Billy

Dear Jonah,

One of my very favorite memories of you was fashioned on Monday evening, January 5, 2009. This was during your winter break from college. Four days later, you would return to Buffalo to begin your 2nd semester of freshman year. I would not see you alive again.

But that was still to come. On Monday evening, January 5, I was treated to one of the most incredible moments of my parenting years: you guest-taught my 10th grade Confirmation class.

It began as a conversation a few weeks earlier. You informed me that you thought you’d declare philosophy as your major. You also imagined yourself becoming a much sought after college professor, complete (if my memory serves correctly) with tweed jacket and pipe. Oh, sir. I’d love to have seen that!

Dear Jonah,

You and I find some fascinating ways to make our lives intersect, don’t we? Yep, present tense … because it’s still happening, kiddo. Consider this …

In the summer of 2004, you were at the URJ Eisner Camp in Great Barrington, MA. You’d been spending parts of each summer there since 1998 when you were 8 years old and in K’tanim (the littlest ones at camp). In 2004, you’d turned fourteen and your unit, Tzofim, was producing a camp show entitled Stars of David. It featured your peers’ take on then-prominent Jewish celebrities, one of whom was Orthodox rapper Etan G, and he was played by none other than you! After a brief interview with the show’s host, you performed Etan G’s “Makin’ the Motzee,” a rap tribute to the prayer before meals. This piece became your signature presentation at weekend retreats in the NFTY youth movement for the next five years or so of middle and high school.

Dear Jonah,

On Yom Kippur in 2010, when it came time for Yizkor (the service during which Jewish communities remember their loved ones who are no longer alive), we always invite a couple of congregants to speak about someone they loved who has died, to share the legacy of values and principals by which they lived and continue to inspire that congregant’s own aspirations.

Before the speakers, though, there’s a service to unfold. In Gates of Repentance – the High Holy Days makhzor (prayerbook) that I’ve always loved and now miss because it’s been replaced by an equally beautiful Mishkan HaNefesh – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (not the Supreme Court justice, but his father who was a noted physician and author) was quoted as saying: “Alas for those who cannot sing, but die with all their music in them.”