We live in such narrow lanes that when serendipity broadens them, we may find we have been given unexpected gifts. If I had not come across the online profile of the woman who would become my wife of nearly 23 years, I would not have come to know her circle of Midwestern friends from her many years at summer camp—and I would not have been in Kansas City this past weekend for one of the saddest and most powerful occasions of my life.
My wife’s friends were themselves friends of serendipity, because she grew up around New York and only attended the camp in question in the north woods of Wisconsin because her parents had met there and her father had later run the camp. One of those friends was Mirra Klausner, from Kansas City—whose Holocaust-survivor father became Concertmaster of the Kansas City Symphony and whose mother is an emeritus professor of history and one of the first women to receive a doctorate from Harvard.
Mirra attended the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy in Kansas City and went on to the University of Michigan. There, in her freshman year, she met a boy named Todd Clauer from Ohio. He was studying to be an engineer and got his undergraduate degree in engineering—but when asked what he would do if he won the lottery, Todd said, “I’d be a teacher.” So he decided to live as though he’d won the lottery. Todd got a master’s in education from the University of Chicago, and began teaching math at a school in Maine. It was in Maine that he began the process of converting to Judaism, and following his conversion, he and Mirra married—then moved to her home town, where he began teaching at Hyman Brand, the Jewish day school she had attended.
Todd died on Friday. He was 55 years old. He was the healthiest person I think I’ve ever known. He was a marathoner, a triathlete, a hiker, and he looked like a movie star. He had received a diagnosis of colon cancer six years earlier and during the course of his treatment sent out honest but chipper emails with news about his condition. He responded well to treatment until he didn’t. He was matter-of-fact and honest about what he was facing, and yet full of determination not to let the pain and disappointment hinder his ability to live life to the fullest, whatever the fullest could have been at that point.
I did not know him well, largely because of our lack of proximity; we would find ourselves in each other’s company in strange places, like a brunchy restaurant in Wausau, Wisconsin while we were on our way north to visit our kids at that very same camp Mirra and Ayala had attended while Mirra and Todd were on their way home southward to Missouri. But there was some kind of easy intimacy between us, I assume largely due to the deep love and friendship between our wives but also due to the fact that there could be no one on earth who could not like Todd Clauer. (The same cannot be said of me, believe me.) And what I was sure of, to my marrow, and what was reinforced by what I heard during this indelibly sad weekend, was that he was a great-souled man.
What do I mean by great-souled? My friend Robert Frost, in eulogizing his own father, put it best and most simply: “He gave more than he got.” This was the way with Todd—he spent his life in service, helping others, teaching others, being an example to others. He worked for 25 years at the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy. He began as a math teacher, served as high school principal, and helped hundreds of kids figure out how and where to go to college.
Parents pray, every year that their children begin school, for a teacher that might understand them, might educate them, might open the world to them. As Proverbs says of a woman of valor, such a teacher “has a price beyond rubies.” And a value beyond what we have come, so tragically, to think we should value in our day. Todd was the educator, the adult in the room, the person you pray for to help you as you try to steer your kids on the right path.
I’ve spent my life around famous people, whose goal it is to touch people’s lives—in writing, in performing, in political action. But that goal is almost always (and in my case as well) about calling attention to the writer, the performer, the politician. The tributes to them, when they come, are about the work, and only secondarily the person, because for the most part, the “person” part mattered less.
No famous person of my acquaintance has ever had a funeral, or a memorial shiva service, as heartfelt and sorrowful—and urgent-seeming—as Todd’s. It wasn’t just that he was only 55 years old and the death of a 55 year-old seems like a cosmic injustice we can only struggle with and fail to rectify. Everyone present at the funeral home and the cemetary and the shiva seemed to need everyone else to know what Todd had done for them. He loved teaching math, and made math something they came to love as well. Colleagues spoke about his ineffable acts of kindness.
One student who later became a teacher at the school talked about getting into trouble and being brought to Todd for disciplinary action. This deeply kind, almost anti-stern, man said to the teenage boy, “No matter what you did, all I ask is that you be honest. Everything will go better if you are honest.” The student-turned-teacher went on to say, “It is a refrain I will hear countless times from him in years to come, from students that I will have to drag into his office for similar reasons.”
To have such a plain, simple, profound thing said to you at a moment of crisis is a gift. Todd’s embrace of the role of exemplar, of simple honesty and true accountability was also present in the way he embraced Judaism and became not only a practicing Jew living in a Jewish home but a Jewish educator and a Jewish leader. Day schools are the way Judaism is going to survive in the United States, and everyone who dedicates himself or herself to keeping Jewish knowledge, Jewish history, and Jewish community alive and vibrant is doing something existentially important. Todd chose this as his calling, and by all accounts, was nearly a Platonic ideal of a man who was called in this way.
On hikes, his kids said, when they would plaintively ask when they would be reaching the summit of the mountain, he would say, “It’s just around the next bend!” The next bend—and four more miles. Todd Clauer knew how to move people, in every sense of the term.
We did not share the same political views. The hell with politics. It was an honor to know him, and it was an honor to all of us Jews that he chose to join our company. And may Mirra and his daughters Haidee, Anna, and Aviva be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
