Here lies Prince, and here are we, our hearts swollen with silence, as we try to comprehend the swift, sudden reality that confronts us. The great antagonist death, whose power is at the last always immutable, in Prince met a formidable opponent and had to use all of his craft to come in the heart of the night to take Prince while he lay with all of his defenses down. But whatever the method, the end is the same.

If we land the power to choose who should live and who should die, we should have chosen differently. If there be a law of justice operative tilled in the poetry of Nobel Laureate Nelly Sachs: here in this difficult complicated world, those who work to reduce to diminish the store of human agony in the world, should be given long life and strength, and enduring opportunity to work their good upon this reluctant canvas called human existence. But there is no such law of justice. Surely the earth is corrupt as in the days of Noah; it has by any scale of justice, earned its oblivion. Our Jewish tradition once believed that the earth would be destroyed but for the sake of certain anonymous righteous men because of whom God preserved the earth and kept is breathing. Prince must have been in some strange, mysterious way one of those zaddikim, one of those righteous.

There is no simple way to take the measure of a man as complicated and sensitive as he was. It is not enough to say, as someone once did, that he was a kind of Renaissance man. That would merely describe a remarkable assortment of talents and accomplishments.

He was indeed a successful lawyer and had been accorded all the honors his profession could gather together. He a community leader and served as an officer of practically every worthwhile enterprise you can imagine. And of course he has been a leading figure in the Jewish community as well—vice-president of the Jewish Federation Council, national vice president of the American Jewish Congress, a member of the Anti Defamation League and American Jewish Committee, long-time vice-president of the Community Relations committee and president of the Hillcrest Country Club.

But he had also once taught Sunday school, served briefly on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, and in his younger days had been an accomplished pianist and was to become a creative and imaginative painter and to have his work accepted by distinguished museums and private collectors.

Prince had a special grace and elegance, which was the product of the deeper qualities that lay beneath the surface of his considerable exterior. Those qualities emanated from a subtle blending of what was human and what was Jewish in him: a respect for culture, for learning, for intellect; a passionate dedication to the Jewish people, its culture and its destiny; a pervading sensitivity to injustice; a love and compassion for persons; a basic confidence in the face of a multitude of disappointments, in the ability of man to overcome the shackles of dogma, privilege and inequity, and to create a liberated social order that could more equitably measure out the experience and the reality of dignity and honor and freedom for all men (not just for some). And the insistence that these goals had to be worked for, fought for, at every level of society, in the political order, in the economic order, in civil rights and civil liberties, in expanding and improving the quality of education.

Prince was a quiet man and a witty man, a brooding man and a joyful man, and often a lonely man as every man of conscience must be. But he was primarily a loving man, whose love was fashioned of that deeper stuff that is a blending of the pain of self-discovery of shared agonies and achievements. He loved Nancy: he loved all that they had nurtured to their children, Michael, Karen, Debbie, Jan, Donna, Mark. They know more than any of us how his love brought them blessing—how he worried over them; can they ever know how proud he was of them!

Good night sweet prince. This earth which bore thee, bears not another greater than thee. Amen.