Shirley z’l’ and Jack Shlachter
On February 25 (16 Adar I) my mother, Shirley Shlachter, “breathed her last…and was gathered to her kin.” The Torah uses such phrases to describe the death of Abraham at the end of Parashat Chayei Sarah, a weekly reading that always reminded me of my mom because of its similarity in sound to her Hebrew name, Chaya Sarah.
In the weeks leading up to Mom’s death, I davened with multiple congregations in Orange County. Surf City Synagogue/Temple Isaiah was especially welcoming to me; congregants transported me to and from hospitals and even attended my mom’s funeral without having ever met her. Others, from my mom’s former synagogue, Congregation B’nai Israel, paid visits to my mom during her last month, prepared food for the meal of consolation after burial, and hosted the family members who managed to fly in on short notice for the late Friday afternoon ceremony.
Rabbi Nadav Caine from Ner Tamid Synagogue in Poway officiated with eloquence, tact, and humor, offering each of us an opportunity to share an anecdote and speaking himself of my mom, whom he’d met during her two years in an independent living center down the street from Ner Tamid.
When Beverly and I returned to Los Alamos, we were greeted by an outpouring of warmth and comfort from members of the Los Alamos Jewish Center, HaMakom, Kol BeRamah, Chabad, Temple Beth Shalom, and Beit Tikva. Not fifteen minutes after walking in the door of our house on Sunday evening, mitzvah angels began carrying in tables, chairs, siddurim, kippot, and food, and an hour later, we had over thirty people in our basement chanting the evening service and providing me with a chance to say Kaddish. Of course it is hard to lose a parent, but the support we received from Jews far and wide was a silver lining and a tribute to my mother’s proud identification with our Jewish heritage.
Despite numerous trips back and forth to California this past quarter, I squeezed in rabbinic experiences, from leading Shabbat, Tu BiSh’vat, and Purim services in Los Alamos and Santa Fe to offering an opening prayer at a session of the New Mexico State Senate to speaking about our Jewish-China connection in Albuquerque and Santa Fe to delivering a lecture entitled “Life with Spirits – Judaism and Alcohol” at a local church. My many hours in hospital-like settings also afforded me much reading time. The list included:
Etgar Keret’s memoir The Seven Good Years
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
Yankel’s Tavern by Glenn Dynner
Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence by Lee Siegel
Worlds That Passed by A.S. Sachs
One Night, Markovitch* by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life by Harold Kushner
Yeshiva Boy* by Jacob Dineson (tr. Ruth Fisher Goodman)
Clarice Lispector – The Complete Stories – translated by Katrina Dodson
The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman
New Mitzvah Stories for the Whole Family, ed. Goldie Milgram and Ellen Frankel
Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate by Letty Cottin Pogrebin
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler
The books with asterisks will for me forever be associated with my mom; I shared with her brief plot summaries when she would awaken, and she seemed to relish hearing how the stories turned out. Following her death, I found solace in a work that had been languishing on my shelves for twenty years, Wrestling With The Angel by Jack Riemer, a non-denominational collection of essays about death in Jewish tradition.
During sheloshim, the thirty days following interment, it is customary to refrain from cutting hair – our focus as mourners is on our grieving, not our appearance. Twenty five years ago, when my dad died, my beard was dark. This time the bulk of what I removed when this phase of mourning ended was white with hints of brown, not the other way around. The wisdom of Jewish tradition with regard to cutting hair was borne out on multiple occasions. Colleagues at work knew something was different and gave me a natural entree to discuss my mom’s death. Each day I faced (pun intended) a reminder that I had suffered a loss, and I was confronted with my own aging and mortality as well. And I could recall, both with sadness and with some laughter, how my mom would chide me if my mustache wasn’t well trimmed. I credit my mom with instilling in me a love of reading and a love of lifelong learning, a sense of humor, and a strong Jewish identity. May her memory be a blessing.