The recording came courtesy of my cousins in Israel. They had found voice recordings from my parents’ wedding among some dusty storage, and they were thoughtful enough to send them over.

It’s not that I wasn’t familiar with my parents’ wedding up until that point. I had browsed through their wedding pictures often when I was a kid, all the while listening to the commentary from my mother about particular guests or family members. The pictures were pretty standard as far as wedding albums go. My mother in her veil and white dress; my father, the mystery, in his suit and tie and hat. The parade of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, all a few decades younger and not exactly dressed in the height of fashion, even for the day, was still an important connection to my family legacy.

I would flip through the album, wondering about the lives and locations of some of the guests, and marveling at the incredible twist of fate that brought these two southern baalei teshuvah together in Israel. But there was one reason above all else that would compel me to open the album: to study my father’s face. I would search it desperately for an inkling of remembrance. Maybe deep in the recesses of my subconscious there was a similar image. But his face eluded my memory.

Ironically, my father’s wedding photos contorted his memory even further. In most of the pictures, half of his face was covered in large dark sunglasses. My mother explained to me that the night before the wedding, my father had gotten kicked in the face while swimming, which left him with an impressive black and blue eye. The choice was either to sport the shiner and look like he’d just emerged from a tavern brawl, or to wear the sunglasses and at worst, look classily nonchalant. I think he made the right choice.

Unfortunately for me, though, it meant I was left with pictures of an unfamiliar face even more obscured. We’ve all witnessed the powerful emotions soundlessly transmitted by a chassan under his chuppah. The smile, the kavanah, the twinkling in the eyes. But my father’s eyes remain in shadow, eternally shrouded in mystery.

I don’t know how he walked or how he talked. I have no idea how he celebrated or vented frustration. And I don’t have a clue how he said Kiddush or led the Pesach Seder. Sure, I knew little factoids about him that other people would share. But it’s a little discomfiting to realize that everything you know about your father is the filtered testimony of a third party.

If I could pick one thing I would have liked to remember about him, it would have been his voice. That would round out the two-dimensional image of what I’ve had up to now — grainy, unfocused photos, or a portrait masked behind sunglasses.

Yet now, I finally had something more.

Initially, I sat in silence with the recording, in contemplation of its sacredness. Yet I was also aware of a creeping feeling of uneasiness: For decades I had imagined what his voice would sound like. What if it was drastically different?

I’m sure you can understand that we yesomim try to imagine our deceased parents at key moments in our life. We picture what they would say, and how they would sound while saying it. We fantasize about gestures: approving head nods, an arm on the shoulder, an intimate wink. We keep the form loose and open to interpretation. We allow our ghosts to improvise, much like a living parent would. We are constantly creating these simple sketches based on memory and necessity.

But even among yesomim, I was different. I was drawing nearly everything from my imagination rather than my memory. And my imagination would stir up this mostly fictional character who bore an uncanny resemblance to pictures of my father. But aside from the visuals, I was left to come up with the gestures, the idiosyncrasies, the script, and definitely the voice.

Still, at every life event, that imaginary voice accompanied me. It was a comforting voice, a familiar voice even. A voice that had been at every baseball game, every graduation, every siyum and every birthday. It was the voice of my internal monologue, and my yetzer tov. It sounded like my mother, my brother, my sisters, my rebbeim, but also at the same time, like none of them. It was impossible to place, yet recognizable. It was always present, but if I focused on it too hard, it vanished. It was unequivocally my father’s voice.

And now, I had the real thing in front of me. One button away. Yet it was not a small thing to forgo the fantasy I had created. I had a loyalty to the voice of my childhood.

But even with my misgivings, I needed to know. Obviously, the sheer curiosity itself was a huge factor. But there was a deeper element as well. In Judaism, a father’s voice is much more than just a memory — it’s a mesorah. The link that binds us all to our ancestors at Har Sinai. Our survival, and the holiness we infuse into our lives, relies on it. Both on the truths it espouses, and the principles it defends. In a world of confusion and constantly changing definitions, our mesorah remains. Unbroken. Passed from father to son. Tethered to the Most Holy.

Of course, we have yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs, and we live in an abundant time where there is rebbi for every talmid. But still, the core of what Yiddishkeit is should come from the dining room table. Nothing can replace the parent’s mitzvah of v’shinantam levanecha. Because every mitzvah reaches back across time and space. It passes through ghettos and palaces and desert encampments. Every prayer we utter was uttered before. By the faces in the picture frames on the mantle, by those who we were named after. By that missing presence in an empty chair.

I was missing this pivotal link. Without my father to link me and the previous generations, the deeds and the words would often feel foreign. I would learn the halachos of tefillah, of Shabbos, and follow them as they were presented to me. But something in the taste was missing. The precious things our family does was absent. I would go to friends’ Shabbos meals and watch how their fathers would say Kiddush. I would hear about their minhagim during Yamim Tovim, or about an obscure shitah that they still had, taken from a land now devoid of Jews. And I would become envious.

I am not disparaging halachah as it is, chas v’shalom, distilled from a collection of sources and hammered out across centuries. We put on tefillin a certain way because that is how the law was codified.

But I can imagine how that must change, when one learns about his great-grandfather who traded his meager rations in order to borrow a pair of tefillin in Auschwitz. Or how a distant uncle performed a bris milah in the face of the brutal czarist regime. These stories do not alter the law, but they do add a new dimension of color. It means that every time one wraps his shel yad or attends a family bris, these ritualistic motions turn into precious family heirlooms.

Thinking back to the Sedorim of my youth, I have fond memories of those long Pesach nights with my siblings and cousins. My family would always move in with my aunt and uncle in New Jersey for the entirety of Pesach, and it was one of the highlights of the year getting to laugh with my cousins deep into the night.

But among the singing and the rituals of the night, there were scarcely any ancestral stories. My uncle and my mother were baalei teshuvah from Arkansas. This meant that the focus of the Seder was more about what the children learned, less about the retelling of ancient family traditions.

The one caveat being when Safta (my aunt’s mother) would share with us stories about her parents and grandparents with great enthusiasm. Every year, when Safta would begin, I would peel my eyes away from my cousin Gavriel’s detailed methodology of spilling the wine, and listen attentively to her memories. It was all so foreign to me, the idea that someone could have such a link to past generations. Her eyewitness accounts seemed more like they belonged in a storybook of Yiddish parables.

AS

I came into adulthood, the missing mesorah started to feel like a real absence. I often found myself sitting around my wife’s family’s Seder table, wondering about how my ancestors might have read through their Haggadah. Silently, I would lament all those customs lost to time, all that color now shaded in gray. And I would listen to the history of my wife’s family. How the different generations would reminisce about past Sedorim with such detail that you could picture their Seder. I would get swept away in their retelling of their mesorah, feeling strongly connected to bubbies and zeidies who were long gone. And then I would scan the bottom of my Haggadah page to follow what ArtScroll told me to do next.

My father’s untimely passing should not have been the total mesorah block it ended up being. He had a father after all, and his father had a father before him. But unfortunately, that way was a dead end as well.

My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. The only member of his family that we know of who made it out alive. He was young when he was liberated, and he, like many Jews at that time, cast away his Judaism and let it lie with his deceased relatives. Everything my father knew about Yiddishkeit came from the families and rabbis that helped him on his teshuvah journey.

My father’s home was a broken one. He came from two people who had lost everything, and not everyone is able to rebuild. Wanting a new path in life, he sought out the religion his father had abandoned. Thankfully, he was taken in by local families who thrived on chesed. Although he was in touch with his father throughout his life, the distance of his childhood remained. When it came to religious tradition, there was nothing to talk about.

My mother once told me that I was not alone in my obsession of mesorah. It seems that my father was bothered by the topic as well. On his own teshuvah journey, he often met Jews from Poland, the country from where his father fled, and he would ask them about their minhagim and family customs in a desperate attempt to perhaps recover what was lost.

The irony is not lost on me, that out of all the people in my life who would have empathized with my plight, my father would have been the first and foremost. Just like me, he had no family mesorah. Sometimes, while I would ponder this problem, I would find solace in our similarity. That alone could be our mesorah. Not having one, but doing Yiddishkeit anyway.

That is not to say my father didn’t leave a legacy. Sure, there wasn’t an inheritance of familial and spiritual riches, but he was his own person who left a strong impression on others. The snippets of his life reflect courage, empathy, and a fantastic sense of humor.

I cherish every tidbit, every story, I ever heard about my father. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time I heard it or the twentieth. They were like that comforting book or that nostalgic song that you can always rely on. A lot of these stories took place after he became sick, and they demonstrate his bravery in the face of despair, and how even with his own life on the line, he would consistently put others before him. And every now and then, in those later stories, there would also be a witty remark, or a joke at his own expense.

The humor was a lot more prevalent in his coming-of-age stories. He seemed to be able to straddle that line between clever and chutzpah, and these were the stories I loved. The ones that showed that despite his challenging upbringing, he put a great emphasis on making those around him laugh.

All in all, through the stitching together of various threads, the picture began to take shape. When a kind soul would share a story with me, I would analyze every detail searching for truth through consistency. Were the stories about his humor laced with kindness? Were the stories about his empathy tinged with honesty as well?

Thus did my mesorah begin to form. Voiceless and inaudible. It preached a strong opposition to any victim mentality. It demanded that I feel the pain of others, compelled me to use my innate gifts to allay that pain, and begged me to search for emes and uphold it.

Still, so much was missing. I still have no idea how he would be mechanech his children, or what zemiros he treasured. I don’t know how he prepped for Elul or what he prioritized in his Jewish study. I’m guessing he would omit the extra piyutim in the Yom Kippur machzor, but perhaps that’s just wishful thinking. But the pieced-together mesorah that I did have served me pretty well, too.

His voice, held tightly in my hand, could not undo any of what I know about him. I know that deep inside my core, but this is still the only message I will hear from his mouth. These words, how he says them, what their content is, will be his voice in my ear from now on. If only he would’ve known that his son would build entire worlds out of these arbitrary words….

I hold my breath and I play the recording.

Forty-one words. Ten seconds. I play it again. He speaks with the nervousness and giddiness of a chassan on his wedding day. I play it again. His voice register is low and he speaks with a deep southern accent. His cadence is quick but not hurried. I play it again. I can’t be sure if he’s smiling, but it sounds like he is. I play it again. Of course he’s not preaching some timeless maxim. He’s not telling the faceless listener about cherished minhagim, or a piece of Torah that gives clarity to the uncertainties of life. No, he’s telling a joke. Maybe that’s what I needed to hear all along. I play it again.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1054)