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A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Good Morning.

My mother Lore died, aged forty-four, when I was five. My father remarried her younger sibling, a practice supported in Jewish tradition on the grounds that no one else can feel such compassion for the dead sister’s children. Isca, my second mother, the last of her generation in our family, died aged 100 this December.

During the sad task of emptying her home, we found hundreds of letters about Lore. It’s profoundly stirring to discover this late in my life so much more about who my mother.

Among those letters, on the thinnest of paper, was the eulogy delivered by the Rabbi at Lore’s funeral, which I was considered too young to attend. Lore, he wrote, chose as her life’s motto the verse from Psalms:

Create me a pure a pure heart, God, and renew in me a steadfast spirit.

I’ve always loved those words, without knowing my mother loved them too. I write them on the opening page at the I start of each new diary.
How strangely the spirit transmits such love across the generations.

Today, the seventh day of Passover, we read in the Torah how the Children of Israel sung: ‘This is my God whom I beautify, my ancestors’ God, whom I exalt.’
It was my ancestors’ God, specifically my mother’s God, who must have guided me to choose the very words for which she had cared so deeply.

When they’re alive, we talk with those we love across the kitchen table; when they’re dead they set their words, invisibly, in our hearts.

May we all be granted a pure heart and steadfast spirit.

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