December 28, 2024
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Miketz—Shabbat Hanukkah
Living Legacy – It’s Complicated
December 28, 2024 – 27 Kislev 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
One of the most magnetic moments drawing us to shul is the observance of a yahrtzeit, the anniversary of our loved one’s passing, which offers us a precious opportunity to show up again for our beloved departed, to say a few words about them, and to recite Kaddish in their memory. Ordinary people who do not show up at shul all that much the rest of the year show up for their loved one’s yahrtzeit. That is through all the seasons. That is through the snow and the cold and the ice. And they do that for years, for decades, sometimes even remembering their loved one in death far longer than they were blessed to have them in life.
And when somebody comes to mark their loved one’s yahrtzeit, a thing we often say is: may you continue to be your loved one’s living legacy. May your father’s beautiful values live on in you. May your mother’s beautiful values live on in you. We say it. We mean it. It is beautiful and true.
I have been saying it, and I have been receiving it when others say it to me, for many years. But this year, for the first time, I experienced a wrinkle, a complexity, that I had never noticed before. What happens if we and our beloved departed mother or father or grandparent have a real disagreement over a matter of principle? They lived. They died. We know where they stand. Their legacy is now ours. But on a fundamental question of principle, we disagree. For the first time ten days ago, I felt this tension myself.
December 19 was the yahrtzeit of my beloved father Nathan Gardenswartz, who died when I was twenty years old. I have been marking his yahrtzeit, saying Kaddish for him, for forty-three years.
But on the very day that I was observing my father’s yahrtzeit, that very day, I was also writing and revising a thought piece about intermarriage. The CEO of the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, had invited me to share my thoughts on intermarriage. Rabbi Blumenthal, and many other leading rabbis, now believe that the movement got it wrong all these years. Our posture had been that intermarriage is a wrong that rabbinic power could stop. That if our rabbis would not officiate, and if our bulletins would not announce, and if interfaith couples could not participate in auf ruf aliyot, then that disapproval would stop intermarriage from happening. To their credit, many of the leading rabbis now realize that that position never worked and is not working today. They have moved from a posture of seeing intermarriage as a wrong which rabbis could stop to seeing intermarriage as both a reality and an opportunity, and that rabbis should cultivate loving and close relationships with intermarried couples and their families.
All that said, as of today, the current posture of the movement’s leaders, even those who want to evolve on this question, is still to prohibit rabbis from officiating at an intermarriage, a position with which I respectfully but strongly disagree. I want the discretion to be able to perform an intermarriage if I believe that doing so is the best chance to strengthn the Jewish identity and education of the next generation. Let local rabbis in the field decide on a case-by-case basis as we know our families best. Rabbi Blumenthal invited me to submit a letter to the movement’s lay and rabbinic leadership stating my position and rationale.
As it happened, on my father’s 43yrd yartzeit, I was refining my position paper that Conservative rabbis should be vested with the discretion to officiate at an intermarriage.
And that’s the rub. One of my father’s deepest principles was that a Jew should only marry a Jew, either someone who is born Jewish, or chooses via conversion to become Jewish. If a Jew were to marry a non-Jew, my father would disown that person, would cut off all contact. This was not an idle threat. It happened.
My mother had a beloved sister named Esta, 15 years younger than my mother, who was close in age to my older sisters. When Esta married a non-Jew, my parents disowned her. This was very painful especially for my mother because she loved Esta, but she had two daughters of dating age, and my parents wanted to send a clear message: interdating and intermarriage are strictly forbidden.
Esta got married in her early 20s. She was cut off by our family. And she died of a sudden asthma attack. When she died, my mother had not been speaking to her.
My mother was in her 30s when she cut off Esta. Roll the film forward many decades. Some 60 years later, when my mother was in her final months, in her 90s, I would sit by her bedside talking to her about her life. The one thing she could never forgive herself for was disowning Esta. She said she would take that regret and that deep pain to her grave. On her nightstand, she had a photograph of a young and vibrant Esta with her new husband. That photo now sits on a table in my study. No doubt Esta’s story, and my mother’s everlasting regret for disowning her, fuels my passion in this area.
So on the same day, I said Kaddish for my father’s Yahrtzeit, and finalized a position paper with which he would have disagreed literally with every fiber of his being.
How do we process this creative tension? What happens when our late mother, father or grandparents think one way, and we think another?
As always, our Torah speaks to our predicament. The Joseph story presents us with three generations, each of whom has a very different lived experience that shapes how they see and act in the world. Jacob the grandfather was born in Canaan and lived 110 of his first 130 years in Canaan. His father was Isaac and his grandfather was Abraham, and Jacob knew in his bones there was a covenant between God and his family that centered on the land of Israel. Then there is Joseph who left Canaan at 17 and lived the rest of his life in Egypt from 17 to 110. He became a powerful Egyptian government official. He married Egyptian aristocracy. He and his Egyptian wife raised their two sons in Egypt. And he went back to Canaan exactly one more time in his life, to bury his father. After discharging that task, he quickly returned to Egypt. And then there are the grandchildren, Manasseh and Ephraim, who are born and raised in Egypt. There is no evidence that they ever left Egypt. In fact, the Torah points out that when Jacob dies, the grandchildren in Egypt do not even go to Canaan to bury him. Three different generations, three different lived experiences, three different perspectives. How could it be any other way? Small wonder that when Jacob sees his Egyptian grandchildren, he asks: mi eleh, who are they? They are so different from him, he is so different from them, that they do not recognize one another.
What does all this generational diversity mean for our traditional words of comfort: may you be your loved one’s living legacy?
It must mean that context matters in shaping people. My late father could not easily understand our world today. In the same way I could not easily understand his world. Just one word makes the point. My father’s legal name was Nathan. Nathan appeared on his birth certificate. Nathan appeared on his death certificate. In between, literally no one ever called him Nathan. Rather, everybody called him Dempsey. Why Dempsey?
My father’s suspicion of non-Jews was well earned. His mother, my Bubbe Sarah, came to America in the wake of the Kishinev pogroms in 1904. She experienced pogroms first-hand. My father was born in Denver in 1916. He came of age well before the Golden Age of American Jewry. He grew up in a poor, tough multi-ethnic neighborhood where Jewish kids were regularly attacked and insulted. My father was always getting into fights trying to defend the Jewish people’s dignity in the face of attacks and insults. A great boxer at the time was named Jack Dempsey. My father got in so many fights with antisemites the name Dempsey just stuck.
What was true for Jacob, Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim—mi eleh, who are they—is true for all generations. With the Kishinev pogrom a fresh memory, with fistfights with Jew-haters a regular part of his reality, my father emerged believing Jews should marry Jews. He died in 1981, never experiencing the different world that has shaped my thinking.
All of which means that to love somebody does not mean to agree with them. We can love people we disagree with. We owe each other not agreement but respect, understanding, generosity of spirit, and love. I certainly have all that for my father. I can only hope that in heaven he has that for me.
Because of generational diversity, the blessing I try to offer is not may you be your loved one’s living legacy. It is may you find your own way to be your loved one’s living legacy. After all, what love is greater than that? Even though we don’t agree on important matters, I love you so much, forever and always, that I will spend the rest of my life trying in my own way to perpetuate your values. Shabbat shalom.