Before Shabbat

Father’s Day is complicated for me. On the one hand, I treasure the time I spend with my children and grandchildren. When I look at this growing family—at the generations that have come from us—I am filled with profound gratitude. Their lives feel like a modern Jewish miracle. To be a father and grandfather is to stand in quiet defiance of the death sentence that was imposed on my very own family and on the Jewish people as a whole. As the Jewish partisan song says, Mir zaynen do. We are here.

Maybe that sounds a little dramatic for a Sunday on the porch barbecuing hot dogs, but it is a profound life marker. And let me tell you, parenting lays out the timeline. It’s like placing two mirrors facing each other – the reflection keeps repeating into infinity. L’dor vador: from generation to generation.

On the other hand… Father’s Day brings up some painful memories. And to be clear, these parent days are difficult for people on many levels. How to walk this tightrope for those raised by a single parent, or when folks have parents who abandoned or abused their kids. Parents who tried living their lives through their children. And then, of course, people who wanted to be parents but could not. Father’s Day can be problematic.

The Torah says Kabed et avicha v’et imecha. Honor your father and your mother. Five words: no asterisk, no footnote, no clause that begins ‘unless’. It sits there in the Ten Commandments between God and murder — between our obligations heavenward and our obligations to each other — as if to say: this is the hinge.

For years after my father’s death, I wondered how I was supposed to live with this commandment. How do I square my own unresolved anger and trauma surrounding my father’s physical and mental abuse with a sense that I somehow owed him my respect – or something?

In the Talmud, the rabbis split the obligation to parents in two. There is kibbud — honor, which they define entirely as a list of actions: feed them, clothe them, walk them in and out. And there is yirah — reverence, which is also defined by conduct: don’t sit in their seat, don’t contradict them, don’t shame them. But nowhere — nowhere! — does the Torah command us to feel anything. It does not say love them. It does not say to cherish their memory. It commands a way of behaving, not a state of the heart. Which means that the tradition, from the beginning, made room for children who act with dignity toward a parent they cannot love. The deed and the feeling were never the same obligation. They aren’t even the same word.

And forgiveness? Forgiveness is a third thing entirely, and the Torah does not put it on this list. It cannot be commanded. I don’t recall my father ever saying he loved me. He certainly never apologized for his rage against me and what followed. Forgiveness cannot be scheduled to arrive before a funeral, and it is owed to no one on demand, least of all to someone who never asked.

I forgive the thirteen-year-old boy my father was, who lost everything in the Holocaust – traumatized, alone, bereft. It took me time to get that far, but it was like a gift I gave myself when I could say it and mean it. But for the adult who wronged me, broke me, terrified me with his anger and rejection, there is no forgiveness – or reverence. I acknowledge him and feel sorry he could not make any room in his heart for me. This means whatever shortcomings I have as a father – and I have many – my children know my heart is wide open – always. I am here.

This past Sunday morning, I caught the Regional out of South Station to Moynihan Train Hall, hoping to reach the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns, on the East Side, in plenty of time for the birth of my third grandchild. I’m not a seasoned New York visitor, so the city always overwhelms me — the noise and the people and the traffic and the smell of machine grease, armpits, and pizza. I ordered an Uber and promptly lost the driver in the melee on 8th Avenue, so I hopped a cab for a four-mile ride that took an hour, thanks to the Philippine Independence Day Parade. No matter. I wasn’t really racing. My daughter was deep in labor, with no clear sense of what came next, and we crawled along bumper to bumper, horns blaring, while my driver swore softly in a language I couldn’t place. (When I climbed out, I asked; he smiled and said it was Dari, one of the languages of Afghanistan.) A tough ride. But I made it.

The Alexandra Cohen Hospital exists for one thing: caring for pregnant women and bringing babies into the world. The feeling when you walk in is otherworldly. There’s no crush of people coming and going. There’s no emergency room. There is unbelievably strict security. And there is a low wave of anxiety and expectation, a sense of waiting on the threshold. It’s a beautiful, singular space that feels almost sacred — and just a little bit scary.

Molly’s labor was intense and difficult, full of pain, until the doctors finally eased it. I won’t narrate the whole of it. I’ll only say that it was soul-crushing to watch my little girl in so much distress. I wished there were something I could do, even as I knew there was nothing — nothing but staying out of the way, which I managed rather well, I must say. In the end she needed a C-section, and it went smoothly, resulting in a beautiful, healthy baby and mom.

I walked into the birthing suite and looked at mother and daughter — and my fabulous son-in-law — all of them sleepy and triumphant. This new baby, so beautiful, so blessed, so exquisite, was finally here. I couldn’t hold her yet, but I could stroke her head and give Molly a kiss. In that moment, I felt such joy — as if I’d discovered a new star in my own small universe. The radiance was overwhelming.

Her name is Edie Tamar Ellenberg. Edie is named for my son-in-law’s uncle David and for a dear family friend, Adina Jick, a woman brimming with spirit and joie de vivre. Edie’s middle name honors my sister, Marta — another burst of light and laughter. And more: Edie shares a birthday with my firstborn son, Jonah. That’s more than coincidence. It’s an existential marker in my life — because Jonah’s own firstborn, Caleb, becomes a Bar Mitzvah this weekend.

I find myself wrapped in a soft, cushioned realm of memory and love. Remembering my wife Liza’s terribly hard labor, which also ended in a C-section. Remembering Jonah’s birth. Holding my son forty-three years ago. Holding my first grandchild, Caleb, thirteen years ago. And now Edie in my arms. So many endings and beginnings. I’m somewhere between the bookends, with so much celebration still to come. So much life, raw and multi-colored.

Sandy Denny sang, “Who knows where the time goes?” She was nineteen when she wrote it. The thing is, I do know where the time goes. Which makes all of this a blessed bursting star — full of family and new light — even as the arrow of time arcs into the darkening sky.

Thank you, Holy One, for love and wholeness and peace. Welcome, Edie Tamar Ellenberg. And mazel tov, Caleb Sol Stern. God bless us all.

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In the midst of working with my grandson Caleb on his dvar Torah for Parashat Shelach Lecha — my Torah portion almost sixty years ago, his father’s almost thirty years ago, his own on June 13th — he turned to me, as he is often wont to do, and asked a characteristically deep question: “So Bebop, what does it feel like to be retiring in a couple of years?”

I was struck silent. Because I’ve preferred not to think about it.

“Caleb,” I said, “it’s one of the biggest moments of my life. There’s a part of me that feels happy to be ending my career in a place I love, with so many people I love. And another part that is sad about leaving a life so full of meaningful service.”

I knew that probably sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents in his ears. What does he know about retirement? Career? He’s in middle school. Meaningful service? Come on. But after listening thoughtfully for a few seconds — which for an almost-thirteen-year-old is noteworthy — he said, “It sounds hard.”

It is hard.

A colleague who retired a few years ago was incredulous when I told her I was retiring in June of 2028. I’d thought the long runway was helpful — for me and for the congregation — to transition to a new reality. “So that makes you a lame duck!” she said.

Lame anything sounds pejorative. The frame is borrowed from electoral politics, where authority drains the moment a successor is named. But a pulpit doesn’t work that way. My rabbinate is relational, not transactional. It fades when I stop showing up. And I have no plans to stop showing up.

One of the many reasons I’ve loved working with Caleb on his dvar Torah — besides the enormous helping of naches I get from it — is revisiting the text itself. There are copious topics and encounters in Shelach Lecha. The one I want to pinpoint is the moment the Israelite spies look out at the inhabitants of Canaan. The Canaanites appear gigantic and frightening. Ten of the twelve scouts return shaken, and they speak the line that has lodged in Jewish memory: “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes — and so we must have appeared to them.”

When the unknown loomed large, the scouts shrank. They lost confidence in their own stature, their own standing. The faith required to enter the promised land collapsed in the face of an opaque and frightening future.

But two of the twelve see it differently. Joshua and Caleb — yes, that Caleb — refuse the grasshopper frame. Vayahas Kalev et ha’am: Caleb hushes the crowd and says, “Let us go up and take the land. We can do this.” It is not lost on me that the grandson asking me what retirement feels like carries this name. The Torah is rarely so generous.

We have learned enough from this portion, and from the subsequent arc of Jewish history, to know that acquiescence has not served us. Passivity has not served us.

Our future is not about entering the land of Canaan. We are, right here, right now, every day, trying to read the future for Jews in America and throughout the Diaspora. The choices the Israeli government has made — without reckoning with how those choices reverberate from Jerusalem outward — have put us in an exposed and compromised position.

There is meaningful debate to be had among us about Israel, about Zionism, about statecraft, about the future of democracy here and there. I trust this community to have it. But whatever our personal positions, this much we share: Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, and now the war against Hezbollah, has dramatically altered how Israel is viewed in the world — and how we are regarded along with it. Most of us never expected antisemitism to be anything more than a history lesson. We are painfully aware now that it is not.

We are witnessing a true sea change. What happens next is frightening and opaque, and depends on factors none of us controls — the trajectory of regional war, the political direction of the Israeli government, the temperature of American public life, and whether anti-Zionism quietly slides into permissible antisemitism.

We are facing a slow-moving storm.

And we are not shrieking gevalt as our ancestors did in the wilderness. We are not rending garments. We are a resolute, robust community. Strength and determination are part of our DNA. We will not knuckle under to the ignorant or the intolerant. That is not who we are. Whatever we face, we face together.

We have carefully built a community that embraces everyone who walks through these doors. We shape the TBA zeitgeist to be inclusive. We believe in this temple’s capacity to give our children — and each other — a sense of confidence and self-worth as Jews. We cultivate curiosity. We sculpt an ethic of caring about the world we live in. We hatch baby chicks and butterflies in our ELC.

We are not raising grasshoppers.

We are all committed to the continued growth and strength of the Jewish people. And that commitment starts right here. TBA is blessed: with a great group of educators, with a soulful cantor, with a battle-tested executive director, with a staff engaged and determined to make this place feel like home — warm, safe, secure.

And you. Without you, none of it stands. Your presence in this room or streaming from your living rooms, your financial support, your soulful support — the dreams and promises we hold at TBA rest on you. This covenant, this brit, is strong and enduring.

There may well be tough times ahead. I am not afraid. I have deep faith in our work and in the path we are on. I have deep faith that our next steps will be taken with a resolute sense of hope and vision.

There are no grasshoppers here.