There’s
a well-known trope/parlor game/interview question that asks which long-dead
persons you’d like to meet, have dinner with, interview, etc.
It’s
fun to think about, and the answer supposedly reveals something pertinent about
us.
About
a month ago, someone put this question to me and I realized my older answers
didn’t hold for me anymore. My old answers were Shakespeare (did he really
author what is attributed to him?), Jesus (what was the historic flesh-and-blood
person really like?), and Abraham (Is he in fact one actual person, or a myth?).
But
I realized that Shakespeare would almost certainly be a disappointment. The
works are far greater than the author, as is almost always the case. Jesus of Nazareth
is also far greater as spiritual residues present to this day. As to Abraham, I
would likely not like him at all and he not like me. Anyone who would sacrifice
his beloved son Isaac and lie to his boy while climbing to the place of the
intended killing (all to prove his complete obedience to G-d) is the sort of
fanatic I avoid like the plague today.
Then,
they came to me like figures emerging out of a thick fog. The people I would
most like to meet and spend a day with, the people I would like to get to know
and be known by, are my father’s mother and father. They perished in the Holocaust
and the Nazis wouldn’t allow my father, still a boy himself, to keep even the
locket he wore with his mother’s photograph.
What
I know of them are the memories of a boy. When I asked my late father to
describe them physically, he gave such a vague description that I couldn’t conjure
their faces. Years later, when my father returned for a visit to Poland and
found a neighbor he remembered from his childhood still living in the old
building, the neighbor angrily snapped at him saying, “What Jews? There were
never any Jews here.” He had hoped someone had photos of his family, but
instead found complete erasure.
If
you believe in the afterlife, you might be telling me that I will meet my grandparents
some day. You might be telling me that they are watching over me right now. I
won’t argue. It’s a mystery, as far as I’m concerned.
But today I would choose to meet them while I’m still part of this world of action, because I sense it would inform the rest of my time here in a meaningful way.
