Over the last two days we have been celebrating the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashana – which naturally invites what is called in Hebrew a cheshbon nefesh, a spiritual accounting. This can take many forms, partly depending on whether you are religious, and partly depending, it seems to me, on how far you are along life’s road.

This was, for Bernice and myself, a rather sobering Rosh Hashana, because of some very sad news that we heard on Friday, as we were preparing for the festival: a very good friend of many, many years, after a year of fighting cancer, had died. I have been wondering over the last couple of days just why this death, more than some others, has moved me so deeply. I think I have identified a few reasons, which I would like to share with you today.

Andy Golstein, of blessed memory, was one of that fairly small circle of friends whom we have known forever (55 years for me, 60 for Bernice) and whom we have stayed in contact with, more or less unbrokenly, for all of that time. She and Steve, her husband, were already an ‘item’ at Hanoar Hatzioni winter camp when I first knew them. We were very close until they came on aliya in the late 60’s. In the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur war in ‘73, Bernice and I volunteered for three months on the kibbutz where they then lived. When we holidayed in Israel in 1983, we met up with them. In the 34 years since our own aliya, we have seen them fairly regularly at parties, barmitzva celebrations, weddings, milestone birthday celebrations. Andy was one of a small group of people that, for us, had always been part of our personal landscape.

Andy was extraordinary, without being in the least exceptional. She was, quite simply, a lovely person: always smiling, always completely engaged with whoever she was speaking with, generous of her time and her hospitality, gentle and cheerful; I counted her as a very close and special friend, and I suspect that many, many others did as well, because that was how she made you feel. The world without Andy is a poorer, greyer, duller place.

She was also, in the deepest sense, a life partner of her husband. I never knew either of them without the other, and how Steve will cope with the loss I cannot imagine. Our sadness at our loss is compounded by our sadness at his loss.

There is, I think, another reason, more to do with myself than with Andy, and it was this that I really wanted to explore today. This is not the first time a close friend of mine has died. In 1968–69, I spent a year in Israel on a Zionist leadership programme, and became friends with another extraordinary person, a Canadian, Lyle Isaacs of blessed memory. This was a very intense year, and we spent a great deal of time together and became incredibly close.

As I reread my description of Andy above, I see that every element of that description fits Lyle as well. In addition, to quote from the Canadian Young Judea website, “To many of us, Lyle had the most to offer of all the human beings we knew in this world”. Those of you who did not have the privilege of knowing him will have to take my word for it that this is no exaggeration. The summer a year after we all returned from Israel, he died in a traffic accident. The news reached me at Summer Camp, where I was Camp Director, and the gaping hole I felt in my life was all the more painful because there was no one with whom I could share this loss: nobody else at camp had met Lyle. I felt utterly alone, and was devastated and not really able to function for the rest of that day.

And yet, Lyle’s untimely and senseless death did not cause me to reflect on my own mortality.

Twenty years later, a film, TV and stage actor called David Rappaport took his own life in California. You may well remember him from his starring role as the leader of the dwarves in Terry Gilliam’s film Time Bandits or in regular guest appearances as a criminal lawyer in LA Law. I had grown up with David, of blessed memory, and for a couple of years we were fairly constant companions at Hebrew classes in Ilford three times a week.

David was born with a form of dwarfism, and by age 10 or 11 was already markedly shorter than his contemporaries. However, I can honestly say that, in his company, I was never aware that he was different, and that is overwhelmingly because David himself seemed completely unconcerned by his dwarfism. I remember a very funny, very creative, very energetic boy, and, the last time I saw him, a very powerful Mosca playing opposite Paul Scofield’s Volpone on the London stage.

When I heard the news of David’s death, I was shocked, because of my memories of him being apparently at peace with himself, and because of his very successful subsequent career. However, again, possibly because of my age at the time (40), and possibly because of the circumstances of his death, I did not consider how his death reflected on my life.

Andy’s death has affected me in a completely different way. I suddenly realised that Bernice and I are now at a stage in our lives when we are much less likely to be making new friends, and much more likely to be losing old ones. This is a very sobering thought. Fortunately, we have several close friends who are younger than we are, and we can therefore expect (once we get to the other side of corona) to be celebrating with them, God willing, several more weddings.

However, the realistic expectation is that we will increasingly meet at funerals and shiva houses. I remember a friend of my late mother, of blessed memory, a woman who was blessed with a wicked sense of humour, remarking that she now knew more people in the Waltham Abbey Jewish cemetery than outside it.

A synagogue is a good place to see this natural development in action. The children of shul members who played outside when we moved to Maale Adumim 24 years ago are now married with children of their own, and when we reach the point in the service where mourners say kaddish, whereas 24 years ago there might be nobody to recite it, today there is usually a chorus.

So, I understand that this is part of the natural rhythm of life; however, that is a less uncomfortable fact to be aware of when you are at the beginning of the cycle than as you approach the end. I expect that I will, in time, adjust to this new (or, at least, newly realised) reality, but, for the moment, I can take comfort only from my mother’s mantra when people commiserated with her ill health: “Beats the alternative!”

The penultimate word, today, I leave to Ogden Nash. I couldn’t remember the title or exact wording of this piece of verse, so I looked through the 508 pages of his Collected Verse to find it, only to discover that it is, appropriately, the very last poem in the collection.

Crossing the Border

Senescence begins
And middle age ends
When your descendants
Outnumber your friends.

I take comfort from the fact that I still have more than three friends (assuming that those four people would agree that we are friends), while I only have three descendants. Fortunately, you can count descendants in quality as well as quantity, using which method Bernice and I have a whole world of descendants.