When you’re the Rabbi’s daughter, your father doesn’t just belong to you, he belongs to the whole community

Chapter 1

Back home in New York, dusk is when the kids scurry inside with their ball and the women on the block retreat to their houses, when the fireflies light up the backyard, and bats swoop down to snatch mosquitoes from the air.

Here, in Yerushalayim, I breathe in the cooling air and lift my head to the clear, inky blue sky.

What does that mean, Yerushalayim-blue skies? My son Yeshaya had asked me before we flew out. Is it really so much bluer than in New York?

His last trip to Israel had been seven years ago, as an inquisitive six-year-old who had vowed then to return for his bar mitzvah. Other boys in his class had asked for parties. Yeshaya had been insistent that this was what he’d wanted, and we’d been glad to oblige and travel to Israel and have a small family-only affair there.

After all, this is where Abba and Ema were.

When your parents live close by, you never fully break out of childhood. There was always the security of Ema will be here. I can ask Abba. In a pinch, I had emergency babysitting or a Shabbos without cooking and another place that always felt like home.

But now, there is a continental divide between us. My parents have made aliyah, and we have come to visit. Every moment is precious, sacred.

The girls all clamber over Ema, sharing a spill of stories all at once, and Ema gamely keeps up. Abba steps outside for air, and I follow him into the dusk. He watches the boys climb the stairs and call to each other, tumbling over uncles and laughing. I wonder if he imagined a Shabbos bar mitzvah like this one for his grandkids, back when he was growing up.

Maybe he did. Abba has always aspired to more — to struggle more, to push himself harder, to be better. I ask him what he thinks was his greatest act of mesirus nefesh, and he laughs. “Hashem knows that I can’t handle too much. I had a charmed life.”

But I know that he downplays his own past. He became frum on his own as a child, and his parents had regarded that with dubious amusement. At 12, he decided to be strictly shomer Shabbos, even with some pushback from his parents. When he turned 13, his parents planned for a small celebration with family. Abba’s parents might not have been frum, but they held a certain reverence for the religious. They walked to shul on Yom Kippur (even if they did put on a movie after Kol Nidrei), and they didn’t eat or smoke on the day itself (though Abba’s father did leave a cigar at shul for the instant the shofar sounded). On the morning he turned 13, when Abba said that he was leaving for shul, his father said, “Well, it’s your bar mitzvah. I’m going with you.”

“I’m walking,” Abba pointed out.

His father scoffed. “It’s your bar mitzvah,” he said. “I’m walking with you.”

His father wasn’t religious — he could barely read Hebrew — but after his father’s passing, he had sent Abba to a yeshivah for first grade to learn Hebrew. “So that one day, you can say Kaddish for me,” he said.

For a full year, Abba’s father went to shul three times a day to say Kaddish for his father. On Friday nights, he and Abba would stop in at a traditional Jewish deli afterward. One night a week, the owner of the deli would wear a suit and tie and the waitress would wear a Shabbos dress, and they would host a Shabbos meal for the elderly Jews in the neighborhood — many of whom were Holocaust survivors, many without family. Abba, still a first grader and the only child there, would lead the bentshing for them.

Eventually, the deli stopped hosting these weekly dinners, but they brought it back in honor of Abba’s bar mitzvah, and Abba walked there with his family on that Friday night.

“Not much of a story,” he says when I prod him for more. “That was the event. I leined in the frum shul the next day, which was a whole controversy, because my parents had arranged that I would lein in the local temple instead. The people at the temple were excited — they didn’t get a lot of bar mitzvah boys — but I’d already started davening at the frum shul and wanted to lein there.”

The traditional temple, which held an appeal each year for the yeshivah Abba attended, protested the plan. The principal brought Abba into the office. “Did any of your rebbeim tell you that they wouldn’t attend if it were at the temple?” he asked. Abba shook his head. That had never occurred to him as a possibility. The principal let it go, satisfied.

He leined at the frum shul, and the temple still held an appeal for the yeshivah the next year. They even sent him a bar mitzvah gift.

“The thing I remember most wasn’t my bar mitzvah,” he tells me now, and we watch the flickering candlelight in a nearby window. “It was a year later, when I leined my parshah again. I came into shul Shabbos morning and sat down next to the rav, like I always did.”

He pauses. “Five minutes later, my father walked in.” For the first time in a year, Abba’s father had taken Saturday off from work and gone to shul. Abba still speaks about it with a shadow of wonder, describes his father putting on that tallis with the same sacred air as we hold on to our moments with him now.

“Mesirus nefesh….” Abba muses when I prod him, as though it still remains an unattainable answer. Finally, he shakes his head. “Even if I could think of something, I wouldn’t tell it to you.”

That’s fine. I can fill in the blanks.