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As I gain more life experience, I come to a better understanding of the term “gratitude”.  For my husband, my children, my family and my life – I embrace Rosh Hashanah – for all the opportunity that a New Year brings equally to each of us, and as importantly, to reflect over the past year.  I am happy to speak on this occasion of reflection, because this past year in particular has been full of life lessons and learning for me, specifically – I learned a lot about my Jewish heritage, in not such a typical way.  I grew up in Toronto, and I am very familiar with the celebration of a “new year”.  As a child, I was not as familiar with Rosh Hashanah.  Jewish tradition only poked it’s head in through various moments of my life without any explanation.  There was gelt and latkes in December, but no conversation around them.  When my Mother would buy apples each September, to make a special family recipe apple cake – I didn’t question it.   I referred to things such as my Mother’s matzo ball soup, and kishka as “Ukrainian” vs., “Jewish” because that is what my father called them.  It all began to change for me in my early 20’s – when my father had a midlife crisis, and broke a lifelong silence, a secret he’d kept hidden under scars and battle wounds – we were, in fact, Jewish.   I only recently forgave him for this secret.  I only recently made peace with it all.  Over this past year, I got a closer view of the legacy of fear that paved over my family’s “Jewish-ness”.

Of my family’s Jewish life experience, I knew little.  This all changed following Rosh Hashanah last year, and this is why I am happy to speak of Rosh Hashanah today with you.  This past year was truly a mixed bag of good and bad.   But it was the year in which I learned both the happy and the sad stories of my family’s experience in Ukraine, Poland, and their confinement in Germany during World War 2.  Around this time last year, my father’s dementia worsened, and added a new layer – he had moments of aggressive delirium.   What we learned was that with the dementia and its progression, the doors swung open, and a floodgate of memories he’d never shared came through – some were terrible, and it left the nursing home staff in awe of what to do with him – and they had no idea what to make of man who spoke of seeing people shot in the head,  and remembering being urinated on during a standing room only train ride out of Poland.  The staff wrote most of it off to the dementia, it was my father’s sister who validated it all as true, as his terrible life experience – it put a mirror in all of our faces.  I was able to come to a better understanding of him by getting peeks in to windows that his dementia left open.  I got to hear his memories about the details of the cattle car that moved his family from Poland to Stuttgart.  He remembered walking from Ukraine in to Poland – memories from when he was 5 years old.  Stories of the little golden haired boy, who in his camp was known as the “button boy”, because it was the closest thing he could create that felt like a “toy”, so the women in his camp would save their buttons for him.  During this past year, I was stripped of all the judgment I’d placed on my Father throughout my life  –  although I am still a little angry that I did not know all of this earlier.  So, there was a part of his illness I was actually grateful for – the dementia took me on a journey through most of his lifetime.  A lot of it actually is not a nice story, and in the spirit of being positive, I am sharing only the quick study version.  My grandparents marched in to a camp in Stuttgart with 12 children, and when they landed in Canada at the end of the war, they came with only 6 children.   When they made it to Canada, they left behind their Jewish religious life, took up a farm in North Bay Ontario, and as quietly as they could they lived their lives, no one spoke of the ugliness that they left behind.

My Father died in the middle of Pesach this year, which was more than interesting for me considering my Mother died a mere few days following Yom Kippur in 2008, and in that same year, her Mother died in the middle of Chanukah.  The “gift” of this is – I am reminded of the importance of family at each of these occasions, as I light candles for those who are not here.  It also ensures for me that they will never be forgotten.  I love Rosh Hashanah because it is clean, and because it is not wrapped in a story of loss.  It is one of my cherished of the holidays in the Jewish calendar, because of how much my parents loved a New Year, not only for the erasing of mistakes, but for the boundless opportunity they believed it held.   

I’m grateful for writing this talk, originally Rabbi Grimberg had asked me to speak of the shofar, and of my children, and what it means to them.  I honestly didn’t have words to describe our experience, because the blowing of the shofar is something we have left to their storybooks of Rosh Hashanah to describe to the rituals of observance, versus the blowing of a shofar in our own home.   But in changing my talk from the shofar to the theme of Rosh Hashanah, it has been a real gift to me.  In reflecting not on the loss of my Father this year, but more on all the lessons I learned in being with him and caring for him at the end of his life, I was able to learn so much about him – and because of that I was able to give him and myself the greatest gift of all – forgiveness.  As I reflect on the past year, I am fortunate - because I have the opportunity to not live my Jewish life as my Father did – from fear – I get to live it in the opposite – from love.   It has taught me the importance of not only the shofar, and sharing this with our children – but also of all the other integral parts our religious celebrations and our Jewish life – we must keep those who saw things we cannot comprehend, close to our hearts even though they have left us.  There is nothing now that I need to be afraid of, as my father was in celebrating that I am born of Jews.  So, I look to this New Year not through the lens my parents may have, but as someone with the opportunity to teach his children all about our Jewish life and heritage, from the shofar to the menorah, the afikomen to the importance of mitzvah. So I embrace this new year, and say to each of you Shana Tova.

Steven Syczewski-Rapoport is a member of Congregation Darchei Noam. He and his husband live in Downtown Toronto with their three young children.