follow.
My grandmother didn’t pass away from me, she passed into me. She saw things in people that they didn’t recognize in themselves. When I was born, she looked at the palms of my tiny hands and realized that I was the one of all her grandchildren to whom she would pass on what she had learned. She told my father to bring me to her every Friday so she could teach me to birth possibility in people. He must have rolled his sky-blue eyes and shaken his head, as all of her children did at her “old country superstitions,” but her will was stronger than his. For the first fourteen years of my life, he drove me to Hell’s Kitchen every Friday morning to be with her.
As far as I know, there is not one other living person on this planet now who has felt her warm dry lips place kisses at the end of each fingertip. There is no one who remembers her faded yellow apron with tiny red roses or who tasted the end slice of the golden bread she baked every Friday. There’s also no one else alive who sat next to her on the rusty fire escape outside her living room, listening to the whispery wisdom that emerged from her lips. It has nourished me in the leanest of moments. It has been sliced and served to friends, family, students, and every person with whom I have worked. They have licked the butter off their chin and said, “I wish I had a grandmother like yours.” I kept promising them that someday I would write a book about her. Now I, too, am an old lady. If I don’t serve her wisdom to you on these clean white pages, it will be lost forever. I once asked her why she kept teaching me each week. She replied simply, “So I can share my zava’ah with you,” as if that should explain everything. Since no one in my family spoke much Hebrew, the word stored itself in the dark recesses of my unconscious mind until a few weeks ago, when it emerged in a dream where she was giving me a purple T-shirt. Emblazoned across the front in gold letters was the word “Zava’ah.” The next morning, I leapt out of bed and looked up its meaning: “An ethical will describing the moral and spiritual understandings accumulated within a life. It is meant to be passed on to one’s descendants in order to impart wisdom and inspiration from one generation to the next.” I was elated as I realized that the book you are now reading is both her zava’ah and my own, a distillation of wisdom gathered as each of us searched to live lives we could love by fulfilling our Promise and making a difference in challenging times.
Because this book is essentially both Grandma’s and my own zava’ah, we’ve shaped the stories the way she shaped her challah, a Sabbath bread. Each of its nine braids was yeasted by a question I asked her so I could discover how I matter. The first strand of each braid is a story formed from one of her teaching tales. It is written in the present tense so she can come alive for you. The second strand incorporates a personal challenge with which I struggled while trying to weave her wisdom into my life. The third story folds that wisdom into the current context through a narrative about someone I worked with as a thinking partner who was searching for how he or she could live a life they could love. After the loaf is braided, there are some evocative questions so that you can share them with those in your world.
This loaf of a book is created the way Grandma made her challah: yeasting, rising, kneading, braiding, baking, and sharing, because bread, gluten-free or otherwise, is the staff of life, basic to human nourishment. During World War II, there was a group of abandoned children in London who were gathered off the streets and taken to an orphanage. Most of them had been without love, caring, and nourishment for months. In the shelter, they were clothed, fed, and held. But there was a problem—they could not fall asleep. No matter what the caregivers told them, they didn’t believe there would be food to eat in the morning. No matter what they did, the children insisted on staying awake. One night, a nurse had an idea. After tucking the kids into bed, she placed a slice of bread into each child’s hand. Without fail, every one of them fell deeply asleep. Knowing they would awaken with nourishment to fill their bellies, the children could rest.
The discovery of how you live a life you love can be found hidden in the stories you tell about that life. Grandma and I are reaching out to you with wide-open questions and with slices of our own stories in the hope that they will yeast the Promise inside you. The inspiration we offer in the pages that follow is not in the questions or stories themselves, but rather in your encounter with them.
My coauthor says that if you never knew your grandparents or didn’t like them, it’s not a problem. She invites you to adopt her as your own. We are, after all, in this together. Each of us can be involved in the dance of spiraling generations in which the elders empower the young with their wisdom and the young empower the old with the energy of new possibility. Whether you are an “old soul” in a millennial body or an elder yourself, I pass the blessing of wisdom from her hands through mine into yours.
“
“The spiritual journey is an endless process of engaging life as it is, stripping away our illusions about ourselves, our world, and the relationship of the two, moving closer to reality as we do”.
—Parker Palmer
What Was the Promise Life Made to the World the Moment You Were Born?
Grandma raises my open palm to her lips. I look at the little lines carved into the skin around them, wondering if they are there because she has spent so many moments of her life kissing things. She looks into my brown-green eyes with her brown-green eyes and whispers in a secret voice, “Did you know that there is a river of blood that runs right beneath your skin?”
My jaw drops open like a baby bird waiting for something delicious to fall in. I shake my head.
“Not only that,” she continues, “but there are special gifts and prayers for you from all those who came before that are being carried in that river.”
I know what prayers are because she told me she prayed for people whenever she made bread, but gifts floating in a bloody river? What does she mean?
“All of your grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents before them dreamt that someday there would be one such as you: one who was free, well-fed, and smart because she could go to school and learn many wonderful things. They left their wisdom floating downstream in that river, the things Life had taught them. All of that is in your blood.”
My mind unfolds its wings and lifts off my bones as I imagine those old people wrapping prayers and presents in bright boxes that float now in the red bloody river under my skin.
She places tiny flower petal kisses on the tips of my fingers, and then whispers, “And here there is something else even more special. No one else who has ever lived has marks like these, and no one else ever will. They prove you are unique, one-of-a kind, a miracle!” She pauses long enough for me to absorb what she’s saying and then continues in a powdery voice, “Some people call them fingerprints, but truly they are promise prints. The moment you were born, Life made a Promise to the world. It left these marks at the very end of your fingers to help you remember to reach out and find what that promise is and make it real.”
The next question falls out of my mouth all by itself. “So what is my Promise, Grandma? Tell me, tell me.”
This time she kisses the tip of her own index finger, and then places it on the center of my forehead. “I can’t tell you that, my darling. No one can. It’s a great and wonderful mystery that you have to discover for yourself.”
“But how will I do that, Grandma, and how will I know if I find the real Promise? And does everybody have a Promise, and—”
Her finger floats to my lips
