From The Bimah: Jewish Lessons For Life

What, if anything, lasts forever?  What is impervious to the ravages of time? What can we do today that will still be talked about a hundred years from now? I have been thinking about these questions since May 13, which is the day that a great writer named Alice Munro died.  Alice Munro won the Noble Prize in Literature in 2013.  She was an absolute master of the short story genre.  I had never read her work before her death, so I started reading a collection with the title Too Much Happiness, published in 2009.  As you might imagine, the title Too Much Happiness is ironic.  The characters in this collection do not have too much happiness. One story is about a recently widowed woman named Nita.  She had been married to a man twenty years older named Rich.  They expected she would be the first to pass, because she was fighting cancer, and because he had gotten a recent clean bill of health from his doctor. But soon after the doctor’s appointment, he passed suddenly and unexpectedly while on the way to the hard