To Bless Them with Love

I’m the daughter of a Kohein, and then I married a Kohein. All my life, I’ve stood in shul for Bircas Kohanim and listened as my family members blessed me and the entire congregation.

But it’s different now. Now that my father is no longer alive.

My earliest memories of Bircas Kohanim involve me and my sisters, all of us standing in a row. We were kids, and we were giggling because we could hear our father. It wasn’t just the sound of his voice that made us laugh. It was the specific moment when the Kohanim said the final word of the brachah — be’ahavah, with love  — and my father’s voice would rise above all the others. His “be’ahavah” was loud, full of feeling. As a child, I was embarrassed by it, by anything that made my father stand out. As an adult, I wish I’d thought to ask him why his voice rose then.

My father was the first to admit that he was completely tone deaf (and I’m lucky enough to have inherited that gene). He was acutely aware of how his voice sounded, and so he didn’t sing much, if at all. Occasional zemiros were pretty much the only singing we heard from my father  — except when Yom Tov was coming. Then I’d hear my father on the phone with my older brother in yeshivah, who hadn’t inherited the tone-deaf gene. My brother would practice the tune for duchaning with my father, over and over again.