From Generation to Generation: Thoughts on the Role of Ritual

You just buried your father this week and will celebrate the bar mitzva of your oldest son this weekend. How have rituals helped you in your saddest and most joyous times?
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This dialogue between David and his teacher Erica is particularly meaningful as David's father Don Gregory died last week and his son, Max, will become a bar mitzva this Saturday.

ritual

EB: You've often said that studying and your faith journey has given you a new language of understanding. You just buried your father this week and will celebrate the bar mitzva of your oldest son this weekend. How have rituals helped you in your saddest and most joyous times?

DG: Rituals provide me a roadmap for how to understand the cycles of my life and those of my loved ones. My son becoming a bar mitzva connects him to our tradition and to our history as he makes a commitment Jewish boys have made since the Middle Ages. That history and this ritual elevates the meaning for me. I feel a soulful connection with Max as he reads from the Torah, as I did, and as his grandfather did before me. My son can mark this as a critical moment of his coming of age infused with meaning because God is especially close at this time. With my father, the rituals of burial and remembrance help me absorb the blow because I feel connected to others before me who have walked the same path. And whether its Kaddish or shiva, I have a way to honor my dad, hold him in my memory and give back what he has given me. More than anything, I find comfort in these rituals. Erica, what does our tradition teach us about how to absorb this co-mingling of joy and pain?

EB: Most faith traditions are packed with rituals that frame the way we sanctify time and space, food and nature. Judaism is a very ritualized religion. From morning until evening, through seasons and over the lifespan, tradition swoops in and offers rituals as a way of helping manage and cushion the anxiety of liminality - the in-between times that signal change. For example, Judaism honors joy and sadness in similar ways. There are specific rituals and behaviors for the day, week, month and year after a wedding and the same time-sensitive traditions applies after a death. We "graduate" into a rich range of emotions. David, how did you manage the passage between your father's health, sickness and, finally, his passing?

DG: He and my stepmother moved from California to Florida so he was much closer. I was able to be around more to be helpful and just to pick him up a bit with my presence. He was so pleased that I liked where they were living in Boca Raton. He enjoyed sharing that with me. Although I could try to talk him through it, his decline was so difficult because of his pain, but also the layers of reality he had to face that he wasn't going to get stronger or healthier, that he was approaching a complete physical shutdown and that he was approaching death. The only way I found to manage this was to try to tend to his spirit as best I could.

EB: Can you describe your parting words and feelings?
DG: It was the day before he died. I had rushed down because he was going home from the hospital after his doctor suggested we prepare for hospice care at home. It wasn't necessarily imminent, but we knew it could be. The night he began in home care was a hard. The next morning as I was preparing to leave, the nurse moved him into his den where he could lay down on his couch among his movies, books and pictures. I knelt beside him and told him everything would be okay. I took his hand and we sang the Adom Olam [Master of the Universe] prayer together: "Into His hands my soul I place when I awake and when I sleep. God is with me, I shall not fear. Body and soul from harm will He keep." He told me he thought it was very nice. I told him, through tears, that I hoped to see him again, but if he died before I did that was okay because my heart was full. I told him I loved him and that I felt so lucky to be his son. He cried as well. It was an honest, direct and loving moment. I felt that nothing else needed to be said between us. I was ready to let him go. I have no regrets. I don't feel cheated in any way. I feel full.

EB: When I wrote Happier Endings, about preparing spiritually for death, I spoke to a lot of people about forgiveness, last words and closing moments and how they linger with us for a long time. That's why it's important to give a lot of thought - when we have the luxury to do so - to what we say and do at the end - ours and someone else's. How did the book helped create a bond between you and your father that did not exist before?

DG: The power of the written word hit him hard; I described being afraid of him as a boy and struggling with him at times as an adult. The process of understanding events in my life was stark and even painful to him. He offered feedback with the caveat that he could not be objective. We didn't always agree about my recollections, but he didn't argue with me. In the process of talking about these events and memories, we worked through them more completely than we had before. We found a resting place for them and moved on. In the process, he grew increasingly curious about my faith pursuits. He was proud but more awestruck. This was never a path he considered pursuing. As he got sicker and felt more vulnerable, my prayers and my explanation of my own journey both in the book and interviews related to it interested him deeply. He told me he hung on my words in person and in print. He was trying to find peace in his life. I remember he told me how hypocritical it was of him to think about a relationship with God at the end when he hadn't had one before. I had a different view, suggesting to him that God doesn't work that way. God is always waiting for us to come home and seek divine presence. Erica, what guidance do you have for reconciling with parents as they draw closer to the end of their lives?

EB: When people are at the end of their lives, it's important for them and those they love to see their relationship in the context of a life and not reduce it to the last drama they experienced with a spouse, friend or a child. The medieval philosopher Maimonides called the commandment to honor one's parents a "mitzva gedola," both a great and a weighty mandate because, especially in the adult to adult relationship, it can be so complex. Hopefully we grow into the acceptance of our parents' limitations and they ours and evolve into a more mature and nuanced sense of what we can give and take from and to them. I end Happier Endings with the story of a man with a cancer that took away his voice. He was profoundly estranged from his son by choice. The clergyman that was present near the end asked him if he could say two words "I'm sorry" and then three words "I love you." He did. The bewildered son left his father's presence awash in tears but deeply grateful for this gift of reconciliation.

EB: David, you're no stranger to tears. You can become very emotional, especially about your family. Some people feel uncomfortable around male tears. What would you tell them?

DG: I can't control it. I try. I do think it's valuable to control your emotions especially in stressful or crisis situations. I'm getting better at that. For me, my emotions are always close. I value that because it means I'm not a stranger to what's at work in my heart. And it makes it easier to express my love. I do, however, try to control myself around my kids so I don't embarrass them more than I already do.

EB: Explain what the Jewish phrase "from generation to generation" means to you at this emotional time in your life?

DG: Now I'm going to cry! It means that we learn from the past in order to create a future. We are merely temporary characters in the huge story of life. Our loved ones teach us and set an example for us and we carry it forward as best we can. I have lost my father. He can't be there for me anymore to support me or pick me up and offer wisdom or reactions only a father can. It's on me now. I'm ready, but I'll miss that role he played. The day after Dad died, I wanted to share show proud I was of Max for working hard and finishing his bar mitzvah practice, even as he was absorbing the blow of losing his grandfather. That pride is a father's pride, and it was now mine, but mine alone. He was the guy I wanted to tell. This weekend I will give my son the prayer book my father gave me. He wrote, "Maybe you will give this to your son one day on his Bar Mitzva day." And so I will with a hug and a smile as I try to impart to him important life lessons I learned from my father.

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