Parshat Tazria: Here, There and Everywhere

 

It took place in the corner of my study.  The act didn't take very long but its significance will be etched into my mind for the rest of my life.  Last Monday night, the 28^th March and the evening following the 25th Adar, I switched off the electric memorial light that has been illuminated since the 7th April, corresponding with the 25th Nissan.  The day that my mother both passed away and was later interred.

The strange vagaries of the Hebrew calendar were not lost on me.  In any other year, this action should have occurred on the exact anniversary of my mother's death.  She left us three days after Pesach but our religion dictates that one does not mourn a parent for more than a maximum of twelve lunar months.  The Talmud (Shabbat 152b) tells us that over that period of time, a person's soul (the Ruach element) ascends and descends to the body.  When these months have been completed, the Ruach rises to heaven and no longer returns (although another part of the soul, the Nefesh, stays with the body, in the grave, forever).

The passage of time is strange and ending my mourning a month early, although of course, this isn't the case, seems like a shortcut to something I feel that I don't deserve.

My servitude to honouring my mother through the Aveilut should run its full course.  Dare I move into this new state of mind?

In removing the memorial light, I started a new chapter of my life.  My official mourning was now over and I now entered a new phase of my existence which meant returning to a sense of 'normality', albeit without the physical presence of my mother.  It felt very odd to have ended my Aveilut and almost wrong.

That was until Stephnie said gently, "This is what your mother would have wanted."

I guess the Israelites might have felt something akin to this.  After hundreds of years of slavery and finding themselves in the midst of the destruction of Egypt wreaked by the plagues, this command would have left them speechless:

Exodus 12:1-2

Then the Lord spoke to Moshe and Aharon in the land of Egypt.  He said, "This month shall be to you the beginning of the months; the opening of the year, this month will be for you."

The nation was then given the instructions to take a lamb on the tenth day of the month and prepare it for what would become the night of their first seder whilst Gd enacted His final plague on the Egyptians.

And on which day were they to be given this command?

Today, Rosh Chodesh Nissan.  The very same day that a year later would see the inauguration of the Mishkan and induction of Aharon and his sons.

In our lives, moving from one phase to the next is never easy and, at times, it is extraordinarily challenging.  We need a metaphorical guard rail to hold onto, to avoid falling into the gaping hole that we fear lies beneath us.  The Torah, in describing the very first mitzvah given to the Children of Israel, is perhaps providing that security blanket.

How can you find something to grasp when the world around you is spinning?  Start by understanding the centrality of time in our lives in the guise of our calendar.

Whether or not I was ready to make that jump, from the 25th of Adar when I was an Avel, to the 26th, when this no longer applied, was immaterial.  I had no choice.  Our religion dictates that twelve calendar months Aveilut do make.  And that is it.  No more.  No less.  If Gd let us know that the importance of creating a calendar meant installing a dividing line between the bondage of Egypt and the journey to freedom, who was I was to argue?  Before the end of the plagues; before the first Seder; before the Exodus and the splitting of the sea and even before the giving of the Torah - it was the mitzvah to establish a calendar that set the path upon which we have travelled for five millennia.

Towards the end of my year, a thoughtful and caring friend did something wonderful for me.  He commissioned a lady to crochet a kippah for me with the legend 'Kan Sham Uvechol Makom  -          כאן שם ובכל מקום' which translates as 'Here, there and everywhere'.  He told me he thought of this as he knew that as I reach the first anniversary of her passing, I will wear the kippah and think about how my mother is always 'here, there and everywhere' in my life (and he knows what a Beatles' nut I am).

Time, by its very nature exists here, there and everywhere.  We live within its borders and it governs our every move.  Without it, we are rudderless.  With it, we are imprisoned.

That is why, by instructing us to establish our own calendar, Gd started off by populating it with some key dates - Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret.  We then added the rest and included in this, the idea of setting down the boundaries for what constitutes a mourning period.  And like everything else in the calendar, it too has its time.

As King Solomon wrote in Kohelet:

Everything has a moment; a time for every action beneath the sky.  There is a time for birth and a time for death...a time to weep, a time to laugh; a time for eulogy and a time for dance.

Please Gd, we will soon find a time to laugh and dance.

Shavuah Tov and Chodesh Tov