Last year, as we prepared for High Holidays as a community, with our private and communal woes, we thought we knew the contours of the year ahead. We found out soon enough that we were wrong.
My father-in-law died on Yom Kippur day, 5784. Twenty-four hours later, my father died in the ambulance traveling from “short-term” hospice to “long-term” hospice. The medical team thought they knew the contours of the days ahead. My Abba’s friends, who had been organizing to get a Torah to my Abba’s bedside for my son to have a pre-Bar Mitzvah in “long-term” hospice care, had known that nothing was certain. They had called a few weeks prior: “Maybe we should do this sooner than later.” We suddenly found ourselves at my Abba’s bedside after Shabbat. Abba wore the shirt my son made for him: “Chess Counselor of Dream Camp 2020,” due to his excellent weekly Zoom chess games from the first covid summer through to 2023, when (S)Abba was too sick to stay awake and play.
My Abba, in his favorite shirt, watched – in tremendous pain – as his favorite first grandson, the soon-to-be but not-soon-enough-to-be Bar Mitzvah boy, led havdalah. He chanted his full Torah portion and haftarah portion while wearing the tallit his Sabba picked out with him a few months before, the fringes not yet tied.
This was not quite the moment my Abba had been holding on for, synagogue pews replaced by beeping monitors. Abba had three words remaining in his parched mouth, through gritted teeth of pain: “Ow. Stop. Wow.” Abba’s last word to the not-soon-enough-to-be Bar Mitzvah boy was, “Wow.”
A few days later, I ushered my husband out of our house in Brooklyn to New Jersey, to prepare for his father’s funeral. As my son and I moved furniture in anticipation of one shiva, my sister got the call from our aunt. When she told me my father had died, I sat down with only one word. “Oh.” I said it over and over. I didn’t expect our fathers to head out of the world in single file, quite this way.
We thought the chevra kadisha would come and relieve my aunt from his side, so she could come to our apartment, shower, and sleep, and my son and I could rush to New Jersey for my father-in-law’s funeral. But the chevra kadisha took such a long time. We didn’t know they were running late because this same chevra kadisha was preparing my husband’s father for burial at the same funeral home. We could never have imagined that my Abba would join my father-in-law in the same room, in the same space, waiting for loved ones to come to their side one last time.
My friend Erica Rubin Lipps’ teaching echoes in my mind: We expect order, but this world? Whether through what science or religion tells us, this world is built out of chaos. And while no grandson should ever have to bury two grandfathers in two days, there was some consolation in both sides of his entire family being in mourning together with him. That was the only order in the chaos – that and a community that organized the three of our lives during weeks of blur.
Our fear in those brief days was that we would not know how to show up for the joy of Simchat Torah in our mourning. Instead, that morning, we heard the whispers in our friend’s living room where she gathered ten adults together to say kaddish for our dads. The whispering rose, and we learned how our mourning would join the mourning of Jews all over the world because of a massacre in the land Jews founded to escape massacres.
After a year of death and loss and illness and Bar Mitzvah, and family, and community, and love, our little family of three left the city for our log cabin in the woods in Vermont. A place where there is order, where the cows come up to the house in the morning and hang out with us as the sun sets, painting the sky in fabulous colors. During one of these sunsets, I walked to the fence where the cows stood nearby, picked up a clover, and exclaimed, “A THREE LEAF CLOVER! I CAN’T BELIEVE I FOUND A THREE-LEAF CLOVER!” I was ecstatic. I was sure I’d die without ever finding such a thing, and here it was right here and… oh, another one! And actually, there were a few and… As it turns out, my brain, exhausted by death and mourning and blood clots and Bar Mitzvahs and concussions – what a year – my brain forgot that what I was looking for in life was a four-leaf clover.
One of the best losses of this year was forgetting that I should have been looking for a four-leaf clover and instead finding the miracle of a three-leaf clover. My pain evaporated in that moment when I thought I was looking for, and had certainly found, a three-leaf clover. I was filled with wonder at the sunset, and cows, and clover.
There has been so much loss in my little family, in our big little global Jewish family, in this world of sensitive hearts. And we are heartbroken. Perhaps we are just heartbroken enough to have lost our minds and memories a little bit. We thought we knew what was coming, we thought we knew what was in front of us. We didn’t. We don’t. But we might have lost enough to find solace in these punch-drunk painful moments, being wildly elated over the smallest of things that for a moment bring us out of ourselves and make us call out in wonder. If you, like me, are finding joy and wonder in the “wrong” places, I celebrate you. Here is a fantastic, impossible, three-leaf clover. May we forget what we think we know long enough to bask in the small wonders of whatever is right in front of us. And may we realize, wrongly and rightly, that it is the thing we’ve always been looking for, the thing we didn’t think we could find. Wow.
Tehilah Eisenstadt is a Clal Associate and Rabbinic Intern, including serving as a coach for The Belonging Project. Tehilah has spent the last 15 years serving as a Director of Education in synagogues, day schools, and JCCs across the denominational spectrum throughout New York City’s five boroughs. In those roles, Tehilah focused on deepening the emotional resonance of educational experiences, creating a leadership pipeline through staff mentorship, and enabling Jews who felt they didn’t belong to connect with Jewish community. In 2023, she launched Wonder and Repair, through which she develops approaches to community-building and care that incorporate best practices in trauma-informed education and ritual. She is currently a candidate for rabbinic ordination at The Academy for Jewish Religion. Tehilah holds Master’s degrees in Midrash and Jewish Education from The Jewish Theological Seminary and a B.A. in English Literature from Binghamton University. She lives in Brooklyn.