This year marks the fifth anniversary of my father Jack’s death. His fifth yahrzeit. Around the time of his first, we held an event in his honor at Drisha in NYC. These are some words I wrote to introduce that event, which was on the theme of “Judaism in America.” Unbelievable that five years have past. For context, this speech was delivered in fall 2017. President Trump was newly elected. My Daddy, forever the gallows humorist, told me he was happy he would never see the man elected. Jack Flamholz died on erev erev Rosh Hashana of 2016, which was the evening of Sept. 30th that year. I miss him.

Preparing for this event, I was unsure how to introduce my thoughts or the topic or the event itself for that matter. I found myself writing long and overly wordy Word documents when I remembered that its been about 10 years since we buried my grandmother, my father’s mother, Bubby Gertie. 10 years and 43 days I think.

At the time of her death in 2007 Bubby Gertie was 94 and the matron of an enormous extended New York Area family. She had, of course, her 3 Flamholz boys: Alex, Joel and my father Jack. She also 10 grandchildren – myself, my sister Eta and my brother Bezalel are the youngest and then there’s cousin Rachel, Big David, Little David, Dvora, Rena, Nomi and Suries – and, I think, 17 great-grandchildren at the time of her death. Innumerable nieces, nephews and cousins who would visit her little apartment in Monsey.

Bubby Gertie was our family’s first Americaner. She was born Gertrude Schindler 105 years ago - the youngest of four siblings and the only one born in America - into Lower East Side Tenement with no running water and no electricity. She shared a room there with her parents Yitta and Aaron and her siblings Nat, Berta and aunt Molly. The family later moved through a cascade of New York’s historically Jewish neighborhoods.

Visiting Bubby in Mount Hebron Cemetery is itself a reminder of our history in this city and in this country. Mount Hebron Cemetery is sandwiched between Queens College and Queens Corona park, directly adjacent to Main St. in Kew Garden Hills. Down the block there are a couple of shuls and kosher restaurants and Amalya grocery – one of my father’s favorite purveyors of olives and cheeses. When we visit Bubby we enter the cemetery from the back, from Main St. They leave the gate open during visiting hours. Bubby is a little south and a little west of the entrance. Take a left when you enter then turn right after the stand of Horowitzes. You’ll know the plot when you see to the stone bench near the elm tree. Really the whole family is in that plot. Take a right and you’ll find her next to Zeidy Dovid, Aunt Molly and Uncle Jack and the great grandFlamholzes – Sender and Rachel.

Dad used to talk up Amalya grocery all the time. “When I’m in Queens I really love to go to Amalya grocery.” “They have even better olives than Fairways.” He loved those wrinkly black olives and the mild French feta. It never occurred to me to ask what he was doing in Queens, but on the occasional Sunday he would show up with olives and cheese. It seems so obvious in retrospect – he was visiting the family. This is something I think on when I visit Bubby, especially now that I am far away in California, especially now that it is hard to visit.

I have a beautiful picture of the young brothers Flamholz in my room in Oakland – my father is a blurry toddler in the foreground. Alex and Joel are in sharp focus looking punkish and clean-cut in their little Yankee caps. A nickel bought you a lot of candy back then, you know, and the neighborhood boys played stickball on the block. Boys would take turns watching for cars and you really had to be a Yankees fan once the Dodgers left in ‘57.

Rachel says I look like Joel. I have a hard time imagining those boys walking a half-mile on the mean streets of south Brooklyn to take a city bus three miles to Crown Heights Yeshiva. It was a different time, I guess.

I also have a hard time imagining how Bubby Gertie managed – financially, emotionally – when Zeidy Dovid died in 1963 of hospital-acquired pneumonia. My father said “hypertension got him into the hospital and pneumonia killed him.” Dad was only 12 at the time and Bubby Gertie found herself with 3 boys, two on the precipice of adulthood and one – my father – only on the precipice of a bar-mitzva. I remember how annoyed I was to be forced to sit and learn to lein Parshat Korach from my father. How didactic he was about the etnachtas and zarqas. I imagine now how proud he was to have the opportunity, how frightened he had been that he might drop dead before he could. Thank God & Science for statins – really.

I spent some time speaking to my Uncle Joel on Thursday and the answer to my question, it turns out, the question of how Bubby Gertie sustained herself – is quite literally the City of New York. Not just in the way that a city dense with family and personal history can sustain you. But also in the literal paycheck sort of way. Aunt Molly had been working for the City and got Bubby a job there as a bookkeeper. Down by City Hall or up by City Hall, depending on your perspective. Imagine that: a single mother sustaining and feeding her son (my father) in Brooklyn on a city salary and giving him an extremely fine Jewish and scientific education.

That salary paid for my father’s remaining time in Crown Heights Yeshiva and his tuition for Brooklyn Torah Academy, where he edited the yearbook and managed the basketball team. That city salary also paid for Dad’s food and housing when he – the inveterate mommas boy – lived at home through his college degree in physics at Brooklyn Polytechnic right near my old apartment in Fort Greene. That city job also furnished Bubby with a pension that sustained her into her old age, that made it simpler for us all to visit and love and care for her.

I’m going to collapse the extended metaphor and expose my agenda for a second here. Both sides of my family came to this country on purpose and then this country and this city literally and figuratively sustained us as humans, as Jews and as American Citizens for three generations. I suspect that we all descend from people who came to America – the Goldene Medina – on purpose for its incredible qualities. For the relative freedom from oppression, for the booming economy, for its constitutional commitment to freedom of religion, for the possibility of building a family and community in a world that was decent and free. In 1921, when my grandfather Zeidy Dovid arrived in NYC from Lodz on the heels of the First World War, these qualities were apparent to all and nearly unprecedented in world history. In 1951, when my Bubby Rochel and Zeidy Josel arrived fresh from the Bergen Belsen DP camp, Europe was in complete ruins.

Admittedly, some of these features of early and midcentury America were contingent – we were far from the European wars and we had phenomenal natural resources to exploit. Other features of American freedom and prosperity were and are deeply unequally accorded – we might look to the civil rights movements and the demographics of contemporary American prisons to see this, but really it should be obvious to us from exploring our own cities and towns. But the fact remains that we live in a country where we are basically free to be Jews or nearly anything else. Even now. And these commitments to freedom and stability are evident in and, I would wager, generated by early American philosophical writings like the Federalist Papers that we can read, writings that my father did read.

In fact this event was generated by my father’s reading of the Federalist papers. In the final year of his life, Dad attempted a chevruta with our friend Moshe Silver exploring resonances between the drashot ha’Ran and the federalist papers. The Ran lived in 14th century Girona in Christian Catalonia and, in some of his drashot, appears to be confronting a question that is particularly salient today - how should Jews relate to tolerant, functional non-Jewish societies that they find themselves living in. The Federalist papers, in contrast, debate the question of how to build a tolerant and functional society.

And so America presents us with a challenge – how to be Jewish in a country where one doesn’t have to be and how to be American when we have so many other substantive commitments, when the act of being American is so deeply contested. And the challenge is all the more, well, challenging in our particular times – where there’s a country for Jews and this one seems so fragile and fractious.

I want to suggest two ways we might approach this challenge – as American Jews and, specifically today, in homage to my father. Two benedictions for a day of learning.

For the last 6 months or so I’ve been following in Dad’s footsteps with my friend Raffi – shameless plug he’ll be speaking later this morning – in learning the Drashot haRan. Really we’ve been ranting about various side topics over coffee at the Shul in Berkeley. Occasionally we stumble upon a footnote that my father left in his copy. The note is terse and to the point in Dad’s impeccable cursive, making clear that he read the intervening 30 pages, understood them, and has this single on-point comment in summary. I’ve subsequently littered the pages of the Ran with much less interesting notes.

In light of this experience of my Dad’s marginalia I want to suggest that we imagine ourselves today like Billy Collin’s Irish monks

in their cold scriptoria
jotting along the borders of the Gospels

anonymous men and women “catching a ride on a vessel more lasting than ourselves.” In my case that vessel is often Jewish and often American and very often brought to me through conversations with my father, his clear concise cursive reminding me that I am not the first to walk this path and there are many fruitful conversations to be had, many things to be accomplished if only we take the time to understand the intervening 30 pages. As my sister Eta says, nothing would have pleased Dad more than to see us all reading together.

In homage to my mother I must also say: it’s not just about the reading, you know. As for a bracha, words and action are intertwined. In this vein, I want to suggest that we imagine ourselves as my father described himself to me – a high-school boy, the manager of the BTA basketball team, sitting in rapt attention on the highest steps of the fire escape at Brooklyn Torah Academy, watching the mostly black boys at the neighboring Erasmus Hall High School practice their most elegant game: basketball. They were so good, he said, so coordinated and so practiced. Dad wished he could play like them. Maybe for today we can inhabit the minds of young boys and girls dreaming of sports – find ourselves appreciating the finer details of Erasmus’ passing game and pantomiming that hook-shot in our heads. Loving the elegant game and imagining that someday we too might play it.