The Unitarian Universalist Church
Rockford, IL
June 30, 1996
[Father's Day]
While I was on my sabbatical I attended a conference on humor. I believe it was there that I heard the suggestion that statistics can only tell us what has happened and not what will happen. The fact that everyone up 'til now has died is not proof that everyone must die- the odds are great that we will, but it is not proven.
I know that fathers and mothers die. I do believe that there was a part of me that clung to the possibility that mine might be the first exception.
On Father's Day, I spoke on the Celestine Prophecy, particularly, because of the timing, stressing the "sixth insight" which suggests that in order for us to realize our own potential, it is important that we gain insight into the dynamics of the families in which we grew up. I shared a list of questions about fathers that was offered in the Experiential Guide to the Celestine Prophecy. I personally found that list very helpful, and many of you have told me that you did too. I was looking forward to discussing it with my father this summer at Chautauqua, particularly in the context of his father, but also getting his perceptions of his own life.
I had a very busy day on Father's Day, and I didn't have a chance to call my father until late in the evening. He was never very big on "greeting card holidays" so I considered not calling him at all. As I started to go to bed, I said to myself, "You never know...." and I went to the phone. He picked it up on the second ring and said to me, "I knew you'd call." I am told that every time the phone rang that day, my father would say, "That's Dave." That, my friends was a close call. As you know, he died three days later.
I am, indeed, my father's son, even though he was always careful to point out that you can only be certain who the mother was. Although I generally advise others against it, I felt genetically compelled at his Memorial Service Thursday evening to try to speak for a few moments about my father - I could see him commenting, if I just sat there and said nothing, "For this I sent him to three years of theological school?" Whether I would get through it remained to be seen. I did, although there were moments when I almost lost it.
When I was thinking about this morning two weeks ago, I considered the possibility of following up on the Celestine Prophecy sermon by telling you about my maternal grandfather, who was a significant influence in my life, and how I understood that influence. Then my father died. I knew I had to talk to you about him - not just as therapy for myself, but also as an illustration of what that "sixth insight" is about.
[Al, the early years]
My father was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 30, 1916 -he would have celebrated his eightieth birthday today. He was the oldest of three children, being joined by Raymond and Esther. His parents had come to the US from Romania. His mother from Bucharest and his father from Braila, a small seaport. Annie tended to remind Lou of her cultural superiority, and there was always a certain amount of tension between them, but it was a happy and giving home, until their life was constrained by the depression. Lou was a waiter, and he continued to "go to work" long after he had lost his job, because he didn't want the neighbors to know he was unemployed. It was a patriarchal household, after the way of the old country. My grandfather would always walk ten paces ahead of my grandmother on the street. Interestingly, my father was taught how to cook and to scrub floors - which were not part of the masculine role. These lessons were to serve him well.
When he was 12, Dad began selling newspapers in the big subway station in Coney Island, which he continued after his graduation from high school - it was, after all, a job.
His formal education ended with his graduation from New Utrech High School in 1934. He unquestionably had the ability to go to college, but it was out of the question economically, since his family so desperately needed his help. He took a Civil Service exam and got a job as a junior file clerk at what was then the New York State Motor Vehicle Bureau in Albany in January of 1937. Albany people did not look kindly on New Yorkers moving up to take what they considered "their jobs," but my father's charm won him many friends in a hurry.
[marriage]
Throughout his life, Dad had a strong commitment to equality and justice for all people, which naturally, in the 30's, led him into Marxist circles. He was active in his support of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and when organizing a large demonstration, he reached out to the International Affairs Club at the State Teacher's College seeking ushers. It was exam time, so few members were available to help, but Ramona VanWie, the President of the group felt compelled to be supportive, so she volunteered. Al walked her home after the rally, and the rest, as they say, is history.
My mother's mother felt safe that she didn't have to worry about her marrying a New York Jew, since he was, in her eyes a Communist - not her daughter! My father's father was concerned about his involvement with a Shiksa (a non-Jewish woman), because "you know how the goyim always turn on Jews!" With less thanenthusiastic family support, they were secretly married on May 11, 1939. They decided that they should have given the families a chance, so they decided to repeat their vows on June 30th and invite the families to attend. No one came, but they were stuck with the fiction and for years we celebrated June 30th as their anniversary.
My mother's mother had been anxious that her daughters not be enslaved by males, so they were not allowed in the kitchen. My mother's domestic skills were utterly undeveloped. The training my father had received from his mother proved valuable. Early in their marriage he received counseling that suggested that rather than complain about what my mother could not do well, he might better use his energy to do it. Throughout the years, he always did the cooking when it mattered. Given her professional training as a librarian, when my mother went to work, it was not long before her paychecks were higher than his, even with his seniority. These role issues were a source of some conflict for someone raised in a patriarchal environment - it never quite felt right to him.
When my mother was expecting me, she got into a conversation with her doctor, Frances Vosburgh, about how they would deal with religion in their new family. Docky recommended her church, the Unitarian Church in Albany, as a great solution, and my father and mother joined it before my birth.
[burdens]
One of the greatest burdens my father carried throughout his life was his lack of formal education beyond high school - it was a source of shame to him. He was always conscious of the educational level of the people in his church, and for many years he felt somewhat inferior. One of the high points of his life was being elected and then twice re-elected as president of the congregation. It was a tribute to the high esteem in which he was held - a visible tribute that even he could not dismiss as he did most compliments.
All those who knew him were aware of the high level of his knowledge about many things - he required little sleep and was a voracious reader on many topics. His thirst for knowledge was part of what made him love Chautauqua so much - he infrequently missed a morning lecture, except when he was ill.
Another matter of some shame for my father was his rejection from the army during the Second World War. He had passed the physical, but at that time he had a very serious speech impediment -he stuttered so badly that it was difficult for him to communicate verbally. He was rejected by the psychiatrist who deemed him unfit for duty. In 1945, he was able to work out a deal with the Motor Vehicle Bureau that enabled him to attend speech therapy on a full time basis in New York City, and work at the MVB office there nights and weekends. It helped his speech immensely.
One of the stories he loved to tell was about the stutterer whovanished from the streets of his small town for a couple of months, and a friend, encountering him asked where he had been. "I've been in speech school," he said halteringly. The friend, embarrassed, asked, "How did it go?" "Just great! Want to hear? 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.' The only problem is, damned few times that comes up in a conversation." It is significant that later in his career Dad took on responsibilities which involved a great deal of public speaking - and he was always in demand because he did it so well. He was often the emcee for office parties. Some achievements for someone who had such a disability.
[career]
When he started working for the state, he received the munificent sum of $16 a week, much of which he sent home to his family. (He and a friend found part time jobs, serving summonses, running square dances, and selling baby furniture in homes.) He rose through the ranks in what became the Department of Motor Vehicles, ending his career in one of the highest civil service positions in the department, Director of Motor Vehicle Regulation. One friend, a deputy commissioner in another department, had warned him that his advancement would be limited by the radical-liberal activities in his record, including organizing of state employees, but he persevered. Ultimately his path required taking on the whole concept of testing in what became a major law case, Weissbard vs. Kaplan. He had reached the top of the ladder as a clerk and took an exam for promotion into a professional title. He did very well on the written exam, but there was also a required oral exam which required appearing before a panel that judged your qualifications strictly subjectively. They failed him for unspecified reasons, and he sued. My father against the State of New York. All promotions in the civil service were held up for two years as it went through the court. He won. The judge found that in order to maintain the integrity of the system, it was essential that even an oral exam have clear criteria that were open to review - not just "gut feelings." Fairness was achieved for all state employees, and the case is still viewed as a landmark decision. My father took the concept of civil service very literally -he believed that he had an opportunity to make government work for people, and service was what it was all about.
One of the unfortunate decisions he made was his retirement in 1979. Given the retirement provisions, he was effectively paying for the privilege of working, and he had a very conflicted relationship with his boss which made him quite miserable. It seemed foolish for him to continue to pay for such grief, but in retrospect, he acknowledged that the misery of work was probably less than the misery of the unstructured life to which he moved.
As a child of the depression, my father suffered greatly from economic insecurity throughout his life. He would get apoplecticabout people talking long distance on the phone, even after 11, or wasting money on greeting cards, or on a myriad of things he considered inessential. He lived for years with the virtual certainty that what he viewed as my mother's profligate spending would leave them in the poor house when they were old.
To forestall that, for all the years I was growing up, he worked a second job as a waiter at Joe's Restaurant, which had the best food in Albany. One of my clearest memories of childhood is of our Christmases. Dad worked an annual catering event for the Mendelssohn family every Christmas Eve, and we would have Christmas when he arrived home at 3 am, because it was easier for him to keep going than to sleep for a few hours and get up early. When I went away to college, he realized how fast the time was flying, and he decided they would have to get along with his working just one job. You know, they did.
[food]
Deb Adler's wonderful poem points appropriately to the importance of cooking in my father's life. It was a metaphor, but more. He loved people and one of the ways in which he expressed it concretely was cooking for them. His cheesecakes were, of course, famous. When he was able, he used to take cheesecakes to all kinds of people as a way of reaching out to them. The parties that were called Hospitality Committee are a part of the lore of this church. Family gatherings always involved a large quantity of food for a large quantity of people. It was his philosophy that there will always be enough room and enough food for people you care about - and there were a lot of people he cared about. No one was ever turned away from his door or his table.
My father was a major force, not only in the lives of my mother and sister and me, which goes without saying, but also in the lives of my spouses, my children, their significant others, my sister's husband and their daughter and her daughter; and of my aunts and uncles on both sides, my cousins, and all their spouses and children. In spite of the cultural differences, my father and my mother's father developed a relationship that was clearly one of deep love and respect. My father was a family figure of great impact - a patriarch.
["family"]
If there was anything true about my father, it was that he was never subtle. Whatever he was feeling was right out there for all to see. It is an understatement to say that he was affectionate. He was a lover and restraint was not his strong suite. What he did was make people know how important they were to him. In the Celestine Prophecy, the author suggests that in most interactions between people, both enter with the intention of getting something from the other - someone wins and someone loses. My father knew that love isnot a limited quantity, and it was always his goal in interacting with anyone that the other should leave that encounter feeling better about him or herself - particularly herself. And he had the ability to achieve that - and he was uplifted by that process of interaction. This included customers at Joe's or at Motor Vehicles, people he worked with, checkout people at the grocery store, doctors, nurses, and family. Martin Buber said that all real living is meeting. My father lived that philosophy.
Family, mishpocheh, was a rather nebulous concept because it had few boundaries. It was always a laughing matter that my father could simply not remember names - I suspect he could forget my mother's on occasion: I know he forgot Linda's after we'd been married twenty years! His way of covering was to call everyone "cousin." [In Dad's honor, I suggest that you turn right now to the people on your right and left and say, "Hello Cousin."] But it was more than that -- in many many cases, he thought of people, all kinds of people, as family- and he let them know it in no uncertain terms. But that is not, by any means, to suggest that those who were related by blood ever had any doubt that our connection was special. I can imagine no limits to what my father would give of himself for his children or grandchildren.
[illness]
One day in the summer, two years after he retired, we were walking along a street in Chautauqua, returning home from a meeting of the Chautauqua Society for Peace, of which he was a founder, and I commented on how his footsteps were echoing. That was the first sign of the peripheral neuropathy which so cursed his later years. Gradually he lost control over his hands and feet. He could no longer dance, and even walking became a problem. He could not button buttons, even zip his zipper, and perhaps worst of all, for him, he could no longer cook - he could not hold pots or a knife. As his condition deteriorated, he began to get materials from the Hemlock Society because he was clear that he was not going to live as an invalid.
The problem with someone who is so upfront with their feelings, is that when they are miserable, you know it. He maintained somewhat of a front with people outside the family, but he was pretty severely depressed and he was reluctant to deal with psychotropic medications. Karen had the misfortune to come into the family when he was at his lowest, and for a time he treated her miserably --absolutely unlike the way he had ever behaved toward anyone else. At the point when I was on the verge of putting distance in what was always a very close relationship, my sister confronted him about it and his neuropathy spontaneously improved just enough. There was a lot he still could not do, but there was improvement. With that his spiritslifted. When I later made reference to his former interactions with Karen, he acted like I was crazy.
Dad's heart has been a matter of concern for more than a decade. Two weeks ago, before he and my mother left for Chautauqua, he went to see his cardiologist who told him, not for the first time, that, given the condition of his heart, he could live for days, weeks, months, or even years. My father, pessimist about himself that he was, heard the days more than the years.
[a peaceful death]
He drove to Chautauqua the following Tuesday, and found some kids to help unload the car. He had a good day. Wednesday morning, a passerby helped him get his battery-operated cart going, and he spent the day tooling around Chautauqua, checking on and brightening the days of many old friends. That night, my mother left the dinner table to sit on the porch spring, where she fell asleep. Dad stayed at the table and had a long conversation with my aunt, which he concluded at 10:30, telling her that that was just the first of many they would have this summer, and with that he went to bed. When my mother awoke on the swing at 2:30, she went in to bed. It was unusual for Dad not to wake up, and in fact he felt cold. She cuddled with him to warm him, and when that didn't work, she tried to awaken him. When the emergency squad came, they confirmed the obvious, he had died peacefully in his sleep. His heart had simply stopped.
[Al the Tzaddik]
Al Weissbard was not without his faults, any more than the rest of us are. He could be impatient and stubborn, opinionated and aggressive, and there were times that he was really lacking in self-awareness, and certainly in self-control. He was, however, scrupulously honest and loving, open and enthusiastic. There was never a room that he entered that was not filled with his presence. He occasionally referred to himself as "Affable Alfie," and that certainly fit, but he was more than that.
There is an old Jewish legend about the Lamed-vav Tzaddikim - the Thirty-six righteous ones because of whom the world continues to exist. They do not know who they are, and no one but God knows -- they are distinguished by their righteous ways not by their occupations - they may be janitors, shoemakers - maybe even civil servants. But the way in which they live their lives is exemplary, and they brighten the lives of all they touch. You know where I am going with this. I believe that if such exist, my father was one of them.
Last Saturday evening, we all got together to talk for a couple of hours about my father, and one of the questions I asked the assemblage was, "What would you say was the credo of Al Weissbard?" The unanimous response was "Be the best you can andhelp others be the best they can." The next morning I went to the church service in the amphitheater in Chautauqua. An eloquent African Methodist Episcopal minister was preaching on the difference between Justice and just-us. She concluded her sermon by singing ,"If I Can Help Somebody." I knew in an instant that there it was. In what we call a coincidence, there was the essence of my father's life. I searched the country for the music and asked, Karen, to sing it at the Memorial Service and this morning. This says it all. [The song was sung.]
[postscript]
I want to add one postscript. I am sure you have gathered some significant insights into your senior minister from all this. There are, indeed, many things I learned and inherited from my father, who always insisted that as his son and heir, that what I would receive would be, "sun and air." He gave me much more. But, had I talked about my grandfather this morning, as I had originally considered doing, you might well have sat here and said, "Aha! Now we understand." Were I to have spoken about my mother, you would also have learned some things about me. Each of us does learn much from his or her parents - sometimes the things we replicate in our lives are not the parts we most admired in them. But we are never their clones - that is what sexual rather than asexual reproduction is about. We are different from both of our parents, just as we are alike them. It is we who are, and must be, responsible for who we become, just as our children must be responsible for who they become. We are significantly affected by our parents, but we are not just programmed.
In the Celestine Prophecy, a priest, Father Carl, tells the central character,
We are not merely the physical creation of our parents; we are also the spiritual creation. You were born to these two people and their lives have had an irrevocable effect on who you are. To discover your real self, you must admit that the real you began in a position between their truths. That's why you were born there: to take a higher perspective on what they stood for. Your path is about discovering a truth that is a higher synthesis of what these two people believed.
Each of us is a unique human being, and our life is about what we are going to do with the inheritance that is ours - what we are going to make of ourselves out of what we have been given. There is always a balance between the assets and the liabilities we have inherited. While I am aware of some of the liabilities, I feel greatly blessed by what I received from my father and my mother, and I gladly take it as my legacy and responsibility to pass on what I can of value to the world in which I live.
What assets and liabilities have you received from your parents, and what are you doing with them?