Tommy raskin facebook full#

He went from being a 12-year-old who wrote “a detailed brief to his mother explaining why he should not have to do a Bar Mitzvah and citing Due Process liberty interests (appeal rejected),” to becoming a Sunday school teacher, “often substituting his social-struggle analysis of the Exodus story for teachings on the Hebrew alphabet,” to interning at J Street during his years as an undergrad. The eulogy also movingly recounts Tommy’s Jewish evolution.

Tommy was a second-year law student at Harvard - one who gave away more than half the money he made as a teaching assistant to charity - before he lost his battle with depression. He graduated from Amherst College and found a passion for the law. He grew to be a man with a passion for writing, languages, and animals, as well as an anti-war activist. The piece speaks of a boy widely loved - by his family his two sisters, Tabitha and Hannah many cousins and by his peers. In every picture, he exudes joy the expression in his piercing blue eyes is unbearably kind and thoughtful. The taboo-breaking tribute is filled with pictures of Tommy, from cherubic toddlerhood to strapping adulthood. It’s a tribute to a luminescent child lost too soon - and to a life of compassionate service as a “radiant light in a broken world,” a reference to the Jewish tenet of tikkun olam.

Tommy raskin facebook full#

The emotional statement, which the couple published on Medium, is full of humor and love. Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, who was deputy Treasury secretary in the Obama years, published a deeply moving and important eulogy for their son, Thomas (Tommy) Raskin.