Teach Me How to Say Goodbye
Some thoughts on big changes and reading Devarim
It’s been a big week here. On Monday, we moved to a new apartment. Today, our daughter E went to her last day of school at the place she’s been for the last 15 months. Both changes are necessary—we need more space now that we welcomed our second child, baby R, less than two months ago (surprise!) and we were lucky to find a beautiful new home. E has grown tremendously at school, where they have loved and supported her and helped her thrive, and now she’s ready to move onto a new school with new skills, joy, and confidence. We are infinitely blessed, and yet, I’ve been in tears all week. It’s hard to say goodbye. To say goodbye to the first home my husband and I made together, to the place where we survived a pandemic and too many losses, and where we celebrated milestones and brought our babies home. To say goodbye to the school where E went from a risk averse toddler who couldn’t talk and was afraid of new things to a curious chattering little kid who loves to say hi to new people and climb at the playground. These places helped us grow, and so we outgrew them. Change is as hard as it is inevitable.
It seemed appropriate that these changes happened the week we begin reading Sefer Devarim, which is ultimately Moshe’s long goodbye. I imagine that, if I had been a member of B’nai Yisrael, his speech would have felt interminable and also too short. On one hand, the people are waiting for him to finish so they can finally leave the wilderness and cross over into Canaan, fulfilling the promise God had made their ancestors hundreds of years prior. On the other hand, they are about to leave everything they have ever known—the Midbar, with Moshe as their leader, and God providing for all of their needs. They long to stay in the moment and simultaneously move to the next place.
Perhaps the bridge comes through memory. I found myself taking a lot of pictures this week of places—our old apartment before it emptied out, the empty living room, the kitchen and baby’s room and living room in progress in our new apartment. I made E take a “last day of school” picture holding a sign I hastily made with her crayons 15 minutes before the bus came this morning, and I sent it with the picture from her first day of school to her teachers, along with a thank you note. (She mostly wanted to know when she could have her daily muffin.) I photograph Baby R multiple times a day, trying to capture a small piece of him before he quickly changes again. I think part of me is hoping that in these images, I will be able to hold on what is behind us while still moving forward.
And indeed, Devarim is all about memory. Much of it is a retelling of what has happened before (sometimes accurately, sometimes less so), but it’s retelling with the goal of informing the future. The idea is that B’nai Yisrael are most likely to succeed where they’re going if they understand where they have been. As the rest of Tanakh tells us, sometimes these lessons are learned and sometimes they’re forgotten. But they’re recorded, and every year we come back to them, and we remember, and hopefully even now, millenia later, we learn.
In the second chapter of Devarim, which we will read tomorrow, Moshe tells the people, “Indeed, your God Hashem has blessed you in all your undertakings. [God] has watched over your wanderings through this great wilderness; your God Hashem has been with you these past forty years: you have lacked nothing.” God’s gifts to the people are abundant, but the blessings are not only for their own sake—they are meant to serve as a bridge to the people learning to bless themselves, and each other.
I know that, inevitably, the feeling of this moment will fade for us. Baby R won’t remember anything about his first home, and E probably won’t remember much either. She’ll keep talking about her teachers and friends from school for a while, but they’ll probably be mentioned less and less as time goes on. Even my husband and I will forget things that right now feel so clear, with the sharp edges fading over time. But I hope all of us—the adults, the toddler, even the baby—maintain a sense of the feeling of this moment. Of the gratitude of what came before, of the possibility of what is coming, and most of all, of the love and care that has surrounded us. I hope it infuses us, as individuals and as a little family, as we traverse whatever comes next.