A Lesson in Humility from my Grandmother

Everything I thought I knew about humility I learned as a young girl from my maternal grandmother. Almost sixty years later, I finally understand the hard-earned wisdom she was trying to share.

My grandmother, Rose, lived in the small Nova Scotian coal-mining community of Glace Bay with my grandfather, known by his initials LH. They raised their family of six children in that town. Life wasn’t easy for the coal miners and their families. Money was tight and the work dangerous and unhealthy. My mother’s family, by comparison, lived very well. It didn’t start out that way.

Like most immigrants who chose Canada in the first decade of the last century, my grandparents arrived with little more than big dreams of a better, safer future. They prospered in Cape Breton beyond their own wildest expectations. My grandfather built a successful grocery wholesale and chain of local supermarkets. His business created employment for his adopted community, higher education opportunities for his children, three of whom followed him into the business, and an affluent life for his family.

As a young girl, I loved to sit drinking tea with my grandmother at her kitchen table, the heart of her home. A staple in our conversations was the importance of always staying humble and respectful. Her favourite talking point, the one she shared with her children and later, eighteen grandchildren, was pretty clear.

Don’t draw attention to yourself!

It seemed reasonable to me. Glace Bay is a small town. It would have been important for my mother and her siblings to never hold themselves above friends and neighbours who were struggling and to always be appreciative and respectful of their own good fortune. At least that’s what I thought she meant.

Since I have been lucky enough to become a grandmother, I have found myself wanting to share with my own grandchildren what I have learned in my seventy-two years on the planet.

No surprise that I use the word gratitude often when I’m around them. The more you are lucky enough to have, the more you need to share also comes up a lot. They are barely two and four-years-old, so who knows what their little minds are absorbing. Maybe one day they will even remember my words. I hope so.

My grandmother’s words still resonate with me after more than half a century. But since the horrific events in Israel on October 7th, they carry an entirely different meaning for me now.

Grandma Rose fled pogroms in her native country of Belarus before marrying my grandfather in the synagogue in Glace Bay that is still standing to this day, unused, across the street from what would eventually become their family home. She knew first-hand about being the target of irrational hate.

I never knew what horrors she might have seen or experienced before coming to Canada. I never asked. I was more familiar with, and shared, her later traumas in the 1960s when she lost LH first and barely two years later, my mother too.

I wasn’t humble enough as a young girl to really listen to her, to value and respect her lived experience. I was too caught up in my own life and opinions to believe she had anything to offer me but tea.

My grandmother’s lesson in humility, though, has informed my own reckoning with the global hatred and vilification of Jews that has since been unleashed in the world and shows no sign of abating any time soon.

It’s true that humility is a lost virtue, a victim of the self-importance and jealousy unleashed by social media. But I believe it’s time for a resurrection. I humbly agree to go first.

My generation of baby boomers Jews, born into the post-war golden age of Judaism that began unravelling with conspiracy theories about 9/11 and now has mutated into blood libels over social media, could use a lesson in humility.

Who were we to think, that with thousands of years of anti-semitism inflicting all the generations of Jews who came before us, that we were going to somehow be exempt from a resurgence of the oldest hatred in the world?