Nina Totenberg/NPR

♡

September 19, 2020

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Words from Justice Antonin Scalia, shared by his son, Christopher, on social media about his dad’s colleague and dear friend, Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

This is a story that Judge Jeffrey Sutton shares about an encounter late in my dad’s life, when he bought his friend Ruth two dozen roses for her birthday. “Some things in life are more important than votes.”

Somethings are indeed more important than votes, and words, and those things often emerge from places of deep compassion, passion, empathy, and goodness. This void of words, and votes, was the platform that formed RBG’s life of service and tireless fight for equality.

A Jewish teaching says those who die just before the Jewish new year are the ones God has held back until the last moment because they were needed most and were the most righteous. And so it was that Ruth died as the sun was setting last night marking the beginning of Rosh Hashanah.

-Nina Totenberg, friend and NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent

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“My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told her granddaughter in the days before her death.

In the end, still fighting for her country.

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