Pesach Day 8 Sermon: The Quilt with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

When I was home for Thanksgiving this year, my mom and I were going through some old boxes at the bottom of a closet when we came across a bag of colorful fabrics.

“What’s this?” I asked my mom.

With a funny look on her face, my mom took the bag and started looking through it. “This is the quilt I was going to make you when you were a baby.”

Apparently, when I was born, my mom didn’t want to just be a stay-at-home caretaker. She wanted to feel productive. To be able to show something beyond a growing baby for the time she was spending at home. Naturally, she decided to make a baby quilt. She went to the fabric store and picked out a book of quilt patterns, she bought fabric and washed it, and then every day, when she would put me down for a nap, she would go and work on that quilt. It all seemed to be going well until it came time to put the squares together. Then, somehow, they wouldn’t fit. At the time, my mom was so sleep-deprived that she couldn’t figure out how to make it work. She threw those squares into a bag in frustration, and that bag of fabric squares and scraps has been sitting at the bottom of her closet for the last 33 years.

When it was time to head back to Boston, I absconded with the bag intending to finish the quilt my mom started all those years ago. I thought it would be a beautiful surprise for her and a gift for our baby—a quilt made over two generations. I didn’t realize the quilt would come to teach me about what it means to honor legacy and to transmit values over the course of generations.