Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
It seems to happen every summer, and it seems to have happened this past summer more than usual. Wildfires break out in a part of the country that has seen very little rain. They rage out of control and threaten private homes in the area, and suddenly dozens of homeowners are faced with a hypothetical question unexpectedly become real: If your house were in the path of a fire and all the family members and pets were safe, and you had time to grab only one item from your home to save from the flames, what one item would you choose to save?
When I was younger, my answer would change every few years. At one point, it might have been my baseball card collection. Then it became my address and telephone number book. A few years later, I might have gone for the silver service we were given as a wedding present, or the Sabbath candlesticks that had been my parents’. Some years after that, it would probably have been the notes for a half-finished doctoral dissertation. But by the time I was approaching middle age, it was clear to me that there was only one correct answer to that hypothetical question. I would rush to save our family photo album. Virtually everything else in the house I could either replace or learn to live without, but there would be no way of replacing the memories those photographs represent.
If I tried to persuade you on Rosh HaShannah that we are not the product of our genes, I would venture to suggest on Yom Kippur that we are very much the product of our memories. Like the little boy who shows his father a bad report card and asks "What do you think my problem is, heredity or environment?", who we are today is the cumulative result of all the things that happened to us along the way. That’s why of all the ills to which the flesh is heir, of all the things that we pray not happen to us or our families in the coming year, the most terrifying is Alzheimer’s Disease. Anything else we can fight, and our families and our doctors will help us in that fight. But if we lose our memories, there is no one home when doctors and family members try to help.
We are who we are because of the people and the experiences we remember, and never is that more true than on Yom Kippur, -- not only in the Yizkor service but in the memories that so many of us cherish of coming to shul on the High Holy Days with our parents or our grandparents. We didn’t understand intellectually what was going on, but we sensed the love and the solemnity of those moments. We intuitively understood that they were bringing us because this was something important to them and they wanted us to share it with them.
I suspect that there are some people here today out of a sense of obligation. There are places you would rather be and things you would rather be doing than sitting in shul, but Yom Kippur and especially the Yizkor prayers grab us and won’t let go. We know we would feel terribly guilty if we didn’t come to offer those memorial prayers.
To those of you who feel that way, let me suggest that we really ought to come to shul on Yom Kippur, and especially to the moments of Yizkor, not out of a sense of obligation or guilt but in a spirit of gratitude. If we didn’t have those memories, we’d be like the victims of Alzheimer’s Disease. We would no longer know who we were, because we need those memories to define us, to tell us who we are.
Some years ago, because of my friendship with the president of the national organization of Unitarian churches, I was invited to speak to the professional staff of the Unitarian movement. (Let me say parenthetically that it would have been a lot easier to get a minyan at the Unitarian headquarters than at a lot of buildings in downtown Boston.) During the question and answer period, someone asked me "Given the fact that the theology of Reform Judaism and the theology of Unitarianism are so similar, why don’t more Reform Jews become Unitarians?" I answered that being Jewish was more than a matter of theology. It was a matter of continuing a family identity, seeing yourself as the next link in a chain of generations. The questioner responded "You don’t understand. A lot of us are here to get away from our families." A woman seated next to her called out "That’s right. For a lot of us, this represents a fresh start, a break with our past."
And I remember thinking to myself "No, these people are doing it wrong. You can’t do that. You can’t amputate your past and re-invent yourself as a brand new person. Too much of who you are is rooted in that past."
Our memories shape us, our memories define us, even when they are bitter, unpleasant memories. I read recently of a social worker in Miami Beach who worked with a group of senior citizens, all of them survivors of the Holocaust, now in their 70’s and 80’s. The group was supposed to be about keeping them informed about medical insurance, Social Security, assisted living, but every time they met, all they wanted to talk about was their experiences during the war. Finally in exasperation, the social worker said to them "Those must have been such awful experiences. Why do you keep dwelling on them?" One of them answered "You’re right. Those years in the camps were the worst thing that every happened to me. But they are also the most important thing that ever happened to me. Take away those memories, hide from those memories because they are so painful to remember, and I’m not me any more. I’d be somebody else."
I can relate to that. I suspect many of us can. We have been shaped by the painful moments in our lives, -- losses, rejections, failures, relationships that didn’t work out – at least as much as by our successes, achievements and parental love. When we come to the moments of Yizkor, a lot of the memories those prayers will summon up will be painful ones – people taken from us too soon, while we still wanted and needed them; words of appreciation, words of apology and reconciliation that never got spoken because somebody died before they or we were ready to speak or hear them; the lingering disappointments over a marriage or a parent-child relationship that wasn’t everything we hoped it would be. Most of the time, we don’t like to brood about those things. They make us feel bad. They make us feel helpless: was there something more we could have done? And now it’s too late to do it. But we need to hold on to those feelings and not delete them from our memory bank, because they are such an important part of who we are.
I got a letter recently from a woman who had read my book about bad things happening to good people. She wrote of how she was betrayed personally and financially by a man she thought loved her, and how much she lost as a result of that betrayal. Then she writes "I would never wish on my worst enemy what I went through during those years. I never want to go through anything like that again. But at the same time, I know that I have learned a lot about myself, about my inner strength and my will to go on. I have learned that God does not promise us only good times, but that I was never alone even in the worst of times. Strange as it may seem to say it, I’m grateful for the events that made me a strong woman, a devoted mother, and a leader in our family."
If we suppress the memories because we don’t like to think about them, then like the Holocaust survivors in Miami Beach, we run the risk that we will stop being us and pretend to be somebody else, somebody to whom those things never happened. But one of the messages of Yom Kippur, a day of dropping pretenses and admitting our faults, is that God doesn’t want us to pretend to be somebody else, somebody nicer and more serene. God wants us to bring our whole selves, our uncensored past to the service. What was Freud’s great discovery if not the insight that if we face up to the memories we have buried because they were too painful, we can master them and become more whole? And along the same lines, the wisdom of the Jewish calendar, the wisdom of the Yom Kippur prayerbook, is to make sure that we don’t lose those memories lest we stop being who we are and become somebody else.
They tell the story of Thomas Edison, that one day his laboratory in New Jersey burned to the ground, destroying several experiments he was in the middle of. Someone said to him how terrible it was that this happened, and Edison is supposed to have said "No, it’s not terrible at all. It got rid of my mistakes and my failures, and now I can start fresh." I don’t want to get rid of the memory of my mistakes, though some of them embarrass me, because if I cleanse my memory of them, if I avoid responsibility and blame others, I may repeat them. I don’t want to forget my losses, the people and places amputated from my life, though some of the losses still hurt, because they are too much a part of me and I would be a less complete person if I forgot them. I need to hold on to the pain and the embarrassment, so that I can continue to be me.
The ancient Greeks tried to imagine the soul’s journey from this life to the afterlife when it left the body. They pictured it coming to the border of the underworld, and being offered the opportunity to drink the waters of Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness. Drink this, they were told, and for eternity you will no longer remember all the pain and suffering you went through when you were alive. Your memory will be cleansed of all the disappointments, all the frustrations. The soul would ask, Will I remember the good times, the pleasures, the successes? And it would be told, No. Drink the waters of Lethe and in order to forget the pain, you will forget everything. And the disembodied soul would say No, thank you. I would rather remember it all.
But if we hold on to bitter memories, won’t that make us bitter people, prisoners of the past, consumed by helplessness and bitterness? I found an answer to that dilemma in an unexpected place. You don’t need me to tell you that the 23d Psalm is a literary and religious masterpiece. You know that. There are reasons why it is probably the only chapter of the Bible that most people know by heart. But in the midst of that wonderful, comforting psalm, there is one line that doesn’t seem to fit. One line seems to break the mood of the psalm Do you know the line I’m talking about? It’s the one that goes "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies." It sounds like the biblical equivalent of "living well is the best revenge," getting even with people who have hurt you by showing them how abundantly God has blessed you. "Wait till all those women who wouldn’t go out with me see me drive by in my new Lexus." "The guy who fired me two years ago just called me begging for a job." It’s an understandable human emotion, but does it really belong in the 23d Psalm?
I recently read an interpretation of that line that made me feel better about it. Reb Zalman Schachter writes that once a year, he throws an imaginary dinner party to which, in his mind, he invites all the people he is angry at, everyone who has hurt him or disappointed him in the past year. In the course of that imaginary dinner, he goes around the table and thanks each of his guests for what they have taught him. Some have taught him not to expect too much of people, because most people will put their own needs, their own wellbeing, ahead of other people’s needs. And he thanks them for that important lesson. His philosophy has become "When a friend makes a mistake, the mistake is still a mistake and the friend is still a friend."
Some of his guests have taught him lessons about himself, driving him to ask himself why he was so bothered by something they did. What is it about him, his needs, his vulnerabilities, that made that encounter so upsetting to him? And is it something he would want to change about himself to make himself less vulnerable to being upset?
When he has gone around the table, thanking every one on his enemies list for the lessons they have taught him, he is amazed at how much better he feels, cleansed of all that anger and resentment, able to maintain pleasant relationships even with flawed, unreliable friends and relatives. And he thanks God for preparing a table before him in the presence of his enemies.
Every one of us is a year older today than we were last Yom Kippur, and that means we are each one year richer in memories than we were a year ago, -- good memories and bad memories, memories of love and memories of loss, moments that made us feel good about ourselves and moments that led us to doubt ourselves. And this is a day to savor those memories, to savor them with gratitude for the ways in which they have deepened our lives, to do so not only during the fifteen minutes of Yizkor but throughout the twenty-four hours of this day on which we clear everything else out of the way so that we can concentrate on the question of what sort of people we are.
But if you agree with me that memories are the most precious things we possess, that memories are what we would save from the fire and that loss of memory would be the most destructive thing that could happen to a person, that raises one more question: what sort of memories are we blessing our children with? What sort of memories will they, many years from now, bring to a Yizkor service on Yom Kippur when they think of us? Will they be memories of sacred moments shared, of love articulated in word and deed.? Will they remember being brought to the synagogue on the High Holy Days in an atmosphere of solemnity and seriousness, a sense that they were being invited to share in something that was truly special to us? I worry that we are raising the first generation of children in Jewish history who won’t even have memories of Jewish grandparents, let alone parents, lighting Sabbath candles. Don’t ask the Religious School to fill in those blanks, to provide your children with Jewish memories. No matter how well we do it, and I think we do it pretty well, we can never match the emotional impact of the home. It’s not just a matter of the number of hours your children spend here compared to the hours they spend at home. It goes beyond that. Home is where your children live emotionally as well as geographically. That’s where their memories will be engendered. The same emotional involvement which will move you to offer Yizkor prayers for your parents and not for the Hebrew School teachers of your childhood will ensure that your children’s sense of who they are as Jews will be determined by you much more than by us.
Will your children grow up with the memories that many of us grew up with, of parents sitting down to check our homework, to talk to us about what we were learning at school, what books we were reading, wanting to know who our friends were? Or are we too busy and are they too busy? Some years ago, I suggested that the last of the Four
Questions at the Passover Seder, the one about "on all other nights, we eat either sitting or reclining; why on this night do we all recline?", should be translated "on all other nights, we eat either at leisure or in a hurry; why on this night do we all eat at leisure?" What makes the Seder night special is not the matzo and not the Haggadah, but the fact that the family spends the evening at the table together, eating and talking. Nobody calls to say "I’ll be late, start without me." Nobody leaves early for a meeting, a game, a favorite TV show. And the result is, what we do on all other nights of the year is forgettable, but the Seder leaves us with warm and precious memories.
If memories are the most valuable thing we own, why don’t we share them with our children? Why don’t we consider them a part of our legacy along with the other valuable things we’re concerned about passing on to them? How many of us have sat down with our children and grandchildren and told them about our growing up years? I bet they would be fascinated.
My friends, there is very little danger of our homes catching fire and our having to rescue our memories from the fire. But there is another kind of fire that threatens our memories. It’s the deliberate amnesia that allows us to forget memories that we would be better off remembering, memories that are painful, memories that tell us things about ourselves. It’s the sin of overlooking the emotional needs of our children even as we make sure to meet all of their other needs, not providing them with the memories our parents and grandparents provided us with.
Late in the day on Yom Kippur, at about two in the afternoon when we recall the Day of Atonement service in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, we read of how the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies, first to pray for his own family, then to pray for all the kohanim, all who dedicated their lives to God’s service, and finally to pray for all the House of Israel. And when he did so, he would add an extra line on behalf of the residents of a certain part of Israel that was prone to earthquakes, praying that their homes be safe from destruction.
We today don’t have to worry about that. But there are other kinds of danger that threaten the foundations of our homes and the foundations of our identity. There is the danger that we will forget who we are and forget how we got to be who we are, because some of the memories that define us are painful memories. And there is the danger that our children will forget who they are, because we didn’t work hard enough to supply them with the memories to answer that question. So on Yom Kippur we pray as the High Priest of old used to pray, -- that our homes be safe from those dangers in the coming year. AMEN