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Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, brings to a close the High Holy Day season with which the New Year starts, ten days that ask us to look at ourselves, to look at our lives, and to look into our Jewish tradition to find and select the values that we want to guide our lives in the coming year. This evening I would like to go back to the opening moments of Rosh HaShanah, to the first words of the first Torah reading on the first day of a New Year. As many of you will remember, it is the story of the birth of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah after many years of longing. It begins VA'ADONAI PAKAD ET SARAH KA'ASHER AMAR, "The Lord took note of Sarah as He had promised to," and to her great joy, she gives birth to a child. At least that's what the translation says it says, but that's not what the Hebrew verb pakad usually means. I looked it up in my Bible dictionary and found seven definitions. It most often means "to punish." It can also mean to command, to organize, to arrange, to appoint or designate. The dictionary lists only one instance where it may mean to remember, to take note, and it's the one I cited from the Rosh HaShanah reading. Nowhere else in the Bible does it mean that.
And then there is one other sense in which pakad is sometimes used. I don't think it's what the Bible had in mind in the passage I quoted but one of the wonderful things about Biblical Hebrew, and one of the things that makes it so hard to appreciate in translation, is that the same word can be saying several different things at the same time, and the poor translator has to settle on one and exclude the others.
When I was fourteen years old and I opened a gemara for the first time in my life and looked at my first page of Talmud, the very first passage I was taught began Hamafkid etzel havero, If you give something to a friend to take care of for you, what is the extent of the friend's responsibility if something happens to it? The Talmud goes on to consider the circumstances: why did you give it to him? Is he doing you a favor by taking care of it? Are you paying him to care for it, in which case his responsibility is greater? Did he ask you to borrow it for his own benefit? Did you alert him to how important it was to you? You see why people who studied Talmud when they were young have an unfair advantage over their classmates when they go to law school.
But for me, the interesting part of that discussion is that the verb for giving someone something temporarily, mafkid, is related to the verb from the Rosh HaShanah Torah reading, pakad. ADONAI PAKAD ET SARAH KA'ASHER AMAR, God gave Sarah something precious but it wasn't hers to keep forever. It was her responsibility to take good care of it even though one day she would have to relinquish it.
Even if the liturgy of Yom Kippur didn't tell us to do it, we would come to shul on these High Holy Days haunted by memories of people who once shared these services with us and are no longer here to do so. The seats around us are full but we sit here thinking about the empty seats next to us and the people who used to sit in them. It's hard not to feel sad, not to feel somehow diminished, maybe even to feel bitter, to ask "Why? Why couldn't they have remained in our lives longer?" And maybe the answer is hinted at in those first words of the Torah for this season: God sent those people into our lives but they weren't ours to keep forever. They were ours to cherish, to enjoy, to learn from and to love, and one day to be parted from.
To love someone is to make yourself a hostage to fortune It is to make yourself vulnerable to being hurt in so many ways: by that person's behavior, by that person's shortcomings, by that person's poor judgment, and ultimately by that person's leaving you, whether by choice or by circumstance. And maybe that is why, at this season which is so heavy with memories, which is so laden with prayers for a year of life, which reminds us (as if we needed to be reminded) of all the things that might happen to us and to the people around us in the coming year, -- maybe that's why the Rabbis ordained that we begin with those particular words of Torah: ADONAI PAKAD ET SARAH, God gave Sarah a precious gift and as He did so, He warned her that it would not be hers forever. God said to her, "I have made your soul in such a way that you are capable of connecting with another person, with another soul, husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, even friends." One of the most beautiful verses in the entire Bible describes what David and Jonathan felt for each other as best friends: "And David's soul was intertwined with the soul of Jonathan." And God goes on to say to Sarah and to every one of us: "When you have that in your life, cherish it because it is so special and because it won't last forever."
The poet Wallace Stevens has written "Death is the mother of beauty." I understand that to mean that we appreciate the beautiful things in our lives precisely because they are so fragile, because they won't last forever. We appreciate the beauty of a New England autumn because it is only here for a short time, the leaves dying and going out in a blaze of red and yellow and orange. If they looked like that all year round, who would bother to drive up to Vermont to see them? ADONAI PAKAD ET SARAH, God gave Sarah something precious and told her not to waste any time, to love it promptly and unceasingly because it would not be hers forever.
It's not only death that separates us from the precious gifts that God has sent into our lives. Time can do it as well. Parents grow old and needy and forgetful, and can no longer be the forceful presence in our lives that they once were, and we feel that we have lost something. Friends grow distant with time. Children grow up and no longer greet us with hugs when we come home. I can imagine God saying to Sarah, "You've been praying for a child for all these years. Do you really know what you're letting yourself in for? You know the pain of being childless, and it is a very real pain. But you're about to find out how painful it can be to be a parent."
When God curses Eve after the incident of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, telling her "in great pain will you bear children," the careful reader notices that the Bible uses the same word for "great pain" that it uses a few pages later when it speaks of how much it pained God to see how human beings were behaving in the time of Noah, as if God were saying "I know what it feels like to see people you care about doing bad things and to see other people you love suffering and not be able to stop the misbehavior or relieve the suffering."
But Sarah persists, so God send her a child. But God says to her, "Let's make one thing clear at the outset. He's yours to raise, he's yours to nurture, but he's not yours to keep forever."
I would remind you of those famous lines from Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet:
"Your children are not your children; they are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself...
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,for they have their own thoughts...
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."
Children grow up, children grow distant. Nature compels them to declare their independence of us, to prove that they have minds and lives of their own. And sometimes during those difficult years we may feel that we're losing them. That is when we have to remember God's words to Sarah: we can't lose them, any more than we permanently lose parents and other loved ones to death. We can't lose them first because they were ours to give life to and to raise but they were never ours to keep. And we can't lose them because the tie between a parent and a child is too intimate to be left behind entirely. That's why I advocate the Little Bo Peep theory of relating to grown children: leave them alone and they'll come home. Try to own them and they will do their best to throw off the chains and escape. But maintain a loving, caring relationship with them even if it's not easy, and maybe when they turn thirty and have children of their own, they'll feel pleased rather than cursed when they realize they're turning into you. And maybe then they'll find their way back home of their own free will. You may remember visiting a son or daughter in their college dorm rooms and finding a poster on their wall with a quote from Jonathan Livingston Seagull that reads "If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it will be yours forever. If it doesn't, it was never really yours."
To find someone you can love, to find someone your soul truly connects with, is a precious gift, made even more precious when we realize how fragile it is. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her autobiography writes of having had a really good friend, someone she felt closer to than she did to her family. They were soul-mates, sharing their most intimate dreams and feelings. Then one day something happened. Dr. Kubler-Ross was facing a crisis. She turned to her friend for emotional support and for whatever reason, the friend wasn't there for her. Kubler-Ross was more than hurt; she felt betrayed. The relationship was never the same after that. They drifted apart, stopped calling each other, lost touch. Then one day a year or so later, she ran into the friend, who seemed genuinely pleased to see her. No guilt, no embarrassment. The former friend insisted they have lunch together. Their lunch conversation was almost entirely about catching up with each other's families. If Kubler-Ross anticipated an explanation or an apology, none was offered. Leaving the restaurant, Kubler-Ross realized she couldn't be angry at her former friend any more. There was no rejection, there was no betrayal. What there was was the realization that there had once been something very meaningful between them and it wasn't there any more. Its time had passed. A friendship, like any other living thing, can flourish for a while and then it dies. Kubler-Ross realized that, rather than being angry at its loss, the right thing for her to do was to be grateful for all that it had added to her life while she had it. Rather than think of herself as poorer for no longer having that relationship, she should realize how much richer she was for having once had it.
It reminded me of the painful column that Ann Landers had to write some years ago, telling her millions of readers that her marriage was ending. She rejected the implication that she, who told others how to handle their marital problems, had been unable to handle her own. She said instead that there were no victims and no villains in this story. There was only a beautiful relationship that nourished her for many years but couldn't make it to the finish line.
Over the years, I've spoken to many of you when your marriages were in difficulty. I know how hard it is not to feel angry and not to feel that you have somehow failed. And I was always struck by the terrible sadness I would feel in discovering how years of love, years of sharing and caring, could be washed away by the rancor that attends a marital breakdown. What happened to all that love, all those intimate memories? Where do they go? How does something like that just disappear? And maybe the healthiest response to the end of a marriage would be like our response to the end of a life, to the death of a parent, even of a child, to say to ourselves as Ann Landers did: I had something very beautiful for a while and it added so much to my life while it was there. I remember how happy I was back then. But it just wasn't meant to last.
I'm not asking those of you in that situation to deny your pain or your anger, any more than I would ask you to deny it at a funeral. What I'm asking, in the name of sparing yourself the bitterness, the self-blame and the self-definition of yourself as a rejected victim, is that you not let the unhappy, acrimonious ending utterly obliterate the memory of the happiness you once had. You're deprived of so much when a marriage goes bad. You're deprived of so much when someone you loves dies slowly and painfully until you find yourself wishing it would end already. Why should you be deprived of those good memories as well?
There are other gifts that God gives us, to cherish while we have them because they won't be ours forever. With every passing year, with every turn of the page of the calendar to a New Year, our bodies and our minds grow older and at a certain point, you realize you can't do things you used to be able to do. We can make jokes about senior moments ( I heard a really good one the other day...but I can't remember it), but like jokes about sex, money and relatives, it's just another instance of our using humor to pretend that something that makes us anxious doesn't make us anxious. How do those of us on the downhill side of life respond to being a year older? We can lament, we can grieve for the loss of mental acuity and bodily vigor. We can be jealous of younger people who still have what we've begun to lose. Or we can bask in the glow of the memories of who we once were because they can't be taken away from us. Every passing year leaves us with more past, more memories than we had before. And we can take stock of what we have acquired to compensate for what we may have lost. If we could get over seeing life as something that gets used up year by year and learn to see life as the accumulation of wisdom, if we could remind ourselves that in today's world wisdom is more of an enduring gift than muscle power, then we will have less reason to fear growing old.
So we come to shul on Yom Kippur and we say to God, "Why do You tease us like this, God? Why do you send these beautiful people into our lives and then take them away when we need them most? Why can't they last forever?" And God says, "I can't do that. I can't cure a sick person every time somebody prays for him. I can't postpone death indefinitely because someone is loved. If I did that, pretty soon there would be no room in the world for young families to have babies. That's why I tried to warn Abraham and Sarah that this precious gift I was giving them was theirs to love and to enjoy but not to keep forever. But if I can't give you the gift you keep asking for, the gift of eternity, I have two other gifts for you to make up for it. I've given you the gift of memory and the capacity for gratitude."
As many of you know, I have a new book out, a meditation of the 23rd Psalm. I describe it as a drama in three acts. In act one, the author's life is serene and placid, -- still waters and green pastures. Then in act two, he finds himself in the valley of the shadow, his life disrupted by sorrow and loss. And it's there that he discovers what God is really about, not the God of happy endings but the God who takes you by the hand and leads you through the valley of the shadow so that you don't have to spend the rest of your life in darkness. Act three is a hymn of praise to the God whom he has come to know and feel close to. The line "my cup runneth over," the line about how grateful he is for all the blessings in his life, comes after the part about being in the valley of the shadow of death. Under the immediate impact of what happened to him, he can only think about what he has lost. But given time and some perspective, he is able to focus on what he had and what in a sense he still has.
There is a prayer in our Mahzor by Rabbi Morris Adler - sometimes we read it at the Yizkor service - that says in part:
"Shall I cry out in anger, O Lord, because Your gifts are mine but for a while?
Shall I forget the blessing of health the moment it gives way to illness and pain?
Shall I grieve for a youth that has gone once my hair is gray and my shoulders bent, and forget the days of vibrancy and power?
Shall the time of darkness put out forever the glow of the light in which once I walked?"
So here we are on a day when we bring so many poignant memories to shul with us, and we say to God, "Why does it have to hurt so much?" And God answers "If you didn't have the memories, painful as they may be, you would have lost those people, you would have lost those good years, those transcendent moments forever. Then you would really have lost them."
And the Lord said to Sarah "Here is something precious, something beautiful to enrich and brighten and complicate your life and fill it with meaning. It's yours to cherish, it's yours to care for. It's just not yours forever, although once you have loved it, it will be yours forever. Do you still want it on those terms?"
The Lord gives but the Lord does not take away. He teaches us to fill the empty spaces in our lives with memories of what once we had and with gratitude for what we still have, and our cup runneth over.