Earlier this academic year my grandpa passed away and this article is all about him.
He was very involved in our local synagogue and its community and used to go
every week, singing each prayer with joy. I’m not sure how religious he was in terms
of personal faith or belief but he certainly took part in as many communal
celebrations and expressions of the religion as he could. He was a traditional man
and Judaism has many strange but lovely customs and rituals which he was eager
for me and my sisters to take part in. The particular tradition that is the focus of this
article is a prayer which is arguably the centre of the religion: the Shema. This prayer
is both a declaration of faith for the person saying it but also a promise to pass on
the teachings of the religion to future generations. It is supposed to be said when
one wakes up, just before one falls asleep, in almost every communal service and it
should also be a person’s last words before death.
As is customary after a funeral, people told me stories about my grandpa and a few
were about how happy he was about becoming a grandpa. The particular memory
that was shared with me which inspired this article was one from when I was nearly 2
years and was staying at my grandparents’ house. My mum was putting me to bed
and singing the Shema with me while my grandpa watched, weeping in the doorway,
he was a very emotional man so tears were not unusual when he was happy.
Something about the image of the scene struck me and I wondered at the enormity
of what he must have felt. This prayer had been with him for all of his life, in his
childhood, through his life as a bachelor, through fatherhood and now in front of him
even as he reached old age. How many memories must have bubbled up as he
watched his tiny granddaughter babble through it. Perhaps he felt relief, the carefree
singing of a child going over the words which he had sung himself during challenging
times may have grounded him and reminded him that, in that moment, all was calm
and the troubles of the past could be washed away for a minute. Or perhaps he
found relief in the knowledge that his way of life, values and traditions would live on
in the next generation, that the world was not completely changed and the wisdom of
the past would not be forgotten. Perhaps he was happy to see parts of himself
translated in his granddaughter. Perhaps he felt none of these things and I am
projecting my own ideas of what it might be like to be old onto him.
There is a strange kind of love that surrounds very young children and babies,
especially at births. Everybody is excited because someone they love has had a
child, while the baby itself is exciting because it represents so many possibilities and
holds so much unknown potential. That is not to say that I know exactly how it feels
to meet one’s grandchild, I am only theorising based on outsider observances.
However, the desire to pass on one’s knowledge and values and shape the life of a
new, unknown child seems to be fairly universal. At the funeral, my dad told me
about the first time my grandpa met me, his first grandchild, and how he had looked
as if his life had changed for ever. For a family man that loved to share traditions,
grandchildren must have meant an enormous amount to him. Tradition allows us to
relive previous memories and share our past with new people in our lives. How
exciting it must be to be able to share cheerful memories of one’s own childhood,
parents and community with yet another generation, to allow the practises and
celebrations that have defined one’s life to be translated into modern life and live on.
Prayers can be so much more than just conversations with god. They can tie us to
eachother across tens of generations and evoke strong memories and emotions.
Even if there is no god listening, perhaps there is sanctity in the connections we
have to one another. Our prayers do not simply go out into the void, they bounce
back, binding communities through shared hopes, values, traditions and, therefore,
memories.
Every time I saw my grandpa, he greeted me with one of the most genuine smiles I
have ever seen and out-stretched arms. That is how I will remember him: beaming at
me and my sisters, singing confidently, and taking joy in living.