Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
He couldn’t construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well.  Cormac McCarthy
 
The book from which this quotation is taken is called The Road.  It is absolutely exquisite while, at the same time, absolutely brutal.  Read it at your own peril.
 
In the course of the story I will not recount here, a father realizes the price of remembering his life during happier times for his son who, like all children, has an interest in earlier days.  Imagine the simple delights of your own youth – ice cream, a first kiss, a trip to Disney World – being described to a child who will never know them.  Remembering those happy times aloud also means delivering the despair that will accompany the telling and the hearing.
 
When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was “Insight.”  If you never heard of it, don’t be embarrassed.  A production of Paulist Fathers, it was a sometimes heavy-handed series of what I can only call morality plays.  Every actor you remember from the 1950s-1970s was in one or more of these half-hour dramas about “the spiritual crises of our times.” In particular, I recall an episode that starred William Windom and Jane Wyatt.  He was an executive of an energy company who had been unwilling to listen to the dire predictions of the impact of production on the environment.  Wealthy beyond reason, he and his wife lived in a climate-controlled apartment outfitted with a machine that would play the sounds of birds and other animals now extinct.  From all those years ago (more than 50, in fact), I remember the denouement: his little granddaughter removed her gas mask outdoors and was killed by the polluted air.
 
Across half a century, McCarthy gives voice to the casualties of nostalgia dramatized in a slightly hokey TV show.  We all grieve for pleasures past, pleasures that cannot be recaptured.  If the good times have not been succeeded by others, recalling those memories means recalling the grief.
 
A colleague of mine who comes from the Mediterranean Jewish community once told me that he never understood the European Jewish custom of naming a child for a deceased relative.  “Every time I go to a naming ceremony, people are crying in remembrance.  They seem to overlook the joy of the baby!”  I have to admit it made some sense.  No matter the intent you have in naming a child, it won’t take long before the name becomes their own.  But the world we try to construct for the child out of our loss carries with it a reminder of what is no longer.
 
Faith communities deal with this phenomenon all the time.  The foundation of Christianity is hope emerging from loss.  The Christian worshiper is confronted with the reminder of both in the symbol of the cross.  It doesn’t matter if the cross is empty, as among the Protestants, or if it has the representation of Jesus, as is Catholic tradition.  And on the most sacred of days – Easter – the story of loss is necessarily recounted as part of the message of hope. 
 
My own Jewish community is no different.  Every day traditional Jews recall the destruction of the Temple as we hope for its restoration.  Every year we devote a full day to mourning that loss, chanting the Book of Lamentations (another book to read at your peril), to be followed less than a week later by a celebration of love.  And, of course, we cannot remember the glories of our vital and productive communities in Europe (and elsewhere) without reconstructing their decimation.  It is present in their music, their humor, their art, even when we reinvent it.
 
This sad truth has dawned on America in many ways over the last generation, but especially over the last five or so years.  We can’t celebrate progress without emphasizing those who have been left behind.  We can’t bring our soldiers home without recalling every life fallen for the cause.  We can’t acknowledge the miracle of an almost instant vaccine without reporting the numbers for whom it came too late.  I would suggest, all as it should be.
 
But there have been those who have stirred up anger over inevitable loss as they tried to construct the world they (think they) knew for the next generation’s pleasure.  The disappeared ice cream, kiss, or trip to Orlando was a snapshot, not a context. That’s the perniciousness of the word “again” when it is used in a slogan.
 
No one persists in a moment of time because no moment of time persists. I guess in the end, pain is what makes sweet memory sacred rather than cause for continuing despair.  Hard as it is, the loss is both necessary and inevitable.

 Wisdom Wherever You Find It


My grandfather was my Google before there was an internet.   Luis Gutierrez


First, some context.  This Luis Gutierrez is not the congressman from Illinois.


Joe Schifrin thought he would be a bachelor his entire life.  He was especially devoted to his elderly mother despite the fact that his childhood had not been a halcyon time.  Later in life, he met Nancy, and before they married, she embraced the Judaism that was so important to him.  Nancy’s daughter had a complicated life, so when her two oldest children were still little, Joe and Nancy took them in and raised them as their own.  So there was Joe – just a few years earlier quietly resigned to life as a single man now raising grandchildren he hardly knew.


I know it was not always easy for Joe.  Though he was possessed of a gentle demeanor, he never had a good role model for dealing with frustration.  I was the family rabbi, and Joe and I had many discussions about childrearing. He was reluctant to believe he was doing as good a job as I assured him.


Luis is one of those children.  His gentle and beautiful sister Jacqueline died tragically young as his grandmother Nancy declined into dementia.  In the end, Luis was all the family Joe had.  When Joe died, Luis had become the remarkable and successful young man Joe had raised him to be.  And in paying tribute to him, he said these words: My grandfather was my Google before there was an internet.  


If you have children or grandchildren, you know there is a period in their lives, beginning when they first learn to talk and continuing until you die, when they have a proclivity to ask questions. (Our family favorite came during errand-running from the back seat: Mom, how do they make car seats?)  Until and unless you put a computer screen in front of them, the major source of information they have is you.  You can tell them to look it up or ask their other parent or figure it out for themselves.  You can answer them with the letters introduced to our family by another one of my kids: LMGTFY (let me Google that for you).  But they will ask you anyway.


And that is something to celebrate. 


As Luis discovered, when a person knows a lot, there is a lot to learn from them.  And when that person is willing to share that knowledge, conversations take place that deepen not merely learning, but relationships.  All the challenges that persuade a parent (or someone acting in loco parentis) that they are failing at the job melt away from a child’s memory if you just take their questions seriously.


Joe was a pretty smart guy, but you don’t have to be.  Nobody knows everything, even if someone small thinks you are Grandpa Google.  “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer.  In those circumstances, adding “that’s a great question” makes it better and “let’s look it up together” makes it best. 


The old aphorism that necessity is the mother of invention is only partially true.  Curiosity, though perhaps fatal to the cat, is really what impels a person to learn and then to apply that learning.  A parent who can help a child cultivate curiosity offers a skill set that can last a productive lifetime.  A curious child who becomes a curious adult asks questions that are answered not because of practical necessity, rather because of a longing for broadening and deepening understanding of the world around us.


I am part of that generation that had to develop research skills if I wanted to know something, and so I have a basis of comparison with the speed and comprehensiveness of the internet.  I am glad for Google, but I yet contend that when you do research online, you never learn things accidentally.  You get what you ask for…and nothing else.


But in a conversation between younger and older people, you get the best of both worlds. And, honestly, if it turns out Grandpa Google is wrong every now and then, it is a small price to pay for the appreciation that builds between two people, one flattered to be asked and the other thrilled to be answered.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
It’s the damnedest thing: the dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.    Jennifer Senior

In the last episode of the Israeli television series “Shtisel,” the father quotes Isaac Bashevis Singer, a secular Yiddish writer.  It is a bit of a stretch for even a fictional ultra-orthodox rabbi to be quoting Bashevis Singer, and all the more so to be quoting the real author of the quote, Romain Rolland.  Rolland was a French Nobel laureate and Stalinist. Here is what Shtisel quoted: Everyone, deep down within, carries a small cemetery of those he has loved.

Those words were going to introduce this column originally, until I encountered the formulation of Jennifer Senior.  She is more correct, at least in my experience.

Among the occupational hazards of being a rabbi in a congregation is a long and intimate relationship with the dead.  A friend of mine recently lost his mother, who was 104.  A long time ago, another friend lost a child at nine days. And, twenty or forty times a year, I became acquainted closely with someone whose age was in between.

I have been personally bereaved of friends and family of all ages.  A first-grade classmate was killed in a riding accident.  A high school classmate was a suicide. My two best friends from high school died young and unexpectedly.  One of my dearest friends of four decades was felled by a rogue disease. Great-grandparents, parents and in-laws, friends of an older generation and my own – I have eulogized them all.  It is no surprise that as I struggled to put into words what I learned from their lives and deaths, I resolved to cling to the important place each one held in my own life.

I have been introduced to so many more people who anchored the lives of their surviving family and friends.  Sitting around a table, people have shared with me remarkable stories of otherwise ordinary people.  A sweet older man for whom English was a late-life third or fourth language turned out to be a most respected and generous member of the community from which he was forced to flee.  A father and grandfather was so skilled a percussionist that he could play “Happy Birthday” on a kettle drum.  A Hadassah lady who survived three husbands had turned down Flo Ziegfeld personally when he tried to recruit her for her piano skills. A fastidious and elegant woman had survived a childhood eating bugs and rats and sleeping on the forest floor while searching for her mother and avoiding the Nazis.
It is rare for me to hear survivors describe a loved one – even one they didn’t like so much – without regretting not having had the chance to get to know them a little bit better.  As Senior says, they abandoned me, even when it was me least of all who was abandoned.

In fact, it is this lament I hear most often from the freshly bereaved.  Even among those who feel relieved that a loved one’s suffering has ended or that they did not need to face an enervating struggle to cling to life-in-name-only, those who grieve most often feel left behind.  There was another question to be answered, another piece of advice to seek, another interpersonal issue to resolve.  Small or large, there is a dose of anger at being abandoned, and a resolve to cling to the vitality of memory in both protest and tribute.

But is it true that we abandon the dead in return?  That small cemetery of the heart is almost always left to neglect.  I don’t mean that we forget the dead; my mother died six months ago and my father more than thirty years before that and neither of them is ever far from my thoughts.  But the intensity of remembering diminishes and all the vows and obligations, pledges and promises that seemed so compelling in the freshness of grief are, with the passage of time, more or less abandoned.  The gaping hole in life we noticed begins to close and, eventually, scabs over, and then remains a tiny scar.
It is as true of the most profound of our losses as it is of the people I came to know intimately only in preparation for their funerals.

You may think I am being cynical or critical.  I am not.  At the other end of life – birth – there is a similar sense of trauma for mothers, the pain of childbirth, that is likewise forgotten, or we would be a human race of only children.  There is too much joy in life to be held captive to inevitable pain.

But this piece of wisdom reinforces for me the rituals of remembering that exist in so many traditions – not the large memorials for the many, the famous and the wealthy, rather the candles and flowers and headstones that exist for the sole purpose of reminding us not to abandon the dead entirely.
​
In my own tradition, that includes the annual recitation of memorial prayers on the anniversary of a death and the dedication of a space in most every synagogue for a small plaque that recalls a loved one’s name.  But most especially, on the most solemn day of the year, Yom Kippur, when Jews rehearse their own deaths, a time is set aside for all of us collectively to remember our dead individually. For a moment, we return to that exact point when neither of us has abandoned the other in a visit to the small cemetery of the heart.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
You’ve got a mouth.  Use it.    Carol Davidson
 
Carol Davidson was my mother-in-law.  She was born and raised in the badlands of New York City and managed to maintain her accent, her elbows, and her pithy observations despite being exiled to Virginia as a young bride.  She was a mere slip of a thing, as much a function of a childhood illness that damaged her heart as anything else. Her face was graced by two distinctive features – a wide smile and a set of very expressive eyebrows, both of which she could deploy effortlessly.
 
In her life, she never used the expression “y’all” nor lost the additional “r” at the end of certain words.  She was adept at finding her way to the head of a line or the front of a crowd, when necessary, with a special affinity for navigating Loehmann’s (which closed at the same time as she died, too perfect to be accidental).  And she had no patience for whining.  If someone had an issue that was generating empty complaints, she had this response:  You’ve got a mouth. Use it.
 
She gave that command to her friends, her children and even her grandchildren.  (She never had to give it to me.) And she took her own advice.
 
At first blush (and because I set it up this way), you might think this is just some sort of New York edginess.  But this piece of wisdom is not some line of dialogue that sounds like it came from “My Cousin Vinny.”  It is, instead, an understanding that words level the playing field.  Spoken or written, eloquently flowing or passionately firing, speaking up is the great equalizer.  Words are power, and power should not be squandered or misused.
 
Carol would not have called herself a Jewish scholar, but her lesson is thoroughly Jewish, even foundational to the Bible.  After all, according to the Book of Genesis, our entire world exists because God has a mouth and used it.  Let there be this, let there be that, let there be these other things and, oh yeah, the humans in God’s image.  The very first action God takes is speaking, and out of that speech everything happened.
 
It doesn’t matter whether you understand that narrative literally or figuratively, it puts using your mouth at the very center of life.  Speak up and create a world.  Stay silent and live in darkness and chaos.  Whine and complain about the way things are and they things will remain the way they are.  Take your issue to the source of the problem and repair the world around you.
 
I’ve been told that I was born talking and haven’t stopped since.  My college roommate once described my course of study in communications as a major in talking.  For me, words come pretty freely.  I expend a few hundred of them like this almost every week.  Not everyone has that proclivity.
 
And, to be sure, there are people who, though they have a mouth, are not always able to use it.  For some, there is a physical impediment.  For some, there are legal impediments.  For some, instead of a bully pulpit, they only have a bully.  But this bit of wisdom is no less important figuratively than it is literally – just like the Bible.
 
Each of us, in our own way, has the capacity to make our circumstances better.  We also have the inclination to accept the status quo as a grievance.  It’s a choice at every step along the way.  Sometimes your voice is spoken and sometimes written and sometimes sung.  Sometimes it is a vote and sometimes a contribution and sometimes an invitation.  Sometimes it is just showing up.
 
Any way you look at it, if you don’t like what’s going on, there isn’t much to be gained by wallowing in misery and muttering about your lot in life.  Arch your eyebrows, smile your widest smile and then – you’ve got a mouth.  Use it.