Quite a day yesterday. Lunch with an old friend who started our conversation with the news that his wife has just been diagnosed with breast cancer and is having surgery next week. Her prognosis seems to be good, but – as they say – who needs this?

From there, I went to the funeral of Rabbi Bill Rudolph at Beth El in Bethesda. I was one of maybe 500 (maybe more?) in attendance. It was a two hour funeral, and if it had gone on for three hours, I don’t think anyone would have complained. I have known Bill for more than ten years and we worked closely together on the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee, but there was so much more about him that I did not know. Yes, I knew his basic career – his education at Hebrew Union College, his work at Hillel both on campus and nationally, his decades at Beth El, and his post-retirement work, but that was only a part of who he was. One of the rabbis who spoke shorthanded it by saying that he was giving a eulogy for two people – for Rabbi Rudolph and for Bill. And then there were his two sons and his daughter who spoke – not only with love and appreciation for their father, but with humor that he would have appreciated and that he fostered in them. And to top it off, a eulogy given by his wife of almost 40 years. It was an A+ funeral. And I know that Bill took an active role in planning it. My immediate reaction was to send him an email to tell him how well his planning had worked out.

As a glutton for punishment, I couldn’t let the day stop there. After we picked up 2 year old Izzy from pre-school and had a quick supper, Edie and I went back to Adas Israel and joined about 20 other congregants listening to Joshua Kulp (not someone I had heard of before) speak about shiva (the Jewish 7 day mourning period) and why, when the mourning period is interrupted by a Jewish holiday, you normally cut the mourning period, not observing the customs either during the holiday or after the holiday is over. It was a talk about history, as evidenced in Talmudic writing.

Perhaps this is not a topic of great interest to most, and in fact I thought the session was a bit helter skelter, but I did pick up a few tidbits. For those rabbis and families who have shortened traditional shiva from 7 to 3 days, I learned that there was at least historical precedent for treating the first 3 days of a 7 day shiva differently from the last 4. When I heard that, for Rabbi Rudolph, the first night of shiva was to be for family only, I was surprised; last night I heard there was historical precedent for that, as well. And I also learned that funeral services in synagogues were a relatively recent phenomenon, that for centuries there were no such funerals held, except for perhaps individuals of great accomplishment and esteem. This brought me back to my father’s 1979 funeral, when my mother wanted it to be in the United Hebrew sanctuary in St. Louis, and was told that was impossible and it was held instead in the common room of the temple’s education center. And later when my mother passed away in 1987, and my sister wanted my mother’s funeral in the synagogue and put up quite a stink, finally reaching an agreement that the funeral could be held there, but the casket would be placed in a side aisle, and not in front of the ark. I remember not understanding why United Hebrew and its rabbi (who was close to my mother) objected so consistently. Maybe, this was also because of some historical precedent and synagogue ritual committee standards. Hard to credit this position to such precedents for a quite Reform institution, but…..maybe so.