by dan pine
staff writer
World, meet Aaron.
Aaron Pine, that is. My son. This month he graduates from U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and already has a plum job lined up with CitiGroup’s investment banking division. In July he becomes an analyst/mogul-in-training, starting out with a salary bigger than anything I ever earned.
As part of his victory lap, Aaron also received a signing bonus. The figure was hefty enough to grant him financial security until he’s officially on the CitiGroup clock. Standing beside him as he endorsed the check, I realized that, as of that moment, I ceased to be financially responsible for him.
I also realized that, as of that moment, I ceased to be daddy.
I didn’t exactly hear “Sunrise, Sunset” playing in the background (well, maybe a little), but I was struck by the significance of it all.
That primal instinct to care for one’s child may shift over time, but it doesn’t go away. I was happy to support him through college. It was a vestige of the days when I would help him with his homework or pack his Ninja Turtles lunchbox.
Now even that vestige is gone. The best I can do is step back and place no stumbling blocks in his path, as we are admonished in Leviticus. I only hope I did my job as a parent to prepare him for the path.
There’s a Chassidic tale about the Zhitomer rebbe and his son who come across a drunken man wobbling along with his equally sloshed son. The rebbe says to his boy, “I envy that man. He has accomplished the goal of having a son like himself. I only hope the drunkard was not more successful in training his son than I am with you.”
I see the wisdom in that story, but it doesn’t match my own experience. Aaron turned out very different from me. He’s macho and aggressive in a Porsche-driving, bling-bling Rat Pack way. I’m more of a Joni Mitchell/”Grey’s Anatomy” kind of guy.
Aaron is Dirty Harry. My life is a chick flick.
As for our Jewish identities, there again we diverge. I was raised with absolutely no Judaism (unless you count my Yiddishe bubbe), and gradually developed a satisfying Jewish life. Aaron started out with the works –– Hebrew school, Shabbat, latkes –– and bit by bit shed it all. Right now he is a devout atheist, uninterested in Judaism or his Jewish cultural roots.
In most respects I could not be prouder of Aaron. He overcame many hardships to reach this day. No one coddled him. Even with all the love thrown his way, he still clawed his way to the top.
Still, I can’t help feeling disappointed by his adamant rejection of Judaism and the beauty that comes with a Jewish life. While I hope he may reclaim it someday, the assimilation bug has bitten him hard. It’s not looking good.
Even so, these are nostalgic days for me.
Imagining him in his cap and gown, I simultaneously hurtle back in time, back to Aaron’s first day of life. He was born two weeks after his due date, so the delivery was not without complications. But after a few hours of lusty crying, Aaron settled into a newborn stupor, sleeping soundly in the hospital nursery his first night on earth.
That second night, he was more agitated, so the nurse let him sleep with me on a cot next to his mother. Once he calmed down, it was as if he melted into me. As in the John Keats poem, with Aaron pillowed on my chest, I felt “for ever the soft fall and swell/Awake forever in a sweet unrest.”
Right then I connected to this child, and have not disconnected since. In some ways, like the Zhitomer rebbe, I wanted to have a son like myself, which included his being proudly Jewish. If that doesn’t pan out, it will be a loss for the Jewish community (he would make a great macher), and sad for me. Mostly because it’s a kind of disconnection, something I’ve dreaded ever since that night on the cot.
But today he is a man. Aaron will go his own way, as he should. My fondest wish for him echoes that of the famous Desiderata: Whatever his labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, may he keep peace with his soul.
Congratulations and mazel tov, son.
Aaron, meet world.
Dan Pinedan@jweekly.com.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California