I ARRIVED in Tucson on July 4, 1976, erev Bi-Centennial for those of us who are prone to turning a national holiday into a Jewish one.
It was hotter than I had ever known, but the thought of spending my afternoons by the pool, working on my post-college tan, cooled me down. That first night as I watched the evening sky turn from cloudless blue to blazing coral to deep lavender, I knew I had come to the right place.
I stayed with my Aunt Gen, who owned a beautiful Airedale dog named Tora. She wasnt much into Judaism and when I asked why she had named him after the Jewish Bible she just shook her head and laughed.
I named him after one of my favorite movies about the attack on Pearl Harbor called Tora! Tora! Tora! she said through her laughter. I could see we both had a lot to learn from each other.
We shared so much that summer, my aunt and I. She was lonely, having become a widow less than a year before, and I was full of energy and raring to go. Whenever she hesitated about going to the movies or for a hike, I pushed her out the door and said, Just do it! And inevitably, we did.
We would joke sometimes about how we were the original Odd Couple. I was religious and deeply involved in exploring Jewish rituals and traditions; she was a thoroughbred atheist who had no use or respect for anything Biblical.
I began to see that, just like my father, she was highly critical and suspicious of traditional Judaism. Both of them were first generation Americans who had concluded that the Judaism practiced by their parents was outdated and artificial and offered little in the way of contemporary thinking or being.
Nonetheless, Aunt Gen and I shared a live and let live philosophy and she never objected to the candles I lit on Friday night as long as they enhanced her dining room when guests arrived for dinner.
I grew up here, Im fond of saying. Not in the birth to toddler to adolescent sense, but in the way you grow up and into yourself after leaving home. Aunt Gen became a second mother to me and I became the daughter she never had.
We experienced each other openly and honestly, sometimes as friends, sometimes as relatives, but always with great love and admiration for one another.
It was a relationship we both needed and treasured.
Aunt Gen was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in January of 1996. They said she had four to six months to live, barely enough time to plan a trip, let alone do what she needed to do before she died. All the people she had to see, the friends and family she had to comfort, the memories she wanted to revisit.
We didnt acknowledge what we both knew was true, that every passing day brought us closer to her end. But we cherished those six months because they gave us time and permission to talk about us, the family, her successes and regrets, and what she would miss most when she was gone.
I asked her once when we were sitting on her back porch whether she believed in G-d. It was a windy day in March, and the scarf that covered her fragile hairless scalp blew softly around her face. In that one moment, she looked so young I couldnt believe she wouldnt be here to watch my children grow up.
I dont really think I believe in G-d, she answered, but sometimes I wish I did. People are my religion. I believe in the goodness of mankind and the creativity and love of the human soul.
We sat there for a while and then she asked me if I would do her a favor.
Would you say kaddish for me after Im gone?
Coming from a woman who had never once acknowledged that Jewish ritual was important to her, the question stunned me.
Of course, but why? What I was really thinking was, Why do you want me to say the traditional Jewish mourners prayer when you dont believe in religion or ?G-d?
She answered as if she had heard my silent question. Because I dont know for certain whether G-d exists and I dont want to die without being remembered in the way that my parents were remembered before me.
She referred to the fact that throughout Jewish history only men had the obligation to recite kaddish for a deceased parent, a view that has changed over the years in contemporary liberal Jewish movements.
THE kaddish, an Aramaic prayer that is more than 2000 years old, is a prayer that consoles, elevates and renews hope in the mourner that G-ds goodness will prevail.
It is recited at the burial and for 11 months after the death of a parent at daily, Sabbath and festival services.
It is a prayer that affirms our awareness of holiness and life in the world in the face of great loss. It makes no reference to death, however, only to Divine greatness.
My Aunt Gens experience of G-d came through the love she had toward the people who touched her life and whose lives she touched. Since her death I have come to understand an essential lesson about life. Love doesnt die, only people do. In asking me to recite kaddish for her, she affirmed her life and the lives of the people she loved.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
