As Expected

Our good friend, a man we've known well since for more than thirty years, a man whose children grew up with ours, a leader in our synagogue, one of the warmest, most generous people I ever knew, a man of great honesty and tolerance, died yesterday of a cancer that was barely detected a month and a half ago. He was, I think, about a month older than I.
We got the news yesterday evening at around six, about a half hour after he died, and about an hour before I was due to travel with other musicians from our big and and appear in a joint concert with a European big band that travels all over the world, bringing the message of (Christian) love and peace through music.
I had twisted my wife's arm, prevailing on her to come to the concert with me, though she really didn't want to. When we heard the news of our friend's death, I untwisted her arm. The last thing she wanted to do was hear big bands. I was ready to skip the concert, too.
The news caught me in the midst of cooking an onion and potato omelet. What could I do? I went on cooking, and Judith and I ate supper together before I left for the concert.
The concert was meant to raise some money for a charity, but the people from the charity didn't make enough of an effort to get an audience, and to say that the concert was sparsely attended would be a severe understatement. The musicians outnumbered the audience. So it was more like an open rehearsal than a performance.
The band with whom we shared the stage calls itself the IHS Orchestra. IHS stands for In Hoc Segno. Though the leader, Lawrence Dahar, refrained from explaining exactly which symbol the orchestra promotes, the Christian evangelical message was ultra clear. Israel is inundated with Christian pilgrims, some of them far more exotic than Lawrence's international band.
Our big band played the first half of the concert, and then the guests took the stage, playing mainly tired old standards like "My Way" and "Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand." But they're good musicians, and they played with a lot of energy. Toward the end of their half of the concert, Lawrence spent a long time telling us Israelis in the audience how much God loves us, which made me squirm.
Before they played the Ellington piece, "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," Lawrence told us that his son, a young man who was confined to a wheelchair all his life and who had played bass trombone with the band when they were in Israel two years ago, had been run over and killed about a year ago.
Another bereaved father.
Then he started telling us how he was sure that his son was in a "better place," doing the things he could never do when he was alive, running around, which was why he was a "lucky so and so." At first I thought, well, if it helps him to believe that... but it's an entirely ridiculous idea.
Why make up the idea of a God who creates a world full of pain and misery, sticks us in it to suffer, and then sends us to a place of bliss after we've been tormented down here? If He could, and, by definition, He could, why wouldn't the Almighty just send us to the place of bliss right away? Why bother with the woe down here?
I'm not prepared to cut religion out of my life. I have some kind of faith. But it sure isn't that childish idea.
After the concert, I went up to Lawrence and told him that I, too, had lost a son, and I could sympathize with him. He wasn't really ready to hear that from anyone. He was still high from the rush of performing. At first he smiled, as if I had said, "You guys really played great!" It took him a moment to realize that I was offering condolences.