I never caught the jigsaw puzzle fever, but my sister is an avid assembler, and during covid, my wife, Sharon, also took them up. Following their lead, I’ll try to construct a metaphoric jigsaw puzzle column, presenting three pieces of events and ideas that I’ll then attempt to snap together smoothly. My hope is that a coherent, perhaps even pleasant, picture emerges.

Piece no. 1. When I arrived in shul on Shabbat morning two weeks ago, the gabbai, my friend Shlomo, approached and said “You have yahrzeit this week, right?” In response to “Yes; for my father,” he offered me the first aliya. I asked if the maftir/haftarah was open, and since it was, that’s the honor I received.

[Pause: While I know all my readers are familiar with shul and Shabbat, I realize that for some, the above paragraph contains lots of inside Jewish baseball. Here are some short explanations. Yahrzeit, the anniversary of a person’s death, is commemorated in specific ritual ways. In the Orthodox community, that includes the gabbai (beadle or sexton) calling the son to the Torah (aliya) on the Shabbat preceding the yahrzeit of a parent. The son (called the oleh) then makes a blessing before the Torah is recited. Since I’m a kohen (a member of the priestly caste), my aliya is usually the first one. But the last aliya (maftir) is a special honor since it is also accompanied by the oleh reading from a book of the Prophets (haftorah).]

Back to the story. I didn’t request maftir because of the honor. Rather, the prophetic reading that week was from the book of Micha (6:8), which ends with the magnificent message: “You have been told, O mortal, what is good/And what God requires of you/Only to do justice/And to love goodness/And to walk modestly with your God.” I love chanting that particular verse on my father’s yahrzeit because I can think of........

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