my grandmother doesn’t love the high holy days
When we were all much younger, she used to represent an automatic, instinctive connection to all things Jewish. Savta, we called her, and still do – the Hebrew word for Grandmother. It’s not that she was particularly adept at making chicken soup, or that she even teased or scolded us with Yiddish expressions. My Savta, however, is Israeli-born, as was my grandfather, her husband, who pre-deceased both me and my elder sister by just a few years. But Savta, now in America more than fifty years, a long-standing and much-honored former Hebrew day school teacher and synagogue principal, an actual veteran of Israel’s Independence War, is a lonely veteran of life and loss and it occurs to me that she really dislikes these fall holidays.
I understand – but it doesn’t soften the ache I feel for her. At Rosh Hashanah, people gather, families reconvene, Jewish communities rejuvenate, people make fresh promises in convocations of prayers and meals. Savta lives alone in a nicely scrubbed apartment in something called the Kensington Center of Lutheran Village in Columbus, Ohio. The irony is not lost upon me, though Savta has naturally developed into the spiritual leader of the several Jewish residents in the facility, conducting Torah study sessions, Yom Hashoah observances, and, I suspect, some form of Yom Kippur liturgy. She certainly makes sure that there are matzohs in the dining room each spring.
The geographic circumstances of our family’s life (we once all lived in Ohio) as well as dreadfully unique physical challenges have displaced her from her children and grandchildren. Much of her family still lives in Israel and they visit the graves of our common ancestors in her behalf. Several of us live here in California, but she relies on the telephone and the Internet, and the occasional visit to calm her spirit and mollify her lonesomeness. Because my father is a rabbi and naturally preoccupied at the High Holy Days, and because my sister (who lives in New York) and I are both, well, busy with our lives, Savta will likely watch local family members of other residents come collect their parents and grandparents at the season of sweet apples and repentance – just as she notices this most every Sunday afternoon. All of us who are connected to this matriarch of ours feel a great deal of anguish about all this, and we do talk with her a great deal, and we do know her pain. But the compost of guilt and frustration we feel pales to what Savta feels in terms of anger with the God of these Days of Awe.
Savta has buried two husbands (my grandfather died when they were both in their early ’40s) and she was profoundly injured in an uncanny elevator accident in Cincinnati in 1994. I still recall the frightening scenario of the nationally-covered elevator mishap, and I how tried, at the age of 11, to discern the deaths of Savta’s three card-playing friends and the ultimately fatal head injury suffered by my step-grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who was fit and enjoying life at the time of this tragedy. Savta, with bittersweet luck, wound up on top of the heap of victims and therefore “only” endured massive damage to her feet and legs. She’s been wheelchair-bound ever since and, while still hearty and literate and wickedly funny, is in a stalemate with God that she feels most bluntly at this annual Jewish season of reckoning. She really can’t travel, we have all moved on through life’s passages, and she is left with memories and aging friends and her precious computer.
“Do not discard us in our old age,” echoes the Jewish tradition. We haven’t discarded Savta by any means, and she does her best to accept the unfortunate equation of her life. But she is not happy with the God she served for so long in classrooms, in synagogues, Israel Day speeches, and Hebraica seminars. I understand why she is so judgmental about this judgment season and wish things were different. I see myself, perhaps 50 years from now. Will I be at the mercy of fate like my dear grandmother?
I shall stop writing now and call Savta; it’s never the wrong time for an apple with some honey.
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