There’s no accounting for the chemistry of friendship. Sometimes it’s the shared experience of being young together, or military service, or a function of family — the coincidence of neighborhood or parenthood. It’s often common interests like work, sports, music, or alcohol. Most of the close friends I have today I met in high school and college in the 1960s, and I haven’t made many more since. So I was unprepared for my friendship with Dr. Norman Wall, which began when the retired cardiologist was in his mid-nineties, more than thirty years my senior. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite the decades that separate us, we have a great deal in common, beginning with the fact that we are both Jewish Democrats, of a leftish mien, with a strong, enduring commitment to social justice.
Still, the beginning was not especially auspicious. We first connected through Rabbi Steven Engel...
