Jonah

Dear Jonah,

You should have been there.

Yes, I know that’s a preposterous proposition. But look who’s writing you letters!

Anyway, your concert is always a mixed bag, of course. The evening is always filled with incredible music, a ton of friends, phenomenal support from the URJ summer program staff, and even mouth-watering baked goods that you’d have loved. Actually, you would loved all of it. Even, in your own weird way, the whole idea that a concert’s being held each year in your name.

I think often of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn who were presumed drowned in the Mississippi River and snuck back to watch their own funeral. Believe you me, boy, if you’d like to surprise us all by opening up the second half of next year’s concert, please do!

Each year, I love watching your concert, even though the evening is always tinged with a quiet but persistent sense that you’re not there.

Dear Jonah,

Yesterday, Mom and I attended the funeral service for Rabbi Aaron Panken. He died young, although not quite so young as you were. It was, of course, an incredibly sad gathering. And like many funerals, it was uplifting too. Aaron was a good guy. He was well-loved by his family and his friends. He loved his life and his work, and he loved living fully. So as we were grieving his death, we were reveling in Aaron’s good fortune to have lived such a beautiful life.

Remind you of someone? (Except for the work part.)

Aaron loved to fly. It was also how he died. Rabbi David Stern said it best, “He fell from the Sabbath sky, but oh how he loved the Sabbath sky.” At the end of the service, two cantors stepped forward and, inspired by Aaron’s love of flying, sang an Israeli tune written by Arik Einstein, “Uf Gozal – Fly Away.”

Fly, my chick
Cut the sky
Fly anywhere you want
But don’t forget
There’s an eagle in the sky
Fly away*

Dear Jonah,

So many of my memories of you are wrapped up in family events. I’m thinking about an amusing moment embodying the playful love that defined so much of our time together: your and Katie’s 1999 birthday gift to me.

It’s really a generation-to-generation sort of thing, and it started back in perhaps 1989 (as best Mom and I can figure). Katie, Mom and I were in Lenox, Massachusetts, visiting our dear friends Fran and Gerry Weingast as we had done many times through the years. Mom’s birthday arrived while we there and I got her a present from all of us. It wasn’t one that she’d asked for nor would she ever have asked for – the original Nintendo Entertainment System (1st released in 1983). Mom would have been happy to never see one of these in our home, but Katie had wanted it and Mom kept saying no. I’ve always been enough of a tech geek to aid and abet your, Katie’s and Aiden’s childhood wishes of this sort. Truth be told, I couldn’t wait to get some play time too.

I dubbed this “The Nintendo Gambit,” congratulating myself on how clever I was in finding such a high-spirited way to bring electronic gaming into our home. If it didn’t exactly have Mom’s endorsement, it still couldn’t have happened without her, right?

She took it well (or so it seemed) but I could tell there were wheels turning inside her head, so I shouldn’t have been surprised (although I was) when my birthday arrived and she presented me with a twinkle in her eye and a very lovely dress. It was a style she adored and, surprise, it was just her size!

Installment number two of “The Nintendo Gambit” had been implemented.

Drop a pebble in the water — just a splash and it’s gone,
But there’s half a hundred ripples circling on and on and on,
Spreading, spreading from the center, flowing on out to the sea,
And there’s just no way of telling where the end is going to be.

Dear Jonah,

At the turn of the 20th century, James W. Foley, the Poet Laureate of North Dakota (!), must have thrown his share of pebbles into water as he thought about the impact even the tiniest participants in Creation can have on the world.

I, of course, contemplate this all the time. Whenever I think about your 19 years, I want to know that your short life meant something, and that it made a difference to have you among us.

Recently, I discovered a ripple of yours that has continued reverberating through the universe even eight years after your death. What’s magnificent about this particular ripple is that it only reached me a few weeks ago.

These events started more than ten years ago. Who knows how much of the story we got right, but there are enough people who have told me it seems to have happened this way that I feel comfortable setting it down for posterity — because if you didn’t do this, Jonah, you were certainly capable of it!

As one of my favorite Hasidic stories concludes, “They don’t tell stories like this about you or me.”

I was interested in listening to the score of that new musical about the airplanes that got diverted to Gander, in Newfoundland, on September 11, 2001. Because I entered the wrong name for the show, Google pointed me to a Twyla Tharp musical about Frank Sinatra. And although Ol’ Blue Eyes had indeed spent some time in Gander, I was looking for something else.

Finally, I found it. The musical’s name is “Come From Away” and just listening to snippets of its songs on iTunes sent tears rolling down my face. Having now purchased the entire recording and been listening to it for two days, I think my eyelids are chapped from all the crying.

“Come From Away” is not a sad story even though it emerges from the devastating events of 9/11. It’s a side-bar tale of 7000 passengers on 38 international flights that were diverted to this little Canadian town of only 10,000 residents when the U.S. closed its airspace. The musical revels in the storm of kindness unleashed by the townsfolk during those three days when their population nearly doubled. Picketing bus drivers got back behind the wheels of their buses as bakeries, restaurants, stores, medical personnel, therapists, and virtually everyone else in town did whatever they could to help the stranded while they waited to go home. Even two great apes had to be tended to!

Dear Jonah,

Yesterday was your yahrzeit. I spent the day sitting quietly at home reflecting on the eight years that have passed without you in them. Well, you’re in them, kid. You’re always in them.

Age 18 (Aug 2008)

Last night, we held the 8th annual concert in celebration of your life. I’m still amazed how powerful these evenings are for me. Part of it is that so many people in attendance want to surround our family with love and support. So while I was ready to just jump in and enjoy the concert, their strong emotions nudged me into a more reflective state than I might otherwise have found myself.

That was okay. More than okay. With your smiling, black-and-white-checked-fedora-topped face on the screens above the performers, you were powerfully present anyway. Again, my visceral response to your photo took me by surprise but that was a fine, comforting way to move through the evening.

Dear Jonah,

Faith is a commodity I’ve spent most of my life peddling. It’s kind of what rabbis do. On this your 8th yahrzeit, I’m thinking about faith. Not mine (although losing you has certainly put that to the test).

I mean yours.

Because the Buffalo medical examiner was unable to prove the cause of your death, the police wanted to label it a suicide. But in canvassing your friends on campus, they found what I’d felt all along. You were not a candidate for suicide. You had far too much faith – in you, in others, and in life.