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April 13, 2023
Author(s): Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger,
Parashat Shemini/ Pesach Day 8
April 13, 2023 — 22 Nissan 5783
The Quilt
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
When I was home for Thanksgiving this year, my mom and I were going through some old boxes at the bottom of a closet when we came across a bag of colorful fabrics.
“What’s this?” I asked my mom.
With a funny look on her face, my mom took the bag and started looking through it. “This is the quilt I was going to make you when you were a baby.”
Apparently, when I was born, my mom didn’t want to just be a stay-at-home caretaker. She wanted to feel productive. To be able to show something beyond a growing baby for the time she was spending at home. Naturally, she decided to make a baby quilt. She went to the fabric store and picked out a book of quilt patterns, she bought fabric and washed it, and then every day, when she would put me down for a nap, she would go and work on that quilt. It all seemed to be going well until it came time to put the squares together. Then, somehow, they wouldn’t fit. At the time, my mom was so sleep-deprived that she couldn’t figure out how to make it work. She threw those squares into a bag in frustration, and that bag of fabric squares and scraps has been sitting at the bottom of her closet for the last 33 years.
When it was time to head back to Boston, I absconded with the bag intending to finish the quilt my mom started all those years ago. I thought it would be a beautiful surprise for her and a gift for our baby—a quilt made over two generations. I didn’t realize the quilt would come to teach me about what it means to honor legacy and to transmit values over the course of generations.
When I unpacked the quilting book and the fabrics, I found a scrap of paper that she had used to note her plans for the quilt. Helpfully, she had bookmarked the pattern she intended to use. But her notes made no sense. There were random numbers written, designs, different options and square counts, and all of the writing sort of devolved as you went down the page until it came to a final line which just read “quilt, quilt, quilt, quilt, quilt” over and over as if my mom had totally run out of steam and started just writing the word quilt in the hopes that it would revive her project.
The first lesson of the quilt was one of sustainability. We all want to go above and beyond for the people we love. But in order to be able to create a gift of love, we have to make sure that we are taking care of our own physical beings. It’s a lovely thought that all we need to do is take care of the people we love, but when we overextend, what is left behind isn’t enough. Instead of the meaningful and beautiful gift that we intend to create and share, we end up with a bag of fabric scraps and an indecipherable sheet of notes rather than the quilt we had intended. My mom’s unfinished quilt is a reminder of what they tell you every time you board a plane—you always must put your oxygen mask on before helping others.
The second lesson of the quilt comes from the squares. My mom picked this pattern that required exact measurements—perfect rectangles lined up “just so” as my Gram would say, with each square exactly the same size as the next. But somehow when she cut the fabric and sewed the strips together, they looked more like trapezoids than squares. Each “square” was completely different than the next, with different ratios of fabrics organized into a differently sized square. And then I had a choice. I could have taken apart every seam, recut the strips, and tried to make the squares all exact and perfect the way the pattern instructs, but that felt wrong to me. In part because I wanted my mom’s seams to be in this quilt and also because the point of quilting is not necessarily perfection, the point is the beauty of the imperfections that come together.
I took each square, cut the outsides down so that they were all at least the same size as a whole, and all square, and sewed them together. When we think about what we want to pass down, when we think about what we want people to remember about us, often we want them to see us in the best possible light. We want them to see us for our successes, for our glories, for the best that we could be. But the second lesson of the quilt is that it’s really important to share our imperfections, our trapezoids, the uneven seams of our lives. We don’t want to pass down a picture of life that’s so perfect that it’s unattainable. We want those who come after us to know that even when you have flaws, even when you have imperfections, even when you have vulnerabilities, you can create a beautiful tapestry of life.
And then it was so interesting for me, because sitting at the sewing machine brought back memories I hadn’t considered in twenty years. As I sat in front of my sewing machine, I remembered the year after my bat mitzvah. My grandfather, or Sir Grandfather as he always signed his cards, passed away on the second day of Pesach. He was a trickster, who loved playing pranks on people and always had a witty comeback. He was brilliant and a snazzy dresser and loved ties. When he died, he probably had 500 or so ties that he had collected over a lifetime. All the men in the family divvied up the ties that were still in fashion, and even taking more ties than they probably would ever wear, there were still more than 400 ties remaining. These were not exactly fashionable ties, and, in fact, some were remarkably ugly. But I couldn’t abide the thought of my grandfather’s ties just being thrown away. And so, as an act of love, I decided to turn those ties into a quilt.
I don’t think my grandfather ever intended for me to end up with all those ties. I’m not sure he ever really thought about what would happen to them after he died. For him, the ties were one long joke. He loved showing up at the bridge club wearing a sharp suit and comical tie. He loved being a snazzy dresser with a sense of humor. If I had asked him what he wanted me to learn from his life, I bet he would have told me to focus on using proper grammar and on speaking up for myself, and he would have wanted me to get his sense of humor. The ties? He probably would have said to just let them go, that they weren’t worth the energy.
And that’s really the third lesson. We don’t get to control what we pass down. Loved ones often receive things that we don’t intend for them to receive and maybe even things we wouldn’t have given them. At the same time, there are things that we really do want to pass down, that are really important for us to give away, that maybe our loved ones don’t want to receive. And so the question becomes, what do you do with these things? You might think that the best way to honor your ancestor is to do exactly what they did, to take what they’ve given exactly the way they intended for us to receive their gifts and to perpetuate their memory exactly. That is one way to honor our loved ones, but I think a more meaningful approach can be to take the gifts they’ve left behind, to honor the love and intention behind their gift, and to repurpose that object or that lesson in a way that fits our own life.
Things change generation to generation. For my mom, the quilt was about her own value as a mother, about creating a gift of love for her baby, about proving to the world she was more than a caretaker. For me, that same quilt is about my mom’s love for me, about the ways that I have chosen to fashion my life in her honor, and about my hope that our little one will always feel that connective support of family near and far. For my grandfather, his ties were about striking up conversation with strangers in the bridge club, about his sense of fashion and his sense of humor. For me, those ties were a way to mourn him, to celebrate all the moments of his life that I would never know, and to hold on to a piece of him albeit one he never intended for me to receive.
In Hebrew, a quilt is called a שמיכת טלאים—a blanket of patches. The word סמיכה, spelled with a samech instead of a shin, is the word we use in Hebrew for ordination—for the transmission of authority and wisdom throughout the generations. This makes sense to me, because in truth, I feel like the work of our lives is to gather all the patches of meaning that we can and to transmit them to the next generation. When we are born, our parents wrap us up in the quilts of meaning that they have painstakingly sewn together over a lifetime. Those bits of love and learning, the collections of experience and regard, all of that keeps us warm against the cold of the world. As we grow, we inherit our own scraps—bits of experience, wisdom, and some of the pieces that our ancestors never sewed into their own quilts. When we die, we pass down not just the quilts we have thoughtfully sewn together, but all the scraps of our lives that we haven’t yet sorted out.
As we rise for yizkor today, I want to invite everyone to picture the quilt that you were born into. What’s the quilt that held you? That your parents received you with? What are the pieces of fabric and love that you’ve picked up along the way that you’ve used to sew your own quilt? And what are the pieces that you intend to leave behind for the next generation to warm them and protect them and to guide them?