Yizkor: Remembering and Forgetting to Remember, Rabbi Lisa Eiduson, Yizkor 5785-2024

Posted on October 25, 2024


Yom Kippur Yizkor Sermon 2024

Rabbi Lisa Eiduson

Temple Shir Tikva   Wayland MA

 

Writer Jesse Wegman tells this story:

“Off Route 6 on Cape Cod, a few miles in from the bay near Yarmouth, Mass., there hides a giant ancient English weeping beech tree. The tree is so big that it has its own parking lot.

But you don’t see it right away. You follow signs to a thick green curtain, push through, and suddenly you’re on the other side, inside…Branches begin close to the ground, snake outward and upward and then reach back to earth, take root, and grow up again. The whole thing is enclosed by long trailing vines of leaves hanging all the way to the ground, creating a veil broken only by shards of sunlight.

From the outside, you can’t see in. From within, you can’t see out. For someone living on the edge of two worlds, as my mother did in the last grueling years of her life, it must feel like home.

Wegman continues: My mother loved all trees, but this weeping beech was her favorite…On one of her last visits there when she was sick, she wrote in her journal: “I had a clear image that I had come out of the earth, and that I had been born through this tree.

Those passages stuck with me, and they are why, each year on her yahrzeit, I go sit in a tree.

Wherever I am on that November day, I head outside at a few minutes before 1:35 p.m., the moment my mother’s breathing stopped. I have been doing this without fail since 2009. I set only two rules: phone off and hands on a tree.

Wegman writes: I wait for my mother to join. I have no idea how long we spend there; time is hard to measure when you’re convening with the dead. Sometimes I tell her what happened over the last year — a marriage, a new job, a new kid, an illness, a news story she would have gasped at. I speak softly, but in a voice I remember. I address her as “Mom,” a word that defined my childhood but that I haven’t said out loud to anyone else for 15 years. And then, after this brief visit to the border between life and death, to the space between two worlds, I head back to work…[1]

For me, this story touches the very essence of this day and this service. Yom Kippur in general, and Yizkor specifically, represent the point in time at which life and death meet. Each year, we enter this space at Yizkor with the stories of our loved ones. Though they are physically not here, they fill this room beyond capacity and keep us company with their lasting presence. Memory is the intermingling of life and death that we carry within us every day of our lives, but that today, we share together as one community of rememberers.

When we think of the people we have loved and lost, our memories do not generally come to us through a still photograph or a time-line, rather by way of our senses and emotions. They come to us in a collage of thoughts and feelings that recall the words and images, textures and colors of not just what they did, but who they were.

Journalist Carol Saline wrote: “This will be the 41st time I’ve said these prayers for my father, the most important man in my life. He took me to parades and double-feature movies in two different theaters on the same afternoon. He instilled in me a love of books and language and a duty to give back to my community. He taught me to stand up straight. I’ve recited Yizkor 17 times for my mother, and I still want to call her every time I come home from a trip to report that I’ve returned safely. And for the last 12 years, I’ve prayed for my beloved baby sister. We had vowed to spend our old age in the same nursing home, side-by-side in our rocking chairs, but cancer prevented her from keeping her end of the bargain. Even after all these years, when the service ends, I will once again be sobbing, still surprised at how I can be overwhelmed by grief. How true it is that death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship.”[2]

This is the Yizkor that we know. This is the transformational power that this hour holds to lift us up out of our grief and loss and into the realm of healing and wholeness. The Unetaneh Tokef describes it this way: V’tif’tach et sefer ha’zichronot–you open the book of remembrance, U’may’alav tik’areh –and read from it, V’chotem yad kol adam bo – for our own hands have signed the page

We write the stories of those we love while they are alive; and we say Yizkor to ensure that we do not forget.

Just as we sculp the memories of those whom we love, so too, do we have creative license when it comes to our own days and years on this earth. In a world in which many things are beyond our control, Yizkor teaches us that we have choices; that the way in which we live our own lives is up to us. Bahya Ibn Pakuda wrote (in Hovot Halevavot): “Days are scrolls: write on them only what you want remembered.”

In a college commencement address a few years ago, Anna Quindlen said: “You are the only person who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life… Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you… Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad. Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas in the suburban neighborhood where you grew up; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black, black sky on a cold night… Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.”[3]

Ironically, Yizkor is a masterclass in life  – because when we live well, we increase the chances that we will die well, too. We also learn to be more loving, more comfortable, more present in the face of dying. The losses we sustain are painful because they are meaningful. The more we love, the more it hurts to lose.

Jesse Wegman (2023) continues the story about his mother and the tree: “We have since moved to the country and have a large weeping English beech tree right in our backyard. And this year, for the first time in 15 years, I forgot to go meet my mother at the tree. There was no good excuse. It was a windy, snowy Monday, I was handling an assignment for work, and I lost track of the time. I didn’t realize my oversight until the evening, when I saw the yahrzeit candle I lit in the morning, still burning.

I felt guilty and desperate. I had failed to arrive at the appointed time and place. How long had she waited? This is my only physical connection to her, and I’d broken it. I was furious at myself. When you lose someone you love, people tell you about the importance of moving on from death, of emerging from the pain of loss. What they don’t tell you about is the dread of finally arriving in that new place. The feeling is one of deep betrayal — that you have the luxury of forgetting, of waking up the next day.

I did wake up the next day, and I returned to the site of the tree. Out of the side of my eye, I sensed that something wasn’t right. I turned to look. The entire western side of the beech tree in our yard was gone. I stared for a moment, not fully processing it. It had snapped off sometime the previous day, presumably from the weight of snow and ice. I ran over to it and pushed past the veil of bare branches. The central trunk had sheared off at exactly the place I would have been sitting.

Irrational thoughts arise at times like this. Had I caused it to fall by forgetting about my date? And I had another, unexpected feeling: anger. I was angry at the tree. It was supposed to be strong and whole, to stand for my mother in her absence. It had been perfect, and through its perfection I kept my connection to her, or at least to the person I remembered. Now it was just another broken thing, splayed and helpless in the dirt.

Had my mother somehow protected me from being crushed by thousands of pounds of wood?

I didn’t believe that, but in anguish I went back to her journal and reread the part about the beech tree. I remembered it being on one page. I was wrong; it went on for several pages more. In those pages she described her tears of grief at being unable to cure herself, at being powerless to protect the people she loved from losing her. And then, she wrote, the image of the tree came back into her mind, and she started to laugh.

“I have never faulted the tree for being a tree, for not solving world hunger or ending global warming,” she wrote. “I understand that the tree cannot move from where it is planted, it cannot leave its situation. I identified with its battle-scarred body, as my body is also scarred. I realized that the only thing this tree can do is to stand where it is: to be a tree, and to create a space of beauty and safe harbor around it. Someday it will be cut down, or succumb to disease or old age, and the offspring that now dot its perimeter will have more room to grow. I felt that this was my mission too: that I could not uproot myself from having cancer, or run from the scarring effects of treatment. My only option was to bloom where I was planted, to create around me the most sheltering, expansive place that I could.”[4]

There is nothing easy about death.  There is nothing easy about the hardness of loss; the bitterness of grief; the hollowness of mourning those we love.  There is nothing soft about being left behind, our fears of loneliness, words never spoken, promises left undone.  And despite what they say when a loved one dies, time can never fully heal us; others can never truly console us.

No matter how much time we spend preparing ourselves for the death of those we love, we can never adequately ready ourselves for that moment. There will always remain one more conversation; one additional “I love you;” one unspoken gesture; one more page to write. In the final analysis, life and death are just messy; no matter how much we strive to finish those conversations, to die without regrets, to say goodbye to our loved ones having finished all of our shared business – it would be unrealistic – perhaps inhuman – to expect this of ourselves or those whom we love.

Instead, we must live life humanely – forgive ourselves and others; be gentle in our hard world of grief and loss; use our memories as sacred instruments of immortality; pronounce our words lovingly and tenderly.  We must help one another live as much as we help one another die.  We must recognize the precious gifts that each of us carry with us in life, and make sure that these gifts continue on through our loved ones.

Like the Weeping English Beech Tree, may we each stand as best as we are can in our own place and live this life, for it may be all that we have. May we bloom where we are planted for as long as we are alive. Held by the memories of our loved ones, may we be the sheltering presence for those who come after us. For this is our legacy – the scrolls on which we write the stories of our lives.

Yizkor: We remember.

[1] Wegman, J. (2023, December 25). In the shelter of a weeping beech. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/25/opinion/editorials/weeping-beech-tree-ritual.html

[2] Saline, C. (2022, September). The journey from loss to healing. Hadassah Magazine. https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2022/08/24/the-journey-from-loss-to-healing/

[3] Quindlen, A. (2000, June 23). Commencement address [Speech transcript]. Villanova University. https://www.cs.oswego.edu/~wender/quindlen.html

 

[4] [4] Wegman, J. (2023, December 25). In the shelter of a weeping beech. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/25/opinion/editorials/weeping-beech-tree-ritual.html