Just over a week ago, I stood at Logan Airport and waved goodbye to my daughter as she gleefully set off for college. Together we had packed her two suitcases and large duffel, shared a sentimental last dinner as a family of four, and taken her to visit her piano teacher and a few of her adult mentors to say good bye. The night before, I reread the Brit Habat, baby-naming ceremony, that Brian and I had written eighteen years ago, filled with our hopes and dreams. Before she left, I also tucked a card into the zipper pocket of the suitcase for her to find when she unpacked, to remind her that I love her and respect her and will always be here for her.

I cannot express my sense of gratitude in watching our daughter become a person who has more than fulfilled the hopes and dreams we expressed when she was an infant, and my joy in sending her off on this new adventure. Better that I don’t go into that, because I would quickly become dull and tedious, and lose all credibility as a parent who boasts excessively about my own children. Besides, many of you have already heard it.

I cannot explain the sense of fear and awe in the pit of my stomach as I imagine her navigating the streets of Chicago, the challenges of a heavy academic load, and the big unknown that looms for our children as they leave the nest.

But I cannot dwell too much on that either, since these are old worries that began the minute my child was born and my heart learned to live outside my body. Besides, I have learned to trust her judgment, most of the time. To put it all in perspective, I was reminded recently of other families who will never know the exhilaration of sending a child away to college, whose daughter or son will always be physically dependent on their support and emotionally limited in achieving her independence. And I cherish my own worries all the more.

There is one more emotion that needs no further elaboration: the sense of loss, and that is what I’d like to talk about today. As much as I love my daughter, I miss having her around. I miss knowing the details of her day and retelling the particulars of my own. I miss seeing her face and giving her hugs. In her absence, our family is undergoing a sea-change. Yet I know that she is not gone forever, a blessing that I give thanks for every day as I think of parents I know near and far who have lost a child.

With that perspective, I become grateful once again—for the pride in her accomplishments, for the fear and awe in the pit of my stomach, and for the sweet memories I keep rehearsing tearfully, with the soundtrack of 18 years of parenthood. I am grateful that I took the time to prepare for this day, treasuring the high school years as if each day would be a goodbye. And I am grateful because I know that all of this means that she has done her job: she has grown up.

And we have done our job. We have let her go.

You don’t need to be the parent of a teenager to know the pride and pain of letting go. As I prepared for this inevitable parting, I remembered so many other letting-gos:
When she took her first plane ride as an “unaccompanied minor” at age 9, cheerfully flying alone to visit her grandparents.
When she walked up the steps to the high school for the first time, shy and nervous and got lost in the immense labyrinth.
When I took her to her first day of day care, when she was 3 months old and I left her for a few hours to go perform a wedding.
When she came to this bimah as a bat mitzvah, and Brian and I assured ourselves that she was well grounded, and we were well-grounded, as we prepared for the bumpy ride of adolescence. And we kvelled. And we cried.

You don’t need to be a parent at all to remember the pain of separation, because each one of us has known separations, as each one of us was once a child who had to leave a parent.

Those partings may have been bitter and reluctant, as some of us left the security and love of home behind for something unknown. For others, the parting may have been sweet escapes to freedom. As children, we may have believed the fantasy that we put the past irrefutably behind us. We thought, or we hoped, that we had let go for good.

A woman I know who is now a grandmother herself, confided in me when her own mother passed away in the spring. She was in anguish over her mother’s death, not because she missed her so terribly, but because it brought up all of the painful memories of abuse in her childhood. “I thought I had already been through this in therapy,” she told me, “but now I’m going through it all over again.” Whether we grieve over our children as they grow and change from birth to maturity, or whether we grieve over our parents who were absent or overprotective or abusive or loving, there is one truth we all share:

Life is a series of letting-gos.

The most memorable sermon I have ever read was called, “To Hold with Open Arms,” written by Rabbi Milton Steinberg in 1946. Steinberg was a follower of Mordecai Kaplan, and best known for two of his books, Basic Judaism, still one of the best guides for individuals seeking an introduction to Jewish ideas and Jewish life, and As A Driven Leaf, the novel read by most Me’ah graduates that describes Steinberg’s own search to reconcile faith and reason. Steinberg was a man ahead of his time. Alas he died too young, at age 46, to touch more of us with the greatness of his mind and spirit.

Steinberg blessed us with the image of holding with open arms. As he recovered from a heart attack, he saw the world in a new light. His lesson to simultaneously cherish and let go of the things that are most precious to us, gives me comfort and strength as a parent, and as a human being, as he preached:

“This then, is the great truth of human existence. One must not hold life too precious. One must always be prepared to let it go.”
On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are brought face to face with our own mortality, and the question of how we make the most of the years we have, never knowing when the final parting will come. We read in the liturgy, “who shall live and who shall die,” well aware of who is no longer with us from last year, and praying for those whose life lies in peril as we enter the new year. The two holy days bring together the joy of adventure and possibility in the New Year, and the fear and awe in the pit of our stomachs. How can we hold onto the most precious gifts we know, while accepting the inevitability that all life comes to an end? What enables us to “hold with open arms”?

It is with this tension that our Torah readings on Rosh Hashanah provide perspective. I have come to see these portions in a new light this year. Both readings for today and for tomorrow tell the stories of parents who learned how to hold their children with open arms.

In the reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Hagar must let go of her son, Ishmael. When Sarah demands that Abraham dismiss the handmaiden Hagar and the son she has born to Abraham, God makes a promise to the aggrieved father:
“ Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave; whatever Sarah tell you, do as she says…as for the son of the slave-woman, I will make a nation of him…for he is your seed.”
With this comforting message, Abraham is able to face the change. He rises early in the morning. This doesn’t surprise me at all; I don’t know how he slept the night before he had to say goodbye. He gives Hagar a loaf of bread and a skin of water, and in a touching act of farewell, places them over her shoulder, together with the child.

But Hagar has not been privy to God’s comforting promise of survival, and when her small supply of water runs out, she chooses to dump her son under a bush (that is how the Hebrew puts it—vatashlech, she threw him—) and go sit at a distance from him, and cries. She does not want to be a witness to her child’s death.

At this point, we learn that Ishmael, too is crying, but only God hears the boy’s voice. After all, his name is Yishma-el, which means “God will hear.” Then, God calls to Hagar, urging her to return to Ishmael and help him survive. In this moment, God “opens her eyes” and she sees before her the well of water that was there all along.

But I want to know how could Hagar give up so easily? Why would she cast her son away? How could she not hear his cries herself? The Hebrew gives us a clue to understanding this story. As long as Ishmael is with his mother, Hagar, he is called “yeled” meaning “boy.” It is only when God hears Ishmael’s cry that he is referred to as “na’ar” which means youth. We know from the text that Ishmael is already a teenager, not a toddler. But Hagar cannot see or hear Ishmael because she only sees the little boy she once knew. Has the adolescent Ishmael disappointed her, rebelled against her, frightened her? Or is she simply unwilling to let him grow up? It is only when Ishmael takes charge and calls out on his own behalf, Hagar is forced to “open her eyes” and see him for the independent young man he truly is. And in that moment, he lives.

It was because Hagar could not let go of her image of Ishmael as a child, that she nearly abandoned him as a young man. He had grown up when she wasn’t paying attention. It was only by truly seeing him as he was, and not as she wished him to be, that she was able to hold him with open arms.

In the next chapter, which we read on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we have another story of parental separation. This story also demonstrates how parents hold tight to the image of who they wish their child to become. It is a separation that is called the Akedah, the binding, and it is that binding that I believe characterizes Abraham’s relationship with his son, Isaac.

Abraham takes Isaac to the mountain top and binds him to the altar, as a demonstration of his faith in God and commitment to the central organizing principle of his life. Only God can tell Abraham to stop, not to sacrifice his child. And just as in the story of Hagar, “Abraham raised his eyes and saw and there was a ram caught in the thicket by its horns. Abraham called the name of that place Adonai-yireh, “on the mount of the Lord there is sight.”

Abraham binds Isaac the way some parents bind their children to their ideal vision of what they want their children to believe and to become. We often fear that if our children do not follow our lead, if they make different choices, then it will reflect badly on us as parents. We worry that everything we have worked for will be lost. Our own pride rests on their following in our footsteps. But in the end of this story, Abraham learns that by letting Isaac go, he need not abandon his purpose. He finds a more appropriate offering for the sacrifice. And he learns that he does not have the right to bind his son to his own convictions. In finding the ram as a substitute, Abraham’s eyes are opened to see that his son must not be bound, but must be free to make his own decisions, and choose his own sacrifices.

At the end of each story, the boys go off on their own, to grow up and carry on their parents’ legacies, each in his own fashion. And so, each of these portions contains a story of growing up, a tale of letting go

Both Hagar and Abraham are forced to lift up their eyes and see. To see where their good intentions should be directed, to see the many possibilities in place of the one, and most important, to see their sons as human beings with an identity separate from their own, and separate from their fantasies of what their son ought to be. Without God’s guiding hand, they would have held on so tight, they would have lost each son for good.

And then there is one final story that we read today, the story of Hannah in the haftarah. Hannah’s tragedy turns to joy when her long-awaited son Samuel is born. The boy she has waited for, prayed for, and suffered insults for. She names him Shmuel, sounding a lot like Yishmael, meaning “God heard.” Hannah could have embraced her long-awaited child and refused to let him go. Surprisingly, she gives him up, to be raised in the temple at Shiloh, saying “It was for this lad that I prayed, and the Eternal has granted my request. I therefore dedicate him to the Eternal. So long as he lives, he is dedicated to the Eternal.” Is her gift a sacrifice? No more than any other parent, guiding a child toward self-differentiation, toward maturity.

Hannah’s strength is that she understands the role that the Divine Presence plays in giving us our children and in helping them to grow. Because in the end, when we hold with open arms, even though we let go, our children come back to us. No matter where they go, and who they become, if we have give them the love and acceptance that is a manifestation of all that is godly, they do come back.

Steinberg offers this insight:
“All of life is the more treasurable because a great and Holy Spirit is in it.
And yet, it is easier for me to let go.
For these things are not and never have been mine. They belong to the Universe and the God who stands behind it. True, I have been privileged to enjoy them for an hour but they were always a loan due to be recalled.
And I let go of them the more easily because I know that as parts of the divine economy they will not be lost....
Life is dear, let us then hold it tight while we yet may; but we must hold it loosely also!
...Only because of God is it possible for us to clasp the world, but with relaxed hands; to embrace it, but with open arms.”

Parenting is the most difficult job we will ever master, and it is vitally important to do it well. And we do not succeed in it every day. How could we! Sometimes we hold too close—and our children slip away. Sometimes we let go too quickly—and they crave our embrace. In the end, there is one steadfast truth: no matter what our best intentions, we can’t always do it alone. Parenting can be a spiritual journey, full of lessons for us every day. We need to have our eyes opened as Abraham and Hagar did: to see those we love for who they are, to take pride in them and accept them no matter what their accomplishments, and most of all, to cherish each day as a gift we will never see again.

On behalf of everyone who has had to let go this year, and everyone who longs to hold someone close, I offer this prayer: May our eyes be opened as we enter this new year. May we perceive what is precious and observe life in all its fleeting glory and then, lovingly, respectfully, be ready to let go.

Rabbi Barbara Penzner
Temple Hillel B’nai Torah
1st day of Rosh Hashanah 5767