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Consider the joke about a husband who thinks his wife is losing her hearing. He gets so frustrated that he tells his doctor about it. The doctor gives the man a test to try later in order to diagnose the severity of his wife’s problem. “When you get home,” the doctor advises, “stand about thirty feet away from your wife when her back is turned to you and ask her what’s for dinner. If she doesn’t hear you, move about fifteen feet behind her and ask again. If she still doesn’t hear you, stand just five feet behind her, raise your voice, and say, ‘What’s for dinner?’ That should tell us how bad her hearing problem really is.”
So the man goes home and asks his wife what’s for dinner from thirty feet away. No answer. Fifteen feet away, again no answer. Finally, standing just five feet behind his wife, he shouts, “What’s for dinner?” At which point his wife turns around yells, “I told you three fucking times already, chicken!”
Sometimes, without even realizing it, we are deaf to the people around us and it’s far from funny. This can true when it comes to children and parents. I remember when my son was sixteen and spent his summer counselor-in-training at a sleepaway camp in Malibu, California. After just two days he called me in near total frustration saying, “Dad, kids don’t listen!”
“Thank goodness you were never like that,” I replied. He got the point.
It’s not just young sometimes miss the wisdom and the warnings of their loving parents. There is a chilling verse in a song by one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Steve Goodman. It's called “My Old Man.” Goodman wrote it after his father, Bud Goodman, died. In this particular verse he sings about all things his father said to him when he wasn’t listening, and how much he wishes he could remember those things now that his father is gone.
A lot of people aren’t aware of it, but there is a powerful and ancient way to speak to the people we love after we are gone so that they remember the most important things we said and taught them while we were alive. Jews have been doing it since the eleventh century in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and now virtually everywhere they live. Anyone can do it.
My own father was unaware of it, even before he lost his mind to Alzheimer’s disease.
By a certain age, most of us have some sort of estate plan and a will to determine who inherits our material posessions and our money, if we are lucky enough to have extra when we die. Once that plan is complete and the will is signed, many people feel they have checked a box and done right by their heirs. We often forget about the other, more important treasures we have to give, the kinds of things I wish my father were still here to impart to me -- our values, hopes, advice, deep love, and the accrued wisdom of a lifetime for those who will live on when we are gone.
I have been a rabbi for thirty-five years. In that time, I've presided over more than a thousand funerals, written more than a thousand eulogies, and sat with over a thousand families in the aftermath losing loved ones. Being around death for so many years and the death of my own father have taught me that despite the fact we spend so much of our lives working to make money to buy things, collect things, wear and drive and live in things, those things matter little if at all to our loved ones when we are gone. Yes, our culture tries to teach us otherwise. We are raised to believe in the power of things and that our self-worth is somehow related to our net worth. If you doubt this, just try asking an acquaintance their net worth and see what happens. You have a better shot getting them to tell you whether or notthey have hemorrhoids! Take a careful look at the ads in most magazines or most commercials on TV and you will see how we are seduced into granting real meaning to material things. Most advertising is not about the product itself but about the exciting or beautiful or meaningful life you will have by owning it. I will never forget seeing most of my father’s "things" piled in a heap on the basement floor of my parents’ townhouse after he died. No one wanted most of it, not even the thrift store. Abraham Joshua Heschel was right when he said "To have more does not mean to be more.” In other words, the purpose of life is not to have, but to be.
The word for word in Hebrew and the word for thing in Hebrew are the same word (davar). To me, this is a very deep, spiritual point. Words have heft and weight; they are as concrete and material as any “thing” we will ever own or leave behind.
So let us leave words for those we love in order that we may journey with them long after we are gone, and let it not take imminent death for us to find those words and craft a more meaningful legacy.
