It's the Jewish liturgical phrase for the endless sequence of connection, from generation to generation.
And wired into it is the privilege given to biological reproduction as the means by which we inherit a sense of belonging in the world.
This side of the Holocaust--with whole lineages wiped out, and others that survived by the most tenuous thread--that phrase is also full of trauma, grief, longing, the desire for reparation.
And for queer children of survivors, I know--sometimes a nearly intolerable burden, as it was for my beloved, gifted friend, the late Oscar Wolfman.
I don't have to be Jewish myself to get the nostalgia, the longing for connection to a family of origin who couldn't teach me what I needed to know about making my way in the world as a man who loves men. Growing up German Lutheran in the Midwest, at the tail end of a dysfunctional generation who loved to think they were the Waltons, I got a full helping of the desire to be seen and mentored, and precious little of its fulfillment.
Of course, it's where my daddy fantasies got their start.
I've decided I'm done with pathologizing those fantasies. I'm ready to move on and accept them as my personal expression of a broad and easily recognizable human need. More radically: I'm ready to say that the erotic connections we form across generations (within the parameters of the law, which is to say 18+) are a precious form of mentoring. Rooted deep in our individual psyches, yes. And at the same time, a means of weaving the queer social fabric we need to thrive and find our place in the world. A means of creating acceptance and belonging for one another.
I'm a man of a certain age, and getting more certain by the month. At some point, you look in the mirror and can no longer deny you're now the older and wiser man you always wanted to meet. I may still be a son longing for his father figure, but it's time to step into being the father figure ready to respond to the younger man who needs me. Giving what I've always needed is the best way I have to experience it myself.
Not to pretend I can recover lost youth, but to send the young into a country I'll only see from the top of a nearby mountain.
"Your children are not your children," wrote Kahlil Gibran. "They are the sons and the daughters of Life's longing for Itself."