Legacies

I was brought up in a community in Brooklyn where our traditions were on display for all to see.
We were Syrian Jews who had mostly migrated to New York in the early 20th century. We were a very close-knit community.
I grew up between Kings Highway and Avenue S.

There were three major yeshiva high schools, two major yeshiva elementary schools and four major synagogues.

We went to the synagogue on Ocean parkway and Avenue S. That was my father’s shul and all of his siblings, 10 in all, attended that one. It was also the longest prayer service.

As a kid with ADHD and an obsession with girls, I had my run-ins with the elderly leaders and one of my uncles who would find me walking up in the women’s section, a balcony overlooking the men’s section, the podium where the cantor stood and the circular stage leading to the ark where the Torah scrolls were stored.

I found myself up on that balcony more than once. One time, I was talking to a girl in a secluded stairwell which went from the roof to the basement. We were just talking and an older man who looked ancient but was probably around 60 or so, yelled at me in Arabic (his native tongue) words I could not figure out but they weren’t complimentary. He took my ear and pulled me down to where my father was sitting. He expected my father to be angry at me, instead my father was angry at him. “You don’t touch my son.” He said.
The “old man” walked away muttering words in his ancient tongue.
The Cantor sang beautifully, but oh so slowly.
The people were all friends and it seemed like a social hall. Smiles and prayers sang in unison, in tunes from Syria and from several songs from the mid twentieth century. He would go Friday night, Saturday morning and Saturday night. If I had gone, it would have been on Saturday mornings. (That’s when the girls would go).
I wouldn’t go early, prayers began around 8:15, I would get there by 9:30. The prayers would end around 11:15.
By 11:30, Ocean Parkway was a wall to wall carpet of people from my community.

This was my part of town, my piece of the community.
We would make plans to meet at the schoolyard at one o’clock to play softball or stickball. Those games were fun.

In the school yard, there was a wall where the school was and rectangular boxes were painted on there to mark the strike zone. There were around six of those boxes, each a safe distance from the other. We would pitch from around 50 or 60 ft away, I pretended to be Tom Seaver.
Behind the pitcher was around a hundred feet distance from the fences. Over the fence was a double, hit to the street a triple, across the street, a home run.
We played with Spalding balls (pronounced Spaldeens) and those balls would fly off the bat. When I would connect with a pitch and I knew I hit it well, I loved to watch the ball sail high over the fences, or a couple of times, land on the 9th floor roof of the building across the street.
The bat was not a broom stick, but it was fashioned as one, with black tape around the bottom where you would hold it with your hands.

As a sixty year old man, I have so many questions to ask my father. I remember when we walked together, he would hold my hand and I never shook him off. There was something comforting in his big hand. He would speak to me and share his thoughts. I wish I could say I remember the words he spoke.

“Oh Pop, I know it must’ve been a bit painful to walk to the shul alone all those times. But it was me who missed out, me who wishes he had the knowledge to absorb your faith, your stories of overcoming life’s curve balls.”

Looking back I also wish I spent a little time talking with the congregants, the older men, the ones with history written on their faces. I was a kid then, I thought I knew better, I thought I was too smart in comparison to them.

Yes, I regret not going with my father to the shul. But, the person and the thoughts I have today are much different than the kid I was back then.

My father wasn’t perfect and if he was like I am, I don’t always mind attending shul alone. Yet, there is a part of me who wouldn’t mind a hand to hold, to share my thoughts with.

My community is not the community it was back then. While we still adhere to our Torah , traditions and the lessons brought down from our parents. It has become much larger and the three major yeshivas and four major synagogues are now in the double digits with a synagogue on each block with their own ideology assimilated from other communities. The wealth accumulated has driven an invisible wedge between the different classes of wealth. Yet, the love of community still unites us. That’s the legacy left by our parents.

A tree is a tree because of the roots that live beneath the ground. I walked past a tree stump this morning, it’s been that way for years. The tree might be gone, but the roots that once brought buds in the spring, greenery in the summer, a myriad of colors in the autumn and the barren branches in the winter, live on. You can take away the beauty of that tree. But you cannot take away the legacies that gave life to that beauty.
It’s those legacies which are embedded within each of us, that time can never take away.