Yizkor Sermon Pesach 5784
“A note, to be opened in the event of my death.” These were the words scrawled across a letter my friend’s father gave her nineteen years before his recent passing. I found myself saying to my friend, “Oh God, I would definitely have lost the envelope. Or forgotten about it entirely.”
No you wouldn’t, she said. She’s probably right.
I’ve heard a lot of stories lately about ethical wills. War, it would seem, leads to an uptick in these kinds of letters. There are too many stories of young people in the IDF hovering over keyboards with their bags packed as they prepare to report for duty.
“I’m writing you this message on the way to the base. If you’re reading this, something must have happened to me. “Even if something happens to me, I’m not permitting you to sink into sadness. I had the benefit to fulfill my dream and my purpose and you can be sure that I’m watching you and smiling a huge smile.
These are the words of IDF Sgt. Major Ben Zussman who fell in a ground action in the Gaza Strip five months ago. His posthumous directions to family and friends were impossible: When I die, celebrate. In my absence, find happiness. What an unbearably difficult thing to ask of the people you loved, the people who loved you. But of course, we ask the people we love to do the impossible all the time. To be patient with our flaws. To forgive us, when we forget to replace the toilet paper or when we offer a nasty retort in an argument or when they asked us not to do that one thing, and here we go doing it again. Fair or unfair, we want our loved ones to be happy. Even after we are gone. Those wishes have unmatched power when the writer knows they have the last word. Ethical wills are sometimes audacious enough to give instruction not just about what to do, but insist on how to feel: You should be happy. You should not “sink into sadness”.
Judaism is not shy about directing emotion. It’s kind of wild, when you think about it, that our tradition contains within it so many mandates for feelings. Back in 12th century Spain, Bahya ibn Pakuda categorized these injunctions as “Hovot Halevavot” — the obligations of the heart, contrasted with the obligations of the bones. Obligating the heart is, of course, irrational. Take Pesach as an example: It is one thing to tell me I should offer sacrifices, drink wine, tell the tale of the exodus, welcome guests, and invite Eliyahu the prophet to visit our seder. Our people can muster these actions even in the darkest of times: even in the loneliness of a pandemic or the trauma of war. But our tradition demands kavannah, prescribes our duties as emotional ones: that I should offer sacrifices with a sense of gratitude; that I should find merriment in drinking wine; that I should express relief and wonderment in recounting the journey to freedom; that I should delight in my company; or that I should believe, wholeheartedly, that the messianic era is near. Judaism is the unrelenting choreographer, demanding that the steps are right but also that we demonstrate more passion, more energy, more happiness.
This isn’t an invention of rabbinic Judaism; it’s spiritual aftergrowth from the words in our Torah: v’samachta b’chagecha — rejoice on your festival. Just as I am supposed to love God and love my neighbor and love the stranger, I am obligated to find happiness in the festival: V’samahta b’chagecha, v’hayyita akh sameah — and you shall rejoice on your festival, and you will, even so, be happy.
The most generous read on that verse comes from Rashi’s commentary in the 11th century: He sees a promise rather than a commandment: Not, you must be happy, but rather, you will be happy. Even in the context of that sanguine interpretation, there is a substantial challenge lodged therein: If I cannot experience happiness on the holiday, it would seem that I’m violating divine command.
Today is Tuesday, April 30, 2024, the Seventh Day of the Omer and Day 206 of captivity wherein hundreds of our Jewish siblings are held captive in Gaza. The challenge of our text weighs with utter devastation: Akh, even so, I am meant to be joyful? To smile in the face of this ongoing historic trauma, that feels brutal. And besides the fact that it seems tasteless, it also feels out of reach. Be happy. As Sgt. Major Zussman wrote: don’t sink into sadness. How could I be happy? And how can I be happy?
Mishnah Moed Kattan shines a spotlight on the uncomfortable convergence of grief and prescribed joy. The fixed seasons in the Jewish calendar override any mourning window, so that if a death occurs just a few days before a festival, there is no shiva. I ruminated on this practice as I stood in the ballroom this Erev Pesach with a family who had just begun to say kaddish as the chag descended. They could only serve cold cuts and pickles: a menu that was caught between. On paper, shiva was canceled out. Nevertheless, Pesach descended, and with it the sense of transcendent joy assigned to the entire Jewish people.
The simcha of the festival came to sit with them, like a visitor at shiva, an uncomfortable and inevitable reminder that each of them is still alive. The Jewish tradition guides us through the cold splashes of water on our hands after the funeral, the first bites of a consolation meal, as if to say, This is mortality. For death to be potent we have to know life and live it with the same hands that just buried a loved one and the same lips that spoke the first kaddish.
And just like that, seder night descends and the same people who just asked the merciful one to give the soul of their loved one a place in heaven — even they are asked to sit at the table k’ilu — as if they have just been personally redeemed from captivity. They are not permitted to sink into sadness.
Our people have set these fixed times for joy, their inheritance and impact so big that nothing, not even loss of life, pushes off the requirement to lean into celebration. We have given the same treatment to communal sadness: We took the date of Tisha B’Av and made of it a container of collective grief. For one long summer day, we are required to enter a kiyyum avelut she-ba-lev, a stance of an aggrieved heart. Maimonides says “in each generation a person k’ilu…” applies to everything the Torah commands us to remember and not forget. Not just the marvel of redemption but also the lachrymose burden of the Temples’ destruction. To remember it as if we personally saw foxes playing amongst the smoking rubble. Tisha B’Av demands that we be sad — Even if you’re at summer camp in the month of Av, otherwise nurturing the joy of that special community. To be sad even if, like my kid, you have a mid-July birthday that sometimes coincides with the 9th of Av — the sadness calls with the same mandated intensity as the commanded joy of the festivals. Our world was broken and is still broken, so our hearts must be broken, too.
Rav Soloveitchik, the great 20th century Jewish philosopher, wrote that there is a universal Jewish experience that overrides and disrupts personal grief and even personal joy. He explained that the backdrop to the Jewish calendar is unitive time consciousness — there is no before and no after; the enslavement in Egypt and the Exodus and the destruction of the Temples are all happening in a kind of “now” in the sense that “now” is always for the Jewish people. Within that construct we find two kinds of grief, says Soloveitchik: Aveilut Yeshanah and Aveilut Chadashah, old grief and new grief.
Aveilut Yeshanah is old grief that has been curated into a ritual rhythm. Old grief is communal. It starts with ambiguity and compounds over time into a fixed vessel on our calendar. It holds volumes, like the kinnot on Tisha B’Av that revisit centuries of persecution and pain. Judaism cinches this pile of tragedies into a thick bundle of memories and commands the expression of sadness. This cultivated bewailing doubles as a refusal to accept the horrors God has permitted to befall the people and our world. Soleveitchik writes that the Jew is asked to express her humanity through this sadness: “[S]he must cry, weep, despair, grieve and mourn as if [s]he could change the cosmic laws by exhibiting those emotions. In times of distress and sorrow, these emotions are noble even though they express the human protest against iniquity in nature and also pose an unanswerable question concerning justice in the world.”
New grief, by contrast, is personal grief. Death that is news to us. Uncurated. Raw. New grief starts as a horrifically sharp pain at a fever pitch, and over time it fades to some other kind of hurt. The lingering ache of a missing loved one. Wondering what dad would say if he were here right now. Missing your sister or your child on their birthday. A tide that crashes intermittently but mostly wanes. Jewish law takes a file to the jagged edges of personal grief. The festival pulls the mourner out of the depths and into the cheerful current of Jewish life where it is almost impossible to be lonely. The mourner is conscripted into the great communal playacting of k’ilu. It is pure na’aseh v’nishmah: doing the thing until the doing changes the way you feel.
Calendared joy and calendared grief lead to a powerful phenomenon for our people: emotional reunions. Emotions are individual and singular and so personal that most of the time, most days, we are in emotional diaspora. Your new grief is your new grief, and it doesn’t share a timeline with my grief. But a few times a year we promise to meet and realign our emotions. Wherever you are, however you feel, whatever you are doing — I’ll see you at Shavuot and we will be happy. And even if I am not sitting on the floor next to you this Tisha B’Av, I will sit by candlelight letting the words of Eicha wash over me and feel wax drip onto my fingers knowing somewhere you, too, are watching the light flicker over our shared old grief. At Yizkor, we experience the pinnacle of emotional synchrony. Side by side we shout the joyful tunes of Hallel; then hand in hand, we let the tears prick our faces in grief; then arm in arm, we return to the sweetness of one last kiddush on this holiday of freedom.
At Yizkor, new grief and old grief are neighbors. But they are not the same, and Soloveitchik points to one experiential difference between the two types of sorrow. The new mourner is not permitted to be betrothed into marriage during the season of aveilut. On the other hand, betrothal is permitted on Tisha B’Av, the annual peak of old grief. This, he teaches, is the difference between the purpose of new grief and old grief. New grief is a painful knot in a personal timeline that cannot be undone even by the promise of love. New grief cannot bear to make promises about the future. Old grief, on the other hand, is a sword that has been hammered into the plowshare of resolve. Old grief swears that we will move on. We will build and rebuild. We will find joy as we imagine what comes next. We will be happy.
In the words of Sgt. Major Ben Zussman, z”l, I hear a young man in a hurry to imagine that the grief over his death will metamorphose from new grief to old grief in a triumphant hurry. He writes:
“If, god forbid, you sit shiva, make it a week of friends, family and fun. There should be food, meat of course, beers, sweet drinks, seeds, tea, and of course mother’s cookies. Make jokes, tell stories, meet all my other friends you haven’t met yet. Wow? Jealous of you. I’d like to sit there and see them all.”
I have stood in some of your living rooms under the fog of shiva and heard you share similar wishes from your loved ones: He wanted us to celebrate his life. She wanted me to be happy. We are trying to mark his legacy with joy.
If only we could will our new grief into old grief: Grief that can be curated, expected, contained, and shared. A grief that carries with it a vow that we will be perpetually akh sameach — that despite it all, eventually if not now, we will find a happy ending. Yizkor is as close as we get to that ideal: a moment of orchestrated sadness nestled in the hug of a holiday. Obligatory sadness sandwiched between great slices of obligatory happiness.
At Sgt.-Major Zussman’s funeral, his mom offered a response to her son’s request with equal measures of faith and conviction:
“We will prevail. We will live. We will prosper and we will build.”
Rabbi Alan Lew of blessed memory offers this framing: “And when we speak of joy here, we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to.”
So I will not tell you to be happy this yom tov. I won’t tell you that you should have fun in the face of your new grief, to find pleasure in our world at war. But I will tell you to seek the joy of deep release, to fully inhabit life. To search for the joy that not only defies death but rises from its ashes. To let your happiness defy death. To be akh sameach.
I’ll end with words from a poem by Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt, published the same week as the Zussman funeral:
You’re allowed to feel
whatever you feel, including of course
sad, despairing, furious, alone
panic-stricken, unable to breathe,
unable to sleep or maybe to wake up,
knowing how many will never wake again.
I want to say: kindle one candle
and breathe with its light! Inside you
the tempests will settle. But this
may not be true. I can’t promise when
the grief will end. Bring light anyway:
our souls are God’s candles, even when
we’re not sure we still know how to shine.
