The Short Vort by Rabbi Eisenman

I observe a daily morning ritual, like clockwork. To be more precise, the ritual is clockwork.

Before I leave my house for shul at 6 a.m., I descend the stairs and head straight to the eastern wall of our dining room, where I make a beeline for the object of my avodah, approaching it with a sense of purpose and reverence.

I reach up and pull on two chains, elevating the weights they bear to their full height, after which I gently push the pendulum. As the pendulum swings, the weights descend downward, and my mother’s cuckoo clock is ready for another day.

For those who don’t know, a cuckoo clock is a hand-wound mechanical clock that strikes the hours with the sound of a common cuckoo bird’s call. It is pendulum-driven, using gravity and not batteries nor electricity to keep the time, and it keeps time with a swinging weight – the pendulum – which arcs back and forth at a precise rate.

My mother’s is a one-day cuckoo clock, meaning it takes 24 hours for the weights to reach the bottom, and it needs to be wound daily by pulling the chains.

My first avodah every morning is to set the cuckoo clock in motion. The process takes a minute or two – it’s not very long – but it is meaningful to me.

Almost ten years ago, when my mother passed away, I told our family that I wanted her progeny to be the recipients of her mementos.

Let the grandchildren and great-grandchildren have the things, I thought. I have my memories.

 Yet my wife, with her binah yeseirah, suggested we retain the cuckoo clock my parents had purchased on a trip to Switzerland decades earlier because she knew that my mother had cherished this clock, as she had set it daily since my father passed away in 1999. We took it to a local horologist (watchmaker and repairer)   for restoration, and then we hung it in our dining room on the wall facing Yerushalayim.

I confidently predicted that the clock would remain dormant after the first week of excitement had dissipated, but my wife’s insistence that we embrace this vintage timepiece contained more than an element of foresight. As Hashem would have it, I became the keeper of the time – and I have never looked back because my morning ministration allows me to connect with the cherished memory of my mother.

The consistent effort necessary to keep my mother’s cuckoo clock going, I soon realized, actually epitomizes my mother, a woman born into poverty during the Great Depression who made every day count. Her determination to achieve an education allowed her to become a teacher. That extra income facilitated the payment of our yeshivah tuition.

Indeed, her insistence that her sons attend yeshiva, despite the protestations of family members who were convinced she was sentencing us to life as perpetual immigrant Jews and precluding us from assimilating into the American Dream- made all the difference in the world.

My mother calibrated her clock as she sent my brother and me to yeshivah every day and went off to work.

 Her daily avodah changed the lives of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

The clock has become more than a conversation piece for the Shabbos guests; it provides me with the regular opportunity to engage with my memories of my mother.

The fact that it needs attention has not been a chore. Quite the opposite: tending to my mother’s clock is a daily labor of love.