A Gift from Grown Sons

On the Danube, 1985
On the Danube, 1985

My sons are gifted givers of love.  To their wives.  To their sons. To us.  The richness of this awareness is indescribable.

To watch a man, a son of yours, arrive home from work, lift his infant son and greet him with such easy confidence and comfort and tenderness, help his toddler handle his anger, joke with his wife, ask with deep concern “how is Dad feeling?” well – you can’t imagine.  If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

To watch his brother conduct serious conversations with his one year old, read to him, laugh with him, unabashedly speak of his love for his wife and child and offer small acts of kindness to us – and to so many others – well – you can’t imagine.  If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

I know many families share in these blessings.  But I’m writing it now because I woke up this morning thinking this, feeling so full of gratitude you can’t imagine.  If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

Lost: a Rapper from 8 Mile and some Men, Women and Children from Austin

eminem Remember 8 Mile, the sad story of a neglected trailer park teen from Detroit – supposedly pretty  close to the story of its creator, rapper Eminem?

I kept thinking about it as I watched Men, Women and Children, the profoundly moving story of a different kind of alienation at least partially enabled by the Internet.  Nobody’s mom was an abusive alcoholic, but one mom fled her family so completely teens library mwcthat she blocked her son Tim from her Facebook account,  one sold slightly risqué images of her cheerleader daughter online and yet another intercepted and read every online communication to and from her daughter Brandy and tracked her movements with a tracker on her phone;  Brandy was so stifled that she created a secret online identity just to get away once in a while.

It’s a beautiful film, a survey of young people so much on their own ; life online allows so much distance from parents and any love or wisdom they might offer.  And even though they make mistakes beyond the web, the same technology seems to have trapped their parents, too.

Reitman chooses to move beyond individual dramas, however, and take us beyond his own observations as he closes the film with Carl Sagan’s  Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space – with a hopeful description that connects us all to one another: enemy or friend, alive or dead, present or past, online or off:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

 

JERUSALEM, THE WALL, AND THE SEPARATION OF WOMEN AND MEN

Kotel_1

Early this morning, in a gray, chilly rain, around ten of us went to the Western Wall (the Kotel) to say morning prayers.  It’s always very moving (and sometimes upsetting) to go to the Kotel.  I’ve been there in summer and fall, alone, with our kids and with groups, to a bar mitzvah and a paratrooper regiment induction (all Israeli military take their oaths there), when I was first pregnant 30+ years ago, and  placed a prayer for our new child’s health into one of the cracks, and countless other times.  One thing remains true.  There’s the Kotel_erica
really big men’s side….   

and the really small and usually (though not today) ridiculously crowded women’s side.  Surprisingly, the separation, like that in the  synagogue, doesn’t bother me.  If I were a young mother whose sons and husband were sitting together while I sat alone, I might feel differently but for some reason I like being with my "sisters" on the women’s side, not worrying about the spiritual condition of anyone but myself.  It’s peaceful.

Of course, in all parts of observant Judaism there’s an undertone of the perplexing – why must women and men be apart for so many of life’s critical moments?  Some of the rules, however they are justified, are difficult and I’m struggling to be available to understand them.  The toughest right now, because we’ve just been learning it, are the Laws of Family Purity and the physical separation of husband and wife any time there is a presence, or recent presence, of menstrual blood.  It’s confusing enough dealing with periods, and the "clean" days after one’s period ends, which must pass before any kind of physical contact (not just sex) is permitted.  Of course rules like these are observed to different degrees by different couples.  Some make token acknowledgment of the requirements.  Some sleep in separate beds.  Some don’t sit on the same couch if there is only one cushion.  SOME won’t even pass a bottle of milk from one hand to the other but place the bottle on the table for the other to retrieve.  OK. That’s a choice – it all comes from brief mentions in the Torah, this is how it’s been interpreted and it’s so private that each couple finds its own way of living within the law.  Women also find their own ways of dealing with what could seem a real stigma.  One of my favorite teachers says it’s a time to "reclaim one’s body for oneself" and further, that the physical restrictions cause couples to deal more openly in verbal terms with many of life’s issues, because physical contact isn’t part of the equation.  I just listen and work to be open-minded – I have learned that much about this world into which I’ve moved becomes intelligible over time – and not to condemn that which I haven’t had a chance to absorb.

Even more confusing and the hardest of all, for me, are the rules of childbirth and miscarriage.  Because we bleed after childbirth, once we are free of birth pains and no longer in distress, in many families the husband does not touch his wife again after that initial support during birth, until the bleeding stops.  One rabbi’s rule:  "Help physically as much as you need to during labor – but the minute the baby is born – no more."  Others say that a post-partum woman is still "sick" so deserving of as much love and affection as she requires.  The same divisions exist after a miscarriage.  The bleeding preempts physical contact once the initial trauma is over.  This is tough stuff.  (There’s also lots to say about the Mikvah – a ritual bath married women visit before resuming sexual relations after periods or childbirth. I learned an enormous amount about that today from a generous young, newly-married friend who’s also on this trip.  But I think it’s another post altogether.  I acknowledge that here so you don’t think I’ve omitted it altogether.)

I have waited over a week since our class about this before I posted, in order to allow myself time to think about it.  I’ve brought myself to a position of tolerance and acceptance; those who believe that this is the way God wants us to live, or believe that these are God’s laws which cannot be broken no matter how we feel — these loving souls should "live and be well" within the life’s rules they’ve chosen.  I’m through with condemnations of everything I don’t agree with.  I used to think so many things —  things that this life has taught me were just ONE WAY of seeing the world.  I’m working on reaching that attitude toward these rules of "family purity." 

They arise today because of this trip to the Kotel – just one more separation — that placed this new family information in sharp relief.  I’ve been troubled by it – probably always will be.  But I consider it real growth that I’m working to understand, not deride, these ideas.  What better place to do that than in this holy city?