I Lift My Chin

During my first address to a congregation, after my officially becoming a Jew, I spoke of Daniel Pearl, zichrono livracha. His last words, “I am a Jew,” - how they moved me. Such courage. Such unabashed identity.

Then his chin was lifted and his life taken.

Continually seeking, reading, researching, and wrestling, I came across the story of Isaac, who after realizing God's plan for him, lifted his chin to his father Abraham. “Take the son you love...” The stories, the midrashim, say that Abraham stood above his bound son. His tears flowed so heavily that they fell upon Isaac. And Isaac, stung both by Abraham's obedience to the will of God and by Abraham's tears, suffered poor eyesight for the remainder of his days. Intellectually, I think that God was giving Abraham a test, and that he failed. Even though he had once confronted God to spare potentially righteous strangers in Sodom and Gomorrah, he did not so much as argue with God for his son's life.

"If I was any kind of father... if I was a good father... I'd take you out and stone you. That's what the Bible commands of me for children like you." My father claimed to be weak, unable to carry out his biblical duties, supposedly because he so loved me. Unlike Abraham Avinu, at least, my father did argue with God against my destruction. Regardless, I have scars on my heart and soul that shall never heal, that always remind me of how much my father despises me.

When I was twenty, I went to his house, one of many times, at the request of my younger brother, to provide refuge. My father often externalized his self-hatred and internal struggles by beating my mother, or my step-mother, or me. Fortunately, for my brother's sake, he was spared physical abuse - though he suffered, as we all did, by witnessing the abuse of loved ones. I always considered my brother to be the one my father really loved. He was the chance of continuation. My father had determined long ago, probably before I had, that I would not be the one to carry on his name. During this visit I was concerned about my father's wife, as no one deserves such harm upon their body, mind, or spirit. Sometimes I wonder still how she has survived it, or why. That night my father said that I was a sinner, and that I was living in a house of sin. I recall my reply - "In my house of sin, we love. In my house of sin, there are no fists. In my house of sin, we do not fear those with whom we live."

I then learned why he despised me so. He admitted something I had previously suspected, something to which others had alluded. "I wrestled with the demon of homosexuality when I was younger." Then he added, "But the Lord Jesus Christ saved me from that life." I further lost respect for my father's "loving savior," because in saving my dad, he condemned my childhood to one of living in a house filled with violence, with fear, with self-hate. My father's redemption was my eighteen-year prison sentence. That night it occurred to me - "that's why you hate me. Because I am brave. Because I have courage to live, to be myself, unashamed, open, gay..."

"... Because I lift my chin."

As he stood before me, my father saw a world - a world he had never imagined possible, existing. And as I stood before him, I was that world, living in his son, me. How could he not despise my existence? Was this why, throughout my incarceration with him, he constantly called me stupid, worthless? Was this why he said I stunk, that I would never amount to anything? That night he repeated how he should have taken me out and stoned me to death.

After my brother's accidental death, I severed ties with my father. It felt so freeing, standing face-to-face with him as he tried telling me "we need to settle this right now" and "how it is going to be." I told him he needed to leave, or surely one of us would die that day. I told him he was never to raise himself against me again. We did not speak with each other again for more than ten years.

The Bible does not mention Isaac when recounting Abraham's return journey. Certainly, their relationship was strained, no matter how much faith or understanding they shared.

Wishing to shed the heartache of brokenness between father and son, I called my father and invited him to hear me speak at synagogue that night of my first address. He came. He cried. We spoke briefly, and he left. He did the same two years later when I had a bar mitzvah at the age of thirty-seven. The last time I saw him was on my fortieth birthday. My spouse threw me a party and my dad became invited due to an announcement on a social media website. In the hallway my father expressed disappointment that he could not count for himself so many friends or so much love. I told him it is never too late. He soon left.

We talk on the phone once or twice a year at best. He lives less than an hour from me. It seems neither of us try anymore. My inner little boy still longs for his dad, but I guess the me that needed to protect myself offered up his chin too easily, too readily. Sacrifice me if you must, but my spirit will continue to live. Maybe his eyes are still too full of tears, me, the first son, not being the son he wanted, and my brother, his hope, being the son he lost. Maybe too my eyes are still burning. Maybe my vision is too clouded, my chin too up, to risk seeing him in a different way.

I am no Isaac, and my father is certainly no Abraham. It may not have been his or my ideal father-son relationship, but he did teach me what I did want and what I did not want. I have learned something: how to live and love like I never knew before, courageously, openly, and to do so despite all the hurdles.

Who knows what the future holds? Regardless of whatever becomes of this father and son, someday I will stand at his grave, and I will mourn, and I will regret, and I will smile, and I will survive, and I will walk away.

With my chin up. With stinging tears of mixed feelings.

Twenty years ago today

In blessed memory of Eric.


Science fiction is rife with time travel and alternate realities. It presents alternate, yet coexistent dimensions, sometimes with characters shifting between shared phases. Approaching both the twentieth anniversary of my brother’s death and only days afterward the celebration of the forty second year since my birth, I cannot help but to wonder if our human interest in the aforementioned sci-fi topics are related. Not having concrete, irrefutable evidence about what really happens when we die has lead humanity on a journey of explanation, and attempts to comfort ourselves about the unknown.

I am a geek, and though it may sound presumptuous, I also think of myself as somewhat of an amateur theologian. I want to make some sense of faith and belief, of religion – something that does not always make sense. Often when watching science fiction programming with my partner, we put the program on pause to discuss how the “entertainment” before us is reflective of a teaching within a specific tradition. Historically, it has been common for science fiction to provide a way for us to present religious praxis such that we might not take offense, but that we might view our beliefs, customs, and actions through a different lens, and learn something about them.

We are currently reviewing Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Like so many things these past few weeks, I keep seeing, as I did in a recent episode, much about life, death, and our holding onto those we love and have lost. The son, Jake, so missing and so longing for his lost father Benjamin spends the entirety of his life trying to undo an accident that shifted his father into a different phase of space and time. For a very short while, every twenty years or so, the father would shift back into current space-time, aged and dressed just as he was at the time of the accident. This being Jake’s story he continued to age normally. Benjamin was able to witness his son grow from his late teens through to his elderly years, and eventual death. At one point in the story, Benjamin was heartbroken to have seen Jake lose his wife due to having been so consumed with trying to recapture, somehow recover, his lost father. Eventually, as many science fiction programs might do, another combination of events returns everyone to the original accident. The destruction is prevented, and their time together as father and son continues where it left off.

The rabbis teach that one single life is a world; that the destruction of one life is the destruction of the world. In the episode described, I saw how the loss of this father destroyed not only the world of the father, but more importantly the world of the son. The son, so loving of his father, so lost without him, led to his not living his own life. Getting lost in a science fiction program where the possibility exists that eventually everything will work out, we risk losing sight of the importance of each of us living in our world. That rabbis also teach that because of the murder of Abel, not only was his world destroyed, but too the worlds of all his potential descendants. They teach that we suffer as we do through loss of loved ones because we experience not only the loss of the loved one and that world we had with them, but the future world that we had imagined together, the future world that we continue to imagine if only they were still here.

I was shocked between phases of reality and imagination only weeks ago when I saw a young man, who looked to be about five years my junior, precisely that of my brother. He was walking in the oncoming direction on the sidewalk, stocky build, dark orange-red hair, still freckled on the face, and I am arrested that I just streamed the word “still” as I write this, as if this man in fact really was my brother. I remember nearly twenty years ago seeing my brother’s lifeless body, yet I was so tempted to call out his name to this stranger on the sidewalk. I almost tested the waters to see if in some twist of fate that maybe all these years of “thinking” Eric is dead had been a mistake.

These worlds my brother and I shared were destroyed because of his death, and I still mourn the loss. The pain of so many led to further seemingly irreparable rifts in the worlds between me and both of my parents. Today, I still find myself holding onto those lost worlds. Good memories are a good thing, yet they are kept in balance as only that, memories. In parallel, there is the knowledge that we will make no further memories together.

It seems so much about my life is affected by this loss. I weigh most actions, and reassign value to interactions recognizing we all have unknown amounts of time together. Time does not heal all wounds, and space is not what I seek. It does not get better; we only get better at managing how we cope with our losses. I used to long for an afterlife where I would get to be with Eric again, something that would hopefully, maybe, dull the pain of him not being here in this world anymore. But that just is not me, it feels disingenuous, and disrespectful to the relationship we had as brothers. It is okay to mourn. My love for him causes me to still miss him, and I am not willing to risk losing those memories of our love as brothers simply to numb me away from the reality of his absence. There is nothing I can do to change reality, hoping otherwise feels like dishonor.

I think, and I do hope that what I have learned is how to make the most of my world, to celebrate life, and how to mourn honestly.


I still remember.

Beginnings...

So, I used to have yonahgefen.blogspot.com, the minimal content of which still exists at that address. However, even for a tech geek like me, since blogspot became part of Google blogger, I have forgotten the username associated with that account. Rather than dig through customer service any further, I've created this place, rejewvinated, to share whatever it is on my mind.