This is my memorial altar. It used to have a Kwan-yin with her multiple hands and arms that found its way to us from Vietnam, and a gorgeous Maria of Guadalupe that came to us from Mexico, but I gave both of these away to very dear people. Now there’s a white Buddha there, given to me in turn by a dear friend.

Below the Buddha is a photo of my mother at a wedding in her older age, surrounded by family, happy to see future generations prospering after her own childhood of deprivation, Holocaust, and war. At the other end is my father with me. My mother was furious about their late divorce after close to 45 years of marriage and wanted nothing to do with him.

And where are the two of us? At the site of the kibbutz they fought to defend during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, when he was wounded. Armed only with guns, they successfully defended against a stronger Egyptian advance with artillery and planes, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, later to become Egypt’s president. But the kibbutz was too close to Gaza and they’d lost one-third of their members, not to mention homes, so they were told to abandon it and restart it further north, where I was born a year later. On his 80^th birthday, my sister and I took him on a tour to visit long-ago friends and family, and there, by the old water tank riddled with bullet holes, she took this photo.

In the middle of it all is Bernie, who probably had a more direct influence on me than anyone else other than my parents. Whatever trajectory I imagined for my life earlier, it completely changed after meeting him.

There, too, is my friend Cynthia Taberner, others, ashes from various dogs who accompanied Bernie and me in our life, both together and apart, and finally an old one of Bruce Mayrock, who attended the same Flatbush Yeshiva High School I went to before attending Columbia University and who lit himself afire at the UN Plaza in New York to protest the starvation in Biafra. In the note he left behind, he called it genocide. I knew nothing about it till a 25^th high school reunion when his name was mentioned among those who’d died young. A fellow classmate told me about him, shaking his head. Setting yourself on fire is not what Jews are supposed to do; life is precious.

I don’t usually sit or light incense on Sunday morning, but I did yesterday reading about Gaza. I can’t stand it, I told the photos on the altar. This is beyond historical narrative or imperative, beyond what you’ve been through and your legacy to your children, beyond beyond, as the Heart Sutra says at the end.

Certain threads of my karma are easily identifiable, I’ve reflected on them over many years: Holocaust family, the lure of Zionism where Jews will be safe, exhaustion from all that history and mythology and a closing of the heart, and finally finding words that spoke to the heart and re-opened it: May all beings be happy. All beings, human and not.

“Just be a mensch,” the man used to say towards the end of his life. He didn’t say be Buddha, though that was in his very marrow. He said: “Be a mensch.” And not just in your personal life, because there’s no such thing as a personal life. You’re one small, changing element in a constantly transforming world. Tiny, if you wish, miniscule, no word to show how small, but also no word to show how big because you are that infinity of being.

I must have cut the photo of Bruce Mayrock from some publication at our 25^th year reunion, one which they probably replicated from an old yearbook showing a young man in a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie, hair combed to the side, obviously dressed for yearbook photos in 1967. Looking forward to his future, as high school seniors usually do.

With his own hands he cut that future short just 2 years later. The photo identifies him this way: Bruce Mayrock, A”H. What is A”H? Abbreviation for the Hebrew: Alav HaShalom. Peace be upon him. What we wish for the dead. What he wished for the living.

I look at him and wonder: Was that the only way you could have peace, by ending your life? Vietnamese monks did it, but a Jewish man from a Long Island Jewish family? If there’s one message you get from your months in the womb, it’s: You must survive. You must live! How else, in the face of this life, can you have peace?

Many will say that he was crazy, that it takes some degree of derangement to douse yourself in kerosene and light a match. Derangement. Comes from old English that comes from old French. Ranger—put things in order, put soldiers in a rank or row. When you derange things, take away order, you must be crazy.

But what about when the range itself is crazy? What about when the categories and concepts you’ve attached to your experiences and teach your children and grandchildren, what about when they’re crazy? Not the experiences themselves, they are what they are, wonderful or horrific, but the various drawers you’ve later put them in with labels, much as I once put into order a communal kitchen and typed out labels for drawers and cabinets: CUTLERY; GLASSES; COFFEE CUPS; TO BE POOR IS TO FAIL; KILL OR BE KILLED; NEVER FORGET.

The house I live in now, the kitchen I cook in, doesn’t have labels because I know where everything is, right? Bernie always laughed at how I put our kitchen straight: “This is where you put the oils, above the oven?” “This is where you put the large plates?” Some of my order was disorder for him, but then, he enjoyed disorder.

I look at Bruce Mayrock’s photo. How do I stop the killing on the other side of the river, I ask the old koan. The starvation, the destruction of entire neighborhoods by bulldozers (no, not planes or soldiers hunting for Hamas terrorists, but bulldozers designed only for demolition of families’ homes). And it’s not so much on the other side of the river, is it, I ask Bruce, because my government now and earlier, Democrat and Republican, sent billions of dollars in arms. The Israeli government can’t do what they do without American arms and support.

It’s a rainy Sunday morning and I know what’s ahead of me. Walk the dogs soon when the rain stops. Take my currently disabled housemate food-shopping. Come home, finish up some bookkeeping, prepare for several very hot and humid days.

Yesterday I sat for 4 hours, part of a monthly one-day retreat, and felt a deep stillness. This morning, I look at Bernie’s photo and imagine his tongue-in-cheek remark: Stillness is nice. Half the time he talked you never knew whether he was being serious or not. But he would shake his head at wanton death and destruction. Just be a mensch. Just be a mensch. And bring peace unto all. We don’t have to kill them, or let them kill themselves, to have those words follow the names. Now, not later, not after they die, bring peace unto all.