Anonymous

Thinking of Amir on the High Holidays

The High Holidays were painful for me because they reminded me of Amir’s death and brought a powerful wave of grief over this terrible tragedy. But one of the things that has given me strength in this difficult time has been the opportunity to perform mitzvot in Amir’s memory. So through a happy accident I ended up helping some young families to build a sukkah for elderly Jews and had the chance to celebrate the life of all the Jewish generations together. And also I took on the obligation to learn a book of the Tanakh for an upcoming siyyum that I have not previously tackled in detail.

Unfortunately, we can’t bring Amir back to life. But we can honor his wonderful legacy by performing as many mitzvot as possible and seeking to emulate his good and kind qualities and especially his compassion for poor black children.

Linking Hearts at Stanford (In Memory of Amir)

From The Chabad House At Stanford:

Linking Hearts at Stanford
Extend a helping hand to special needs children.
Kickoff Event – meet professionals and volunteers

Sunday, October 17th 10am – 1pm
Location: Hass Center – 562 Salvatierra Walk – Donald Kennedy Room
RSVP appreciated – For reservations click here

Linking Hearts is dedicated to the loving memory of Amir Lopatin.

Doing Bikur Cholim in Amir’s memory

Recently I had a powerful experience which painfully reminded me of the tremendous loss and void that Amir’s death leaves in the life of his family and friends. A friend invited me to participate in his bikur cholim group that Shabbos afternoon. I knew that this mitzvah would be the perfect opportunity for me to heal and to honor Amir’s memory. And so I went with my friends to a hospital, and we comforted various Jewish patients and their neighbors. I plan to continue performing this mitzvah in Amir’s memory.

Along the way I had some incredible bonding experiences with Hasidic patients and their families. I met a young Viznitzer woman and offered to pray for her recovery and talked to her. I met a Hasidic mother who told me her seven-year-old son was going to be admitted to the hospital to treat an infection in his appendix after Shabbos. His father was davening fervently for his son. But thank G-d the child’s infection was not life-threatening. As a result, I felt profoundly at peace while davening mincha in the chapel where the service was led by Hasidic men.

I was deeply moved by Jonathan Wolfson’s latest posting in which he described Amir’s final moments of life. I am totally amazed that as he was dying, Amir was thinking of how to save the lives of other people. His final wishes were to donate his organs and ensure that his best friend Jonathan was being taken care of. Amir demonstrated the highest level of selflessness, righteousness, and kindness that a Jew can possibly show.

Thinking of Amir on Tisha B’Av

I was deeply moved and gratified by the letter from Jonathan Wolfson. I have been praying for his recovery every time I have been in shul for 4 months and am glad that he has at least partially recovered enough to communicate with the friends and family of his best friend Amir Lopatin.

On Tisha B’Av I went to shul to hear the chanting of Eichah. And I didn’t pay attention to the line by line recitation of Eichah. But the mournful melody of the chanting of Eichah allowed me to think calmly and sadly of Amir and to remember his kindness and his good deeds. As I sat on the floor, I was able to reach a different place in my mourning for Amir. Because to me Am Yisrael is incomplete without Amir, and one of the reasons the Beit HaMikDash has not been rebuilt is that we are missing wonderful neshamas like Amir. Amir practiced the kind of Ahavat Yisrael that most of us can only dream about toward ALL JEWS and all human beings. If every Jew showed as much kindness toward other Jews and all humanity as Amir, then we would be worthy of having the Beit HaMikDash rebuilt. So let us pray that the memory of Amir can inspire us all to practice Ahavat Yisrael toward Jews whose level of observance or political views may differ from ours.

Women’s Pick up Games

Source: http://www.wudi.org/
Author: deb
Subject: RE: Strange Women’s Pick-up e-mail
Date: June 30, 2004

To answer your question about who organized this women’s game, it was Amir Lopatin. He was a dear friend of mine. Perhaps you knew him? 3 summers ago he organized the New York City Public Ultimate League, NYCPUL, which plays in central park. Not surprisingly, there was an imbalance of men to women in the league. We played 5-2 on a good day. Amir addressed the shortage of women in the league by sponsoring women’s pick up games. It was a huge success, and some of the women even joined the league. He did that 2 summers in a row. Last fall Amir moved to California to go to graduate school. Amir sent several emails even after he moved to California asking for a volunteer to replace himself in organizing the league. No one stepped up to run the league after his departure, not even me. On March 25, Amir was killed in a car accident.

amirlopatin.com

After that, Brant Stevens volunteered to run NYCPUL.
I said I would continue the women’s pick up games that Amir had started.

Captain Amir

I don’t know whether this goes in “Brown” or “Stories.” In any case, this is just one example of how my time at Brown was made even more memorable by knowing Amir.

I met Amir early on at Brown (we being CS majors), but it wasn’t until our junior year that we became friends. We were both graphics geeks and I had the privilege of working with Amir on our final project for CS-224, one of those classes that makes geeks feel like blood brothers when they’re through. When our junior year ended, I was happy to hear that Amir had found a sublet for the summer right next door to my apartment on Governor St. There was a certain young woman that he was trying to impress so one day, he invited her and me (as wingman) to India Point to show off his sailing skills. He had been taking a sailing class and was now ready to brave the waters unsupervised. So the three of us hop in this little sailboat and Amir immediately starts ordering us around and telling us about the different ropes and doodads. After a few false starts, we’re off. Amir is pulling ropes, maneuvering the rudder. Then he says, “Hmm, this rope is tangled around the rudder. I’m gonna detach the rudder and try to fix it.” It wasn’t long before we found out that when you detach a rudder in open water, it’s nearly impossible to get it attached again. So Amir, looking slightly flustered now, says, “No worries, let’s just take down our sail. That’s the signal that we need help.” So we take down the sail, but there’s no sign that the boathouse employees are moving. The whole time, the boat is going wherever it wishes and we’re getting closer and closer to some pilings until !BANG! we crash right into them. We see the boathouse employees jump off their chairs and onto their waverunners. When they reached us, they looked totally pissed, but Amir just stood their calmly saying, “Didn’t you see me take down my sail?” Well, needless to say, that was the last time I stepped on a boat with Amir.

Amir, I can’t kick myself enough for saying, “Reunion’s coming up, I really need to get in touch with Amir.” You are sorely missed.

Ramaz Reunion Speech, full version

I looked up to Amir in Ramaz. All his close friends did. He was decisive, brilliant, and blunt. We hid little from him. He expected total honesty from us. When he perceived that we had misattributed a motive he would say so, instantly, in a short sentence delivered in a voice so fast he’d skip the syllables that might slow him down. “You’re-just-saying-that-because…!” “Whatever, you’re-just-trying-to…” We either had to accept his analysis or we had to look deeper for the real motive. His honesty (and Jon’s, of a different sort) was an example to us that we needed to be completely honest with ourselves, with each other.

For a period, I lost touch with Amir after Ramaz. We phoned rarely and saw each other even less often. I visited Brown a couple of times, he visited Sarah Lawrence once… When he moved to New York after his year in Utah it had been 6 years since I had last spent time with him regularly. I found much of his conversation to be about the proper use of his time: he felt that if he was not using his time completely and in a worthwhile way, then he was not using his time morally. He played a lot of computer games and felt guilty about the time he lost playing them. I didn’t have a good handle on what he was doing with his time… working as a programmer for some company with streaming ad content or something. Playing Ultimate Frisbee. Meeting a lot of new people in the upper west side mid-20s singles Jewish community.

Amir would often say that he felt obligated to do something. If he felt obligated he would never try to avoid his responsibilities. Morality can perhaps be divided into moral thought and moral action. Moral thought: I think this is the right thing to do. Moral action: I’ll do it. Many people consider themselves moral because their thoughts are moral. Amir could only consider himself moral if he deployed those thoughts. He thought about children who were disadvantaged, so he was a Big Brother for three years to one boy. He could not reconcile in his mind people who were hungry and homeless, so he participated in organizations to help feed them. Amir treated his family obligations with sincerity and steadfastness. When his father was ill he was there for him constantly.

While the tragedy of Amir’s death has brought me shock and sorrow, the past few months have also brought me peace. I have had his example to celebrate and follow. I have had Amir in front of me and in my thoughts every day. So how can I be sad when Amir is with me? Every day I think to myself: If you think it is right you must do it; if you are honest with yourself in thought you must be honest in deed; if you waste your time you are being dishonest. How can we be sad when Amir is with us?

Amir is still bringing us together

We just had our 5 year college reunion for the class of ’99 at Brown over Memorial Day weekend. Throughout the weekend we shared stories about Amir and even now, Amir has helped bring our friends together. Our wishes are with his friends and family.

Junior Congregation

My wife and I have been leading a youth minyan at Congregation Emek Beracha for the past couple of years. We pray with the kids for 15 minutes and then play a fun, educational game for 15 minutes (e.g. Chumash Baseball). For a while we had been looking for people to help us out and give us some weeks off, but it was hard to find volunteers. Then, just a couple of months after he moved into Stanford, Amir came up to me and asked if he could help out. It was perfect timing, just when we needed the help! It’s clear that education was important to Amir not just as part of his PhD program or as his future profession — he wanted to educate children in his free time, too.

He was a little nervous before his first time leading the group, and he asked if I should help out to make sure things went well. Being excited about the day off, I told him he would be fine on his own. After the group ended and he returned to synagogue, he looked a little disconcerted. I asked him how it went, and he said, “I was too easy on them, the kids were out of control! I don’t know if I can do this…” I asked the kids later when I saw them, and they said that they had a great time with him, and that he made up a new game for them to play (I can’t remember what it was). Amir was just being hard on himself, because he cared so much about education. Amir wasn’t too easy on them, he just helped them have fun while they were learning…We’ll miss you, Amir.

I miss him

I met Amir on my first day at Stanford. It was lunchtime during orientation to our doctoral program in education. My first impression of Amir, I am embarrassed to say, was so stupidly knee-jerk. We were talking politics, and Amir asked my impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Amir told me he was “middle of the road” polticially…pretty much on par with the rest of America. I thought “who is this guy?” I pretty much dismissed him. Since then, Amir has taught me much.

There is not one conversation I had with Amir that could be described as mundane. Amir’s inquisitiveness sometimes rubbed me the wrong way, particularly when he would ask questions like: “Aurora, you’re gay, how do you feel about religion” or “Are gay people attracted to themselves?” and he always caught me off-guard…these were happy hour, end of the week type questions. What I loved about Amir, is that he had the courage (audacity?) to ask the questions and did so in such a good-natured, friendly way that all I could do was give a little sigh, turn to him, and answer honestly. He made me reflect and give a little more of myself than I think to give. And to me, that was a very profound gift.

I am haunted by the long conversation Amir and I had about what kind of car he should buy. He was so excited about the Honda Element, and wanted to know a woman’s opinion… would it attract the girls? I told him I would prefer the Subaru wagon he was considering, but that he should go with what makes him happy. He couldn’t wait to get on the road with his new car. I wish he had dropped his work and joined the cohort trip to Tahoe… I wish…

Amir and I talked about relationships. I had just ended one, and he had a lot of good wisdom for me about endings. Amir got drunk on margaritas at my house and sang Les Miserables duets with Colin and told funny stories. He said nice things about me. I thought a lot about him after that.. about how first impressions are not always correct, about how complex people are, about why I hold back. Jon and I ran into Amir while hiking the dish. He had been running, and Jon and I were both impressed. They talked about climbing the wall sometime. I smiled at Amir. He said “have a good spring break if I don’t see you before then.” It was two weeks before spring break, and I hoped I would see him before then, but I didn’t.

Amir didn’t hold back with people, at least not with those of us in the SUSE cohort who knew him. I learned a lot from him in the few months I knew him. I think I can honestly say that Amir was one of the most unusual people I have ever met. My faith does not help me understand what happens to souls when they move on, but something in me believes very strongly that Amir’s soul is doing some profound work for our world, and my hope is that his friends and family feel his love and amazing presence even now.

Amir, you were so clearly a gift to everyone who had the privilege of talking to you even once… thank you for your time here. I hope you like where you are now. I will miss you.

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