Rabbi Philip Weintraub
Congregation Agudas Israel
September 23, 2015
YK Day: Holiness of Mundane in Loss
As my daughter approaches the age of Disney movies, the dramatic absence of parents is particularly powerful. Think back to your childhood or of your children and grandchildren: Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Lion King, Bambi, Dumbo, Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, The Fox and the Hound, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, Aladdin, Frozen, even Pixar with Toy Story or Up. Mothers, fathers or both are killed or disappeared in remarkable numbers. Some suggest this comes from a tragic accident that resulted in the loss of Walt Disney’s own mother. Others say it is simply an effective narrative tool--if you want to talk about growth and maturity, “knocking off a parent” is useful shorthand.
Whether in Disney terms or in reality, no life is complete without loss and loss can be an opportunity for growth. At this stage of my life, I am grateful to have my parents and in-laws. Parenting is a tremendous blessing, but no matter the child, having a resource to ask questions is a gift. I cannot imagine the loss of any of them, and do not pretend to. Yet empathy, the loss of grandparents, and even the loss of a potential life, makes grief no less real in my own life.
Having studied grief academically, through chaplaincy, through our shared experiences and my own personal losses, I have seen how different traditions attempt to assist people through their grief process. I cannot say strongly enough how lucky we are to be Jewish, to choose Judaism, especially when we lose someone. As Jews, our religion offers us a rubric, an algorithm, a language for loss that is frankly missing in much of our surrounding culture.
I don’t say this to make you feel guilty if you sat shiva for three days instead of seven. I know that not all of you will come to Yizkor services next week for Shemini Atzeret, at Passover or Shavuot. We do not have a daily minyan here to help you say Kaddish every day, but we will help you with a minyan for shloshim, for shiva or for a yahrzeit. In all of those cases, we have always come together--as long as we have a week’s notice!
I stand here to affirm my message from the last week. Every single day of our lives is one that can be filled with holiness, with kedushah, with little points of light that can inspire us to deeper, more meaningful lives. The lesson I have not clearly articulated over these last few days is that as modern Jews, we are all Jews by choice. If we were born Jewish, we did not have any official conversion ceremony, but we chose to remain within our tradition. As such, the rituals, the metaphors can speak to us, can help us make daily choices that bring God into our lives. As I quoted the Kotzker rebbe earlier this week, “Where is God found? Wherever we let God in!”
For Passover 2014’s Yizkor, I introduced you to Superman Sam, Sam Sommer, the second child of two rabbis, Phyllis and Michael Sommer. Sam had a difficult form of childhood cancer and his parents blogged from the beginning of his diagnosis, through remission, recurrence, and to his death. Unlike so many health journey blogs, they did not stop at his death in December 2013. While not as frequent, I get regular emails with new blog posts, with photos of the family and memories as they live their lives and as they remember him. No matter the stages of grief, it is not a purely linear process. People may be angry one day and accept another. They may go back from acceptance to bargaining or denial all on a daily basis.
Rabbi Phyllis wrote recently:
Pouring
I was driving today, wearing sunglasses.
Because the sun was shining.
And then suddenly, it started to rain.
Pour, actually.
But the sun was still shining.
Brightly.
I looked around, thinking that if I tried hard enough, I would find a rainbow.
But I didn't.
And then the rain stopped.
The sun shone.
Sometimes that is how I feel.
The sun can be shining.
And without warning, a monsoon pours down upon me.
I am overwhelmed with grief.
I want to find a rainbow, to imagine that it's going to end.
The rain stops, but sometimes the rainbow doesn't show its face.
Sometimes I am completely overwhelmed with the realization that I'm never going to wake up and find Sam here.
I hope for the rainbow. For the light and love and blessing.
Sometimes it hides its face.
That’s what life is. Moments of joy, moments of sadness. I especially loved the line that sometimes the rainbow doesn’t show its face. It made me think of the rabbinic concept of hester panim, that when we feel lost, hurt, it is as if God is hiding God’s face. Yet even when we feel abandoned by God, we may just be looking in the wrong place.
On Rosh Hashanah, I argued that we will find more meaning, more happiness, more joy if we could be more appreciative. The same is true with our memories and with sadness. We live in a world that is afraid of emotion. We numb ourselves and distract ourselves from the realities of the world and the realities of our lives. I argue that our lives our richer when we allow ourselves to mourn, allow ourselves to feel sad, to cry.
In this year, I shared with you some of my own feelings of loss. We are grateful to Gd, no kunahuras, and hope to celebrate a new addition to our family after next Purim, [pretend to spit]. Yet, even as I find myself incredibly excited about such possibilities, I still grieve and yet am somehow a tiny bit grateful for the miscarriage Rebecca had last summer. I mentioned earlier the great blessing of the Jewish tradition--rituals and things to do when we lose someone. One of the biggest challenges people have around death is not knowing what to do, how to act, yet our tradition gives clear instructions--except where it doesn’t. Miscarriage, perinatal and neonatal loss don’t have traditional Jewish rituals. We discovered things in the back of my Rabbi’s Manual, online, and Rebecca found going to the mikvah to be a healing experience. For me, this absence of ritual was the hardest part. Yet I was blessed to have all of you. Sharing our story with you, I heard so many, many stories. Had I not been a rabbi, we might not have told anyone, which would have been so much more difficult for us. We discovered that we were not weird alien creatures for being sad about losing a potential child, but truly part of a community, one of many who shared that experience.
It has not been easy to share the experience. As much as I put myself in front of you all, there are some feelings I am more reserved about. I love to share my joy, but am less excited about sharing sorrow. Yet that sorrow makes joy so much richer. I firmly believe that our ability to appreciate the wonders, the miracles of our lives is in direct relationship to our ability to mourn the losses of our lives and the broken world we live in. When we recognize the sorrows of others, when we work to support them, how much more can we gain from our experience, how much more can we appreciate the blessings that we do have. How much more can we celebrate? In my own life, I ask for your continued prayers, as we hope to have much to celebrate in the coming year! Every morning, Psalm 30 tells us that God turns our mourning into dancing. I pray that this year will do so for all of us.
Thinking about Yizkor, our minds go to a place of memory, remembering important people in our lives. Whether they are parents, grandparents, children, siblings, spouses or other relatives and friends, they touched our lives deeply. We simply would not be the people we are without their influence. Whatever their biological role, they were our teachers and even without a physical existence, they can still teach us.
As Jews in the 21st century, obligation (or guilt) does not resonate in the ways it did for generations of Jews. Yet you stand and sit here today. You recognize the potential for holiness, meaning, love in our lives. We are not simply organisms for whom living is our only goal. Over the last few days, I have spoken of bringing the kedushah, the holiness, of today into the rest of the year. I have spoken of the tools of gratitude, prayer, Israel, relationships, community, respect, and now memory and loss. I pray that in the year to come, these tools will help you discover holiness, find meaning, bring gratitude and love into your life. These are huge goals, yet we need not entirely accomplish them to reap huge dividends. Every moment is an opportunity. Do not waste it, let us turn now to the Yizkor service.
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