Redux: A Literary Journal: #65: "Midrash" by Sandell Morse

Redux: A Literary Journal: #65: "Midrash" by Sandell Morse http://www.reduxlitjournal.com/2013/01/65-midrash-by-sandell-morse.html?spref=bl

This story was previously published in the New England Review( 1997).              

Bessie Feldman parks her car in front of Hebrew ...

Forgiveness

“Every encounter with forgiveness requires defeating the ego over and over again.”

                                                                                                Gandhi

Two nights ago at dinner, my granddaughter bore down on me in anger. I don’t remember her words, but I see her face, eyes cold, lips pursed and spitting words. Shouting as if I were her thirteen year old adversary instead of her seventy-three year old grandmother, she was relentless. Mean. Melting inside, I sat tall, found what I hoped was a soft but firm voice and said, “N., go to your room.” She pushed back her chair, rose silently, and walked from the dining room. A day passed without our speaking or  seeing one another, although we lived in the same house. This morning before leaving for an early morning yoga class, I offered a ride to the bus stop. She accepted. 

           Driving, I asked about yesterday’s cross-country ski meet, her dance lesson, each question a slick of ice covering the deep pool of our discontent. This was not the time to address her disrespect, her tone of voice. This was a time for both of us to take a breath and to reflect, consciously or not. My grand daughter talked openly and energetically about the meet—she fell down three times, but that didn’t matter. She had fun. In her dance class, she was learning a routine. “You start down on the floor,” she said, then reciting each move, she explained how each dancer rose to her feet.

            At the bus stop, I shifted the car into park. We sat in silence, but not uncomfortably.  “I’m sorry, Grammy,” my grand daughter  said, her voice soft and contrite.

            I don’t remember what else she said. Perhaps, I didn’t need to hear more. Turning to face her, my voice grew thick. “We love each other very much, don’t we?” 

            She nodded.

            Because I’m preparing for my Bat Mitzvah, I’m thinking deeply about moments like this one. What are the values I want to pass on? Atonement? Yes. Forgiveness? Yes. But how do you forgive when your ego won’t let go, insisting instead of holding onto hurt? Anger’s doppelganger is fear. Afraid to reveal vulnerability, we hide inside of anger’s hard shell. We need to stick out necks, but hiding feels safer. It’s not. Anger leaves a path strewn with destruction. Stepping out of anger and ego, we step into a place of humility and of harmony. Love springs forth as it did for Nina and me. So what do I want our family to value now and after I’m gone? That extra breath where the ego gives way and we draw forgiveness into our lungs. 

I Did It List

I’m a writer who beats herself up. Most of us do. So I want to thank Erika Dreifus (http://www.erikadreifus.com/newsletter/current/) for her adaptation of Lisa Romeo’s post, Looking Back, Looking Ahead, No Regrets please (http://lisaromeo.blogspot.com/). These past few months, the rejections have come in, plunging me down into that place where writers go when they're despondent. It's rather dark in there. So I'm climbing out to write my "I DId It List" for 2012 as Lisa suggests. 

After a trip to France in 2011, I completed four essays on material I gathered there, researching and interviewing, beginning a series of essays related to Jews in France during the Second World War, one about Germaine Poliakov is published in ASCENT  (http://readthebestwriting.com/?p=1581).

Returning to France this past fall, I interviewed Germaine Poliakov for a second time. Germaine is ninety-four, vibrant and sharp. I drafted an essay about her life in Paris after the Second World War. Then, traveling and conducting three more interviews, I drafted three more essays.

An essay, “The Groves,” won second prize in the Press 53 Open Awards Contest, and is published in the Press 53 Anthology, 2012. That same essay is upcoming in CALYX.

An essay was named a finalist in the Maine Literary Awards, short nonfiction category for 2012.

I was awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (http://www.vcca.com/main/index.php).

I met two wonderful writers, West Moss (http://theyearofmynovel.blogspot.com/2012/06/home-again.html) and David Ebenbach (http://davidebenbach.com). .

I strengthened my friendship with writer, Kristen Cosby (http://www.kristencosby.com).

I have taken Steve Almond’s (http://stevealmondjoy.com) seminar “How to Create an Irresistible Narrator” at Grub Street in Boston.

With the help of one of my sons and daughters in law, I have updated my blog to include links and I have committed to publishing more often.

I continue to work with my wonderful writing group, driving to Brookline ten times each semester to sit at the table with nine wonderful women.

Probably, after I publish this blog, I will think of more that I could have added to this list, but this is enough to keep me looking ahead without regrets, as Lisa Romeo suggests. I'm so happy to have discovered her website. 

Not a bad idea to make a similar list for other aspects of my life.

A happy and healthy New Year to all.  

What Is An Ethical Will?

Lev, my teacher, my guide to my Bat Mitzvah, is big on ethical wills. We talked about them years ago on Thursdays when a group of us met to study Torah, Torah in the broadest sense of Jewish learning. We were supposed to write one. We never did. Teaching a class at the University of New Hampshire, Lev asked his students to write ethical wills. A friend who teaches at the University told me, Lev’s students weren’t thrilled. The assignment seemed odd. Who would ask an eighteen year old to write an ethical will?

So just what is an ethical will? It’s not a living will, a document in which you communicate your wishes to medical personal and to your family when you are alive, but unable to express those wishes yourself. It is not a legal will, the document that distributes your material possessions and is read after your death.

In Jewish culture, ethical wills date back to the Hebrew bible, Jacob gathering his twelve sons (Where was Dina?) around his death bed, so that he can bless each, Moses blessing each of those twelve tribes after God tells him he will not enter the promised land. So ethical wills are blessings and moral pronouncements that began in our oral tradition. Overtime time a written tradition evolved, and ethical wills became known as Teachings of the Fathers. I will call them Teachings of the Mothers and the Fathers.

            In his book, Ethical Wills, K. Baines, lists transitions that might inspire one to write an ethical will: a single woman or man not planning to have children, but wanting to bequeath values to nieces or nephews, an engaged couple articulating values they want to share, parents reflecting after the birth of a child, parents reflecting as they raise children, divorced parents, reaffirming values for themselves and their children, men and women of middle age and beyond, capturing and harvesting values. Ethical wills are about reflection. So when Lev asked his students to write ethical wills, he was teaching them to look at themselves, to consider, to be aware, to go deeper. How cool was that?

            So as part of my journey to a Bat Mitzvah, I will write an ethical will, harvesting my values and gathering family stories. I will write and reflect, hoping that what I pass on will spark my children and my grandchildren to dive down into their own memories, their own reflections, and in this way we will link generations. For me an ethical will is about that linking. A way—not the only way—but a way to give meaning to our lives. 

Sentience

Awareness. Is awareness one of the ten values I will name preparing for my Bat Mitzvah? The word feels strange on my tongue. Aware meaning cognizant, conscious, alert. Ness, a suffix attached to an adjective or a participle to form an abstract noun that denotes a quality or a state. Such as: goodness, kindness, darkness. A synonym of awareness is mindful; an antonym, oblivious.

Last Friday, before the snow that fell over the weekend, I drove home, pulled into the garage, and as I stepped into the kitchen, Dick said, “How do you like your fields?”

He’s like that. No hello. A quick question. After all these years, I still can’t take a breath. I blurt. “What fields?”

“Out by the driveway. Didn’t you notice them?”

I’d asked to have those fields cut down at the end of summer, but neither Paul nor Matt, the two men who run the lawn crew had managed to get the job done. Then, Matt had a stroke, and the fields became unimportant. I figured someone on the crew would cut them down in the spring. But Paul arrived. Probably, he’d listened to the weather report. I hooked the dogs to their leashes and walked outside. Tall stalks of dried grass lay on the ground like pick up sticks, small birds foraging. 

To be aware. To notice. To take in. That’s my job as a writer. So why, when I’m not in my writing space—space being both a state of mind and a place—do I check out? Because awareness is hard. To be present, cognizant, conscious, alert. That is one edge of the knife blade for a writer. The other is a kind of drifting inside that space, what I call space around the space.

But back to my drive along the driveway. What had I been doing inside my car? Listening to a C D of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a book I’ve wanted to reread for years, and knew I never would, so I borrowed the tapes from the library. My attention was focused on listening and on watching where I was going. Perhaps, awareness is inward as well as outward, a sifting of stimuli. And what of complete inattention, a moment last summer, sitting on a weathered wooden bench at the edge of the sea, dogs at my feet, the scent of salt, the squawk of gulls, my mind as open as the sky? Perhaps, that, too, is awareness.

Still that word, awareness, chafes. Is sentience my word? An online dictionary defines sentience: feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception or thought. No, that doesn’t work either. Perhaps what I value is sentient awareness, a place where unknowing and knowing intertwine. 

This Season of Giving

Now that I am thinking about values, I cherish and wish to pass on, they spill forth, integrity, honesty, compassion and in this season of giving tzedakah, a Hebrew word we often translate as charity.

            Yesterday at a Bat Mitzvah at Temple Israel in Boston, I listened as Suzie, a young cousin, described her tzedakah project, volunteering for an organization that gives birthday parties to homeless children. The project brought her to a homeless shelter in Roxbury. How lovely and poised she was talking about her experiences. How well versed in Hebrew as she read from the Torah, led us prayer. How articulate as she interpreted her Torah portion. Yesterday, standing on the bima, the altar, her grandparents and her parents passed her the Torah, both literally, and figuratively, handing her the scroll, passing on Jewish tradition. Jewish values.

            I never had a Bat Mitzvah. My sons did not have Bar Mitzvahs. No formal Jewish education for any of us. I came back to Judaism too late for that. Sitting in the sanctuary, yesterday, I realized my own journey toward a Bat Mitzvah would be the opposite of Suzie’s. I would not receive the Torah; I would pass it on to my grandchildren in a more formal way than I’d done for my sons. For Torah is more than the scroll, more than Midrash, those years of interpretation of the texts. Torah is a way of life integrally involving mitzvot or good deeds. And tzedakah.

            Before Suzie’s service, I spent time in a small room off a corridor viewing an exhibit where artists had painted, constructed and built tzedakah boxes. A traditional tzedakah box is just that, a box with a slot where you drop in coins or bills, then choose a charity to which you’ll donate. These tzedakah boxes were works of art. Words accompanied the exhibit, and I learned that tzedakah literally means righteousness or justice. This is the concept of Jewish charity I want to pass on. In Jewish tradition, charity is not a favor we give to the poor, but something the poor have a right to, and we as donors have an obligation to provide. And most important is the spirit with which we give, for the value of our gift increases with human kindness. And the most highly valued gift of all is a gift of the self.

            Happy giving to all. 

Let's Talk

What makes a value Jewish? How can Judaism claim what many of us value, Jewish or not? I shift in my chair. Face Lev. This is another moment in that Starbuck’s in Winchester when we met. In front of me, a display of red and white mugs, wrapped with red bows. Outside, the white lights of Christmas. Lev gives me a knowing smile. “So, Judaism gives us this, these values and it (Judaism) includes anybody who has these values.”

So because I am Jewish, exploring values such as my love of learning or my commitment caring for others, those less fortunate or those who are sick, in a Jewish context, those values become Jewish. Is that what Lev is saying?

“Yes,” he says.

And here I am—it seems—exploring a constant theme in my life and my work: Jewish identity. When I began my writing life as a fiction writer, none of my characters was Jewish, and many of my stories lacked an authenticity, something intangible that shone through certain characters. I, the writer, was wishy-washy, refusing to declare an essence. Was that character Jewish? I, the character and the reader needed to know. But in real life, I could pass, and I did, sometimes declaring I was Jewish, sometimes not. I hid behind a wreath on my door, a Christmas tree in my living room. The only Jews in our rural New Hampshire town where I was raising my family, I truly believed I could live inside the landscape of a Currier and Ives print. Walking into woods behind our house with my husband and my sons, we would choose a tree, chop it down, drag it home through snow.

Those romantic images of country life have an underside. When I began teaching language arts to fifth through eighth graders in my town, the two most hurled insults on the playground were the N word and Jew. I denounced both, told my class I was Jewish. A sixth grade boy brought me a book: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in 1902, The Protocols is a anti-Semitic rant, purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. It is a forgery. That same sixth grader asked to see my horns. I’d thought such myths associating Jews with the devil had died out with the middle ages, but he year was 1972. I taught tolerance. At home, I told myself, I could do both, turn on the lights of my Christmas tree and light my Hanukkah menorah. My children were wiser. “Mom, it’s too confusing,” Richard my oldest son said. “Can’t we just celebrate Hanukkah.”

            And we did.

            As the years passed, I became more and more visibly Jewish which meant for me, studying Torah, especially the women of the Hebrew Bible. I read and I read, diving down into the wealth of Jewish learning. I brought what was deep inside of me to the surface, memories of cooking with my grandmother as she prepared shabbos dinner, then circled her thick fingers over the candle flames before blessing the shabbos candles. I learned the prayer, moved my own fingers in a circle, and gathering in goodness and light, I blessed the candles inside my grandmother’s brass candlesticks.

So, is Jewish identity a value I can pass on? Although I’d like to do just that, I can’t. Each of us has our own journey toward that philosophic search for self. What I can pass on is a desire to know and to learn. A wealth of Jewish learning trails behind us. Only by knowing where we came from will we learn who we are. 

Judaism is a religion of dialogue. I invite your comments. Let’s talk.