The Family Table - The Rhythm of Life
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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the blessing of sorrow. Turning Grief Into Healing. Narrated by Michael G. Phillipe Senior. The Table of Life, a tradition in some French Jewish communities, was for the men to construct the table from any good and suitable would that would be used for family gatherings and on which to enjoy their meals. Each man would do so, knowing that his coffin would one day be built from the wood of that very table. I think about this custom from time to time, especially in 21st century America, were sorrow and mourning are rarely discussed or plan for picture the imagery. A man's family and friends come to his funeral and see his casket, which was once the table where they had sat and talked and laughed and cried. Grief is therapeutic and healing when it has handprints all over our lives when it's part of the subconscious, long before it comes along with its pain and desolation. The origin of this table to coffin notion found in the Talmud is that since the Jews no longer had the temple in Jerusalem, it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 ce ah person receives atonement through his table. The kitchen table is where a person can give nourishment to others, invite the poor to come and eat, bless family members and generally share his or her bounty and good fortune. Or it could be the center of emotional indigestion and spiritual hunger. As plates air filled and conversations ensue, souls mingle or bump into each other Most directly, you learn a lot about people who will eventually die. After the days and evenings spent around the table top, you'll have tender details to remember the shape of their hands, their trademark fragrance, a piece of music. They humped classic phrases they repeatedly invoked, thus keeping them spiritually alive. Most of us can recall the kitchen table of our childhood and adolescence. Stories were told. Anger was flashed, quarrels were resolved or people broke up with each other, and someone left the table in a huff. We saw and heard our parents close up, and without ceremony they could Joel, one another, interrogated us kids declared rules, expressed their love, bickered about finances, and they certainly disciplined us. It wasn't always congenial, but it was real. And some things spoken there have never been for gotten the table was a kind of sanctuary of personal history, the table still the landscape of truths, sullen end, blissful. What you do and say at the kitchen table, how you behave, how you degrade or inspire. Others become the etchings of other people's memory and the libretto of their grief When you die. One's eulogy is inscribed over the years in the clanking plates and cutlery, the steaming soups, the briskets or tofu turkey's the exceptionally celebrated maternal entrees. The romantic antic dotes, the generational stories that weeping, the shouting and the forgiving, even the matter of who prepares the meal and how the table is set defined the rhythm of real life in a household. It wasn't always pleasant at the meals, but it was tangible, and some things spoken there have never been discarded. Converting the tables would into a coffin eternal ized the nuances of human being and service the Mourners who at the funeral literally beheld the same planks around which they had sat for decades. It was not about the mortuary or the formulaic obituary or the lofty tributes are designated speakers. It was certainly not about how long ornate was the table of someone's life. It was about what the table was made off. So wherever this practice prevailed, the builder of the table shopping and refining the wood, designing the pattern, smoothing the corners, knew from the start that he was also creating a legacy derived from the exact lumber of his efforts. In the end, life and death evolved from the trunks and branches of the same tree. There's a protecting shade about grief, and if bereavement is anticipated and contemplated, it will provide us with the fruit and nourishment of healing. We start with the realization that there could be no tree of life without a seed being planted. Grief and memory are the natural alchemy that renews the table of life even after someone has left it.