Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win
The idea, as I understand it, is this: If God is deciding during the High Holy Days who shall live and who shall die over the next year — inscribing and then sealing us all in the imagined Book of Life and Book of Death — then those who die close to the next High Holy Days are the ones God granted the most time. In this thinking, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was doomed to die during the Jewish year 5780, but nonetheless was allowed to live — and so very fully — almost until the year 5781 began.
Ginsburg embodies this concept in a secular context, too. If the universe had determined she would die during President Trump’s tenure, she persisted until practically the end of this tumultuous four-year term. In and out of the hospital, facing grim diagnosis after grim diagnosis, she battled on, not just surviving but always returning to the intense work of the bench — and the gym; she was famous almost as much for her planks as for her principled dissents.
There are so many parts of Ginsburg’s life, career and character for us to learn from and be inspired by. The way she soldiered through the sexism and antisemitism that limited her early employment opportunities. How she balanced early motherhood with acing Harvard law school. The glorious, egalitarian, passionate partnership she shared with her husband Marty. The pioneering of the feminist legal field. The planks!
But for me, as much as any of her legal opinions, Ginsburg’s close friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia is core to her legacy. Much has been written about this odd couple — she a tiny Jewish woman whose squeaky voice was heavy with her native Brooklyn, he a heavy Italian man who sounded like his native Queens; her fierce liberalism and his staunch conservatism that landed them on opposite sides of most decisions; their mutual love of opera, the special opera created to chronicle their bond.
https://forward.com/opinion/454790/...-a-true-tzadik-battled-to-the-end-now-its-on/
Ginsburg embodies this concept in a secular context, too. If the universe had determined she would die during President Trump’s tenure, she persisted until practically the end of this tumultuous four-year term. In and out of the hospital, facing grim diagnosis after grim diagnosis, she battled on, not just surviving but always returning to the intense work of the bench — and the gym; she was famous almost as much for her planks as for her principled dissents.
There are so many parts of Ginsburg’s life, career and character for us to learn from and be inspired by. The way she soldiered through the sexism and antisemitism that limited her early employment opportunities. How she balanced early motherhood with acing Harvard law school. The glorious, egalitarian, passionate partnership she shared with her husband Marty. The pioneering of the feminist legal field. The planks!
But for me, as much as any of her legal opinions, Ginsburg’s close friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia is core to her legacy. Much has been written about this odd couple — she a tiny Jewish woman whose squeaky voice was heavy with her native Brooklyn, he a heavy Italian man who sounded like his native Queens; her fierce liberalism and his staunch conservatism that landed them on opposite sides of most decisions; their mutual love of opera, the special opera created to chronicle their bond.
https://forward.com/opinion/454790/...-a-true-tzadik-battled-to-the-end-now-its-on/
