R. Arnold Jacob Wolf, z”l, "The Black Revolution and Jewish Theology" (Edited by Rabbi Noa Kushner; Essay originally published in Judaism, 1964)*
(1) At the convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis last June, a telegram was read from Martin Luther King appealing to the Reform rabbis to leave their meeting and come to St. Augustine to join with him in a creative witness to the struggle for equal treatment there. The officers and social-action chairmen of the Conference did not respond. Of the entire assembly, only some sixteen rabbis made the difficult journey south. The rest – the overwhelming majority – stayed on in Atlantic City. So did I.
I must ask myself what the meaning of my refusal to answer Dr. King’s call was, a refusal shared by nearly all my colleagues on this and nearly every other occasion. On the face of it, my record is as good as anyone’s: I have not only signed but initiated petitions for equal housing. I went on the Washington march in the summer of 1963 and another time visited my senator, Everett Dirksen, who informed me that clergymen had powerfully influenced his decision to support civil rights legislation. I have preached on the theme of racial justice ad nauseam. ...I have picketed a Jewish hospital together with Black workers asking for union recognition, though many angry board members of the hospital were on my synagogue board. I have raised as much money for SNCC and NAACP and ACT as anyone I know, and though those organizations have never put me on their decision making committee (perhaps they don’t have one), CORE did once throw me a birthday party. ...And yet I did not go to St. Augustine.
The most obvious possible reason is that I was scared. It is perfectly true that I am afraid of violence and even more of jail. My friends who have come back from Jackson and St. Augustine and Birmingham did not look well, at least for a while. Even a short stay in a Southern jail produces in most of my kind an hysteria which often culminates in either mania or depression. But I do not think it was jail I feared. I have risked more than jail for causes I supported much less strongly than the one in question. I am no hero, but I have done my duty even when it looked to cost more than this one did.
(2) The real reason for my refusal, one shared by nearly all my colleagues and, in my opinion, paradigmatic of the whole Jewish community, is a deeper one. It is more than the sum of my personal inadequacies. It is wider than the total anxiety of the community. It is not something we do when our worst natures take over; it is an act (or an unwillingness to act) that comes from our whole existence. When I said, “no,” it was a purer and more profound saying than any “yes” which I had more superficially produced before. When I had said no, I meant it. No – I do not really wish to work with you! I do not wish to swim with you! I do not wish to go to jail with you! I do not wish to eat your food or be one of you!
As an American rabbi, I am inevitably and incurably bourgeois. I live off men who live off workingmen’s work: entrepreneurs, ad men, promoters, small manufacturers, salesmen, tax experts whose function in American society is only to grease the wheels of capitalism—that very capitalism whose profits are squeezed from the machines destined to replace the African-American as America’s muscle. The American Jew is the most marginal and therefore the most loyal of capitalists. He lives on the fringes of the large corporation, doing its bidding on request, defending its policies which keep him in the waiting room but rarely give him the executive key. And because he is not quite in and not quite out, he defends most passionately American free enterprise, the good life of Life magazine and the TV commercials (which he writes, partly because he so desperately needs to believe them), and the lily-white suburb. The American Jew lives by his superiority to and distance from the African American and American poor. And I live off him. Both of us are terribly frightened by the new American revolution. Like most revolutions in the past, this one is likely to do the Jew no “good.”
(3) ...I have said we refuse because it will cost us too much to say yes. But will it not cost all white America a great deal too? How can we concede to power-hungry young demagogues of the African American community the right to make our decisions? How can we support hospital strikes, stall-ins that will clog the highways, meetings that denounce the mayor, fund-raising enterprises whose funds are never accounted for, young radicals who court death in the South provocatively and sometimes, we suspect, unnecessarily? How can a convinced bourgeois ever support an authentic revolution?
(4) If he does what he believes he should, he cannot. He will find “good” reasons not to. He will approve of integration but oppose every possible step toward it. He will support nonviolence (which secures his own skin) but never participate in direct action. He will ...listen to the sermons of Martin Luther King and cherish their homiletical skill, but he will not do what they ask him to do. The bourgeois Jew will hold art fairs for civil rights organizations and not demand to know where the money goes, because he does not really care. It is the show, the pseudo-action of support that counts for us, not the deeper negation it masks. Our minds and our hearts and our fearful flesh agree that the African American should be made to behave in a way protective of our own imperiled success. That is to say, he should remain our slave.
It is very pleasant to be someone’s master, to lecture Dr. King as a Birmingham rabbi did, to play cat-and-mouse with the revolutionaries as the best
of us do. It is very stimulating to sing the freedom songs and march in the freedom marches as I have done, and then retire to a suburban study to read Heidegger and Midrash, it is reassuring to do what I want to do and be able to believe it is the right thing I am doing. It is much easier to write about not going to St. Augustine that to go.
And so we have the enormous literature of Jewish affirmation-negation: the ...pretentious inanities of official rabbinic pronouncement, the pathetic false starts of the congregational social-action committees ...the reservations, the posturings, the agonizing, and the lies. With all our philosophic and literary talent, our American Jewish literature is utterly banal on the revolution. It cannot learn to say what it cannot believe, so it wallows in poignant irrelevance.
(5) What we cannot believe is that God is a revolutionary. So long as we act by our lights we shall act poorly, because our insights are really self-interest and our convictions mere rationalizations. Marx meant us when he said we do what makes us rich, and believe what lets us do. Freud meant us when he said that words do not express so much as suppress, that only acts can dissipate ambivalence. Our whole hope of wholeness is to find an Archimedian point, a place of relation in which we do not merely express our private wish but are revealed and commanded and empowered.
(6) Liberal Judaism quite early distinguished sharply the prophetic teaching of social justice from the more profoundly prophetic poetry of encounter. We liberals have tried to believe for a hundred years that there is no (personal) God and (Deutero-) Isaiah is His prophet.
But our own theological convictions have come home to roost. A God Who is my own best nature is not God enough. My own best nature does not care much about the [African American] or the poor. A God Who is Idea or Process or mere tradition is a God out of things, an ahistoric diety Who could not care less about Americans in revolution, simply because He cannot care. We have built our action programs on the shifting sands of humanist caprice, and it is no wonder now that they come rumbling down about our shoulders.
Thus Reform rabbinic pronouncements look just like statements from the ADA, and Judaism is merely the enactment of Democratic party platforms of some years back. Our Reform movement divides between the various theological neotraditionalists, on the one hand (Isaac Wise, Kohler, Cohon, Silver), who are silent in controversy and vote Republican, and the flaming liberals (Stephen Wise, Horace Wolf, Israel), on the other who eschew “mysticism” and want to get about the important business of making religious action come true. Both sides are finally disappointed: the old-fashioned theologians who produce no disciples because they could not connect their
word with their God (they don’t speak up), and the liberals who have only the same old political liberalism to sell, because they know no Teaching God to teach them something new. The same thing happens in Conservative and Orthodox circles: on the one hand, disciples of traditional theologies who cannot speak to the cruces of their time, and, on the other, the perpetually up- to-date who cannot convince because they merely enunciate and never discover, because their words speak louder than their acts.
(7) The radical isolation of God from man, the loss of mitzvah, the refusal to see our own time as God’s kerygma (proclamation), has castrated us and left us powerless to act. What one sees in the Black revolution is people not trying to get what they want (Dr. King ....has more to gain elsewhere; even the very poor have their lives to lose) but seeking what they have been made to know is wanted on high. The revolt of the underprivileged against us who are overprivileged is not simply a war for redress; it is also incipient revelation.
(8) We Jews are ambivalent because in our heart of hearts we think we are free. The African American ....is emancipated because he has discovered that no man but only God rules. Nonviolent direct action is an affirmation of the Kingship of God, that God alone is Power, but that we are yet commanded to act. Judaism has become violent nonaction, a principled inactivity which, profiting from the exploitation of other men, is therefore built on violence and force. The African American defies police power and fierce human opposition to obey God; we are loyal to our privileged communities and seek better police protection while by every act and by every refusal we defy God. (9) Thus is revealed how we have lost that sense of commandment by which alone (and not easily, in any case) a man or a people can transcend themselves and learn to fulfill other people’s needs before and even in opposition to their own. Only out of the excruciating dialogue of prayer and confession and hearing can a person or a people learn to obey God and their world to God.
(10) I believe most of us know this much. We know that the obedience to commandment is the only path to encounter with God. And therefore we withhold. We refuse, as a community, the sacraments of prayer and devotion. We refuse he central command to study sacred texts. We refuse to segregate ourselves as a holy community or to integrate ourselves with the great unhappy multitude of people. We refuse to support with our money whatever certainly signifies the sacred. We systematically diminish the synagogue, the rabbi, the custodians of tradition, and those who seek a new way to mediate revelation. And we do these things, uniquely in all Jewish history, not because we are athiests but davka because we are anxious believers.
If God were dead, as the philosophers feared (or hoped; it may come to the same thing), we should not need to run so fast from God. If we were full hearted epikorsim (heretics), we could even do right and not fear that God was behind it all. We could dispense with the secularized synagogue, phony religious education, and our naïve and ritualistic social-action programs. But we know, somehow, that God is not dead, nor does God sleep. We know that God is present all God’s ancient and terrible wrath, and therefore we seek to evade God with all our refusals.
(11) The charisma of “We Shall Overcome,” the martyrdom of the Reverend Bruce Klunder (the Unitarian minister killed in the South), the preaching and work of Presbyterian leader Carson Blake and the neo-Orthodox King have no present analogies in the Jewish community and are likely to have none. Our only prophets are novelists whose pens scratch gall, or poets of another time who have lost God, or rabbis fiercely loyal to their calling but forgetful of Who it is that called them. Even our most alienated Jews know that in the great American rallies and private agonies, we Jews are strangers. We no longer know how to pray for forgiveness and hence cannot work with poignancy or effect. All our touted institutional wisdom remains abstract. All we good men trying to be better are not good enough for times that demand heroes and not simply decent folk.
...When the Messiah comes, he will not find the Jews ready, because we have not committee charged with discovering the Man of the Millennium. What is more to the point, we do not want to know where the revolution moves and by Whom, for we guess by a racial intuition (or just plain common sense) that where thousands are gathered in God’s name, God too is there.
(12) To meet God is to face annihilation and rebuke. It is to be cast into the dust and hurled to the sky and again cast down. It costs a lot of money. It hurts. It undercuts all the comfortable and conformist housing that we use to cover us against the rain. It lashes us with a wind of awful, rushing force. It sends us back to the Bible no longer critical and cool but whimpering for a word of consolation. It sends us back to the synagogue not for Bar-Mitzvahs and self- congratulation but for atonement and instruction. It sends us back to our own loved ones surprised they have not been swept away by the vengeance of a just God.
What we fear from Martin Luther King, what I feared to find in St. Augustine, is not only a hard job but a hard Taskmaster. My liberal theology had protected me again surprise or rebuke. The God of my father and grandfather had learned to be polite. Chastened, God did not has for much, nor, to be sure, promise more. God was decorous and decent. God was a true Liberal.
But that God could not help me or mine when we walked into a shadowy land. He was only a name. He was only an Idea. The true God Who found me in my personal despair and Whom I have ever since evaded with more ingenuity than success is the same God who finds our black brothers and in their American Egypt and has promised to set them free.
(14) I owe this God something. A tithe of my money; a tenth part of the total budget of congregational and communal funds. A building one-tenth as find as our own building built by us for us. A tenth of the time I would rather spend playing or reading or basking in the affluence that mistakenly God had given me. Concern. Concern for one poor person, one black person, for all poor people, for all the hidden disadvantaged.
But I must not pay aggadically, out of the goodness of my crooked heart or the shame of my acquisitive community. Rather: halakhically, legally, as a constituent requirement for membership in the community, as dues financial and moral for the privilege of being a Jew. Of every ten words I write or speak or publish, one must be for those not of my skin or condition, Formally, unimpassioned, bound. Unsentimentally, relentlessly, I must pay.
I pay God by repaying not what I think I owe nor by doing what I should like to do, but by responding to God’s prophets, the emancipators, and to God’s friends, the poor...
(15) ...The Jewish community must become a pressure group for higher taxation (which would, more seriously than is now contemplated in Washington, moderate the economic gaps), for mental health (which is the most tragic problem of the poor), for civil rights. What is needed is not mere pronouncement, which is everywhere felt to be ...unimpassioned, but direct action under the rule of Torah. This kind of involvement will frighten many Jews away. If it is authentic and rigorous and not merely bourgeois do-goodism, it will make all of us anxious. But it is also capable of purifying, partly by diminishing in number, the mixed (insincere) multitude that constitutes our Jewish polity today. And who knows what allies, human and superhuman, we might thus acquire?
The time for refusal is over. Judaism teaches that we achieve theological insight not by Greek speculation nor yet by mystic ecstasy, but by living Law. Our goal is not impossible self-realization. Our aim is not coldly ethical. What we seek, and in seeking begin to achieve is the meeting with God Who has chosen us from among all nations to suffer and to witness.
(R. Arnold Jacob Wolf, “The Black Revolution and Jewish Theology,” Unfinished Rabbi, p. 84-92).
*Note: Rabbi Noa Kushner edited the word “Negro” in original essay to Black or African American so as not to distract modern readers.
From "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 16, 1963
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God’s nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means You, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true You of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets
God does not reveal himself in abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affected by what happens in the world, and reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorry, pleasure or wrath...He reacts in an intimate and subjective manner, and thus determines the value of events...This notion that God can be intimately affected, that he possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God.
Franz Rosenzweig: Law [Gesetz] must again become commandment [Gebot] which seeks to be transformed into deed at the very moment it is heard. It must regain that living reality [Heutigkeit] in which all great Jewish periods have sensed the guarantee for its eternity. (FR, On Jewish Learning, 85.)
Walking Along Jew Street
I try to walk the road of Judaism. Embedded in that road are many jewels. One is marked "Sabbath" and one "Civil Rights" and one "Kashrut" and one "Honor Your Parents" and one "Study of Torah" and one "You Shall be Holy." There are at least 613 of them, and they are of different shapes and sizes and weights. Some are light and easy for me to pick up, and I pick them up. Some are too deeply embedded for me--so far at least, though I get a little stronger by trying to extricate the jewels as I walk the street. Some, perhaps, I shall never be able to pick up. I believe that God expects me to keep on walking Judaism Street and to carry away whatever I can of its commandments. I do not believe that He expects me to lift what I cannot, nor may I condemn my fellow Jew who may not be able to pick up even as much as I can...
I do not "accord status" to the commandments. I do not feel permitted to rate them in advance of performing them. In principle, no commandment is inferior to any other. But some are in fact unavailable to me, some are dependent on a land in which I do not live, some on a world that is not my world. Some are just too heavy for me to lift. That is no reflection on them or, perhaps, even on me; it is just so. Any Orthodox insistence that every Jew must do the same thing at the same time in the same way is oblivious of human differences. Liberal subjectivism that lets every Jew be his own god forgets our deepest need to become what we are not yet by serving a very great Master. Neither Orthodox nor liberal, I try to be a Jew. [AJW, Commentary Symposium, August, 1966]
Franz Rosenzweig [the early-twentieth-century German-Jewish theologian] refined our understanding of liberalism and the law by accepting in principle the whole of traditional halakhah but living only that portion of it that he could conscientiously perform. He would answer for those details of the law that he could not himself enact by pleading "not yet." I have described this view in recent years as "walking along Jew Street picking up all the packages of mitzvot that one can handle and leaving those that are, for the time, still too heavy." This view has the advantage of not identifying the whole tradition with that portion of the tradition that we find personally congenial, and yet leaving us not feeling guilty about that portion of it that we simply cannot live with in our time and place. And, as long as we have not eliminated parts of the halakhah from the Jewish agenda just because we find them too difficult or remote, there may come a time when we, or our descendants, will recover those portions. [AJW, Moment, September 1983]
https://www.jta.org/2008/12/25/culture/obama-wolf-not-just-neighbor-but-friend
My Neighbor, Barack
By Arnold Jacob Wolf
Not everyone can claim to be the neighbor of a Presidential candidate – I can, though, because I am.
Barack Obama’s Chicago home is across the street from KAM Isaiah Israel, the Hyde Park synagogue at which I’ve served for 27 years. He spoke to our congregation as an Illinois state senator; more recently, his Secret Service agents have made use of our, shall we say, facilities.
But it’s not neighborly instinct that’s led me to support the Obama candidacy: I support Barack Obama because he stands for what I believe, what our tradition demands.
We sometimes forget, but an integral part of that tradition is dialogue and a willingness to disagree. Certainly many who call me their rabbi have taken political positions far from mine – just as Barack Obama’s opinions have differed from those of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The candidate recently gave a speech which made abundantly clear that he and Wright often disagree. Obama condemned Wright’s “incendiary language,” and “views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but… that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.”
Of course, race is only one issue on which Wright has stepped beyond the bounds of civil discourse. He’s frequently made statements regarding Israel and the Jewish community that I find troubling. But to limit our understanding of Obama to the ill-conceived comments of the man who once led his church is dishonest and self-defeating.
Obama’s strong positions on poverty and the climate, his early and consistent opposition to the Iraq War, his commitment to ending the Darfur genocide – all these speak directly to Jewish concerns. If we’re sidetracked by Wright’s words, we’ll be working against these interests. After all, a preacher speaks to a congregation, not for the congregation.
And still many remain concerned that Obama isn’t committed to Israel. Some want him to fall in line behind the intransigent, conservative thinking that has silenced Jewish debate on Israeli policy, and enabled the Bush Administration’s criminal neglect of the diplomatic process.
Clearly, though, anyone who thinks Obama waffles on Israel hasn’t been paying attention. In 2007, he spoke to AIPAC about “a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel”; today, his website states clearly that America’s “first and incontrovertible commitment in the Middle East must be to the security of Israel.”
For my part, I’ve sometimes found Obama too cautious on Israel. He, like all our politicians, knows he mustn’t stray too far from the conventional line, and that can be disappointing. But unlike anyone else on the stump, Obama has also made it clear that he’ll broaden the dialogue. He knows what peace entails.
Speaking recently before a Jewish audience in Cleveland, Obama did the unthinkable – he challenged the room. He talked about the need to ask “difficult questions” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “I sat down with the head of Israeli security forces,” he said “and his view of the Palestinians was incredibly nuanced…. There’s good and there’s bad, and he was willing to say sometimes we make mistakes… and if we’re just pressing down on these folks constantly, without giving them some prospects for hope, that’s not good for our security.”
Yet, in spite of all of Obama’s strengths, there’s another truth we’ve been loathe to admit: Among some American Jews, race plays a key role in the hesitation to support the Obama candidacy. We’ve forgotten that Black and Jewish America once shared a common vision; in the civil rights era, I and many in our community stood shoulder to shoulder with the giants of our generation, demanding freedom for all Americans.
Obama himself doesn’t share our amnesia, however. “I would not be sitting here,” he said in Cleveland, “if it were not for a whole host of Jewish Americans.” That was literal truth, but not everyone remembers it.
I’ve worked with Obama for more than a decade, as has my son, a lawyer who represents children and people with disabilities. He has admired Obama’s dedication and skill as he worked on issues affecting our most vulnerable citizens.
Obama is no anti-Semite. He is not anti-Israel. He is one of our own, the one figure on the political scene who remembers our past, and has a real vision for repairing our present.
Barack Obama is brilliant and open-hearted; he is wiser and more thoughtful than his former minister. He offers what America, Israel, and the Jewish community need: a US President willing to ask hard questions, and grapple with difficult answers.
I am very proud to be his neighbor. I hope someday to visit him in the White House.
Letter from President-Elect Barack Obama
Funeral of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf December 26, 2008 Chicago, Illinois
Letter from President-Elect Barack Obama
Funeral of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf
December 26, 2008
Chicago, Illinois
I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, who was not just our neighbor, but a dear friend to Michelle and me. We are joined in this time of grief by the entire Hyde Park community, the American Jewish Community, and all those who shared Rabbi Wolf's passion for learning and profound commitment to serving others. Today we bid farewell to a titan of moral strength and a champion of social justice.
Rabbi Wolf always remained true to the meaning of being a rabbi: he was a teacher. He took great pleasure in delving into Judaism's ancient texts, drawing out lessons about right and wrong, and inspiring young people to engage the world and strive to improve it. He transformed the historic tradition into a catalyst for Tikkun Olam - the sacred pursuit of repairing a broken world in our own time He taught us by example that we must pray not just with words, but with deeds - and that we must truly live the meaning of "love thy neighbor as thyself.”
In the great Rabbinical tradition, Rabbi Wolf was passionate and provocative in this work - and my conversations with him were always lively. You knew that if he disagreed with you, he would let you know in no uncertain terms - especially if he thought you were overlooking the moral dimensions of an issue, or rationalizing your own failure to live up to the highest moral principles. But he did it with kindness, and often with a smile or a laugh to let you know that even though you were just plain wrong, and had no idea what you were talking about, he still loved you.
Rabbi Wolf's commitment to justice started early in life. As a young rabbi serving at a turbulent time for our nation, he was determined to fight discrimination of any kind, and his involvement in the Civil Rights movement alongside Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel helped strengthen the bonds between the Jewish and African-American communities.
Rabbi Wolf embarked on an historic experiment with the founding of Congregation Solel on Chicago's North Shore. Solel, which means "trailblazer," describes him well. He was proud to have Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an honored guest speaker. He was among the first to introduce to Chicago the writings of Elie Wiesel and Holocaust studies. And he never shied away from controversy or challenge when he saw an opportunity to advance the cause of freedom.
Throughout Chicago and in Jewish homes and classrooms across our country, Rabbi Wolf's name is synonymous with service, social action, and the possibility of change. He will be remembered as a loving husband and father, an engaging teacher, a kindhearted shepherd for the K.A.M. Isaiah community, and a tireless advocate of peace for the United States, Israel and the world.
And I will always be personally grateful for the support he showed me as I embarked on my own journey. In a piece Rabbi Wolf wrote on my behalf months ago, he wrote that he was proud to be my neighbor and that he hoped to someday visit me in the White House. In the end, however, the honor was all mine. And while he may not have lived to pay that visit to the Oval Office, I hope that his spirit of love, his love of learning, and his deep dedication to serving others will live on in the work I do each day. May his memory be a blessing and a comfort to us all and an inspiration for the generations to come.