Virtual Yizkor - Tuesday, April 14: Chol Hamoed Pesach, 5th Day Omer (Nisan 20)
6:00p Mincha and Virtual Yizkor with Rabbi Bodner and Ramat Orah (Password: RAB)
Reflections on Yizkor on Pesach 5780
By Jessica Spector, Secretary, Stanton Street Shul Board of Trustees
As we celebrate Pesach during the coronavirus pandemic, many things are different from "normal." Our Yizkor this year will be different, too. We are challenged to grieve and remember our departed relatives and friends while keeping physical distance from the living loved ones who would ordinarily comfort us. My heart is with the newly bereaved, those who would not be saying Yizkor during the first year of mourning. I am thinking of and sending love to everyone who has experienced a loss and could not eulogize their relative or friend at a funeral, be visited and embraced during shiva, or say kaddish. This is excruciatingly difficult. I pray that Hashem will comfort you and you will find whatever your heart needs to heal.
Following are some of the words I shared before Yizkor on Yom Kippur 5780 at the Stanton Street Shul:
This will be my 15th year saying Yizkor for my beloved mother, Sari Kastenbaum Spector, zichronah l'vrachah. For some of us, our losses are fresh. Some of us have been grieving our losses for a long time. For some of us, our love for our parent, sibling, spouse, is almost too much to bear, yet it sustains us. Some of us had complicated relationships with our dearly departed, who were, after all, complex humans during their time on Earth. Yizkor accommodates us all. Each of us carries into this collective prayer our individual memories that keep our relatives, ancestors, and martyrs alive in our hearts and in our present lives.
As we prepare to say the Yizkor for Yom Kippur, this is a poignant moment to reflect on the importance and nature of memory in our Jewish tradition, as a living connection to those who came before. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks writes in his preface to the Koren Yizkor, “More than it has history, the Jewish people has memory.” In the biblical Hebrew of the Tanach, there is no word for history. Modern Hebrew had to borrow the word, "historia." On the other hand, words with the root “zachor,” remember, occur no fewer than 169 times in the Torah, referring to subjects as diverse as Shabbat and Amalek’s attack on the Israelites. (Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Preface to the Koren Yizkor.) The Torah tells us repeatedly that the basis for any number of mitzvot is “because you were slaves in Egypt,” thereby using our sense of collective memory to promote empathy and compassion for others in the present. (Rabbi Shoshana Gelfand, Why We Recite Yizkor Individually.)
While history is an account of events that happened sometime else to someone else, memory is the past internalized and incorporated into my identity. This is what the Mishna in Pesachim means when it says, “Each person must see themselves as if they went out of Egypt.” (Sacks.) Jewish tradition understood that simply mentioning past events is not enough to solidify a memory and that intentional action could help to embed a memory in the brain. (Gelfand.) Through the Jewish holiday rituals, we reenact the Exodus from Egypt, receiving the Torah at Sinai, the creation of the world so that even those of us who were not physically present at these events may “remember” them as if we were and connect to Hashem through our shared memories.
Bringing us back to the prayer at hand, Rabbi Shoshana Gelfand observes that our usual focus on shared memory makes the Yizkor prayer all the more striking. During Yizkor, we draw on individual memory as opposed to communal memory. Although Yizkor preferably is said together with the kehillah (congregation), with a minyan, each of us recites our own personal prayer for our relatives who have died. It is in this way unlike a funeral or shiva, where our individual memories are shared publicly and form a montage of the person we are remembering. Instead, "Yizkor provides a communal space for individual internal reflection and inward memorializing." (Ibid.)
When we recite the individual Yizkor, we drawn on only our own memories of the person we have lost, without a photograph or someone else’s recollection to "correct" our memory of how the person was in life. Yizkor allows us to have an ongoing private relationship with a loved one that is not fixed in time. As we change and grow, so do our memories of the person who is no longer here. We have the ability to forget those characteristics of our loved one which are not constructive to the ongoing relationship. (Ibid.) The memories we connect to this year may not be the same memories we connect to next year. Our memory literally keeps the person alive in the sense that they continue to change and develop through our changing perception of them. It is not as satisfying as embracing our loved one, nevertheless, it allows us to maintain a dynamic relationship with them. (Ibid.)
In this way, Yizkor reflects on a personal level the enduring and transformative nature of Jewish memory. Rabbi Lord Sacks writes, "Whenever the word “yizkor” is mentioned in the Torah, it refers not to the past, but to the present and to renewal. VaYizkor Elokim et Noach- God remembered Noah; VaYizkor Elokim et Avraham- God remembered Abraham; VaYizkor Elokim et Rachel- God remembered Rachel; VaYizkor Elokim et britoh- God remembered His Covenant. In each case, remembering was about the future rather than the past. God remembered Noach and brought him out to dry land. God remembered Avraham and saved his nephew Lot. God remembered Rachel and gave her a child. God remembered His Covenant and began the process of rescuing the Israelites from Egypt. In Judaism, memory itself is future oriented." (Sacks.)
The individuals we remember during Yizkor live on, not only in our memories, but in how their lives have been internalized in us, in our words and gestures, in the acts of kindness that we would not have done had that person not left their mark on our own lives. (Ibid.) They will continue to live on as we recall them and leave our own marks on those around us. We have the opportunity in the present to lift up and carry forward into the future the legacy of our loved ones, earning merit on their behalf, as we perform good deeds and give tzedakah donations in their memory.
May the souls of our loved ones be bound up in the bond of eternal life and may Hashem safeguard us all in this life and seal us for a good year in the Book of Life.
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