My Dad’s Tallis

This sermon is part of our 2024/5785 High Holiday sermon series, featuring sermons by alumni of Clal’s clergy training programs.

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I delivered this sermon on the first morning of Rosh Hashanah, Thursday, Oct. 3. The members of the congregation where I am the rabbi (Kehilat Shalom in Gaithersburg, Maryland) recently voted to put our building up for sale. Our membership is significantly smaller and older than when our building was built more than 40 years ago, with a lot of deferred maintenance. While we have decided to sell the building, we have yet to figure out what our next step is, besides a strong desire to remain intact as Kehilat Shalom and not merge with another congregation. 

It is Sunday morning, Nov. 7, 2021. I am on the New Jersey Turnpike in South Jersey driving North. My phone rings, and I answer it using the Bluetooth built into our car. The voice on the other end belongs to the funeral director who is handling the funeral for my dad, who died the previous day, and he wants to know where my dad’s tallis is.

For those of you who might not know, in a traditional Jewish burial, the deceased is wrapped in white shrouds known as tachrichim. If the deceased is male, he is also wrapped in his tallit, but the tzitzit in one corner is cut off to make the tallit no longer usable. This symbolizes that the deceased is no longer required or able to observe the mitzvot.

My dad was not particularly observant, but he had grown up in a traditional Yiddish-speaking immigrant home. He once told me that non-kosher meat had never entered his mouth until he was in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He wanted his funeral to be strictly traditional because, he said, he was born a Jew, he never hid the fact that he was a Jew, he got beaten up in the US Army because he was a Jew, and he would die and be buried as a Jew.

When he passed, my stepmother and stepsister went to look for his tallis, but they couldn’t find it. I told the funeral director that I didn’t know where it was but I assumed that it was in a drawer in his bedroom. My dad and his wife only attended services on the High Holidays or for a family simcha, so he wouldn’t have needed to keep it anywhere where it was easily accessible on a regular basis, especially considering that they lived in a tiny apartment in Queens. In the end, my stepmother and stepsister couldn’t find the tallit, and so he was buried in an inexpensive tallit provided by the funeral home — and presumably charged to the bill — rather than in his own.

My dad retired at age 65 and died at 92, and for all but the last few months of his life, he was generally in good health. Which meant, among other things, that for about 27 years, he had a lot of time on his hands. And I don’t think he ever realized how busy a congregational rabbi can be, especially around the fall holidays or Pesach. So it was not uncommon for me to call him and be greeted by the following sentence or something like it: “You finally remembered that you have a father.” 

All of us have weak spots and buttons that are easily pushed, and I tend not to handle criticism very well. My dad’s desire to be called more frequently than I called him ran right up against my desire to avoid criticism, and on more than one occasion, I decided that if I was going to get chastised when I called him, I wouldn’t call him at all. This might go on for several weeks until my stepmother would phone and plead with me to speak to him.

When I visited my dad for Father’s Day in June 2021, it became clear to me that he was probably in the last few months of his life. So I made a commitment to call him more regularly, to visit him in New York as frequently as I could, and to try not to get upset if he made a snarky comment about the frequency of my calls. I fell into a rhythm of calling him every two or three days at least, and for sure every Friday afternoon after I finished work and before I got ready for Kabbalat Shabbat. A few weeks before he died, my stepmother said that my dad was so happy — “I feel as if I have my son back.” I miss that rhythm of calling him on Friday afternoons now that he is gone.

My dad passed away in November of 2021, and in June of 2023, my stepmother left their tiny two-bedroom apartment in Queens and moved into an assisted living facility in the Boston area, close to her daughter. On Christmas Day, 2023, I drove up to New Jersey to visit my brother. Shortly after I got there, he handed me a reusable Whole Foods shopping bag and said that it had a lot of stuff of our dad’s that he had found in the Queens apartment when he was helping our stepmother clean it out. He had already taken the items that he really wanted to keep, and I was welcome to anything in the bag that I wanted.

As I was pulling things out of the bag, one of the items turned out to be a blue velvet bag with silver embroidery of two lions and the word “tallit” in Hebrew. I opened it and pulled out my Dad’s tallis. I recalled that I was with him when he bought it in Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem when he came to visit me when I was studying in Israel.

Like most rabbis who serve congregations, I have two tallitot that I wear regularly. One I keep in the shul for Shabbat and holidays, and one I keep at home to use for my own daily prayers — or when we have morning services that are only on Zoom. As soon as I got home from visiting my brother, my dad’s tallis became my weekday home tallis.

The first time that I wrapped myself in my dad’s tallis, I felt his embrace, almost as if he was physically hugging me. More than nine months later, I still feel that way when I put it on. Did my dad somehow make sure his wife and stepdaughter wouldn’t be able to find his tallis, so that eventually it would come to me? When he was dying, did he purposely put it somewhere they were unlikely to look? Or did he somehow intervene from the afterlife to accomplish this purpose? I’d actually like to think that this was the case, as unlikely as it seems. Regardless, I now pray wearing my dad’s tallis, and I feel a warm embrace that I did not feel that often when he was still alive.

I am sure that however it happened that the tallis couldn’t be found for my Dad’s burial and thus came into my possession, I would not feel the same way while wearing it had we not repaired our relationship in the months prior to his death. As a colleague said to me when I told him this story a few weeks ago, the question we often need to ask ourselves is, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to save the relationship?”

Do you want to be right, or do you want to save the relationship? I felt then, and actually still feel, that my father was overly critical of me at times. And I distinctly remember him telling my grandmother many times that “the phone works both ways” when she would complain to him about us not calling her more frequently. So as far as I am concerned I was right, and I’m sure that my dad felt that he was right. But at the end of the day, our relationship was more important than being right or getting the other person to acknowledge that they were wrong.

Kehilat Shalom’s motto is “Where Friends Become Family.” And families don’t always live together harmoniously, and this has been the case since the beginning of human history. A more accurate name for the biblical book of “Genesis” might well be “The Book of Dysfunctional Families.” And unfortunately, our congregation often has a culture where it becomes the norm for someone on the losing end of a debate to, as it were, pick up their ball and go home — or to be purposely obstructionist.

As a community, we have a lot of decisions to make over the next few weeks and months. All of us have our own desires and ideas for what Kehilat Shalom 2.0 should look like. What should our new home be and where should it be located? Should we rent, buy, or build from scratch? Stay in the general area where we are now or move elsewhere? Must our new space be large enough for our attendance on the High Holidays or should we gear it to our normal week-in and week-out attendance and rent a bigger space when needed? And so on and so forth.

Lots of decisions, and chances are pretty good that not every decision we make as a community will be precisely the one you prefer in every instance. But what makes us the community we are, and what has allowed us to continue as a community for as long as we have, under challenging circumstances, is the relationships that exist between us. Do you want to be right? Or do you want to save the relationship? I’m glad that I eventually made the choice that I did, and I’m reminded of the importance of relationships every time I wrap myself in my dad’s tallis.