Hot Dog Peels

Love is the currency of faith.

Thursday night was my grandfather’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of his death. My grandfather died before I was born, when my mother was still young enough to need him. He was born in 1889 in White Russia and he came to America before the first World War. He died in the early 1960’s. I was born in the late 1970’s. We had a meal to commemorate the anniversary because it is meaningful to my mother. Kaddish is the prayer that we say after the death of a loved one. My uncle, who is, thank G-d, over 90, said the kaddish for my grandfather at our house before the meal. It made me think about tradition and what we hold onto and what we pass on to the next generation.

We had food for the meal, but we had a siyum-the celebration of completion of a part of the Torah, and my uncle’s kaddish, first.

It was too long for some of the members of the family to wait.

So, in the respectful silence, there was a lot of motioning of tiny children asking their mothers for hot dogs. The small children had gotten their own hot dogs surreptitiously, but the toddlers who needed help had to ask their mothers.

As the moms silently apologize (to the master griller, wink), our five-year-old is cutting up the hot dog he got himself into three inch rounds, and then peeling each round, leaving an unattractive mound of hot dog peelings on the still clean, as yet unserved on, table. (Also there, was our great nephew, my grandfather’s great-great-grandson, also five.)

And the most precious moment was our eight-year-old nephew, watching our son grossify a table set up for more than two dozen people, while the speech is still going, smiling knowingly, as if to say, “Kids, what are you going to do?”

And it was unbearably cute but also heartwarming because he is only eight, which if math isn’t your thing (It isn’t mine, but I do grill.) means that he was five, the age of our living Norman Rockwell painting, only three years ago. But he already gets it. This is not how we behave. This is childish behavior we indulge until the child knows better.

And it made me realize, in that moment, that the currency of faith is love.

We absorb faith through love, we profess faith through love, we pass down faith through love.

We learn how to love G-d because we ourselves were loved. Our nephew knew, sure as he was standing there, that when he used to not understand not to speak when we are supposed to be silent, not to eat before the food is served, he was loved, and that our son making an unappetizing mess was loved, and that he is loved now that he gets it and he is one of the big kids who understands decorum and waiting until food is served.

And a wave of warmth and recognition and love and tradition passed down through two turns of the century hit me.

This is how we teach the next generation.