Ask Someone Who Was There

Written and posted early this week. We’re on the road, the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are full, and there wasn’t a good hour left in front of Shabbat.

We packed the car last night and we’re driving east today, most of the way across the country, off the road well before candle-lighting. My husband runs the music, which lately means Hebrew and country in whatever order Spotify hands them over. I like the long drives more than I should. Somewhere in the third hour the conversation thins out and what’s left is whatever you’ve been carrying around for a month without looking at it.

This month it’s been one verse.

Ha’azinu is almost entirely song. Moshe has days left. Instead of a final speech he’s given a poem — seventy-odd verses, and the instruction is to teach it to them so they’ll have it by heart. Not for now. For later, when he’s gone and the land is good and everybody has comfortably forgotten what it cost to get there. He’s writing something to be carried by people he won’t be around to correct. Then he tells them who to ask.

זְכֹר֙ יְמ֣וֹת עוֹלָ֔ם בִּ֖ינוּ שְׁנ֣וֹת דֹּר־וָדֹ֑ר שְׁאַ֤ל אָבִ֙יךָ֙ וְיַגֵּ֔דְךָ זְקֵנֶ֖יךָ וְיֹ֥אמְרוּ לָֽךְ׃

Remember the days of old, consider the years of ages past; ask your parent, who will inform you, your elders, who will tell you.

— Devarim 32:7

Ask your parent. Your elders will tell you.

I came up out of the mikveh as Uriel ben Avraham Avinu v’Sarah Imenu. The Uriel I chose. The rest of it is what every convert gets — no Jewish parents to name, so you’re given Abraham and Sarah’s. Nobody in my close line lit candles on a Friday. My mother was nominally Catholic and didn’t practise it, and she died when I was twenty, years before I had a single one of these questions to ask her. My father is alive. This year has been hard on his health.

For a long time I read that verse as a door shut to me, and I was wrong about it in a way that took paperwork to notice.

When my husband and I started the aliyah application we had to trace his family back through the generations, so I ran mine down alongside it. My great-grandfather was a Jew. He married out, the thread dropped, and the family never said a word about him in three generations — but he’d named his daughter (my grandmother) Leah.

Then this past Pesach my father mentioned, in passing, that as a boy he ate matzah every spring and never knew why. Just something his mother did.

That’s what I keep turning over, because Moshe knew it. He doesn’t just hand them a legal code to memorize nor only a history lecture. He also hands them a song — and the difference is engineering. An argument needs somebody who can still explain it. A tune doesn’t. A tune rides along inside people who have lost the reason, gets sung at the right time of year by somebody who couldn’t tell you what it’s for, and comes out the other end of a bad century intact.

You can hear the thing working this week. There are melodies that only come out for these weeks — the same words you say all year, set to something you won’t hear in the other eleven months — and the tune tells you where you are in the year before you’ve processed a syllable of the Hebrew. Somebody who has lost the language entirely still knows, from about four bars, that this is not an ordinary Shabbat. The information is in the music. It was put there on purpose, by people who understood that words are the part that goes first.

Which cuts both ways, because a tune doesn’t check what it’s carrying. At some point I noticed that one of the melodies we sing is Itsy Bitsy Spider. I would like to report that I then un-noticed it. I did not. It’s there every time now, it will be there this year, and it will be there when I am eighty. The mechanism that kept my grandmother’s matzah on the table for three generations of people who couldn’t have explained it is the same indiscriminate mechanism that put a nursery rhyme in my shul. It carries whatever you hand it.

And Leah’s matzah was exactly that. No framework around it, no vocabulary, nothing anybody could have written down. A woman put unleavened bread on the table every spring, her son ate it and didn’t ask, and it reached me anyway.

So I ask now, constantly, and I ask people who aren’t my parents. I ask my rabbi things I’m slightly embarrassed to be asking a year and a bit in. People answer — enthusiastically, at length, occasionally for longer than I wanted. There’s a particular delight Jews take in being asked. The verse gave them a job.

Over Rosh Hashanah I kept going back to Avraham walking Isaac up the mountain, and I suspect I was doing arithmetic most of the room wasn’t. That man is my father. Not as a metaphor — by name, the one I was given at the mikveh, the one I’m called to the Torah by. Every convert is handed him. And the story the year opens on is him going up a hill with his son, the wood, and a knife, fully intending to go through with it.

He doesn’t. That matters and it isn’t the part that stayed with me. What stayed with me is that somebody born into this inherits Avraham the way you inherit a grandparent in a photograph, and he’s been furniture since before you could read. I was given him on a specific afternoon, in front of three rabbis, as my father — and then went away and read about the worst morning of his life. Nobody warned me. Nobody had to. They’d had him a lot longer than I had.

This Shabbat is Shabbat Shuva, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and the word is teshuvah — usually translated repentance, though it’s built on the root for return.

Which should sit badly with somebody like me. Return to what? But I’d rather not spend the drive on the beautiful version of that question, because there’s a plainer one next to it and it has a clock on it. The verse says ask your parent. My father is the only one left to ask, he is not well, and almost everything he knows he doesn’t know he knows. Nobody is going to hand me a list of what’s in there. I have to think of the questions myself, I have to think of them now, and mostly I’ve been busy.

That’s the accounting I’m bringing into next week. Not the large one about the year. The small one about whether I’m still asking, or whether a year and a bit in I’ve started nodding along like a man who already knows.

We’ll get in before Shabbat, unpack a little, light the candles somewhere new. And tomorrow, before it starts, I’m going to call my father — not about any of this, he’d have no idea what I was on about. Just to call him.

Though I might ask what else she made.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham