Coming Home

Truth be told, Alaska was never on my bucket list of places to visit. I would have been just fine picking up the kids from summer camp on the West Coast, spending a few days with my family in LA, and returning to New York without ever leaving the “Lower 48.” But Debbie had other plans. This would be, after all. the last summer all six Cosgroves would be together before our oldest daughter Lucy leaves home for college, and we were going to spend five days in August hiking, biking. and kayaking far away from everyone we knew. There wasn’t really much of a discussion. Our planning consisted of Debbie emailing me the flights she had booked, and before I knew it, I was on a raft, in the rain, shivering on an Alaskan river.

It wasn’t just the scenery that was majestic and new, but also the subject matter – specifically, the world of Alaskan fish. Our rafting guide regaled us (as I will now regale you) with the migration patterns of salmon. Apparently, salmon roe are born into the gravel of a river bed; not yet fish, they are called “sac fry.” In this early stage, they undergo a series of physiological changes to become smolt, so they are able to cope with – among other things – the shift from the fresh water of their river of birth to the ocean salt water that awaits them. Eventually, at the appointed time and season, the maturing fish swim downriver and into the ocean, and it is there that they spend up to four years maturing into adult ocean salmon, developing their full swimming ability and reproductive capacity.

It is here that the real drama begins. Because after several years in the ocean, in one of the great feats of the animal kingdom, the salmon return to the natal rivers in which they were spawned. Nobody is completely sure how they do it. Some speculate that a strong sense of smell leads them back to the home cooking of their estuarial birth. Other researchers attribute it to something called magnetoception, the ability of salmon to orient themselves and navigate by way of unseen electric fields. However it happens, the obstacles to a safe return are daunting. The salmon travel untold miles against the current, leaping over rapids and jumping over waterfalls. They negotiate bears and bald eagles and fisherman and all the other predators who congregate by the rivers, not to mention pesticides, neurotoxins, and other ecological threats to their survival.

Until finally, eventually, a certain percentage of the salmon – the few and the proud who have defied the odds and overcome the obstacles – make it back to the river of their birth. It is there that the now adult salmon spawn once more, laying their roe in the riverbed gravel. The cycle of life – from generation to generation, dor l’dor – begins again.

This evening announces Rosh Hashanah and with it, we in this room sense we have returned home. The sounds, the tastes, the setting all signal our homecoming. Not everyone, sadly, has made it back, and many of our families – and our community as a whole – are diminished by the absence of loved ones. So, too, there are new faces whom we warmly embrace just as you embrace Park Avenue Synagogue as your new Jewish home. For so many of us here, this sanctuary is filled with history, a repository of memories that knows no limit, and we look forward to the addition of new memories, from our new members, in the years ahead.

But the migration on which I would like to focus is not just our annual comings and goings, but the journey of body and spirit that is about to commence in my own family. Because the shiver down my spine may just have been the cold, and the drop of water on my cheek may just have been the rain, but in listening to the guide wax poetic about the Alaskan salmon run, I realized the very thing that Debbie understood when she booked the Alaska trip in the first place. This time next year – all bets are off – my firstborn will be leaving home. As the tradition teaches: bat babayit, or babayit, “a daughter in the house, a light in the home.” Lucy, my first light, will be swimming downstream into that great wide ocean.

One could, I suppose, argue that the time for me to speak about a child leaving home should be next year. What do I know, after all, about a subject that still sits on my horizon, all the more so, in the company of so many who have already experienced their children’s exodus? Besides, while some in the room may well identify with the angst connected to a child leaving home, there are many in this room who do not and will not have children. A child leaving home is but one of life’s many transitions: marriage, birth, graduation, divorce, the death of a parent, retirement, and others. Why give center stage to my thoughts about children leaving on this sacred day as we usher in a new year?

The questions are justified, and my answer to them all is, in a word, “exactly.”

Because aside from the fact that there are things that I want to say now while my daughter is still in the room, I believe it is this feeling that I have this year, whether we have children or not, whether they left home two or twenty years ago, that is precisely how we are all supposed to feel on Rosh Hashanah. That anxiety-ridden feeling of a parent imagining the imminent departure of their child from home, in all its implications – universalized – is what we should all be thinking about, whether we are living through it in real time, recalling it as we once went through it, or just imagining it as if it were ours to experience.

Consider for a moment every single Torah and haftarah reading that we will encounter over the next forty-eight hours. Each one of them is about a parent dealing with a child leaving home. Tomorrow morning we will read of Abraham’s anxiety as his son Ishmael is sent into the wilderness and then Ishmael’s mother Hagar placing her son at a distance for an uncertain fate and future. Tomorrow’s haftarah reading will tell of the long-prayed-for birth of Hannah’s son Samuel, a son who, upon being weaned, is dedicated – literally lent out – in service to the Lord. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah we will read about Isaac, the gift of Sarah and Abraham’s old age, and the inexplicable commandment that Abraham bind him upon the altar as a sacrifice. And then, in the haftarah for second day, the mournful scene of Rachel weeping, rahel m'vakah, for her children who have left, her tear-filled lament and prayer for their safety. The theme in common is not marriage, not the death of a parent, not even, for that matter, the birth of a child. It is the thought of a child’s launch into the unknown to which we are asked to return each and every year. The thread has always been there, I just never noticed it until this year, when that story became my story.

The question nevertheless remains – why? Why would the tradition insist that we consider the thought of a child leaving home as we usher in the new year?

One perhaps obvious answer is that a child leaving home is unambiguous proof of the inexorable passage of time. You can change your job, the color of your hair, you can change a lot of things trying to fool time, but if your child is leaving home – well then, my friend – time is passing. Like the new year itself, it is the closing of one chapter and the opening of another – for the child, and all the more so for the parent. Today we all turn and face the strange. What does it mean to reconsider our primary point of identification? What does it mean for me, for my spouse, for the two of us together? If I am to undergo a process of redefinition, how can I be reborn and reinvent myself? These questions are not contingent on whether or not we actually have a child. Your passage may be retirement, divorce, a health challenge, marriage, becoming a grandparent, or something else. At their essence they are about redefinition or, more precisely, resilience – our ability to successfully leave one life chapter and enter another – and they are questions we must all ask of ourselves at this time of year.

A second possibility is that there is something about sending a child into the world that becomes a sort of referendum on your own personhood. As father to four very different children, I am a big believer that some behaviors are hard-wired, that our children’s personalities have as much to do with nature as nurture. But our children are, nevertheless, rather candid windows into our own value systems. Is my child kind, funny, Jewishly minded, generous of deed and spirit, their sibling’s keeper, physically active, intellectually curious? You can stand on your soapbox, you can give big sermons, you can do all sorts of things, but your kids, they see if you snack late at night, they know if you volunteer your time, if you give forgiveness freely, if you speak kindly to your spouse, if you go to synagogue. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool your kids for eighteen years. Our children’s value systems are, to some degree, a reflection of or a reaction to the home they grew up in, and that is a very sobering thought. To send a child out into the world is anxiety-producing because it says more about who you are than you care to admit. What are the High Holidays, if not our annual check-in to assess the gap between who we say we are and who we actually are? What better way to measure that gap than in that transparent receptacle of your values called your child?

As anyone who has left home knows, growth only happens by way of one party leaving another and letting go. From the lekh l’kha command to Abraham to “go forth” to Jacob’s flight from home to Joseph being sent down to Egypt, every biblical hero – Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Ruth, Moses, you name it – had to leave in order to develop into the person that he or she would become. It is the people who never leave home, like Joseph’s brothers, who are developmentally stunted and fail to become self-reliant. Even Adam and Eve only achieve the fullness of their humanity upon leaving the Garden of their divine parent – a parent who had to let go. Jewish mysticism calls it tzimtzum, a form of contraction in order to make the space for others to grow. Maybe that’s what the holidays are here to teach us. That in order to individuate, in order for all of us to become our fullest selves, we all need to contract a little and let go. Now there is a thought to consider over the next ten days: that our boldest acts of transformation will be found not in what we take on, but in what we let go.

Ultimately, I think the reason we are asked to imagine how a parent feels upon a child leaving home is because that is how our parent, our parent in heaven, Avinu Malkeinu, feels on Rosh Hashanah. It is an insight of no small significance to realize that the child being let go on the High Holidays is each one of us. God is the one experiencing separation anxiety, knowing that though we will fall and perhaps even fail, we must be allowed to leave in order to achieve the fullness of our being. What are the High Holidays if not one grand exercise in learning how to hold ourselves accountable, to stop pointing fingers and playing the blame game, and to begin acting like adults? God, no different than any parent, seeks to bring close and let go at one and the same time, a shared struggle that brings us all closer to one another.

And it is this realization, this recognition that the real parent in question is not me, you, or any of us, but our divine parent in heaven, that the final and most critical piece of the High Holiday drama falls into place. Maybe, just maybe, these holidays are not just about the anxiety of letting go; maybe what they are really about is the question of whether our children will return home. The swim downstream, after all, is relatively predictable and straightforward. But will my child return home safely?

Lucy, I have spent the last eighteen years teaching you, trying to role model for you, laughing with you, and most of all loving you. There is nothing I want in this world more than for you to grow up and become your own person, individuated, self-reliant and self-confident. But will you come home? Will you come home to the values that your mother and I have tried to model for you? Will you come home to the traditions that have sustained our people from generation to generation? Will you come home to your sisters and brother when they need you, as they come to you when you need them? Most of all, having ventured out into this rough-and-tumble world, where bears and bald eagles abound, will you find your way home to yourself, to the beautiful and pure soul, the unique light that is yours? At the end of the day, that is my highest hope for you, that you should always come back to your true self, your best self, and feel comfortable in your own skin. No matter where life takes you, may you always be blessed to make your way back home.

That is how a parent feels when a child is leaving home . . . and that is how God feels towards all of us this evening.

A final thought, a Hasidic tale – modified – that is always told at this time of year. There was once a King who had a . . . daughter – a daughter who had to leave home, well, because that’s what everyone did, and that’s what she had to do. Years passed, the daughter wandered through this world, and over time, she developed her own voice and her own interests. And the king, on his end, also continued to develop; he too was human, and he needed to grow. Eventually, one day, the king sent his ministers to find his daughter and ask her to return. When they located her, she answered them that she could not return to the kingdom: She was no longer the girl who had left home years before. Too much had changed. She was not just her father’s princess, she was her own woman. The ministers brought back the sad news to the king. The king told them to bring his daughter the following message. “Return as far you can, and I will come the rest of the way to meet you.”

Is the tale about an actual parent and child? Is it a parable about God and humanity? Or is it a metaphor for the return to the inner child within? Yes to all three. The calling of the evening, the calling of the season is about our return home. As the sages taught: “Make for Me an opening the size of an eye of needle, and I will make an opening for you wide enough for wagons to enter.” Obstacles though there may be, the river of return is always there for those who seek it. May our children, may all of God’s children, find their way home as we enter the new year ahead.