Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

Just before Hanukkah, I called David Ingber, a rabbi who had become a colleague and a friend. It had been six months since my wandering had commenced. After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, ‘This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.”

His voice is off-key, plaintive, beseeching, and when our eyes meet across the dining table, he smiles at me and reaches over to pat my hand. A song of ascents. When the Lord will return the exiles of Zion, we will have been like dreamers. Then our mouths will be filled with laughter, and our tongues with songs of joy.

As we sat in his quiet inner sanctum, he recited the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, / And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in it.” In that instant—my fresh tattoo hidden beneath my summer cardigan—I understood what the rabbi was offering. My newfound awareness was both gauntlet and gift. The choice wasn’t to see it as one or the other. It was to embrace it as both.