I wish I could sum up my legacy as succinctly for my descendants

My father and I were standing in the large back bedroom of our house, which I shared with my brother Jeremy and which served for some months as the venue for our family’s nightly performance of Royal Canadian Air Force exercises.

I don’t remember what, if any, conversation preceded Dad’s comment. Just him saying to me rather matter-of-factly, “You’re smarter than most people, you’re better-looking than most people (okay, he was my father, and it was a long time ago); and you are more affluent than most people. And you did nothing to deserve it.” Whether my father actually said it, or it was only implied, I understood that I was thereby obligated to make the most of my undeserved gifts for the good of others.

Many times over the years, I have described those words as the primary message with which I was raised, though I have only that one memory of my father articulating it specifically.

I wish I could sum up my legacy as succinctly for my descendants. Or that there were some image of me that my children will all share — like the image my friend Alan Sakowitz bears of his father, who while on family vacation in Mexico City plunged without hesitation into a gang of toughs beating a complete stranger. Years later, at a crucial juncture in his life, that image forced Alan to share with the FBI his suspicions about a Ponzi scheme, knowing that he was thereby putting his life and that of his family in danger.

Or the image carried for life by a Jew, now deceased, who was the initiator of kol davar she’be’kedushah in the Great Synagogue of Petach Tikvah. Despite being separated from his parents when he was not yet ten, he was zocheh to not only remain frum but to raise a family of talmidei chachamim. Near the end of his life, he shared with one of those sons the image that had always guided him: his father running after the train taking him across the Austrian border to safety, shouting, “Zei a gutte Yid, Zei a gutte Yid,” until he fell facedown on the train platform still crying out to his son.