The Zayde Chronicles

      Mittendrinnen, out of the blue, Arthur sent me a message on Facebook: “Are you the David Raphael who went to Camp Ramah in the sixties?” And, in fact, I am such person. This opening line led to a flood of back-and-forth. Arthur (then Artie) and I were camp friends for four years at Camp Ramah and then years after. As young teens, Artie and I would meet at the Port Authority in New York and spend the day walking the streets of Manhattan snapping photos with our new SLR cameras (Can you imagine parents allowing a 14-year-old to do that today?). In 1969, we traveled to Washington DC together to join the March on Washington to protest the Vietnam War. We lost touch somewhere between high school and college.  A half-century later, Arthur and I have now renewed our friendship.      Over the course of my life, I have been blessed with wonderful lifelong friends, some of whom I’ve known for over half a century: Richard, who became my “besty” playing...

  Sixty years ago (give or take), my cousin Jeremy (age 10) and I (age 12) sat impatiently in Uncle Myron’s study at the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights in New York. Uncle Myron, known to the congregants as Rabbi Fenster, lingered at the opulent kiddush, greeting congregants, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, shmoozing, and wishing all a good Shabbas. He did this every week. At long last, the study door opened, and Uncle Myron came in and began to remove his clerical robes. Moments later, there was a knock on the door, and a crying, despondent young boy entered. “What is it?” Uncle Myron gently queried. “I can’t find my tallis, my mother’s going to kill me!” “Well, since this is a matter of life and death, we can call her on Shabbat.” Even as a 12-year-old, I knew this wasn’t a matter of life and death, and I understood Uncle Myron’s intent. Judaism is in the service of humanity was the lesson he shared with me that day. How many of us have been blessed ...

    I recently found myself leafing through my dog-eared copy of Andrew Solomon's " Far From the Tree ," a masterful book that illuminates the dynamics and challenges of children and family members who, because of identity choice or cognitive or physical differences, upend the intergenerational cliché "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." In the opening chapter, Solomon identifies two types of identity: Vertical Identities: "Attributes and values are passed down from parent to child across the generations not only through strands of DNA but also through shared cultural norms." Horizontal Identities: "May reflect recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors." The dynamics of children's and grandchildren's horizontal identities can be especially complicated for grandparents....

  Like many of us, I had four grandparents.   And, also, like many of us two of those grandparents were grandfathers. My father’s father “Jacob” emigrated to the United States from Romania in 1902 aboard the La Champagne sailing from Le Havre, France.   On that same ship was Rachel Moskowitz who would soon become his wife and, later on, my grandmother. To say that Jacob Raphael was taciturn would be an understatement.   There may have been a time when he smiled – but I have no memory of such.   Every Sunday our family would pile into our Pop Jacob and Nana Rachel’s home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn for a seemingly interminable visit. And each, Pop Jacob and I had the same conversation: “Duvid, he would say from his lounge chair near the front door, “what is the Parsha HaShavuah” – (the weekly Torah Portion). And, each week, I would answer: “I don’t know.” This must have been hard on him as, I ...

  F ew items are as ubiquitous in Jewish lives as Tzedakah boxes.   They stand proudly in our homes, synagogues, and Jewish organizations. As the “Greatest Generation”, the “lost generation” and “baby boomers” we grew up with tin blue and white JNF boxes and watched our grandparents and parents, returning from work or preparing for Shabbat, drop in precious coins.   For our people and our communities, Tzedakah, supporting those who need our help is not charity, it is social justice. For her first birthday, I bought Bina, my granddaughter, a Tzedakah box. Clearly, she did not know what it meant, but she enjoyed the clinking sound as the coins dropped. The visceral pleasure of guiding the coin into the narrow slot, watching it disappear, and hearing the pleasant “clink”, led to habit, which led to muscle memory. Now as a first grader in a Jewish day school, the act of giving tzedakah is becoming a shared experience and part of the social contract of her six-year-old communi...

It was the perfectly silly Zayde game.  I covered Bina up with the blanket and she’d pretend to be asleep. I pulled the blanket back and she giggled and announced “awake”.  We did this 10 or 11 times until it was time for another game.  But as she climbed off the couch, I realized that the blanket we had been playing with was, in fact, an Afghan knitted, over 55 years ago, by Nana Francis, my grandmother, her great-great-grandmother.   Among our tasks as Nana’s grandchildren was to partner with her in the creation of afghans by holding up the hanks of yarn as she wound them into balls. We’d sit on the small ottoman across from her in her lounge chair, two hands raised and moving back and forth as the wool strands traversed the distance between us.  I close my eyes, and I am still there; sitting erect, synchronizing the movement of my arms with the flow of the yarn. The threads of Nana’s afghan stretch back hundreds of years. ...