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Learning to live without the voice, the face

LOGIC and experience say that death enters consciousness in direct proportion to age. Not necessarily so.

We sent one of our sons away to yeshiva at the age of 13. He was the youngest student in the institution. A few months after he arrived a large funeral took place in the yeshiva. One of the staff had died.

Now 16, he has mourned the passing of no less than three staff members (or their spouses).

At whatever age, it is necessary to learn to live without the voice, the face, the hand, the familiar presence — of loved ones, of friends, of others close enough to matter. Temporarily, it is necessary to learn to live without those close to you who themselves go through one of these losses, who are too distracted to be themselves.

“I’m too young to be losing friends,” said one of my children. Her loss? Her husband’s former congregant, a 50-year-old father of four. I met Yossi Shachnovitz once; he made a lasting impression for his joie de vivre.

He made each guest a host, insisting, for example, that a guest for Shabbos sit at the head of the table  and be the one to recite the kiddush. It was non-negotiable.

Shachnovitz was an orphan, who feared he would leave his own children orphaned. That, it seems, was his only fear. When he was told of his terminal illness, the doctor asked whether he wanted anxiety pills, so he could sleep. He said no; and he slept well each night, since he saw everything, including his own untimely demise, as G-d’s plan.

Shachnovitz wanted no eulogies at his funeral. That, however, would have been too painful for his wife and kids, so he relented.

In Israel the habit is not to delay a funeral at all — do it the day of the death, or if one died late in the day, do it at night. To wait for relatives to arrive from abroad is not the custom.

Last week, a friend of my wife’s from childhood said she didn’t feel well. She lay down last Shabbos night. Her husband noticed her in exactly the same position the next morning.

“Death by a kiss.” No illness. No suffering. But a huge void in the life of her husband, seven children, and more than 40 grandchildren. The only known medical “event” in her recent life was a flu shot she took two days earlier.

She was buried that night, after Shabbos.

At age 58, Dr. Shayndel Feuerstein, a kind and brilliant Jewish educator, mother of eight, Harvard-educated, wife of my longtime friend Rabbi Mordechai Feuerstein of Livingston, NJ, lost an eight-year battle with cancer.

Another huge void.

And in our community, one of our few denizens of Sephardi heritage, Julia Verderber, unassuming, fluent in English, Italian, French and Spanish, known to surprise others with her kindness and cooking, died at 91.

Many losses crowded into a very short time.

Many thoughts.

SOME of us when we are younger and some of us when we are older — we all have to learn to live without.

For some the pain is metaphysical. What happens to the deceased? Is there meaning in life? Is the human being totally alone?

For others the metaphysical perspective is clear. This life is but the smaller part of what becomes, upon death, an eternal life. But the physical is filled with pain. It is excruciating to continue without this person.

And so, inevitably, our world shrinks. Over time there are fewer familiar voices, common stories, shared experiences, instinctively understood jokes. Sometimes we forge ahead, start over, build new relationships. Sometimes not.

About 10 years ago I made a family tree, including my wife’s side. Many of her relatives were killed in the Holocaust. I sent the family tree to all the living relatives. From a few of them I never heard a thing. Years later it got back to me from one of the relatives that while he did appreciate receiving the genealogical information, it was too painful for him to respond. The reason was that while for me the family tree was a mere list of names, for him many of those names were real people. Martyred, each of these names represented a relationship, a face, a personality, a bitter memory. The pain of remembrance chilled his capacity to respond.

I once was driving the late, great scholar and saint, Rabbi Benjamin J. Zilber, on the morning before Yom Kippur. We passed Jerusalem’s Sanhedrin cemetery, where a funeral was underway. He commented: “Just because it’s Yom Kippur, do you think death is on strike?”

He meant: No moment is free of the obligation to plead for Divine mercy, and to act in a way that one is worthy of that mercy.

It is an illusion to think that we control our own lives.

Even after our death.

Return to Yossi Shachnovitz.

TO this man who died at 50, if you began a mitzvah, G-d would help you finish it. His belief in G-d’s help could not disguise his steely tenacity to complete a mitzvah.

The same dignity he bestowed on guests in his home, he showered on everyone he met. He connected to everyone, which is why hundreds of people, many of them strangers to each other, came to his funeral.

Once he met a man at work and through their friendship Yossi learned that his co-worker was a Holocaust survivor. The man died shortly after they met, just before Rosh Hashanah. In conversation with his new and late friend’s wife, he heard her tell him she was going to “do ashes.”

Yossi pleaded with her to give her husband a proper Jewish burial. Especially since he was a Holocaust survivor, she shouldn’t “do ashes,” he urged.

To no avail. So, he asked whether he could take control of the ashes and bury them in a Jewish cemetery. To this she agreed.

This conversation was on the night after Rosh Hashanah. Yossi stayed up all night trying to locate a Jewish cemetery anywhere in the world that would bury the ashes. None agreed, but finally, toward dawn, he found one such cemetery in South America and he rejoiced.

When he called the local funeral home to get the ashes he was shocked to learn that the body was still intact. He said: Do nothing. I am coming right over. Others had spoken to the wife during the night. For reasons that are not clear, the cremation was delayed.

He told the wife that he would pay for everything: the funeral, the plot, the burial. He did.

And he rejoiced, telling his children that if you begin a mitzvah, G-d will help you complete it.

And so, we all navigate our short blip between two eternities, attempting to complete our mitzvot.

Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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IJN Executive Editor | [email protected]


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