Tonight I would like to tell you a story.  The story is about me. I invoke this prerogative having reached the age of 70.  Seventy, according to tradition, is the year you achieve wisdom, so everybody, I got me some wisdom. That means you have to pay attention. Some of you for the first time!

This rather instantaneous wisdom started in May and I will be looking forward to having this wisdom do something special for my life.  The truth is I want to tell you several stories of my childhood.  The stories are connected in that they are all about my grandparents.  And, my great grandfather as well!  And they all deal with what I choose to identify as “lessons in respect”. Respect is defined as: to treat with consideration; the recognition of a person’s worth and the esteem for all living beings; deference, veneration and reverence are synonyms.   

One story concerns how you treat your own father. It teaches how you treat your own parents.  And, the other concerns how you treat other living beings – all other life forms - with respect.  I see these as lessons about respect that I learned very young that have stayed with me as personal memories and today is yom hazikaron, the day of memories. And much of the feelings of love are obviously embedded in the bosom of these stories. Love in many instances converges with respect. But whether you love them or not at any given time, our tradition teaches always show respect and honor your parents.

The first story is when I’m about eight and the second story I believe I’m about nine but I may have this reversed.  

My great grandfather we knew as Zayde Blau.  He was my mothers’ mother’s father.  

Some of the salient facts about the man are relevant. During my childhood he lived around the block with his daughter, my grandmother, on 55th St. We lived on 54th Street in Borough Park, Brooklyn.  He would get up in the morning and walk around the block.  He’d have his Yiddish newspaper with him.  And more important than anything else, as far as I was concerned, he could be trusted to have a cache of rock candy in his handkerchief. This was this transparent, translucent sugar piece that he passed off on me, and treated me with, secretly as his great grandson, from the earliest time I can remember.  He did it in such a way as to smile and to be surreptitious so we kind of bonded a little bit at that...

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I have served in the past as the rabbi of the National Institutes of Health where scientists conduct research and provide medical service impartially to individuals of all varieties of faith, nationalities, cultural traditions and every religious stripe across the board.  My fellow chaplains and I in the Spiritual Ministry Department of the N.I.H. worked as a team dedicated to addressing the religious and spiritual needs of all patients, their families and loved ones in a health care clinical setting. In times of personal crises and at various stages of a patient’s illness, through uncertain worrisome times and fluctuating degrees of recovery and return to health, as well as at life’s closure, chaplains provide spiritual and emotional support, and an attentive ear.

          Over a number of years I have conducted research on the affects of crises, trauma and catastrophe upon individuals who have walked through the valley of the shadow of death. My book, The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors, is based on an in-depth survey of over seven hundred Jews who endured the devastation of Hitler’s Europe. In that previous study conducted for the most part in Israel, I applied the most rigorous sociological research methodology to examine and determine how, why, where and when, concentration and death camp survivors were spiritually, religiously and in other ways, changed by their ordeal...

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