(The names used in this story are made up to protect the identities of these true stories.)
Story #1
Recently, a woman reached out to me from the local shul to ask me if I wanted to write an article for the synagogue newsletter. I didn’t recognize her name, but through the grapevine I discovered that she was the mother of someone I knew from both middle school and summer camp. It was heartening to connect with the mother of a friend from a lifetime ago. Once I learned of the family connection, my Jewish-connector self was excited to let this woman know, over email, that I knew her daughter! We were connected. Yet, at the same time, for reasons I couldn’t explain, I had this nagging feeling it might not be an appropriate inquiry. My curiosity got the better of me. When I asked about her daughter, her response was chilling. “I have been estranged from both of my children. Last I heard about fifteen years ago, one of them is on the West Coast.”
I was stunned to learn this, even over email. Family estrangement was something I knew about, but had never really had to confront. I felt a mixture of sadness, frozenness, embarrassment, shock, and maybe even denial. I did not know how to respond. Even the simple “I see you, I hear you” seemed removed as an option. I was out of my league.
Story #2
Attending a recent bar mitzvah of a friend, I bumped into “Carol,” an elderly woman I recognized from my youth. We found ourselves sitting together at the party and memories flooded back to me, specifically of her household and her three children. It was only natural to ask her about her now adult children. She told me about her two boys and gave details about their careers and growing families. I could see she was hesitating to say anything about her daughter. Not having any idea, I asked, “How is Sarah?” I was not expecting what came out next. “She married a person who poisoned her against her family. She hasn’t spoken to us in a decade. I have not heard a word.” Through tears she told a few details of how her living daughter completely disappeared from her life.
This time, there was no time for processing my own emotions and shock. There was so much stimulation in the room already, but I needed my focus. We were at a bar mitzvah party. The backdrop of this conversation was klezmer music, yet this person was confiding in me in real time. All I could do, the only option I had, was to listen and bear witness to her immense grief. The sense of helplessness I felt. That feeling that nothing I could say would make any of this better. Much of me was attempting to silence the urge to squirm away. It might have been a joyous occasion that brought us together, but this little catch-up moment was a cold plunge into her personal, family hell. I tried to listen with as much openness and as curiosity as I could without offering any unsolicited advice.
In both stories, I received information I wasn’t quite prepared to receive about estrangement of the most intimate kind: between a parent and a child. A type of loss among the living. I knew such family dynamics existed, even in my own extended family, but I had no direct experience. Both situations evoked very different and simultaneous responses within me, one pastoral and one avoidant. But that visceral dread I experienced stayed present for weeks and months after.
Having these two moments so close together put family estrangement firmly on my radar. Like a long-lost relative I never knew, but always knew about, just reentered my life and my consciousness. And despite my efforts to categorize it as “terrible or devastating,” those descriptors were only apparent in one of my interactions with it. For some people, family estrangement was the absolute best of many terrible options. Losing a living relative is a real loss and there’s no obvious path to acknowledge it in a healthy, supported way.
The two most common words in modern Hebrew for estrangement are hitrachakut 
and hitnakrut 
The former comes from the word “rachok,” which points to physical distance as a metaphor to describe emotional distance. The root word of the latter is “nechar,” referring to alienation; it’s as if something is causing a relationship to shift from familiar to foreign. Both of these terms seem to build off the biblical Hebrew word for human-inflicted strangeness, “ger.” Our most ancient texts have a much more open-door understanding of what it means to be made a ger. Most famously, the experience of being a ger is linked to the moral imperative to not treat others like a ger since we were all treated that way in Egypt. The ger eventually also becomes the term we bestow upon the convert. It seems like the terminology is shaping our approach to foreigners. But what about being made into a ger in one’s own family?
Jewish tradition has been grappling with strained family dynamics since the early stories in the Hebrew Bible. Torn families are a regular feature of the Jewish origin stories in the Torah. Jacob and Esau are siblings at war with each other. Abraham cuts off one of his wives and son from his family. Yes, in most biblical examples, loving the ger is not the language used to describe what is happening in those families; estrangement is more of a cosmic problem. You can be at war with your siblings and be mostly cut off from your parents. But actual estrangement? That is reserved for the human-divine realm. We are never fully estranged from each other, but we can estrange ourselves from G-d. The major fast day of Tisha B’Av is our annual reminder, and warning, that estrangement from G-d is not only possible, but etched in our history. When estrangement happens with G-d, it is likely to take us down a dark path. So too does darkness ascend in our lives when we are estranged from our family members.
So how can we bring some light into this equation? Without making things for those already estranged from family members worse, how might we call attention to this difficult and often painful subject? Part of being Jewish is wrestling with the questions with the belief that eventual paths of wisdom will emerge. I would like to see a ritual for people who, for whatever reason, become estranged from a family member. I believe there are better ways to name this kind of loss, and also to mark it in one’s life. Can we hold sacred some part of a broken relationship, even as they are not a part of our lives anymore? What are the contexts in which we can tell the story of these fragments of our lives without shame?
In the meantime, a blessing for whoever needs it:
May we all be blessed with patience as we navigate the dynamics of our families of origin.
May we have discernment for ourselves and family members regarding the path of peace.
And when the time is right, may we be blessed with courage to come face to face with our closest strangers.