YIZKOR 5767; by Rabbi Denise L. Eger

In a few moments we will rise to hear the haunting melody and words of the El Maleh Rachamim prayer. Our cantor will chant the ancient words asking God to bring peace to the souls of our dead loved ones. We say “El Maleh Rachamim—God full of compassion who sits on High, grant perfect rest to the souls of the departed.” We pray on this Yom Kippur afternoon for the souls of our parents, and grandparents, spouses and lovers, children and friends to be at peace. A Perfect rest we say. But what is the peace we ask for?

Is it that their souls are wandering through some purgatory, a limbo land —looking for a place to rest?
Are they having trouble finding their way to the heavenly abode?
When our loved ones die—especially when we have witnessed their suffering, or battle with illness, we say he is at peace now. So if she is at peace in death, then why ask the Holy Compassionate One for something that already has happened?
Or are we in asking for rest for them—are we really asking for perfect peace for ourselves? Are we asking that the void, the pit of loneliness and grief that can overwhelms us, tear at us and causes such great restlessness, to be removed?
Are we intimating that our loss is so great, so disturbing to our beings, that our rest, our lives are unsettled?
Joan Didion’s award winning book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” documents her year of grief and mourning following the sudden death of her beloved husband and famed writer, John Gregory Dunne and the illness of their daughter Quintana.
She writes,
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days….Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself (p188-189).”
Didion captures the deep and disturbing pain that envelops
us when death comes to our loved ones. I think she articulates the emptiness and futility that grief brings to our lives.
Although many of us try to avoid dealing with that sense of loss. We stifle it. Refuse to give in to it. Deny it. Only to have it eat at us in different ways; shutting down a part of our very being. That very grief if left unattended can destroy us and our sense of personhood. We can lose ourselves in that grief.
Or we can use time honored methods and traditions of coping and renewal. We Jews through our rituals of grief and mourning try to countermand these trends in human nature. By reciting the Kaddish, we have an organized formula for helping us fill the void. The communal nature of reciting the kaddish prayer, a minyan –a quorum of ten Jews is required to say this prayer in memory of the dead. This is in part the antidote to pulling away from life when the grief is overwhelming. Yes, in coming to say Kaddish, you are commanded to be with others, even when it might seem easier to hide at home. But the truth is that isolation can kill us. It can starve us of proper relationships and intimacy.
Our wise and wonderful Jewish tradition commands us to have a funeral, not to ignore the life of the deceased but to honor her life and her deeds. This value is called Kavod HaMet, giving honor to the dead. No mere celebration of life, or party to mask our sadness, we acknowledge our loss and our human fraility and theirs. Our tradition teaches us to honor how he lived through acts of tzedakah to bring justice and healing to others even as we ourselves are in need of healing. Judaism tells us to remember the dead at the yarzeit, and four other times a year at the Yizkor service on this Yom Kippur Day, at the end of Sukkot, at the end of Pesach and on Shavuot. At these sacred seasons you are recalling the generations of your life and the chain of tradition that you are a part of.
As many of you know my own dear mother, Estelle, died this May. Confined to assisted living and nursing homes these last twelve years, my family tried to bring a sense of dignity to her very narrowed world. And as her dementia deepened in the last couple of years, until she no longer recognized her family, but could still communicate her needs and desires, we mourned not her death but her loss of vibrancy. And now we mourn her death and all she had once been - a loving, vibrant soul full of thirst for knowledge, a person with a great sense of humor and a deep and abiding faith in God’s goodness and protection even in the face of adversity. A wife and mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Hadassah and sisterhood president, bookkeeper and songwriter. Many of you extended yourself to me through your kind words and loving presence. You helped to ease the days of overwhelming grief through your gentleness and understanding. As a member of the community, you opened your own hearts and helped to fill my void. And while the void left by the death of a parent can never be fully filled—the comfort of friends and community can help restore us to day to day life. As you helped me.
We build a community together and have shared rituals and rites that carry us through the years—As Jews these help us not to avoid the mourning but rather go through it so that on the other side we might find life again… Our life. Yes, it will be changed. We will be changed. But when we ignore our customs, skip over the shiva, and kaddish, or skip the funeral itself as too sad, give no tzedakah in memory of them…we only give in to the void of Didion’s magical thinking. And then where are we? Alone and adrift.
So today during our Yizkor service when we are so engaged in trying to sweep away the sins of the past year, and renew our very being, our plea and remembrance of those who have died is for their eternal rest and protection by the Divine be somehow extended to us through our remembrance of them. In their perfect rest and peace, we shall find peace here on earth, and not be swallowed whole by the pit of grief. By hearing the El Maleh Rachamim prayer and reciting the Kaddish we participate in something so beyond our ownselves that we literally lift ourselves up from the edge of darkness to life and light. We place our hope in God and in the power of our connection to earlier generations.
The actual Yizkor prayer states that, “In remembrance of my beloved I shall perform acts of tzedakah and kindness.” Our deeds as well as our memories are divine and holy treasures that link our essence to their eternal essence, their souls. And thus the Divine protection extended to the dead through our righteous acts shall also be extended to us.
May their memories be a blessing to us and to future generations. And may our recitation of the El Maleh Rachamim help link us to them through God’s overwhelming and great loving compassion.