Words of the Week
“None of us had ever met this Rabbi before, and he ended up getting around 30 percent of his speech correct. I was standing with my grandmother’s body on my left and my mother to my right as this backup Rabbi started the eulogy: ‘We’re here to celebrate the life of … it’s here somewhere … one second … Miriam Bat Leah.’
Someone corrected him. ‘It’s Leah Bat Miriam.’
‘Leah Bat Mariam,’ he continued, ‘such a loss!’
A pattern emerged: He would confidently say a line, we would correct him and he’d shamelessly just repeat the entire line in the same cadence with the new information he learned mid-eulogy.
‘The Holocaust destroyed a beautiful life she and her family had in Poland.’
‘Czechoslovakia.’
‘The Holocaust destroyed a beautiful life she and her family had in Czechoslovakia.’
He was basically reading from a Holocaust funeral Mad Lib he had in his siddur.”
Source: Eitan Levine, “Burying My Bubbe During a Pandemic” (The New York Times)