A seven year old girl, who attends a shul with her family where a friend of mine is the rabbi, recently learned in school about the custom of eating challah with honey starting on Rosh Hashanah and continuing through the end of the holiday season on Simhat Torah. She came home from school and asked her parents about the practice because it confused her: “Why do we continue to put honey on challah for Shimini Atzeret and Simhat Torah; those aren’t happy days, those are sad days.”
I’ve shared that story with a few of you already because it encapsulates one of my fears. There is a distinct and credible risk that out of the very necessary and urgent and indispensable need to mourn the lives lost last year on Shimini Atzeret, Simhat Torah, and the year of war that has followed, we will turn those days into days of somber mourning. Who can blame a Jewish child for thinking that Simhat Torah is a sad day after hearing her parents and teachers and community talk about the atrocities of Simhat Torah for month after month?
I remember being a teenager when I first started reading Israeli newspapers and magazines during visits to Israel. I remember feeling so confused that the Yom Kippur supplement of every Israeli newspaper was not about the holiday and its meaning and relevance, but was rather a commemorative retrospective on the Yom Kippur War. I now understand. Shemini Atzeret will forever be linked in my consciousness to the current war and its outbreak on that dark Saturday morning and I suspect that will be true for all of us for the rest of our lives.
But, somehow, we have to find a way to mourn and to remember without erasing an entire holiday from the Jewish calendar. Just as the Yom Kippur War is an inescapable resonance on each Yom Kippur for the generation that experienced the trauma of that war and yet Yom Kippur as a foundation of our religious lives endures as a special day on our calendar with its own unique meaning and power.
We are not the first generations to struggle with the question of the interaction of memory and mourning on Shabbat and festivals. After the massacres of the Jewish communities of the Rhineland by the armies of the first crusade in 1096, the Av HaRachamim memorial prayer was composed to honor their memory and to give voice to our grief. Originally the prayer was recited only on the Shabbatot of sefirat ha-omer in the spring, the period of time when the massacres occurred, but over the generations Av HaRachamim became a standard memorial prayer recited almost every Shabbat.
Memorial prayers on Yom Kippur emerged out of a desire to “redeem the dead” as well as the living at a time when every soul, alive and dead, is judged. Charity given in the merit of the deceased earned them a more favorable judgment beyond the grave as the meaning and impact of their lives and legacy continue to be shaped by our actions undertaken in their memory and inspired by their examples. The earliest prayers to open with the phrase “Yizkor” or “may God remember” were composed after the crusades as a way to memorialize by name the many Jewish victims of the crusader’s bloody march across Europe. The listing of names was a medieval precursor to the Yizkor books that our shul publishes each year.
Ashkenazi Jewry recovered from the crusades but was buffeted by plague and expulsion over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries. After the Black Death, the center of gravity of Ashkenazi Jewry, no longer in Northern France and Germany, shifted to the east to Poland and Eastern Europe. The Maharil, the great preserver and collector of Ashkenazi customs and liturgy, writing in the 15th century as Ashkenazi Jewry is reestablishing itself, describes the practice of reciting memorial prayers on the final days of Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot. This practice was originally called “Matnat Yad” after the Torah reading for the second day of yom tov which describes the pilgrimage to Yerushalayim and the donations that were made “each with his own gift (matnat yado) according to the blessing that the Lord your God has bestowed upon you.
In time the prayers to redeem the dead on Yom Kippur and the charitable donations in the honor of deceased parents on the holidays converged into the Yizkor prayers we know, recited on Yom Kippur, on Shimini Atzeret, the last day of Pesach, and the second day of Shavuot. In the nineteenth century the early Reform Movement turned Yizkor into a more somber reflection on death by starting the “Yizkor Memorial Service” with a responsive recitation of biblical verses that meditate on mortality. In time, many Orthodox shuls, including this one, have adopted that practice; the Birnbaum, Artscroll and Koren machzorim all include those verses.
At first glance reciting a Yizkor service on a festival is incongruous and inappropriate. Consider that someone who, God forbid, buries a relative on Hol HaMoed Sukkot will have their mourning and shivah suspended until after Simhat Torah has ended. The mourning can’t set root during the festival and yet we recite Yizkor prayers on Shimini Atzeret. Consider that we omit reciting the Kel Maleh Rahamim memorial prayer for the entire month of Nissan because Nissan is the month of our redemption and we can’t mourn wholeheartedly in such a propitious time. And yet we recite Yizkor prayers on the last day of Pesach itself.
There are several reasons why Yizkor is appropriate. At its core, Yizkor, as anyone who has recited it knows well, amounts to a pledge to tzedakah and it is always appropriate to make a pledge to tzedakah and it is especially appropriate to do so on a holiday since the inclusion of the widow, orphan and stranger, in our holiday celebrations is core to the Torah’s understanding of the festivals and how we are meant to rejoice on them.
And, Jewish tradition has recognized the cathartic value of tears. A moment of sadness when remembering deceased relatives can enable us to rejoice with a more full heart at other moments of the holiday. We miss loved ones so much more on holidays, and Yizkor provides us space to recognize that so that the loss does not take over the holiday.
Yizkor on Yom Kippur is appropriate for an additional reason because confronting, and even celebrating, our mortality is a core theme of the day. We abstain from food or drink and dress and act in as angelic a fashion as we can. It is as if we have shed the dross of our humanity and turned, at least for a day, into celestial beings. And yet, a consistent theme of the Yom Kippur liturgy is that God prefers and treasures the prayers of fallible human beings more than the heavenly choirs of angels.
Pay attention to the piyutim in the machzor before we recite the Kedushah. The Kedushah is our most angelic prayer since the words themselves come from prophetic visions of the heavenly choir and our posture and choreography when reciting the kedushah is meant to mimic the angels themselves. And yet, despite our incorporation of an angelic prayer into our machzorim, the poetry that proceeds Kedushah declares quite boldly that God likes our Kedushah more than the angelic one.
Asher Eimatecha – even though Your dread is upon the faithful angels, the mighty heavenly hosts, created of ice mixed with fire…
Ve-Avita Tehilah – yet you desire praise from those formed from earth, denizens of the valleys below, whose actions are meager, and good deeds few in number.
V’Hi T’hilatecha – and this is your praise!
Stanza after stanza expresses the perfection that surrounds God in heaven. And stanza after stanza expresses God’s desire for praise from imperfect humans.
This dynamic, according to a beautiful tradition recorded in the Talmud, goes back to the dawn of Jewish history when the angels in the heavenly court objected to the Torah being handed over to human beings. God turns to Moshe and asks him to justify the gift of the Torah. Why do sinful and frail human beings deserve access to the Torah? Moshe’s winning argument is to open the Torah and see for whom it is relevant.
The Torah creates obligations that respond to human needs and that protects us in our fragility. The Torah prohibits things that human beings sometimes wish to do.
We, and not angels, are tempted by base urges, petty jealousies and resentments. We, and not angels, are tempted by the easy availability of living our lives without introspection, without moral scrutiny, and without responsibility for others. And it is because of those human temptations and weaknesses that our dedication of a day for prayer and self-examination is meaningful. Sure, the angelic choir sings better. Every angel sings on key. But God treasures our efforts to transcend our limitations.
Our mortality is what gives us skin in the game. That’s why our lives and our choices are significant. Unlike the angels we don’t have an eternity to spend in the presence of God. We are here for only a brief time and we make choices about how that limited time gets spent. Coming together in prayer, on a fast day when the lines between human and angel are blurry, when weakness of fasting and our shroud like clothing reminds us of our mortality, is a sign to God -and a sign to ourselves – that we have chosen, at least for today, to allocate our time and efforts towards noble purposes.
If a confrontation with mortality is a central theme of the day, why do many children and others blessed with two living parents have the custom of leaving shul during Yizkor?
Gesher HaChayim, the great halakhic and philosophical encyclopedia on death and mourning suggests that if people were in shul, and remained silent while others were reciting memorial prayers their silence would be construed as opposition. Better to leave than to say nothing while others pray. But of course everyone has someone they can memorialize in prayer whether it is a grandparent or a fallen soldier or Holocaust victim.
The more common assumption is that leaving for Yizkor somehow protects our parents from an “ayin harah,” the tradition of avoiding anything that might incur the jealousy of mourners, or the fear of what would happen if someone with living parents “accidentally” recited a Yizkor for them, or perhaps the eerie sense that being in shul is a kind of “playacting” of what it will be like for a parent to die. That can feel frightening.
But these motivations can be overcome and often are overcome. What will incite jealousy more than watching dozens of friends and neighbors stroll out of shul? Indeed some yeshivot gathering for prayer with mostly younger worshippers have for many years instructed all of the students to remain in shul for Yizkor so as not to leave only a few unfortunate individuals behind. And, instead of fearing accidentally reciting a Yizkor prayer for a living parent, someone can choose to pray on behalf of their parents’ health and well being.
The researcher Zvi Ron, in an article exploring this phenomenon suggests a simple historical explanation. Yizkor’s origins, as we have seen, was a public collection of tzedakah. Children left shul because they didn’t have money to pledge. Indeed, there were no “groups” in Medieval synagogues; children probably just left shul for the boring parts.
The first reference we have to someone asking about those with living parents leaving for Yizkor is only in the 19th century, around the time that the Reform movement was codifying the evolution of Yizkkor into a “Yizkor Memorial Service.” Before then nobody would think to ask about the absence of children or adults with living parents since their absence was obvious and not at all noteworthy.
We are going to say Yizkor in a few minutes and it should have all the resonances of Yizkor on Yom Kippur, to evoke our mortality in a way that gives added meaning and depth to our prayers today. As always, everyone, even those blessed with two living parents are welcome to stay.
But the next time we will recite Yizkor, in less than two weeks, will be on Shimini Atzeret, the yahrzeit of nearly 1200 Israeli civilians and soldiers who were killed just last year on that day. And our Yizkor prayers will have to accomplish so much more. We are going to honor, by name, those who were killed over the past year, and we are also going to identify a moment for focused grief and mourning, in order to save Shimini Atzeret and Simhat Torah as days when we and our children can feel real joy and dip our challah in honey without question.
If you are blessed with living parents and they would like you to leave for Yizkor, please exit the shul silently and remain silent while you wait in the hallways before being called back into shul.
And I would like to make one more request from you. After Yom Kippur please reach out to your parents and ask their permission to be in shul for Yizkor on Shimini Atzeret. Tell them that you will pray for their health. Tell them that it is important that our community all come together in a noble act of memory and commemoration. We are going to need to grieve together as a community in order to celebrate together.
G’mar Hatimah Tovah and Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 