Executive Offices Show submenu for “Executive Offices””.Administration Show submenu for “Administration””.Fifty-plus years into my own life, closer in age to my grandfather than I’ve ever been, and I’m still trying to find the answer, returning time and again to the thoughts in that little blue book, which I inherited along with the broken menorah, more than a decade ago when my mother died. Or maybe it wasn’t in Walla Walla at all and we were in Palm Springs, where I often spent Hanukkah with my grandparents, and the book was really the sports page, but the question and the story were the same. Afterward, he showed me the framed family tree on the wall, the cigar smoke growing stale in the room, faces of long-dead Jews with my hairline, my eyes, my thick eyebrows staring back at me, some of whom never left Bar, are there still. It was late July, not December, too hot to smoke outside. Didn’t we usually go to Walla Walla in the summer? Maybe he was reading one of the other books, maybe it was the burnt orange one - “Holy Mountain: Two Paths to One God” - which is beside me now. Though, now, I worry I am conflating experiences. “Can you imagine leaving your home behind, tomorrow, forever?” I could not. How his last name - Barer - which is my middle name - forever marked them as being from that place, no matter where they went.
He flipped through the book and told me how, when he was my age, he’d escaped the pogroms - massacres of Jews in the Russian Empire - in Bar, Ukraine, his family stuffed in sacks of potatoes, his infant brother dying in his arms. I asked him what his book was about, and he said, “Do you know what it means to be Jewish?” It was late December, too cold to be outside. It was one of three books that were always stacked on the side table next to his chair - one blue, one burnt orange, one black - in descending order of size. In my memory, I am 7 years old and my grandfather, Poppa Dave, is in his basement in Walla Walla, Wash., smoking a cigar and reading the book. The hardcover is blue moire, the spine gilt-lettered in navy, the title embossed in an austere roman font. It’s about a book that I keep on my desk: “A Book of Jewish Thoughts,” edited by Joseph Herman Hertz. This time of year, I often find myself beset by a memory that I’m not sure is real.
So, when I light my menorah, it isn’t to recall the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem, it is to light the way to my own past. But love and trauma have caused me to believe in an afterlife that no holy book makes space for, and that what I hold dear, at the end, is for me. I believe in being a witness to history, in many of the teachings of the Talmud, in the practice of asking questions, of the sacred being open for discussion and interpretation. Which is funny because the truth is that I’m not much of a Jew my faith is more in metaphor than God. Still, we don’t want to burn the house down, so we placed it on a shelf where I can still see it and swapped in a slick new menorah that looks like a piece of modern art: brushed chrome, smooth lines. It’s been broken for 50 years or so, by my estimation, since I can’t recall it ever looking any different than it does now.
My wife tells me there’s a piece missing, a branch that is supposed to go from the Star of David in the center of the candelabra to a slot on the back to hold the shamus - the candle used to light all the others.
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