hide behind “It’s not my turn”?
Seeing the Reb now, slumped behind his desk, reminded me, sadly, of how long he had been on top of his family’s list.
Why don’t you do sermons anymore? I asked.
“I can’t bear the thought,” he said, sighing. “If I stumbled on a word. If, at a key moment, I should lose my place-”
You don’t need to be embarrassed.
“Not me,” he corrected. “The people. If they see me discombobulated…it reminds them that I’m dying. I don’t want to scare them like that.”
I should have known he was thinking of us.
As a child, I truly believed there was a Book of Life, some huge, dusty thing in a library in the sky, and once a year, on the Day of Atonement, God flipped through the pages with a feathered quill pen and-
What do people fear most about death? I asked the Reb.
“Fear?” He thought for a moment. “Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?”
That’s big.
“Yes. But there’s something else.”
What else?
He leaned forward.
“Being forgotten,” he whispered.
There is a cemetery not far from my house, with graves that date back to the nineteenth century. I have never seen anyone come there to lay a flower. Most people just wander through, read the engravings, and say, “Wow. Look how
That cemetery came to mind in the Reb’s office, after he quoted a poem both beautiful and heartbreaking. Written by Thomas Hardy, it told of a man among tombstones, conversing with the dead below. The recently buried souls lamented the older souls that had already slid from memory:
They count as quite forgot,
They are as men who have existed not,
Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath
It is the second death.
The second death. The unvisited in nursing homes. The homeless found frozen in alleys. Who mourned their passing? Who marked their time on earth?
“Once, on a trip to Russia,” the Reb recalled, “we found an old Orthodox synagogue. Inside, there was an elderly man, standing alone, saying the mourner’s Kaddish. Being polite, we asked for whom he was saying it. He looked up and answered, ‘I am saying it for myself.’”
The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be
How then, I asked the Reb, can you avoid the second death?
“In the short run,” he said, “the answer is simple. Family. It is through my family that I hope to live on for a few generations. When they remember me, I live on. When they pray for me, I live on. All the memories we have made, the laughs and the tears.
“But that, too, is limited.”
How so?
He sang the next sentence.
“Ifff…I’ve done a good jobbb, then I’ll be re-mem-bered one generation, maybe two…but e-ven-tu-allllly… they’re gonna say, ‘What was his naaame again?’”
At first I protested. Then I stopped. I realized I did not know my great-grandmother’s name. I’d never seen my great-grandfather’s face. How many generations does it take, even in close-knit families, for the fabric to unravel?
“This is why,” the Reb said, “faith is so important. It is a rope for us all to grab, up and down the mountain. I may not be remembered in so many years. But what I believe and have taught-about God, about our tradition-
Connected?
“That’s it.”
We should get back to services, I said.
“All right. Yes. Gimme a little shove here.”
I realized it was just me there, and he couldn’t get up from the chair without help. How far was this from the days when he commanded the pulpit with a booming voice and I sat in the crowd, wowed by his performance? I tried not to think about that. I awkwardly moved behind him, counted “one…two…three,” then lifted him by the elbows.
“Ahhhh,” he exhaled. “Old, old, old.”
I bet you could still do a helluva sermon.
He grabbed the walker’s handles. He paused.
“You think so?” he asked, softly.
Yeah, I said. No question.
In the basement of his house there are old film reels of the Reb, Sarah, and their family:
Here they are in the early 1950s, bouncing their first child, Shalom.
Here they are a few years later with their twin girls, Orah and Rinah.
Here they are in 1960, pushing Gilah, their youngest, in her baby carriage.
Although the footage is grainy, the expressions of delight on the Reb’s face-holding, hugging, and kissing his children-are unmistakable. He seems predestined to raise a family. He never hits his kids. He rarely raises his voice. He makes memories in small, loving bites: slow afternoon walks home from temple, nights doing homework with his daughters, long Sabbath dinners of family conversation, summer days throwing a baseball backward over his head to his son.
Once, he drives Shalom and a few of his young friends over the bridge from Philadelphia. As they approach the toll booth, he asks if the boys have their passports.
“Passports?” they say.
“You mean you don’t have your passports-and you expect to get into New Jersey?” he cries. “Quick! Hide under that blanket! Don’t breathe! Don’t make a sound!”
Later, he teases them about the whole thing. But under that blanket, in the back of a car, another family story is forged, one that father and son will laugh about for decades. This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.
His kids are grown now. His son is an established rabbi. His oldest daughter is a library director; his youngest, a teacher. They each have children of their own.
“We have this photograph, all of us together,” the Reb says. “Whenever I feel the spirit of death hovering, I look at that picture, the whole family smiling at the camera. And I say, ‘Al, you done okay.
“This is your immortality.’”
