Only Online: In Memoriam
James William (Bill) Whedbee, Ph.D.

Nancy B. Lyon Professor of Biblical Studies
September 24, 1938-January 22, 2004

From Tamara Eskenazi, wife of Bill Whedbee

Let me first give thanks to this incredible community, Pomona College, and the larger Claremont community, for the ways you have embraced and sustained us in this time of need, as well as to the wider circle of L.A. and beyond – to all of you! – for your outpouring of affection and for your unwavering support during the ordeal of our life. Please know that Bill was fully aware of your devotion to him. It sustained all of us in these difficult months, and enabled us to find blessings even in the midst of sorrow.

It is only fitting that we gather to remember Bill on Valentine’s Day because the word “love” most easily comes to mind when one thinks of Bill,

To know Bill is to know about love - a passionate love of life, love of literature, love of laughter, love of learning, love of listening.

It is equally fitting that we pay tribute to Bill on the very day when the story of the giving of the Torah at Sinai is re-read in the synagogue. Bill’s extraordinary gifts as a teacher of biblical traditions place him in a direct line that goes back to that momentous memory. Many of us received a precious Torah, a precious teaching, from Bill. I gratefully count myself among these lucky ones.

The poet who composed the biblical Song of Songs/Song of Solomon must have known Bill in some way when she wrote the lines that so often appear in Bill’s writings and teaching:
“For love is as strong as death . . .
Its sparks are sparks of fire, a flame of God [Yah],
Mighty waters cannot extinguish love
and rivers cannot drown it” (Song 8:6b-7a).

As our wedding day approached, Bill wrote this to one of the rabbis who married us:

Certain key lines have often sprung up in [my]relationship [with Tamara] , often poetic lines that enliven and embody our love for one another. “Love is as strong as death,” the famous quotation from Song of Songs . . . has embedded itself in our union. Both of us had known death intimately . . .
Yet love has proved strong as death – not stronger than death, not negating fully the terror of death or its sense of separation, loss and wounding. Love has helped to keep us alive to life and to the possibility of renewed life – not as an easy panacea, but as a hard-won insight gained from living life fully even when staring death in the face” (Bill Whedbee to Sue Elwell, May 11, 1999).

I don’t think I can begin to convey to you the kind of pervasive joy, the simple yet profound pleasure that permeated our life together, the sheer delight in just being together, sparked by a divinely fuelled love, and sharing everything possible in a “magical circle of transperancy and trust,” to use Bill’s words. And yet I suspect you can imagine that, knowing as you do Bill’s passion for life, his vitality and his gentle, smiling affirmation of those around him – qualities that remained undiminished to the very day of his death.

In a book that I gave Bill for his last birthday, titled You Alone are Real To Me, Lou Andreas Salome writes to the poet Rilke; she must have known us as well:
“ . . . you were for me the first real truth – . . . indistinguishable body and human spirit, undeniable proof of life itself. . . . We became friends hardly by choice. . . Two halves did not seek completion in each other. But a surprised whole recognized itself in an unfathomable totality” (Lebensrucklick, p. 139, cited in You Alone are Real to Me).

The poet of Song of Songs also must have known Bill very well when she described the one she loves as swift, graceful, strong yet gentle, responsive and eqloquent. Listen to her words in Chapter 2:
“The voice of my beloved, behold, he comes!
Leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag . . . . .
My beloved responded to me and said:
‘Rise up my friend, my fair one, and go forth ” (2:8-10)

The poet of the Song then recounts how this lover invites her to blossom with his enticing evocations of budding life in springtime. Opening her eyes to the dazzling beauty of flowers beginning to appear, and her ears to the melodious song of birdes, he coazes her to venture onward like them, repeating the invitation to go forth:

“Behold! the blossoms have appeared in the land,
the time of singing has come.
The song of the turtledove is heard in our land. . . .
Rise up my friend, my fair one and go forth
Let me see your face, let me hear your voice. . . .” ” (2:12-13).

The capacity to respond, to enchant, to open our eyes to see - the text or the texture of life - these are qualities that Bill embodied to the fullest degree as he, playfully, teased all of us into our potential or inspired us to find our voice.

The loving voice of Bill will continue to be heard. Behold, he comes! Leaping over the foothills, bounding and abounding throughout Pomona College, the home he so dearly loved, and reverberating in the hearts he touched, even if his swift legs no longer grace the track.

Love is as strong as death.

Bill’s voice continues to be heard, as the perennial invitation to each of us to blossom, to go forth, to see, the world, to hear each other, to be enchanted by the literature that he so cherished and by the unquenched love of life that animated his very core to the very end.

“For love is as strong as death . . . Its sparks are sparks of fire, a flame of God [Yah], Mighty waters cannot extinguish love and rivers cannot drown it” (Song 8:6b-7a).