Rosh Hashanah

Dear Mom,

So it's our New Years Eve, and I made my challah yesterday - not one of my best, but a challah, so there's that - and now I'm waiting for Myke to get back from school so we can observe together.

I was talking about Jewish holidays last night during my Holocaust class - not in any great detail because the lecture is perilously close to running behind the readings, but I was giving them an overall grounding in Jewish history and culture because how can you begin to understand what happened if you don't understand the people to whom it happened, and why they were 'selected'? Anyway, that got me remembering, and then later I was telling our friend Ruthie about our family traditions, and how you made it a family thing, a series of rituals that were given meaning, in part, by the way the family fathered together to enact them.

You were never 'religious' in the conventional sense, although in your own way very spiritual - I remember referring to you as an 'atheist' and you corrected me. You believed in God - or at least in some sort of Superior Being - but weren't comfortable with most organized religions. And, like me, you had a distrust of extremes and extremists.

But Rosh Hashanah and Passover, in particular, were very meaningful to you. I'll never forget the time that, after we'd been deeply estranged for most of a year, I called to ask about the New Year. You were cool - as you'd been for awhile - and said you weren't doing anything special, no big meal or studied observance, but if I wanted to come up from New Jersey, that would be fine, but you weren't extending yourself and you weren't planning on cooking. After stewing for awhile I came to understand - with some help from Jonathan, of all people - that you needed to know that when the chips were down I might be willing to jump through a hoop or two for you, rather than always expecting it to be the other way around. Could I do that? I decided I could. So I called you up and said sure, I'd come, and I'd provide dinner. We arranged for me to meet you at the DMV and we'd go back to your place together.

Well, you came back from lunch soon after I got there, and introduced me around - you'd been there for years but it was my first time visiting you at work - and were able to take off early. We stopped for me to pick up the things I needed for dinner and you added a couple of staples to my basket, and as I went to pay for them you pressed a couple of bills in my hand - more than the cost of what you were getting. When I tried to give you change you waved me away irritably. As we continued to walk, you said you needed to stop in the bakery, where you bought a challah, and the liquor store for wine. "I thought you weren't making a fuss," I said, and you said, "It's Rosh Hashanah. We have to have wine. And bread."

We talked while I cooked, about things I don't remember, and things I remember precisely and well. Jonathan joined us when he got out of work. When we left, I felt the thaw had started. Which it had. Happy New Year indeed. We were all written in the Book of Life for another year, and some years after that.

I miss you. I love you. Those things never change.

b