Remembrance of Things Past

By Rabbi Elyse Winick
KOACH Assistant Director

It’s funny how different ears can hear the same sounds in different ways. The midrash says just that about the sound of the thunder on Mount Sinai at the moment of Revelation: one sound was made, but there were many voices, each in tune with the ear of the individual listener.

When I considered the theme of this month’s KOACH on Campus, I heard it very differently than the rest of our authors. I heard the emotional tug of the holiday season. I heard the sound of my own tears.

While each of the days of the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, is filled with richness and meaning, it is Tzom Gedaliah, the Fast of Gedaliah, which colors the other nine days for me (the Yamim Noraim include the ten days beginning with Rosh HaShanah and concluding with Yom Kippur).

Who was Gedaliah and why should we fast because of him? Gedaliah ben Ahikam was the Governor of Israel in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. His assassination led to the downfall of Judean autonomy at the time, followed by the slaying of thousands of Jews and the exile of those who survived. Perhaps most painfully, his assassin was a fellow Jew, recruited by Nebuchadnezzar to commit the dastardly deed. Gedaliah had heard of the assassin’s intent, but refused to believe that it was any more than a slanderous rumor.

Most of our minor fast days mark the steps which led to the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jews. In contemporary practice, many Jews have consciously cast these fasts – including Tisha B’Av, the date which symbolizes the destruction of the Temple itself – aside, noting that we have a modern, autonomous State of Israel, thus rendering the fasts irrelevant.

I find myself in the minority, in that I continue to fast on these days. They are poignant remembrances of a world gone by, of ways in which we allowed our glory to slip through our fingers, of the anguish of a history marked by loss. I find that the fasts fill me with introspection of a national scope, moving me to make my contributions to our community both significant and lasting.

But I don’t fast on Tzom Gedaliah.

When I was seventeen, my own world was shattered on Tzom Gedaliah. It was the first day of my sophomore year of college and the day on which my father died. The whole world turned upside down for me on that day and in so many ways, it has never been the same.

We had had a perfectly unremarkable Rosh HaShanah. We went to shul for two days running, ate lots of traditionally unhealthy food. Late that night, after the holiday had ended, I had a heated disagreement with my father because I was not yet done packing. I stormed up the stairs to my room and, reaching the top of the landing, paused to call back down, "I love you." My father called me back downstairs and we reconciled. I suppose he was prepared to accept that it was my karma to do everything at the last minute. And I just didn’t want him to be angry with me, even though I thought the whole thing was stupid. As I walked away he noted that I shouldn’t take his anger as a form of rejection; there was only one way he would ever leave me. I went back to packing.

We got up early the next morning and my brother and sister-in-law drove us some two-and-a-half hours to unload my belongings in the dorm. We all joked and chatted along the way. It was a perfectly unremarkable day.

We parked as close as we could to the dorm and began to unpack the car. My brother and my father battled over who would carry the heaviest items. Finally, my brother threw up his hands and let my father shlep.

We finished moving all of my boxes and bags and I stood looking out my new window at the magnificent, tree-filled view. In the distant reaches of my mind I heard something which made me turn from the window in time to see my father collapse. I rushed to catch him as he slid to the floor.

The next five minutes are a blur. My brother began CPR. My sister-in-law tried to call for help on the as-yet-unconnected phone. I ran to try to find help. It didn’t take long for the EMTs to arrive. But I could not walk back into the room. I knew that the man I had helped to the floor was not my father anymore. And would never be again.

I don’t fast on Tzom Gedaliah. It’s customary to fast on a parent’s yahrzeit. I figure the two must cancel each other out. My father would much prefer I sit down with a quart of milk, a quart of Pepsi (yes, it used to come that way) and an Entenmann’s Apple Pie and polish them all off. This, of course, explains how I lost my father at seventeen in the first place.

Where Gedaliah was undermined by his loyalty to his fellow Jews, my father was undermined by his preference for mayonnaise on his spaghetti. It’s a far less glorious way to go. No national day of mourning will be declared for my father. But my constant sense of loss, which surges on these Days of Awe, is entwined in my personal-national identity. And the absence of a fast doesn’t mean I don’t remember. And it doesn’t mean I don’t use the opportunity to consider our national destiny. I see it looking back at me in the green-gold eyes of my oldest child, named Avi, who looks, remarkably, just like his grandfather.

These High Holy Days are indeed a time of high emotion. But that can’t ever mean that we drown in our introspection. These days are a powerful force for building the future and that, ultimately, must be the purpose of remembrance.

[Posted 9/29/05]