Beth David, a quiet place that resonates

There are now no differences among them. The calendars of their lives have run out, and all their legacies are equalized. The dates of birth and death on their stone monuments yield nothing about their individuality when alive. 

Their chronicles are interred with their bones.

The living should pay respects to anyone who has "crossed the bar.” Give them credit for completing the journey. They have experienced the final revelation but are not at liberty to share. 

They have undergone the unfathomable discovery of faith or its betrayal, but Nature swears them to secrecy. They have no consciousness we can measure. They have shed their electrical fields, but an aura lingers around their graves.

Susceptible visitors are prone to picking up on their mystical presence. We'll catch up with them some day, when we're done gathering rosebuds.

In a century-old cemetery, minutes from New York City, in a suburb that has seen better days, (its local plumber is actually called "Doodyman to the Rescue") are left the remnants of tens of thousands of people. Imagine the permutations of their personalities and the trillions of their combined accomplishments, interactions, engagements and decisions when extant.

From all we can tell, since they cannot, they are now all at peace. Or at least beyond awareness. It is too late to interview them, but in some cases, we can still draw inferences and make their acquaintance by research. 

I recently attended a ceremony at the gravesite of a relative's dearest friend. The cemetery, which I had never heard of, had a particularly otherworldly atmosphere that shut out the outer world and put me in a magnified spiritual state of mind.

Allowing for delays because I don't have a GPS, I arrived early and walked around its crowded grounds and labyrinthine paths, looking at names on tombstones. None of their ghosts gave me the courtesy of popping up to introduce themselves, so I googled the cemetery to see if there were any notable posthumous confinements. 

Here are some of them. What a soiree they would have made!  

Eduard Bloch was a Jewish physician who treated Adolf Hitler and his cancer-stricken mother. He didn't charge them because they were poor. A few decades later, his medical practice was closed by the Nazis, and Bloch pleaded with Chancellor Hitler to intervene.

That was, to say the least, a long shot, the ultimate Hail Mary pass. 

But Hitler responded by ordering the Secret State Police (Gestapo) to leave him and his family alone, letting him sell his house at market value, and allowing them to leave Germany while exempting them from the Reich Flight Tax, which normally confiscated all Jews' assets.

Bloch emigrated to the U.S. and lived out his life in The Bronx!

Bernard Herrmann was the composer of music for many of the greatest movies, such as “Psycho,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Taxi Driver,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” “The Birds” and “Fahrenheit 451.” He collaborated with Orson Welles, and his classical orchestral compositions were conducted by Stokowski, Beecham, Barbirolli and Ormandy.

Jackie Mason, an ordained rabbi, the stand-up comedian who almost ruined his career by giving television variety show hosts Ed Sullivan the middle finger, was active into his nineties until his death a few years ago. Typical of his jokes: "Being a doctor is a great profession. Where else can you ask a woman to get undressed and then send the bill to her husband?"  (this joke is behind the times, since the woman would get her own bill). Another: "Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.”

At one time he earned the equivalent of $100,000 per week. Now he too is a pauper.

What's the link between Elvis Presley's hit "Jailhouse Rock" and this cemetery, which is obscure compared with Woodlawn and Green-Wood? Abe Axler, an assassin for the Purple Gang, which took part in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago lies there, utterly de-weaponized and off-loaded by a co-titleist who gave him a touch of his own leaded "medicine.”

Sidney Lumet, film director of “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Prince of the City,” “Serpico,” “The Pawnbroker, “ “12 Angry Men,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Long Day's Journey Into Night,” “Fail Safe” and “The Wiz,” is now an extra within the big-screen landscape of that memorial park.

Herman Wouk, author of “The Naked and the Dead,” “The Caine Mutiny,” “Marjorie Morningstar” (cinematized starring Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly), and “The Winds of War” is stationed here. As a soldier in World War II, he served in some of the most nightmarish battles in The Pacific, including Okinawa, the Mariana and Palau Islands campaign, and the life and death struggles in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. 

He was an unapologetic patriot and supporter of a Jewish homeland until his death, just shy of 104.

Jack Newfield, a genius of "participatory" advocacy journalism in NYC during the peak of the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War resistance, who chose to resign as editor of the Daily News rather than cross the picket line of striking workers, is palpably present to visitors as soon as they catch a glance at his grave marker. He got a special award from the New York State Bar Association for his revelatory investigations of a case in which an innocent person was convicted of murder. 

Newfield was a scribe of the New Left but became disaffected by certain of its "incarnations" that seemed "anti-democratic, terroristic, dogmatic, stoned on rhetoric and badly disconnected from everyday reality.” He'd make a scathing "gadfly on the wall" of our modern debating chambers.

Abe Vigoda, the actor famous for roles in “The Godfather,” “The Man in the Glass Booth” and “Marat/Sade,” and as the star of the television series Barney Miller, shares a casting call at the same cemetery theater as Martin Landau, who is remembered for his parts in "Mission: Impossible," “Pork Chop Hill” (with Gregory Peck) Cleopatra, and Woody Allen's “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

No doubt they've both aced their heavenly auditions.

I'd never heard of the jazzily overdone and strikingly original fashion designer Iris Apfel until I saw a movie about her, in which she sported her iconic gargantuan flashy-colored eyeglasses and wit, almost to the hour of her death at 102, but she too occupies a plot less auspicious than the script of her career. 

Others who, in a manner of speaking dwell there, include Sam Levenson, who was a very popular humorist and television host; Andy Kaufman, a performance artist comedian who never told a joke and whose days on earth were cruelly truncated; Jay Larkin, a prominent television executive who marketed, distributed and produced such as Paul McCartney, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra; and psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers, who won the top prize on The" $64,000 Question" scandal-tainted television of the 1950s, and became a ubiquitous media personality and columnist.

It's said that "youth is wasted on the young," but has it been noted that the lessons of life are wasted on those who are gone and can no longer articulate them?

What really counts to me right now, and what I would never renounce, if my values survived me, is the dignity of ordinary working people. That certainly befits my niche at The Chief.

And therefore, I demand to know why don't the hardworking groundskeepers at Beth David Cemetery don't have a bench to sit on anywhere?