children and grandchildren.  

Daniel,former footballer turned wine merchant, father of an 11-year old girl, walked me through his childhood - where he slept in the kibbutz, where his first teacher lived, where he and his cohort built a fountain for their bar mitzvah project. It sits on the edge of the kibbutz overlooking the fields that separate the homes of Nir Oz from the border of Gaza.  We stopped in the cactus garden his grandfather cultivated from a tiny Haifa bulb to a world famous botanical miracle punctuated here and there with bicycle wheels and ironing boards - refuse transformed into art. Daniel took us from the garden to the house of his grandparents, the house that was his solace, his home, after his parents’ divorce.  We walked through a burnt out shell, heavy with the acrid stench of fire and desecration.  My eyes blurred with halo vision - that strange partial loss of sight - and thought “if I don’t sit, I will pass out, which will be embarrassing at the least and wildly inappropriate overall given the context.” I was overcome - panic, anxiety or maybe just the heat of the day.  I managed to stand as long as I did out of sheer embarrassment - what was my episode compared to what Daniel endured, what his grandparents suffered, what an entire country was feeling? Miraculously, an unburnt chair sat in the middle of the Lifshitz home and I asked Daniel if I might take a seat.  “Of course,” he said, and motioned to the chair - both of us acting, absurdly, as though proper etiquette for a host and guest applied.  I sat for a minute, angry at my weakness, thinking about Oded in captivity, Yocheved without her husband, the other victims of Nir Oz and beyond, families I knew now by name and photograph: Bibas, Gonen, Shem Tov, David and on and on…

Daniel asked if I had a pen.  We had walked a short distance and stood outside a house with a hostage poster hanging to the right of the door.  “This,” Daniel said, “is my best friend.”  Dolev Yahod was 35 years old on October 7th.  He was kidnapped from Nir Oz.  He has a wife.  He has children.  Daniel and Dolev grew up in Nir Oz, slept in the communal room for children, went to school together, were separated for being unruly together.  They are brothers in every way but blood.  I handed Daniel a pen and watched as he crossed out “35” on Dolev’s kidnapped poster and marked it as  “36”.   And then he wrote, “Love you brother.  We’ll keep doing everything to bring you back home 💗 Daniel Lifshitz”.   Daniel handed the pen back.  “There we sat, the weekend before,” he pointed at the plastic flowered cover on a picnic table on the front porch of the Yahod home.  A “Happy Birthday” celebration banner was strung from post to post, punctuation of a past with children and love and barbecue and hugs.  A loud BOOM rattled our bones, Rebecca flinched, we all stopped for a beat - ordnance fired not far away - a reminder that this war is far from over. 

Hours later, we returned to the car, parched and sweaty.  Gideon cranked the AC and we headed north, back to Tel Aviv.  Daniel pointed to bus stops as we drove.  They serve as bomb shelters along Route 232 - all are decorated with cheery murals - all are now riddled with bullet holes from October 7th.  We passed a sign for Re’im - the site of the Nova Festival.  We had no choice but to turn left off the 232, bumping along the dirt road to a parking lot with two buses, a dozen cars and us.  Walking toward the festival grounds - the place where 3000 peace-loving festival goers were targeted, leaving 364 massacred and 40 kidnapped - was surreal.  A voice boomed from beside one of the shelters - the very specific kind of voice that is easily identified as a midwestern pastor - in this case, Pastor Paul from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.  He asked if he could interview Daniel who graciously told his story - then Pastor Paul prayed with Daniel for the safe return of his grandfather and all the hostages in Jesus’ name.  Daniel said Amen.  The men hugged.  This must happen to Daniel a hundred times a week.  He tells the story of his grandparents.  Strangers hug him.  Daniel, Rebecca, Gideon and I walked the grounds of Nova in silence, going from one memorial to another, from one photograph to the next - this one murdered, that one kidnapped, flowers, flags, small personal items.  Most are decorated.  Some are bare sticks in the ground, waiting for a family member or friend to visit.  

Back in Tel Aviv, Gideon dropped me at Icholov Hospital in Tel Aviv.  I was there to visit a soldier.  “It must be hard to listen to these stories,” might say the one who does not know how to ask.  And I would answer, “it can never be harder than it is for them to tell them, or to have lived them.”  

Barak is one of five sons.  Three of his brothers were at the Nova Festival on the 7th of October.  Barak was sent to Be’eri where he was lightly wounded, but recovered quickly and was deployed with the first teams to enter Gaza.  There he remained until mid-December when he was part of a mission to rescue Noa Argamani.  But the IDF intel was a trap - he and his men walked into an ambush of twenty terrorists in a building.  They were only six.  Four fell back, one was shot immediately and Barak held off the twenty on his own.  A grenade blew up his legs and a barrage of fire knocked the rifle out of his hands.  He was left with one grenade of his own and a pistol.  Down on the ground, bleeding out, he decided he would throw the grenade, and then use the pistol to kill himself - death being preferable to being taken hostage.  He managed to toss the grenade just before passing out, and the next thing he knew he was waking up after five days of a coma, and what would become a year ahead of surgeries and rehab to put him back together - a heroic Humpty Dumpty of steel rods and pins and trauma he works out by telling his story over and over again.  We talked about his battle, we talked about politics in America, being Jewish out of Israel.  He asked about what was happening on college campuses and I told him the truth: I can’t explain it. We were silent for a moment and then Barak said, “I feel sorry for them.”  I was struck, as I had been at Sheba, by the sharp contrast between these young men who put their lives on the line for their country, who felt pride in being Israeli, and young men and women on American college campuses screaming support for Hamas, calling for the eradication of Israel.  

The next day was my last.  I ran the requisite errands in the shuk - bought white knit yarmulkes for my daughter’s upcoming wedding, gifts of local olive oil and a small bag of dates for myself.  I made a last journey to the headquarters of the Family Forum to say goodbye to Rebecca.  On my way out, I shared the elevator with a man who pulled out his phone.  He wanted to show me a video.  “This was pesach last year.”  The man was Gilad Korngold and, though I’d never met him, I knew his story well.  Six of Gilad’s family members were kidnapped on October 7th, including his son, Tal Shalom.  Tal and his entire family were taken from Kibbutz Be’eri.  Tal’s wife and children were returned after 54 days.  Tal remains in Gaza.  Gilad pointed out each family member and when the video ended, he put his phone away and said, “We will not have a seder this year.  We are not free.”  

Gilad is not the only person in Israel who told me they would not have a seder. I heard the same from the manicurist who lives with the dread of her 16 year old’s son upcoming conscription.  I heard it from the cab driver who thanked me for coming from America and said aloud what I felt in the air: “The whole country is sad.”  I was surrounded by a nation of people who, whatever their political or religious or cultural differences, have been bound together by the collective trauma of October 7th, a nation of people whose freedom is inexorably cleaved to the plight of 133 hostages still held in Gaza.  

In the diaspora, even talking about the hostages is something many do not feel free to do.  In Israel, the community is held together by common pain.  In the diaspora, our community has been shattered by adversity and moral confusion.  Gilad Korngold is right in so many ways.  We are not free - no Jew is free unless all Jews are free.  In Israel, families are held in limbo, waiting for news of their father or son or grandfather or sister, waiting for news of a hostage or a soldier, many are refugees in their own homeland.  In the diaspora, we are simply not free to be Jews.  We are not free to send our children to university without fearing for their safety, we are not free to put on our Star of David necklaces without thinking twice about judgment, we are not free to talk about Israel and defend her without fear of retribution.  We are not free.  We are surrounded by the children who do not know how to ask.

YK 2023

When I was 22, I walked into temple for the first time for something other than one of my cousin’s bar mitzvahs. It was Kol Nidre and I found the service foreign and daunting and wildly compelling.  I was, at the time, what my husband would call a “deli Jew,” culturally aware and religiously ignorant.   But I wanted to know more, I wanted to be one of those Jews who knew the melodies and the prayers, who felt comfortable in a community on the most important holiday of the Jewish calendar.  Year after year of attending services and I still want the same thing, though I grow closer to feeling at home in my own religion with every rotation of the annual cycle.  Yom Kippur is known as the day of atonement, a day of fasting and self-reflection.  Its also a day very much about death.  And while I didn’t have much exposure to Judaism in my youth, I was exposed to death in 1981 when my father died.  The irony that I became more Jewish in response to the death of my very atheistic father is not lost on me and not without a modicum of guilt.  But its true.  My YK drash is usually about a particular prayer or portion of the liturgy.  But this year, I’m focused on a bigger picture.  And what better way to enter the exploration than with a quote from the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

 

​“Yom Kippur – when we do not eat or drink or engage in physical pleasure, and when there is a custom to wear a kittel like a shroud – is a dress rehearsal for death. It forces us to ask the ultimate question: what did I do in my life that was worthwhile? Did I waste time or did I share it, with my faith, with God, and with those in need?”

​

On Yom Kippur we spend 25 hours engaged in this dress rehearsal.  We abstain from eating, drinking and showering.  We dress in the white that represents the shroud in which we will be buried.  In silent meditation and in communal atonement, we acknowledge that death is coming - today, tomorrow, sometime in the future, inevitably, painfully, sweetly, silently, it comes for us all.  So if that’s true - if we can all acknowledge that we live with the inarguable truth that ‘who by fire’ is an inalienable fact of life, how do we face it with more dignity, more bravery and maybe even more willingness to embrace its inevitability?  We.  All.  Die.  It is as true as the statement that we were all born.  Yet we spend significantly less time acknowledging or affirming that truth.  We know that we die as we were born - inelegantly, naked and afraid.  But we don’t know how or when. 

 

A few weeks ago, Matti and I and two dear friends were out to dinner when suddenly, one of them stood and gasped, hands over her mouth in shock.  Across the street, a dog had been hit by a car.  She saw it happen.  It took me a moment to register.  But next thing I knew I was cradling this dog, petting him as he lay in a liminal state, caught between life and death.  I don’t remember crossing the street or even getting down on the ground.  But there I was, in the middle of Sunset Boulevard, stroking the silky, noble head of this sweet dog and telling him he was a good boy.  Matti was all action - taking the dog’s collar so he could try to reach the owner. “Rowland” was the name on the tag.  Two strangers and I moved the dog onto a blanket and into the car of good samaritans who transported the dog to the nearest emergency vet.  As they drove off, I walked back across the street, washed the blood off my hands in the restroom and hugged my friends goodbye, eager to return home.  We were snuggling our own pups when the text came through from the owner telling us that Rowland didn’t make it and thanking us for taking care of him in his final moments.

 

“I think I should be a death doula,” I said to Matti the next day.  “Because you’re obsessed with death?” he asked.  “I’m not obsessed with death,” I replied.  And that’s true.  Nor was I traumatized by the death of that dog.  I was sad for the dog, upset for the owner and angry at the hit and run driver who was never caught.  But I was also grateful - grateful for the opportunity to be with that animal - to pet him and keep him calm.   I was sad for the owner that his dog died - but also sad that he wasn’t the one to hold him in his last moments.  Its not death I’m obsessed with as much as the process of dying, and of grieving.  Death and its consequences are an undeniable part of the life cycle, but one we spend too little time thinking about, much less discussing.  In his book, Being Mortal, Dr. Atul Gawande talks about how as a culture, we have become more and more removed from death - death has been medicalized and institutionalized.  We pawn death and dying off to professionals - professionals who are strangers.  We do this in the guise of doing the best for our loved ones.  But we are also trying to do the best for our own fears - as if to remove ourselves from death’s proximity will somehow stave it off.  

 

My father’s death at the age of 48 was a sudden blow, a shock to my 14 year old system.  I didn’t see him get sick, there was no ramp up, no rehearsal, no “cat’s on the roof.”  He was alive and vibrant.  And then he was dead.  So the idea of holding someone as they die, of being able to kiss them on the forehead, say goodbye, help them through their pain, seems to me an extraordinary gift.  To help a soul transition, to be present, to witness and maybe try to ease the transition from this life to whatever comes next - what a privilege.  

 

As a 14 year old kid, if asked I would say, “I don’t believe in God.”  I said that because my father didn’t believe in God.  And I loved my father.  His death was a great tragedy in my life.  It was also, in many ways, a great opportunity.  Because without his very powerful presence and great certainty, I had to figure shit out on my own - and ponder things like “do I really not believe in God?” “If I don’t believe in God, why am I so drawn to Judaism?  Why do I like talking to rabbis?” “And why do I care so much about Yom Kippur?”   I think my father called himself an atheist because he didn’t have the words for what he really was: an ethical humanist maybe, a naturalist perhaps.  Always a Jew - God or no God - my father would defend his identity as a Jew and fight against anti-semitism no matter what.  My father defied definition.  And I adored him.  

 

My father made only one grave mistake in his life, as far as I’m concerned.   And the mistake of his life was about his death.  As much as his death was a shock to us kids, it was clearly something he had thought about and discussed with my mother because she had very strict instructions: no funeral, no memorial, no burial.  He requested a simple cremation and that his ashes be spread in the Sierras by his family.  And that’s what was done.  One moment, I’m standing in my childhood kitchen when my mother answers the phone and received the news my father is dead.  A few weeks later, we hiked up a trail in the Desolation Wilderness to scatter his ashes.  I never saw his body, never had a reckoning with the idea that the vibrant, energetic man that was my father, was no more.  

 

My mother, an agnostic herself who left any formal Judaism behind the day she married, was only 46 when my dad died.  She had three kids and no idea how to be on her own - she’d gone from her parents’ home to the one she shared with my father.  Her grief was all consuming and manifested as alternating depression and anxiety.  She did the best she could, but it never occurred to her that we were grieving too.  Or at least that’s what it felt like.  She’d lost her husband, her first great love and the father of her children.  We had lost our dad.  With no one to guide me and no religious education or community to support me, my grief took on a decade long cycle of depression, loneliness and bad behavior.  

 

So in many ways, its the most obvious thing in the world that I would be compelled as an adult to dive into an exploration of death and grief in Judaism and that I would embrace Judaism’s strict guidelines for the end of the life cycle as being not just crucial but incredibly kind.  Death is not what scares me.  Grief is what scares me.  Grief with no boundaries - mourning without process - these are things that no child should have to encounter and no adult should have to endure.  As Jews, we have strict rules around death - how we are to prepare the body, how quickly it must be buried and that the burial is done by our own hands, not left to strangers.  I take seriously the obligation to wrap my hands around the crude wood of the shovel to scoop dirt into the gravesite of my grandfather, old friend, father-in-law, mother-in-law of my best friend.  There’s a term for this in Judaism: Chesed Shel Emet - compassionate concern and kindness of the living for the deceased. To me, Chesed Shel Emet is a great honor, one I did not have the privilege of bestowing on my own father.  

 

Our tradition tells us that just as the burial ends, so does our cycle of grief begin.  We are commanded to grieve on a schedule and in stages: directly following burial is seven days of shiva, thirty days of shloshim and, for children mourning a parent, a year that ends with the setting of the headstone.  The schedule dictates that none of these things is done in isolation.  Shiva is with our community - a community encouraged to not deflect conversation away from the deceased but rather to talk about the dead and celebrate the dead in order to not forget.  Kaddish is with our community.  Our community is there to lift us up when our knees are too weak to support the weight of our pain.   

 

Just as we have the schedule of mourning, so too are we commanded to STOP mourning - after thirty days for a loved one, a year for a parent - and to return to our routines, to stop our period of mourning and to LIVE.  And, our tradition also allows that on very specific days of the year, we are to REMEMBER - remember our dead, say a prayer for our dead, honor our dead.  Yom Kippur is one of those days - Kaddish coming at the height of our hunger when we’ve been on our feet and praying and entering the beginning of the last phase of the most intense day of prayer of the year.  The traditionally packed synagogue yields to those in mourning, to those remembering a father, mother, son or daughter, husband, lover, friend.  Left standing in front of the altar, stripped of our inhibition, unadorned of perfume or jewels, hungry and ground down to our very essence, our voices join in shared mourning - supporting one another - once again in community.  And just like the cycle of mourning, when Kaddish is over the community comes back together to continue the prayers and rituals of Yom Kippur that take us to the 25th hour, to the very edges of our emotional and physical tolerance, to the highest of highs of our davening just before we have that one little bite of bread and sip of grape juice, so that we may begin the cycle of the year again.   

 

So maybe I am a little obsessed with death - death as part of the life cycle and which I’m beginning to understand includes being there for the dying because one day that will be someone I love dearly - and one day that will be me.  I will always believe that grief and the life cycle can never be discussed enough, felt enough or be enough of the fabric of our existence.  To live is to spend every day dying just a little - so how do we demystify and embrace that fact and the emotions around it in ways that become less taboo and less terrifying?

 

As we approach the end of these Days of Awe - the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when the gates to Heaven are open and we work to open our hearts, seek forgiveness and spend time in deep, introspective meditation - I think about what my interest in death means about my belief in God.  I’m reminded of my father-in-law, who turned to my husband a few days before his death and said, “Say Kaddish for me and get the rabbi.”  He hadn’t spoken for days before and he spoke almost no words again.  An atheist in life, he requested a Jewish burial as he neared death. Did this mean he felt God’s presence in some way?  Another friend told the story of her husband seeing an angel just days before he died.  She is not particularly religious, but the way she told the story made clear she was comforted by the presence of that angel, as was he. Both my father-in-law and my friend’s husband were men who likely spent quite a lot of time wrestling with the question of God’s existence in life, but who found themselves close to God or thinking of God as they approached death.   

 

I want to say I felt close to God as I held that dog in the street a few weeks ago.  I’m not sure what I mean by that except to say that I felt overwhelmed by love and responsibility and privilege and gratitude all at once.  I was reminded of being with my grandfather as he was close to death and of holding my Great Aunt’s tiny hand in mine as I sat on the edge of her hospital bed the week before she passed.  Its a feeling being entirely present and connected to another soul. It is a feeling devoid of fear.  

 

If we knew we could die with our hand held, our life honored by a loved one, or even by a stranger who cared enough to be present in the moment, to take account of the time spent here on this planet, would that make us less afraid?  If we knew our death would not inevitably be pawned off to a stranger in a nursing home would that give us comfort?  If we felt the inevitable degradation of sensory perception as part of the natural course of events, and if that decline were met with love and humor rather than shame and denial, would we feel differently, less alone on the path that leads to the end of the cycle of life - that thing we fear called death?  We’re all living longer.  And our longer lives simply give us more time to fear that which we all know is coming.  But if we had the courage to face what is coming and say it out loud - say I’m dying, someday, maybe not for days, weeks, months or years, but when it is my time, these are the things that matter - would that ease our fear and temper the anxiety of those who love us most?  

 

As much as Yom Kippur is sometimes referred to as a “dress rehearsal for death,” the truth is we don’t get a practice run.  Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote “If life is a pilgrimage, death is an arrival.”  We die once.  There are no do-overs.  That doesn’t make me afraid but it does make me want to do it right - for myself and for others.  So yes, maybe I am a little obsessed with death and maybe that does make me think more about God and my Judaism, maybe it does make me grateful for a tradition that understands that providing a framework for navigating the inevitable will never make it less sad or painful but can make it more tolerable.  Maybe it even makes me think about becoming a death doula.  

 

G’mar hatimah tovah and much love to all.  

 

YK 2021

 Faith and Hope in 5782

I’m a walker.  I like the rhythm of walking, how my jaw resonates with each pounding footfall, breath punctuating whatever podcast plays for distraction, education or entertainment.  Walking sustained me through the early days of the pandemic and now, alone in a city I do not know, walking is the best part of my weekends - time outdoors, winding along unfamiliar streets past charming cupola-topped houses of the 1700s, random field of sunflowers, jagged sidewalks pushed up by old rooted trees, the smells of the local bakery or putrid trash heap, un-mufflered motorcycles roaring and just last weekend - soul music blaring around a corner.   

It was Sunday morning, barely 10am in what I thought was a residential neighborhood.  But as I followed the music I found myself in front of a tiny building on a corner with an even tinier sign: Congdon Street Baptist Church.  Behind the church, a parking lot.  In the parking lot was a band, leading services for masked and socially distanced worshippers - maybe a dozen strong - all Black, all standing and singing, arms raised to the sky. I stopped and watched, caught up in their collective rapture.  Then, suddenly self-conscious and out of place in my sweatpants and baseball cap, I moved on.  

But the moment stayed with me for the rest of the day and made me think:  What did it take for those congregants to gather, Sunday after Sunday, in a small cracked-asphalt parking lot, only hard folding chairs to sit on in the hot humid air, sweating in masks, separated by by social distance?  They were dancing, raising their hands and voices together despite all obstacles.  What brought them there, week after week, mask after mask, to the sweltering parking lot?  Was it faith or was it hope?

When our kids were little, we kept Shabbat, every Friday night without fail.  And from the time Nathaniel was six years old, every Friday, Matti would turn to him and ask, “Why do we have two challah on Shabbat?”  Anxious to please his father, the boy would stumble for an answer.  Friday after Friday, for weeks and then months, he struggled until his Jewish education kicked in and he knew the biblically correct answer about God and manna and all of that junk.  But every week, Matti would ask a second question.  “Nathaniel,” he would say, “why do I ask you this question every week?”  Years passed, week after week, the same question would go unanswered.  Some Fridays, Nathaniel would joke- cuz he’s funny and clever and incredibly charming.  Others, he would snap back in irritation - cuz he’s a normal kid and got frustrated with himself and his dad.  But never did he have the right answer.  Every Friday night, year after year, he showed up to the shabbat table, knowing he’d be on the spot, knowing he would fumble for the right answer - the answer that would please his father.  

Then one Shabbat, some time before he was Bar Mitzvah, Nathaniel looked at his father and said, “You ask me this question every shabbat because I’m different.”  THIS was the answer Matti sought week after week for so many years.  At the age of eleven, Nathaniel wasn’t likely thinking about this Friday night ritual in the context of faith or hope.  He was merely doing as his father asked - digging deep to find a unique answer to a question that remained the same.  Until that Friday when he recognized that although the question remained the same, although the ritual was consistent, HE had changed.  And so did his response.  

My ritual is the Modeh Ani.  My day begins with it, recited silently - to myself - for myself - a reminder of gratitude, a reminder to be present, to pay attention.  Most days, I try to find a quiet moment to take three steps back, stretch my arms to the sky, bring my hands to my heart and pray for the strength to be a better human, wife, mother, friend, to take a breath before I speak, to think before I react. I do this, day after day, week after week, returning to a ritual in order to return to myself so that I can be for something other than myself.  Is that faith?  The words are the same every day - the words of the Modeh Ani, the words of my personal prayer.  The degree to which I am present, the intention or focus I may or may not have as breath meets lips and tongue and teeth to form words shifts daily.  But some days - not as many as I’d like but more than I probably deserve - I take three steps forward into the physical world and feel emboldened, galvanized, and yes, sometimes even hopeful.  

So maybe Faith is in the doing.  Hope is in the feeling that the doing has meaning that ultimately will yield fruit.  It comes in an instant at the shabbat table - the lightning flash moment that you are different - you can and have changed - and that change manifests as new perspective - a new take on whatever box you feel stuck in.   

A movement from faith to hope - I have faith that my morning ritual is good for me, like eating lots of vegetables and not eating too much sugar.  The practice started as an idea - an intellectual pursuit of a spiritual practice.  But in the embodiment of ritual - entering a physical space (yes - the three steps forward and back thingy), closing my eyes and speaking the same words day after day, something happened.  What began as forced routine became welcome practice.  Sometimes that practice takes up three minutes of my day, sometimes thirty.  Some days the feeling that I’m doing something correct for myself and in doing so for the people around me comes easily.  Some days - most days - it doesn’t come at all.  And still I get up, find a corner and say the words I need to say, praying to feel the ‘something’ that must be optimism.  Faith, for me, is discipline.  Hope is what is born of it.  

And why do I mention this as we enter what you may be sick of hearing from me:  Yom Kippur is my favorite holiday of the year and Kol Nidre my favorite service of my favorite holiday.   Blah blah, yes you know - the spirituality, the community, the chest-beating, the cell phone I don’t look at for 25 hours and of course, my insistence on giving my annual drash that focuses on a different miniscule aspect of the liturgy each year. Enough already.   But here we are.  Its YK 5782 and its not that different from 5781.  Yes, we have vaccines.  Baruch Hashem.  But we also have variants and uncertainty and borderline insanity.  How, in the midst of all of this, do we hold on to hope?

So this year, my drash is about that old chestnut, Kavanah: not just showing up, but showing up with intention.  Because showing up with intention has the power - every now and then - to turn faith into hope.  Those people, outside the Congdon Street Church showed up with intention.  My son, every week of his childhood at the shabbat table, showed up with intention.  I want to be a person who shows up with intention - not just during Kol Nidre services, not just on Yom Kippur, but every morning when I carve out time for the Modeh Ani, every moment I race to an answer without thinking, or react without considering my reaction.  I want to be the person who stops, who takes a moment to consider the words I’m about to speak, the impact they might have on anyone nearby.  I want to live intentionally.  And in doing so, live hopefully.  Living hopefully means being present for myself so that I can be present for others - my husband, my children, my friends.  Living hopefully is putting on my oxygen mask so I live long enough to help someone else put on theirs. I fail most of the time.  But still I keep trying.  Yom Kippur offers us the opportunity to acknowledge our failures and move forward with the hope that we can and will do better.  It offers us the chance to do better.    

This reset button we get to push every year - this moment of deep connection to ourselves and our community whether they’re with us in body or spirit - is the reminder that routine is not enough - showing up is not enough - and sometimes even intention is not enough.  Sometimes we show up and close our eyes and say the words and the feeling eludes us - the best of intentions leads no where.  So what do we do?  We show up again.  We say the words again.  We try harder.  And finally, finally we find ourselves aloft on the melodies that bring us back year after year, time after time, and in those brief moments we are reminded of why we do the work - and what it means to truly feel the rewards of Kavanah. We are reminded to hope.

G’mar chatimah tova.