Shalom Chaverim,
Over the last couple of weeks since my father died, I’ve heard people say/write several times that ‘nothing prepares you’ for the loss of a parent (or really for the passing of anyone with whom your life is deeply entwined). I’m finding that to be true.
At the same time, I’m also finding that family, friends, and community – our Temple Sinai community – have in fact ‘prepared’ me for this as well as I can imagine being prepared for the unpreparable: The people in our lives and the mutual care and support we give to one another is what is getting me through these difficult days now. I like to think that I was appreciative of these relationships before now, but certainly during difficult times the awareness of how important and meaningful these relationships are is felt even more immediately and deeply, and the gratitude for them rises to almost an overwhelming level…
I’m so grateful for the all the many visits and comfort during shiva, the many cards and texts and emails and phone calls and hugs and kind words, the sympathy in people’s eyes and the gentleness in their voices, the loving gifts of food and helping out so I could take the time to travel and sit shiva…
Thank you.
I wrote the following to some young families who are in the stage of life where they are building their community connections that will over time, hopefully, become for them as well the foundation of the beautiful sense of ‘kehillat kodesh’ – a community of holiness –that you all established and built into our Temple Sinai community today:
I was so moved and supported by the sense of community while sitting shiva with my mom and family in Virginia, and then here for a couple of nights. I was thinking during the shiva: I see you all – your great group of young families – being so conscious of creating your community. I’m awed and impressed by what I see as your awareness and your holding community as a value…more than I did when my kids were younger. But I got lucky in landing at Temple Sinai where the older folks here really built a remarkable community when they were in your stage of life as families with young kids — and it has persisted to now for them and is so amazing and supportive and cherished by them. And by me now too of course. I wish the same for you all…. I am eager to help in any way I can, and honored to do so. I think you all have a real opportunity to create an amazing community for your generation in Marblehead/Swampscott. The truly wonderfully good folks at Temple Sinai would be thrilled, I know, to help in whatever you need and to utilize whatever resources, experience, infrastructure, mentoring or anything else in TS to help you all not only ‘join’ and feel welcome and engaged in the existing TS community, but to help you transform it into your own for the future….
I think that I have never so strongly felt as I do now the value, immeasurable strength, importance, and meaning of – nor sensed the full beauty of – what Jewish community is all about.
Thank you Temple Sinai…
SHABBAT SHALOM!
Rabbi Michael Schwartz