In my last article, I discussed the blessing of a table. Today I would like to discuss another aspect of our homes. How do we add furniture, artwork, paint colours to our homes? What are our ideas about decor? In our home, we decorate by inheritance, from paintings, a Le Corbusier lounge, a glass-front china cabinet. And yes, even tables. Our house is mostly decorated with furniture and art, and dishes inherited from friends and family. But more than the actual items, we have decorated our home with memories. I can look around our living room and see a small table and remember Myre singing a song during our Pesach Seder that he hadn’t sung for 50 years. He grew up over a century ago, a Jew in Glasgow, and his delight in singing lives on in me. I might glance to a painting on the wall and remember Agate telling me how she gave herself a year in Mexico to see if she could make it as an artist. Her story gives us room to measure our potential against any given timeline.
I remember stories about people I never met. I inherited stories from my husband’s memories, which enabled his family to become mine through Aunt Gert’s mirror and his mother’s wingback chair. My family became his through my parent’s maple kitchen table and my great grandmother’s bookshelf and buffet. Joyce is with us, with her much loved bedroom chests. Aunt Ethel’s tchotchkes, Goldie’s tweed coat and Bram’s heirloom candlesticks grace our rooms. Our house is full of treasured stories, memories of people long gone from this earth, people who helped us become who we are today. Our souls love this continuity and connection. And like our souls, our treasures are connected to our Jewish tradition, linked to each of us through inherited memory and adopted memory, very similarly. How we hold, and utilize, and treasure such inheritance is what keeps our Judaism relevant and relatable.
Keeping Shabbat allows us to light candles and use treasured Kiddush cups, keeping and holding our memories within traditional blessings. My bookshelves sag slightly with the weight of their books, a blessing of learning, a blessing of shared discovery. I can open a book and remember sitting by the family woodstove and listening to Uri speaking about his passion for Edward Whittemore, a passion now mine The Hannukiot have been put away, but when we bring out the special dishes for Passover, more memories will flood through us. And, just as we treasure that patina of inheritance, we may also welcome the new. Just as we might buy new furniture, we might evolve and innovate ancient traditions. We might create a burial service for an infant born too soon. We might help guide a woman committed to laws of modesty, though her married partner is another woman. We might bring young girls to mastering the art of reading Torah, as we do in our shul. As Jews, we might find new avenues to explore alongside those many ancient pathways – all with an eye to preserving the very best of our much-loved traditions.
Each day brings room for the new stories of our becoming. The blessings of our pasts merge with the blessings of our lives lived today with the blessings of what will be. What we inherit, material and spiritual, becomes part of us, and we too will pass that inheritance forward, as we inhabit our place in our shared sacred ground. In our belongings we might find belonging, and we say to the Eternal One, He nei’ni; Here I am.
Rabbi Lynn Greenhough is rabbi with Victoria’s Jewish Reform community – Kolot Mayim Reform Temple.
You can read more articles on our interfaith blog, Spiritually Speaking at /blogs/spiritually-speaking
This article was published on Saturday, December 30th 2023
