By Steve Arnold
One of the things that attracted me to Judaism in the first place was the sense of community that has always been such a part of Jewish life. I never really understood what true community means, however, until my wife died April 23.

On that terrible night one of the first calls I made at midnight was to Rabbi Jordan Cohen who came immediately and stayed with me for three hours in my parking lot while my home was invaded by a succession of police and coroner wondering why an otherwise healthy 56-year-old woman had simply died in her sleep. The real embrace of community came days later when funeral arrangements had been made and it was time to clean a house that had suffered from years of cleaning neglect.

I planned to sit shiva starting on a Tuesday night after the funeral. On Sunday morning a "Jewish tornado" of more than a dozen people, some who I didn't even know, swept in the front door of my tiny townhouse and within three hours left the place with a shine it hadn't worn since it was built.

I have a memory on sitting in my basement television room watching a parade of bric-a-brac and other junk disappearing into a storage room to make space for the chairs needed for a proper shiva, of our congregation president with a toilet brush and rubber gloves tackling bathroom that should have been under a public health warning and our cantor scrubbing a floor that hadn't been washed in a year.

In the days that followed, as I fought with relatives over the nature of the funeral Margie would receive, made the wrenching arrangements for cremation and handled my own burden of grief, every time the telephone rang it was another member of this wonderful new community asking simply "What do you need?" The support continues today as I struggle to make a home for one out of what seems to me nothing more than an empty house.

I've said many times the only reason I was still standing at the end of the ordeal was because of own family and the members of Temple Anshe Sholom.

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