Eulogy for My Father, 8.12.2011

Last time many of us were here together, I said that it had been forty-one years almost to the day since I had spoke from this podium on my Bar Mitzvah at age 13. Sadly, today, it has been only 70 days since the last time I spoke from this podium, June 2, 2011, the date of my mother’s funeral. It is much too soon for us to be reunited here again. Much too soon.

In writing the words to follow, I realized that they were meant as much for my 13 year-old son’s ears as in praise of my father. In order to heal, I have to look forward as much as back. I believe Morris Brown believed this also. You will see why.

They say that the child is the father of the man. To me, this means that the man is formed from the child and becomes a mensch, through the right kind of teaching and experience. A mensch, in Yiddish, is a person of integrity and honor, a real human being of character.

Morris Brown was a mensch. He was, and remains, the moral center of my life. He was a vast repository of knowledge and wisdom. He was not a chatterbox. He would say something to you once in his laconic, unequivocal way, and you remembered every word, just the way he said it.

Morris Brown loved the law, the Jewish religion, his family, his colleagues, and his fellow human beings. As a trial lawyer, in chanting the book of Jonah every year for decades on Yom Kippur, and as a son, brother, husband, father, colleague, and mentor, he played a key speaking role in our lives. More important, he taught by example.

He taught me that no one is superior or inferior. Every one is equal.

He taught me respect for authority, as much as I resisted.

He taught me that there is honor in all work.

He taught me to sacrifice.

He taught me to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome, often starting with self-effacing humor.

He taught me to love knowledge. You knew who and where you were if you understood the world. He avidly consumed historical biography and several newspapers a day, front to back.

He taught me professional ethics and to make disinterested decisions.

Indeed, he taught me to smell conflict-of-interest until it was second nature, intuitive.

Like others before him, he sought to make a just world that he would be proud, content, and safe to live in.

He taught me to tell the truth and that the truth was not always pretty.

I his last weeks, his dignity seemed to stand out as even more refined and compelling amidst the insults of the hospital.

Last Wednesday evening, as I hand-fed him his dinner, he looked at me straight in the face between small bites and said, “this is just what I did for my father every night when he was in the hospital.” His sentiment was both universal and very Jewish. In one sentence he encapsulated what a son should learn from his father and demonstrate without prompting generation after generation. David Hersh ben Moshe ben Fishel.

Yesterday, I handled my father’s effects that I had collected from him just before he went boldly into surgery. Glasses, watch, wedding ring, and wallet. I had been carrying them with me everyday for twenty four days. His wallet contained no pictures but one, a laminated Little League baseball card of Manny, my son, smiling in batting position. He didn’t need other pictures. He knew what we looked like, that we were formed. Manny had his whole beautiful life ahead of him. So when you think back on this morning, thing of this card.