Last Friday night, December 30th, our young cantor’s sweet voice sang an old prayer to a secular tune. When, after perhaps ten seconds, I identified the song, a wave of sadness washed over me. The tune, B’shana habaa (In the new year), is an Israeli song for the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana, and it was the first Israeli song that I attempted to learn during the intensive Hebrew course that my wife and I took at Beit Hanoar, on Herzog Street, in September and October of 1972, after our arrival in Jerusalem.
Our Hebrew course began before Rosh Hashana, so it was appropriate for Dalia, our gifted teacher, to teach us the lyrics to B’shana habaa, especially because it contains useful vocabulary as well as an irregular noun. While the lyrics are appropriate for the religious new year in Israel, which takes place in September or October, they are utterly inappropriate for the secular new year in New York, as can be seen in the first line, “In the new year, we’ll sit on our porch and count migrating birds.” Still, the tune that our cantor was singing reminded me of new beginnings.
But the beginnings I remembered were in the past. When I first encountered that song, I was 40 years old, half my age now, my career largely ahead of me. Our parents and grandparents were still alive, and our children were still very young. I was starting work on an exciting research project in what for us was an exotic locale. The future was endlessly long. But when I heard that song last Shabbat, I felt the sadness of nostalgia for a time that can never come again, for the time when we were still young.
In that week’s bible portion, Vayigash, the aged Jacob hears the astounding news that not only is his son Joseph still alive but that Joseph is now the viceroy of Egypt, the land to which his sons now take him. Robert Alter (The Five Books of Moses, a translation with commentary: p. 265) comments: Jacob’s story, like David’s, is virtually unique in ancient literature in its searching representation of the radical transformations a person undergoes in the slow course of time. The powerful young man who made his way across the Jordan to Mesopotamia with only his walking staff, who wrestled with stones and men and divine beings, is now an old man tottering on the brink of the grave, bearing the deep wounds of his long life.
I wouldn’t characterize myself as a powerful young man at the time I first heard B’shana habaa, although I was clearly more powerful than I am today, nor am I as feeble as Jacob was at the time his sons carried him down to Egypt. Still, hearing B’shana habaa, shortly after reading Alter’s comment, brought home to me how advanced in age I’ve become, how careful I now find myself when walking over rough terrain, how slow I am in ascending the subway staircases, how little time there is left.
But the other morning, as I was walking in Prospect Park and mulling over these sad thoughts of decline, I looked up at the sky, cloudless and radiantly blue, and I thought that the present is a good place to be. And I remembered the advice a surgeon gave to the daughters of a man whose cancer he had excised: "Everyone dies," he said, "but not everyone lives. I want you to live." That's what I'm doing my best to accomplish during the time that is left.
2010-2012 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved
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