Passover Yizkor Sermon 2018

Today, we hope will bring with it the last snow of winter, even though spring officially began last month. With snow and ice on the trees and the ground, we can’t help but wonder if spring will ever really come? We’ve had hints of it, but it hasn’t fully revealed itself. And so it is with memory and loss. When we walk the path of mourning, we remember. We remember deeply and long truly to return to a life of springtime without sorrows, and yet we know that spring is coming, that one day our sorrows will diminish, leaving only remnants of loss and memories behind.
The words to Ysaye M. Barnwell’s song Wanting Memories, brings this image to life:
“I am sitting here wanting to memories to teach me, to see the beauty in the world through my own eyes, but since you’ve gone and left me there’s been so little beauty, but I know I saw it clearly through your eyes.
Now the world outside is such a cold and bitter place.
Here inside I have few things that will console.
And when I try to hear your voice above the storms of life, then I remember all the things that I was told.”
We are a people who remembers. We are a people for whom the past lives on. We are a people whose lives are intertwined with those who have gone before us and those who have yet to be born. We remember.
This morning, on this last day of Pesach, we are tasked with a special kind of remembrance. This morning, we participate in the Yizkor service. We engage in an act of remembering together and as individuals.
Yizkor, literally means, may God remember. But, like with the case of saying Kaddish, the act of us saying Kaddish for a loved one isn’t about God. It’s about us. It’s about our act of memory, our walking through the stages of mourning in community and in relationship with God.
In a recent episode of the NPR podcast Invisabilia, Hannah Rosin, describes her mother’s year of mourning. Hannah begins her story by telling us about her 74 year old mother’s seemingly crazy idea to jump out of an airplane. About one year earlier Hannah’s father, was diagnosed with a rare stomach cancer and died a few weeks later. Her parents, Miriam and Eli, had been married for 51 years, and they did everything together. He drove her to the train every morning. He picked her up every evening. He made her tea every night, and it had been that way for 50 years. Every inch of their lives they had walked together. And Miriam didn’t know how to walk her life without her husband. She kept asking herself the same questions over and over again. What could I have done differently? Could I have taken him to a different doctor? Should I have noticed he was sick earlier? She didn’t want to eat, or cook. She was stuck. But, then as the first anniversary of Eli’s death approached, Hannah received a link from her mother in a text that was totally out of character. After all, Miriam never went out to dinner, she didn’t go to theme parks, nor did she bike or jog. So it was a surprise to Hannah when her mother texted her a photo of a guy skydiving. The picture was accompanied by the words “Interested?”
As she describes in the episode, Hannah was confused by her mother’s interest in skydiving. Why couldn’t she do something else, maybe take up a different hobby?
At the same time, Hannah was engaged in her own journey of loss and mourning. In the episode she describes that how after her father died she was continually drawn to stories about loss whether they were about “people losing their job or their house, their dog or their democracy.” She expresses that she felt like what was happening in her head felt like it was happening outside everywhere. At one point she decided she was done with losing things and so was her family. For instance when her son lost his tooth, she refused to give it to the tooth fairy. Instead, she woke up in the middle of the night to steal it from under his pillow and then started obsessing over how she could put it back in its rightful place – his mouth. Again, when her husband accidentally donated a bag filled with their beloved baby books to the local library sale, she panicked. On the day of the sale, she woke up really early, biked to the library in her pajamas and harassed the ladies running the sale to let her find her bag among the hundreds of bags. In the end she says, “I found myself standing in the middle of the street in my pajamas holding our old Richard Scarry book. Why? Why did I care so much about some old Richard Scarry book? Why couldn’t I get on with it?”
She comes to the conclusion that when we encounter loss, we have to find a way out of our old stories and into new ones. We have to re-write the sentences playing over and over again in our heads. After coming to this conclusion, she contacted James Pennebaker who is a professor of psychology at UT Austin who studies words and language.
Some people, Pennebaker argues have an easier time re-writing their stories. They can say to themselves that loss is a natural part of life, and accept it, or that they’ll find someone new to share their lives with. But for others, it’s not that easy. They encounter the question, “Do I change my story about my life, or do I continue persevering with the old story even though the facts don’t fit very well?”
In response to this Pennebaker came up with a program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count which enabled him to discover which words people dealing with loss used repetively which kept them either stuck in the same stories.
What he found was that there was a huge difference in pronoun usage between those who were in the depths of mourning and those who had transitioned their stories. The most important words for him to keep track of were the words I, me, and my. A person who was still stuck in an old story continually used first person pronouns. Like, Why didn’t I? Have I not been a good enough person? I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to cook. In comparison, he noticed that those who had transitioned used third and first person pronouns, meaning they had engaged with their story and gained some perspective on it. These individuals had worked through their stories, to create something new. Their new stories retained a bit of the old narrative, but moved forward as they did so with their lives.
It sounds easy, but it’s not. It’s hard for us to let go of people much less the stories we tell ourselves about our relationships to them, and to rewrite the words we repeat over and over again in our heads.
For a long time, Miriam Rosis couldn’t bring herself to do the things she had loved to do with her husband, eating the foods they had for breakfast each morning, going shopping, or eating their favorite bagel. But, one day she was able to make the switch.
Miriam described the switch in the following words, “When I reversed the whole thing, and I said what I would like him to do if it would be reversed, and the answer was a hundred percent yes – I don’t want him to suffer – that make my life much easier to accept. And the jump would be a conclusion of the whole thing. And hopefully that would enable me to continue life and just keep going.”
Hannah admits that it’s not like her mother hadn’t heard these same words and suggestions from other people. She had to come to that conclusion and that place on her own. Now we can finally begin to understand why her mother wanted to go skydiving. As it turns out, Miriam’s new story begins in 1967 in Tel Aviv in the midst of a blackout during the war.
As she sat in complete darkness there came a knock at the door. At this point, Eli, Miriam’s husband had been gone for 60 days serving as a paratrooper, and when she opened the door, who did she find, but her husband whose unit’s truck had broken down, and who had hitchhiked to Tel Aviv to stop by and steal a kiss. Although Hannah had heard this story many times over the years, her mother had never explained that this, her father’s army service, was the one thing they never shared together. Miriam never served in the IDF. As it turns out, Miriam wanted to skydive, to be in a place that Eli had been that she hadn’t. She had this magical idea that if she was in the sky, she could say a prayer and be a little bit closer to him, both the him that was once a paratrooper, and the him that was now with God. As Miriam skydived that day, Hannah watched as her mom prepared to jump, as if she was ready to pray. And when Miriam exited the plane, Hannah saw her mother’s lips moving as in prayer, “I love you Eli. I love you Eli. I’m doing this for you. I feel you Eli. I really do.”
Just as Hannah and Miriam had to re-write their stories, so do we, even though more likely than not it won’t include skydiving. Each year as we enter into the Yizkor service, those feelings of loss and mourning resurface, just as they do when we sit at a holiday table where someone’s chair is no longer occupied, when we celebrate time honored traditions when we are the ones leading them instead of parents or grandparents, when a room or a closet is empty, when a place in our hearts is broken. What we do on this day, is remember. What we do when we say Kaddish is remember. Over time, we begin to feel the sharp pain of loss less and less. While it doesn’t go away, it does change, just as our stories begin to change. Over time, we shift from that broken record and stuck feeling of I, to remembering the he and she and them, alongside us. We intertwine ourselves with their stories.
Passover, as many other Jewish holidays are, is a holiday of remembrance. Above all we are commanded to remember Yitziat Mitzrayim our exodus from Egypt, to remember that we were once slaves in Egypt, that we were once in bondage, but now are free. Each one of us whether we are at the very beginning of mourning, towards the end, somewhere in between, or for that matter, returning for Yizkor for the 1st or the 20th time, relive that sense of loss. We return to our stories, to the pain and to the joy of life. However, as we relive loss and as we strive to remember, may our stories guide us. After Yizkor, may we all share some of our stories whether with one another or with our families, memories of those long gone or who have passed not so long ago. By telling our stories, our memories, we ensure that our loved ones live one, that their memories are a blessing.
After all, Zachor means to remember, and Yizkor means may God remember. On this Shabbat shel Pesach and in our moments of remembrance this morning, may God remember and recall the stories of our loved ones, may their memories be a blessing to us and to all who come after us, because we are a people who remembers.
May God bring comfort to all who mourn,
Chag Sameach and Shabbat shalom.

Alix Spiegel, Hannah Rosin, “I, I, I. Him,” Invisibilia Podcast, NPR, March 9, 2018, https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=592080033.