Do you stop to consider the power of words? Someone once asked me, what was the starting point for the ripple of change and transformation that I have been working on. It’s actually quite hard to select just one situation or experience, for the truth is there have been many. It’s rather like a string of beads. Just as every bead contributes to a beautiful necklace or bracelet, so too there are times that several situations can contribute to a major change in direction.
In life we all go through challenges. Experiences that will alter the direction of our lives and it’s how we respond to them that is the most important factor in whether the experience will lead you down the path of good or the opposite.
There is one sentence someone said to me before my wedding that I have never forgotten:
“You don’t deserve a wedding without a father to make it for you.”
Until that moment, I had somehow managed to tell myself that not having a father wasn’t such a big deal. But then the idea was repeated in a slightly different manner.
“You are not the community’s responsibility!”
I had hardly known my father. He had died years before, and because I had barely known him, I had learned to think, What am I really missing? I can manage through life without a father. I mean to be honest, he wasn’t really there from the age of 7 years until I last saw him alive when I was 13.
I thought I could live without knowing the answer. But all that changed when I was preparing to get married and someone said those words. Then the words were kind of repeated in a similar but different manner. It was like a bucket of ice water had been thrown over me. Suddenly I understood that there were things I had been missing all along—things I had never even allowed myself to think about.
There was one thing in particular that nobody else could give me. A father blesses his daughter when she becomes a kallah. Nobody else could stand in my father’s place. Yes my new Chatan gave me a blessing but it wasn’t the same, it couldn’t be the same as the blessing that a father gives his daughter as she prepares to unite in marriage.
My father also had a beautiful singing voice. I knew that from the little I remembered. My memory was confirmed when I tried to find if anyone had his voice recorded. People agreed that my father’s singing voice was something special. Two people had recordings, but neither would let me hear them, and then sadly the owners of the recordings died too and I never did get to have a copy or to hear that beautiful singing but my heart remembers.
So even his voice was something I could not have at my wedding. I hadn’t stopped to consider what my father signing at my Chuppah might mean to me. Until that moment, I had been able to push all of this somewhere deep inside and carry on.
But those words brought it all back. In fact it’s been a painful lesson in just how powerful words can be. Slowly I began to understand that being an orphan was not simply a fact about my life that I had learned to live with. There were things I had lost that I had never understood I had lost, until I came to prepare for my wedding and finally I understood what having a father really meant and what my own father could give to me that no-one else could. No-one else sang like my father did, there was no-one else to replace him, there never could be a replacement for my father.
And that was only the beginning of what I would eventually come to understand. I thought back to the time that I first stood at his grave side, a remembered how something inside of me had begun to stir but still I only began to understand what is was when I was getting married. And as I began seriously studying Torah and Jewish history, I started asking a much bigger question:
What does Torah actually teach us to do when someone is in this position? What does Torah say about a person who lost a father. What does Torah say about a Kallah who gets married and has no father to make her wedding? The list of questions increased and keep increasing. So many questions, including what does Torah say about the power of words.
These questions changed the direction of my life. I want to tell you about that next.
