Anthem

God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape

the gates of hell are locked from the inside

O if I,

if I were a boy, and might come to it still,

and sit,

propped on the future’s arms,

and reading about Samson,

how his mother first bore nothing,

and then everything.

"So we’ll hunt him.

Because he can take it.

Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector.

A Dark Knight"

Commissioner Gordon

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

My father had multiple sclerosis. From the time I was about 8 he was in a wheelchair and by the time I was a teenager he did not have gross motor skills in his hands. Part of his daily routine was going 'up the street' to the local stores to buy lottery tickets that he would either have his kids or his aid scratch off, get his coffee, a bite to eat (actually, to be fed) and maybe take in a movie before returning to the apartment exhausted.

Once he was home his nurse would use a hoyer lift to take him out of his electronic wheelchair and place him on the carpet where he would read or watch TV.

One day, up the street, my father stopped in front of the Judaica store. This was weird, because he was not religious and the store did not have wheelchair access, so I was pretty sure he meant to stop at 'Mark's Newstand' which was next door. But I was wrong, he wanted to buy a siddur (prayer book). So we went in and bought a large Hebrew-English Artscroll siddur for him. We put it in the basket under his wheelchair and completed our trip.

From that day on there was a new component to the afternoon floor routine; my dad davened.

The only thing he really knew how to say was שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל ה' אֱלֹקינוּ ה' אֶחָֽד - but he said it every single day.

Lying on his right side, there on the floor, he would awkwardly push open the book with his clenched hand and would either get help to get to the right page or sometimes the book just opened to the perfect page because of how broken the spine was. To keep the place he would push his elbow down on the lower right corner of the book. Sometimes the corners of the pages underneath tore.

In fact, over time most of the pages on the right hand corner wore away. A few years went by and it got to a point that the book was in tatters. That didn't really matter, he knew shema by heart anyway, but it didn't stop him from opening that book. Then, one day, I came to visit him, he was on the floor and the siddur was gone. I hadn't been over in a few days and my grandmother explained that the book had completely fallen apart so it was thrown out.

I was shaken. In fact writing about it over 25 years later, I'm still brought to tears. I fervently believe that all prayers are holy, but there was something special about seeing him read from the siddur that I can't even put into words. And then to have that siddur just discarded, it wasn't that it was sacrilegious, to me it was just sad.

But then I think about how somewhere out there there is a siddur that is torn and beat up more than any other. A siddur that was only used for 3 pages. A siddur that sat on the floor and was tossed in the trash. But a siddur that is so unbelievably holy it's almost scary.

To that siddur I want to say thank you. Thank you for suffering such abuse and for helping my father pray.

Today is my father's yartzeit. I am grateful to him for many things. One of those is for teaching me the idea of mesirat nefesh for prayer, to be willing to open a siddur and daven, even when you can't.