Acts of bravery and cowardice

As I write on Father’s Day Iranians are on the verge of rebellion. The odds are against the insurgents; they have neither the guns nor the organization, just Twitter and Facebook. They do have the moral authority, and sometimes that’s enough. I wish president Obama were more forthright in his support, just as I wished that president Reagan had been more forthright in his support of Filipinos when they took to the streets following their rigged elections in 1986, and I wish that president Bush (41) had come to the defense of the Tiananmen Square democracy advocates, but that didn’t happen either.

I envy the Iranian (and before them the Filipino and Chinese) protestors courageous enough to face the armed police without themselves resorting to violence. But it embarrasses me to see the brave of Teheran demanding an honest recount while in America we stood idly by as our presidential election was stolen in 2000. Yes, in Florida there were protests (Mary Matalin famously denigrated them as Jesse Jackson’s rent-a-riot) but the rest of us who were in the plurality did nothing. What a fiasco that election was. Buchanan won votes from myopic Jews of Palm Beach instead of to Al Gore their intended recipient; remember the hanging chads, and the confusion of the butterfly ballot, and the uncounted ballots, and the disenfranchisement at black polling places, and the fact that one candidate’s brother was in charge of the farce? Florida should have become the epicenter of a mass protest; instead one person (and four of his colleagues) gave the election to Bush, the fellow with the fewer votes, and what a swell job he did. And we did nothing as government became a shambles and the Afghanistan war was abandoned before victory was attained, and Osama bin Laden still taunts, and we still cower. Congress should have discussed scuttling the anachronistic 18th century Electoral College and substituting direct elections or some other way of approximating reality, but it too did nothing. In America, the self-styled land home of the brave we dared not oppose the coup. In Teheran, they are daring.

In shul last week we read about the ten spies Moses had sent into Canaan along with Joshua and his doggedly honorable friend Caleb. Yes the land was beautiful and flowed with milk and honey, but the people are giants, the ten wailed, and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves and so we must have looked like it to them, they groveled. And despite the contrary testimony of Joshua and Caleb the people refused to believe in themselves, refused to believe that they had the power to overcome the obstacles, refused to believe in God, if you will. The lesson of the Hebrew spies is that failure to do the right thing, the moral thing, failure to have confidence in oneself can be a recipe for disaster. I wish I had been braver in 1961 and again in 1967 when each time I had the opportunity of doing the right thing, but didn’t. In 1961 I didn’t join the Freedom riders as they boarded their integrated busses and headed southward. In 1967 I didn’t fly to Israel to work the fields or factories. I live with the shame and try to make up for it.

Then I read of Jihad Jaara who orchestrated the murder of an unarmed 71 year old American turned Israeli during the second Intifada, ironically a man who’d befriended Arabs. Jaara was part of the murderous crew trapped in the Church of the Nativity in the spring of 2002. After a five weeks’ siege U.S. officials of the Bush (43) administration arranged for the European Union to take the killers. Jaara was flown to Dublin where he cowers in fear of Mossad or CIA attack. When a reporter from the New York Times found him he was shocked and afraid. His physician told the reporter, “You must give up the name of the person who gave you this address. Jihad is terrified because his security has been so easily breached.” “You must help us," Jihad said, angry, moving toward [the reporter]. "They want to kill me.” Shakespeare put into Julius Caesar’s mouth the sentiment that cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. Jihad Jaara, who conspired in the murder of innocents now fears inevitable retribution and dies his thousand deaths one by one, day by day. Poor Jihad.

Filming the aftermath of the Rwanda Genocide

In a previous column I wrote of my friend Mark Grashow who has dedicated his retirement years to furnishing school children in Zimbabwe and Tanzania with books and school supplies and teachers. Now let me tell you about my step-nephew-in-law, Taylor Krauss.

A Yale graduate, Taylor began his professional life working for documentary film maker Ken Burns. On assignment in post-genocide Rwanda, he saw something that struck a chord. As a student at Yale he’d visited the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies. But in Rwanda, where during 90 days of hell, at least half a million minority Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were killed by fellow Rwandans, no one was recording testimonies, or even providing social services for survivors. He worried that the mistake of not listening to survivors of the European holocaust was being repeated, with potentially devastating results. After all, if the story was forgotten, it could happen again, there or elsewhere. So he founded “Voices of Rwanda,” to record on film survivors’ testimonies about the destruction of their families during the genocide, and of the lives they’d lived before.

This is psychological and historical aid he brings. It’s not food or school books, such as Mark is providing, but on another plane it’s just as vital. It’s an opportunity to make sure that no one forgets, that unlike our holocaust, which is denied by Nazis and their sympathizers. Now, while stories are still fresh they can be recorded, and by recording, perhaps the victims will achieve some sense that what they went through was something the world will care about. It’s therapy for us too; we can’t just ignore Rwanda, tucked away there in the middle of nowhere, as we tend to view central Africa, but it’s a land where savage murder occurred on a massive scale, one “master race” of blacks perpetuating it on another, as one “master race” of Europeans perpetuated it on us.

The parallel isn’t lost on Taylor. Unlike the Holocaust, after which survivors mostly fled to Israel or the United States, in Rwanda, he says, “you’re living next to the killer who killed your family. There’s no space to tell stories,” which must be told. Here’s where he, the outsider, the Jew, comes in. “The reason I can be doing this work is because I am a Jew.” Krauss graduated from a Catholic high school in Phoenix, in 1998. He says that being in such an environment forced him to confront his own Jewishness because he had to represent a whole religion. When he would explain to Rwandans that he was a Jew, they would respond, “Oh, OK, you understand.” His being Jewish made it easy to relate to the survivors, and easier for them to tell him their stories. He said that in some regard, they feel that there is a shared history. And obviously so does he.

Taylor and his colleagues sit for as long as each story takes, sometimes more than 12 hours, and they have collected hundreds of hours of testimonies. But numbers don’t matter, he says. “Even one testimony is priceless. The more people share their testimonies the more I realize the importance of being there. The act of listening is the most important thing.”

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Taylor has a credo, but if it does it might be this: “If you care about these issues [man’s inhumanity to man], then you have to make changes in your life.” He believes that it is a Jewish obligation to be listening to survivors in Rwanda. “We will be committing the same mistakes if we are not listening. The retelling of the [Rwandan] Holocaust is exactly the reason I am here.”

I was reminded of all this while reading president Obama’s recent speech—the one at Buchenwald.

“To this day,” the president reminded, “there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened... This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history. This place teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests.”

It is exactly in this spirit that my nephew Taylor is working in Rwanda, because he is a Jew.

You can read more about Taylor and his activities on his website: voicesofrwanda.org

President Obama’s comments can be found in their entirety at http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/06/05/1005677/obama-at-buchenwald

Memorial Day Relfections

I type this on Memorial Day. The rain has ceased, spring may have arrived at last, but not for them, not for America’s fallen. Some of the wars they fought kept us free, others were of no discernable purpose, either then or now, but yet they are all equally dead, the brave ones and those who cowered in fear, the enlisted men and the officers, the Jew the Christian the Hindu and the atheist. In schul this morning we paid tribute to them by reading David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan (“Oh how the mighty have fallen”) and from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (“that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”) As we did so I thought of another biblical lament, also ascribed to King David. His son Absalom, in revolt against his father, had been killed. When the news was brought to the king, I imagine he tore his clothes and cried out what all parents must feel, even if they do not know the words—“My son Absalom! O my son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you! O Absalom, my son, my son!” But it did not bring Absalom back. The war dead, all of them our sons, are gone. We concluded the service, before the final mourner’s kaddish, by singing the first verse of America the Beautiful “O beautiful, for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.” Afterwards it wasn’t just us mourners who remained standing for kaddish, but all of that small congregation.

It’s an historical oddity that both Israel and the United States commemorate their war dead in the spring, in the time of new life. In Israel, I’m told, there is no one who does not know a fallen soldier, few who do not have a brother or a son or a father or a cousin or a friend who have paid the ultimate price for keeping Israel alive. There as here some of the wars were of necessity, others could have been avoided, but the dead are equally dead, the survivors weep, the parents, widows, and orphans wonder might have been.

The First World War was a conflict that produced poets. John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields which begins as a eulogy but ends with an appeal to continue the struggle:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

From the other perspective there is Seigfried Sassoon’s Memorial Tablet:

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west ...
What greater glory could a man desire?

Shavuot approaches, the end of the Passover season, it’s said. From the Exodus to the giving of the Law at Sinai, 50 days later. It’s not biblical, you know, this association with the Ten Commandments; it’s an add on by the ancient rabbis who wanted to give some Jewish significance to an even more ancient agricultural festival, but the myth holds; we are grateful for the early spring Exodus from slavery, for the late spring law which turned us from tribes into a people. Yesterday I saw parent cardinals teaching their fledgling to fly by a tree outside our window. Spring is here; the dead are gone, new life continues.

Who is the ass?

[This column began with a picture of a young donkey draped in ceremonial robes with Hebrew writing on them.]

If your Hebrew is a bit weak, I’ll translate. The sign on the donkey’s drapery says, “I feel like a damn fool, but I’d rather look like an idiot than be in that sheep’s clothing.” Or something like that.

With all the world’s trouble, from economic melt down to swine flu to Taliban successes in Afghanistan and Pakistan I turn to the daily Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily Briefing with some trepidation. But then I read this story and wondered if it wasn’t a holdover from Purim.

Here’s what grabbed my attention. How could it not: “SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- It took nearly two years, cost more than $7,500, and involved two donkeys, one sheep, a case of mistaken sexual identity, several DNA tests and the unwavering faith of two fervently Orthodox Jews in Australia.” Now there’s a lead paragraph to capture the reader’s attention.

My theory is that it all began because people in Australia are all walking upside down and the blood rushes to their heads and they get dizzy and giddy and waltz with machine guns named Matilda. Two chasids from normally rival sects (Vishnitzer and Belzer) who study at Adass (read that slowly and carefully, and no, I’m not making it up) Israel Congregation in Melbourne found an obscure passage detailing the rituals of pidyon petter chamor—redemption of a first-born male donkey. The ceremony is like the more familiar pidyon haben, where if the first born child of an Israelite Jewish woman is a boy, money is given to a Kohen to redeem him, to prevent the necessity of giving the child to the Kohaneem. A very simple ceremony and a lot less painful than the one that takes place 22 days earlier. But I digress. Instead of money changing hands, at a pidyon petter chamor, in exchange for the donkey, a sheep is handed over to a local Kohen.

The problem was (one of the many problems was) that the chasids didn’t actually have an appropriate donkey. Who does? But resourceful as only the obsessive can be, they found a donkey breeder in Canberra, about 400 miles away. “There, a maiden female ass who had never been pregnant or miscarried was selected and mated with a male. She soon became pregnant.”

Mazal tov! Problem solved, right? Wrong. Or maybe right. The breeder reported that the foal was female. Quoting an ancient rabbinic text our two chasids lamented, “how all occasions do inform against us.” A new search for a virgin donkey would have to commence immediately. But lo and behold, miracle of miracles the breeder called back a few days later to report that the foal was, indeed, the desired male. Since there was some uncertainty the Adass rabbi ordered a DNA test. On the third try it confirmed that the ass was indeed a male.
Everything was now set. “We were thrilled,” Berel Goldberger, the Vishnitzer, said. “We really wanted to do this mitzvah.” Naturally, because of the rarity of event, a simcha fête was declared. Parliament member Michael Danby, whose electorate includes the Adass schul, was among those in attendance, reports the JTA. (One can only wonder what he reported to his wife upon returning home, weak and weary from the festivities. “For votes, honey, you’ll never guess what I did today,” is my guess.)

So, blessings recited, the sheep was handed over to the Kohen, the donkey was redeemed, not slaughtered.

“It probably looks strange, a bit primitive,” Yumi Rosenbaum, the other chasid, acknowledged. “But there’s a general theme throughout Judaism about the first of anything -- the first fruit, first born and so on. It was fairly unique.”
The sheep was slaughtered, its meat distributed to the poor, its hide to be used at circumcision ceremonies in the Adass community.

And the donkeys? Mom has been named Tip Top and baby is going to be called Peter. I don’t know why.

So, nu, what do we learn from this story? That it’s better to be an ass than a sheep? That absurdities of religion come in all forms—from the slaughter of Muslim women in honor killings in Pakistan to the benign (from the human perspective) killing of an innocent sheep so that another animal might live? I don’t know; I’m only grateful that our Adass chasids didn’t find an obscure passage saying that the son of a virgin donkey could be used as a substitute for a rooster in the Yom Kippur ritual of shlugen kapores. Oy, what absurdities we weave when first we practice to believe.

Booking a trip to Africa

With luck, next summer I won’t be trampled by an elephant in Zimbabwe.

This particular terror has never been high on my concerns’ list. (Falling asleep during one of my own lectures is a much more frequent fear.) But then I got a note from an old college chum, Mark Grashow. In 2002 he and his wife Sheri Saltzberg were attending a wedding in Zambia. Not far away in Zimbabwe is Victoria Falls. As he was a recently retired teacher (mathematics, Lincoln High School in Brooklyn) and she from a career in public health, it was suggested that they visit a school while in the area. What he saw was out of a Dante canto. “The school had no books, no pencils, no paper, no desks, no blackboards, no chairs, nothing.” He knew that schools in America throw out thousands of used books every year. It was almost an algebraic equation. There had to be some way to get the two together. So that was the dream. I dream too, but Mark and Sheri also had the will.

Upon returning to the States they organized an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) the U.S.-Africa Children’s Fellowship Program. Schools in New York are partnered with schools in Zimbabwe and Tanzania. But they had to commit for three years, donating all old textbooks, library books and other materials no longer in use, packed and labeled. Students in the American schools are asked to donate pencils, pens, notebooks and children’s books, art supplies, toys, games, toiletries, sneakers, sports uniforms and musical instruments. Sometimes specific items are requested. One day there was a bicycle drive. Students brought their old bikes to a waiting U-Haul truck. Seventy bicycles were collected in a single day. (The school athletic uniform drive may have been too successful. Reports have reached Brooklyn of five Zimbabwe soccer teams showing up for a match, each wearing the colors of Abraham Lincoln HS.) Students are encouraged to engage in an ongoing pen pal program and schools to raise money for shipment of supplies to Africa. These are shipped over in containers at a cost of about $11,000 to Zimbabwe and $10,000 to Tanzania. Each school is encouraged to raise $400.

There are three permanent 40-foot containers in the back parking lot of Hanger B in Floyd Bennett Field. Donated materials are brought there pre-boxed. The containers hold about 1,500 boxes weighing about 40,000 pounds. Four times a year the materials are brought by ship to Africa, escorted by Mark and Sheri who supervise the distribution of the contents. Bill Clinton in his new book “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World” devotes a section to the effort. And his foundation donated $25,000 to the cause.

So far the program has partnered with 100 schools. Libraries have been created; classes have textbooks; the passing rate of the 7th grade reading exam has risen from 5% to 60%; art classes have been organized where none existed before; the population of many kindergartens has more than tripled with the introduction of toys. Boys and girls are participating in sports impossible before because they had no balls, and had no shoes—in fact, students now with shoes can attend schools in the winter. Before it was too cold to walk that far.

There have been difficulties. Hyper-inflation is the order of the day. Steve Hanke, an economist with Johns Hopkins and the Cato Institute estimates that in the two years following January 2007 the rate of inflation is 89.7 sextillion percent (89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000%). What cost 1.00 Zambian dollar then cost 853,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 in November 2008. In this economy, combined with an epidemic of AIDS, and another of cholera, teachers are leaving the schools by the thousands. Students don’t bother to return after vacation because there are no instructors. So USACF started a new program. It pays $250 a year to high school graduates to cover “distance learning courses” as long as they agree to teach in one of the Zimbabwean schools. In four years they will earn a degree. Currently there are 40-45 students receiving these scholarships. More would if there were more money. Write me if you want to contribute; I’ll send you the address; USACF is a 501(c)(3).

Mark does not describe himself as a religious Jew, but he wonders what great force brought him to that school to observe it. I wonder if he’s not more Jewish than he thinks. There is the concept of Tikkun Olam reflected in his use as a credo “There’s a big planet out there. Someone’s got to fix it.” Well, I give money; he does things.

Which brings me back to being stepped on by a pacaderm. Mark organizes trips to his African schools. He’s invited his old college friends to join him, but he warns “the safari part (six days) is in tents. Elephants wander through the camp site at night.”

Next summer I hope to see with my own eyes the results of his Herculean efforts. I’ll report.

Kaddish at Fenway Park

On the day before Passover I said Kaddish in memory of my father. This is not unusual, I say Kaddish in his memory every day, morning, afternoon and evening. It was the setting that was peculiar. On opening day I was at Fenway Park with my friend Sam, and I did a hasty count. We were two. There were at least three Jewish ball players on the field, that was five; we knew of two Jewish executives of the Red Sox we assumed were on site, seven. Three short. But then I looked at the throng before me and surely, I told myself, of the 37,000+ other people in the ball park, three of them must be Jewish. So, during the Seventh Inning stretch, after singing “God Bless America,” while everyone else warbled “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” I said Kaddish.

Saying Kaddish doesn’t bring my father back to life, and certainly not to health, and I don’t actually believe in the efficacy of prayer to begin with, so I wonder why I arrange my daily schedule to accommodate the needs of someone who cannot possibly know that I stand for him and utter words in Aramaic I do not understand—even when I read them in the arcane English translation generally supplied? Is it ancestor worship as a rabbi/scholar I know maintains? Is it a hope that if I say Kaddish my children will say the prayer for me in my time?—and if they do, how does that benefit me, exactly? I’ll be pretty much dead under the circumstances. Is it for the same reason I keep a kosher diet, so as not to break the link in the chain unlikely ever to be mended, a chain that I suppose goes back to Pharisaic days?

In point of fact I could not deliberately skip the daily ritual for my father any more than I could eat a ham and cheese sandwich with a pork rind chaser, but I can’t rationally tell myself why. Passover, the story of our liberation, has just ended, but it’s also the story of our bondage to ancient law we neither created nor formally consent to except in the observance. Hegel in the 18th century argued that what gives us freedom is acceptance of the burden of law; Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher argued that without law we are no better than the savages whose lives are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. So, do I obey the law to avoid the chaos of freedom, or does the law give me freedom while it binds me to action, the purpose of which eludes? The law we obey, is it that which makes us Jews? That’s a simple one. No. There are Jews who never consciously observe any Jewish ritual law, and yet they are Jews. (We call many of these people “Israelis”.)

This is my constant quandary, why observe the laws of Judaism. An associated one was added before Passover when I saw the play “Grace” at the Gamm Theater. Grace is the eponymous central character, a professor of natural science. She refuses to call herself an atheist because that defines what she is not, a not believer in god. Instead she defines her attitude as “naturalism”. She mocks William Paley’s creationism and fawns over Darwin. The universe has no purpose. Things just happen. Then her son announces that he is becoming an Anglican priest. The sparks fly.

She attacks: You with your moderate religion are giving cover to Scriptural literalists who turn the irrationality of religion into the violence of bomb-throwing fanatics. But is it true? That’s the question, never fully resolved in the play. Do the moderate practices of religion, the observing Passover, for instance or Lent or Ramadan, provide cover for the fanatics who would destroy all that is not of their revealed belief? If benign religion morphs into cultural oppression or murder, is the irrationality of religion compensated for by its social values? Hamas, after all, runs hospitals.

Religion pretends to be rational when it bothers to. Maimonides and Aquinas believed in Aristotle’s rationality, but even that depends on the irrational belief in an unmoved mover, a contradiction in terms. I’d like to abandon formal religion. But then I’d have no opportunity to say Kaddish for my father in that lyrical little band box of a ballpark off of Yawkey Way, a whimsy that would have brought a smile to his baseball loving heart.

In the end the Red Sox won the opening game, Kaddish was recited, the tulips are coming up; the trees are showing their leaves. Spring is in the air. Let us rejoice.

Poems intrude: Thoughts on the Death of My father

Poems intrude. The first begins:

“Say this when you mourn for me:
There was a man—and look, he is no more.
He died before his time.
The music of his life suddenly stopped.
A pity! There was another song in him.
Now it is lost forever:”

The second urges:

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Out of the canon of Scripture we read:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens; a time to be born, and a time to die…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”

In August my father, still strong, still vibrant, still a lover of life suffered a series of strokes. He was left physically debilitated but his mind remained as sharp as ever. I don’t know if the medical teams saved his life or prolonged his death. I know that as a result of their efforts my father suffered, too weak to live, too strong to die. Until he died.

His sons and others who loved him mirrored his physical pain with our own emotional anguish. Seeing him unable to speak, I knew that thoughts were cascading around his brain and that he in frustration could only try and fail to express them. There was so much more to say; I was his son; I am his son; I have learned so much from him about being a man—but there is so much more to learn and suddenly I am fatherless, left to cope with the world as though I knew its answers, as though I even knew what questions to ask of it. I know there was at least one more piece of instruction in my father but he could not move it even the brief distance from his brain to his mouth to my waiting ear. And I know what words I could not speak. I could not say, “Father, you are dieing” because I could not move the words even the brief distance from my brain to my mouth to his ears. He had given me so much; could I deprive him of hope? But because I kept his hope alive (because I kept my own hope alive?) I denied him the dignity of facing up to his own death; I denied myself the last words of truth I could give him.

He did not want to die, though in the last days he accepted death’s inevitability. I think he was afraid to die, afraid to give up the pleasures of life which consisted mostly of kvelling over his grandchildren, walking the golf course, attending schul, schmoozing with friends, breathing air, tasting water. He did not want to die, of that I am certain. He did not want go gently into that good night; he would not even have acknowledged that the eternal night he was entering was good. He wanted to live, but he could not. I wanted him to live, but knew he couldn’t. I did not want his death prolonged, but it was, and selfishly I was happy to have him just a few more days, though it broke my heart to hear him gasping for air. I could have let the mucus in his lungs overwhelm him, but each time I rang for the nurse, “Hurry, hurry, he’s choking,” and each time they did deep suction and each time he suffered the pain and each time I wept.

Once he was young, but now he isn’t and it was his time. By most measures 95 years is a good long life. But he had another song; he struggled to breath. The Stoicism of the poem is a front-porch kind of philosophy, easy and obvious, but he had another song to sing. People whose parents died before they were 95 might resent my feelings. And it’s true, as far as it goes; I was lucky to have him so long. But it wasn’t long enough. There is a time to be born and a time to die—and I have wept on both occasions—for as my first child was born I held him and thought, “What have I done? Selfishly, satisfying my physical and emotional needs I’ve brought this innocent person into the world and he who was not is now destined to die. And then I wept again as my father lay dieing, his teachings incomplete with at least one more lesson he could not get out as he lost his fight against the eternal night.

As I shoveled dirt onto my father’s coffin I thought, “He had been a man, a good man, an accomplished man, an intelligent, loving, kind and wise man. And now I, his weeping son, am covering him with earth. He had covered me as a baby, protecting me from the cold night as I slumbered innocently in my crib. Now I was covering him, and the all the poetry, all the philosophy, all the stories of heaven and resurrection were powerless to bring him back or to comfort me. There lay a man. My father, who was dead.