Yom Kippur Yizkor

Rabbi Philip Weintraub
Congregation Agudas Israel
Yom Kippur Yizkor 5773, 2012

Boker Tov, Gmar Tov.  Before I begin, I want to share a joke with you.
A rabbi, a priest and a minister are sitting at a deli discussing their lives.  At one point the rabbis asks his friends, “What do you want people to say about you at your funeral?”  
They sit and think for a moment.
The priest responds first.  He says “I want people to say that I was generous to the poor, that I served my flock well, that I was a good preacher, and that I made a difference in people’s lives.”
The minister thinks for a moment and says, “I agree with the priest, but I also hope my wife and children can say that I took time for them, too.  I want to be remembered as a good husband and father, as well as a good minister.  Rabbi, how about you.”
The rabbi waits to make sure his timing is just right and then says, “ I want someone to say: ‘Look, he’s moving!’”

Now that I got your laughing on Yom Kippur, I need to ask your forgiveness.  In my pastoral education program at Vassar last year,  I discovered that one of my biggest gifts and also one of my biggest challenges is that I can find humor in almost any situation.  For some this is helpful, it serves as a way to connect, a way to see that even in our darkest moments, there is always some light to be found.  At the same time lightening the mood in the wrong place is painful, humor can be a defense mechanism, a way to prevent us from feeling our emotions, our grief, our loss, our sadness.  This is especially challenging since we live in a world that wants us to be happy all the time. For some the solution to that pressure comes in a bottle or a pill or a drug.  While this is NOT a sermon about addiction in the Jewish community, we must be aware that the classic statement “a shichur is a goy” is not true, there are Jewish alcoholics, drug addicts, and we cannot abandon them by pretending they do not exist.

This morning I want us to think about our legacies.  While the rabbi in the joke turned his answer to a serious question into a joke, the priest and minister thought about what they wanted to pass on to their flock and their children, what lessons were important to them.  Even if they spoke of what they wanted to be remembered for, they were defining their values: taking care of the poor (tzedekah and gemilut chasadim), serving their community, and being part of a mishpacha, family.

In just a few minutes, we will recite the Yizkor prayers.  We will remember family members, fellow congregants, parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, those nearest and dearest to us, but also those who are more distant.  We will think about how they touched our lives; how they helped us grow and develop.  We might also think of the challenges and obstacles they had in their lives.  What lessons did they learn from them?  What lessons did they teach us?  Were they hindered emotionally or physically from early challenges?  How did that affect us?  How does that affect our memories of them?

Last October, the weekend of the blizzard and my installation, take 1, my grandmother, Alice Paulin, had a stroke.  Since that point, she can occasionally hold a conversation, but in many ways, she is like someone with Alzheimer’s.  She can communicate, but not clearly.  Sometimes her sentences make sense.  Sometimes they do not.  Sometimes she seems to be in the present, other times, she asks for family members who passed away long ago.  Regularly, she asks about her mother, her father, her husband (my grandfather).

Before her stroke, my grandmother had difficulty seeing and hearing, but was mentally great.  She would tell me stories about her parents and grandparents, her family.  She told me about her life.  Unfortunately, I never took good notes, so the stories are all jumbled in my head.  I don’t know all of the names or places.  I know she had a relative with a fur factory in the south, and was able to get a beautiful coat.  I know the styles changed and she had the trim redone by her father? grandfather? here in NY.  I know that when she was able to use her computer, she used family tree software to trace our genealogy back generations, but that computer doesn’t work anymore and she never printed it out!  

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we think about our mortality.  We wonder who will be here with us next year and remember those who were with us last year.  In preparing for my family’s future, I just purchased life insurance.  While debating about how much/what kind/what can I afford, the broker said, “sign up for some today, you don’t know what happens tomorrow.  We can always change the coverage, but if you start today, you know you are covered.”  While it was a little depressing to think that I could be run over (Gd forbid) walking to shul one day, buying life insurance was one step of my Rosh Hashanah life review.  

It made me think about my story.  What do I want to tell my children (one day)?  What do I wish my parents or grandparents told me?  What should I ask my parents?  
When thinking about our stories, we think about our personal character and influences upon it.  What are the driving forces in our lives?  For me, this includes parents who value education, who motivated me to self-motivate, who demonstrate the importance of helping others, and who teach me that we are obligated to treat everyone with respect.  After first meeting my wife, Rebecca, I immediately recognized these common values, which led us to pursue our relationship.

Although every moment in our lives is important, if we could remember or tell our story moment by moment, the story would last as long as our lives.  In recalling, we think of key events and instances that have particular impact.  For me this would include childhood memories of my brother and sister, shame over not clearly citing sources in a 6th grade paper (it sounds funny, but it’s true!), helping my Dad at a conference for adults with disabilities, many memories of USY, gaining scholarships to Brandeis and JTS, key conversations with classmates and professors from college and seminary, and of course, the influence of Rebecca and her entire extended family, who I first met at our nephew’s first birthday party, not too long after we started dating.  

In sharing our stories, we may want to gloss over negative influences or events.  We may not want to discuss the time we drank too much or made other mistakes in our lives.  We may not want to discuss times in our life when we were not at our best, when we padded our resumes or were not respectful of our commitments to our spouses or others.  Personally, I am still a little embarrassed that at my high school awards ceremony, I was given an award for doing more than 300 hours of community service.  (I think they double counted something or mixed up volunteer hours and working in Hebrew school hours, but I was told not to worry about it when I asked if the numbers were accurate.)  Of course, if you are telling your life story to your children and family, there is a difference between brutal honesty, whitewashing, and sharing your story.  Hopefully you can find the right balance.  Do remember, if it is a matter of public record, ie you are secretly a Roosevelt, a Lincoln, a Mother Theresa, a Maimonides, a Sandusky, a Madoff, or any other public figure, your family will know more about you than you care to reveal, so you may want to share your perspective.

No matter your public persona, your accomplishments are a joint effort.  They came about through your work, your family’s influence, society’s influence, and maybe even government’s influence.  There is a reason that on Yom Kippur our confessions are in plural, very few of our actions are done individually--good or bad.  So we have to acknowledge the contributions of others in our lives.  I mentioned before my parents and grandparents, my wife and inlaws.  I cannot imagine my life without the influence of numerous Rabbis like Josh Heller in Atlanta, Bill Lebeau or Neil Gillman at JTS, or Mark Greenspan in Oceanside, just to name a few.

Don’t look now, but in the special Yom Kippur pamphlets, I have given you a list of questions and ideas to think about that will help you tell your story.  I encourage you to document your life for your family.  Teach them about your history.  What drove you?  What led you here?  How integral is Judaism in your life?  Take pictures and label them.  Give captions to the people and places that you know you will always remember, but your family might not.  Collect videos and photos and writings and stories and put them together somewhere safe AND somewhere where you and others know where they are.  If they are in a bank vault and no one has the key, that is not very helpful.  As long as your stories remain in your head, they are in a similar vault.  Put them somewhere safe before you lose your key!

This morning I have raised too many questions.   I have been told that if you ask more than one or two questions in a sermon, you lose your audience, because they are too busy thinking.  I hope that a few of you are still with me as we prepare for the Yizkor service.  At the same time, I pray that these words will inspire you to share your own stories, to write them down and ensure that your family members will truly remember you.  Now that we have thought about our own legacies, about our family’s legacy, we can properly pay respect to those in our family who are no longer with us.  As we remember them, we connect ourselves to the chain of Jewish tradition.  By saying Yizkor we add another link in that great chain.  We acknowledge our place in Jewish history by remembering those that allowed us to be here today.

We turn now to p. 290.