Closing a circle, 37 years later
I closed a thirty-seven-year circle this Sunday at the consecration of a tombstone for a man I never knew.
Last year, as I drove to the local cemetery to officiate at a funeral, the funeral director phoned. “There is a funeral right after the one you are doing. The man has no living relatives and no rabbi. Would you be able to officiate?”
My rabbi instincts kicked in and I agreed. I rushed from the first funeral – all the way at the far-flung new section, one-and-a-half kilometers at the top of the cemetery – to the chapel to conduct the next funeral (which was back up at the new section, too). Puffing as I rushed to meet the waiting crowd, I quickly got a thirty-second glimpse into the deceased’s life so I could scratch together something of a eulogy.
Snow flurries swirled around us as we trudged up to bury John Doe. For a man with no family, he sure had a crowd of friends. All seemed truly sorry to see him go, and I gleaned that Rob was a man with a massive heart who lived for others and paid scant attention to himself.
We lowered his casket into the ground and shivered as we shoveled sand into the grave. Something had caught my eye about his name, so I used those few moments as friends covered the coffin to ask the one question that had niggled me through the entire procession.
“Margolius, it’s an unusual spelling of the surname,” I asked his friend. “Do you know who his parents were?” I was going on a Talmudic hunch, mixed with my Chabad sixth sense.
The answer confirmed what I had suspected. “They were humble people who owned a shoe repair store next to Balfour Park shopping center.”
Bingo! I remembered the Margolius family. He, lanky and stooped, was reserved and arthritic. She, with steel-wool hair, was a straight-shooter who could called life as she saw it. They were on my Friday Tefillin route back in the ’80s. I remembered the couple well. Of all the rabbis in Joburg, I’m certain I was the only one who knew them. They weren’t the Shul-going type. When their son passed away, Hashem ensured that the one rabbi with a connection to the family would be there for his final send-off.
It made for a powerful eulogy for a man I had never met.
On Sunday, we unveiled his tombstone – my chance to close a circle I had opened in October 1987.
We shivered less from the cold this time, but I had goosebumps reading the epigraph on his tombstone. It was a poetic testament by friends to a man who had lived and loved without a tinge of ego.
I surveyed the crowd, friends who had collaborated to ensure he had a Jewish burial, a dignified send-off and a beautiful tribute etched in stone. I imagined this is what Bilam saw when he gazed over the Jewish camp, hoping to curse us but singing praises for the beauty of our tents. He must have seen how the Jewish community pulls together. When our enemies see how we care for each other, their hatred melts into praise and blessings.