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Back And Forth

Okuribito (Departure) by Japanese director Yojiro Takita won the 2009 Oscar for best "foreign" film. It is a remarkable movie about a young cellist who loses his job when the orchestra he plays in is disbanded for lack of an audience. He wrestles with his feelings about his talent (and, we later learn, the source of his motivation to play), and decides to sell his instrument and move back to the small town in northern Japan where he grew up. Once there, desperate to support himself and his wife, he takes a job preparing the dead for Japanese funeral rituals. At first he is repulsed and ashamed, but the job, and the re-connection with his past, help him find what is fulfilling to him, and the source and the depth of his connection with music, as well.

I am not a movie buff, but even I can see what makes this "a film" akin to some of the Bergman classics like Wild Strawberries. Because it's a story that moves on many levels; about the gulf between youth and the aged, taboos about death and dying, about lives lived quietly but well, about the meaning of place. But maybe, most of all, it is a meditation on, as an adult, having the chance to see your parents as whole people rather than from the perspective of a little child, to get a glimpse of their feeling for you, so deep, and yet so much only a part of their long and complicated life. These chances are produced, it seems, mostly at some discontinuity in their lives or ours; a death, moving, the unearthing of artifacts that reveal what of our childhood they held on to, and where it is found among the other mementos of who they were before and after us.

My sister and I were raised by the same parents, but we differ in our approach to those artifacts. She wanted only one or two things from my parents' home, while my house if filled with "stuff" - the knife my father used to cut the bagels on Sunday morning, the watch I often wear even though it needs to be wound a little too frequently. Paul Auster, in his memoir about his (Jewish) father, predicts that these things will soon wear out and be discarded, that they will lose their significance just as, after a while, when you know something well, you forget where or when you learned it. But I am not sure. I like the idea that my kids now have some kitchen hand-me-downs that were my grandmother's - worn but useful knives, cutting boards thinned from innumerable loaves and salads, pots that don't quite sit flat on the stove but have a certain heft and burnish to come home to.

Though I wasn't so intimately involved then, I remember that one of our concerns when BSS planned its new building was that so many ties to the past would be lost. Winter sun on Bolton Hill's red bricks on a Sunday morning, what we were all thinking, laughing, and worrying about that would be forgotten without the familiarity of the old place. We have the case of mementos in the new lobby, the window, Mike Green's "Greatest Hits of Chaverim" compilation, but a lot of other things are just stuffed in drawers here and there in the building, or arrive in bags from someone's basement when they, too, have to move.

How to look forward and back at the same time? We have a big anniversary coming up (volunteers needed to plan!). We will use it as a time to raise endowment, to re-dedicate to service, diversity, and community. But what will we save and what will we decide is worn out? How do we resist the urge to fix what is not broken, to remember the thousand things that so many of our members (and our office staff) do quietly and behind the scenes to make the place work, and at the same time evolve?

I am writing this looking out at some exotic hills and listening to the BBC World Service on a little radio my father gave me 30 years ago when he was the one traveling to far-off places. I hold onto these things because they connect me with the past, but also because they carry me into the future. So even if it isn't Yom Kippur I need, at this stage in my turn as president, to apologize for all that I still don't know about Bolton Street: for all the people I have yet to meet, for all the perspectives on what Bolton Street means that I don't yet understand and honor. So who is volunteering for the anniversary committee?

- Larry Wissow

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