He Never Hung Up

My best friend's father died this week. The rabbi asked how we want to be remembered, and I can't stop thinking about who we're forgetting how to love.

Irving would stay on the phone for twenty minutes after his grandson walked away. The boy was four. He’d wander off mid-FaceTime, the way four-year-olds do, gone to find a toy or a snack or nothing at all, and the phone would sit there pointed at an empty room. Irving waited. He knew the boy would come back, and he wanted to be there when he did.

I learned that on Friday, at his funeral. Irving was my best friend’s father. You go to a funeral for the living, and I went for my friend. I did not expect to leave thinking about how we treat each other. I left thinking about almost nothing else.

The rabbi talked about a question the rabbis have been turning over for two thousand years. How do you want to be remembered?

There’s a passage in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, where a teacher sends his students out with one assignment. Go find the good path, the one a person should hold onto for life. They come back with answers. A good eye. A good friend. A good neighbor. One says it’s seeing how things end before you begin them. Good answers, all of them. Then the last student, Elazar ben Arach, says the good path is a good heart. And the teacher stops the room. That’s the one, he says. His answer holds all of yours inside it.

The classical commentators explain why. The heart is the engine. The good eye, the good neighbor, the rest of it, none of it runs without a good heart underneath. Get the heart right, and the rest follows. Get it wrong, and nothing else counts for much.

Irving had it right.

In Judaism, we say the soul is a candle. “The soul of a person is the candle of G-d,” from Proverbs, and it’s why we light a small flame when someone dies and let it burn. The candle goes out eventually. The flame doesn’t, not really. By then, it’s already lit other things.

Irving spent his life making sure nothing went dark. He was a writer, in the way ordinary people are writers. He kept journals. He wrote down the moments the rest of us let slip past and lose forever. And he’d text his son passages from years earlier, things he’d recorded when they happened, sometimes in a private code only the two of them could read.

A man who spent decades refusing to let memory disappear is now the one being remembered. He fought, forgetting his whole life, and he handed his son the flame in a language only they shared.

There’s a custom at a Jewish burial. You don’t lower the casket and walk off. Each person takes the shovel and places earth into the grave with their own hands. In many communities, you don’t pass the shovel hand-to-hand. You set it back in the dirt for the next person to lift, so you never hand your grief to someone else to carry.

We call burying the dead chesed shel emet. The truest kindness. True because the person you do it for can never thank you, never repay you, never even know. You do it for nothing.

Irving’s life was full of that kind of kindness. When his granddaughter couldn’t get the hang of a bike, he didn’t just sign her up for lessons. He taught her himself. He couldn’t stand to see anything wasted, food most of all, but really anything. To a fault, his family said, smiling as they said it. He was still madly in love with his wife after all those years, the kind of love people quietly stop believing in until they see it up close.

A man who couldn’t bear to throw away a scrap of food.

If the truest kindness is the one you give to someone who can never repay you, then the cheapest cruelty is the one you aim at someone who never did a thing to you.

We are doing a lot of the cheap things right now. Not to strangers across the world. To people closer than that.

Antisemitism is climbing in this country. Plenty of it is right where you’d expect. The torches in Charlottesville, the “globalist” wink, the open antisemites who keep getting handed microphones and follower counts. That’s real, and it’s deadly, and I’ve never been quiet about it.

But the kind that unsettles me lately doesn’t come with a tiki torch. It shows up in rooms full of decent people who would be horrified to be called bigots. Their anger about the war is often real, and plenty of it is fair. The trouble is what rides in underneath it, an old idea about Jews that sounded true enough to share without a second look. They aren’t monsters. They’re good people who picked up something ugly without checking what it was.

You’ve seen Wicked. Half the country has, twice. You remember the Wizard, the charming fraud at the center of Oz, and the quiet thing he admits about how power really works. “The best way to bring folks together,” he says, “is to give them a real good enemy.”

You wept for Elphaba. The green girl was turned into a villain because it was useful to somebody. You sat in that theater, and you knew exactly who the bad guy was, and it wasn’t her.

You can criticize the Israeli government. I do, often. It has earned plenty of criticism, and there is nothing antisemitic about saying so out loud. Palestinians are human beings with every ounce of dignity you and I have, and their suffering is real.

Honest criticism isn’t the thing that scares me. The slide is. When “the Israeli government” becomes “the Israelis,” and “the Israelis” becomes “the Jews.” When an argument about policy turns into an old, old story about hidden money and secret loyalties and a people who can’t quite be trusted. That story is centuries older than the state of Israel. It has killed a lot of people like him. And every time it comes back, it shows up wearing the costume of whatever the moment is angry about.

That’s the Wizard’s trick. Somebody hands you a really good enemy, your heart goes a little colder, and you never quite notice the moment it happened.

You don’t get to write your own eulogy. Irving didn’t write his. His family wrote it, in the way they talked about him, in a grandson who will grow up knowing his grandfather waited on the line for him every single time.

But you’re writing yours right now. Today, in what you repeat and what you refuse to pass along, in whether you stop to check the ugly thing or just hit share because it matched how you already felt.

A good heart, or a good enemy. You’re choosing one. We all are.

I’ll tell you where I am. I’m tired. A lot of us are. Two and a half years of explaining, of biting my tongue at dinner tables, of watching people I love repeat things that would have embarrassed them a few years ago. Sometimes I told myself it was exhaustion. Sometimes, if I’m honest, it was that I wanted everyone to still like me. Some mornings I’m scared in a quiet, ordinary way I never used to be. The easy thing, the thing my gut keeps reaching for, is to stop answering the phone.

Irving didn’t. Not even when the boy walked away, leaving him talking to an empty room. He waited because he knew the kid would come back, and he wanted to be there when he did.

That’s what a good heart looks like when you slow down to see it. Not grand. He just refused to give up on people.

A lot of good people have wandered off the line lately. They picked up a story that turned someone into an enemy, never checked it, and walked away from the better part of themselves without knowing they’d done it.

I’m not ready to hang up on them. I don’t think Irving would be either.

May his memory be a blessing.