Some post Yom Kippur thoughts

There are moments that can occur during the observance of a holiday that change how you experience that holiday each subsequent year.
Those of us who attend Yom Kippur services each year read over and over again our desire to be inscribed in the book of life. As we say the confessionals each year we hopefully think about our own lives in the balance.

The Yom Kippur of 2009 that message was made all too real. Rafi Lehmann, the son of our dear friends, was across town at Mount Sinai in the ICU. he had been there for the previous three weeks.
On that Yom Kippur Rafi’s family had to make the terrible decision to remove hi from life support. “Who shall live and who shall die”, indeed.

Last year, during Yom Kippur we knew that my father in law’s death was an any minute sort of a thing.

Rafi’s death was by any reckoning a tragedy. My father in law was 97 and had lived a rich and full life.

This year, the life of no one I knew was in the balance. Yet my experience of the day was colored and changed by those two Yom Kippur memories.

Rafi with his father

Morris at age 14

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