Question: What, exactly, was my father?

Answer: He was the personification of his favorite word, which he both used and misused with equal delight. First, last, and always, Samuel Reuben was an iconoclast. Things to him were always either “iconoclastic” or “highly iconoclastic.” If we were looking for a roll of film, we could find it “in the iconoclastic section.” If we noticed someone who was particularly clumsy, he was an “iconoclastic spastic.”

All in all, my father may very well have been less a religious man than a man who found pleasure and comfort in the trappings of religion. Entwined, of course, with his personal brand of iconoclasm.

When I was a child, the Beth El Temple held its morning services in a small sanctuary overlooking Lake Michigan. On winter mornings, members of the congregation could look through windows facing east and watch the sky become an awesome panorama of pinks, yellows and oranges as the sun rose.