Parashat Yitro, 5770, Bileca
Steve Bileca
Parashat Yitro
February 6, 2010/22 Shevat 5770
Shabbat Shalom.
Picture the following scene for a moment.
A seven year old child returns home from Hebrew School. Parked in his driveway, he sees the car of his uncle Vasile and knows that his grandparents are visiting. They are not Jewish, they do not really speak English, they love him unconditionally. A dilemma. He knows that his parents were born to two different religions, that his father converted to Judaism before he was born. He knows his Zayde’s mother tongue is Yiddish, his Papu’s Aromaneaste, a nearly lost language of the Balkans. He feels a tug inside, a slight rending. If he goes through the door with his homework papers in hand, Hebrew letters carefully copied onto the ditto sheets, will he cause his grandmother and grandfather, his Moomie and his Papu – some kind of pain? Will he shame his father by extension? And if he throws the papers into the trash can on the curb, what would his Zayde, the rabbi, have thought? He had been dead a year now, but he still lived vividly in the boy’s mind. How would that make his mother feel? The boy stood for five, ten, fifteen minutes, unsure what to do.
Kibbud av ve’em. How do we honor our parents? Like many of us, it is a question I’ve wrestled with most of my life.
In this week’s parashah, the Ten Commandments are revealed to Moses and the Israelites. Rabbinic teaching points out that the first four commandments concern our relationship with God while the last five concern our relationships with others in the world. The first four, what we owe the Creator due to the divine act of creation; the last five, what we owe others by virtue of sharing existence with them. The fifth commandment of kibbud av ve’em – to honor one’s parents -- is what joins the two parts. Without my parents, I would not exist and therefore wouldn’t be able to fulfill either set of commandments. When the tablets are inscribed, kibbud av v’em will be on the first tablet, on the side of the Divine. And yet our parents – at least my parents – are most definitely human. We owe our parents all that we owe others, and yet that is still not enough weight on the scale. For we also owe our parents – like God – an infinite debt for having participated in our creation.
Perhaps this is why Shimon bar Yachai taught that kibbud av ve’em is the most difficult commandment to follow. The word kibbud comes from the root kaf bet dalet, signifying “weighty.” And indeed at times the responsibility of honoring parents is a heavy one. Lately, as my father’s health has been deteriorating, it has become more insistent, more urgent. Watching the effects of his decline on my mother and my siblings, all of whom live within 15 miles of one another, has been hard. Trying to help, to honor, and to mediate from 3,500 miles away has been, at times, a nearly unbearable weight.
But we might also liken the heaviness of kibbud to the weight of an anchor. Just as a boat would eventually become lost without the ability to cast anchor once in a while, we children risk setting ourselves adrift if we lose sight of what we owe our parents. And if too many of us float far enough away enough from their caring shores, society will soon find itself in a state of perpetual shipwreck.
Significantly, the commandment doesn’t ask us to love our parents; it asks us to honor them. This makes sense to me. Thirty five years after the scene I just sketched, I can tell you now that I wasn’t trying to find a way to love my parents or my grandparents in that moment. Love flowed easily and abundantly between my family members, and continues to do so, thank God. No, in a very seven-year old way, I was trying to find the proper way to honor them. Sometimes that’s a much harder thing to do. In the years since, I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten it just right. Do we ever?
Kibbud av ve’em. How do we honor our parents?
The drama of my parent’s life stories is not unique. Many from their generation experienced similar ordeals and similar joys. But the stories themselves ARE unique to them, as all stories are precious to their owners. I am beginning to grasp just how important it is to understand and to preserve that singularity. And I am coming to see that one powerful aspect of Kibbud av ve’em involves seeing with our hearts the fullness of our parents’ life stories, to find subtle and myriad shades of meaning where once we might have seen only a single, broad brushstroke.
In this drash, I would like to bring some of these meanings to light. I share them with you this morning because for me Netivot Shalom is above all a place of spiritual yearning, individual and communal. Although my parents are not physically here today, they have visited in the past, and I think they grasp the good that can arise from sharing soulful intentions in a place like this.
My mother was born in South Africa by accident. Her father, my Zayde, had gone to Palestine following his graduation from Yeshiva University. He had been invited to study with Rav Abraham Kook and received his smicha just as the 1936 Revolt in Hebron erupted. Though his own family had emigrated to the United States via Cuba 15 years earlier, in 1936 he chose to return to Lithuania, where he was born, in order to meet the bride who was waiting for him there. The bride’s two brothers had been sent by their families to Southern Africa in the 1920’s, when they were adolescents, in order to escape escalating anti-Semitism in the hopes that the rest of the family would soon follow. So my grandparents left Lithuania for South Africa shortly after their wedding, intending to stay in Johannesburg for a few months with her brothers, who by now had become successful men in their adopted country. My grandparents’ plan was to return to the United States and for my Zayde to follow his own father’s steps to become a practicing rabbi.
But the war had other plans for them.
My mother was born in Johannesburg shortly before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Her father postponed his return to America as long as possible. But a business opportunity lured him back. In uncertain times, he needed a way to care for his family. And so he left his wife and child in Africa, safe in the hands of his brothers-in-law and made the journey alone in order to open a restaurant on Wall Street with another family member.
Two years passed. Love can pull hard.
It pulled my grandmother back to her husband despite the danger of making that crossing in 1942 with a 3 year-old in tow. The ship they sailed was torpedoed about a hundred miles off the US Coast. Most of the passengers made it safely aboard the four life rafts. Three were rescued three days later by the US Navy. The one missing raft had on board a young Lithuanian bride and her 3 year old daughter. So close to reuniting their small family, they were now terrifyingly far away. Two weeks later, when the missing raft was finally picked up, the naval officers found my mother in the care of a young Swiss woman. Her own mother – my grandmother – had died that very morning. She had given the meager rations to her daughter so that she might survive, and she herself died of exposure and dehydration. The three year old’s eyes remember to this day watching her mother get buried at sea.
Kibbud av ve’em. How do you honor a mother you no longer have, who has sacrificed her life so that you may live?
My Zayde, inwardly broken by the death of his wife but resolved to make a living for his daughter, worked his restaurant. But how could he ensure that his child was cared for during his fourteen hour workdays? He sent her to live with his own parents, in far away Pennsylvania, where my great-grandfather was the orthodox rabbi in Harrisburg. My Zayde lived and worked alone during the week. He traveled four hours each way to Harrisburg every single weekend in order to spend a few precious hours with his daughter. I don’t know if this was the first time he broke the Shabbas prohibition against travel. But I would like to think that his own father forgave him for it, and that he forgave himself as well.
Kibbud av ve’em. How do you honor a father who does this for the sake of his daughter?
When the travel became unbearable, he found a family that took my mother in while he worked Sunday through Friday. On the Shabbas days they spent together, my mother didn’t share with him anything about the cruelty the family showed her during the week. For they didn’t treat her as the “step-daughter” they promised. Far from it. Perhaps she didn’t want to take away from the happiness they felt at being together. Perhaps at some level, this was her way to honor her mother – by being the least troublesome daughter she could be, by not worrying her father. I do know that my mother bore the cruelty until she simply couldn’t endure it anymore.
Twelve years later. My Zayde had remarried in order to give my mother a home, his home. My mother chooses to go to a college not in NYC, and he consents, hard as it must have been for him. Bridgeport CT isn’t that far away, but it was far enough. Far enough. First year of college and my mother meets a young man, falls deeply in love with him, hides the relationship from her parents. The young man is not Jewish. And she worries about Kibbud av ve’em. She feels it and she knows. And yet love pulls…
You can imagine her parents’ reaction when they found out.
They withdrew her from college. My Zayde dropped everything – his restaurant, his work, his community – and left for an extended trip with his only daughter. They traveled to Israel and stayed a while. They returned to South Africa to visit her uncles. Six months later my grandfather returned to Brooklyn with my mother. He was sure the spell had been broken.
But love pulls hard. My mother secretly wrote letters to the young man throughout the journey, and he wrote back. An aunt in Johannesburg acted as the go-between.
Kibbud av ve’em. How do you honor a parent’s ability to self-sacrifice? How do you honor a father who has lost his wife and given up his calling in part for your sake? Do you follow the half of your heart that compels you to respect his wishes and his devotion to you, to remain under the literal and metaphorical shelter of family, tradition and religion? Or do you follow the other half, the half that responds to the call of love and fulfillment even though, or maybe precisely because it extends beyond the particularity of parental protection and religious identity?
My mother eloped with my father a few days after returning to Brooklyn. When he found out, my grandfather began making preparations to sit shiva.
* * *
When I turn to my father’s life story, I am just as perplexed and awed by the question of how to honor parents.
My father was born into a remote Balkan ethnic group known as the Aromanians or Vlachs in a tiny village in present-day Bulgaria near the Black Sea. The region where he was born had been taken by the Romanians in the Balkan wars leading up to WWI, and the Romanians sought to populate it with as many non-Bulgarians as possible. So it was that my paternal grandparents were lured there from Albania, where they had been born. Much like the resettlement of the Lithuanian shtetl populations to South Africa, my grandparents’ village of Frasari moved en masse from the rugged Albanian-Greek border region that formed their ancestral homeland to the linguistically related country of Romania. They too were escaping a particularly ugly form of xenophobia and nationalism.
In 1940, when my father was a little boy, the Nazis forced Romania to cede the land back to Bulgaria. The very next day my father watched the front door of his home burst open. The neighboring Bulgarian peasants razed the village in order to repossess it. Cowering underneath a cast-iron bed with his older siblings, my father saw his mother get shot as my grandfather narrowly escaped death by jumping out a window. With less warning than the Sephardim in 1492, that very evening the entire village packed what they could carry, left everything else, and began the journey to safety across the new border. My grandmother was taken by relatives on horseback to faraway Bucharest. It would be weeks before the family knew that my grandmother survived the attack. My father’s family spent the war years moving throughout Romania, briefly settling in six different towns, all the while fleeing Romanian fascists, German Nazis and Russian Communists. Throughout it all, my grandfather somehow managed to provide for his five children and wife. By turns, a milkman, an itinerant merchant and a store owner, my Papu never once bemoaned his fate in front of his children. And none of his children can recall ever seeing him break down or even complain, much less give in to despair. This includes the equally difficult times that were to come, when they immigrated to America on a freighter quite literally with only the clothes on their backs.
Kibbud av ve’em. How can one honor the example that parents set for their children? How can we possibly repay the lessons they wittingly, and so often unconsciously, impart to us?
As a child growing up, my father told me many, many anecdotes of these war years. He began writing them down a few years ago, in the format of a kind of Bildungsroman, a story of moral development, as a gift to his children and grandchildren.
Two of these stories have left an especially deep mark on me.
When he was seven years old, my father’s family settled in the town of Suceava, where they were permitted to move into a stately home, recently abandoned. As my father recounts it, he didn’t understand what the word “Jew” meant when he asked his parents who lived in the house before them, and why it was left just so. Then they explained some of the terrible rumors that were spreading about the fate of these Jews. As he tells it, from that moment on, my seven-year old father became obsessed with the thought that there was a family like his own, with a little boy like him, somewhere in Europe, terrified because they had been forced out of their home and had nowhere to go. In a large Byzantine church around the corner from this house, he spent hours asking God how he could allow such a thing to happen. This is when, he has told me many times, God became a life-long problem for him.
Second story. Same town, same year. My father was sitting in the yard of his house. Next to him was a pear tree ripe with fruit. An elderly woman came by and asked him if he would pick one for her. Without knowing why, he refused. Hungry, she asked again for him at least to give her a fallen pear from the ground. Still, he refused. As he recounts it, he knew he was doing wrong, but felt powerless to do right. Why? He didn’t know. I do know that the regret he felt for his actions has haunted him ever since. Forty-five years later my father underwent a particularly complicated and life-threatening open-heart surgery. When he awoke to find himself miraculously alive, it was the memory of this old woman that filled his being. Still unable to give her the fruit she asked for, with no way for him to answer her simple plea differently, he yearned for a second chance. I believe he still does.
Kibbud av ve’em. How can I honor my father for teaching his children such things? For loving us enough to share his searing experiences in order to awaken a moral sense in us? For wanting us not to suffer as he did, but still to glean the bitter-sweet fruit of a sharpened conscience?
I was given an extraordinary opportunity to attempt to practice kibbud av with him two years ago, when he made his first and only trip back to Romania since leaving as a 10-year old boy. I had been pleading with him to return for many years. He hadn’t been ready. My family, my brother’s family, and my mother accompanied him when he finally was.
Among the many overwhelming events of that trip, two incidents will forever live in my mind as moments when I may have gotten kibbud av ve’em close to right.
With a Romanian uncle at the wheel, my brother, father and I drove into Bulgaria in search of the village where he was born. Years earlier, he heard his house had been destroyed. But still, he wanted to see the village one last time. It wasn’t easy to find, for the name had long since changed and between the four of us we didn’t speak a single word of Bulgarian. On the way, my brother and I were bracing for how best to comfort my father. For we were afraid that either we wouldn’t find the place at all, or that if we did, it would be nothing like the memories he preserved of it. After all, he had fled as a 4 year-old boy -- whatever he remembered must have long been enhanced or tinged by the haze of intervening decades. In fact, when we did find the village, nothing original remained of it. Not the fountain, not the schoolhouse, not the church, certainly not his house. We tried to ask a number of peasants if we were in the right place, but we had no common language. Depressed, we began to drive away. At the edge of the village, we saw three men drinking coffee in a front yard. We stopped one last time. English? No. Romanian? No. Bulgarian? They asked. Nyet. As we got back into the car, I thought to ask “Deutch”. “Ja,” one old man sputtered. His few words were enough to find us the former mayor of the village, who spoke enough Romanian to unlock a lost world. Five minutes later, he accompanied us down the hill to the lower reaches of the old village of Frasari. Here it was. All of it. Counting paces backwards from the ruins of the church, my father recognized his street, each of his uncle’s homes, the house where his grandfather had lived.
Words don’t exist for what I felt as I watched him kiss the walls of the house he was born in. Though it was half-abandoned, it hadn’t been destroyed after all. He caressed the trees his father had planted, looked out over folds of hills that matched in every detail his photographic recounting. The mayor asked someone to force the front door open. There in exactly the same spot where nearly 70 years earlier my father had seen his mother get shot, was a cast-iron bed just like the one he remembered, the one under which his older siblings had sheltered him as their parents’ lives hung in terrible uncertainty.
Before we left, we filled our pockets until bursting with over-ripe apricots from a tree in the yard. They weren’t the pears he had denied the old woman, but to me they were nearly as sweet.
A few weeks later, we were in the town of Suceava. The town had been destroyed during the war and what was left had been rebuilt under Ceaucescu’s less-than-fashionable Eastern European Communist aesthetic. It was unrecognizable to him. We left the rest of our family in a park on the edge of town as my father and I tried to find remnants of his past. I’ll save you the long version. In the end, I was able to find us a man in a travel agency who knew the layout of the old city and an elderly woman who led us to the neighborhood he had lived in. Still, he recognized none of it.
And then, surrounded by modern double-wide boulevards instead of narrow dirt roads and set off on a small hill by a neatly maintained patch of grass, we saw the Church of St. Dmitri, the place where he began to question God. We entered. I watched him wipe tears from his cheek. And I watched him stop wiping as they simply streamed down his face. What did his tears contain? Was it the awe he felt as a child? The yearning he knew as an adult? The lifetime’s worth of struggle with questions that were still waiting be answered?
Kibbud av ve’em. Being with him in that deep place, having helped him literally to find it again, caused the meaning of this commandment to vibrate almost palpably within me. At once, a weight was lifted and an anchor was dropped.
***
In the end, my Zayde didn’t sit shiva. My father converted, though it was out of sincere respect for my mother’s family and the idea of religion rather than out of belief. The two men became very close. In fact, the only Bubbe I ever knew, my Zayde’s second wife, once told me that my Zayde insisted that the most beautiful thing that ever happened to him was not sitting shiva that day, that the best thing my mother did for him was to marry my father.
Kibbud av ve’em. And here I am, left still with questions.
What is it that the commandment wishes me to accomplish by honoring my parents? How do I approach this infinite debt I owe to them both, and to each of the cultures represented by the two sets of my ancestors?
One day, I hope in the far future, I will say the words “may their memory be for a blessing.” The trace they leave behind will be in me, in the deeds they have done during their lives, and in their names that carry on for a while. But I believe that the honor I show them then through “zachor” will have the same origin as what I can do for them now. It is, at bottom, perhaps related to that desire for immortality we all feel at one time or another. How can we better honor our parents, if not to remind them that their lives have meant something, that they have lived and hoped and dreamt about things that matter, that they have tried to leave the world better for having been in it. How better than to teach these same values, including kibbud av ve’em, to our own children, so that, in a distant time when our own names are faint or forgotten, the desire to do good still remains, transmitted through the generations.
Kibbud av ve’em.
Oh, and by the way, the seven-year old me found a very seven-year old solution to the Hebrew homework dilemma. I folded the dittos, put them inside my book and placed it under the front yard hedges. When I came back for them later that night they were a little damp, but still there.
Shabbat Shalom.