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WHY?  We all collectively screamed!  Why couldn’t she live just a little longer?  …. at least a few more months.  This wasn’t supposed to happen. Was it?  
    Why erev Rosh Hashana?
    It is, I have since learned, a blessing.  Jewish tradition calls one who dies at this auspicious time a tzadik, a righteous person, whose fate is written and sealed on Yom Kippur, but who is then given every precious moment of that last year.  
    First the news came, then the lists:  

• •    RBG was only the 2nd woman on the U.S. Supreme Court
• •    The 1st woman to lie in repose at the Supreme Court, and the only justice to do so for two days instead of just one.
• •    The 1st Jewish person to lie in State at the U.S. Capitol.
• •    The 1st woman to do so
•  * ( no, historians quickly add, Rosa Parks lay “in honor”, not “in state”)

Yita Ruchel was not the 1st Jewish Justice, she was the 6th. But she was the first female Jew.

Kvelling over these lists – first woman at this, longest at that – reads like a pedigree. Just nouns. The type of his-story written by men, not the her-story that the notorious RBG deserves. 

RBG, I think, was a verb.

Praising a woman’s ability to “make it in a man’s world” seems to buy into the very paradigm Ginsburg rejected – that women are interchangeable and, so long as any one of us seizes the brass ring, we feel we’ve progressed even tho the merry-go-round is still spinning in circles. 

So long as her replacement is a woman, little girls still have their role model.

Thurgood Marshall can be replaced by Clarence Thomas because both men are black.

At a shiva minyan, it’s a mitzvah to share stories about the departed.  We make them verbs. Remembering Justice Ginsburg as a verb helps us tell her-story.

At age 13, in 1946, Ginsburg wrote an essay in her synagogue news bulletin, saying all nations should “meet together in good faith.”  Her wish for peace was lifelong.  She taught us to disagree with our opponents, while not hating or treating them badly. 
 
Most of Ginsburg court battles came long before she became a judge.  Women marching in the streets, America in turmoil – sound familiar ? --  There was RBG, pouring over books, bending the law towards tzedek.  

She started by arguing that gender discrimination was bad for men, too.  She challenged tax deductions that favored only female, not male, caregivers and liquor laws allowing women, but not men, to drink in bars at age 18.  These creative twists made case precedent for future cases establishing women’s rights more directly.  

Eventually, one case at a time, she literally dismantled the merry-go-round. Had she not, we might still be going around in circles.

When first appointed, she was regarded as a moderate.  The court grew more conservative around her.  She wound up writing dissents --- dissents her Rabbi called "not cries of defeat—they were blueprints for the future."  

Ginsburg is reported to have regularly worked on Yom Kippur.  But after she became a Justice -- like Sandy Koufax, who famously refused to pitch Game One of the 1965 World Series on Yom Kippur -- she declined to sit with the Court on Yom Kippur.  The Chief Justice changed the schedule. The Court hasn’t sat on Yom Kippur since.

Yita has been translated as, “one who emanates light.”   Her very name describes action. Remembering the notorious RBG as a verb will help tell her-story, ----her story -- and keep us engaged in her work as we -- somehow -- move forward without her. 

But in the silent small moments, the moments under the tallit, I may still scream.