Dear Judith, Ephraim, Noa, Hodya and all the family,
I send my love and support. I have been transported back in time--to a time when you all meant so much to me --when we lived together on Hayes St.--a time that was so pivotal in the formation of the next stage of my life. It is during this stage that I have the fondest memories of David. It was during this period that I experienced David as a really good friend, a wise counselor, a devoted husband and father. David helped me realize that I was a very 'spiritual' person and he gave me a place to feel comfortable with being Jewish. We enjoyed so many Shabbots together. We all loved his sprinkle covered challah. Each challah was always "David's best challah". I believe that is how he took on making the challah--as if it were going to be his best. I loved watching David lift Efraim and Noa on the Sabbath and the way he honored Judith during that ritual.
I will be forever grateful to David for keeping and caring for my dog ,Barney when I moved to Magic Forest Farm. Barney was the source of many laughs--David gave him many names as he migrated from coast to coast with Judith and David. I laugh when I think of David taking Barney to the carwash because he had so many fleas.
I laugh --than cry-- than laugh when I remember David, but now is the time to do both and so I am doing both along with you--very far away in reality--but close in spirit.
I love you all,
Judith Anne 2005-07-28 10:56:04 °60 |
The following is to be published in the Baltimore Jewish Times and the New York Jewish Week.
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By Ira Rifkin
Death is always sudden. One second there’s life, and in the next it is gone. One second you have an ailing friend, and in the next he is dead.
I met David Margolis some 20 years ago when we both lived in Los Angeles. We were the same age, we were both native New Yorkers, and we were both journalists working within the Jewish community. Moreover, we shared a sixties hippie past and an emerging Jewish consciousness that made for a comfortable familiarity. We connected easily.
There was always so much to talk about; writing, Jewish communal politics, religious beliefs and practice, Brooklyn, and Israel. I have made few lasting friends since my school days but David was one of them.
In the early 1970s, in San Francisco, David discovered Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Like so many baby boomer Jews casting about for a life of meaning, David was smitten by the blending of sixties social openness, traditional ethnic self-awareness, and serious but joyful spirituality that characterized the Carlebach approach.
Over the years, David’s practice became increasingly Orthodox and his Zionist leanings ever stronger. In the early nineties, he, his wife Judith, and their daughter, Hodya, moved to Israel.
Despite the geographical distance our work continued to bring us closer. As an editor at Religion News Service and Beliefnet.com, I sent assignments his way. Eventually, he became my editor at The Jerusalem Report magazine. This gave us reason to maintain an almost daily e-mail correspondence that effortlessly moved back and forth between work and personal issues. We saw each other when he visited America and when I visited Israel, which is where we last got together in 2004.
One day I drove to David’s home in Beit Yatir, an Orthodox moshav in the South Hebron Hills that delineate the Negev desert from the undulating Judean terrain. Beit Yatir is a settlement, meaning it sits just over the green line dividing Israel proper from the West Bank. It’s a dry, windy, almost barren environment, and Beit Yatir, despite being a quarter-century-old, still has a semi-frontier feeling. About 70 families, some 250 cattle, and 180,000 chickens call it home.
David and Judith (Hodya left for college) purchased a house at Beit Yatir’s northern edge, facing the city of Hebron, visible in the distance on clear days. It is, as David said, “a healing view,” and he was upset that the security barrier meant to protect him and his community would eventually rise some 300 yards from his home, marring that view.
Judith, an artist, worked out of a dilapidated trailer that dated from Beit Yatir’s early years. David commuted to Jerusalem, about an hour drive through the West Bank, never knowing when the beauty of the landscape might take a back seat to Palestinian hostility. David was a committed player in the creation of contemporary Jewish history, and – between living in a religious community and ongoing Palestinian violence, his essentially liberal sensibilities were tested repeatedly.
We went that day for lunch to Arad, the closest sizeable town. Our shwarma was cheap, but our conversation was rich, as always. We shared our latest successes and failures, our joys and hurts, and our fears that human folly could destroy everything we cared about.
David was also an artist; to be precise, a novelist. That sensitivity afforded him an insight into himself beyond the ordinary that I appreciated greatly. The best friends are those in touch with their truth and unafraid to share it, no matter how vulnerable it renders them. David had the touch.
In mid-June, shortly after Shavuot, David manifested what seemed a flu-like illness. By July 18 he was buried. Colon and liver cancer took him swiftly.
David once wrote a piece about folk music (Dave van Ronk was his favorite; oddly, they shared a physical resemblance in their later years). He wrote about how the Greenwich Village folk scene was once his world, and how he had come to realize as his interests changed that what we call the world is really a collection of interconnected “little worlds.”
It’s a shock to lose a friend, even more so when it’s so unexpected. I imagine the loss of a loved one in a freak accident, minus even the forewarning of illness, must be harder still to digest. But this is enough for me.
In a world fragmenting ever more quickly into little worlds unable or unwilling to coexist, it is a wonderful thing to know someone willing to cherish interconnection. Nurture such relationships. They can be gone in a second.
David Margolis: May his memory be a blessing.
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Ira rifkin lives in Annapolis, Maryland. 2005-07-28 13:20:25 °61 |
July 18
Judith dearest,
I can't begin to imagine what you are going through right now. I can
barely understand it myself. I had been thinking about you quite a
bit lately, and yesterday we heard David was sick, and this morning
that he had passed away. Impossible I said, but the forward was from
Efraim, so I know it is true. My heart breaks for you.
I am flooded with memories of David, from Hanukah at your place in
Venice to reading the first draft of Stepman to your visit in Shave
Zion to the e-mail correspondence I had with him not that long ago.
I keep seeing the pictures of David you showed me on your laptop, and
the stories you told me about him and life in Bet Yatir.
Dear friend, we loved David and we love you. We're sending love and
strength to you and all your family. May he rest in peace. Baruch
dayan haemet.
All our love,
Yael, Jake, and family 2005-07-31 10:33:52 °66 |
July 31, 2005
David,
I can't remember how long ago it was we met, but Barney came to schul with you then. You and Judith came to the synagogue of Jews the other Jews of the neighborhood crossed the street to avoid on the holy sabbath. We were members of Young Israel of Santa Monica and you joined us with Judith and Hodya and Braney and Dreidel the cat. We had shabbes lunches in those days that lasted most of the day. There was much to discuss. We had New Year get togethers during which we watched Hitchcock films---Vertigo, Rear Window......Since then I have always regarded you as a dear friend (tears come into my eyes as I type this). I think many people regarded you as such, because you were fearless when it came to being yourself, so you always spoke to us as a dear friend possessed of no pretension, no apparent forethought, just David.
What has become of all that? How did all the things happen that have happened over these many years. Time has passed and you are gone, and we look at your picture on the internet scarcely believing you have gone.
I don't think you paid much thought to what might happen on the other side of life. You were too occupied by the matters of this world. There was much to get done.
We will keep busy and dedicate a portion of what we get done to your blessed memory. We have had you in mind over these many years and now will preserve those thoughts, adding to them, improving upon them, honoring you for who you were and for the strength of feeling you caused us to feel.
Philip and Judith Miller 2005-07-31 23:18:17 °67 |
