My Mother’s Prayer

If we believe that HaShem runs the world then we believe that there is no such thing as coincidences. So when my mother’s twentieth yahrzeit fell out the day after my grandson would be putting on tefillin for the first time I felt it was Divine Providence.  

My mother was born into a large, assimilated Jewish family. Although she had a scant religious education, she had a strong sense of Jewish identity. One of the ways this feeling was manifested was in her commitment to tikkun olam, fixing the world. Whether it was being a private, volunteer nurse to hospitalized relatives and friends, trying to make peace between family members, or raising her daughter to be racially color-blind, she acted.

For years there was a yellowed newspaper clipping hanging in our kitchen. The article was brief and the picture blurred but if one looked closely my mother’s face could be found. She was a tiny spot among hundreds demonstrating for equal housing for all.  Their campaign was successful and a short time later we had black neighbors. 

With all her concerns for equality, though, she had a red line. Due to the aforementioned sense of Jewish identity I was raised knowing that marrying a non-Jew, no matter what color, was not an option. She had her non-Jewish friends, kind and decent people whom she loved dearly, but we were different from them. As Tevye asked in Fiddler on the Roof: A bird may love a fish but where would they build a home together?

Why my mother was able to brainwash me when so many of her contemporaries had children who did marry out is a question I’ve often asked myself. To this day I still don’t have an answer. All I know is that Friday when I witnessed her third great-grandson wrapping his treasured tefillin around his arm at the Western Wall in the Holy City of Jerusalem in the Land of Israel, the land flowing with milk and honey, I knew her prayers for the Jewish continuity of her family had been answered.   

My husband with out three oldest grandsons