c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) “April is the cruelest month.” Although the opening words of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem, “The Waste Land,” have entered our lexicon, my cruelest month is March. That’s when the two most important men in my life, my father and my brother, died.

Something inside me senses it is March because that’s when my dreams about Dr. Philip Rudin and Dr. Berton Rudin are more vivid than the rest of the year.

This year is no different. My father and brother appear in my dreams just as they were in life: Dad, my best mentor and “Buddy,” my admired big brother.

Both men were graduates of the University of Pittsburgh Dental School graduating 27 years apart, and my father was also 27 years old when Bert was born. In another coincidence, both served in the United States Army as dental officers; my father at Fort Belvoir, Va. and my brother at Fort Bragg, N.C. And both were officers of Congregation Rodef Shalom in McLean, Va.

They appear spirited and loving in my March dreams. And indeed, the three of us engage in animated conversation. The Jewish tradition asserts a “dream is an unopened letter addressed to oneself.” But in my dreams at this time of the year, the letters are wide open, and the message easily read: “I miss them so much!”

That is, of course, the price we pay for being part of families, the price we pay for having had the extraordinary opportunity to love, and the price we pay when we outlive those we have lost. It is the universal cost of being human.

But despite their shared dental profession and alma mater, there were great differences between Philip and Bert Rudin. My father grew up in Pittsburgh in the “Hill District,” made famous in the TV series, “Hill Street Blues.” That was an area of the city where poor Jewish immigrants from Europe first settled. My father lived with his parents and seven siblings literally in the back of the family’s small grocery store.

For whatever reasons, he was the only one of his brothers or sisters who attended college and for my father his dental degree was always a symbol of pride. Tom Brokaw would surely include Philip Rudin as a member of “The Greatest Generation:” those men and women who lived through the Great Depression and fought the noble, and thank God, successful fight against Nazism and fascism during World War II.

While I did not inherit much of my father’s superb manual dexterity _ he was both a dentist and a carpenter _ his legacy included an intense love for Jews, Judaism and the State of Israel combined with a passionate belief that America’s future well-being depended upon all religions, races and ethnic groups achieving full equality and liberty free of prejudice.

When he died of emphysema at age 85 in March 1988 (my mother followed him in death sixteen months later at age 87), I mourned deeply, but I knew my father had lived a full and purposeful life complete with six grandchildren and one great grandson.

My brother and I grew up in a different America, one free of poverty, an America of exceptional opportunity especially for white males. But Bert and I were always keenly aware that had we lived as Jewish children in Europe and not the U.S. during the Holocaust years, we, too, would have become ashes spewing from a Nazi death camp crematorium.

In fact, during World War II’s early days when it seemed possible the Allies might lose, we plotted, as only youngsters can, how we would flee the Germans when they invaded Virginia and seek safety somewhere “out West.”

My brother’s death in March 1974 when he was only 44 was a family catastrophe. A victim of Hodgkin’s disease, Bert left behind a widow, four children, two parents and myself. I draw no comfort knowing that my brother had achieved so much in so little time, and his loss grows more painful every March.

I constantly think of what Bert has missed.

He never lived to see, fondle and caress his eight grandchildren _ all born after he died.

He never even had the shock that comes when the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) mails its free membership cards to 50-year-olds.

It is now March, the cruelest month. But I once again “have” my father and brother in my dreams, and when I recite the Kaddish, Judaism’s magnificent prayer of mourning, in our synagogue.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

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