Remembering a friend

This past Saturday night, tens of thousands of people attended a rally in Tel Aviv commemorating the life – and more specifically – the death, of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, who was murdered 15 years ago by a right-wing extremist.

At the same time, I was with about 1,000 other people commemorating the death – and more specifically – the life, of a friend, RivkA Mattitya, whose long battle with cancer finally came to an end on Friday.

On one hand, the cancer won out in the end – it claimed the life of another victim. On the other hand, maybe RivkA won the battle – after all, she is no longer suffering and in pain.

No matter which of them can be declared the “winner”, there is no question in my mind that the rest of us have all come out as the losers in this one.

I won’t spend this blog eulogizing RivkA too much. I doubt that I have anything to say about her that hasn’t been said by anyone and everyone that had the opportunity of knowing her. What’s more, I hadn’t really been in touch with RivkA for the last 3 or 4 years (which I referred to in my blog on October 20) but there are a few things that I feel that I can and perhaps even should share about her.

First of all – her name. You may have noticed the capital A at the end of RivkA’s name every time that I type it. Yes, I often do type a capital letter when I don’t intend to (the fun of having “full-figured” fingers and not being a particularly skilled typist). But this time it is completely intentional. One of the first things a person would learn about RivkA upon meeting her is that her name is pronounced Riv-KA – emphasis on the second syllable, as opposed to the more common pronunciation on the first syllable. She would never get angry about the pronunciation, but she left no doubt that this was more than a mere “request” or preference. This was how she expected her name to be pronounced when she was being spoken to.

And nobody had a problem with that (it may have been hard to remember sometimes – but only one time per conversation).

There are a couple of things that speak the loudest for what an amazing woman RivkA was. One, obviously, is the number of people that attended her funeral. Over 1,000 people coming to a funeral – after the Sabbath, at 10:00 at night (we won’t even go into the idea of being in a cemetery at midnight the night before Halloween…). More than half of the people in attendance stood outside – in the relatively cold weather, listening to nearly an hour and a half of eulogies, all to pay tribute to this woman.

People don’t do that – especially not that many people, for just “anyone”. They do that when they feel that the hole being left by a person’s passing is a significant hole, and they wish to join together in love with others who are feeling the same sense of loss.

The second thing that emphasizes (for me, at any rate) the affect that RivkA had on people is actually based on Facebook. She and I have 78 “mutual friends”, which in and of itself is not so unheard of when you have a lot of Facebook friends. What amazes me about the 78 mutual friends that we share is how many different times and places in my life these friends represent. It’s not that we shared a big circle of buddies all in touch on Facebook – but rather, she is friends with people I know from Jerusalem, from Modi’in (where I currently live), friends that I knew when I studied at Bar Ilan University, and several other sources of my friends – most of which RivkA had not been with me. One of the friends that posted on her wall after she passed away on Friday is actually a friend of my wife from her childhood!

RivkA touched people all over the place – religious and secular, in Israel and abroad, old, young and everything in between.

She kept a blog throughout her battle with cancer – called “Coffee and Chemo” in which she not only chronicled the fight for her life, but also shared her vast wisdom about a plethora of other, more personal subjects. RivkA was an open book – she was never shy about sharing anything, or about asking anything about those with whom she spoke, and regarded as friends. Her openness, her honesty, and her love of her fellow mankind were an inspiration, and she will be sorely missed.

The last thing that I would share about RivkA was mentioned at great length in every single eulogy delivered the other night, and rightfully so, because more than anything and everything else, it was her most defining quality. Anyone who had the pleasure of knowing RivkA can probably already guess that I’m referring to her love and commitment to her family.

Years ago, when I was studying in yeshiva (a learning center of Jewish texts, thought and tradition), a student asked one of the Rabbis about the Jewish view of life after death.

The first thing that the Rav said was that, as with pretty much every topic, there is no “one” Jewish view or approach, but many. All the more because, since nobody has yet died and then come back to tell us what was going down on the “other side”, we can’t really know, we can only guess.

The second thing that the Rav said was that there was one of the approaches in Jewish thought to life after death that particularly appealed to him. He said that the way that a person touches those around them while they are alive determines their “life after death”. Not in a spiritual, or hard to grasp way, but something much more down-to-earth. The way in which we relate to those around us – the love we show our friends, family, colleagues and even strangers – stays with them in some form or fashion. When that effect is a positive one, then those touched by us, in turn are able to touch others in the same way (maybe it’s just me, but it sort of reminds me of the old (and very annoying) commercial for Faberge shampoo – “they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on…”).

Here, it’s the same thing. What people gain from us, they pass on to those in their lives, who in turn pass it on to those in their lives, and so on, and so on, and so on. In that sense, a part of us can continue living forever – through the legacy that we leave with those that we love and that love us in return.

If all of her friends are feeling the loss of RivkA as strongly as we are, I cannot even begin to imagine the emptiness being felt right now by her husband and 3 children. My thoughts are with them, as are my prayers that they – and all of us are able to keep all that we were fortunate enough to gain from knowing RivkA, and continue passing it on to those in our lives, and in doing so, that we will always keep a big part of RivkA alive.

May her memory always be a blessing.