Our guest blogger today, Sharon Cores, is one of the best early childhood educators I know. She just has a special way with young children, and their parents, that makes them feel special, loved, appreciated for who they are. She creates community wherever she goes. Currently she teaches preschool at the Lexington (MA) Chabad. What she doesn’t tell you in this post, is that while we met in Andover, MA, the community she is describing is Grand Rapids, MI, where her mother and sister live. It is posted today in honor of her father’s yahrzeit.
Av in the year 5750 was to be one like no other. We had lost my dear father in law, of blessed, blessed memory just a few weeks prior on the 6th of Av after a relatively rare neurologically degenerative condition took him from us. Just moving out of the 30 days of mourning for him, shloshim, and barely on our feet, we were cruelly thrust back into mourning when my own dad, my mentor, our love, went into a rapid decline and was gone in three weeks on the 14th of Elul. We found out afterward that it was his second cancer but was not known to any of us…was it known to him? We will never know.
Staggering doesn’t begin to define the emotions, the anger, the confusion that all of us walked through that year. Why these two wonderful men, who only lived to support their families, show them love, teach patience, respect, and commitment by example? None of the platitudes helped, none of the prayers and psalms comforted…there was only numbness, disbelief, and moving forward barely one foot at a time.
It was then, during this month of Elul, that I learned about community…the community of saying Kaddish for one’s parent. While staying with my mom and sister for shiva and a while afterward I found community walking into two different synagogues, one Conservative and one Orthodox, for minyanim…entering as a stranger and being welcomed as a friend. People made sure I did not sit alone, invited me out to coffee afterward, asked if I needed anything. And yes, the first day I left my mother’s house after shiva to say Kaddish at an early morning minyan, there was a rainbow over the roof of the synagogue.
This was to be experienced over and over during the following year as I went to minyan as often as I could with a job and two sons at home. I found a support system among the familiar and the new, but the welcome was always the same, the prayer, always the same. This was community.
Sharon Cores