We have been speaking about hope these past ten days.
On Erev Rosh Hashanah, I posed the question…From whence shall our hope come? Where will we find hope today? Where in these challenging times and as life accelerates … Where shall we locate the source of our hope?
On Rosh Hashanah morning, we explored together what I refer to as, Judaism’s “Eternal Hoping Mechanism,” which is our people’s undying search for God.
And on Kol Nidre, and this morning in Freehof Hall, I addressed the importance in our own day – here and now – of our being willing to consider how we must change, and how our ideas about ourselves and our priorities and our communal goals must change, if we are to bring hope to this day.
And now in this Hour of Memorial, I want to join you in a conversation about memory and its power to bring us hope not for today, per se, but for all the days to follow….
For tomorrow, for the day after tomorrow, and for as far into the future as we can imagine – and for as much time as we will be afforded to know and to share.
Yizkor, as it happens, is, perhaps not surprisingly, long been associated with and invested with hope. But not, I suspect, in the ways we might at first imagine.
Originally the Yizkor service – Judaism’s traditional memorial service – was intended to be a means by which we hoped that our prayers offered on behalf of our ancestors would help their souls on the other side.
The belief being – our hope being – that in our calling on prayer in the name of our loved ones, our memorial prayers might be helpful to our dear departed family and friends in their making the passage safely from this world over into the next.
Secondarily, it was believed – it was hoped – that by our invoking the memories of the-righteous-we-call-to mind-at-this-hour – by our invoking the worthiness of our ancestors, we might improve our own chances for a hatimah tovah – a good outcome, a sincere and beneficent sealing in the Book of Life.
And today…? Today I suspect, at least as we walked in here and took our seats in the greatest number as gather here at any time of the year….
Today, I suspect, our understanding of Yizkor runs more in the direction of our taking this service as an opportunity to remind ourselves, rather than to remind God, of the worth and the wonder of the lives of those we loved and what they meant to us…
To remind ourselves of the love we knew, and the merit and blessings we shared, in the company of those we remember at this hour. So it is our hope in coming here to honor the memory of those we love-still, though they are no longer here to sit beside us.
Today, if I am correct, Yizkor continues to be rooted in memory and hope, but not the hope that God will be affected by our memories, but the hope, the trust, the pledge, that we will not forget – that we will be mindful – that we will remember – what made these good people so precious to us, to our family, and to the world.
Certainly, this was the sensibility we shared almost one month ago when we came together as a nation – all of our respective differences stripped away – as we commemorated the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
I do not intend to revisit that now. But I would like for us to consider the words of Daniel Libeskind, who is the architect who won the commission to design the master plan for the memorial space at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
I would like to share with you the words he offered by way of explaining his inspiration for a memorial that would speak to us, as well as to all the future generations to come.
“You can never say history is over,” Libeskind offers, “There is no moment when something is not related to something else. It’s all interrelated, always in the making…
“And that,” he continues, “is what I thought about this project from the very beginning.”
In consecrating a memorial in both time and space, Libeskind teaches us, “You have to start, not with gleaming buildings, but rather with what is irretrievable and eternally memorable.”
The power of memory... The power of memory to inspire hope…
So it is that the dearly departed we carry in our hearts never quite leave us. They return in dreams and reveilles. They inhabit the pictures on our wall, and in our albums. They lurk in our cellphones and on our disc drives. They come to us at night and in our waking moments and at random moments and as time goes by.
Perhaps we see a face that looks familiar… hear a voice that has echoes… see a photograph… catch a glimpse of oneself in the mirror or we hear ourselves speaking in a parents’ voice… revisiting a lover’s memory… or hear a song play on the radio… a joke retold… or when fulfilling a task or enjoying a pleasure…
And, once again, we are transported back to a happier time… a simpler time… an indelible “irretrievable eternally memorable” moment… that has helped to make us what we are today.
The power of memory… Our hope for tomorrow.
Again, Daniel Libeskind. Here reflecting on his life’s work…
“Everything I do is informed by who I am, where I come from, and who my parents are. [My] Jewish understanding of the human soul and the meaning of where we came from and where we are going – these aren’t footnotes to my work. They’re central.”
The metaphor of architecture – of the Torah as a blueprint for creation and for our lives, how we will fashion them, and with what inspiration, how they will unfold, and what ultimately our lives will mean – this does not begin with Libeskind. Rather, architecture as metaphor for life is an ancient Jewish trope.
Our memories aren’t footnotes to who we are, the memories we cherish are central to us and to the lives we build going forward. For memory plays a central role in reassuring us that there is something more to our lives – more to who we are, and how we are known, more to what we can be and what we can do with the time we are afforded – than could possibly captured in a present moment alone.
As we look towards the future, we remember those who have known us in the past, who understood all that we are and all we have been – far more than what we can capture or explain in this moment. And we bring our memories of these people and of our relationships with them into our lives today so that we might secure a more hopeful tomorrow.
But the power of memory is not only its ability to reassure us about who we are, and who we know we can be, given who we were in the company of those we loved. No. The power of memory is also its ability to focus us on our fleeting grasp of time itself.
A story: Once a student asked the great Rabbi Elijah of Vilna where he found the greatest teachings about character improvement.
The student expected and perhaps we might as well that the rabbi would refer to his own parents or to his teachers or even to his children.
But instead, Rabbi Elijah pointed across the room towards his bookshelf.
The student said, “But which volume do you mean, rabbi?”
“You don’t understand,” replied Elijah. “I’m not pointing at the book shelf, I’m pointing at the clock on the wall above my bookshelf. That has been my greatest teacher.”
Rabbi Elijah learned moral lessons from the clock that reminded him with every tick, that time is passing, that time is precious.
And all of us heard the same message any number of times this past week as we listened to tributes to Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs.
Most of these tributes, invariably, referenced his 2005 commencement address to graduates at Stanford University. Though his words have been replayed often, they bear repeating here as we consider the power of memory.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life…,” Jobs begins.
“Because almost all external expectations – all pride and all fear – these things just fall away in the face of death… Leaving only what is truly important.”
And it is this, my friends, that is memories’ true power.
The power to reduce all of life to its precious fleeting essence… encouraging us to fill our days – both this day and all of our tomorrows – with purpose, with meaning and with hope.
For when we are mindful of the truth that “we are here for what amounts to a few hours, a day at most” and we choose to use this truth to live purposefully, holding fast to our cherished memories of days and loves of an earlier time, we may find that in the words of poet Tracy K. Smith as “the moment [of our lives] sweep past, the grass then learns again to stand.”
Or in the words of my favorite poet Yehoshua November:
Sometimes a man
Will start crying in the middle of the street,
Without knowing why or for whom.
It is as though someone else is standing there,
Holding his briefcase, wearing his coat.
And from beneath the rust of years,
Come to his tongue the words to his childhood:
‘I’m sorry’ And ‘God’ and ‘Do not be far from me.’
And just as suddenly the tears are gone,
And the man walks back into his life,
And the place where he cried becomes holy.
As this sacred Yom Kippur Day draws to its close, may our precious memories carry us through this day and into the next. And may the knowledge that all our days are “numbered and precious and few” be the inspiration that reminds us that it is ours to fill our days – our today’s, and our tomorrows, and all that we shall share with one another – with meaningful purpose, expansive love and inexhaustible hope…
A hope that this place – and the next – and this day – and tomorrow – may for us “become holy.”
G’mar Hatimah Tovah
May we each be sealed for a year of blessing, a year of hope, a year of peace.
Amen.
