Moonset

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really…How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? 

– Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

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My father died 3 weeks before my twin sons were born. I’m still unpacking that. Life on the heels of death. Mourning followed by celebration. I’m struck by a few things in retrospect as I reflect on these life moments that occurred in such a concentrated dose for me. 

I’m not a religious person. I was born into the Jewish faith and follow some of the larger traditions prescribed. There are a few key ones we follow when it comes to both death and life. 

For death, it’s bury your dead fast, begin the mourning process right away, include your community in the process…and then get on with living.  For life, if it’s a boy – and I had two of them – it’s invite your close community to watch a stranger cut off their foreskins. Rituals for death and life are fairly immediate and focus your time and attention on a process and encourage you to include your community. And these rituals, which guide us on how to deal with transition, demand immediate time and attention, particularly as we adjust to dealing with what was to what is no longer and from what didn’t exist to what holds the future. 

As I think back to the events around my father’s death, I had no real time for sorrow. Someone needed to put his piano tunes into playlists, organize the zoom, pay the funeral home, order the bagels, and the list goes on. At my boys’ britot, someone had to find the mohel (the person who removes the foreskin), organize space for two ritual circumcisions, set up the zoom, and of course buy the bagels. As it relates to my father’s passing, I felt that the real grieving for me began when all of the activity was in the rear view, allowing the weight of what we’d lost to settle. I felt elements of that with the birth of my boys through their first months of life – it was all a happy blur, and the real joy builds as the magnitude of what you’ve gained sets in. 

Rituals frame life and represent our way of creating order amidst the void. They provide structure against a backdrop of what could otherwise resemble weightlessness in outer-space. I had an immediate roadmap of things to do when confronted with both finality and a new beginning. That turned out to be so important – having traditions that would simply let me start a process that would unfold over time. 

The Torah portion read when my boys were born was Va’etchanan, which means “I pleaded” and is from the book of Deuteronomy. These passages recount the story of God telling Moses he will only see the land of Israel from afar but never enter it due to an indiscretion. Moses pleads with God, but the answer remains the same. The passages also introduce the most central prayer in all of Judaism – the Shema. We print this on scrolls and place it inside a safe container on our doors.  “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD is One. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might…”

I wonder if my father pleaded with God to let him see the promised land of my boys, or if there was something I in-turn should have done in the wilderness of my life that would have unlocked this possibility or that unknowingly prevented it. This passage is also a concentrated dose of death and life. God basically says to Moses – You will never enter the promised land, but only see it. But I give you this prayer which will become the cornerstone of all your people’s beliefs, helping you navigate the weightlessness of time. I give you spiritual gravity so you can orbit your life and this world until it’s time to go. 

We often can’t choose what happens to us or when life presents both joy and sorrow. But we can choose how to deal with it through the art of performing rituals. And to live a full life, I believe that it is as important to learn how to channel joy as it is to manage sadness. We can do both through following a playbook – whether it’s our own or one we believe came from above.  

My father gave me an appreciation for ritual. At my circumcision and bar mitzvah, he set aside bottles of whiskey that he opened to toast me. I found those bottles of whiskey in a box in a storage locker where he set them aside. At my boys’ circumcision, we toasted their lives with these same spirits. This was a simple act but connected me to a past tradition. I in-turn bought my own bottles of spirits that we’ll use to toast Augie and Elie in the future. And so it goes. Death and Life. 

Moonset. 6:49 AM. September 8th, 2025