In the months before my beloved father died, he suffered several falls and a bout of sepsis. Increasingly frail, but stubbornly resistant to professional nursing, my siblings and I decided to put together a rota in which each of us would look after him for a week at a time.
Inevitably, this entailed responsibility for his intimate care. Many adult children are brilliant at this, taking on the tasks – as my brother and sister did – with matter-of-fact kindness and good humour.
I failed miserably. Not only was I prey to mere squeamishness, the story of Ham “uncovering his father’s nakedness” haunted me with its murky suggestion of taboos that I was anxious not to break.
Of course, rationally, I could set aside lurid rabbinic speculation that Ham did not merely see Noah’s nakedness, but that he castrated or even sodomised him (Sanhedrin 70a). Yet there was no doubting that Ham’s gaze had profoundly dishonoured his father. It demoted Noah from the standing of a man so blameless that he walked with God – a man whom God had chosen to do nothing less than redeem human futurity itself – to an object of curiosity and ridicule.
Without drawing any analogy between the helplessness of extreme old age and the perils of drinking oneself under the table, I was, like Ham and his brothers, navigating a moment of danger. There was a risk that intimate care for my father would dishonour him by stripping away the last vestiges of his dignity; that my pity would not remember the time of his glory.
I therefore followed the lead of Shem and Japheth who revered their father by holding up a cloth against their backs and, walking backwards towards him (as for a king), covered him with their faces averted (9:23).
The problem was that I protected my father’s modesty so conscientiously that I barely cleaned him at all.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. If I had, rather literally, turned my face from the most acute of his needs, it was less from a deficit of love than its surfeit.
In retrospect, if I had been less fearful of falling into the sin of Ham and better understood how Shem and Japheth had made loving and honouring a vulnerable parent one and the same moment, I might have done better. The Torah was not given to make difficult moments harder still.
Professor Melissa Raphael
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