You Can Go Home

By Larry Gordon – Five Towns Jewish Times

The hall closet still has a box of mothballs sitting on the shelf directly over the coatrack. As a result, it still harbors this pungent but otherwise sartorially healthy scent that tells you that the clothes in here are well protected. This is the hallway closet in my mother’s house in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. I’m there often—though not often enough—usually to pick my mom up before Shabbos or drive her back home after Shabbos, but rarely, if ever, am I there to spend a Shabbos there myself these days.

In fact, I can tell you exactly how long ago it’s been since I spent a Shabbos in the house I grew up in. I can easily recall the last time I spent a solid 24 hours in the home where I gave up my baby bottle as a toddler, the home where I had my bar mitzvah and even the shalom zachor of my firstborn son. Up until last weekend, it had been 14 years since I made Shabbos in that house.

With my mother recently out of orthopedic rehabilitation after breaking her femur, instead of moving her around to one of our (her children’s) homes, we’ve begun a rotation of joining her for Shabbos in her home. For days I felt that coming back after all these years was not going to be a simple, matter-of-fact event for me. More than anything else, I knew that I’d end up grappling and trying to make peace with my new/old “frozen in time” surroundings. I felt that I’d have to try to reconcile this contradictory feeling that here in my childhood home time has both come to a complete halt and also marched on at an unrelenting pace.

So much of this house is the same—but so much has changed. One of the things I can’t get over is how the six of us (four children and our parents) were so comfortable in three relatively small bedrooms and—even more shockingly—with just one bathroom. Yes, there was also a half-bathroom in the basement of the house, but who wanted to go down there?

As the Shabbos weekend approached, I found myself anticipating mostly two things. The first was what it would be like to sit at the Shabbos table—just my mom, my wife and me? And the second was what would walking to shul and being in shul really feel like?

A few words about shuls in Crown Heights in the old days as well as the setup today. Crown Heights was once quite Jewishly cosmopolitan. It was home to an extensive cross section of Jews and was considered one of the premier Jewish communities in New York. To this day, you will find that many, many members of the Jewish community who today reside in far-flung locations once spent some time in Crown Heights.

Of course, today most of those shuls are gone and have been replaced with Chabad satellite shuls that accommodate the ever-burgeoning Lubavitch community here. In the 1960s and 1970s, some of the major shuls just within a block or so of my house included Skvere, Satmar, Skulen, Ger, Bobov, and a Mizrachi shul. There were also big shuls like the Young Israel and Chovevei Torah. Eastern Parkway also featured large Conservative and Reform synagogues. The Mizrachi shul, just a few doors away from Satmar, was usually jam-packed with a broad array of Jews on Saturday night for Maariv. I believe that this was because they featured the earliest minyan for Maariv in town. Now there is a paper-goods store where that shul stood.

As a kid, I thought people were just always in a hurry for Shabbos to end because there was something they had to do. Later I learned that if you see a chassidish-looking guy in the Mizrachi shul for Maariv on Shabbos night, it’s not because he necessarily has something important to do. Most of the time it’s because he’s an addicted smoker and as the sun sets on Shabbos day the urge to light up becomes even more intense with the realization that the time to smoke will soon return.

The last time I was here in Crown Heights for Shabbos, the Lubavitcher Rebbe was still alive, though ill, infirm, and in a coma of some kind. A lot of things were supposed to change in the aftermath of that traumatic and indeed life-altering event for Lubavitcher chassidim. The prognosticators assured us that Chabad as we knew it would dissolve after the Rebbe’s passing—that there was no leadership structure and it would ultimately, over a few years, cease to be influential or have the impact that it had during the Rebbe’s life.

Well, for the most part the opposite has happened, and the movement grew and continues to flourish. New Chabad Houses in different parts of the world are opened almost daily. And to think, many of those kids who are out there today in Passaic, Palo Alto, or Portugal most likely once walked these streets, up this hill on Kingston Avenue up to 770 Eastern Parkway, where they learned, davened, and absorbed enough inspiration to both last a lifetime and spread more than just a little around to others.

The huge shul here is packed on Friday night. Between Minchah and Maariv I walk around recalling the different parts of the shul I used to daven in. For a time, as a young adult, I stood in the back of the shul, so I went to stand there. Then I moseyed my way up to the front, to where my father used to sit. He once told me that he paid a certain amount of money that made this prime location his seat for life. I guess when he passed away 19 years ago we lost the seat, too, though I haven’t checked the fine print (of which I’m certain there is none).

The next day—Shabbos—I squirreled my way into the minyan that takes place in the Rebbe’s office/study, within the four walls that pretty much served as his home for his last years. I have been in this room a few times in my life. The first was before my bar mitzvah, at a time when boys that age routinely received an audience with the Rebbe to mark their coming of age. The next time was with my fiancée just before we were married, when we received a berachah from the Rebbe. The next time I was there was by his funeral, when thousands passed by this office door where the Rebbe spent so much time talking with leading rabbinical figures, heads of state, members of parliaments, and bar mitzvah boys.

Along with some 150 other men, I davened in the room with the history, the experience, the ambience and the spirit of the Rebbe. The seven Shabbos aliyos to the Torah are all awarded to young men who are either getting married in the coming week or whose wives gave birth to children in the previous day or so. Here in this crowded room, it’s all about the vigor of life and the future. I saw and met some people I literally had not seen in decades. Some of our conversations picked up seemingly from where they left off three or four decades ago. So I was walking through a past here that still seems to have a lot of energy. Sure, for me the experience was nostalgic, but I looked around and saw that for the others it was anything but that. For many of them, there seemed to be an exuberance as if we were still gliding through an unfinished epic tale.

I came back home after davening to make Kiddush for my mom and my wife. The unusual thing was that over these past two decades I was mostly only here for maybe a half-hour or an hour or so at a time. Like I said, I was either picking my mother up or bringing her back home. I know there are times she doesn’t like the hassle of having to pack up and leave and then come back the next day. But she’s stoic and a champ with a stiff upper lip, and she does what she knows needs to be done.

But this Shabbos I wasn’t there on a specific mission or to make any grand gestures. I wasn’t even there to visit her. I was just there to be there with her, and I discovered that that was exactly what she needed—and I subsequently discovered that it is what I needed, too. I needed to be here like I once was—as a child, a teenager, and a young adult. I had to sit with her and my wife at a Shabbos table without looking at the clock on the wall or thinking about the next place I had to be. I found comfort and relaxation in sitting in the living room on Friday night and just studying or reading. I even dozed off on the couch in the living room. After a half hour, I awoke suddenly only to realize where I was, so satisfied and pleased to be there.

Most importantly, I think that my mom was content. We were just hanging out on Shabbos afternoon, not anxious to leave. Some cousins came to visit before Minchah, and we were there to be visited too. For a day I experienced elements of yesterday combined with a measure of the here and now. As nighttime arrived, I was also pleased that it had been such a wonderful experience and that no matter how much time passes, I can always go home again.