Moments

Written by Lael Gold, PhD

I want to express my joy today—the joy knowing Michael Avram Ruttenberg brought me and strangely, I guess, the joy I sense he is now experiencing.

One of the first things about Michael that drew my attention and immediate enthusiasm was hearing him speak about his travels with the Pygmies in Africa—an adventure we will all recognize as one of many in his singularly adventurous life.  Months later I saw a slide from that trip that contained an image that for me captures so much of Michael’s greatness.  It was a shot of Michael poised in mid air, diving fearlessly into a probably bacteria-laden river on a hot African afternoon.  Of course, Michael was better aware than most of us of the risks involved in immersing himself in those particular waters.  But Michael was hot, and he dove right in.  (“Fuck it!”” I think, were his words.)  I loved and learned from Michael’s readiness to dive fully, nakedly and beautifully into life.

Another aspect of Michael I remember with joy and awe was the particular sort of devotion to reality that his vast scientific knowledge represented.  Once Michael became upset when a speaker made a claim Michael knew to be false about a planet’s placement in the sky at a particular time.  Michael’s indignation about this spoke to his utter lack of vagueness and his unflagging mental energy.  This fierce fidelity to the concrete and natural worlds was, to my mind, a kind of holiness. 

His deep connection to the natural world was also amazing at its less cerebral.  Speaking of the death of a mockingbird, with whom he’d communed musically and in silence, brought him to tears years after the fact.

I remember discussing King David with Michael once.  (By the way, one of his brilliant and original theories accounted for the slaying of Goliath on purely medical grounds.)   Anyway, Michael and I agreed that what made the complicated, hyper-talented, imperfect David so great and so lovable was that he “ate life.”  “He ate it up.”

By helping himself to so many servings at life’s banquet and by diving repeatedly and without hesitation into unknown waters, Michael lived a life that was a gift and a marvel.  I know that my own invisible interior walls toppled in his presence.  My sense of what was possible and what might be ventured expanded a thousand-fold.

I loved Michael’s outrageousness—his delight in himself and his unabashed eccentricity, his readiness always to perform and his eagerness on occasion to costume himself bizarrely.

I am joyful today for the amazing expression of life that was Michael.  I am joyful for all he gave to me and to countless others, not so much by his conscious and prodigious efforts to be of service but rather what he gave unknowingly by being so fully himself.  Finally, I am joyful because I believe that Michael now grasps one piece of information that eluded him in life—the knowledge that he was enough.  Michael, you were and are so much more than enough.  Thank you.  Be well and happy travels.