Editor’s Note: Carney delivered a version of these remarks at Toby’s funeral on Sunday, February 4.
You always knew exactly where you stood with our inimitable friend and congregant Toby Stein. My most vivid and lasting memories come from her role as an invaluable if sometimes disquieting truth-teller.
I have lately, with the help of my friend and onetime college roommate Frank Aronson, embarked on yet another of my adventures as a recent Jew–synagogue-hopping on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Last shabbat, we visited the legendary Spanish and Portugese Synagogue on Central Park West, home of Congregation Shearith Israel. (more…)
Present at Creation, only God can begin
His people must begin again
And again And again
We cannot accept imposed ending
Thrown down, we get up
And do it again (more…)
A tidy euphemism denotes
Flotsam of ships of state
Left as a tide of blood recedes
The savage Twentieth
A century of refugees
Displaced millions
The music had caught me. I swayed in time and began to sing along with the musicians, three elderly black men singing in harmony and playing rhythm and blues. The three had propped themselves and their battered instruments against a bench beside the tracks at a midtown stop on the Lexington Avenue subway in Manhattan. My adolescent daughter looked at me with faint embarrassment; I could hear the unspoken “Oh, Dad!”
I was pretty sure Rachel had never heard Stand By Me. I was entirely sure she had never heard her Dad burst into song in a public place.
