About a week ago, on a Monday afternoon, I attended the funeral procession for Naomi Rosenberg, a dear community member who lived here, in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a period of time.
A few years ago she moved to Allenton.
We all remember her. She was an active member of the community for many years, always volunteering if assistance was needed, organizing various events and programs.
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I was reminded of all this when I attended the funeral.
When the funeral was over, her two children, Robert and David, came to me to thank me for helping organize the Jewish funeral. We talked about her character. I always knew she was a quintessential "Yiddish mother," Judaism was always important to her. She loved the holidays and kept all the traditional Jewish foods and customs.
Robert and David told me about their experience as children in Ohio.
When I asked them how they remembered their mother as a child, they replied that they remembered difficulty. They said it was hard for them to stand out as Jews and they were always afraid of anti-Semitism. Their mother enrolled them in Jewish school, but they didn’t like going there. Mother Naomi wanted a Jewish education for her children, but the children didn’t cooperate.
They didn't even throw them a Bar Mitzvah celebration.
When I heard this, I pictured the deceased. I knew her. It was clear to me that she wanted a Jewish Bar Mitzvah celebration for her children. I was sure that she had been pained over the years that her children had not celebrated their Bar Mitzvah. She would surely have wanted to share her love of Judaism with them.
I said, maybe it's time, right now, to fulfill a dream she never got to see come true. I asked Robert and David if they wanted to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah.
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The situation was bizarre. We were standing at the gates of a cemetery, after the funeral procession. Two orphans. We went outside and shook hands. The brothers were eager to put on tefillin. To say 'Shema Israel', and to pray.
Tears welled up in their eyes as we sang "Siman Tov and Mazal Tov." They knew that their mother, who had just been buried, was standing above, clapping with her two children.
I never thought I would attend a funeral and two bar mitzvah celebrations in the same hour. But this week it happened.
It took me a while to digest the experience. Before my eyes stood the language of the Zohar about sadness on the one hand and joy on the other.
When we have sorrow in life, we wonder how we can be happy. But even when we are sad, we can also find a bud of joy at the same time. Our hearts are big enough to contain both of these movements together.
