FIRST PERSONAs a rabbi, he helped others mourn. So why wouldn’t his daughter say kaddish for him?
The author with her father. Courtesy of Sara Sherbill
Today marks one year since my father died. Traditionally, the Jewish religion prescribes a defined framework for mourning a parent, a series of numerical imperatives that build on, then fold into, one another: seven days of shiva, which is part of shloshim, the first 30 days of mourning, followed by aveilut, the 11 months that mark the full year. There are myriad laws the mourner must follow during this time, including prohibitions against listening to music, buying new clothes, participating in public celebrations.
I grew up in a religious Jewish home, daughter of a prominent Chicago rabbi. Although my father performed thousands of weddings and bar mitzvahs in his lifetime, death was his specialty. Since I was a child, I’d watched and listened as my father guided his congregants through the stages of grief. Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers — my father sat with them in hospital rooms and living rooms, sometimes our own living room, listening to their fears, explaining the customs, letting them know they were not alone.
And yet, when it came time for me to mourn my father, I had no guidelines for my grief. I did not attend my father’s funeral. Nor did my family host a shiva. I did not sit on the floor in ripped clothing, as Jewish law commands. I did not attend synagogue to recite the kaddish prayer for the dead.
A broken relationship
It wasn’t only that over the years I’d stepped away from religious observance, shedding its prohibitions and commands one by one, like layers of skin. It was that my relationship with my father was so broken, so irreparably fractured, that by the time of his death I had not seen or spoken to him in six years.
As every preacher’s kid knows, my father’s job depended not only on his ability to project an aura of righteousness, but also on our family’s ability to project a picture of happiness — the moral outcome of a wholesome religious life. For so many years, this was my job — attending Shabbat services, chatting with congregants over stale sprinkle cookies at kiddush, waking early Sunday mornings to tutor at the Hebrew school — all while pretending I was not suffering.
Because when he was not leading services, or visiting the sick, my father was abusing my mother and siblings and me in the privacy of our own home where no one else could see it. There was the physical violence, yes, which sometimes resulted in bruises, but that was not the worst part. The worst part was trying to understand why my father, who was so kind to so many, was doing this to us.
‘I was disappearing’
For years, as adults, my siblings and I lived scattered across the world. Our father died of cancer during an Omicron surge in the pandemic; COVID-19 travel restrictions and health concerns made it too difficult for most of us to gather in person. One of my brothers came to visit me in the early days following his death; one afternoon, we went on a long, cold walk to a 7-11, where we shared a cigarette outside. We were regressing.
But once my brother left, I mourned my father alone. At home, I continued to live with my husband and young son. But somewhere, I was disappearing.
I tried to write about my father’s death, but nothing came out right. I tried to talk about his death, but didn’t know what to say. In the wake of his passing, I could easily recall so many of the terrible things he’d done. But I could also remember so many of the good things. One memory in particular kept returning — my father preparing cholent on Friday afternoons. As in so many religious Jewish homes, it was my mother who cooked for Shabbat, producing loaves of challah and cauldrons of matzo ball soup — but it was my father who prepared the cholent.
Making the cholent
First, he took out a massive blue cast-iron pot. Next he seared the meat, a crackling sound hissing up from the bottom of the pot, before adding the marrow bones and coriander seeds and fennel seeds, paprika, rosemary, sage, cumin, turmeric. Then he added everything else all at once — lentils and kidney beans and parsnips and potatoes and turnips and onions and barley, several eggs, and enough water to submerge it all. My father allowed the contents of the pot to first boil up on the stovetop before placing it in the oven to sleep.
For centuries, cholent was not only an economic necessity — made, in its simplest form from beans, barley and cheap cuts of beef— it was also a religious necessity. Because Jewish tradition prohibits the use of fire on Shabbat, which precludes cooking of any kind, the dish is traditionally assembled and cooked before sundown. At the Shabbat lunch table, my father would present the eggs that had hard-boiled in the stew overnight. He cracked them delicately, revealing their soft brown flesh, all our eager faces turned toward him as he told a story from that week’s Torah portion or regaled us with one of the long, meandering tales he invented on the spot, always involving an intrepid traveler on a long journey with no end.
One cold Friday afternoon nearly a year after my father died, I decided to make cholent myself. Looking through a pile of old papers, I was able to find my father’s recipe, which I’d scribbled down in a notebook years earlier. My father’s version followed the Ashkenazi tradition of Eastern European Jews, but also included the spices of the Sephardic tradition, gleaned from his years living in Jerusalem as a young rabbinical student. First, I bought an enameled cast-iron pot the color of the night sky, like the kind my father used to use. I seared the meat and bones and spices. When the pot reached its boiling point, I placed it in the oven just before sundown.
The aroma of Shabbat
When I awoke the next morning, I was hit with the aroma of Shabbat, something I had not experienced in years. Even before I tasted it, the cholent had announced the past. I took the pot out of the oven and ladled out a small bowl, which I ate by myself standing next to the stovetop.
Suddenly, I was transported back to my childhood home on a Shabbat afternoon, all of us recently returned home from synagogue. There was my father, in his leather armchair at the head of the table, a man who is trying to do good because he hopes that maybe that will make him good.
There was my mother, in her at-home Shabbat dress, trying to give her children a good life, even as she was drowning. There were my brothers and sister, all still little, hoping everything would be OK today.
Perhaps it was not a coincidence that I had thought of my father’s cholent in the wake of his death. Since biblical times, hot stew has been served as a mourning food — a simple, dense meal designed to nourish those in pain. In the biblical story where Esau sold his birthright to his brother Jacob for a pottage of lentils, the commentators teach that Jacob had been preparing the stew as a meal of mourning following the death of their grandfather, Abraham.
A passage in the Talmud explains why lentils are a mourning food: because they are round like a wheel, and mourning is a wheel that revolves around the world, touching everyone sooner or later.
Good deeds — and bad ones
Which father was my real father? The man who told us stories at the Shabbat table, or the man who took out his anger on those he was meant to protect? Does a bad deed cancel out a good deed? I do not know the answers to these questions and I probably never will.
Somewhere in a 12th-century book, it says that a Jew who does not eat cholent on Shabbat is a heretic.
By any definition, I was a heretic. A full year had passed that I did not recite kaddish for my father, that I did not attend a yahrzeit service. In most ways, I had failed as a daughter and as a Jew. I had only done one thing, which was to make his favorite dish one Friday afternoon, then another, then another.
To tell you the truth, I’m not mad my father’s gone. In his later years, his experience of life was mostly relegated to suffering — and to making those around him suffer, too. Death is always supposed to be a tragedy, the worst thing that could happen. But I do not feel that way. It is only now that my father is occupying another realm, one far away from Earth, that I can feel his love.
Sometimes, he comes to me in a dream to tell me he is sorry.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Jacob sold his birthright to Esau. This version corrects the error, reversing the brothers’ roles.
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