“It Happened Again”
Reflections on Purim Past
MiShenichnas Adar Marbim BeSimcha!!
When Adar Comes, Joy Is Increased!!
We are enjoined to be joyful during the month of Adar.
After all, is it not the month when we celebrate Purim, as an observance of national salvation, when good overcame evil and Haman and his sons died on the gallows he had built for Mordecai?
They hanged Haman and his sons al ha etz, on the gallows. Conversely, the Hebrew etz also means a tree, a symbol of the Jewish people itself, as is Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life.
And if you are wondering about God whose name does not appear in the Megilat Ester, the Scroll of Esther, He was there, just “hidden” but indisputably present, steering the helm of history through His masterfully skillful use of nissim, His vast, miraculous wonders.
The demise of Haman parallels that of Pharoah.
The evildoers met their ends, each in a different manner of death, but which, in both cases, had been intended for the descendants of Jacob whom they despised.
It worked out nicely for us.
We survived and the would-be slayers were themselves slain.
However, there are people for whom the enjoinment to increase one’s happiness may present an emotional conundrum.
Each joyous holiday in Judaism forges a link between us and our mesorah, the heritage, of our collective past. It is incumbent upon parents to share the simchas ha yom, the joy of the day, with our children.
Do we not say twice a day …
Veshinantam levanecha v’dibarta bam, teach them to your children and speak of them, but what becomes of this injunction if and when a child dies? What if the worst parental nightmare befalls us? What then?
How can the companionship of our grief be reconciled with the joy we are supposed to feel at holiday time? Is any bereaved parent capable of switching grief on and off and setting it aside for the sake of simchas ha yom, the joy of the day?
The Fortune of Friendship
I am rich. I’ll tell you why.
We all have, I hope, at least one quintessentially invaluable friend without whom our lives would be a great deal less pleasant than they are.
Though I suppose it possible such a friend can be a family member, I have found the bond to be paradoxically stronger when, in the absence of blood ties, there is no familial obligation.
I have such a friend.
He and his family have been my lifeline and connection to my community.
Connectedness.
It is an absolute prerequisite to be able to grieve healthily. To think we can grieve by ourselves is a mistaken and costly approach to grief management.
Life is better and the pain of death less burdensome when we share them with caring people in a community. My shul, synagogue, is my community and its rabbi, my dearest friend.
Rabbi Louis, whose remarkable family, caring attitude and irrepressible good humor have lifted me up on countless occasions, has been there for me through times sad and joyous when, during these past ten years, I have faced a crumbling first marriage and divorce, my son Benjamin’s struggle with diabetes and epilepsy, his death, the onset of my Parkinson’s Disease and the joy of my wedding day to my Kallah at which he officiated.
Certain moments become fixed in our memories, brief interactions yet leaving long trails behind.
It happened one morning after minyan years ago.
We were chatting in the fleishig kitchen, just Rabbi Louis and I, about our children, naturally. We did this sort of thing almost daily but especially on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Friday mornings when we typically had a few extra minutes before each of us had to run off to work. On Mondays and Thursdays, we did not have the extra time due to the morning’s Torah reading.
I listened intently while he spoke beamingly of his son, Moshe, who was studying in Israel.
Suddenly, he stopped talking.
It was not a mere pause.
“Rabbi, what? You were saying about Moshe?” hoping to encourage him on.
“No, I can’t,” he responded, determined to remain silent.
“Your son is not here anymore. I don’t want you to feel bad!”
This is the sort of person Rabbi Louis is.
The Beginning
Two years before I met Rabbi Louis, I used to daven in a small chapel where gathered the daily traditional minyan of the conservative shul to which I belonged at the time.
Steamily hot one summer Shabbat morning, the heat of the morning’s sunshine pierced the brightly illumined stained glass of the chapel in which we held our services. The sound of the cantor's droned on and on during Mussaf, the additional service.
I was sitting in the front row. The stifling heat weighed heavily upon an already stuffy room.
I looked behind me.
Comprised almost entirely of elderly gentlemen, including several Holocaust survivors, every one of them had nodded off. The whole minyan was asleep except the chazzan and me though I think I was more awake than he.
I looked around. There would be enough for a minyan if I left.
And so I did.
Happening by Rabbi Louis’s Shul
I needed fifteen minutes to arrive at my destination even at a feverish pace, but I knew happily where I was going and very much wanted to be.
Having passed through a wooden archway just off to the right of his garage, there was nowhere else to go but down the steps leading to the basement where I hoped to find the shul.
“This has ‘gotta’ be it,” I muttered to myself.
I opened the door to a place, as I soon discovered, oozing with haimishness. Peeking inside, I espied a red-bearded man with an infectious smile, his cape-like tallis afloat in the breeze of his eager gait, tzitsis flying, heading toward me invitingly.
“Come in. Come in. Bruchim Habaim!”
That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Before building a new synagogue adjacent to his house, on the lot which at the time was occupied by an old farmhouse, Rabbi Louis opened up his home to the congregation where it held daily services in his basement.
Grieving in Shul
It seems invariable.
Melancholia overtakes me whenever I am there.
I don’t think it debilitating, short-lived as each instance is, but it remains a constant in the equation of my grief.
Yet, I know this is where a grieving Jew should be because it is a makom kodesh, a holy place, wherein I feel the presence of my son Ben in its most intense manifestation.
I’ll even venture a remark that may seem odd to some. As strong a pull as it is to stand before Ben’s grave, I struggle to sense his presence. Oh yes. I know his body is beneath my feet, but that’s just it. Ben’s body remains, but his neshuma, his soul, is elsewhere.
I believe that it hovers in shul when I am there. Ben spends time with me that way, I suppose. It is his way of making up for the time when I sit alone.
I felt it recently on Purim. It is different than any feeling I experience anywhere else including Ben’s room from which I write these words.
You see, no sooner than I take my seat in the row behind my dear friend, Rabbi Louis, I look over the mechitza to the yahrzeit panels on the south wall and see Ben’s name, the eleventh one in the first column on the first panel.
Though I fully expect this grief, I am thankful to take my seat each time. We have a tradition in shul life that one’s seat becomes his set place, a makom kavua.
I should tell you Ben was not a regular shul-goer. His seat is next to mine.
Nobody else sits there.
Whether it be the mystery of Purim, the revelry of Simchas Torah or the trepidation of Yom Kippur, my son remains by my side.
Other fathers have their sons sitting next to them. I miss that but I possess something they do not-the certainty my son lived a life abundant in loving-kindness.
Time moves forward inexorably. It pauses for no one. That Purim morning I lamented how much time has passed without Ben.
I am reminded daily his absence is forever. No matter though how many years have already gone by or however many are yet before us, Ben’s death will always be for me in the present tense.
I will never say:
“Once upon a time I had a son named Ben.”
I won't tell you I'm not glad to be alive because I know I am a better person for having known and loved Ben.
He taught me so much.
Still ... know there are moments when I am filled with guilt that it was he and not I.
Alan D. Busch
3/24/07
revised 3/2/08
