The day of my mother’s 80th birthday party dawned inauspiciously, cold and wet and disappointingly unfestive. The date of the party had been chosen months ago, hashed out via a flurry of texts back in January, far enough in advance to allow everyone to clear their schedules. Depending on the Hebrew calendar, my mother’s April birthday is often an afterthought; a quick phone call, a card, rarely a party for a birthday that inevitably falls out during Pesach. I felt a little bad that the celebration was pushed off until May. I had assumed that the party was a surprise and I worried that Mom would think we had forgotten about her birthday, but the surprise was on me because one of my brothers couldn’t keep a secret.
In Pirkei Avos 5:25 Yehuda ben Tema discusses different ages and stages of life, each age having its own distinct milestone. There is a curious and perplexing redundancy at ages thirty and eighty which seems to defy reality. Thirty, says the Mishna, is the age of koach; while eighty is the age of gevurah. Translated into English, these two words both mean “strength,” but certainly the strength of an average eighty-year-old is incomparable to that of a thirty-year-old. What is this Mishna trying to teach us?
On the morning of the party I got an email from the little elves who operate Microsoft OneDrive telling me that I had a photo memory to look at. I was shocked to see that the picture was from my mother’s 70th birthday party, which was exactly ten years ago. Although it should no longer surprise me that these nosy computer pixies know everything about our lives, the unexpected appearance of the photo on this specific day was disconcerting and bittersweet in the most painful kind of way. Although the older grandchildren still look very much the same, there is something missing now from their overall countenance, perhaps a glow, perhaps a softness, perhaps just the innocence that inevitably faded with the onset of young adulthood. The youngest grandchildren, of course, had changed the most; their plump pinchable cheeks gone forever, replaced by tweens and teens who barely remember that long ago birthday party for their bubby. Inexplicably, my beautiful mother has barely changed, but my father is forever frozen in time at seventy-something, vibrant, alive, smiling his signature half-smile that downplayed how happy he must have been to be surrounded by family.
The drive from Highland Park to Brooklyn is never good. On the day of the party, a trifecta of extra insults threatened to make the trip even worse – weekend traffic, pouring rain, and the Five Boro Bike Tour, which meandered its way over the Verrazano Bridge at exactly the same time that we were traveling. This is the downside to planning so far in advance, but the ride was thankfully uneventful, aside from a brief delay on the bridge as the cars slowed down to watch the rainbow of spandex cycling by. By the time we walked into the restaurant, most of the family was already there. There are, thank G-d, a lot of us; and so the sheer physicality of the moment, the noise, the crush of bodies, the smell of French fries and babies, smoothed out the raw edges of the old birthday photo that hovered like a specter beneath my eyelids, making the comparison between then and now less painful.
According to my father’s rebbe, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, koach and gevurah are not the same entity at all. Koach means physical strength, while gevurah means heroism or inner strength, a specific form of self-control. This is the type of strength that an eighty-year-old has, and in the language of Pirkei Avos 4:1 we are taught what true gevurah is: “Who is strong? He who subdues his inclination.” As little kids we are taught that being kovesh your yetzer means conquering your evil inclination, but as adults we become aware that the concept of yetzer is much more nuanced than that.
When I was younger, I never thought of my mother as my role model because she did not want to be my role model. She encouraged me to live a life that was different from her own. She wanted me to go to college, to get a good job, to be able to support myself, by myself. An unintended consequence of my mother’s dreams for me was that they actually came true, but left me somewhat rudderless. I grew up to have a life that was very different from hers, a life that required a delicate balancing act, a life that included working late and on weekends, a life that included not being home with my children every second of the day. Because I had no role model for this life, I struggled to figure it out as best I could. Because Mom also had no template for a daughter who lived this life, she too struggled with some of my choices. We didn’t always agree on things in those early years, and our different personalities meant that we dealt with our dissonance in very different ways; Mom wanted to talk about it while I wanted to compact my feelings into a little ball, stuff them into the back of my closet and walk away.
Toward the end of the party we encouraged my mother to say a few words. Her voice laden with emotion, she shared with us that during the war her father wondered if they would live, if he would ever become a grandparent; and now, for her to see the room splitting its seams, bursting with four generations, was a gift beyond compare. She then gave thanks to Hashem for allowing her to reach this point in life, quoting Tehillim 90:10 “The span of our life is seventy years, or if given the strength, eighty years.” It is through Hashem’s gevurah that a seventy-year-old reaches eighty.
A few weeks after the party I was reading Women in Tanach by Leah Kohn, and in her essay on Rus I discovered a new way to look at the concept of gevurah. We are taught that the lesson we learn from Megillas Rus is the importance of chesed, acts of kindness. There are many examples of kindness in the story, but the most important act of chesed is her marriage to Boaz, specifically because of the unconventional way their marriage came to be. Naomi, Rus’s mother-in-law, knew that Boaz was a relative of her deceased son Machlon, and she wanted Boaz to marry Rus in order to fulfill the mitzvah of yibum. In the narrative, Naomi gives Rus a series of strange and awkward instructions; she tells Rus to put on lotions and a beautiful dress, and to go to the threshing floor where Boaz would be sleeping, whereupon she should uncover Boaz’s feet and lay down. The meforshim agree that there was nothing untoward about Rus’s actions, and once Boaz figured out who Rus was, he realized that she had uncovered his feet in order to symbolize the halachic process of chalitzah. Aside from being a baalas chesed, Rus was a paragon of modesty, the personification of tznius, and it is precisely this quality, this middah, that made carrying out Naomi’s directive that much more difficult for her.
This was not the first time that Rus had demonstrated her formidable inner strength. Rus was raised as a Moabite princess, a nation notorious for their wicked behavior. Although Rus was born into this evil nation, she rose above her upbringing and became a Jewish convert, accepting upon herself a belief system that was antithetical to that of her ancestors. As mentioned above, in Rus’s second act of inner strength she overcame her innate modesty, and approached Boaz in a way that was inconsistent with her normal behavior in order to perform the will of G-d. This is gevurah, the ability to conquer one’s natural inclinations, the ability to rise above one’s DNA, one’s personality traits and one’s preconceived notions in order to do the right thing.
As my children grew older they started to have their own ideas about things, some of which did not dovetail with my own. This is a unique kind of karma that parents often wish upon their children, but it actually made me a better mother – and a better daughter. A year after my mother’s 70th birthday she became a widow, a lifecycle event that had the potential to demolish her. But my mother was strong, harnessing the gevurah of her eighth decade and demonstrating a resilience worthy of her foremother Rus, also a widow who rebuilt her life after sudden tragedy.
My mother asked me to speak at the party, but I was speechless. What words do you use to describe that complicated dance between mothers and daughters, two people forever bound by a microscopic cord that elongates and shortens but is impossible to truly sever. This defiantly unbreakable bond is strengthened through generations of mothers who pass on the feminine mesorah by channeling the strength of their own mothers. Make no mistake, the bond can fray. It can stretch to the ends of the earth. It can stretch to the point of invisibility. It is however, always there; eternally patient, waiting, waiting.
My words were elusive. My fifty-something years with her flipped through my head like cards in an old rolodex. Where would I start? What would I say that wouldn’t sound fake or clichéd or overly saccharine? How to distill a lifetime into an entertaining yet meaningful soundbite?
Toward the end of the party my grandson stood up in his rickety wooden high chair and announced “home.” We laughed and began to extricate ourselves from the cramped room, flipping up hoods and umbrellas, hugging each other goodbye. The party was over, leaving in its wake a jumble of feelings, many of which would need to be sorted out in the coming days. Maybe later I would find the right words, but more likely, when the time was right, the words would find me.
Happy birthday Mom, I love you.
