Yom Kippur Morning Sermon – 5786

This past December, I was on the phone with my own mother, helping her to close the book of life for her own mother, my grandmother. As I couldn’t make it up to Troy New York in time before she passed, I had my phone on speaker, and was singing some psalms and then finally the Shema to my grandmother as she lay in her bed unresponsive. She passed fairly soon thereafter. When I got the call that she had gone, it was not a surprise. I felt a deep ache, knowing that things in our family would never be the same. So many of us had never known life without her in it. The matriarch had passed. That matzah ball soup with the right amount of carrots…that laugh that sparkled with pride in her family…had gone out…at least physically. I have to admit, any acute pain that I felt; that was mostly a referred twinge reserved for my own mother. I knew how painful this whole experience was, and was going to be, for her. When asked, I was more than willing to officiate at my grandmother’s funeral and burial service up in the capital region. I knew it was what grandma would have wanted. She certainly would not have accepted anything else. I will never forget the surreal feeling that was being up on that bimah. I had been in that same Temple before, as a fairly liturgically confused young boy, counting down the minutes until the High Holy Day services would be over and I could go home. Standing on that bimah, I distinctly remembered being a kid again. I recalled how big everything looked. How large every person seemed…the cantorial soloist’s voice echoing throughout the space with such operatic grandeur. Having no idea what anyone was saying most of the time. The holy days were larger than life.

When turned around 180 degrees, everything seemed small now. My grandmother’s simple wooden casket, adorned with a magen David, stood directly and unforgivingly in front of me. I watched my extended family enter the small sanctuary I used to shuffle in and out of as a child. I saw my mother, my aunts and uncles, my cousins who I grew up with so closely. We were mostly scattered now; a diaspora of our own. My mind immediately began to question: “This is where we reconvene, and this is how and why we reassemble? There had to be a better way to reconnect than this.” Before my internal dialogue could digress too extremely, I realized that It wasn’t time to reflect. I had to run the service. I did, and I was so glad to be able to honor my grandmother in that special way. It was truly something that I never expected when I was growing up.

Directly following the burial, we returned to my grandparents’ house in Troy. Now, this was a house that I grew up going to almost every weekend. I know every inch of that house. My brothers, cousins and I would excitedly convene, write and proceed to put on shows, sing loudly and probably badly, find space to explore, and just enjoy one another’s company. We kept going back weekend after weekend for years and years, until at some point in time, we didn’t do that anymore. It stopped. We grew up, went to school, moved around, got jobs, had children of our own. When did all of this happen? It was unclear. But, as we gathered once again in my grandparent’s house following the funeral, we all sat around and talked again. We were catching up as adults, taking up furniture that used to dwarf us in size. Looking at a crawl space underneath a couch, and commenting on how we used to wriggle our way through it. In my mind, there was an absurdity to all of us, now adults, dressed in black, sitting around and talking. Weren’t we just here, but young and ridiculously carefree? Time seemed so strange; as if someone had flung us all forward quickly. At some point during our warm conversation, I heard some commotion. It sounded like laughter, playing and maybe even a bit of light roughhousing. I got up and walked down the hall; the main hallway was always so filled with pictures, with memories. There was not an empty spot on that wall without a photograph capturing some moment in time. Eventually I looked into one of the bedrooms that all of us now-adults used to play in. This time, I saw my own two children and my cousin’s children playing. They were getting along like they had known one another for years. Cousins from across the country playing in the same room we all used to play in. Having the same kind of fun we used to have. It was like standing there watching myself in the past, being able to step out of the order of time that we are so accustomed to being ruled by.

When we got back in the car to drive home to Long Island, our youngest immediately said, “I want to keep playing with them. Can we play with them again? I want to go back. Can we please go back?” This, to me, was so profound. Amidst the tears of the loss of such a great matriarch. Through the memories shared through misty eyes…through the eulogizing about life never being the same, about not being able to go back…there was still hope for return. There is always an active desire somewhere to go back.

I think I found in this experience a brand new dimension of what the High Holy Days can be. We take just a few days out of the linear lockstep of our lives and the limitations of routine to remove ourselves from our usual perception of time…to return to what is pure and beautiful, and to discard what is detrimental to the health of our souls. Our sometimes very blunt High Holy Day liturgy makes it clear that we do not deny the harshness of life and death; but we find beauty and the return to purity in such unexpected places. On Yom Kippur Morning, we read from the Book of Deuteronomy. We hear these words: “Adonai your God will return to gather you from all the nations where you were scattered. Should you be banished beyond the horizon, even from there Adonai your God will gather you up and take you back. Adonai will bring you to the land of your ancestors…” After my grandmother passed in December, I returned to the land of my ancestors. All of us, now scattered about, discovered a haven for a moment in a place out of time; in the surreal moments that exist between life and death. Perhaps this experience impacted me so profoundly due to the fact that I had previously felt that I lost much of that childhood wonder. My own childhood was a bit tumultuous in many ways, and it became almost too easy to focus on the negative memories, to allow the laughter and kinship of family to shrink behind a shroud of chaos and anxiety. As our Torah reading tells us, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse…Choose life.” My grandmother’s passing put death right before us, right before me, but through the pain and anguish, perhaps especially so, the glow of God’s eternal blessing shone even in dark places. The re-connection of my family; the connection of new family. This was a blessing of life.

We talk a lot about “Teshuvah,” or repentance during these High Holy Days. While Teushuvah can literally be translated to “Return,” it is helpful to know what exactly we are returning to. There are many ideas about what kind of return we might be seeking during these days before the proverbial Book of Life closes at the conclusion of today. Biblically, we are returning to God, we have sinned, or strayed and we long to return to God’s good graces, lest we not be inscribed for good in the Book of Life. I prefer a bit of a mystical approach to Teshuvah, at least this year. In the “Zohar,” the 13th century text that lies at the heart of Kabbalah, Teshuvah is seen as a way of stitching back together the spiritual tears in the fabric of the universe. When the universe is out of balance, we can, through a return to a spiritual sort of homeostasis, restore order. Spiritual energy is coursing through the universe, and we have a say in how this energy flows. As we step out of the regularity of our lives, we are given the spiritual space to make fixes. As we engage in cheshbon ha-nefesh, an accounting of our souls, we can ask ourselves exactly what we might like to account for.

I learned this past December in a new way, that the Book of Life might close, but it is never sealed for good. That must be why we keep opening it year after year. In the faces of my children and my cousins’ children, I saw that the Book of life was not closing on the memories, laughter and innocence. I was simply moved onto a new chapter, one that had not been read or written yet. Our children were tracing the letters and words that we had already written, and it was our job to move onto new chapters, however unfamiliar and scary that might be. If we allow for it, perhaps we can take God’s hand while the Book of Life is being written. We can, in concert with God, repair some of what was broken in us. We can break down some of the spiritual walls that keep us from feeling fulfilled. We cannot control life and death, but we can change our perception and our attitude toward the experiences that life and death provide. We can choose life even when death and sadness are present in the plot. We can repair what we thought was broken in our lives by returning to moments, and we can, in doing so, repair the world.

I am not up here trying to sugarcoat the pain of loss. That would be foolish and misguided. I still lost my grandmother, my mother lost her mother, and my grandfather lost his wife of over 70 years. But I saw something in my grandfather as well. I saw him sitting on the couch in his living room, one of the only times I had ever experienced him without my grandmother physically close by. He, even through the grief of loss, saw children playing in his house again. He smiled, perhaps knowing that the purpose of his Book of Life was being ultimately fulfilled-that life and death ultimately are measured by what we write down before we move on.

On this Yom Kippur morning, I ask you, before we disperse from this holy time of togetherness, before the dust clouds our eyes from the shutting of the book, have you given your soul the permission and the space to return to holiness, to return to what feels ripped or broken, and to let yourself repair it? Have you allowed God’s hand to guide yours, not resisting the flow, but moving in relationship with the Holy motion of it all? Let us all be blessed to feel the grand nature of this day. To understand that in the affliction of a fast, or the pain of a loss, God is actually there. Even when we move on to next sections, when we lose our perception of purity, down the hall of memory, you can hear the laughter, the playing, the Godly connection. You can return if you realize that time is yours. In the poem “Epitaph” by Merrit Molloy, which we so often read before the recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish, we hear: “You can love me best…by letting go of children that need to be free.” I learned that we don’t have to let go…not of the good parts…in fact, we can return to the pure moments, even when we least expect it. The book practically writes itself. Let’s offer our presence to the poetry of it all.

G’mar Chatima Tovah.