The Gates of the Heart

As I recently said, "a naked poet has no secrets." For me, at least, the practice of poetry is a stripping off of what is not real, and a baring and communicating of what is. I'm sure that many of my readers have watched in amazement as two competing traditions pulled at me from opposite directions. This is the kind of thing that I resolve in poems and in "aha moments" in the middle of the night.

I have always known that at least a quarter of my ancestry was Irish, and that another quarter had come to this country from Sweden. Both parents of my paternal grandmother, Judith Jacobson, had come to America from Sweden, where the two families had already known each other. But until I was about thirty years old, my father did not tell me that some of them were, or "had been" Jews. In recent years, I have learned a lot more.

This explains many things. It explains the old, pipe-smoking Swedish grandmother (great- or great- great- to me) who had a little cabin to herself on the family farm. The kids liked to peek into her windows, where sometimes they saw her lighting candles and practicing exotic rituals. She was not a witch; she was lighting candles for Shabbat.

It also explains why my father never mentioned a first cousin who had retained his ancestral faith and died fighting the Nazis when his plane was shot down over Germany.

It further explains why every week MyHeritage is sending me notification of new "DNA cousins" in Finland, a country that was never mentioned in family history. There are others from northwest Russia and from the Ukraine, also never mentioned in oral family history.

Finally, it helps me to understand why Judaism has attracted me (has been screaming in my blood, actually) most of my life.

Those ancestors who came to this country from Sweden, having passed through the Ukraine, northwest Russia, and Finland, most of them at least, did a very unwise thing: they cut themselves off from the very roots that were there to nourish them. In those days, many others did the same thing.

So a correction, if not an expiation, is in order. I have been embracing those same roots, in many ways, since 1964. I now feel strongly that this embracing needs to be done in a more "official" way. And so it will.

But there is a fly in the fruit bowl: a pandemic is here, now just forty-five minutes by car from where we live. My wife and I are both "seniors," but Sandy is especially vulnerable to the new virus, due to both age and existing respiratory problems. I cannot unnecessarily put myself in the middle of large groups of people.

So for now my congregation will be Sha'arei Lev--the Gates of the Heart.

Text © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.