Exile and the Prophetic: My Father’s death

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

My father, Herbert Moore Ellis, died yesterday. There is darkness in my mind.

There is also light. My father’s memory lives on.

What to do when life’s interplay does another turn in death?

This morning I thought how life joins love and trauma. The love we share. The trauma we experience.

As with most Jews, my father had little to say about the after-life. “Nothing,” he responded when I asked as Parkinson’s disease began to diminish him.

My father was a salesman most of his working life. When I was a child, his work desk was in my bedroom. Lying in bed one night, I asked if he believed in God. My father turned and replied matter-of-factly, “Of course.” It was the only discussion about God I ever had with my father.

Some weeks ago, my youngest son, Isaiah, texted me the same question. We went back and forth until he felt the discussion becoming abstract. Yes or no, did I believe in God? I switched hats from mentor to father:

Isaiah, I’ve spent my life writing about the prophetic and God. Let’s say I’m deeply involved with the question of God. And if you were to ask me, as your father, if you should believe in God, I would say yes. Let the quest and questioning begin.

As I texted Isaiah, I thought, like father, like son – when it’s stripped down.

Whatever kindness there is in me came from my father. Simplicity, too. With only a high school education, he never contributed anything to the world, New York Times-style. Yet everyone who came in touch with him admired his humor and honesty.

As a salesman, my father worked strictly on commission. Even when inflating sales would have helped our family tremendously, my father admonished his customers to be safe rather than sorry.

Like many of his generation, my father volunteered to serve in World War II. Training in the American south was an experience for Jews of his generation. Suffice it to say, there was a whole of lot of learning going on beneath the insults he experienced.

After the war, my father served several years in Germany. He hated Germans throughout his life. When I travelled to Germany to think through the process of healing and reconciliation, I invited him along. He waved me away.

There was little of the greatest generation feeling in my father. He remembered his army years in Europe as necessary and unpleasant. Like many in the armed forces, he had little interest in returning to Europe to sightsee. My father never traveled abroad again.

My father showed little ambition. He knew what he could and couldn’t do. He supported a family and gave his children the foundation to pursue what they wanted to do in life. That he could accomplish. Was there more?

My father’s Jewishness was a sensibility more than a religion. His father was a dentist and the president of the first Jewish community center, Beth Sholom, in Miami Beach. Later the center became a temple. Rabbi Leon Kronish, a prominent leader of Reform Judaism, became its spiritual leader.

Born in New York, my grandfather came to Miami Beach on the advice of his doctor who felt Florida’s climate would have a beneficial effect on his bad heart. His fatal heart attack occurred several years later while speaking at the center.

My father’s views on Israel were muted. He didn’t know enough to say. He was more interested in life where he lived. He never showed an interest in traveling to Israel. When my work became controversial for its support of Palestinian freedom, he was supportive. He didn’t need the details.

In his divorced years and the conversation topic turned to the children, he needed to know more about what I wrote and believed. I never saw my father read a book growing up so I was surprised when he delved into my Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation. Knowing more was good with the “ladies” as he put it.

When my father told me he was reading my book, I asked him if he wanted to chat about the contents. He smiled knowingly.

Because of my involvements in liberation theology, my father met and conversed with some of the great liberationists of our time. On various occasions my father spent time with Otto Maduro, the Venezuelan sociologist of religion, who recently died. I listened in as my father and this highly sophisticated, European-educated and well known Latin American radical intellectual discussed aspects of life and the world.

My father’s simplicity disguised a subtle intelligence. He was often joking around but when I went to him for fatherly advice, he was entirely present. More than anything, I will miss those moments.

My children’s mother cried when she heard of my father’s death. Every woman I’ve known who met my father loved him – except my mother. That was the in-joke we often replayed. The fact was, though, my father never stopped loving my mother.

We mark each other for life in ways we rarely understand. Neither of my parents remarried.

For many years my father owned an apartment a few blocks from where I live now. We loved going to the beach together. As we approached the ocean, my father would run and dive head first into the water. He continued this tradition with my oldest son, Aaron.

When my father died, Aaron was in the United Kingdom presenting a paper at a conference on Simone Weil. I reached him by phone at the airport in Atlanta on his way home. As we talked about my father’s life, he wept.

I have asked for ashes from my father’s cremation. We will scatter them in the ocean he loved.

After I heard the news of my father’s death, I walked the beach thinking of my father and, strangely enough, of the future. It was a beautiful evening, with a refreshing breeze, and the sky was a melody of light and dark blue rain clouds against the fading light.

My father has passed into nothingness. There is darkness in my mind.

There is also light.