Light damns

On the train coming home today, reading about the obsfucation inside our community I had a flashback to 1973. I was standing in Ansche Chesed in the rabbi's office the day my father was nifter. I was begging him to intervene and stop my mother from cremating him. His response was, he's your mother's husband, I can't intervene, its her right to do as she wants.

My father was already considered 'dead' by the Jewish community; he married a shiksa, his own famiy sat shiva for him and never spoke to him again. Our jewish neighbors didnt speak to him (or us). For everyone, my father was dead long ago...it didnt matter what my mother did with him, his body, I counted him as a Jew, the rest of the world had already discarded him. I doubt he would have received a jewish burial or had been allowed to be laid inside the cemetary among Jews if the rabbi had helped us. Years later after obtaining his ashes from my mother, he was buried finally, outside in a special area with others not allowed a space among jewish dead.

Its not easy being 'chosen', too many wrong choices and you might as well be in an ari miklat.