Living a Year of Kaddish

Chapter 1 The last time I saw my father was in August 1999, one month before he died. I was in Israel on university business, mapping out a trip to the Holy Land as part of a spring seminar that I teach at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. At that point, I hadn't seen my dad in a year and I could tell immediately that his health had deteriorated. My father was a vigorous man who, curiously, became more relaxed and more adventurous with age, especially after he moved to Jerusalem in 1992. Six days a week he went to a daf yomi class in the Orthodox neighborhood of Geulah, a short drive from his home. Daf yomi is a system of study in which a folio page of Talmud is studied each day; at that rate, the entire Talmud (all 2,711 pages) is covered in a little over seven years. For my dad, daf yomi was part intellectual, part devotional (the study of Talmud is in itself meritorious), and part social event. His daf yomi study group was made up of about thirty men in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties, most of them from the United States, but some also from England, South Africa, and Australia. English was the language of discourse, although the text was read in the Talmud's original Hebrew and Aramaic. The class was led by Rabbi Eliezer Simonson, who like many of his aging daf yomi students was a retired American pulpit rabbi. My father had spent his life buying, selling, and managing real estate in Hartford, Connecticut, and retired to Israel at the age of seventy. But he too was a rabbi, privately ordained in 1944 after graduating from Yeshiva University in New York. Several of the other men in his Jerusalem daf yomi class were, in fact, classmates of his at Yeshiva University. Here, some fifty years later, after raising families and building careers, they were together again, reading the very same texts they had studied as young men. Shira, our kids, and I spent the academic year of 19971998 in Jerusalem, and during that time, I sometimes joined Dad at daf yomi. He introduced me to his friends with great enthusiasm, and then we sat down to study. I was surprised by how easily I fit into his world of Torah learning, a world I had drifted away from. In the year since I'd last seen him, Dad's doctors had discovered cancer in his right lung. They had taken out the lower lobe and were confident that they'd gotten all of the cancer, but the operation seriously weakened his heart. He recovered enough to resume his cherished daf yomi routine, but he could no longer drive to the class in his own car. Either friends would pick him up or he'd take the Number 14 bus right on his corner. He walked slowly and with a cane. But his spirits were good. He was excited that I was visiting and he encouraged me to stay in the extra room in his apartment on Lloyd George Street. But I was traveling on an expense account, I told him, and I was looking forward to staying at the new Jerusalem Hilton. I promised to take my Shabbat meals with him. I arrived in Israel on a Friday morning, took care of some business, tried to catch up on my jet lag (I can never sleep on the plane), and then met Dad at his apartment for the walk to synagogue. It was a walk that we'd taken together many times beforedown the main thoroughfare of Emek Refaim, across the railroad tracks over which trains never ran on Shabbat to the neighboring community of Bakka, and then down Yair Street to the old domed-roof Yael Synagogue. My father's gait was unsteady, and he leaned heavily on my arm. What was normally for him a fifteen-minute walk, was taking twice as long. He stopped often, ostensibly to point out a new store along Emek Refaim or to listen to my answer to a question he asked me about my children. I remember feeling frustrated at how slowly he was walking and how often he stopped, especially on the waGoldman, Ari L. is the author of 'Living a Year of Kaddish ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780805211313 and ISBN 0805211314.