Repairing Generations
We sat at my grandmother’s table for Shabbat lunch most Saturday afternoons, just down a great hill from where we lived in University City, St. Louis. The meal never changed, we didn’t want it to. Cole slaw, vegetarian meatballs in a sweet and sour sauce, rich pilaf, frozen veggie burgers. We had heard stories of a grander meal before the house was converted vegetarian, but we didn’t mind. And my grandfather had a mighty affection for ice cream. After lunch the freezer would be emptied of ice cream pies from Baskin Robbins and we’d go through three of them whilst singing the songs of grace that conclude the sabbath meal.
There is a strange aphorism written of the ancestors -- all that happened to them will happen to their children. The texts of scripture are so often misread as history, and this is a good reminder of the power of mythology. The great family dramas of genesis, homelands left behind, tests of love and devotion, hatred and betrayal of brothers and kin -- the stories our ancestors lived a thousand years ago we are living again today. In a world so caught up in change, the drama of being human, the toil of finding oneself within the constellation of a family hasn’t changed at all.
I hadn’t seen my other grandmother in the years the pandemic has kept us cities apart, but she was invited to New York for a wedding, and I was invited as her date. Alone we sat before the canopy, the other guests busy with cocktails, and she drew the tree for me, her elder siblings I couldn’t even name, the great-grandparents the children all the lines running through time and trauma over oceans meeting here, grandmother and grandson guests at a wedding. I asked her if her parents taught her something of the apparent magic in her possession, an unceasing zeal for life, and joy and meaning. She said, they didn’t teach me anything, but they gave me a lot of love. And I didn’t quite believe her. We hit the dance floor hard, once in a lifetime night, and she tried to pawn me off on the bridesmaids when she couldn’t keep up, but my eyes were for her.
The text continues -- in matters of healing, there is no future and past. Abraham raises a knife over his child, and though the child is unharmed he is greatly wounded, trauma sown into the bones of all of his descendents. Lifetimes later, Moses raises his hand over the sea as it parts and the generations of the future go free, this moment reaches back in time, and heals the father and son on the mountain top.
We come from legacies personal and cultural in need of repair. And the linearity of time says that the wounds of our youth, and the youths of our ancestors are with us forever. But it’s not so. Like a tree stretching for growth into the thick dark of the earth, the eyes lead us astray. Another kind of seeing, past surfaces and simple dichotomies, where the gesture of a hand, repeated now with love instead of anger, can bring a renewal of life to the living and the dead.
On Youtube at midnight I found a melody we used to sing at that table over ice-cream. Recorded probably in Turkey, not long after the technology for making records was invented, 1920 maybe. As the tune had made its way through the generations, from Spain by horse and caravan across North Africa, and by ship through the port cities of the Mediterranean, some of the magic notes fell away, and what I heard in Missouri was closer to a frozen veggie pattie. In this sound, and the nightingale cantor Chayim Bachar Effendi, I hear the keys that open all the stories of the ancestors.
The rose blooms in the month of May
My soul darkens from the sufferings of love
The nightingale sings, sighing of love
And the passion kills me, and strengthens my pain
Come swiftly my dove
Come swiftly to me
Come quickly you to my soul
because I feel myself dying
—
La roza enflorese
En el mez de May
tMi alma s'eskurese,
Sufriendo del amor.
Los bilbilikos kantan,
Suspirando el amor,
I la pasión me mata,
Muchigua mi dolor.
Mas presto ven, palomba,
Mas presto ven a mí,
Mas presto tú mi alma,
Ke yo me vo morir.