As you know, or will soon find out, at its core Yizkor is a glorified pledge to tzedakah. We do this on Yom Tov because the Torah’s conception of celebrating a holiday includes making space at our tables for those who are marginalized and disadvantaged. A tzedakah pledge is therefore in the spirit of the holiday in a way that other financial discussions would not be. And one really important and urgent activity when the holidays end is to follow up on those tzedakah pledges made at Yizkor.
But, as we’ve discussed over the years, each Yizkor takes on the character of the holiday in which it is recited. Yom Kippur Yizkor evokes questions of existential meaning and the direction of our lives in light of the legacy of our ancestors. Yizkor on Shavuot invites us to contemplate our place in the chain of transmission of Torah, from Sinai to the generations that will come after us.
What about Yizkor on Shemini Atzeret?
What, even, is Shemini Atzeret?
Our rabbis noticed that Shemini Atzeret is treated in an unusual way by the Torah. Its very name, “the eighth day of culmination,” suggests that it is no more than a final, eighth day of Sukkot. But Shemini Atzeret is given distinct rituals in the Torah, and a seven-day holiday cannot simply have an eighth day. And so the rabbis determined that Shemini Atzeret is a unique and distinct holiday in some ways, but not in others.
The midrashic imagination gives us poignant metaphors for this strange holiday.
Rashi, commenting on Vayikra, compares Shemini Atzeret to a king who invites his children to a feast that is supposed to last for a certain number of days. When the time comes to say goodbye and leave, the king says: “Stay with me one more day. It is hard for me to part from you.”
Or, as Shakespeare might have put it: “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
Rabbi Elazar, in the Talmud (Sukkah 55b), offers a different but related image. He compares Shemini Atzeret to a small, intimate meal between a king and his beloved after a week-long state dinner. During Sukkot, seventy bulls were sacrificed in the Beit HaMikdash on behalf of the archetypal seventy nations of the world. On Shemini Atzeret, one bull is offered. After the great public celebration, after everyone else has gone home, the Jewish people have one more day of intimacy and connection with God.
These metaphoric depictions of this day are similar but they pull in different directions. According to Rashi, Shemini Atzeret derives its meaning from its duration. Because of Shemini Atzeret (and Simhat Torah) our holiday season stretches for an eighth and a ninth day after the start of Sukkot. God wanted more time together with us, and a bit of extra time together was written for us into the Torah.
According to Rabbi Elazar in the Talmud, Shemini Atzeret derives its meaning precisely from its intimacy. If you need to tell your boss or your dean why you’ll miss work or school for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, or for Pesach, to commemorate the exodus, it is easy to explain the story behind those holidays. You can tell your colleagues that you will be spending Sukkot eating in a temporary shelter to commemorate our vulnerability as refugees fleeing Egypt. But what are you going to say about Shemini Atzeret? You can’t say anything. You can’t explain it. And that’s the point. It isn’t about explaining to others, it’s about enjoying our private relationship with God.
Both of these ways of understanding the holiday can lend their meaning to this Yizkor. Shemini Atzeret exists because we want a bit more time and parting is hard. For many of us, there is nothing we would not give for another day together with those who have departed. When we recite Yizkor, we can at least connect to their memories.
And Shemini Atzeret exists as a day of intimate celebration that cannot be communicated with others, a day to inhabit a relationship with God that is fundamentally incommensurate with what anyone else may experience. The relatives we memorialize in Yizkor prayers, each one of them, had their own connections to us. Each one shaped us in unique ways, and the relationship honored at Yizkor is unique to each person reciting those prayers. As we recite them, privately, in just a few minutes, we can engage in personal reflections that we never have to explain to anyone else.
And then there is the meaning that Shemini Atzeret acquired three years ago. It was Shabbat morning then, too. More than 1,200 people were killed that day: men, women, and children murdered in their homes and at a music festival, and soldiers and police who fell defending them. Two hundred fifty-one more were taken hostage. A war began that would claim so many more lives and leave thousands of widows, orphans, and wounded. For many of us here in the United States, that morning was a turning point.
In the weeks that followed, we discovered feelings we hadn’t anticipated, and found ourselves reconsidering things we had long taken for granted. Some of us struggled to explain to colleagues and classmates what we were going through. Some of us struggled to explain it even to ourselves. We have not all experienced these three years in the same way, and we may not all understand them in the same way. But few of us have come through them unchanged.
Yizkor on Shemini Atzeret is an opportunity to mourn those murdered on this date and those who fell defending them, the hostages who did not come home, and the soldiers and civilians who died over the course of the war. It is also an opportunity to reflect on what changed for us: our sense of security, our place in the world, and, for some of us, our own self-understanding and identity. And it is a chance to sit with questions for which we do not yet have answers.
But let us remember that no matter how overwhelming the sadness can feel, and no matter how vast the darkness seems, today is still Shemini Atzeret. I believe that God still wants us close. Even when we no longer recognize the world around us, even if we don’t fully recognize ourselves, we have all chosen our relationship with God over despair, simply by being here this morning. And we still have a unique and irreplaceable role to play in the unfolding story of humanity. The world may be harder to understand than it was three years ago. Our task may be less clear than it once seemed. But God asked us to stay one more day, because parting is hard. And so we remain here, remembering those who are gone, standing with love alongside those who remain, and trying to discern what we are called to do with the lives we have been given.
