October 17, 2024
Author(s): Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger,
Sukkot
Bird!
October 17, 2024 – 15 Tishrei 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
When I was growing up, we spent a lot of time with my Grandpa Gene feeding the geese. My Mom kept a 50 lb. bag of birdseed in the car, and, even when Sir Grandfather, as he liked to be called, was not feeling well, we would drive to the pond, and he would sit and watch from the front seat as we tossed out birdseed to grateful honks. My grandfather also had this superpower. He could spot any flock of birds in the sky and would just know exactly the number of birds in an instant. He would look up and say 39 or 17 or 22 and we would start counting and a minute later, we would confirm his internal knowing.
I loved my grandfather, and I loved the time we spent together, but I did not love birds. My mom and sister spent hours learning the different names and calls and colorings of all the local birds, but not me. I did not want to learn more. If someone would say to me, “wow, that’s a beautiful bird—do you know what kind it is?” I would always say definitively, “yes, that’s a mongor.” If they really didn’t know, then I seemed smart, and we could move on to more interesting topics of conversation. And if they did know, well then, they would laugh, and then we could move on to more interesting topics of conversation.
When Eder was born, we named him after my Grandpa Gene. It’s funny, whenever I meet with soon-to-be parents and they want to talk about how to name their children, I always tell them that when you give your child the name of an ancestor, it’s more than a name. I share that according to Jewish tradition, each one of us accrues blessings in our lifetime that live far longer than we do. When you name a child after someone you love, it’s like giving them a spiritual trust fund. They get all the mitzvah points that their ancestor accrued during their lifetime, and they also earn their own mitzvah points with a great interest rate.
I believed in this Torah, but I didn’t fully get it. In my mind, by naming Eder after my grandfather, I was trying to create a link so that my grandpa could be connected to this little one even though they would never meet in real life. I wanted to create opportunities to talk about my grandfather and the qualities I hope Eder will emulate when he’s older. I never could have predicted what has actually happened.
Eder is 17 months old. He is just starting to express himself and to share his preferences. What does he love more than almost anything in the world? Birds. Every car trip is punctuated by excited, “Bird! Bird!” When I pick him up from daycare, “bird!” Every evening, we go walking together as a family through the cemetery by our house to watch the birds as they fly to their roosts for the night. In the morning, if I need to distract him while I pack up, he watches videos of birds flying on YouTube. Even 20 minutes in, he still exclaims “Bird!” every time a new bird flies on screen. Eder only knows a few words: more, purple, ball, car, apple. But he knows his birds. He knows eagle and hawk and geese and duck and chicken and pigeon and owl. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day he looked up at the sky and knew the number of birds flying in an instant like his great-grandfather.
Did Eder come into this world with his own unique love of birds or is it possible that somehow, he got that love straight from my grandfather? And if he got that love from my grandfather, is it possible that all of us have our own version of this? Is it possible that we are all connected to the people we’ve loved and lost in tangible ways we don’t always acknowledge? Is it possible that some of our dreams or proclivities are inherited rather than inherent?
I raise this today of all days because Sukkot is not only the festival of booths, but also the festival of ancestors. Each night as we sit in our sukkot, we have the tradition of inviting specific ancestors or ushpizin to join us in the sukkah.
My Rebbe, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi z”l, would teach that we don’t just invite our ancestors into the sukkah for the sake of their presence generally, we invite them to come and teach us the qualities they exemplified in life. Today, we are focused on the quality of loving kindness. We remember Abraham sitting at the opening of his tent waiting to welcome the stranger and Miriam standing at the side of the Nile worrying about baby Moses. We remember their kindness and ask them to come to our sukkot, to be with us and to teach us, and to help us as we work to become more loving and more kind in the coming year. Then, if you follow my Rebbe’s practice, you can also invite other guests who exemplify this quality. You can invite people who are living, and you can invite loved ones who have passed on. You can invite people you know and people you wish you could have known.
Sukkot reminds us that the barriers in our lives are not permanent, nor are they as solid as we might have imagined. Ancestors are calling to us, calling through us, all the time.
Let me tell you a story. Back when I was living in Nashville, I used to attend the Orthodox shul there. I remember there was one shabbos we had a bunch of visitors from a world religions class at a local university. They came right at 8:00am and stayed for the whole 4.5 hour service. I remember I kept looking over to see how they were doing. Were they enjoying services? Did they understand where we were or what we were doing? I kept seeing covered yawns, curiosity giving way to total boredom. They didn’t even have enough understanding for this to be a spectator sport. But then, we got to the musaf Amidah, and the cantor started singing one particular melody. All of a sudden, one of the bored students burst into tears. She was sobbing uncontrollably. Sobbing so hard she had to leave.
A few weeks later, she came back. Again, she showed up at 8:00am. Again, she burst into tears during musaf. Only this time she smiled and cried and stayed.
Later, at kiddush, she shared her story. She said that she grew up going to Church. She never really had any kind of profound spiritual experience, but it was always nice. Then she came to our service and heard that melody and something touched her soul. She couldn’t stop crying. The melody sounded familiar even though she knew she had never heard it before. When she told her grandparents about the experience, they were very surprised. They couldn’t believe she would react to a melody in a synagogue. After all, they explained, their family hadn’t been Jewish in many many generations—not since they fled the Spanish Inquisition. At kiddush, I’ll never forget her question: “do you think it’s possible that my ancestors used to sing that melody?”
As we celebrate Sukkot this year, let’s not forget that there is so much more to the world than what we see. Just as the walls of our sukkot are open to the stars, so too our souls are open to the love and support of our ancestors. Always.