NOT QUITE CERTAIN

I begin to speak only when I am certain what I will say is not better left unsaid.      Cato the Younger

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Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
I begin to speak only when I am certain what I will say is not better left unsaid.      Cato the Younger
 
The world would be a quieter place if everyone adhered to Cato’s standard. In every realm in which words are the coin – politics, interpersonal relationships, scholarship, and especially blogs like this one – saying something is not the same as having something to say.  Maybe that’s why I use the insights of other people to prompt my writing. It is definitely why I have taken this long hiatus from my weekly column.
 
I can’t promise that I am back weekly, but I have enough supply of other peoples’ wisdom to last me about a year, taking time out for meals, of course. So you will see me regularly, if not on a dependable schedule. That much is no change.
 
But there have been changes, and big ones. The landscape of my family’s life has undergone radical transformation. My three wonderful children and their equally wonderful spouses all became parents (in one case, for the third time) during a six-week period last summer. The joy and excitement was indescribable…for almost four months. And then Oliver died. The eldest of the three newborns, he succumbed to complications unforeseen after necessary and seemingly successful heart surgery. He died on October 5.
 
On October 7, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and murdered 1200 innocents. Israel, justifiably and expectedly, retaliated. And continues to retaliate.
 
These columns will be infused with my new consciousness of these events. Sometimes (like next week) one will be directly addressing some aspect of the upheaval of my soul. Other times, I am certain, you will be able to identify the stream of sadness that has been forced to the surface of my every day only by your own sensitivity or my oblique and likely unintentional choice of what I have decided not to leave unsaid.
 
The virtually simultaneous tragedies gave me an unwanted window into the workings of the human heart. My life has not been without its challenges and disappointments, but I have always been aware of my good fortune and privilege. As a rabbi, I found myself proximate to people grieving (and, also celebrating) the important transitions of their lives much like the green plastic stake that supports a tomato plant – there to give structure and strength, but best when unnoticed. Even on those days when I found myself walking down the hall from the celebration of a first-born to the funeral of a young husband and father, my emotions were best displayed as reflections of those around me, not my own.
 
And certainly, there have been powerful moments in our family life when I needed pastoring from others – one grandson was born shortly after the death of one of my best friends and almost immediately before the death of his great-grandfather. But here I was, retired from any position in which the title “rabbi” was relevant, and therefore left to navigate my life as it was integrated with those whom I desperately love: my kids and the Jewish people. What could I say about the micro- and macro-cosms of devastation and how they had impact on each other?  And by “what could I say” I do not mean to others – although any parent knows that expectation – rather, what could I say to myself?
 
Every victim (every victim) of violence in this current war rekindles the intensity of the feelings of loss and injustice surrounding our family’s great devastation. No parent or grandparent loves their child less for the circumstances of their death, whether that child is a babe in arms or an armed combatant. Would that life were so simple that we all could simply stop and dissolve into tears for awhile and then get back to life. If it doesn’t work when I am grieving our baby, how much the more so when there is an overlay of national pride and indignation.
 
And there it is. Something probably better left unsaid. So consider this a caution for the weeks ahead: you cannot depend on me to take my own good advice.  But you have been generous to indulge me in the past as I work out my issues in pixels and print.  I thank you for coming back for more.