The Part They Don't Tell You
Sharon July 12th, 2009
A few weeks ago we had guests for Shabbos dinner. The friends we gathered there were ones who had come to our table before – a couple of our own approximate age and life stage with three children who are my children’s friends; a couple in their 50s who have been kind to us and who we’ve shared meals with at other friends, and a couple in their sixties who first helped welcome us to the community, who have been our friends since we arrived. In many ways the meal wasn’t that unusual – we love to have guests, and have them frequently. In one way, it was very different indeed – Josh, one of the oldest of the three couples, was very ill, and we all of us knew that it was probably the last time we’d come together at our table.
It was a lovely evening – we ate a lot – my friend Alexandra made Trifle and we all indulged in too much whipped cream. We talked and laughed until Asher fell asleep in my arms. Josh told me that night that they’d just learned he was not eligible for the clinical trial they’d hoped to enter into, and said very calmly “You hear this kind of news, and you don’t know how to react.” I told him I was sorry, and he told me that he was more sorry for his wife, that it was harder for her than for him. I didn’t know quite what to say, but he did – that morning he’d received what amounted to a death sentence, and he greeted it as calmly and gracefully as he approached his whole life.
When Eric and I moved here, we knew we needed a Jewish community – in the city, we’d been able to get by with university groups and small minyans and prayer groups, mostly made up of people like us, because, well, Jewishness was always near, we were young, we did not have children and there were many such groups. It didn’t matter that the members were always shifting, that grad students left and people moved, that families changed and there were no commitments, just a good times and good food now.
But when we moved here, we knew we needed a shul – which was something very different, something heavier, stronger, with an institutional memory and a long past, sometimes a weighty one. It seemed overwhelming to me – it was easier to be part of a light and shifting community in which there was no deep commitment to one another’s lives. But the children needed a Hebrew School, and we could see, dimly, that there were things missing from our old approach.
Being part of a community, rooting ourselves in one place and with particular people, was harder. And better. That is, it wasn’t always easy to fully enter into the community, it wasn’t always easy to fit into something that has its own life. Sometimes it would have seemed more fun to pray only with people in our stage of life, people who never complained when the kids made too much noise and who got all the Gen X jokes.
But what we got was worth more. It included the members who had been here for generations. It meant dinner guests of 90 along with the dinner guests in their 30s. It meant more kinds of laughter, and watching other people’s children grow up, and getting their advice on ours. It meant being supported through my pregnancies by women grown elderly for whom the blessing of a new life was long since shorn of any ambivalence. It meant being part of lives that began after we arrived, of brisim and birthday parties, and of lives that began long before the world we live in now began. It meant substitute grandparents, and people to tell us what having teenagers was like.
Most of all, it meant experiencing all of the stages of life at once – there were always babies being born, always children making their way into the classrooms for the first days of Hebrew school. There were always bar and bat mitzvahs, young girls in their first long dress and boys with cracking voices standing up and reading Torah alongside the grownups who do that good work each week. There were always a few weddings, and children going off to college. There were always people retiring, devoting more time to the community, and there were always elders becoming frail, and then loss, and mourning, and the routine of Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Life is like that, of course, but only in a strong community, religious or secular, can you be part of all of life at once, and see it all as a whole. Even the hard parts lose some of their fearfulness, exposed to the light, lived in people you admire.
Once, an older woman in the congregation told me a joke. She named the person who had told it to her, went on, and then stopped, and named him again, saying with emphasis “of blessed memory!” We both went on to laugh, and I was struck by that emphasis – she was not saying the name by rote, with a conventional reference, she was literally stopping to acknowledge that his memory was a blessing, and to remind me that the laughter she was passing on to me was a memory, a gift by transmission from a man now dead. She wanted to be sure that I remembered, when I told the joke again, from whom it came.
Josh and his wife, Celia helped us join in the community – they were among our first friends, among the first guests from the shul we ever had to our home. They were older than we, but like us – Josh was a Professor of Physics like Eric, with a dry sense of humor and a deep kindness, Celia had been an English Ph.d candidate and was merry and lively and brilliant. They were good friends to us, and helped us navigate the loss of Eric’s grandparents, always kind to the children and welcoming to them.
Last night, Josh died. Eric and I grieve for him, and for Celia and the children and grandchildren he leaves behind. And it feels rather strange to be saying that this grief we feel is one of the gifts of community – how, after all, are we to attract people to the sometimes hard work of making community by telling them this – if you stay in place long enough, you will grow to love people and they will get old and die or you will. It would look bad on a brochure, so this is the part they don’t tell you.
And yet, that’s a part of the truth, and maybe they should, because there’s something to tell about the gift of this - community, real community that invests all the people in it, old and young, comes with this gift – the gift of blessed memory.
You get to be part of a whole life – you get to be there when people are celebrating, and there when they mourn. You get to live the good parts, and the hard and painful ones, and be richer for it. You get to know what it is like to be helped and to give help, to see people face death and grief, and come through it with courage, and when the time comes for you, perhaps you are a little better for it. You get to be part of a living thing – the community, the whole, which exists not because of one person, but because of all of them, which transmits the past, those lost, forward to those still to come. No death can kill it, as long as memory remains. You get the stories, and the memories of the past, you get the comfort of knowing that others have come through hard times and gone on. You get people in all stages of their lives – the ones with time on their hands and those with none, the ones who give everything and those who can give less, and those who need you. You get to give and receive in perpetuity as part of something bigger than you. You get to know people you would never have known, to be part of their lives and memory, and in turn, they of yours. You get, someday, the best we all can hope for – that someone will say your name, tell a story of you, and add sincerely, with feeling, “of blessed memory.”
We will take my sons to make a shiva call – it will be the first time they have been called upon to make formal expressions of mourning to others. They do not fully understand why their father and mother are so sad, but that’s ok – what matters is that they be a part of the cycle as well, at least for a few minutes, before they run and play. And I will talk to them, as they grow, about the people they knew that are not here any longer, but linger, in blessed memory.
Sharon