Daniel W. Cantor

Thank you for including me in this important moment of memorial for the life of Danny Cantor, zichrono livracha.

I never had the privilege of meeting Danny, only learning of him and the life he lived after his untimely passing two nights ago.

I asked some of the people who were closest to him, who cared for him and checked in on him and helped him through many difficulties over the past 45 years, Eileen and Jeffrey Houben and Ellen Hertzmark, to share with me some of the details of his life.

I learned that he was a poet and author, someone who had a great imagination, a love for literature and science fiction, and for sharing his ideas with others.

In his healthier years, he spent time at the Coolidge Corner library and at poetry readings.

He was well-educated, a graduate of Bard College, a man who wrestled with his Yiddishkeit throughout his life.

He would come to shul at the old Young Israel of Brookline building, he would ask questions of halacha and theology from one of the Chabad shluchim in town.

Danny was a social person, always in search of the right community to fit into within the Jewish community and within the wider Boston literary and creative scene.

But he also had many difficulties in his life.

He was not physically or emotionally equipped to stay employed for any prolonged period and needed assistance from the government and from friends.

His emotions alienated him from many of the people in his life and he did not have that many people who really knew him well.

He struggled with psychiatric and physical health issues until his final days, including periods in his final months where his only nourishment was through a feeding tube.

And yet, despite the ways in which he was lonely, in which his life did not take off in the sense of a career or building a family of his own, we are all here.

And we are here because he did have people who showed love and care for him throughout the decades they knew him.

People who shopped for him, helped him organize his home, who invited him to their home for meals, who davened with him, who helped him get the proper medical care he needed, who checked in on him and tried their best to keep up his connection to his Jewish identity and to his community.

We’re here because there are people who mourn him, who did everything they could for him to his last day and wish they could have done even more.

And that’s the amazing thing about friendship, about love, about kindness – it is what gives meaning to every person’s life, no matter the challenges they faced.

Tomorrow, we will read the end of the book of Numbers, ספר במדבר.

And in one of the final chapters of the book, the תורה recounts the journeys made by the Jewish People throughout their 40 years in the Wilderness.

The תורה emphasizes that each journey was recorded by משה and then lists them one by one – ויסעו מ... ויחנו ב..., they traveled from here to there, from here to there.

רמב״ם says that the detailed list is meant to counteract any heretical claim that the תורה is merely a book of fairy tales.

If it’s all just a legend, a myth, says the רמב״ם, then, how could it have such specific and precise details recorded within it?

But Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, based on a comment of רש״י, gives another explanation.

רש״י compares this to a father and son who experience a very difficult journey, where the son almost died of illness but miraculously recovered.

During the journey, they had no time to stop and think about where they had been.

But when it was over, they reviewed their experience in detail, relishing the time they spent together, the story they now share.

In other words, the journey in the Wilderness is not only valuable because of the destination, because of one’s accomplishments.

The experience of life itself is precious, is worth it, even with all the trials and tribulations along the way.

And that’s why each journey, each stop, must be recorded and remembered for eternity.

As Rav Lichtenstein writes:

“[T]he Torah taught us in writing all the journeys…[that] even the person who died between Almon-diblathaim and Jericho and did not enter the [Promised Land] – his travels were of great importance, too. Every single journey is important.”

Even though Danny Cantor, Z”L, did not have many people who knew him well, we are here because he mattered, because he was loved, because every journey, even those less known and less traditional, is just as worthy of being remembered.

May the love he gave and shared with those he knew him be a source of merit for his נשמה and Eileen and Jeffrey and Ellen and Dean and all those who cared for him throughout the years.

And may his memory be a source of blessing and happiness and inspiration for everyone who knew and loved him and for all of us.

Yehi zichro baruch.