Shabbat Shalom.
I’m grateful to be back. I know the services while I was gone were beautiful, and kept getting more beautiful, and deeper and higher as they went, with last week’s Pride Shabbat as a kind of climax. And I return this week, still a little out of it, sluggish, feeling rusty, like the Tin Woodsman eyeing the periphery for that oilcan.
I was in Israel, as you all know. There to spend time with my aging mother- and father-in-law. I was there at an odd time. Just after this last war with Gaza. And there for the change of government. All full of complexity and conditionality.
I arrived in Israel tired from the red tape of trying to go during the pandemic, and I stayed tired. Unlike other visits, I wasn’t there as any kind of seeker. I wasn’t exploring how Israel and my Jewish identity touch. I was just a civilian, a son-in-law.
So we ate and walked and ate again. And before I could find ways to be more ambitious with the trip, I received the news that my nearly 103-year old great-uncle had died in Chicago. And so, 11 days into my 3-week trip, I turned tail and flew to Chicago, my own homeland, to officiate at his funeral, as he asked me to do a decade ago.
Uncle Irv was dear to me. He was my grandmother’s baby brother, 15 years her junior. He was closer in age to my mother, his niece, than to my grandmother, and he and Mom were good friends. When she died, I inherited some that friendship. Uncle Irv and I would talk on the phone; I would go visit. I’d update him with family history discoveries, with births, and more often with deaths.
Because he was the last of his generation. When you die at 102+ and you are the youngest of your 5 siblings and the youngest of your 40-or-so first cousins, this is what happens. You are the last. You bury everyone. Friends, relatives, wife. And then you outlive some members of the next generation and even the next one after that. I don’t know what that feels like. Exceptional old age is certainly a blessing, but it is a mixed one.
And now he is gone. And then there were none.
I am keenly aware of the significance of this in the family story. The feeling of not only losing a beloved individual but losing an entire generation.
When I opened up this week’s Torah portion I was surprised to see this feeling reflected right back at me. I’ll explain.
This week’s portion, Pinchas, features another census. This is the last of three in Torah. The first was at Mt. Sinai at the beginning of the journey in the Wilderness. Now we are at the end of that journey, 40 years later. The Children of Israel are encamped on the plains of Moav, and they do the counting again, the always-problematic counting of men, perhaps because battle is coming and they are counting what they perceive as their conscriptable military force. Or maybe it’s just the unimaginative default into the familiarity of patriarchy, reminding us who, in that system, did and did not count.
But for all the problematicity of the census itself, there is a rather stunning moment at the end of it. Torah says:
אֵ֚לֶּה פְּקוּדֵ֣י מֹשֶׁ֔ה וְאֶלְעָזָ֖ר הַכֹּהֵ֑ן אֲשֶׁ֨ר פָּֽקְד֜וּ אֶת־בְּנֵ֤י יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ בְּעַֽרְבֹ֣ת מוֹאָ֔ב עַ֖ל יַרְדֵּ֥ן יְרֵחֽוֹ׃
וּבְאֵ֙לֶּה֙ לֹא־הָ֣יָה אִ֔ישׁ מִפְּקוּדֵ֣י מֹשֶׁ֔ה וְאַהֲרֹ֖ן הַכֹּהֵ֑ן אֲשֶׁ֥ר פָּקְד֛וּ אֶת־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בְּמִדְבַּ֥ר סִינָֽי׃
“These are the persons counted by Moshe and Eleazar the priest who counted the Israelites on the steppes of Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho. And among them, there was not a single one left of the people counted by Moshe and Aharon the priest when they counted the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai.”
This is not news. Many of us are familiar with the story that the generation of the Exodus, the transitional generation who were born into slavery and crossed a Sea to freedom, did not reach the Promised Land but died in the Wilderness. This is core Jewish lore.
But this is the moment when it is announced. Noticed. And there is a gasp, a moment of surprise and shock when we read it. “Among them, there was not a single one left.” I can’t tell if the gasp of surprise is mine or Moshe’s. Moshe’s gasp as he realizes suddenly, personally, incontrovertibly, that he outlived everyone. Everyone. Moshe’s gasp as he realizes that the fulfillment of the Redemption is not for the generation he promised Redemption to. But only for the generations to come, who would have no firsthand memory of the Old Country.
Like us.
The first of Uncle Irv’s generation were born over the Sea, in a shtetl at what is now the Poland-Belarus border. Uncle Irv’s parents, my great-grandparents, took to the Sea with my baby grandmother, landing in Chicago, as did their siblings before and after them. That generation who took the risk of leaving with their babies and toddlers and virtually nothing else is now long gone, but they lived on in their many children, and then fewer children, and finally, only in Uncle Irv.
I stood in the cemetery last week – the Erste Krinker Verein Cemetery, a section of Chicago Waldheim that was bought by the landsmanshaft, the aid society created by the immigrants from that village. An inexpensive piece of earth, a thin strip abutting the train tracks. But sacred nonetheless. Ancestral land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodawadme people; and now also the holy, transplanted, ancestral land of the Jews of Krinek. This cemetery section of around 370 plots had been managed for many decades by my great grandfather, Meyer Jacobs. The cemetery’s luminaries include Studs Terkel’s parents (but not Studs himself, whose ashes are cleverly hidden at Chicago’s famous Bughouse Square, a shrine to free speech), and some of the Shure family, whose microphones and sound equipment we use at Ner Shalom, and maybe 40 or so of my own close and distant relatives. In preparing for the funeral, I introduced myself to the elderly funeral director and he told me stories about my great grandfather. I realized that this would be the last time in this world that I would be identified as Meyer Jacobs’ great grandson, one of the few times, and the last time, that that would be a meaningful reference point.
We said Kaddish for Uncle Irv, and I knew this would be the last time I would officiate or attend a funeral on this sacred ground.
וּבְאֵ֙לֶּה֙ לֹא־הָ֣יָה אִ֔ישׁ
Because with Uncle Irv they are now all gone. I’m the family historian; I’ve done the census. And none remain. The immigrants and their children. The generation of the Exodus. The souls who crossed the Sea. I felt Moshe’s gasp of surprise and loss rising in my own chest.
But there is nothing amiss here. Generations die off. They are remembered by some descendants and then they are absorbed into the collective and become the stuff of history and of imagination.
Wendell Berry writes: “This business of the past involves the historical record . . . and we are obliged . . . to paw through those documents if we’re going to take the past on as an obligation. Then there’s memory. Inevitably all through it is imagination. . . . Some of the connections are going to have to be imagined if they are going to exist at all . . . .”
I am close enough to remember Uncle Irv as an individual. I know what kind of mandel bread he liked, what kind of smoked whitefish. I know he fought at Normandy. I knew his wife and his home. I know the sound of his voice. He is not yet absorbed into the collective of a generation.
When Moshe realized that no one remained from his first census, he also remembered them as individuals. Their quirks and personalities. Who was combative. Who broke the tension with jokes. Who wouldn’t eat garlic. Who had sweaty hands. Moshe knew the sound of so many of those people’s laughs.
We don’t. We read their collective story every year. The story of this generation. Gen-Xodus. But we can imagine. In fact, the story doesn’t really have power, doesn’t really mean something, until we take the trouble to imagine. Not just the mass movement but the individuals. We can imagine, and we will not be exactly right about any single individual, but we will reanimate them anyway, and reinvigorate Torah in the process.
And in the years to come, when future historians and storytellers call to mind my Uncle Irv’s generation, I hope that once in a while they imagine someone like him.
I’m grateful to Shlomo/Salome Pesach for pointing me to this Wendell Berry quote, taken from What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be (University of Chicago Press, 2021).