Sharing Stories

By Rabbi David JAffe

Image description: Blog image with a photo of a dry landscape with flat land in the foreground, and small hill or islands in the background. On top of the image is text that reads: Tammuz 5785 by Rabbi David Jaffe.

In the 1870s in southern Poland, my great-great-grandfather, Jacob Kempler, was imprisoned after falsely being accused of setting fire to his own barn. Lacking any income, his 14 children were seperated among relatives and friends near and far. One of those children, Toni, came to the New York to be a maid, met my grandfather at a dance for immigrants, got married, had children, and built a life in her new country with generations to follow.

I’ve turned to that story recently as a source of encouragement and resilience in this time of war and authoritarianism, when anti-semitism is being successfully weaponized as a wedge election issue that also splits our Jewish community. Staying alert, connected, and proactive, without getting stuck in bitterness and despair, is a real practice in these times.

Professor Marshall Duke of Emory University recently presented to Kirva’s Ovdim fellowship on this topic of family story as a tool for resilience. His research, based on responses to the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., demonstrated that children who knew their family stories were more resilient when dealing with a variety of social and emotional challenges. While some families tell “ascending” stories of deprivation to success or “descending” stories of good times to bad, the most powerful stories are those that oscillate between up and down. Oscillating family stories relate experiences of coming through hard times and give the message that life is built of ups and downs, and the current reality will not last forever. Duke also teaches about the “integenerational self” that senses its life span to extend back as far as its ancestors and thus, embodies the resilience that it took to make it to present through many challenges. Lately, I’ve leaned into this sense of my intergenerational self and drew on Jacob and Toni’s experiences to keep myself grounded and open-hearted.

Family stories and lineage can be fraught for many people due to experiences of assimilation, enslavement, immigration, genocide that disrupt and destroy written and oral records of the past. Duke points out that few of us ever hear the “full” family story in one sitting. We construct these stories from fragments we hear from family members, from observing the behavior of relatives, and from historical sources like museums or books. I find it hopeful, that even a broken lineage can be pieced together through different sources to create a story. Duke said to us, “All family stories are true, and some even happened.”

As Jews, whether by birth or by choice, we are part of a long, 4,000-year-old oscillating story. Rosh Chodesh Tammuz kicks off a 40 day period in this story of calamity, mourning, and rebrith. One of the key events of this period was the building of the Golden Calf on the 17th of Tammuz, only one month after receiving the Torah at Sinai. The Golden Calf was such a big deal that Moses smashed the tablets upon witnessing it. I read an incredible thing in the Talmud the other day:

[The people of] Israel made the Golden Calf only in order to give an “opening of the mouth” - i.e. encouragement - for penitents (Talmud Bavli Avodah Zarah 4b)

The sin of the Golden Calf is so striking because the people just experienced God’s presence and now they created an idol - exactly what God said not to do! And yet, God forgives them. The message of the Talmud’s teaching is that, if these people could be forgiven, then, all the more so, you will be forgiven for your mistakes and transgressions (which can’t be as bad as the Golden Calf).

I see this as one unit of the Jewish people’s oscillating story. Sin/Mess-ups/Wrongdoing and repair and forgiveness. The Golden Calf story is the paradigm of that move of brokenness and repair that our people have been through so many times. Rebbe Nachman teaches, “if you believe you can mess-up, also believe that you can repair.” We know we can because our intergenerational self has done it so many times.

As we enter this period of historic-mythic brokenness and repair as well as this current time of such brokenness, may we draw on our personal and communal intergenerational selves to stay awake, grounded, and compassionate with ourselves and those around us.

Chodesh Tov,

David