MANNA article 'From non-Jew to Rabbi'
Written by Rabbi Roderick Young' Friday, 29 April 2005
How To Honour Problem Parents
MY FATHER WAS BORN and raised in Wales. Every evening, except Sunday, my grandfather drank half a pint of beer in the local pub, with my father drinking lemonade at his elbow. Half a pint was all Grandpa could drink because most of his stomach had been destroyed by mustard gas in the trenches of the First World War. He did not drink on Sunday because the pubs were closed. In those days the Welsh believed that divine retribution would fall on the head of anyone who desecrated the Sabbath with drink. Every Sunday my family worshipped in a small red brick church. Afterwards they went home, defied God and drank. And the priest went with them. My great-grandfather plied him with whisky and cigars and before each sip or puff the priest would bellow: “I drink your drink and I smoke your smoke to the greater glory of God.”
In that red brick church, Sunday after Sunday a curious thing happened. As soon as the organ began to play, my father began to weep. Soon he would be so hysterical that he had to be taken outside to calm down. When he grew up, he never went to church again.
Far away, in the East End of London, my mother’s family was leaving the little cramped squares around The Great Synagogue where they had lived for a hundred years. They moved into great houses filled with Christian servants. My grandparents were married under the chandeliers of the West End’s Central Synagogue, and breathed the same air as the Rothschilds.
My grandmother, a Jew born and bred, hated Judaism. It was my grandfather who took my mother to sit in the opulent and Moorish splendour of their new shul, the West London Synagogue of British Jews. But Shabbat after Shabbat a curious thing happened. As soon as my mother saw the dark mahogany staircase and the rabbi with black hat and black beard, she began to weep. Soon she would be so hysterical that she had to be taken outside to calm down. Her father died when she was ten and she never had to go to synagogue again.
Many years later the lives of my mother and father flowed together for a while and then abruptly flowed apart again. And all that remained of the brief collision of two very different worlds was me.
My father left when I was four. I did not want him to go. I took all the pins from my mother’s sewing box, went out into the street and stuck them into the tyres of his car. I suppose they were not long enough, or sharp enough, for he went just the same. When I was older he came back into my life and took me to that same local pub in Wales. There I watched him do to his system, with alcohol, what the Germans had done to his father with gas.
My mother raised me, sending me to an ancient public school where I was taught to be a good Anglican. She forbade any of my relatives to tell me of my Jewish origins. She led me to believe that we were of Royal blood, descended from the kings of Scotland. She hung a framed certificate of my baptism above my bed. Never once did I suspect that my lineage was anything but British Christian from the dawn of time.
When I was twenty three I discovered that my mother had been born a Jew. How that happened must be a story for another time. But every year when we begin to read the Book of Exodus, I relive the shock of that discovery. In my heart I know how terrifying and thrilling it was for Moses, the boy with the Egyptian name, raised by Pharaoh’s daughter in the very heart of the luxuries of Egypt, suddenly to discover that his road lay not with the rulers who had raised him, but with a group of strangers, his own enslaved blood relatives.
In the Torah portion Yitro (Exodus 18:1-20:23) the Ten Commandments are proclaimed. Right in their centre they say: “Honour your father and your mother, that you may long endure on the land that Adonai your God is giving you.” What went through Moses’ head as he noted that? His own mother and father gave him away as a baby, to save his life, and then disappeared from the story. So how did he honour them? He was raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, who named him Moses and called him her son, and then she too disappeared from the story. Did he feel the need to honour her as a mother? We have no window into Moses’ mind on these matters. But I feel sure that Moses, the first person ever to know the fifth commandment, struggled with its meaning, just as many of us do at some stage of our lives.
The first time that I walked into a synagogue it was Shabbat Parashat Ekev. In the Torah reading, Moses and the Israelites stood poised on the borders of the land. I too stood at the border, wanting to begin the journey home. But I had read the fifth commandment. How could I honour my mother and be a Jew? I took my question to the Lubavitch and they said: “Honour your mother and be a good Jew? No problem. When you go to her house take your own pots, pans and plates and cover her kitchen with aluminium foil.” That was missing the point, so I took my question to Rabbi Louis Jacobs – head of the Masorti Movement in England and a true tsaddik. He said: “You are a Jew. Now find a way to make your mother feel that Judaism is something that you arrived at on your own and not something that was inevitably passed through her.” I have tried to achieve this balance, but I have not always been successful. My choice to be a Jew and a rabbi is not something that my mother understands and on her face I have read anger and betrayal. So, knowing that I can never honour my mother as she would like, a few years ago I took my question to the rabbis of the Talmud.
In three different places in the Talmud I found one of the passages that is traditionally said each morning in the prescribed liturgy: “these are the obligations without measure – honouring one’s parents, the practice of loving deeds, hospitality to wayfarers, peace making between a person and their neighbour but the study of Torah surpasses them all.” According to the Talmud a parent never has the right to ask us to do anything that goes against the Torah. The rabbis quote Leviticus 19:3: “You shall each revere your mother and father and keep my Sabbaths.” From this they conclude that if a parent demands that a child disregard Shabbat then that parent must be disobeyed. And from here it was but a short step to the conclusion that “honour your father and mother” does not necessarily mean “obey them”.
But tradition is equally adamant that, even if our parents do something terrible, we are still bound to honour them. Why should this be the case? The answer is also in the Talmud, in a beautiful passage. “Our rabbis taught: There are three partners in every person, the Holy One, blessed be God, the father and the mother. When a person honours his father and his mother, the Holy One, blessed be God, says: “I praise them as though I had lived among them and they had honoured me.”
So at its root the fifth commandment is a commandment to honour God and the gift of life we have been given. How we do that will differ from person to person.
A few years ago I was home with my mother and in an old suitcase I found some mementoes of a visit that she and her mother made to Egypt in 1939. Amongst them was an invitation card, which read: “On the occasion of the Birthday Anniversary of His Majesty King Farouk I, The Governor of Cairo requests the honour of your company on board the Misr Nile Steamer at the Anglo-American landing stage, Ghezireh, at 8pm on Friday, February the 10th 1939.”
Only as I read this invitation did I finally understand how far from her roots my grandmother had led my mother. The name of that Nile steam ship was “Misr”, meaning Egypt. It is closely connected to the word Mitzrayim, which is the Hebrew for Egypt. But because of the Israelites’s suffering in Egypt, the word Mitzrayim transcended the physical country, and came to signify a narrow place of darkness and imprisonment. Truly, my grandmother took my mother by the hand into the very heart of Mitzrayim. When they curtseyed in front of King Farouk they had arrived at the position of social prominence amongst the British for which my grandmother had been fighting. But to arrive there they had to bow at the feet of the modern pharaoh and abandon their heritage.
My mother was determined to pass on that social position to me. Never should I be called a Christ killer or a little Jew, as she had been. Unencumbered by the past, her son would be an unblemished English Christian. Instead I disobeyed her and if I had not I would not be living my life, but instead her vision of what my life should be. I would be like an Abraham who decided to stay at home in his father’s house, never to open the front door.
According to the Talmud, I can fulfil the letter of the Law by visiting my mother and helping her financially. For a long time I thought that was all that was required of me. But slowly I have begun to understand the powerful love that caused her to act as she did. And I know that I can only truly fulfil the fifth commandment once I have accepted my mother for who she is, and for the path she took.
The bond between a child and a parent is a beautiful and a sacred bond. For most people it is a joy to honour the mother and the father who gave them life and love. But, if a child, for his own mental or physical safety, has to cut himself off from a parent, how can I as a rabbi say to that person “honour your parent”? I can do so by saying: Remove yourself from your parent, if you must. But then, make the most of the life that came, yes, through your parents, but from God who is the source of life and the original parent. Perhaps The Maggid of Meserich, an eighteenth century Hasid, had just such a child in mind when he taught: “The fifth commandment is... an injunction to see dignity even where there is no dignity, just as God’s glory can be discerned, for those who have eyes to see, even in this world of error and confusion.”
God said that if we do not honour our parents then we will not long endure in the promised land. That is true. When we remain enslaved by old pain and hurt then we are unable to honour the source of life, or live life to our fullest potential. There is a Mitzrayim of anger from which it is hard to emerge. With regard to my father I live there still.
But God brought the Israelites out of Mitzrayim with a strong hand. And God does so still, for in all our lives there are moments of synchronicity that have the hand print of God upon them.
When I was working as a chaplain in a New York hospital, I visited Bob every day for nine weeks, until his death. He was fifty-five and dying of cancer. His opening words to me had been “I’m a Jewish boy from Brooklyn and I’ve forgotten how to pray.” We became very close. One day I was about to leave the office of my supervisor, Paul, when Paul’s grown up son came in. They kissed in greeting. And I suddenly felt terribly alone, knowing that I could never have a relationship with my father that included such physical intimacy. I walked over to Bob’s room and he behaved as he never had before. He threw open his arms and said: “May I kiss you as a father would, for I feel that you are like another son to me.”
With such moments of synchronicity God effects healing.
My father was a pilot in the Royal Air Force for twenty years. During the year that I spent as a rabbinical student in Jerusalem I visited him in England and I asked him if he had ever been stationed in Palestine. He had been – in 1947. His job was simple. Every day he flew his plane over the Mediterranean. If he saw a ship load of refugees sailing to Palestine, then he radioed the Royal Navy, who intercepted the ship and took the refugees to Internment Camps on Cyprus. He told me how once he circled very low over such a ship and that the Jews on it covered every surface, like a swarm of ants.
I returned to Jerusalem, ashamed to tell anyone what I had heard. My class was studying literature with an exceptional woman named Ada Pagis. One morning she gave us a piece by the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, about his internment as a child by the British on Cyprus. I felt impelled to tell my father’s story. There was silence and Ada stared at me. Then she said: “When I was a child of twelve, in 1947, I sailed on a refugee ship from Germany. We were in sight of the coast of Palestine when a Royal Air Force plane circled low overhead. And we knew that it was over. I was interned on Cyprus.” She paused and stared at me again. Then she continued: “On Cyprus I was taught to hate those British soldiers. But somehow I never did. And who would ever have believed that fifty years on I would be teaching the son of one of them in Jerusalem.” After my class mates had left she put her arms around me and held me tight.
With such moments of synchronicity God reminds me that a parent’s love may be found in unexpected places. We fulfil the fifth commandment when we accept the love of a mother or a father from those who offer it to us in the daily round of life. My father sought to keep Jews from the promised land and one of those very Jews took me a little way down the road, out of the Mitzrayim of anger. I am not clear of Mitzrayim, but this is a continuing story and only God knows where the road will lead.
None of us has perfect parents. None of us will be perfect parents. But those who do have the unconditional love and support of a parent have a most precious gift. And those who don’t, can take comfort in finding God the mother and God the father dwelling in the likeness of those extraordinary men and women, who from time to time enter our lives and illuminate them with the reflected splendour of God ƒÞ
RABBI RODERICK YOUNG is a graduate of Hebrew Union College. He currently serves Leicester Progressive community and is shortly taking up a part-time post at West London Synagogue.
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