My grandfather, Sidney Miller, died November 6 at 99. These are the rules he taught me:
Rule one: You gotta make ’em laugh
Grandpa had rules. He always pushed me to start my sermons with a joke. So, Grandpa, this one is for you.
When I was born and it came time for my bris, my grandfather went up to the mohel and asked for a handful of his business cards. For years afterward, whenever someone asked him what he did for a living, he reached into his pocket... and handed them the mohel’s card.
He had half a dozen other mohel jokes. But the business cards? He actually pulled that one off.
For Grandpa, laughter wasn’t a break from the serious things. It was how he carried them.
My grandfather was also one of my most important teachers. Once, in a movie theater when I was a young boy, he told me with a completely straight face that he was a secret agent. To be honest, I wasn’t sure at the time if he was joking or not.
Then he enrolled me in spy school. Spy school had its own rules. A few he taught me out loud. Most I learned by watching him. Every one of his grandchildren could stand up here with their own version of Sid’s rules. These are the ones he taught me.
Rule two: Always know the safe exit
The first lesson of spy school, the one he taught everyone, was this: whatever room you walk into, locate the safe exit. He would have me physically point to the emergency exit and tell him how I would get to it. When I was a kid, I thought this was about fires.
It took me years to understand that the safe exit was also how he did business. He was never trapped in one room. He kept a door open and an eye on it.
Spy school taught me where the doors were. It took me longer to learn what they were for.
Rule three: Thresholds are holy
The mezuzah on my grandfather’s front door from my childhood was worn smooth. Thousands and thousands of times he touched it on his way out, and then touched his fingers to his lips. And every morning in the apartment building elevator going down from the 31st floor, no one was allowed to talk to him. He was saying his prayers. You could be standing right beside him, and Grandpa was somewhere else entirely.
Our tradition hangs the mezuzah, or doorpost, on the threshold, the place of leaving and arriving. Grandpa knew the in-between is holy. It is where transformation happens.
A few years ago, I went through a significant work transition that left me feeling quite disoriented. Most of the people who love me did what loving people do. They supported me. They consoled me. They gave advice. My grandfather was jubilant. Something had ended, which meant there was finally room for something new.
Rule four: Repetition makes a relationship
One Thanksgiving, when I was a kid, Grandpa asked if he could borrow forty dollars. In return, he would pay me two dollars every week for the rest of his life.
This felt backwards. Usually my grandfather was the one giving me presents. He told me he needed the cash.
He framed it as a lesson in investing. What he was really teaching me was the power of relationships. To collect my two dollars, I had to come back to him every week. Every single week. I made a profit. He secured a lifelong relationship. Sometimes he called it his life insurance.
It turned out to be one of the deepest presents he ever gave me.
For the record, he stopped paying me decades ago. But the weekly rhythm kept going. When I went to college, the two dollars became our Friday phone calls before Shabbat. And they never stopped. Wherever in the world he was, and wherever in the world I was, Friday came and we checked in. He always asked about my wife Leah and my kids, including my youngest, who carries Bobby’s name.
That is more than a thousand Fridays. Most of those calls were not profound. That was the point. We did not build our relationship in big moments. We built it the way he wore down that mezuzah: one touch at a time, again and again, until it carried his shape.
Sid’s rules, one last time
In his last months and days, I watched him teach me every one of his rules again, more deeply.
Rule one: You gotta make ’em laugh
The day before he died, I sat by his bed and reminded him of everything he taught me. I told him how he once tried to teach me to read a stock chart, and about the dead cat bounce: the little jump a falling stock makes before it keeps falling.
He mumbled back: “The cat’s not dead yet.”
With almost nothing left, he was doing Monty Python.
Laughter was never how he avoided the hard things. Even at the very end, it was how he faced them.
Rule two: Always know the safe exit
When I was a kid, I thought the safe exit was about fires. Later I thought it was about business.
In his last days, I watched him lying peacefully in his bed, making his own decisions, choosing at the end to stop eating and drinking. All my life, the safe exit had been about how to stay alive. Now he was showing me how safe, and how peaceful, an exit from this life could be.
A man who loved life so much, and lived so long, and loved so deeply, and prayed so hard, could let go into death with peace and grace.
Rules three and four: Thresholds are holy, and repetition makes a relationship
Back in May, I visited him for his ninety-ninth birthday. He was sick, and we ended up calling the EMTs to take him to the hospital. As they wheeled him out, he stopped them in the doorframe and asked them to wait, so he could kiss the mezuzah on his way out.
On Friday afternoon, just before Shabbat, in the hours when we would have been talking, he passed through the doorway one last time.
ה׳ יִשְׁמָר־צֵאתְךָ וּבוֹאֶךָ מֵעַתָּה וְעַד־עוֹלָם
G-d will guard your going out and your coming in, from now and forever. (Psalm 121:8)
May his soul be bound up in the bond of life. May his memory be a blessing for every one of us. And may each of us, in the weeks and years ahead, share Sid’s rules, with each other and with our friends and families, so that we all keep learning from Grandpa.
So, one last time, the way we ended every Friday: Shabbat Shalom, Grandpa. I love you so much.
