Who Sits with Us at the Table Even When Their Chair Is Empty?
Who Sits with Us at the Table Even When Their Chair Is Empty?
Who Sits with Us at the Table Even When Their Chair Is Empty?
Sometimes a person opens his mouth and suddenly hears his father speaking through him. The same sentence Father used to say, the same reaction to money, the same anger about lateness, even the same joke. Sometimes a woman prepares a Festival dish exactly as Grandmother did, even though for decades there has been no way to ask her what the recipe was. There are other inheritances too. A fifty-year-old person is still afraid to fail because a fifth-grade teacher said he was “good for nothing.” Another person cannot cry because in the home where he grew up they said that men do not cry. Some people are no longer in the room, yet they still sit inside us.
On Sukkot this idea received a special expression in the custom of the Ushpizin. The Zohar describes that when a person enters the sukkah, the person invites the “supernal guests,” the Ushpizin, and mentions Abraham and the other righteous figures who come with him (Zohar, Emor, 103b). The tradition developed of inviting on each night of the festival Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David, with differing orders according to various Jewish traditions. We sit in the sukkah in the present year of our lives, yet at the same table we make room for figures who lived thousands of years ago.
This does not mean, of course, that Abraham physically sits on a chair in a literal sense. The custom of the Ushpizin belongs to the spiritual and kabbalistic world. Yet it places before us a fascinating human truth: a person does not begin on the day of birth. Within personality live stories, customs, words, beliefs, and behavioral patterns that passed down from earlier generations.
The Torah repeatedly commands us to build identity through intergenerational memory. “Ask your father and he will tell you; your elders and they will say to you” (Deuteronomy 32:7). It is not enough to know what is happening now. Some things cannot be understood without asking where we came from. Regarding the Exodus from Egypt, the Torah says: “You shall tell your son on that day, saying: It is because of this that the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt” (Exodus 13:8). The story does not remain in the history book. A generation that was never in Egypt learns to say “the Lord did for me,” because the past of its ancestors becomes part of its identity.
Proverbs says: “Hear, my son, the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the teaching of your mother” (Proverbs 1:8). The sages ask a person not only to honor those who came before but to carry forward the Torah and tradition received from them. Pirkei Avot opens an entire tractate with a chain: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders...” (Pirkei Avot 1:1). The Torah a person holds today did not begin with that person. Someone transmitted it to someone, who transmitted it to someone, until it arrived here.
Intergenerational inheritance, however, does not pass only through books. A child learns at home what people do when angry, how one speaks to a spouse, whether money is a source of security or anxiety, how one responds to mistakes, whether one says “I am sorry,” and what Shabbat looks like. Very often no one explicitly taught the child these things. The child simply watched them thousands of times. Then, when building a home of one's own, a person discovers that part of the home in which one grew up moved along to the new address.
Psychology studies processes of intergenerational transmission, the passing of patterns, attitudes, and behaviors from one generation to another. Research in family and developmental psychology suggests that attachment styles, parenting patterns, coping methods, and even beliefs about relationships can pass between generations through learning, imitation, and the family environment. This does not mean a person is condemned to reproduce the parents. On the contrary, once a person identifies what was received, that person can also choose what to transmit onward and what should stop here.
The psychology of bereavement also uses a concept known as continuing bonds. Contemporary grief research challenged the older assumption that healthy adjustment to loss necessarily requires “severing” the relationship with the person who died. For many people, the relationship changes form. A person continues to ask what Father would have said, prepare Mother's dish, live according to a value learned from a teacher, or tell grandchildren about a grandfather they never met. The person is not living in the past, but the past remains part of the system of meaning.
The sages give this phenomenon a moving expression when they say: “Jacob our father did not die” (Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 5b). The Gemara itself asks how such a statement can be made when the Torah says he was embalmed, mourned, and buried, and it answers through the connection between Jacob and his descendants. Without entering into the full depth of the passage, the sages establish a link between a person's continued presence and what continues to live within the descendants. There is a kind of existence not measured only by a pulse. A person can remain present in the world through what was planted in those who came afterward.
But here the more complicated question arrives. Not every guest from the past deserves a place of honor within us. A person may inherit remarkable honesty from a father and destructive anger as well. From a mother one may receive kindness and also a constant fear of what people will say. From an entire family one may receive a magnificent tradition and, in the same breath, a pattern in which no one talks about pain. Gratitude toward earlier generations does not obligate us to pass to our children everything we received from them.
The prophet Ezekiel confronts the belief that a child is absolutely bound to what a parent did and declares: “The soul that sins, it shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, and the father shall not bear the guilt of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). A person has a past, but also personal responsibility. One inherits a story but does not have to become its copy. It is possible to honor Father and still decide that in my home people will not shout as they shouted in the home where I grew up. It is possible to love Mother and still decide not to pass to my children the anxiety she passed to me. Repairing a family pattern is not necessarily a rejection of the family. Sometimes it is the way we take the good we received one step further.
This can become a special form of work for Sukkot. When we invite the Ushpizin, we can think about our private guests as well. Who are the people who are no longer here and still sit at the table? Which sentence from Grandfather still governs one of my decisions? Which trait of Mother do I want my children to inherit? What did I learn from a rabbi, teacher, or friend who is no longer in my life? And at the same time, which pattern has traveled through our family for three generations and deserves for its journey to end with me?
There is great responsibility here. In twenty or thirty years, perhaps we too will be the invisible “guests” at someone else's table. A child will say a sentence and discover it came from us. A granddaughter will perform an act of kindness because that is what she saw at home. Someone will respond to crisis in the way learned from us without our ever knowing we taught it. We are writing memories into other people now, long before they know these will become their memories.
Perhaps this is why the Ushpizin fit the sukkah so well. The temporary home fills with people who remind us that a human being is a link, neither beginning nor end. We received something from those before us, and we are passing something to those after us. The question is not whether we will transmit. We transmit every day. The question is what.
When we invite the Ushpizin this year, it is worth leaving room beside them for one more question: which guests from the past do I want my children to continue carrying within them, and which guests should part from me and not pass into the next generation? Perhaps one of the deepest ways to honor our ancestors is not only to remember them, but to examine carefully which part of their inheritance we choose to continue writing into life.