Going home again: A childhood synagogue, a Talmudic classroom and ‘Our Town’

(RNS) — This week, Jews celebrate the festival of Sukkot, dwelling in flimsy huts that remind us of both the impermanence and resilience of home. 

Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” which speaks to Sukkot’s theme, returned to Broadway this month. The show Edward Albee once dubbed “the greatest American play ever written” was called last week by The New York Times “unbearable: in its beauty … and its refusal to offer beauty as a cure when it is only, at best, a comfort.”

In the play (spoiler alert, if your high school was the only one in America not to produce it), Emily Gibbs, who has died in childbirth, returns from the grave to see one ordinary day in her little town of Grover’s Corners in 1899 — her 12^th birthday — only to realize how extraordinary it all was, and how unbearable that realization can be. In Wilder’s words, she learns “to find a value beyond all price for the smallest events of our daily life.” 

I’ve never returned from the grave, but two weeks ago, for the first Rosh Hashana in 46 years, I returned to the synagogue where I grew up, reliving the last moments of my youthful innocence (I was 21 at the time) and of my father’s life.

That synagogue, Kehillath Israel, in the Coolidge Corner neighborhood of Brookline, Massachusetts, was my Grover’s Corners. My father had been the cantor there for 30 years at a time when it was the epicenter of Boston’s thriving Jewish community, during the Golden Age of what author Joshua Leifer recently called the “American Jewish Century.” For me, that Elysian moment was shattered by my dad’s sudden death from a heart attack on Jan. 1, 1979.

On Rosh Hashana, just three months before his death, I sat with him in the back pews as he recovered from a prior heart attack. We sat in the same sanctuary where his magnificent voice had resounded for so many years. How strange he must have felt. How strange it must have been for the congregants to see him there and not in the pulpit; and then the following year, not to see him at all, knowing that he was gone forever. 

Like Emily, I didn’t appreciate how, within a few months, my father would be gone, my childhood home sold and my innocence shattered, leaving me to embark on a lifelong rabbinic journey that would keep me from returning to my home synagogue on Rosh Hashana – until two weeks ago.

For many years I could not bear to return at all. But just two months after my own retirement, I went back home and back in time for an ordinary day – well, as ordinary as Rosh Hashana can be.

For Emily, what was most troubling was watching everyone skidding through life without understanding how precious it all was.

“I can’t bear it,” she says, watching her family. “They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all. Everything. I can’t look at everything hard enough. Good morning, Mama!”

As I looked out at the packed sanctuary where I had grown up, I recognized almost no one. A few elderly folks came up to me to share memories — how they stood in awe of my dad; and they recalled little Joshy — me — clinging to his leg. Almost everyone I remembered was gone.

The shell of the room was little changed — the same stained-glass windows with the names of donors and honorees from the past century — but the pulpit had been relocated to the middle of the room, in the more intimate style increasingly popular in 21^st century America. But scenery is beside the point. In “Our Town,” when Emily returns to her home, the kitchen table and chairs are gone. Wilder’s message is clear. Life is not about things.

When I was a child, children were nowhere to be found in Kehillath Israel’s cavernous sanctuary, and while people always sang with passion, decorum was at a premium. Now, babies were everywhere, and people moved about the cabin, schmoozing with impunity while the praying was going on.

Like Emily, I was more comfortable looking across at the dead people, those familiar names on the windows or on the nameplates of the prayer books. That is, until I looked over and saw the name of the very synagogue president who made my father feel so miserable and unappreciated during his final months. 

The whole experience was dizzying and disorienting. This was not the home I had known. Nor was this the home that knew me. Almost no one had any idea who I was. And my dad, nearly five decades gone, was, in the words of the High Holiday prayer, “a passing shadow, a vanishing cloud, a blowing wind, a fleeting dream.”

His life’s dreams had vanished into nothingness. My childhood, too, had been exposed as a fleeting dream. And now, so had my 40 years in the pulpit. How quickly it all ends. How precious it all was.

Emily sobs at the realization: I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. … I didn’t realize. She asks to be taken back to her grave, but asks for one more look:

“Good-bye, Good-bye, world. Good-bye, Grover’s Corners … Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Like Emily, I learned that I could not go home again. 

Until I discovered that I could.

The Talmud records a story about how, when Moses ascends to heaven, he sees God sitting and tying crowns on the letters of the Torah. Moses has no idea why, so God explains:

“There is a man who will be born in many generations named Akiba, who is destined to derive from each thorn (of these crowns) mounds of laws. It is for his sake that the crowns must be added to the letters of the Torah.”

Moses says, “I gotta meet this guy,” and so God whisks him to the end of the eighth row in Rabbi Akiba’s study hall. Like Emily, he becomes distressed at his return to the living, but this time, not because they don’t understand, but because he doesn’t. He has no idea what Akiba is talking about, and he begins to doubt his own grasp of the very Torah that God had given him.

Then, one of Akiba’s students asks his teacher where he got his ruling. And Rabbi Akiba says to them: “This is the law transmitted to Moses from Sinai.”

And Moses understood. Yes, almost everything had changed; but something had endured, something very real, something that joins the past to the future, the dead to the living, that enables even long-lost wanderers to return home.

And I felt that in my childhood shul. I felt … welcomed.

To my surprise, I was given an honor of coming up to the Torah during that service. I choked up as the rabbi introduced me, explaining to the packed hall my deep connection to the place, and my father’s enduring legacy and that final time I sat with him, in the back row. I choked back tears as I chanted – in the purest, most melodic voice I could muster – the same blessings Jews have been chanting for so many centuries, in the same language spoken in Akiba’s Academy and on Moses’ holy mountain.

A day will come when I’ll be forced to bid goodbye forever to Coolidge Corner. But generations from now, people I never knew will be reciting those same Torah blessings I recited, with the same words and the same tears. They’ll look around and, if they are very fortunate, just for a second, get a glimpse of life’s unbearable beauty and truly appreciate it. We’ll know in our bones, as Wilder’s stage manager states in Act 3, “that there is something eternal” about all of this, “and that something has to do with human beings.”

And somewhere in the back row I’ll sit with Moses, my father and Emily Gibbs, smiling.

(Rabbi Joshua Hammerman is the author of “Mensch-Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi” and “Embracing Auschwitz: Forging a Vibrant, Life-Affirming Judaism That Takes the Holocaust Seriously.” See more of his writing at his Substack page, “In This Moment.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)