The novelist-philosopher Tom Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again, and I did last night for one of the eloquent interludes of my life.
You may remember that a month ago, one of the two wisest elderly men to illumine my life, Joseph Cahn of Venice, my teacher and moral role model, died after spending most of the past year hospitalized.
Since Judaism is about precision, he didn’t “pass” or “pass away,” he died – not “about” a month ago but exactly 30 days ago.
The ritual my former synagogue community in Venice celebrated last evening was a Shloshim, Hebrew for thirty.
Mr. Cahn’s beautiful family – Betty, his widow after 67 years of marriage, Yoel, his son, and wife and their large observant family, and Mr. Cahn’s fellow learners, Alan Lipman, Dr. Allen Shoff and Mark Abraham – among dozens of others met just after sundown in a satellite synagogue.
For 2½ hours, the men, the women and the extremely attentive children closely inspected, vividly replayed and vigorously honored the golden memories that Mr. Cahn unobtrusively created, with Mrs. Cahn, during their 30 years in the community.
We experienced the only significant form of climate change that matters – stepping from the dusty, often deafening, frequently vulgar environment of our daily lives into a compact, brilliantly lighted oblong room drenched in exactly the amount of nourishing spirituality that suited each person’s palate.
Relatively intimately, every person in the room was richly influenced by Southern-born Mr. Cahn’s extravagantly modest, immutable menu for living.
His thirst for learning Judaism, trailing into its most arcane corners, matched his desire for being productive, of pragmatic service to the world.
He worked at his profession, as an engineer, until his final year.
Two days ago, Mr. Cahn would have turned 93 years old, and much of last evening’s learning happily centered on where and how he spent it.
