Epilogue as Prologue

I sit in the departure hall at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, and I begin to put words onto paper. Where this will lead I do not yet know. I have for some time now been bursting with thoughts and feelings. Intellect and emotion have dammed up in me. Damned up, perhaps? Is it a cliché to say that I have begun to wonder what I am doing here? Not here in New York, but Here, in Life? The turmoil within has been welling up for ages. Ten, twenty, maybe thirty years. I am not a bookish person. Until relatively recently I read novels. Almost always, novels. Not for some time now. I am consumed with politics, history and philosophy. The Management of Life. Peter F. Drucker never wrote a book about that. Or maybe he wrote all his books only of that? I wonder. The turmoil within is indeed of many years. But it has been well dammed (damned?). I am the ultimate dammer. I keep in. Cost me my colon – that, I was not able to keep in. Ah, such is life. Keep in the emotion. Keep out the colon. There is a connection between the emotional and the physical. And it costs. However, since the death of my father – Adoni Avi Mori, my master, my father, my teacher – Rabbi Josef Jakub Fogel, may his righteous memory be a blessing, I am like the Dutch child with his finder in the cracking dike holding back the water. This crack is temporarily stopped up, but the developing cracks elsewhere in the dike permit seepage and before long the water will truly gush. Maybe that is why I am starting to write down what’s in my head. Dr. Meir Tamari told me some months ago to write. What should I write?, I asked then. He said, whatever you want, but write. So now I am writing.

I think this may be my manifesto, my legacy to my family? Will this be my dybbuk? This is a private family joke. So I will write about my thoughts and of that which resounds in the hollows of my mind. My introspection has increased since my father’s death. My pursuit of happiness has taken on greater significance in my life and in my pursuit of happiness. Life should not be a potato, filling, yet somewhat tasteless. Life should be a journey through the spice filled markets of experience. A search for the beautiful and (dare I use the word) the meaningful and the sensual and the spiritual and not necessarily in that order or in any order, but inclusive of all of these. Experientialism, I will call it. Life should be experientialist. Not hedonist, but experientialist. What is the difference? The difference is that my understanding of hedonism implies pleasure-seeking without a spiritual dimension. It may not be an accurate definition, but it is as I understand it. I do not condemn it nor judge it. But it is not mine. Experientialism demands that I seek out the world. One of my favorite stories is of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, leader of German-Jewish Orthodoxy in the late nineteenth century who very late in his life exerted himself to visit the Alps. When asked why he had done so, Rabbi Hirsch apparently responded: “After 120 years when I appear before God and He asks me ‘Have you seen my Alps?’ I want to be able to answer in the affirmative.” It is a spiritual imperative to visit the Alps. The Alps are a metaphor, of course. The teaching is that there is great beauty in the world. Everyone should see them. Believing people should regard seeing them as a religious imperative. A mitzvah, if you wish. See the world. Experience it. God wants you to do so, so that in the end of your days you will be satisfied with your life. My pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of satisfaction. I want to die satisfied. I know it will not be a complete satisfaction, but that is of no matter or consequence. It is not your task to complete the work, it is taught in Ethics of the Fathers, but neither are you free to desist from it. I don’t want to desist from it.

My mother’s death did not result in this introspection. Is that because her death, when it came, even though sure, was still a surprise, a shock, a devastation, a soul-rending experience for me. It was the first time death had entered my door. The pain of my mother’s death was a physical pain. It hurt me in every pore of my being. I had no cell that did not hurt. Could it be that this was a result of the knowledge that my mother had been actively neglected to death in the hospital? My justification at that time was that I believe that our lives end when they are supposed to, and God organizes things in such a manner that we die when we do. Mazminam Lepundak Echad. Thus God, I believed then, organized for my mother to be actively neglected to death. God organized for the cardiologist to be neglectful in not insisting that the nurses wash their hands before they treat their patients, and for all the doctors to be neglectful in not insisting that she receive sustenance and not remain unfed for three weeks, and for the nurses to be neglectful in not washing their hands before they treated my mother thus themselves bringing on the infection that killed her. And this in a hospital called Gates of Justice. It almost sounds Catholic. The thing is I then bore no anger against God for organizing my mother’s death. We die. We live and we die. It’s the way it is. Thus though I knew my mother would die on the day she did – the doctor told us “the situation is very severe” (words I would hear again, possibly from the same doctor, in a different, wonderful hospital, a week before my father died) and that we were talking of hours, not days. Yet, when I left my mother the night she died, I was completely certain that I would see her the next day. In retrospect I imagine that somehow my denial of what was about to happen would not happen because I was denying to myself that it could happen. Denial is the great enabler of escape.

I did not look upon my mother’s face after her death. When I returned to the hospital after she had died her face was covered. I did not lift the sheet to see her. I did not want to see my mother in death. I am not sure today if that was a wise decision or not. It is what it is. I did not want to see my mother in death.

My father’s death on the other hand was equally sure for me, yet being present as his soul departed his compact, larger-than-life, small, thin, body has left me with two life-changing experiences. I have witnessed life coming into the world with the birth of my three children, and I have witnessed life departing this world as my father’s heart ceased to beat. Bearing witness to death, peaceful though it be, changed something in me. I do not know what it was that changed. But seeing my father, unconscious but connected to a respirator, watching the heart monitor detailing the diminishing beats of his sweet, good, kind, righteous, giving heart until it flat-lined, seeing the color of life draining instantly from his beloved face as the angel of death completed his task of the moment, changed something in me. A wondrous event. Exquisite in its painfulness. This is the experience that has moved me to action. What kind of action? I do not yet know. One action is putting these words onto paper. What a contrast! Life begins and ends. The stuff of life is transitory. Paper, paper-thin paper, remains as a testimony to the stuff of life that is the epitome of fullness. All life is reduced to paper and sometimes not even to paper. A fifteen minute eulogy at best and you are put into the ground, but not into the ground. Your body goes down. You live on, on the paper, and in voice and sound and cellulose. Now, you live on digitally. Eternity in ones and zeroes. A puzzling phenomenon.

Many years ago, when my father visited my sister and her family, he asked my niece "Where does Saba come from?" to which my niece replied "Airport". Oh, The lovely, sweet, gentle, beautiful and factual innocence of childhood. And so my father became "Saba Airport." Today I davened in a minyan twice at Kennedy Airport. Mincha & Maariv. Who would have thought? There is comfort in saying kaddish at the airport for "Saba Airport."

I am home. The return to Israel comforts me. Hamakom Yenachem Otcha Betoch Shear Avelei Zion Virushalayim. The greeting for the mourner. The Place will comfort you among the mourners for Zion and Jerusalem. Which Place? Traditionally, the reference is to God. The Omnipotent will comfort you. I like it the other way. The Place will comfort you. Which Place? Every place that was important to my parents comforts me. Most of all Israel comforts me. Returning to Israel comforts me. The sweltering heat in the sleeve connection to aircraft to the airport building overcomes me in its comfort. I am embraced by the sticky, heady air of Israel. It comforts me. Visiting my parents' apartment, now empty, comforts me. Seeing their tombstones, their final Place, comforts me. Ramat Pinkas comforts me and Thaba 'Nchu comforts me and Carletonville comforts me and Johannesburg comforts me and Cape Town comforts me and Netanya comforts me. Ra'anana partially comforts me.

The driver taking me home from the airport complains about a multitude of illnesses that are the stuff of life in Israel. I long to be at home. To see my chidren and be again in the arms of my wife, partner, friend, lover, confidante. To hold and be held. Welcome home.