From Generation to Generation

My nephew, sixty-four years old and unschooled in Jewish practice, found himself crying when the Torah was passed down from two sets of grandparents, to the parents, and finally to my grandson at his Bar Mitzvah this past shabbes in Minnesota. The power of this choreography took him by surprise. The six of us who lined up to physically convey the teaching were four Jews including a rabbi and two non-Jews. Two of the Jews had at one time been married to each other in a previous century in pre-gentrified lower Manhattan. One of these, now sitting with a Buddhist sangha in Great Barrington, was wearing a gold-embroidered red velvet kippah, as if to stake a claim to the rusty mechanism of her lineage. There were no men with payes and no men in dark blue jackets, save the Bar Mitzvah boy himself who, in keeping with tradition, was dressed in his first suit. My nephew, in from an entirely secular life in Oregon for the event, couldn’t understand why he was crying. Seeing his tear-stained face reminded me of my mother who always cried during kaddish on the rare occasions she found herself in synagogue. Something about her mother and the long trek from Romania. This response, independent of an unbroken chain of practice or belief, seems to have a life of its own that lies in wait for moments like these. Moments that feature a heightened awareness of family, history, and above all the ocean of love that lifts all boats of spirit. When the congregants sing l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, the volume kicks up several notches. Everyone wants to sing this song. I’m standing among them beaming at the boy trumpeter, the Little League catcher, but my mind is also conjuring up the faces of my own grandparents in Budapest and Iasi, the ancestors who carried their prayerbooks to America in battered suitcases. They are with me and with the Bar Mitzvah boy, even if he doesn’t know their names and even if the Judaism they lived in was a far cry from the well-fed, midwestern, gender-inclusive occasion of the simcha in Minneapolis.

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

There is something that binds these disparate practices together, something that translates the dark and vastly different life experiences of the Old World grandparents into the vernacular American. It’s something about connection. I’m reminded of a comment made by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Bengali and English-speaking writer, in her recent book about translation. In her forties, Lahiri took up Italian, translating it and eventually embarking on the remarkable project of writing in Italian and translating her own prose back into her native English, a tide of words ebbing and flowing in and out of different grammars. She observes that there are a great many more synonyms in language than there are antonyms. Fiddle is a synonym for violin, but what is the opposite of violin? What is the opposite of antelope? What is the antonym of Torah? It’s as if language itself is constructed to teach us that this is like that. That we are more alike than different across oceans, across history, across religious cultures and this sometimes makes us cry because connection is the breath of life and feeling connected generates an awareness of the coming and going of breath, the passing of generations.

Aging in earnest now, Frank looking at his 80th birthday, the winds of change are swirling around us. Quite literally. After fifty years in the Berkshires, we are moving to not one but two different locations to be with our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Summer and fall in Minnesota, winter and spring in Northern California. The separation of decades has worn thin, improbable. We want to be with them right now in their dailyness, in the time out of time we experience when we sing l’dor v’dor. It’s a yearning for connection that seems to be intrinsic to being human, synonymous. It grabs you by the throat when you least expect it, squeezes the tears out of your eyes and sings to you in the minor key of the universal heartbeat. It sustains you in this life and carries you downriver back to where you came from.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.