Before Shabbat

Like many Americans, I’ve been tuning in to watch the Olympics. There are several reasons I am motivated to do this. The most honorable of them is to appreciate the spectacle of it all. I’ve never been on ice skates – ever. I’ve gone skiing twice. The first time was cross-country skiing in the Sierra Nevada with my newly married spouse, who is, by the way, an extraordinary skier, the kind that causes people to stop and watch as she comes down the mountain. Liza was sprinting up the hills minutes after we got fitted with the boots and skis. And I… well, it was just so embarrassing. I could not figure out how to coordinate movement on two sticks. I spent more time on my butt than upright. And while it didn’t end our marriage (still here after 45 years…), it was a rather rocky acknowledgement of my gross motor skills as opposed to her graceful, enthusiastic embrace of the sport. The other ski experience is not even worth talking about, except to say it was the final nail in the coffin of my skiing ambition.

It’s also true that I’ve never curled, been in a bobsled, or on a snowboard. So I watch the athletes with child-like admiration. I don’t know how they do what they do, stunts in the middle of the air in a snowstorm, turning upside down and back around without dying. The slaloms, people travelling on those 2 fiberboard skis at 80 miles an hour? In flimsy outfits and helmets and no body armor? I cannot even vaguely imagine being in one of those skating pairs, speeding around the ice, twirling and jumping and gliding, small women tossed into the air and caught with grace. The curling? I watched for about 25 minutes without understanding the sport, the broom, or the stones. It was like watching a cricket match: incomprehensible. It’s all incomprehensible to me. They all live with a precision I do not possess in anything I do anywhere.

Another reason I watch, and this may be revealing a character flaw, is anticipating the agony of defeat, always included as a likelihood in the Wide World of Sports telecasts. I don’t wish for accidents and miscalculations to happen. But inevitably, they do. I have no experience akin to what a gold medal winner feels. To win anything due to physical prowess is just not in my wheelhouse. But when someone falls or slips or miscalculates or freezes or just gets it wrong – that I can feel. Not the physical pain or the sudden loss of endorsements and Wheaties boxes, but rather the shame and the crushing truth of that moment: there’s no rewind, no award for trying hard.

I think about the vast majority of Olympic athletes who win nothing, who aren’t fast enough, big enough, small enough, talented enough… They spend endless hours practicing, not to mention endless dollars: Estimates suggest that raising an Olympic-caliber skier from youth through the Games can cost families $500,000 to over $1 million across a career. Some estimate the annual cost for a competitive teenage racer at $50,000–$100,000. And then, they win nothing. I can’t imagine what it feels like on the winners’ platform. But I do resonate with the folks who are packing up, being thankful for the experience, and then moving on: to coaching, teaching, working in AI, on a car lot, or back to school.

Sure, some Olympians come back to try again, and sometimes they make it and rise to the top. And sometimes it’s a quixotic gesture, doomed to fail due to age, anxiety, malfunction, or any number of reasons. As Paul Simon once sang, “How many nights do you think that you can do what you’ve been doing? Who do you think you’re fooling?”

Alan Kildow watched his daughter Lindsey Vonn mount a comeback. He watched her crash 13 seconds out of the gate. When interviewed after the debacle, he said, “She’s 41 years old, and this is the end of her career.” I understood his definitive fatherly perspective. She may or may not have learned much in that terrible fall – but he did, and he said it with the intensity every parent feels when they realize how seriously they misjudged the moment. It’s not always about getting up and trying to do the same thing again. It’s about getting up and asking, what’s next. What do I do now?

Life hurts. We fall and then, God willing, we get up again. That’s called being human. Living with loss. Hopefully, we learn a lesson in the process of getting up again. About humility and limits and what motivates us. About what counts.

Walking through Newton Center days after the big storm, I noticed a man shoveling his sidewalk. Why now, I wondered, days after everyone else had cleared their walks? I almost crossed the street to ask, but caught myself. Maybe he’d been away. Maybe sick. Maybe it wasn’t even his property. Or maybe – like most of us – he’d simply been putting it off. 

We’ve all been that person, staring at what needs doing and… not doing it. Not because we’re bad people, but because we just can’t seem to get it together. We stall out. 

Here’s what makes this struggle so universal: our brains evolved to prioritize immediate threats and rewards because that’s what kept us alive. But modern life demands something unnatural – the ability to consistently choose distant, abstract future benefits over present comfort. The relentless planning, deadlines, and delayed gratification that define our days? These are relatively recent demands on the human psyche. Research suggests that 80-95% of us struggle with procrastination. We’re not broken. We’re human. 

When we face a task, we don’t just assess the work itself – we experience emotions about it. Anxiety: “What if I fail?” Boredom: “This is so tedious.” Resentment: “Why should I have to do this?” Insecurity: “I don’t even know how to start.” Procrastination, researchers now understand, is primarily an emotion regulation problem. We delay not to avoid the task, but to escape the uncomfortable feelings the task triggers. 

This creates a vicious cycle. Avoiding the task provides immediate relief, which reinforces the behavior. But avoidance breeds new negative emotions – guilt, shame, mounting anxiety. These make the task even more difficult when we finally face it, which makes us more likely to procrastinate again. 

Every morning, I wake up telling myself: “Treadmill time!” And then I immediately… check my phone for messages. Minutes pass. I glance at the clock: “Hmmm, probably don’t have time now before work.” So I skip it, knowing full well I’d have a better day if I did thirty minutes on the treadmill followed by fifteen minutes of meditation. Sometimes I bypass the phone entirely and just do it. Sometimes I give in to feeling good now and guilty later. 

Our tradition has language for this struggle: yetzer tov and yetzer hara – not simply “good inclination” versus “evil inclination,” but the ongoing tension between immediate gratification and intentional living. The rabbis understood that this isn’t about moral superiority. It’s about being human. 

Judaism begins with the assumption that we are flawed. We avoid difficult tasks. We duck confrontation. We choose the easier path. This isn’t wickedness – it’s the predictable way we try to manage uncomfortable emotions. The tradition doesn’t demand perfection; it asks for awareness and return. 

But here’s what matters: excessive self-judgment only makes procrastination worse. The shame we pile on ourselves becomes yet another uncomfortable emotion to avoid, deepening the cycle. The wisdom tradition suggests something different – not harsh self-punishment, but patient self-awareness. Not “How could I be so lazy?” but “What am I feeling? What am I avoiding?” 

At a certain point, the yetzer tov breaks through – not through willpower alone, but through recognizing that continued avoidance will only compound our suffering. The voice that says: this won’t get easier by waiting. The feelings won’t improve on their own. Start small. Start now. 

rebhayim

Every year, MLK Day is a very moving time. I am inspired to reflect on who King was and what he did to change the world. Ultimately, he gave his life for the causes of justice and equality. King did so with a full heart and with open eyes. I remember learning of his death on the evening of April 4th, 1968, and feeling devastated. It was as if something fundamental had broken in America. It was as if the world cracked open, and all I could see was a looming, dark chasm.

In that bitter trough of pain and woe, of racism and assassination and Vietnam, I wondered whether we could ever break the cycle of violence. The numbers tell a grim story: in 1968, there were 23,875 total firearm deaths. This includes suicide, police shootings, accidents, and homicides. Outrageous. Even worse, in 2018, fifty years later, the number was 39,741 total firearm deaths.

The trajectory is demoralizing—and yet MLK Day is not meant to be a time for elegiac reflection. On King’s 97th birthday, our task—our duty—is to recommit ourselves to the vision for which he lived and died.

Three years before his murder, King gave a guest sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood. His words from that day still pulse with urgency: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. As we sang tonight, We shall overcome, because Carlyle is right: ‘No lie can live forever.’ We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right: ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right: ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet, that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown stands God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.’ With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discord of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up that day.”

This message still resonates with enormous force. We don’t roll our eyes and sadly intone how naïve this message was. We don’t eschew its contents as irrelevant. Rather, we embrace the hope King expressed. In this nation where violence is so ingrained in the fabric of discourse, we cannot succumb to its twisted path into chaos. King would never condone that. Neither should we.

The song goes, “We shall overcome—someday.” It doesn’t give a time and date. It gives a directive, a horizon to aim for, to believe in. This echoes a very contemporary Jewish theology: we work to bring the Messianic age without knowing if or when it will arrive. We don’t wait passively for redemption. We never stop working to bring more peace and more justice into the world.

Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning to become president of the United States in 1968, which is why he was in Indianapolis the night MLK was murdered. He was preparing to address folks, mostly all Black, in the inner city—the ghetto—of Indianapolis. His campaign staff got the news about King’s death and begged RFK to cancel the event and get out. The Indianapolis Police were convinced there would be violence and told Kennedy they were leaving, suggesting Kennedy should do the same. He refused to go. He was the one who announced King’s death. He bravely believed he could deliver this awful news to everyone there with sensitivity and grace. Without notes, he spoke from his heart with eloquence and honesty:

 What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our lives, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

 Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

The words and wishes of King and Kennedy—two leaders of my generation cut down as they sought tikkun olam, the repair of the world—still resonate. In times like ours, we need to hear them not as history, but as present-tense directives. Not as distant ideals, but as daily work.

We shall overcome. Someday.

Hanukkah approaches, and with it comes a boat-load of memories spanning my entire life. The early childhood celebrations remain hazy—I know we lit candles and ate latkes. My menorah was classic: squat and silver-plated, the kind that graced countless Jewish homes in the 1950s/60s. We learned the blessings in Sunday School. I can still recall singing them with my sisters and my mother.

But I can’t summon my father’s voice.

Thanks to VCRs and camcorders, I possess videos of my mother from her later years—singing, laughing, her particular cadence preserved. I can splice those recordings into earlier memories, retrofitting sound to silent film. But for my father, there is no such archive. His voice singing the blessings exists nowhere I can access it.

This is one of life’s peculiarities: we carry our dead within us, yet cannot always conjure their faces or voices at will. That moment when we first realize the pictures are fading, when the soundtrack trails off to a whisper—it’s profoundly unsettling. The information must be somewhere in our neural folds, but the brain operates with ruthless efficiency. What’s deemed nonessential gets filed away in cabinets we cannot open.

When we set up the hanukkiah each year, we’re issuing invitations to memory’s ghosts. We imagine ourselves as children, playing dreidel with cousins and great-aunts, with grandparents who smelled of specific perfumes and colognes, as the aroma of latkes filled the space. I’m certain these scenes unfolded in my life, but there’s no one left to verify them.

This is where myth becomes not deception but rescue.

I have constructed an origin story of family celebration. Is it true? Did these events unfold precisely as I “remember” them? For that matter, did the Maccabees truly find one miraculous cruse of oil that burned for eight nights? Did the Sea of Reeds actually part? Does it diminish Moses that historians find no evidence of his existence? Does it matter that I cannot prove I played dreidel with my grandfather in his Pittsburgh home when I was four?

A myth is neither lie nor trick—it’s how we choose to remember our becoming. These stories, processed and polished over time, offer insight into our present circumstances. They provide comfort. They fill blanks in the historical record with meaning. They make room at the proverbial table for our ghosts, giving them chairs and voices and the weight of presence.

The Hanukkah story itself teaches us this truth. We light candles not because we can prove what happened in that ancient Temple, but because the story illuminates something essential about perseverance, hope, and the human capacity for rededication. Our personal myths function similarly—they may not be documentable history, but they are true in deeper ways.

So I ask: What are your Hanukkah memories? Who are the ghosts that visit when you strike the match? What family myths have you constructed to make sense of who you are and where you came from? I’d welcome hearing your stories at rabbistern@bethavodah.org.

In the meantime, bundle up and prepare for candles and gelt and latkes—and ghosts.

The older I get, the more firmly I believe in the philosophical concept of duality. Light and dark, mind and body, love and hate. In its most basic form, duality describes how we often experience the world in terms of opposites or complementary pairs. Things exist in relation to their opposite—we understand warmth because we know cold, joy because we know sorrow.

But duality isn’t merely about recognizing that opposites exist. It’s far more transformative than that. It’s also about how understanding the relationship between opposites actually can transform us. Duality creates change and possibility rather than static opposition.

Put another way, it’s not about life or death: it’s instead about life and death. It’s all things wrapped up in one incredibly messy bundle. As Yossi Klein Halevi taught on a podcast, don’t trust a Jew who is not ambivalent. Leaning into a single perspective does not create understanding. A yin without a yang is dogma.

I mulled over these thoughts as I sat on the third floor of the Beth Israel Shapiro building in the waiting area for the urology department. It’s a big area, a ring of chairs that surrounds a wide-open center from the lobby to the floors above. My fellow patients and I wait to hear our names called. It’s like an old WWII movie: Smith! Sanchez! Chou! Fitzpatrick! Stern! All nationalities. And all ages in all phases of treatment. Some of us are in wheelchairs. Others are mobile. No one is happy about whatever treatment is waiting for us. But a glance around the circle spots no one running away. We know we have to be here.

Spend enough time in a waiting room and you learn its rhythms, how it hums. Most of the time, the third-floor waiting area is very mellow. Everyone sits quietly, phone in hand. We mind our own business. But yesterday, it was wild and crazy. Twice as many patients waiting our turns, staff scurrying a little more frantically than usual. Of course, we don’t know why, not that it matters. But it does redirect my thoughts in a different way.

Which, I suppose, is how I ended up here, pondering duality. Happy to be done with my treatment. Sad to contemplate how I ended up sitting here in the first place. So excited to be gathering for Thanksgiving. So sad remembering my sister, Marta, now gone. So thankful that a Canadian urologist, Alvaro Morales, figured out that the tuberculosis vaccine BCG had significant anti-tumor effects in bladder cancer. No one knows why, but it most definitely works. A bit muted, because bladder cancer has a high recurrence rate. So happy when they call my name. So disappointed that my very last round of BCG will not be done by Brian, the guy who’s given me all eight previous treatments, but instead will be administered by a new person. Oh well, I sigh as I get up from my chair, it’s the mess of life delivered to my door.

Thanksgiving underscores the essence of duality. In my joy for all the great moments in my life lived to this moment and the promise of unbridled simchas to come—including my son’s upcoming wedding and my grandson’s upcoming bar mitzvah—there is a running tally of loss and separation.

That’s not happiness or sadness; it’s happiness AND sadness. Which is what duality and life are all about. The relationship between my opposites actually continues to challenge and transform me.

This Thanksgiving, I’m learning to hold both the joy and the ache, the gratitude and the grief. That’s the wisdom point—it’s the mess of life, and it’s teaching me how to live.

The Stern Gang joins me in wishing you a beautiful Thanksgiving.

Every time it rains/It rains pennies from heaven
Don’t you know each cloud contains/Pennies from heaven?

The U.S. Treasury Department announced that the last, the very last penny, was minted in Philadelphia last Monday. There will be no more fresh pennies. Ever. A penny costs 3 cents to produce, making it a losing bargain for the Treasury. According to CNN, “Its current form arrived in 1909 on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, when it became the first American coin to feature a president. But it has declined in both use and popularity ever since. The Treasury Department now estimates that there are approximately 300 billion pennies in circulation. That comes to a bit less than $9 for every person in the United States. But most of those coins are “severely underutilized.”
I can’t argue the logic of phasing out the penny. From a macroeconomic level, it’s a sound decision. In various random spots around my home are jars filled with marbles, dry pens, paper clips, rubber bands, and pennies that have been stored in those jars for years. So I get their “underutilization.” But from a personal perspective, it’s very sad, this slow extinction event, and indicative of the passage of time and the things that slowly fade away.
You’ll find your fortune’s fallin’/All over the town
Be sure that your umbrella/Is upside down

For we children of the baby boomer generation, pennies were our primary currency. We saved them in piggy banks and smelly Dutch Masters cigar boxes. We could buy penny candy that cost one cent. Five pennies got us a pack of baseball cards, which included a piece of stale pink bubble gum inside. We felt flush having a pocket full of pennies. It dragged our pants down, but the extra-tight belt was worth it.
Change has a way of thoroughly erasing the past. Things that were precious to us become curios or punchlines. Rotary phones. Betamax. VHS tapes. Record players. Answering machines. Typewriters. Card catalogs. None of these things are, in and of themselves, culturally iconic. They are not lynch pins holding our way of life together. But they do represent things we never imagined would evaporate.
The end of the penny is a poignant reminder to everyone: all things must pass. We can protest and shake our heads, vehemently refusing to accept this fundamental truth. But the way of the world will not respectfully pull over and wait for our sadness and anxiety about change to resolve.
So when you hear it thunder/Don’t run under a tree
There’ll be pennies from heaven/For you and me
I understand that we’ll all have to round up or down whenever we pay a bill with cash (which is another endangered practice)—no big deal. Nickels will replace pennies in the cash drawer.. And when our great-grandchildren hear this old tune, Pennies From Heaven, will they ask, “What’s a penny?” Of course they will.
I hate losing one of the few objects of good luck from my childhood. What will take the place of lucky pennies?
Don’t we need luck more than ever right now?

A Pink Guitar

On Instagram, there is a man known as Plumes. He wears a jaunty cap, carries a pink Epiphone guitar, and travels to farms, zoos, and wildlife reserves worldwide to sing for animals. Horses, foxes, cows, lemurs, meerkats, tigers, and seals become his audience. He performs no screaming solos or rock covers. Instead, he plays quiet melodies—oldies and gentle songs—in a calm, cool voice while sitting in very close proximity to creatures who cannot possibly understand his words. And yet, they listen. They are mesmerized. Somehow, across the barrier of species, a man with a pink guitar communicates something profound.

I confess that I am not naturally an animal person. The dynamics of how creatures experience the world has never been a category of particular curiosity for me. But watching Plumes strum for a tiger—sitting peacefully behind a fence, making no demands, simply offering music—I found myself arrested by a larger question: What do these animals hear? What language are they receiving? Every species apprehends sound differently. Many creatures can hear frequencies that are entirely beyond the human range. And yet they all listen, transfixed by the same vibrations that move us.

Several years ago, a colleague shared a story that crystallized this truth. He visited someone on a memory unit—a resident in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease who had become almost entirely mute. The disease had stolen her words, her recognition, her ability to engage with the world through language. Faced with this profound wall of silence, my colleague made an intuitive choice. He decided to sing the Shema and V’ahavta.

As he chanted those sacred prayers, something extraordinary happened. The resident’s eyes opened wide. She began singing. For nearly two years, until her death, they sang together at every visit—prayers, melodies, songs from her past—creating islands of connection in an ocean of cognitive loss.

This woman was not cured by music. Her Alzheimer’s did not disappear. But this use of music is now a standard of Alzheimer’s treatment. Neuroscience explains what happens: music accesses memory and emotion through entirely different neural pathways than verbal communication. Even as the disease devastates the brain regions responsible for language and factual memory, the areas that process music remain relatively intact far longer. Patients who cannot recognize their own children sometimes weep at the sound of a beloved song. We are quite literally wired for music at the deepest level of our being.

My colleague recognized something profound: when language fails, music remains. When the mind fragments, melody holds. In the Jewish tradition, we understand this instinctively. We do not merely recite our prayers—we chant them, sing them, give them music. The Shema is not just words; it is an experience of sound and soul joined together.

What Plumes offers to animals and what my colleague offered to a woman with Alzheimer’s are expressions of the same fundamental truth: music transcends boundaries. It does not require shared language, shared cognition, or even shared species. It requires only the willingness to offer it and the capacity to receive it—capacities both far more universal than we typically imagine.

Think of what this means. In the presence of music, a tiger and a man sit together in peaceful attention. In the presence of song, a mind shattered by disease recognizes itself again. In the presence of melody, we remember that we are not alone, that our experience of beauty and longing and joy can be shared, that something in us resonates with something beyond ourselves.

This is not sentiment. This is neurology, biology, and spirit converging to tell us the same story: we are creatures made for connection. Music is one of the primary languages through which that connection speaks.

As we gather today to celebrate the installation of our new cantor, Gabe Snyder, we are not simply welcoming a skilled musician; we are also welcoming a dedicated leader. We acknowledge that Cantor Snyder does what Plumes does and what my colleague’s voice did: opens a channel through which the human spirit can speak and be heard.

In our tradition, music is not an accompaniment to prayer. It is not filler or pleasant background. It is part of the very substance of our spiritual life. When we sing Shabbat prayers together, we are participating in something that transcends the merely intellectual. We are vibrating together, remembering together, hoping together.

Gabe brings to this sacred work not only technical excellence but also his gutte neshumah—a good soul. And it is the soul that music truly conveys. It is the soul that moves across all boundaries: between human and animal, between the intact mind and the fractured one, between strangers who suddenly find themselves singing in unison.

We do not know what the seal heard when Plumes played the pink guitar. We do not fully understand what language passed between them. But we know something essential occurred—a moment of connection, of openness, of one being offering itself peacefully to another. This is what music does. This is what our cantor will continue to do, week after week, bringing the vibrations of our tradition into our sanctuary and into our souls.

I don’t know if he plays for his cat, but we’re all ears.

One day, in my early adolescent years in the mid-1960s, a thought burst forth from some deep corner of my soul that truly rearranged my sense of the Universe. I was sitting outside at the bus depot in Middletown, waiting for a 10 am NYC-bound Greyhound. I don’t know what it’s like now, but in those days, the station was a small house repurposed into a rather decrepit bus stop. The plain, slightly seedy look of it all didn’t bother me. It was a beautiful day, with wispy white clouds moving gently across the sky, and I was about to visit an old friend.

Another bus bound for Providence was idling as passengers boarded. I looked at the scene, the line of people slowly wending their way into the bus, handing over suitcases and bags. That’s when it struck me. These people I was watching —high school-age kids like me, college students, adults, men and women, and a few young toddlers —were all sharing this moment in time together. And I would never see them again. Ever. This was it.

At first, this thought was disconcerting. It exemplified the true randomness of existence and the sheer vastness of the Universe. Everyone in line had a story, but I would never hear them. We were destined to be total strangers. And more: even if you have a friend circle of 100 people, and you know some of their relatives and relations, the number of people you know is infinitesimally small once you realize that there are 8 billion humans on earth. We live in a world surrounded by the unknown.

These numbers and the tiny circles we inhabit make the people we do know and love even more important. To be known and to be loved are the foundations of humanity. We recognize that loneliness and disconnection can be traumatic and profoundly distressing. We may not know every member of our temple community, but when we gather, we share certain familiar stories that draw us closer.

I know that social media is rightly criticized for creating algorithms that draw people of similar opinions together, excluding a proliferation of other thoughts and possibilities. Pockets of conspiracy, lies about everything from the earth is flat to the moon landing was faked to vaccinations are bad and cause disease, to Jews are seeking to supplant the power of white people, all these and more are all toxic. The astonishing array of ideas in the world can keep us humble and always inquisitive.

But these algorithmic siphons don’t just channel the grotesque our way. Sometimes they bring enlightenment and insight. A few days ago, Jack DeJohnette died at age 83. Perhaps you don’t recognize the name. However, if you listened to jazz, DeJohnette was a legend —a truly iconic master drummer. He did things I found transcendent: beautiful, caustic, gentle, explosive, riveting: all in one tune.

Jack DeJohnette was not only a master technician but also deeply spiritual, a true artist who understood Music as a path to transcendence. In an interview, he once said, “”Music is a spiritual thing. It’s about touching people’s souls, helping them grow, and connecting them to something greater than themselves. He lived that philosophy in every performance, every recording, every moment behind the kit.

I went to hear him play years ago with the Keith Jarrett Trio at Jordan Hall in Boston. I mentioned this to a jazz drummer friend of mine, who expressed some envy over this upcoming gig. He said, “Jack is a supreme musician. If you want to know who keeps it all on track, listen to what he does with his cymbals.” I was skeptical but paid close attention to DeJohnette’s performance. And my friend was right. DeJohnette led the way with dexterity, grace, and muscle. It wasn’t just good Music – it was sacred.

My Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok feeds were filled with clips from performances by DeJohnette and comments from hundreds of jazz fans and musicians, all mourning the death of a truly great man. I found myself within a group of strangers – all sharing a dual sense of loss and appreciation. And it felt so good. Like singing together. Like praying together. 

rehhayim

A month has passed since my sister Marta’s funeral, yet the entire event still feels surreal. Part of me remains frozen in that first raw moment of loss. One image refuses to fade: looking down at her coffin at the bottom of the grave as I tossed in a handful of earth. I’d performed this same ritual as a rabbi so many times at so many services.  I did it at my mother’s funeral, and my brother’s too, but this time carried a sharper poignancy. Perhaps it was my heightened sense of vulnerability, my intimate knowledge of the disease that took her. Or perhaps it was simply the weight of having aged—of standing closer to the end than to the beginning.

There’s no celebration in this proximity to death, no prize or ticker tape parade. I know there are Jews who view this life as a prosdor, an antechamber to the olam ha-ba, the world to come—where God acknowledges our suffering and rewards our souls with eternal life, where we shed our pain and receive blessings and grace.

I wish I could embrace this traditional vision of what follows death. Marta endured more than her share of pain and suffering. If anyone deserved the gift of wholeness and an afterlife of ease, not to mention a parade and a tiara, it was my sister. But I don’t believe that’s her destiny—or mine.

When we go, we’re gone. Period.

Yet fragments do remain. The sound of Marta’s voice chanting Kol Nidre. Our duet version of Magen Avot. Her raucous laughter. These still play in my mind with perfect clarity. We delighted in each other’s company, and these recollections have no expiration date. They may never disappear.

But other things will inevitably fade. It’s the nature of spacetime itself—entropy flowing into chaos. The universe expands faster than light, pulling everything apart. Eventually, complete darkness will reign, with no sources of light, temperatures near absolute zero, particles separated by vast and ever-growing distances. No organized structures or processes will be possible. Time itself will become meaningless because nothing will change. Humanity will likely be long extinct by then, but the point remains: everything that’s put together eventually falls apart.

In the meantime—before oblivion—I hold both the sadness of loss and the warmth of love. Like all of us, I balance the blessings and curses accumulated over a lifetime. The juggling act can be exhausting, heartbreaking. Just yesterday, I spoke with a young woman about her upcoming wedding. When I asked about her grandfather, who died ten years ago, she didn’t just cry or tear up—she wept, genuinely wept.

It struck me then: humans possess this extraordinary capacity to love and grieve simultaneously. This is why parents cry at their children’s B’nai Mitzvah and weddings—life and death collide in a place so deep it defies identification. How many times has someone said, “I don’t know why I’m crying”? But I know: it’s Eros and Thanatos wrestling for our attention.

A part of my memory book is gone forever. Marta knew me like no one else could—we swam in the same womb, shared a lifetime of understanding. Now my sister Joan and I continue forward, carrying Marta’s laughter in our hearts, until our own end of time.