Home for Dinner

Dear Congregants,

Various rabbinical seminaries – most recently the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia – have been kind enough to invite me and my colleagues from time to time to address students on the practical matters of maintaining one’s balance while functioning as a congregational rabbi.  At RRC, the question posed to me was: “Assuming you were into Jewish life prior to entering the rabbinate, how do you keep yourself ‘Jewish’ while meeting the demands of rabbinic life?”

Good question.  The other day, I went out front to get my newspaper, and someone walking her dog said “wow, you look like you’re about to go to work.”  That other day was Shabbat, which for the dog walker was “weekend,” and I was indeed oddly dressed in a suit and white shirt. But since a Jew shouldn’t work on Shabbat, why was I giving off the impression of a person readying for business?

The answer is too complicated and nuanced for a short response. But here’s one thing I told the rabbinical students: I kept my sanity over the years – and my Jewishness – by going home for dinner each night. I would go home, help put together a quick meal, sit with the kids, and often head back to the synagogue for a class or meeting.  The meal was never too quick for a brief motzi and birkat hamazon, some topical discussion, a check-in for everyone, and maybe a little Torah that one of us had learned that day.  This, to me, was elemental Judaism: the mundane made holy; the pasta transformed into a sacred offering. Shabbat dinner and Passover seder notwithstanding, this weeknight routine was the kind of thing that helped me stay grounded as a Jew.

There was an accepted exception to my ironclad rule, however, and it came on Monday evenings.  For my first eleven years here, the kids knew that their dad was eating pizza on Monday nights with the “big kids,” the high school students of the so-called “Dor Hahemshekh” or “continuing generation” program.  They always assumed they’d get their chance to do the same one day.

That day came.  My oldest entered 8th grade and joined the class. Four years later my next child came into the program.  For a year I had two children in that chaotic pizza party room every Monday. I was in heaven.  Then the third came, replacing his sister who went off to college.

Last week I found myself eating my final Monday night Dor Hahemshekh dinner with one of my own children present.  It has been a run of eleven years.  Only when I realized it – as my son and his senior class were leading their swan song birkat hamazon – did the tears start to flow. The older two were present along with their mom.  They had come for the closing speeches and gift-giving that always concludes this marvelous gathering of our young.  We were a Jewish family eating together that night, and we weren’t the only ones.  Others in this congregation have sent one child or multiple offspring through this uneven but richly rewarding program, always knowing that their kids would be “dining” with their peers and learning some variation of Torah with adults who were crazy about them.  On that concluding evening, we were not the only parents graduating their youngest child from the pizza- and-Torah experience.  And my college boy and grad student girl were hardly the only Dor Hahemshekh alumni here to support their young siblings.  It was an unforgettable siyyum, a conclusion of a chapter of learning and life.

Of course, my plan is to continue supping on Jewish-Italian fare every Monday for as long as I can get here to work.  I’ll get to spend quality time with a whole new generation of kids, and they will be “my” kids in every way.  As the Rabbis riff on Isaiah’s verse, v’chol banayikh limudey a-do-nai, v’rav sh’lom banayikh, “all your children will be learned of God[‘s Torah], and great will be the peace of your children,” comes to mean that the act of transmitting Torah through the generations transforms your students into your own sons and daughters.

No question, it will not be the same.  I’ll keep imagining my kids here, knocking around with their friends, resisting my request that they put on a kippah, giggling and snickering and hoping I don’t notice some mischief they were plotting.  But somehow, this privileged moment of eating the most mundane of foods in the most informal of settings – and then hearing the kids chant that blessing and head off to argue whatever passes for Torah that night - will remind me that being a rabbi doesn’t have to contravene one’s life as a Jew.  Mondays will always constitute a kind of “eating at home,” a sacred Jewish meal at a sacred Jewish table

Rabbi Lester Bronstein

Reprinted from Lev La'am, Summer 2011

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