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October 10, 2011 | 2:19 pm

Steve Jobs, His Father and Sukkot

Posted by Rob Eshman

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Only after Steve Jobs died did I learn that his birth father is still alive.  His name is Abdulfattah John Jandali. He is 80 years old, He lives in Reno, Nevada.  And Jobs, who died last week at age 56, never spoke to him.

That’s right: the man who devoted his life to making it easy for us to communicate with one another from anywhere on the planet never once connected with his father, who lived 250 miles away.

Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble gave birth to Jobs out of wedlock, when both were 23 years old.  Because they weren’t married, they gave their son up for adoption to Paul and Clara Jobs.  Later in life, Jobs hired a private detective to track down his birth parents.  He developed a close relationship with the daughter the couple eventually had after they were married, the novelist Mona Simpson.  And he grew closer to his birth mother.  But for reasons he never disclosed in public, he never talked to Jandali.

In an August 2011 interview with The Sun newspaper, Jandali said he too never called his son.  He said as a Syrian he was too proud to be the one to make the first call — he said he didn’t want his son to think he was interested in his money.  Jandali, who was divorced from Schieble, was also estranged from his daughter Simpson.

So, yes, families are strange and mysterious and everyone has their reasons.  Jobs himself acknowledged that one of the things he regretted most in his life was having abandoned his own daughter, whom he had out of wedlock when he was 23.  He didn’t reconcile with her until later in his life.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a man whose psyche was formed, at least in part, by his inability, and later his unwillingness, to connect with his father, would make connection the central driving force of his career.  Jobs set off on a hero’s quest to find what was missing inside him, and in so doing fulfilled his destiny to change the world.

He changed it by enabling the rest of us to talk to our fathers and mothers and sons and daughters face to face, no matter where they are on the planet.  He developed tools that made a virtual connection as easy, or in his case, easier, than a real one.  He gave us the tools to do what he, up to his dying day, couldn’t.

Many years ago I was walking up Fifth Avenue with my son, on his first visit to New York.  We passed the iconic square glass cube that marks the entrance to the underground Apple Store, and he asked what it was.

“A Sukkah,” I said. “There’s so many Jews in New York, they have a permanent glass sukkah.”

“No, really,” he said.

I hadn’t thought about that little joke until this week, reading about Jobs just before the holiday of Sukkah.

What do we do on Sukkot?  We build huts. They are the stripped down, Jobsian version of a house—one room, three walls that are barely walls, a roof that is barely a roof.  When Jobs said that the secret to design is what you leave out, he might as well have been describing a sukkah.

God must have known His People are not especially handy, at least His menfolk. Sukkot are easy to build. They are not plumbed or wired.  Inside, there are no distractions. They are a primitive kind of technology, but a technology nonetheless — designed to accomplish a task. Like a Jobs product, sukkot do one thing, and they do it exceptionally well: they bring us together.

Within this simple structure, we gather with friends and family to eat, pray, sing and talk.  That’s it. 

Yes, they also remind us of our foundational story as a People: that we wandered in the desert for 40 years.  And they serve as useful metaphors for any number of sermons: that life is fragile and fleeting (ask Steve Jobs) and that our only true shelter is God. 

But all that is on the level of identity and intellect.  The social function of the sukkah needs no explanation: it forces us to come together.  There are no additional walls inside a sukkah, no other rooms to escape to, no work stations, no outlets.  It is the annual reminder that you can’t build real community remotely.  “Virtual community” is an oxymoron. We want our iPhones and iPads—and we should, they are useful, remarkable machines. 

But we crave, we need, real contact.  I believe Steve Jobs craved it so much he devoted his whole life to developing substitutes. Sukkot is the real thing.

27 Comments — Leave your comment

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Steve was in one sense a member of the larger tribe to which Syrians and Jews both belong, so perhaps his design principles are not so coincidental.

Comment by A reader on 10/10/11 at 4:28 pm

This story doesn’t surprise me.  It appears he was also not a very charitable man if he was charitable at all.  He apparently said that building his business and caring for his family was enough.  Now we see he didn’t even care about his whole family.  I certainly don’t want to take away from all he did in the field of communications, technology and design.  But hey, that’s just consumption after all.  When it comes to how he treated others - his family, those less fortunate, even those workers in China who labored away for a pittance to produce our toys, and the environment, which he certainly didn’t serve by producing a product without replaceable batteries - the man clearly fell short.  The crazy lionization he’s received by the press and the consumers is way out of proportion to his moral achievements.

Comment by Lauren Steiner on 10/10/11 at 5:04 pm

steve jobs was a bright guy. there are other bright people who died young, including a bunch who worked on apple assembly lines before they shipped the jobs to wherever.
i wanna see something about a great jew who died this week, al davis, who put a picture of moshe dayan on the raider helmet.

Comment by david weinstock on 10/10/11 at 6:48 pm

Since when does Eshman practice posthumous psychoanalysis?  Licensed or not, it is bad form, and vulgar chit and chat.  And is Eshman to be numbered amongst the psychoanalysts? to paraphrase a phrase from Kings?

Comment by Jascha Kessler on 10/10/11 at 6:50 pm

Most people are deficient in family matters and relationships. Techies, like him and the millions of other techies, are prone to emotional deficiencies.

I belonged to an amateur radio club and the men (techies) were clueless as to how to treat their wives or kids. They spent their time playing with their electronic toys and avoiding their wives and kids.

Comment by joybook on 10/10/11 at 6:56 pm

Very nicely done; just want to understand what is meant by “our only true shelter is God”.  Never thought of God as shelter - unless you simply mean shelter as in protector.

Comment by William on 10/10/11 at 7:28 pm

Nobody is perfect, I’m sure Steve Jobs would be the first to admit that while he demanded perfection in anything that carried the Apple brand, he had his faults. But I don’t know whether the fact that Steve Jobs apparently had little or no interest in making contact with his biological father is such a great fault. He was in contact with the parents who raised him and while Jandali’s pride prevented him from contacting Steve, perhaps Steve’s loyalty to the couple who adopted him and cared for him more than Jandali, overcame any curiosity he may have had about his biological father. RIP Steve Jobs and thank you for being an extraordinary human being, with faults.

Comment by David on 10/10/11 at 7:32 pm

You can nit pick Jobs to death, but he is already dead, so why bother? He was primarily an inventor and an innovator. His forte’ was not as a corporate manager or CEO.

Comment by joybook on 10/10/11 at 7:52 pm

Steve Jobs’s father was Paul Jobs.
period.

Comment by Beth on 10/10/11 at 7:55 pm

Lauren Steiner, beautifully said. The more I read about him personally, the lower my opinion goes. Not only was Jobs not charitable, he was so controlling of his image and his way of presenting his products, he stepped all over journalists’ right to free speech. He even went after little bloggers who might dare give away a secret or detail. Some say his Apple fortress makes the Pentagon look like a leak tank. All this secrecy and control—in order to gain the attention and the $$$$. Gates gives back and actually cares about education. Jobs gave away MACS to schools, but surprise…the free MACS are not powerful enough to work properly. Obviously a ploy to get Macs in the hands of kids early, but it has not worked out so well for many classroom teachers. Ask some who have to try and use them. Ask the schools who invested in Mac software that won’t run. In schools, PC’s still rule. Public schools just don’t have the bucks to be “cool.” In the PC/Mac debate, Gates will always have the moral upper hand. Do we really need more “cool” gadgets in a world where people can barely make a living? And how did we ever live without i-pods? I think in many ways Jobs helped to hamper real person-to-person communication than enhance it. But we can’t give him too much credit—or all the blame for the downside and upsides of today’s technology.

Comment by Susan on 10/10/11 at 8:51 pm

Whether we know our father (s) or not, the legacy is
from The Name.  In midrash, Yitzhak does not speak to Avraham after the “sacrifice”.  We send our children to war and expect them to love us when they come home.
We debate the “covenant” with new sensibility and nonsense medicine.  Steve Jobs suffered enough his last few years. I wonder how many of us said his name in the Mishebeirach.

Comment by BenBuddy on 10/10/11 at 9:17 pm

Keep grasping straws.

there is SO LITTLE details about him and you see fit to do an analysis on his life without even reading his authorized biography? I find it pretentious to be even trying to understand what really went on without better information. Shame on you.

Comment by realist on 10/10/11 at 10:18 pm

This is amazing. I just posted on the other blog “Evangelicals, Bigotry, Mormons—and Jews” about bigots and hatred as follows.
“The reality is that bigots all hate those not like them and are cowards. So, their targets change with the political and social climate of the times and places. They also target those who can’t fight back, like dead people.”
These people trashing Jobs are just bigots that have acquired another defenseless target for their hatred.

Comment by joybook on 10/10/11 at 10:24 pm

You’re a very good writer and editor, Rob, but for the life of me how you drew a line between Jobs and Sukkah is way beyond me . . . just because you had a fading memory of taking your son to the NY Apple store? Nuh, uh. Reading that was like pulling the ends of two ropes together that just won’t meet. It just does not fit nor make any sense. Be well.
RCD

Comment by Dick Dennis on 10/11/11 at 12:14 am

People in Glass Houses - should not throw stones. If you cannot say anything good about a person - shut up. Steve Jobs father - Jandali - did not get in touch with his son (a bastard) because the father would expose his sex life out of marriage - and to make this matter worse - this father gives away his son- born out of wed lock - to another couple to bring up.  A typical Jew article always pointing their finger at others - to cover their own crimes. God is everyone’s judge - not us.

Comment by Isabella on 10/11/11 at 12:35 am

To David Weinstock above - here’s a lengthy piece about Al Davis - http://blogs.jta.org/eulogizer/article/2011/10/09/3089772/oakland-raiders-owner-al-davis-football-maverick-dies-at-82

Comment by The Eulogizer on 10/11/11 at 1:37 am

There is more: Patti Jobs, Steve’s adopted sister, three years his junior, was also estranged from him.  Hopefully Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs, out in two weeks, should demystify Steve and his dysfunctional family.  That much baggage would make anyone sick.

Comment by Lynn Cee on 10/11/11 at 5:03 am

I thought this article was wonderful, insightful and gave me a lot to think about as I build my family’s sukkah.  Thank you Rob Eshman!

Comment by janice Kamenir-Reznik on 10/11/11 at 9:33 am

Thank you for the point re that Sukkahs bring us together.  Regarding the terms used for Steve Jobs’s bio-dad:  speaking as someone who is not adopted and doesn’t have adopted children, I think that the term ‘father,’ when used without an adjective, should be reserved for men who raise children.  Thus (assuming that the article’s facts are correct), (a) the adoptive father, Paul Jobs, who raised Steve Jobs, is/was Steve Jobs’s father, and (b) Mr. Jandali is/was Steve Jobs’s birth father.  (As presently written, the article correctly calls Mr. Jandali the birth father in the first paragraph and perhaps in one or more other places, but in a number of places it simply calls him his father.)

Comment by A Father (who also is his children's bio-dad) on 10/11/11 at 11:55 am

(Responding to my own comment, which is immediately above this one.)

I meant and mean no disrespect to bio-dads and bio-moms who place children for adoption.  Generally speaking, they should be accorded huge gratitude.

My point instead was to reinforce providing adoptive parents the respect of characterizing them as no-adjective-needed parents in situations such as the one described in the article.

Comment by A Father (who also is his children's bio-dad) on 10/11/11 at 12:25 pm

Let us be clearer with defining the terms, mother, father and parent.
Mothers and fathers are what biologically create a child. They can also be the parents of that child or other children.
Parents are those that are responsible for the care, education, protection, nurturing and guidance of their biological or non biological children.
Anyone can be a mother or a father. It takes a lot of heart, knowledge and training to be a great parent and very few are great parents. Most parents are good parents, at best. Most parents find it more important to convince others that they are good parents than to actually be good parents.
I have searched for decades and have only found one mother that I would call a great parent. I wish I could have been as great a parent as she is.

Comment by joybook on 10/11/11 at 2:23 pm

the economically naive think that steve jobs was ‘exploiting’ chinese factory workers.those with a modicum of world history awareness understand that those chinese workers face a choice between joblessness/starvation and such laborious 14hour work days in cramped conditions.guess what their choice is?
not death.
arrogant cum ignorant people sitting in first world countries imagine that the tradeoffs and troubles that poor people face are the same that they encounter.
steve jobs GAVE thousands of chinese people jobs.they would be on the roads or starving otherwise.lets get that straight.
bleeding heart people should try to get their soft heads around the concept of scarcity and trade-offs in life.first world solutions dont fit in 3rd world countries

Comment by pravin on 10/12/11 at 2:21 am

You are so entrenched in you assumptions you don’t even know you are making assumptions. My assumption about you the writer since you referred to the bio male as the father and wrote the whole article from that perspective, is that you must think that adoptive parents are the biggest suckers that exist. They spend money time and love on a child and pay for everything including college and you don’t even call them parents. Steve Jobs made it clear while he was alive that his parents were Mr and Mrs Jobs.

Comment by TMay on 10/12/11 at 8:58 pm

I love funerals, you find out the best and worse one lived their lives. AJJ Steve’s BLOOD birth father a Muslim did not practice his religion. Would this hamper sale of Apple $$$ goods when the public found out? This was in 1987….24 years ago! It could be one reason. AJJ sent a few email birthday cards plus ALL his medical records and hope he’d get better. He said he received only a Thank You back. I hope his dad has that proof. I would love that to be true! Friends and family say NO? Did they really
SEE IT? His father has been working on finishing some books….I’d love to read them one day. Yes, Steve was a royal poop allowed to be a loner which he loved. Hot tempered dude when things did not go or get his way. He also dressed up as JESUS for Halloween and he really rode that wave .. my way or the highway…. Be nice be nasty we all will die. It’s bitter sweet but we love both… Yes, let’s not milk our heros dry… for tomorrow just maybe Reed Paul Jobs Jr. he’s 20 now might be passing a ifly back to US! We can hold that thought for a while. RIP~ Steve Paul Jobs ~RIP miss U

Comment by Appletart on 10/19/11 at 8:40 pm

Even the biography has errors.

Comment by patty on 10/23/11 at 7:08 pm

I can’t believe that falsehoods are being perpetuated here of all places.
SJ found his mother and sister. They told him about the birth father’s treatment of them and he wanted nothing to do with him.
The birth father has spread a good lie, saying that he didn’t marry the mother because her father was a racist. Not true, but it sounds so good to vilify yet another religion.  Mr. Jandali was from a family that even the Syrian community thinks very poorly of. When Mona Simpson needed help and contacted her father’s brother in NY, they completely turned their backs on her and wanted nothing to do with her. THAT is the real reason Steve wanted nothing to do with Mr. Jandali. Personally I don’t think I would pursue a relationship with a toxic person either.

Comment by michellegc47 on 11/02/11 at 12:22 am

I’m completely surprised at the comments here. The complete lack of understanding, and in fact attack, of a man who clearly has suffered the very well known hardships deep in the psyche of an adoptee. It is very clear he played out his burning desire to communicate with those he lost at a tender age in his daily toils in creating great things to communicate with. It was embossed in the absolute admiration of artist who have captured the ability to communicate across time as his desire was equally profound. Eshman sees this yet it escapes the larger portion of you. He’s accomplished so much more than anyone in this respect yet it’s still obvious there was a hole left there from his young abandonment.

Comment by Sonny on 12/07/11 at 12:04 am

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