"כי אבי ואמי עזבוני, וה' יאספני"—“For my father and mother have abandoned me, and G‑d will gather me in.” (Psalms 27:10)

My father's yahrtzeit is coming up again. We're having a small commemorative event, and I feel it's appropriate for me to speak. So Shabbat morning, I find myself wrapped in my tallit, trying to think of what I could say that would honor my father.

I hardly remember what he looked like

It's a challenge, since he passed away when I was too young to even know him. I hardly remember what he looked like.

"He was an activist." My mind begins to paint a nice picture. "Instead of only taking care of his family and business, he invested time and effort into matters that affected the entire Jewish nation. And he was passionate about it. He did it voluntarily, and gave it his all."

I'm not impressed. I think the same could be said about many people I know. I don't feel this means anything to me, and therefore cannot mean much to my potential audience.

I need to find something.

"He lived his life very seriously and conscientiously. He changed his lifestyle based on his personal conviction. And he was a very warm father. My brothers tell me how he would say funny things to them," my mind offers.

My heart is not giving in to this. This is not unique or outstanding, though it is admirable. These are things that other people told me about him. It's like nice stories about a stranger.

At this point, I decide I don't need to share something unique or earth-shattering, just simply him.

Who was he?

I don't know. I don't have a clue. And it doesn't even bother me. I feel indifferent towards him.

So at this point, I sense the question making its way to the forefront of my mind: “What do I have from my father? What do I experience from my father today?”

And my entire being thunders out the answer: "I experience his absence!"

That's what I have from my father.

Here I am, realizing that I have no feelings for or impressions of my father. But it's very important for me to commemorate his yahrtzeit. It's not an emotion or a philosophy, it's just a powerful truth. This is my father, it's his yahrtzeit, and I observe the customs of a yahrtzeit because he is my father.

I don't miss him. I don't know if I would have liked him. I don't know if we would have understood each other.

But he is my father.

I find this connection special. It's the connection of absence. Absence of intellectual explanation or of emotional identification. It just is.

And that "just is" is powerful enough to make me want to name my child after him, to commemorate his yahrtzeit, and to visit his grave.

I look around at others who grew up with fathers, and I imagine that they feel grounded. That they have some confidence in the paths they’ve chosen over the course of their lives. They're following a way that was paved for them by someone who they trust in a very deep way.

But II feel like a feather blowing every which way feel like a feather blowing every which way on a windy day. Up, down, right, left. I’m on my own. I need to choose my own direction. Which parts of Torah mean a lot to me, and which parts I'll just observe without identification. Which elements of my community bring comfort to me, and which are just a nuisance to bear. I feel I have no context or point of reference from which to make these deep choices.

But strangely enough, every once in a while, as I find out more bits and pieces of my father’s path in life, I realize that there is so much commonality between my path and his. I thought I was taking this path “on my own,” independent of outside influence.

It's like he peeks into my life and gives me a wink.

This is the connection of absence. I’ve travelled my lonely journey of life—only to discover that I’ve taken my father with me the entire way.

At the end of the day, all the wonderful things he did, and any interesting traits he may have possessed, are not him. These are things about him. Since he is no longer living, those traits are not reality, they are just memory. Good material for nostalgia for those whom he knew and loved.

But the simple fact that he is my father, and we are connected, is a deep, real truth that gets down to the essence of who he is and of who I am.

And the way I connect to all this is with my simple, dry performance of the rituals that honor him. Chanting Kaddish, lighting a candle, and saying Yizkor. As it says in Ethics of our Fathers, “The deed is the essence.”1

It’s like the journey of my soul, my longing for a conscious and real identification with my Creator.

“We became orphans with no father,”2 says the prophet, referring to all of us.

I’m an orphan of my G‑d. I exist because of Him, yet He hid himself3 before I came onto the scene. He left me with a set of instructions, and said, "Do it!"

I want my service to be meaningful to me, and to Him. Lip service pains me. Heartfelt service feels real and warm.

I want to teach myself how good He is, how incredible His creations are, and how indebted I am to Him. So I meditate about creation, about the angels of the spiritual spheres, and the unimaginable infinity beyond those spheres . . .

My heart remains a stone. This is not Him. It’s a figment of my mind, an awe I wish to conjure, of Someone I’ve never seen or felt.

For all I know, I could be misunderstanding all this stuff that I’m meditating about.

What do I have left at this point, in terms of inner motivation to serve Him?

Nothing!

My being screams to me, "I am a Jew, and I do the mitzvahs we were commanded, to the best of my ability. More than that, I don’t truly know."

This is the reality of my connection to G‑d and to my Judaism.

I’ve had, and have, my setbacks and struggles in life. Often, I’ve felt overtaken by the feeling that nothing and no one could help me. I’ve felt that prayer was a waste of time, or just an opportunity for self-pity and wishful thinking. The naked truth—I thought—was despair.

Today,I've had my setbacks and struggles thankfully, I’m able to see that the worst nightmares in my life were not only stepping stones for good, but what really shaped the positive aspects of who I am. And I trust that, ultimately, this will be true for those struggles that I have yet to overcome.

I’ve felt like I was on my own, a victim of unfair, random circumstances. But in the end, I heard the message—I felt the wink—of G‑d, communicating that it’s all Him. He’s saying, "All this is the path I have paved for you to reach Me, and to reach the depths of yourself."

“For my father and mother have abandoned me, and G‑d (Havayeh) will gather me in,” says the Psalmist.

In Kabbalah, “father” represents abstract, pure intellect, while “mother” represents more tangible, comprehensible ideas that awaken emotion. The divine name Havayeh (the Tetragrammaton) represents the essence of G‑d as He transcends nature, understanding and any conception.

I don’t have a “father” or “mother.” I don’t have the proper understanding of G‑d, or the capacity for true, consistent feelings for G‑d.

But I have G‑d. And I have my parents, albeit not in this physical realm. I do the things that make them happy.

It’s written in the Talmud that "the house of law is the father of the orphans."4 I interpret this to mean that as orphans—of biological parents, or of our conscious connection to our Creator—we need “law”: the commitment to action, where the essence of our connection is borne out.

And in the end, G‑d protects me from all the harm my biological and spiritual orphanhood could bring—for He “gathers me in.”