Welcome back to all DAFF recipients who have been suffering in silence for these past few months while we tore our hair out to debug our listserve software! Finally, we seem to have found a solution. This, however, is not it. It is being sent via a home computer, and next week we hope to move to the new listserve software. Thanks to everyone who responded to our inquiry with such encouraging words about the DAFF!!
I'd been singing "Greensleeves" to myself for the past few days, and on January 1st it suddenly became clear why. It was my father's birthday! My father, alav hashalom, passed away almost four years ago, after a brave, hopeless, and heartwrenching battle with lung cancer. A year passed, then another year, and slowly memory of my father moved to "running in background", as our tradition insist that it do in order to allow those left behind to go on. When I would use those objects of his left to me, I would feel comforted by a subtle presence, but mechanical pencils break, tools are borrowed, Walkmen break, and the daily impact of the realm of his objects also grew less prominent.
But my father left me with another legacy - - - his songs. From as early as I can remember, he would so often have a song on his lips. He didn't have a fine voice, but it was adequately melodic, and more important to me, it was his. He would infuriate us as he would loudly sing the folk songs he learned as a boy in Northern England when on a hike we would walk past people, oblivious of our teenaged embarrassment. He would make us laugh as, returning from the San Diego Zoo exhausted after a long day walking to see every animal, he would drive up the 405 windows unrolled, belting out silly songs such as Peter, Paul and Mary's "We're going to the zoo" to keep himself awake. But his voice took on an indescribable quality, a real beauty, when he sang the Shabbat zemirot and Yiddish songs of his youth, a youth left far behind and incomprehesible to us. All we know was that it must be very powerful if, across the worlds that Dad had placed between our life and his seldom-talked-about upbringing, it could so bring his voice to such warmth, his eyes almost to tears.
My father's two favorite Jewish songs were each the antithesis of each other, and mirrored the tensions in his soul. One was Rachel's poem, V'ulai (I don't recall if that is actually the title), the song of a tortured pioneer soul, ostensibly secular, dying of tuberculosis, scarcely believing she once was so full of vitality, throwing bales and drenched in Kinneret sunlight. The beauty of the melody always bested the pathos of the words as my father reached beyond his capacity for its highest notes. The other song was from psalm 104 - Ashira Lashem Bechayay - I will sing to Hashem "with" my life... My father delighted in its bouncy melody, and, it seemed, wasn't bothered by its joyously pious words, so much at odds with his deeply held atheism covered by a this garment of professed agnosticism.
My sister was born the first day of spring, my brother the first day of autumn. I was born on the day on which we begin saying "Ten tal umatar" in the diaspora, and my father - January 1st, 1930, in Dvoretz, Poland. So many worlds he traversed, and from each he collected those songs that subtly, touched the depths of his heart, and he bequethed them to us as jeweled holograms of his rich being. I have learned to love the songs which, when I was younger, I needed to "cast off so discourteously" so as to assert my independance. I have learned to explore the legacy of my father's Jewishness, seeking the hidden recesses in which he stored his faith, unbeknowest even to himself, except for those moments when he his voice would rise and tremble, his eyes would well, and the fortress of intellectual mastery would reveal its vulnerable points before reasserting a dominion that gave us such a sense of security.
When the brothers brought Yosef's message to Ya'acov, the midrash tells us that Serach bat Asher sang a song whose lyrics mentioned that Yosef was still alive - this in order not to shock a frail Ya'acov with the bald, forthright truth. The music percolated into Ya'acov's carefully preserved abiding faith, and his faith emerged to redeem his suffering. Od Yosef Chai, he sang, as he gingerly mounted the wagons his son sent.
And as for me . . . I understand. My father sang me "Greensleeves" from across worlds, so that I might take courage, "delight in his company" and sing back to him, "Od Avi Chai".
Rav Yehoshua Kahan
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Rav Yehoshua Kahan is a teacher at Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He has held pulpits in Knoxville, Tennessee and Los Angeles, and served as educational director of Livnot U'Lehibanot. He blogs on Parashat Hashavua here |