Martin Abramowitz

Dick was not my friend; he was a presence. It mattered to me a lot when he
told me he liked a drosh...or thought it was longer than it needed to be.It
mattered when he chose a lull at a wedding party to directly "give me a
piece of mussar" when he felt I had strayed from derech eretz on a
professional matter. It mattered when he nudged me into using e-mails, or he
bound my old siddur, or tried to engage Jacob in a Sukkah conversation, or
kept lending me wigs every year for Purim.( For a few years, he would say,
"You know, you can have fun rummaging through a batch of these at the
Hadassah Thrift shop". Last year, when I came to borrow another wig, and it
was clear to him I would never take the hint, he gave up, and said, "You're
never going to go over there. You may as well keep this one)And of course it
mattered when he dug up text sources, or found an old reprint of one of his
pieces. It even mattered when I could only HEAR his presence...as, in the
middle of an early Fall communal meeting at the JCC, his hallway shofar
blasts made us smile ruefully.

Martin Abramowitz