Because of the thickness of the rind, a desiccated etrog does not rot. It simply dries out, becoming small and hard in the process. Dried etrogim are no longer needed for a mitzvah, but can be used with cloves for a spiced etrog for havdalah. The late Anne Brown used to prepare and sell etrog jam to raise funds for tzedakah. Jackie Kahn saves the peel for zest. Sometimes that which is dried up is no longer usable. But an etrog can have an after-life.
This past year, Manley and Barbara Walters gave me a remarkable book about a dried up language, Aramaic. My Father’s Paradise, by Ariel Sabar, tells the story of Kurdish Jewry through a family memoir, beginning with his great-grandfather, grandfather and father who grew up in Zakho, a small village in Kurdish Iraq.
Kurdish Jews were tiny minority in northern Iraqi mountain towns, living in small pockets often isolated one from another. Kurdish Jews were different from the Arabic speaking Jews of Baghdad or central Iraq, who were urban, cosmopolitan, and integrated into Iraqi cultural, commercial, and political life.
The Kurdish Jews, because of their geographic isolation, still spoke the ancient language of the Near East, Aramaic, the language of the Talmud. At one point, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the ancient world, spoken from the eastern Mediterranean across the Middle East to the edges of India and China. Now the speakers of Aramaic are almost all gone. The language is drying up, like this etrog.
Zakho was a simple, faithful town where so many were pious, traditional Jews. Sabar describes his great-grandfather, Ephraim, as “a workman-scholar. A [fabric] dyer-mystic. A nobody-somebody. Epharaim Beh Sabagha (Tzabaga) had … respectability, ... based not on the size of your land or your income, but on the depth of your knowledge and the strength of your faith” (60). All that would change with the birth of the State of Israel.
In the early 1950s, 18,000 Kurdish Jews left what had been their ancient paradise for a new one, the Promised Land. They brought with them Aramaic, which had persisted in their community for 2700 years. Among the olim from Kurdish Iraq were Sabar’s grandfather, a respected seller of woven cloth, the grandmother, and their children. One of the sons, Yona, was the last bar mitzvah in Zakho. He would also become the preserver of the ancient language.
Israel in the 1950s was a Paradise only in the minds of those who yearned for the Holy Land. Rationing and governmental restrictions were common to all. New immigrants from Europe, survivors of the Shoah, had it harder than most. Only after the capture and trial of Adolph Eichmann was the power of the Nazi machine understood by sabras who had previously denigrated the survivors for lack of resistance.
Throughout the 50s and 60s, Kurdish Jews were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, lower than the Moroccans, maligned as primitives and scorned for their sacred beliefs. Slowly but surely, Kurdish Jews began to deny their origins and identify themselves with other national backgrounds. Only when the Ethiopians came in the 1990s were the Kurds replaced at the bottom.
The last bar mitzvah, Yona, experienced his family's decline in Israel. His father, once a prosperous merchant, became a manual labourer. Yona, embarrassed by his Kurdish family name, Hebraicized it from Sabagh (tzabag) to Sabar or Tzabar. But something from Zakho lingered. The etrog, associated by one tradition with the forbidden fruit of paradise of Eden, was drying up, but something of its sanctity stayed. It had an after-life.
Yona went on to become student at the Hebrew University, a Yale PhD who married a blue-blooded Jew by Choice, and a distinguished professor of Near Eastern languages at UCLA. Yet the memories of his childhood paradise remained with him. As a boy, Yona spent every morning in Zakho's synagogue watching his grandfather, the town cloth-dyer, absorbed in prayer. As an adult, Yona took on the mission of cataloguing the words of his desiccated language, preserving them in what would became the definitive dictionary of Aramaic.
Yona Sabar did not begin his linguistic work to create a legacy. He simply liked words and had a particular gift for language. Slowly, over the years, the recording and preserving of Aramaic became a life project.
David Brooks writes of two ways to find a path in life: a Well-Planned life and a Summoned Life. “The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?” (David Brooks, NY Times August 3, 2010).
Yona Sabar had a Summoned Life. But it wasn’t easy. Uprooted from Zakho to the Katamonim of Jerusalem. Drawn to Yale for a few years of study, he wound up living his adult years in Los Angeles.
Life is hard for immigrants. The author of the memoir was raised in an American paradise. “I grew up in West Los Angeles in the 1980s, a skateboarder and rock drummer; Kurdish Iraq, where my grandmother gave birth to my father at age 16, might as well have been the moon.” (NYTimes, 2008).
Ariel looked at his father with shame, scornful of the alien who “bought suits off the bargain rack at J.C. Penny” and who dressed “in pastel plaids ... intended for the golf course [worn] cluelessly to campus”. Yona’s “accented English was a five-car pileup of malapropisms and mispronunciations” and his life-work related to a language and civilization radically different from the Southern California culture of his son.
Yet “twice in the career of this least glitzy of men, Hollywood [came] calling. [In the film,] Oh, God! ...starring George Burns ...a group of theologians tests the bow tie–wearing Almighty with questions written in an “ancient tongue.” The handwriting is [Yona’s]. [In] The X-Files ...Mulder and Scully ... [discover] a biblical artifact called the Lazarus Bowl ... [the voice reading the encrypted [Aramaic is Yona’s].” (Brown Alumni Magazine, 2000)
The stubborn and rebellious son now lives in Washington. Married a non-Jew, he was stimulated to restore a relationship with his scholarly father by the birth of his first child. “Would Seth break with me as I had with my own father? Would he, too, think he had nothing to learn and his father, nothing to teach? ‘Who are you?’ Seth ... seemed to be asking... I was thirty-one years old, but I had no answer.” (3)
In some ways, My Father’s Paradise is about the gradual restoration of the father-son relationship, the journey of Yona and his journalist son to Jerusalem and then back to Zakho. The etrog can’t be replanted, but even if it is dried up, it may have meaning. There may be an after-life.
The book is also about the relationship between language and identity. Those who speak Yiddish, Ladino or Hebrew feel that connection. Can we maintain a Jewish culture in Canada without our own language? Long after I put the book down, I kept thinking of the last bar mitzvah boy of Zakho, who struggled to preserve Aramaic and to maintain a balance between past and present.
The Sabar saga is also about our paradise. In Zakho, paradise was a sense of history and rootedness. In Israel, paradise was the ancient promise of a redeemed land. In Los Angeles, paradise is constructed from personal dreams. But not all paradises are really paradise. Where is yours? In your past? In your present? In your future?
Finally, the narrative is about the uncertain future of every family. The son rediscovers the father and comes to understand the long path that his grandfather and father took to build a new future for the family. The grandfather chose Israel. The father America. The son, belatedly seeking his roots, is trying to establish his own connection.
The Biblical verse detailing the mitzvah of etrog describes it as הדר פרי עץ, which is usually translated as the fruit of an הדר עץ, a beautiful tree. But a midrash takes the word הדר as if it were a verb: “the fruit that remains on the tree” from year to year. An etrog does not drop off a tree. It remains on the bough until it is picked. Only then does it begin to dehydrate.
As long as it is attached to the tree, the etrog remains alive. So it is with us. As long as we cling to our Tree of Life, the Torah, we will not dry up.
Ariel, the great-grandson of the cloth dyer and master of prayer, now has his own family. He is trying to reclaim his religious and linguistic culture and transmit his heritage to his children.
“Passing on our culture to the next generation isn’t always easy…. America makes it possible to be who you want to be…. But a consequence of that freedom and acceptance is that it is easy to forget where you came from…. We can’t pretend that traditions are unending, or that each generation will invariably pick up where the last left off…. From my father’s quest to preserve his vanishing language and culture [I learned that] we have the power to hold on to the parts of our past that we value most.” (339)
As we prepare to recite Yizkor, please consider who from your family is in your mental paradise? What do you value from your language, religion and culture? What will be your spiritual legacy to the future? Will your etrog be fresh or dry? Will it have an after-life?
May your memories bring you blessing and help you find your personal path to Paradise.
http://www.arielsabar.com/bookclub.html
http://www.thebookstudio.com/blog/bethanne/conversation-ariel-sabar
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17lives-t.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/opinion/03brooks.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1
"A midrash tells us that when Job complained about his misfortunes, the KB"H showed him a three walled sukkah."
He goes on to talk about how a three walled sukkah, though incomplete, is still kosher, and that everyone who has suffered a loss in life is essentially a three walled sukkah, kosher but not quite complete. "It's not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts."
