The Intangibles

Every once in a while, I hit a stretch of very busy time when I can’t spend as much time with my family as I’d like. A few years ago, when Nadav was 4, I had left home one day before sunrise and returned right before bedtime. I hadn’t seen Nadav all day and I had arrived home just in time to read him his bedtime story. But Nadav insisted that Shira read it to him instead. He was punishing me for not being around enough. He wanted me to know that he had noticed and that it could go both ways. (Maybe I’m reading a lot into a four year old’s stubbornness, but he’s a smart kid, so I’m not so sure.)

Chastened, I began to think about an appropriate response to being snubbed by my eldest son. I made a number of legitimate excuses: 1) These were a few busy weeks, but they will pass and then things will be back to normal. Okay, perhaps. As long as it’s true. 2) He’ll forgive me. He’s four and he’s just a little upset with me, but tomorrow morning, he won’t remember anymore. Probably so. 3) I haven’t really been away all the time. We spent a whole Sunday afternoon together. I took him for ice cream one day, just Abba and son. I’m usually home for dinner and bed-time. This is not what one would call absentee fatherhood. Fair enough.

But I also advanced the following excuse, which I have come to see as folly: 4) True, I haven’t been around much, but I give him the important things. If I can’t always spend time with him every day, at least he has a roof over his head, food to eat, clothes to wear. I shouldn’t feel bad because I can’t spend as much time with him as I’d like.

I don’t know if a child ever grew to respect and love his parents because they provided for their basic needs. Maybe it’s the ultimate inequity of parenthood, but kids expect their parents to take care of them. There will be no rewards for cooking dinner, even if there ought to be.

It’s all the other stuff — the intangibles — that seem to make the difference in our relationships with our kids: emotional support and understanding, discipline, moral compass, role-modeling. These intangibles seem to be the invisible equation that determines whether our kids want to rebel against us or be more like us.

And so – I was thinking – you’d better give them a few servings of intangibles every day or they’ll be emotionally malnourished. I wouldn’t let Nadav go a day without protein, how could I let him go a day without a few precious drops of attention from me? Sure, he’ll survive without it, but he won’t be healthy without it.

And this is what I’ve been thinking about as we cruise into this final stretch (the forties!) of the annual Omer count. The 49-day Omer count marks the passage of time from the Exodus (Passover – physical freedom) to the Revelation (Shavuot – spiritual freedom).

The law is that to count the Omer with a blessing, you need to be “in” the count, that is, not to have missed one full day of the count. Once you’re “out” – let’s say you missed Day 34, you can’t count with a blessing anymore. (Full disclosure, I missed a day this year for the first time in a few years. It’s a sad and pathetic story having some thing to do with thinking I had already counted, but remembering the day before and then it was too late, but let’s just say it can happen.)

It’s not like you can’t count at all – every Jew should mark the passage of time of every day and certainly the days leading up to Sinai. But if you miss the day, something goes out of the count, something that can’t be replaced. Every day is precious and it affects the vector of the next day as well.

Every omer count – like every phase of a child’s life – comes to an end and then we start a new count (next month when we hit the 3 weeks, next Elul, next year’s Omer) so all is not lost when you miss a day. You can get back on the wagon and start over. But some thing precious has still been lost.

King David says in Psalm 90, verse 12: “limnot yameinu kein hoda”, which the medieval commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra explains means that if God will give us much wisdom, we will with great effort come to be able to fill each day with enough wisdom to come to understand the ways of God. So it shall be, with God’s blessing, that we should waste no day, that we should find no day without its quality time, that we should never find ourselves in a day where we have barred ourselves from our proper blessings.

May the graduates of 2009 go from strength to strength and draw the inspiration they need to make every day count. Shabbat shalom!

Mazel Tov
to all the graduates of BU class
of 2009
and their families!