January 21, 2023
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Va’era
Journey
January 21, 2023 — 28 Tevet 5783
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
The great writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez once observed: “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”
I learned of this quote in the forward to a fascinating book about secrets. Written by noted American Jewish author Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the book is entitled Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy. Pogrebin talks about how deeply held, and deeply embarrassing, secrets were part of her family’s culture.
For example, there was Aunt Joanie. Aunt Joanie and her husband Herbie had no children. Supposedly the reason was that Aunt Joanie was “barren.” That was the word the family used. As a result, at family gatherings, where there were lots of children, there had always been a sense of feeling bad for barren Aunt Joanie. Until one day, decades later, Joanie confided to Pogrebin that in fact she had not been barren. Rather, she and Herbie simply did not want to have children. That was too embarrassing to confess within their family after the Holocaust, when there was such a widely felt Jewish imperative to replenish our population. And so they came up with this lie, that she was barren. By the way, she confided, she had had four abortions over the years. A deep family secret. But far from the only one.
Letty Pogrebin’s mother had secrets that were sources of shame. She was embarrassed that she did not graduate from high school. She went to a photo studio and rented a cap and gown and diploma so that a picture could be taken that made it look like she was a high school graduate. She was embarrassed for her family’s poverty. They lived in a small tenement in the Lower East Side, with lots of people crowded into cramped spaces. She never let a date pick her up or drop her off at her actual home, but went to great lengths to contrive some address in a nicer neighborhood where she did not live where the date would pick her up and drop her off.
The lack of education, the poverty, the lies that covered them up, were not the biggest secrets. It turns out that Letty Pogrebin’s parents each had a secret that she only found about years later. Each had been married before. Her parents’ marriage to each other was a second marriage for both of them. They each had had a daughter from their previous marriage, Letty Pogrebin’s half-sisters.
In her memoir Letty Pogrebin wrestles with the legacy of these deep family secrets. Here is her question: we all want the crown of a good name, keter shem tov. And yet most of us have our own version, perhaps tamer versions of, these kinds of family secrets. The default position for a secret that she grew up with is that it is a shanda, a disgrace, something to be embarrassed about, something to keep under wraps. But she asks: Is there another move here? Is there a different way that we can think about, and act on, our family’s, and our own, deep secrets?
After all, all of us are so often mysteries to our own selves. We sometimes cannot control what we feel and when we feel it. What we want and when we want it. What we think and when we think it. What we are drawn to even though we know we should not be drawn to it. Many of us have these secrets.
And if Letty Pogrebin grew up in a home where these secrets were not shared, we live now in an opposite era, the era of overshare. The era of look at me. Look at the meal that just arrived at my table. Look at the fabulous vacation I am on. The era of confession. The era of leaving no secret untold. Prince Harry’s recent memoir entitled Spare—the very title captures his existential place, that he feels that he is a spare part, that he is not necessary, that he is not where the action is, in which he shares that his brother Prince William is, in his words, his “arch nemesis,” Prince Harry’s memoir embodies the overcorrection and the overshare of our time.
When it comes to secrets, there are unhelpful extremes. Letty Pogrebin’s parents said nothing about their secrets. Prince Harry, and so many tell-all authors, share every sordid detail.
Is there a sane middle ground?
We get a glimpse into a healthy practice for dealing with our secrets from Moses. Moses carries a secret. He is both son of Hebrew slaves and also prince of Egypt. He grows up in the Pharaoh’s palace, but he recognizes the Hebrew slaves as his people. When he defends his enslaved kinsman by striking the Egyptian taskmaster dead, his complex welter of secrets forces him to run away and to seek peace as a shepherd in Midian.
Moses the shepherd, Moses in Midian, is immobilized by his secrets. Derailed by his complex identities. Paralyzed by his past.
Eventually Moses finds a sane way to deal with his secrets. He goes back to the Pharaoh’s palace in which he had been raised and explicitly casts his lot with his people, the Hebrew slaves. Shalach et ami v’yaavduni, let my people go so that they can serve God. The key word psychologically is ami, my people. Yes, I was raised here, in the Pharaoh’s palace. But my people are slaves. And now I am back in the palace to free them.
Moses does not act like Letty Pogrebin’s parents, burying secrets, never talking about them, allowing them to be festering sources of shame.
Nor does Moses act like Prince Harry in Spare, telling the world all about his plight just to tell the world all about his plight.
Rather, Moses acts constructively to make the world better He defangs his secrets. They no longer immobilize him.
Which leads us back to Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s memoir. Her response to her family’s deep secrets has been to create a family life that is the opposite, where transparency is sacrosanct. She and her husband have been married for 59 years. She has 59 photo albums, and 59 story books, one for each year of their married life. Everything material that happened to them is in those albums. No secrets. She writes her book about secrets to have no more secrets. She writes her book about secrets to banish secrets and their power to shame.
That is Letty Cottin Pogrebin. What about us? Do our secrets control us? Or do we control our secrets? How can we flip the script on our secrets, defanging them of their power to embarrass, and inspiring us to live proud and unafraid in the light? Shabbat shalom.