By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — God willing, I’m traveling to Israel for two weeks in January, to visit the combined resting places of my parents for the first time and to rejoice with my daughter Debra’s pregnancy (it’s twin girls!). It’s a bittersweet and healing journey of memory, life, and renewal at a particularly transitional moment in my life. Let me start with my father.
He died suddenly and dramatically in 1976. Myself nearly 63 now, I am seventeen years older than my father was when he succumbed to a massive myocardial infarction while playing handball at the Cincinnati Jewish Community Center. My young mother and I were called to come over and we saw his lifeless body on the court, covered uncomfortably by a white sheet. His feet, in sneakers, protruded from underneath.
People stood around, some ghoulishly curious, others in shock, most not knowing what to say. The situation was larger than virtually all of them. The police and rescue squad workers did their work in silent futility and my immigrant father’s body was removed. Documents and releases were signed in painful submission. Mom and I went home to a stark new reality and to inform my younger brother and sister that our world was inexplicably changed forever.
He had fallen so hard that his eyeglasses lacerated his forehead; a small pool of blood stained the floor adjacent to the covered mountain of a man. Having fought valiantly and been wounded (ironically, above the eye) in Israel’s War of Independence, my father, Jeff Kamin, died of a weak heart and a spirit that could never really make peace with his own identity, his professional journey, and his obsession with disproving his own mortality. He had heart issues and wasn’t supposed to play handball. So he did.
He was brilliant and hot-tempered, cultivated and edgy. He wrote elegiac poetry in Hebrew to his many fallen comrades in war; he gave dissertations in impeccable English about the physics of aerospace. He did everything right but come to terms with life and its vicissitudes.
We originally buried him in a lonely cemetery in Cincinnati, light years away from his roots, his friends, his land, and the mulberry tree that my grandparents planted in Israel on the day of his birth. A few years ago, the family gathered his bones and re-interred him, at last, at home in Zion. My mother, after over fifty years in America, eventually returned home to Israel and died in 2013. They now both lie, side-by-side, in a cemetery near Ashdod, surrounded by many of my elders.
Now I go to see Debra, filled with life and hope–as well as my brother Sam and many other children of the elders in that cemetery. Debra and her husband live and thrive in the happening, cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv. I will cry tears of joy even as I acknowledge my own advancing age. This life eventually becomes the price you pay for loving people.
I will visit and say prayers for the first time at my father’s final resting place, knowing that after a short life of restless wayfaring and conflicting emotions, he is home in the land of our birth. I will say kaddish and forgive my mother for inexorably complicating my life in ways that matter less and less as my feet walk the earth of the burial grounds. I will fete my daughter’s great happiness and success as an international journalist and a joyous partnership with the father of my first grandchildren.
Under the biblical sun, along the blue Mediterranean, beneath Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers, and beside the Judaean hills, I will consecrate life’s meaning, and realize that I am lucky to understand what is good and distill what is bad. And I will again pledge to myself to take none of it for granted.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in Oceanside, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com. Comments in the space below should be accompanied by the respondent’s full name and city and state of residence, or city and country for those living outside the United States.