About 5am this morning, I lit my dad’s yahrzeit candle. Twenty-six years since his death and coincidentally the yahrzeit candles burn 26 hours. The custom of lighting a yahrzeit candle comes from the Book of Proverbs 20:27 “The soul of man is a candle of the Lord.” This custom of lighting a yahrzeit for the deceased is very widespread and deeply ingrained in Jewish life. Many Jews who are otherwise unobservant follow this custom.
So I took a moment to remember my dad, who was omnipotent for first 26 years of my life. Notice how 26 keeps coming up? I looked up the significance of the number 26 in everything from chemistry to numerology and the possibilities of any meaning here are endless. The nun next door gave Tin a kelly green Irish rugby shirt with the number 8 (2 + 6 = 8)) on it yesterday and he wore it this morning. But I don’t want to get hung up on meaning since I have been telling all of my close friends in the past two days to strip meaning away in order to better position themselves in harmony with the world.
The first thing I remembered was my father’s grave, the one I haven’t been to since he was buried in it and the year after for the one year anniversary of his death. My father had asked to be buried in Israel, my brothers refused to acknowledge this wish. My two older brothers were members of Beth Israel, one of the few orthodox synagogues in New Orleans and previously located on Canal Boulevard but now out in Metairie with a number of other synagogues that have all huddled together on West Esplanade after the Federal Flood damaged several of them.
My father desired a headstone like his father’s – with a marble headstone that flows into a continuous marble top on the grave and inscribed with his family genealogy. The synagogue voted against allowing my father’s headstone because of a policy that existed that said no grave could be bigger, more extravagant, too different from the others in the synagogue. This is a very Ashkenazic tradition, whereas Sephardim don’t abide by this custom. So a problem ensued whereby my family asked for one-time exception.
It turned into a big huge drawn out, my entire family quitting the synagogue fiasco, but in the end my father’s grave was covered as he had wished, even if it wasn’t where he had wished. I thought about this as someone had just asked for a one-time exception with something I am working on in the community and I had said I didn’t think it was a good idea and then was told I am “ugly and rebellious”. Pishaw, I thought.
So the day we went into the synagogue and came out of shiva to honor my father and the rabbi spoke in not so subtle undertones about the dispute raging about my Sephardic family asking for a one-time exception, and the brotherhood obstinately refusing to even consider the idea, an ugly and rebellious battle royale was fully underway. As the rabbi spoke in his gifted oratory, the torah that my family had donated to the synagogue years before, jumped out of the ark behind him and rolled all the way down the middle of the shule. Lord today!
Such was my life when my father was god. And now I looked at the email from the woman and thought, it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t matter. I lit my father’s candle and also lit a stick of nag champa and thought about Winnie the Pooh who Tin and I were listening to on the way home from visiting my mother’s grave in Franklinton yesterday and I thought of this quote:
