I’d like to express my deepest condolences to all of you who are mourning for a loved one who died during this past year, as we gather at this sacred Yizkor Memorial service to remember them. Shortly, we will read their names, as we recall all that they meant to each of us. But this year, seared into our minds is the memory of our brothers and sisters in Israel, who were taken from us in the brutal massacre one year ago this week. I offer these words by Alden Solovy, a modern day poet and teacher, who is a friend and inspiration to so many of us in the Reform Movement, from his recent prayer : “Eileh Ezk’rah After October 7.”
Eileh Ezk’rah
These I remember…
The young and the old,
The children, the mothers,
The babies, the fathers,
And I do not look away.
The brutalized, the maimed,’
The assaulted, the raped,
Burnt alive,
Terrorized and tortured,
Killed and kidnapped,’
And I do not look away.
Al-eileh ani vochiyah…
For these I weep…
In every age,
In our homes and our villages,
In the fields and on the streets,
In our cities and our towns,
Death and terror stalk…
Eini, eini yordah mayim…
My eyes, my eyes flow like streams of water…
For every community,
In every generation…
Eileh esk’rah…
These I remember…
But how can I remember
What was stolen?
The loves, lost.
The dreams, lost.
Scientists, poets,
Artists, visionaries,
Leaders, learners,
Teachers of Torah,
The generations, lost.
The children of children,
And their children, And theirs,
Never to be.
Eileh ezk’rah, v’nafshi alai eshp’chah…
These I remember,
I pour out my soul from within me…
And I call out…
Adonai, Adonai, El rachum v’chanun…
God, God, compassionate and gracious…
Remember us. Amen
[Solovy]
But, of course this Yizkor service is about remembering our loved ones who have died during this past year, as well as all of our loved ones who are no longer with us, no matter how long they have been gone.
This is why Yizkor is such an integral part of Yom Kippur, in order to teach us that mourning and atonement are indelibly linked. For on Yom Kippur, we confront our own mortality, we think about the real meaning of our lives. What is our purpose? For what will we be remembered?
Yizkor is a transcendental experience when we rise above and beyond the normal range of our daily lives and we try to see ourselves for who we really are. We try to see that we exist apart from and not subject to the limitations of our lives. And we do this as we remember our loved ones who are no longer with us.
The Hebrew word “Yizkor” means “remember,” as we pray that God will remember our loved ones. But this Yizkor service is a time for us to see our own lives within the context of those we’ve lost. We reflect upon the lives of our departed loved ones and we think of the lessons we have learned from them. And the best way to honor their memory is to value all that was good in their life, and to retain that good as part of the essence of who we are.
But this is a huge task! How do we really improve ourselves? How do we pay attention to our own life? Well, I’m glad you asked! I happen to have a few thoughts on that.
Recently, I have come to realize that there are two places to find guidance on how to pay attention to your own life: The Book of Genesis, and the great author Thornton Wilder, whose play “Our Town” is, to me, one of the most powerful pieces of literature ever written. I was drawn back to “Our Town” by last year’s NY Times #1 best selling novel “Tom Lake,” by Ann Patchett, which is based on “Our Town.”
There is also yet another revival of Our Town, which opened recently on Broadway, where it has been enacted many times since it first appeared there in 1938.
“Our Town” is one of those pieces of literature that most of us were required to read in High School, and you may have dismissed it as a simplistic, “relic of Americana…preaching old fashioned values to a modern public.” [David Margulies].
But coming back to “Our Town” after I had lived enough of life to finally understand what was so great about it, I see it as “timeless, profound…it is said to be …life itself.” [ibid]
“Our Town” has a lot to say to us today, during this Yiizkor service because it is about paying attention to your life and realizing life is just made up of little moments, little connections. It is about “finding value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life.” [ibid].
It is a play in three acts which takes place in a fictional small New England town (Grover’s Corner, NH) in the early 20th century. In the first act, you meet the characters and see them in their daily routine lives. In the 2nd act, two of the characters, high school students Emily and George fall in love and get married. And [Spoiler alert] in the 3rd act, Emily dies in childbirth, and the scene switches to the town’s graveyard during Emily’s funeral. The dead are seen sitting in chairs on the stage – representing their gravesites – talking to each other.
Emily, recently dead, longs to go back to visit the living, to see her family – and her younger self, while she was alive and happy.
And here is the climax of the play – when Emily is granted her wish to return to see her living family, she realizes that she is seeing life the way most people live it. Troubled, going through their days in a busy matter-of-fact manner. Never really noticing each other. Emily pleads with her mother “just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama…now that we’re all together, just for a moment…let’s look at one another.”
Emily then leaves her family and returns to the dead, and she cries a plaintiff good by and says “Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you…(and she asks) Do any human beings ever realize life when they live it?…” Every, every minute?…
One of the other people in the graveyard says to Emily, “Now you know what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance. To go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To always be at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. To live in ignorance and blindness.”
As brutally honest as the playwright is in that scene, he ends the play with a message of hope, just as our Yom Kippur day ends in hope. Wilder says, “We know that something is eternal. It’s not houses, it’s not names, it’s not earth, it’s not even stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people who ever lived have been telling us that for 5,000 years, and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
Thornton Wilder said that the central theme of his play is “What is the relation between the countless “unimportant” details of our daily life, on the one hand, and the great perspectives of time, social history, current religious ideas, on the other?”
And you might say that this is the central theme of Yom Kippur, and of this Yizkor service.
How do we train ourselves to notice the countless seemingly “unimportant” details of daily life? How do we notice the power of every connection? How do we perceive the awe in life?
The great 20th century sage Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said “the meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life, or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era. Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing, the stillness of the eternal.” [Heschel]
In the book of “Bereishit” Genesis, our ancestor Jacob has his famous dream of seeing a stairway set on the ground where he slept. The stairway reached all the way to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it. And Jacob dreams that God appears to him and promises to protect him and his descendants.
When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he said, “Achein! Yeish Adonai ba-makom hazeh, v’anochi lo ya’da’ti.” Jacob said “Wow! How awesome is this place! God is present with me, and I, I did not notice!” [Gen. 28:16-17].
Jacob was traveling on a trip from one place to another. He simply laid down to rest before the next leg of his journey, a lot on his mind, distracted… sort of like we are on a typical day.
And then he had the most extraordinary vision, and wakes up and says “Wow! Awesome! God is here – and I didn’t even know it – until I took the time to notice. To look. To open my eyes. To really, really see. To be alive in the moment. To be radically amazed. To perceive the awe…every every moment.
My friend Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl from Central Synagogue in New York, recently wrote that she is worried that people are going through life without wonder and awe. She said she was walking through Central Park one day and saw a college-age student wearing a tee shirt that read: “Born Bored.” Rabbi Buchdahl said she wanted to pull her under a blossoming cherry tree she was walking past, totally oblivious, and yell: “YOU WERE NOT BORN BORED!! NO ONE IS? LOOK UP!!” [Buchdahl].
Heschel said “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement…to get up in the morning and look around at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted…to be spiritual is to be amazed.”
In this Yizkor Memorial service, think about your life with your departed loved ones and try to recall one moment when you were together. Can you remember a moment of awe? Can you remember a time when you really looked at each other? Can you think of a time when you really realized life when you lived it together? Every, every minute?
I hope you can. But I know it’s hard to live life in the moment, every, every minute. We’re busy, we have a lot on our mind. We have work to do, iPhones to check, games to watch, cable news to make our blood boil. We are busy. We are distracted.
On these High Holy Days we say, “Awake you slumberers!” Look around you. Notice the needs of your spouse/partner who needs your love. Hear the cry of your child who craves your attention and guidance. Reach out to your parents who long for your words of comfort. Embrace your friends who treasure their relationship with you. Be aware of the world around you and do what you can to relieve some suffering.
And please do it today. As the author Ann Patchett said, “all those moments in life we missed…we will never get them back again.” And those of us in this room today, who are grieving from the recent loss of a loved one, we can tell you that life is short. Way too short. And you never know when it may be too late to awake, to open our eyes, and open our hearts, and notice the awe that is all around us…every, every minute.
AMEN.
MATERIAL GATHERED FROM:
Our Town by Thornton Wilder, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1957.
“Forward” to Our Town, by Donald Margulies, Harper Perennial, New York, 2003, 2013.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2023.
God in Search of Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1976.
“Stanford University Baccalaureate Address”, Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl, June 17, 2023, from Stanford Report, June 19, 2023. Book of Genesis Ch. 28 v.16-17.
Enter These Gates, by Alden Solovy. CCAR Press. 2024. New York.
