Yom Kippur - Yizkor- 5770/2009
I have always been alert to casual snippets of conversation that strike me as significant beyond the moment when they take place- I think it’s a rabbinic trait. But being in this year of kaddish for my mother has had the effect of sharpening my antennae when I listen to people in pain. Every once in a while, someone in that state of being will make what for him/her is an off-handed remark, but it will linger with me long after the conversation is over.
One such incident occurred during my vacation this past August, when I had the chance to visit with a dear friend- also, parenthetically, a rabbi- who’s been struggling with cancer. Robin and I have known and loved him and his wife since before Rabbinical School, and I’d been trying to find a time to see him. He doesn’t live locally. As of this writing, he is, thank God, doing better. But when I saw him, he was in that less than wonderful place that cancer treatment can leave you. The doctors were telling him that he was in remission and things were looking up, but all that they had done to him and put his body through in order to put him in remission had left him depleted, exhausted and dispirited. It had also, as you would imagine, taken a tremendous toll on his wife, who is also a dear friend.
I was standing in the kitchen with her late one afternoon, watching her unpack the groceries she had picked up on the way home from work, talking about what it had been like during that very harrowing year. She turned to me, looked me straight in the eyes and said “You know, Gerry, all I really want is to have a day where my biggest worry is about whether or not I’ll have time to do laundry.” And then she returned to the groceries. I’m not exactly sure why, but that particular observation hit me squarely between the eyes. It was, in its simplicity, an eloquent tribute to what might be called the “the glory of the ordinary.”
All around us at this time of year, the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur utilizes dramatic images of life and death to impress upon us the fragility of the human experience, and it does a great job. In a Hebrew High School class last week- our first of the year- I asked my students what they thought the underlying reason was for the increased synagogue attendance on the High Holidays. It took them a while; they were looking for some profound answer to the question. But finally, one of them raised his hand and said meekly “People want to live.” “What do you mean by that?” I said. “Do you think they think they’re going to keel over if they don’t show up to services?” The general consensus in the class was, probably not, but no one’s interested in taking any chances.
Smart kids, right? We all want to live, and praying for life is an essential component of the penitential experience. We want to be around for the next act, we want to make it through the coming year, and the gut-level insecurity that we have about our longevity, particularly as we age and feel increasingly vulnerable, fuels our commitment to the experience of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
The interchange with my students was fascinating- I always enjoy those classes- but it was after that interchange that I realized, unhappily, how distorted a picture of our tradition and its value system one can get if the prayers of the High Holiday machzor are one’s only serious and sustained exposure to Jewish prayer. The truth is, of course, that the real-time story of our lives is about much more than life and death and intuitions of mortality. It’s about how the story of your life plays out. I spoke a lot on Rosh Hashanah about the degree to which we control more of our experience than we might assume, and the idea of our being responsible for our own destinies. But there is also a difficult parallel truth that sooner or later we all come to understand, and that has to do with the pieces of our individual experiences that we don’t control.
That, I think, brings us closer to understanding what my friend was talking about in her off-handed comment about the laundry. It is a desperately disquieting moment when you realize in a deep and conscious way that life as you knew it, and depended on it, has slipped out of your grasp and your control. And that, I would suggest to you, is probably a better working translation of mi yichyeh umi yamut that we read in Unetane Tokef; not who shall live and who shall die, but rather, who shall live a life worth living, and who shall merely exist… To live with serious illness and its fallout- and, of course, grief- can feel like just existing. And in that context, having the most mundane of routines be your biggest concern- even doing the laundry- seems like the most pleasurable of experiences.
There is a wonderful blessing that appears in the daily prayerbook, not the machzor, and because of the nature of its content and the context in which it is recited, it rarely gets the respectful treatment that it deserves. Actually, though it appears in the weekday siddur as one of the opening prayers of the morning service, it is intended to be recited each and every time we exit the bathroom. Its location in the siddur owes to the fact that most people use a bathroom when they wake up. Many know it as the asheryatzar, as it was called in Europe, based on its opening words.
It begins like every bracha- Baruch attah Hashem Elokeinu Melech Ha’Olam- Praised are You O Lord our God, Sovereign of the Universe, and continues: asher yatzar et hadam b’chochmah, who has fashioned the human being with wisdom, uvarah vo nekavim nekavim chalulim chalulim, creating him and her with various orifices and passageways. Galui v’yadua lifnei kiseh kh’vodecha, it is well known before the seat of your glory, she’im yipatei’ach echad meihem, o yisatem echad meihem, that if one of them that should be closed opens up, or one that should be open becomes blocked, ee efshar lhitkayyem v’la’amod l’fanecha; it would be impossible to stand and survive before you. Baruch attah Hashem, Praised are you O God, rofeh khol bassar u’mafli la’asot, healer of all flesh and creator of wondrous things!
The prayer’s immediate meaning, of course, is rooted in the intricacies of the human plumbing system, which is why it is recited upon leaving a bathroom. It’s hard to think of something that we take more for granted than the ability to relieve ourselves when we need to, but I need not elaborate on the myriad ways in which that system can go wrong and make life absolutely miserable for us. We depend, somewhat arrogantly, on the utter predictability of human biology. And when it doesn’t work as it should, and we are taken out of that comfort zone of predictability, we are brought, figuratively and sometimes literally, to our knees.
When either we ourselves or a loved one are assaulted by serious illness- and I use the word “assaulted” advisedly- the whole grid of predictability and meaning on which we depend is threatened. What my friend said was that she longed for a day when her biggest worry would be about whether or not she’d have a chance to do laundry. I suspect that what she meant was, “what happened to the routines of daily life that used to bore me to tears sometimes, but that now I’d give anything at all to retrieve? What could I possibly have been thinking when I tired of the ordinary and predictable? All I have now is the extraordinary and unpredictable, and a horrible fear that what matters to me the most might be slipping away?
Along with all those for whom we pray on a regular basis here in our congregation, I pray for my friend’s health, and for his wife’s strength. If you listen carefully when I recite the Mishebeirach for cholim, for sick people, I almost always include a prayer for caregivers along with those for whom they care. I hope they can retrieve that “glory of the ordinary” that is so often lost in the practical demands of ill health. I hope my friend and his wife get to do laundry together, and can revel in the sheer boredom of it all.
But now we pause in our service to remember those who exist for us only in the domain of memory, and for many of us, that poses its own special set of challenges. There is no real sense of “ordinariness” in the practice of memory, because by definition, everyone’s memories, even of the same person, are unique. Objective realities, such that they exist about the people we remember, particularly members of our families, are filtered through the layers of our own experiences with them and our personalities, and we often times fashion their memories as we would like to remember them, and not necessarily as they were. This is, I think, the mind’s way of easing our pain, and enabling us to process memory in a way that we can better tolerate. The complexities of memory are endlessly amazing to me, and as I myself work through my own sense of loss this year, I, too, am humbled by the challenge memory represents.
Towards that end, I would like to close with a personal note…
By my calculations, I have delivered well over one hundred Yizkor sermons over the course of my rabbinate here in Forest Hills. When I first came Rabbi Bokser would always speak at Yizkor- I remember the first time he let me have the pulpit then- and I missed one when I was ill in the hospital with my leg. I believe Matt Beizer delivered that sermon for me, on the last day of Pesach in 2003.
This year, as I approached the task at hand, I found the challenge more than a little different. Although the shivah for my mother last May ended just a few short days before Shavuot and I did actually speak on that Yizkor day, as you might imagine, my mind was elsewhere, my body was jetlagged, and I remember very clearly wishing that someone else would say something meaningful to me, so that I could just sit in the congregation as a mourner.
As of today, I’m just about four months into my kaddish. It remains, as any dedicated Kaddish-zogger will tell you, that peculiar combination of act of love, unrelenting obligation, and programmed memory. There are more than a few days when it feels like Kaddish has taken over my life, and my family’s. But even when it gets that way, I also consistently find that the relentless quest for a minyan and the seemingly endless davening provide some kind of structured time for me, each and every day, to think about my mother, and contemplate the meaning of her loss. Memory, as we all learn, is not turned on and off like a faucet, and the long year of kaddish intentionally gives it the chance to linger.
This morning, as we recite Yizkor, we invite our individual memories in all their diversity into the community of this sanctuary, and we share our emotions and maybe our tears. Some memories are of children, others of grandparents. Some are of people who died in their sleep in old age, and others are of friends and family who died horribly cruel deaths in the Shoah. Some died, in the words of Unetane Tokef, b’kitzo- in their appointed times, and others did not. In many instances, we have long since reclaimed our sense of the ordinary in our lives; we don’t live the pain of their loss with a disabling intensity. In others that may never be true.
What is for sure is that we are better able to handle these memories when we are together, and that- I think- is really why so many of us are here today. When all is said and done, we remember as a community, we share our sorrows as a community, and we heal as a community as well. I’m relatively new to Yizkor, but I appreciate its remarkable power. And I feel privileged to be sharing my memories with you.
