It was late. Very late. We were crawling through the trenches. Keeping low to the ground, clumsily inching our way forward on our elbows and forearms. Remembering to keep our tushies down.
Until Mom came in. And told us to go to bed.
It was one of those great nights that Daddy tucked us in. It’s truly amazing how he somehow was able to stretch 8 weeks of Basic Training into years of bedtime tales (you would have thought he was a WWI veteran). “Tell us an Army story!” Jen and I would beg. And he would. We learned how to crawl through the trenches. We heard about “swabbing the decks” and eating ice cream sundaes in the galley. And we were told about the soldier from Kentucky, who first tried to find the horns on my father’s head, but then relied on Dad to read and write his letters home.
“Write about Daddy this month,” my mother told me. And so I did. Because I’m a good daughter who listens, because I usually write about Mom, because he just celebrated his 70th birthday, because it’s Father’s Day on Sunday, and, well, because it’s time I acknowledged all the wonderful things that Jewish fathers do!
My dad didn’t have any sons to teach how to put on a tallis or wrap tefillin, but he gave his daughters many wonderful Jewish memories. I remember watching him pitch on the Men’s Club softball team (and coming home with a big trophy!) I remember going to the “Fiddler on the Roof” puppet show he hired the year he was B’nai Brith president. I remember him saying Kiddush and teaching me the Four Questions and letting me braid the fringes of his tallis.
Dad (like many other dads) left most of the lectures up to Mom. Which made it all the more effective when he called one of us in for a “talk.” I’ll never forget the afternoon he told me to quit playing around and go to the Federation’s Jewish singles event that weekend and meet a nice boy (and yes, that was the night I met my husband!)
There are more recent memories, of course. Dad walking me to the chuppah. His eyes brimming with tears when Sofie, his first grandchild, was named for his father, the man who gave him his big ears and soft-spoken manner. My dad holding my son, the first grandson, during his bris. (Jules is named for my great-uncle Joe, an actual WWI veteran, who, even though he was my mother’s uncle, found the son he never had in my father.)
And then there was that conversation in the car. I was in my early 20s and Dad was driving me to the train station after a visit home. I asked if he believed in God. I had never talked to Mom like this and I still I don’t know why I asked, but I did. And I expected my dad, a mechanical engineer, to say no. He thought for a moment and then told me that the more he understands about the universe, the more he realizes all that is beyond the scope of science. That science reaffirms his belief in God. And I’ll never forget that moment, when my dad taught me that it’s not silly or embarrassing to believe and that science and faith are not mutually exclusive.
These days I smile when I watch my husband recite Kiddish, when he comes home late after playing basketball with Brotherhood, when he lets Sofie braid his tallis fringes. And I know that I’ve married a man who is as wonderful a father as he is a husband. Just like my Daddy.
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