A Puzzlement
I never caught the jigsaw puzzle fever, but my sister is an avid assembler, and during covid my wife, Sharon, also it them up. Following their lead, I’ll try to construct a metaphoric jigsaw puzzle column, presenting three pieces of events and ideas that I’ll then attempt to snap together smoothly. My hope is that a coherent, perhaps even pleasant, picture emerges.
Piece no. 1. When I arrived in shul on Shabbat morning two weeks ago, the gabbai, my friend Shlomo, approached and said “You have yahrzeit this week, right?” In response to “Yes; for my father,” he offered me the first aliya. I asked if the maftir/haftarah was open, and since it was, that’s the honor I received.
[Pause: While I know all my readers are familiar with shul and Shabbat, I realize that for some the above paragraph contains lots of inside Jewish baseball. Here are some short explanations. Yahrzeit, the anniversary of a person’s death, is commemorated in specific ritual ways. In the Orthodox community, that includes the gabbai (beadle or sexton) calling the son to the Torah (aliya) on the Shabbat preceding the yahrzeit of a parent. The son (called the oleh) then makes a blessing before the Torah is recited. Since I’m a kohen (a member of the priestly caste), my aliya is usually the first one. But the last aliya (maftir) is a special honor since it is also accompanied by the oleh reading from a book of the Prophets (haftorah).]
Back to the story. I didn’t request maftir because of the honor. Rather, the prophetic reading that week was from the book of Micha (6:8), which ends with the magnificent message: “You have been told, O mortal, what is good/And what God requires of you/Only to do justice/And to love goodness/And to walk modestly with your God.” I love chanting that particular verse on my father’s yahrzeit because I can think of almost no other text that so accurately describes the essence of his character.
A yahrzeit also causes you to think about the person whose death, and more importantly life, is being remembered. I therefore mused over the many lessons my father, Simon Kaplan, taught me and my siblings, usually through actions and not words, about values like honoring parents, charity, and Torah study.
Sometimes, though, he had to spell things out explicitly. I once overheard him gently saying “no” to a friend’s request for a charitable donation without giving a reason. This was rare for him, and I asked why he didn’t explain his decision. His answer, which our family now calls the “Zayde Rule,” was that no matter how good your reason is for saying “no” to any request, you will be met with five arguments why the reason doesn’t apply. You’ll then go around and around futilely, with a likely result of hurt feelings and strained relationships. “A simple, warm ‘I’m sorry but I can’t,’” he said (I paraphrase), “is a better way to go.”
Piece no. 2. I have written many times – if not double figures, then close to it – that for the past 15 to 20 years, every Shabbat and yom tov (holiday) I read a sermon by Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm. But as much as I bore you with my tales of Rabbi Lamm’s sermons, just think of my poor family, including my older grandchildren, who have been subjected to Daddy/Grandpa droning on about this, not double-digit times but probably triple. And yet, nary a complaint (at least to me).
And I recently realized that one of the reasons I’ve been so moved by Rabbi Lamm’s sermons is that I was brought up in a home where kavod harav (respect for rabbis) was paramount; a home in which we often discussed the superb sermons of our rabbi, Rabbi Ralph Pelcovitz of the White Shul, around the Shabbat table; a home that considered such sermons deeply important, even when we (read I, the rebellious teenager) might have disagreed with some points. Of course, Rabbi Pelcovitz’s depth of thought and eloquence of language (similar to Rabbi Lamm’s) were important ingredients, but while necessary they were not sufficient.
Rabbinical sermons were important in Kaplan households, and that concept spanned generations. Indeed, it spanned families, as I learned after my marriage to the daughter of another brilliant darshan (sermonizer), my father-in-law, Rabbi Murry S. Penkower.
Piece no. 3. My oldest grandson, Ezra Goldberg, recently graduated from high school, and we spent a wonderful weekend, culminating in the graduation, visiting our Toronto children and grandchildren. Shortly before we drove up (but after we made plans to do so), we learned that Ezra was chosen valedictorian of his Yeshivat Or Chaim class.
All graduations of children/grandchildren are wonderful, but listening to your grandson deliver the valedictory address is quite special. What especially touched this particular grandpa’s heart, though, was hearing Ezra, about two-thirds of the way through his speech, begin a paragraph by declaring “In his Parshat Korach Sermon in 1961, Rabbi Norman Lamm . . . ,” and then use the point of that sermon to explicate the message he was delivering to his classmates.
I asked Ezra questions about this afterward, and he made two points. First, he not only heard me speak about Rabbi Lamm’s sermons, but also took to heart my observation that those who take Modern Orthodoxy seriously need to refer to important MO leaders when discussing Jewish ideas – which is exactly what he did. Second, once he knew he wanted to speak about Korach – the following Shabbat’s Torah portion – he went online and read all nine of R. Lamm’s Korach sermons before choosing one to use. He’s planning on a career in engineering, but that dedication to thorough research tells me he’d also make a really fine lawyer.
And now to the puzzle. How do these three pieces connect? It has to do with generations. My parents – while I wrote about my father above, the same applies to my mother, though some of the lessons were different – clearly had a significant impact on my life in many ways. I’m not sure, however, whether, or to what extent, they realized that. I certainly regret that I was remiss in telling them how important the lessons I learned from them were to me, how my journeys in life were made so much smoother because I traveled on paths they paved.
Now that I’m on the other side of this equation – I’m the parent/grandparent wondering about the impact I had and have on my family – I see that someone actually listened to and acted upon something specific I’ve spoken about. I can therefore hope that other ideas, while not overtly acknowledged, also might have seeped in.
The picture I see appearing from these puzzle pieces is thus one of family continuity; a picture of ideas being passed from generation to generation; a picture of values binding parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren; a picture of lessons not getting lost as the years pass by, but appearing and reappearing as children morph into parents and then grandparents and then leave the scene.
It’s a picture, to switch prophets from Micha to Malachi, foreshadowing the majestic vision of that great and awesome day when the world will experience ve-heshiv lev avot al banim ve-lev banim al avotam (3:23-24); he shall bring parents’ hearts back to children and the children’s hearts to their parents. A jigsaw puzzle picture worthy of framing and hanging on your heart.
Joseph C. Kaplan of Teaneck, a regular columnist for the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News and a Rockower Award recipient, is the author of “A Passionate Writing Life: From ‘In my Opinion’ to ‘I’ve Been Thinking.’” He is a retired lawyer; he and his wife, Sharon, have been blessed with four wonderful daughters and six delicious grandchildren.