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January 20, 2024
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parashat Bo
Brothers and Sisters
January 20, 2024 —10 Shevat 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
I have been thinking a lot about something that many of us—not all, but many—have in common: brothers and sisters. I have been in a deep brother and sister place this week for two reasons.
I am the youngest of six children. My five older siblings live in different places. Two live in Los Angeles, one in New Jersey, one in Denver, and my sister Jill and I live in Newton. This past Monday night, for a brief, incredibly sweet, totally-to-be-cherished nano second, we were all in the same place together, Brooklyn, for the wedding of Jill and Steve’s son Ari to his wife Esther. Between geographical challenges, health challenges, Covid, and life, the six of us don’t get a chance to see one another altogether in the same place nearly as much as we would like. The last time all six of us were together was at another nephew’s wedding in Denver before the pandemic. So it felt incredibly special, and rare.
And, just as we were dancing at Ari and Esther’s wedding, my brothers on Shira’s side of the family, Ari in Jerusalem, Daniel in Atlanta, and I were concluding saying Kaddish for our father after the 11 months. Every morning, and every evening, in Jerusalem, Atlanta, and Temple Emanuel, we said Kaddish for our father, and it was deeply meaningful that we were doing so together in our respective cities. This past Tuesday we said our last Kaddish.
Sharing the wedding and the Kaddish with brothers and sisters made me think about the special blessing, and special challenge, of brothers and sisters. A deep paradox lies at the heart of the sibling relationship.
On the one hand, brothers and sisters share so much. We share a past. Nobody on planet earth knows us longer than our siblings. Our siblings know us longer than our parents who ultimately pass away. As Kohelet puts it, dor holech v’dor bah, one generation goes, another generation comes. Our siblings know not only our childhood, but also our later chapters. Our siblings even know us longer than our spouse knows us. Our spouse picks up our story with our adulthood. But our siblings know our youngest years. And as much as we love our children, our siblings obviously know us and our story far longer than our children ever could.
We also share a future. In many families adult children, even if they live in different cities, come together again to take care of aging parents. Siblings have email and text threads about the decisions that must be made for loved ones who are no longer able to take care of themselves. Siblings divide up responsibility. One sibling handles business and legal issues. Another stays in touch with the doctors. Often there is the local adult child who checks in on parents day to day.
So siblings share a past. Siblings share a future. But very often siblings do not share a present.
Siblings live in different cities, if not continents.
Siblings lead different lives and make different choices. There is the corporate attorney who works for a big firm in a big city, and the free-spirited artist who lives in an artist colony in Santa Fe. There is the sibling who got married and has many children and grandchildren, and the sibling who never got married and has no children.
There are siblings who run a hedge fund, and siblings who count their pennies.
In our polarized age, siblings can have dramatically different politics, and there is often that delicate negotiation about what we can or cannot talk about at the holiday dinner table.
In short siblings present a unique blessing and challenge. Shared past. Shared future. But different present. Which can lead to drift, to slipping away from one another as the years go by, or worse. To distance. To division. To alienation, which does not heal itself. I want to share a story that has an image I saw with my own eyes that I will never forget.
There were once two siblings, both well advanced in years. Their parents had passed long ago. There were no other siblings. Just the two of them, and each’s spouse and children and grandchildren. The distance, the drift, the division, that had built up over the years went unhealed, and now one sibling is burying the other, and their two families don’t really know one another. I remember being at the graveside, and looking at the surviving sibling, and seeing that sibling’s deeply sad eyes: for what was lost, for the connection that was lost and cannot now be found. Those sad eyes: In a big, cold, impersonal world, how many siblings do we have? How sad is it if what we had is broken? How sad is it if what broke we never managed to heal?
We see the whole sibling dynamic play out in the Exodus story.
Miriam, Aaron and Moses are siblings. Miriam saves her younger brother by following the wicker basket into which baby Moses is cast and then connecting with the daughter of Pharaoh to arrange for Moses’s mother to nurse him when he is a baby. Roll the film forward 80 years. The Torah goes out of its way to point out that when Moses starts confronting Pharaoh, Moses is 80 years old, and he is joined in this work by his brother Aaron who is 83. His sister had saved him when he was born. His brother now walks with him, speaking truth to power, 80 years later.
But the siblings struggle with the present. Miriam and Aaron gossip about Moses. Why does Moses have the power? Why does Moses get to talk to God? What about us? Envy creeps in. God punishes Miriam with leprosy.
Absent an intervention, the last word on their relationship could have been sad eyes—their shared past eclipsed by a ruptured present that never healed.
But Moses will not let it end that way. He prays the shortest prayer in the Hebrew Bible: el na rephah na lah, O God, please heal her. His prayer works. It heals Miriam. And it heals Miriam, Aaron and Moses.
What would it look like if we could do our own version of that?
If you are blessed to have siblings, think about the siblings you are blessed to have. What is the state of our relationship? Does it need mending? Has drift set in? If so, what kind of intervention can arrest the drift and heal the breach?
There is no one magical healing move that works for us all. But I will share with you the insight that I felt at Ari and Esther’s wedding in Brooklyn this past Monday night.
Ari grew up here, and he has evolved to become quite observant. He defies easy labels and categories. I don’t know whether he would identify himself as Chabad, or not. But I do know that before his wedding, he, and his father Steve, and his uncle David, Steve’s brother who had flown in from Israel, all went to 770 Ocean Parkway, the world headquarters of Chabad, to daven mincha, a gesture that was deeply meaningful to all. There were Chabad rabbis who officiated at the wedding. At one climactic moment, the main rabbi who officiated invited all in attendance to rise as he read a letter to the couple written by the Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Shneerson, who had passed away years ago, but whose letter is still read to many Chabad couples getting married today. Hearing the blessing of the Rebbe conferred on Ari and Esther under their chuppah while all stood was beautiful.
Can we love through difference? And if we can manage to love our biological brothers and sisters, can we expand that to include our metaphorical brothers and sisters? Can we love our brothers and sisters in Israel, and here in America, with whom we share a past, and a future, and a challenging present? Can we love through difference in our home and in our homeland? It is not easy. And the answer is not clear. But the stakes are so high. Sad eyes. Who needs them. Let’s get to work loving through difference. Shabbat shalom.