Yesterday I was looking for a photo of something (beloved step-daughter Shirra’s tattooed arm to print onto a cloth patch, in fact...) and it got me scrolling through scads of old snapshots on my computer. Lots of shots of long tables laden with platters of food -- our house, friends’ homes, out in the woods, the shul. Lots of seders, lots of birthdays, parties, meetings (which somehow still often feature the full table in my world, I’m happy to say.) And at so many of them a happy-looking Rosamond Gumpert-Jorgensen fressing with the crowds. Mousing backwards, I saw her getting younger, her hair redder, her eyeglasses punkier until whenever it was that I got my first digital camera.
Right now we are mid-shiva for Rosamond, who died this past Sunday at age 93. It’s been a lovely sifting process, even with its sadness, reflecting on the essence of this beautiful and intricate soul with whom we had the privilege of being in life over all these years.
Each night at the shiva minyan there has been a moment when people share what they’ve been thinking that day about who Rosamond was. Last night a couple of people talked about her being our community’s matriarch. Whether or not we as individuals knew her well (and an utterly stunnin g number of people of all ages did have intense personal friendships with Rosamond,) we looked forward to seeing her when latkes were being served or a Purim play put on or Torah studied or prayers offered, movies shown, other people celebrated or mourned or just fun going on. She, in turn, knew that people would be coming to her throughout the gathering, kissing and hugging, asking after her, checking in to see if she needed any help with anything. For all her wide-ranging adventures in life, the Jewish people and our little Jewish community here on the Coast were central, essential, lifeblood to Rosamond.
I knew this well, even if I didn’t often think about it in this over-arching way while she was alive. What I hadn’t thought about much until last night’s conversation was how much we all depended on her presence. “Our matriarch.” We have a truly magnificent generation of elders in our community -- younger elders, only in their eighties, seventies and wherever below those numbers one starts to attain the stature of age. But one doesn’t become a matriarch or patriarch by virtue of age alone. I’m just now starting to sort this out in my mind. It has something to do with holding the community and its individual members deep in one’s heart. And with being held deeply by that community.
I think here of the beit din which stands before the congregation for Kol Nidre each year, as we all confess that we have been unable to live up to our promises over the past year. These three witnesses, ritually a court of judges, are supposed to mirror the “heavenly court” hearing our plea. I have the privilege each year of inviting people to take on this role. In recent years I have understood more and more clearly that the earthly individuals appointed to the beit din should be those who can look on us all -- in all our fallibility and failure -- with mercy and affection.
It’s not so easy when you are younger to look on the failures of your peers with mercy. Somehow we’re just more knotted up in the specifics or something. I think of another friend in her eighties, who once commented that it was such a relief at her age not to have any bad relationships anymore. By now, she said, you’ve either worked it out with people or taken your distance.
Last night at Rosamond’s house someone spoke about her role in our hevra kadisha. There was a time when she could be part of the team for taharah (the ritual washing of the body of a person who has died.) At some point she could no longer manage that physical task. But she could still make phone calls. Then there came a time when she couldn’t manage this either. But her spirit continued to inform and energize our hevra kadisha, even until the day when its practices were being done for her. I am sure this will continue until we youngers are old and then gone ourselves.
It seems to me that it is a mystical as well as a physical process, becoming a matriarch or a patriarch. In the first blessing of the amidah, we call God eloheinu v’elohei avoteinu v’imhoteinu. In most prayerbooks we see that phrase translated as “Our God and God of our fathers and mothers” (or, truly, in most prayerbooks just “God of our fathers!) Or “God of our ancestors.” But the prayer goes on to list the “fathers and mothers”: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God of Sarah, God of Rebekah, God of Rachel, God of Leah (and of Bilhah and Zilpah in our shul.) This blessing isn’t just about our ancestors, not just our fathers and mothers, but God of our patriarchs and matriarchs -- God of those particular predecessors whose personal energies and passions set the tone for who we are today. Later in the same prayer we say that God “remembers the lovingkindnesses of our avot v’imahot and brings redemption to the children of their children...”
No one would ever make the case that our avot v’imahot were perfect. In fact it’s rather wonderful to note how sacred stories so old as those of the biblical matriarchs and patriarchs still describe such complicated and individuated personalities. Still and all, their particular souls and stories leave their marks through the generations to today and beyond.
And likewise, writ a little smaller, our local matriarchs and patriarchs affect the personality, the soul, of our community through the generations. At some fractal level, I suppose, every person who passes through the door affects the future of the community. But our matriarchs and patriarchs do so powerfully and memorably. Even in the relatively short historical lifespan of MCJC, we can feel the energies of our early days: seders at Table Mountain and B’nai Boo, Adele Saxe’s particular fondness for Shavuot (and tzedaka and delicious Jewish food), Lou Miller’s good sense and open heart, early b’nai mitzvah, most especially the expansive energy of Reb Chanan Sills, the passions of David Berent, Walter Green and Ella Russell, among our avot v’imahot. (Lou and Reb Chanan, by the way, are both alive and well as I write, thank heavens!) We are shaped by everyone, but most intensively by those who hold us most passionately.
Now that Rosamond has “laid down and been gathered to her kin,” as Genesis says of the deaths of our biblical avot v’imahot, I find myself wondering who are now our living matriarchs and patriarchs. Whose presence, whose spirit, do we depend on to be the community we are? Whose passion and vision shapes us? Who holds us in his or her heart like the heavenly beit din, looking upon us, with all our dreams and all our flaws, with affection and forbearance?
May Rosamond’s memory, together with the memories of all who have gone before us, continue to be a blessing. And may each of us be surprised at some moment, upon walking into a room full of us folks, to realize how much someone else’s presence there -- or maybe even our own -- matters.
© Rabbi Margaret Holub 2010
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Updated 02/28/2010 (rge)