Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
It will probably never happen again in my lifetime. It may never happen again in your lifetime. So I think it is worth taking sermonic notice of the fact that this year Yom Kippur falls only nineteen days before Halloween. It's more than just a quirk of the calendar. What's the connection between Yom Kippur and Halloween? Yom Kippur is the one day of the year when the synagogue is haunted. Tonight and tomorrow we will sense the presence in shul of the spirits of the departed, people who were once part of our lives and are no longer physically among us. We will feel their presence not only tomorrow during Yizkor. We will find ourselves thinking of them when we come in to find our seats and remember times when they sat next to us. They will be on our minds when we recite the prayer "who shall live and who shall die, who in the fullness of their years and who before their time," and we will remember other years, other Yom Kippur services when that prayer forced us to contemplate the fact that our parents were getting older and we wondered how many more Yom Kippurs we would have with them. We will remember other years, other High Holy Day services when maybe we had a sick husband or wife at home, or maybe a brother or sister or even a child was in the hospital and the Mahzor's prayers about life and death merged with our prayers for their recovery.
There will be ghosts walking the aisles of the synagogue during the service tonight and tomorrow. Listen to what they have come to say to us. Don't be afraid to listen to them, for fear that they have come to nag us or criticize us they way they may have done when they were alive. The world they now inhabit is a world without complaints, without anger. It is a world that knows only truth and love. So listen to them.
The first thing they have come to say to us is, Remember us. Remember us because the only place we still live in this world is in your memories. We don't live at the cemetery. You can't find us in a photo album or on a memorial plaque. The only place we live in this world is in your heart. Illness, death took us out of your world physically but you have the power to keep us present, to keep the essential part of us alive emotionally by remembering us. Pass on our names, tell your children and grandchildren about us and you will help us to overcome death and find our way back in the only way we can to the land of the living.
They are saying to us, Remember us for your own sakes as well as for ours. You forfeit such a large part of your identity if you erase us from your sense of who you are. Like the person suffering from Alzheimer's Disease who can't lead a meaningful life because he has lost that sense of who he is, you'll never really understand who you are if you leave us out of the equation. Remembering us is not something you do for us; it's a favor you do yourself. You can't understand who you are, where you come from, why you do some of the things you do if you try to forget the people who were once a large part of your life.
Remember us, because when you do so, you act as a role model for those around you. You teach your children and everyone who knows you how to hold on to people you love and lose. Remembering us is your insurance policy for your own immortality, the knowledge that people will remember you and attach your name to a blessing even as you do for us.
The ghosts that populate the synagogue tonight and tomorrow are saying to us, Remember us in love. Even if some of the memories we left behind are hard ones, even if some of them are painful, let the good memories prevail. If there is bitterness, if there were disappointments, if you find yourself wishing you had had different parents, wishing your marriage had turned out differently, wishing you had gotten along better with some of your family, please cleanse your soul of all that bitterness. It's too late to do anything about the past, so why let it infect your soul with unhappiness and regret. They are saying, If we made mistakes years ago, it was because we were amateurs in an area where even the experts don't always know what is right. But remember, the word "amateur" doesn't only mean "unqualified." "Amateur" comes from the same root as the word "amorous." It means doing things for love. Even our mistakes were done out of love.
There was a book that came out a year or two ago by George Vaillant, titled Aging Well. It's the third and final volume of a long-term study initiated at Harvard that tried to identify those traits of personality in young people that seemed to forecast a happy and successful life. Dr. Vaillant identifies two things that correlate with a satisfying last third of a person's life, and I thing they are important enough to apply even to people for whom a satisfying old age is a far-off prospect that you shouldn't have to worry about for decades. One was the ability to make new friends as old friends die or move away. That way, your social network keeps growing instead of shrinking. You feel your world getting larger instead of smaller. Especially if you find yourself in an empty nest or moving from a house to an apartment, you need to know that your social world is expanding even as your physical world may be contracting. Vaillant suggests that you check in on yourself every six to twelve months, asking yourself "Have I made a new friend recently or am I limiting myself to the same shrinking group of people I've known for years?" The second and more important trait is the willingness to forgive people you're upset with and angry at, some of them still living and others long gone. He defines forgiveness as the recognition that it's too late to have a better past, and points out that holding on to grudges rarely hurts the person we're angry at but eats away at us. It's like the woman who came to see me some years ago, after I had given a Yom Kippur sermon on the theme of forgiveness. She told me how her husband had left her for a younger woman some years before, and how ever since then she has had to work two jobs to pay the bills. She described having to tell her children there was no money to go to the movies or buy video games, and then she said to me, "And you want me to forgive him for what he did to us?"
I told her, "That's right. I want you to forgive him, - not because he deserves it, not because what he did was all right. I understand that sometimes the only power you have over someone who has mistreated you is the power to withhold forgiveness, to keep your anger on life support and not let it die a natural death. But look at what you're doing to yourself. You're not hurting him. He's living it up with his new family in another state, and your simmering anger just convinces him that he had good reason to leave. For ten years, you've been standing here in Natick holding a hot coal in your hand, waiting for your ex to come by so you could throw it at him, and all you've done is burn your hand. It's in your own best interest to put the coal down and go on with your life."
Some of you may know that I've been working on a book about the life of Moses. The last chapter is devoted to the last great achievement of Moses' life: that he wasn't angry at God for the way his life turned out. He could have been. The Israelites who had made his life difficult with their demands and their complaints were about to enter the Promised Land, and Moses would never get to do that. The burden of leadership had taken its toll on his family. He could have been angry at God but he chose not to. He could have resented other people for getting to do what he would never get to do, but he chose not to do that either. The Torah ends, in its last two chapters, with Moses' hymn of praise to God and his blessing of the twelve tribes of Israel.
I have known too many people in and out of this congregation who could not enjoy the last third of their lives because they were angry at God for the way their lives had turned out, for all the things they yearned for that they never got, the recognition, the promotions, the family nachas. And I felt sorry for them. They perversely kept on hoping for a better past. It never occurred to them that, over and above what life had denied them, they were denying themselves that final blessing of living their days out in peace and contentment.
Some of the ghosts that will be haunting the congregation tonight and tomorrow aren't sure how welcome they will be when they come to us, when they try to infiltrate our minds. They are hoping that we will recognize that what is past is past, that we will let go of old grudges and resentments, - why be angry, why be jealous of someone who is no longer alive? - and that we will welcome them wholeheartedly.
The ghosts who come here tonight are saying, "Remember us. Remember us even if some of the memories are painful, memories of illness and helplessness in the face of illness, memories of words unspoken that should have been spoken and words spoken that would have been better withheld, because you can't hold on to the good memories, the golden hours, without the sad memories tagging along as well." Have you noticed that in the last few years, there have been a number of movies about people losing their memories? Some of them are comedies, like the Adam Sandler movie in which his girl friend meets him every day unable to remember that she has ever seen him before. Some are dramas; a person has had something terrible done to him but he can't remember why or by whom, and he has to find out. Some are science fiction; a man who knows too much has his memory erased. I find myself wondering why this theme all of a sudden, and I can think of two reasons over and above the obvious one that, in Hollywood, when one movie does well, it inspires a dozen copies. For one thing, in this age of computers, we can delete obsolete computer files to make room for new data. One scientist I know explains the fact that around age fourteen, we lose our ability to learn new languages by comparing the human mind to a computer that erases certain skills to free up capacity for new challenges. But I think there may be another reason, a more important one. So many people are walking around burdened by painful memories, victims of war and discrimination, victims of crime and betrayal, people hurt by someone close to them, people ashamed of something they have done, and they wish they could wash their minds clean of those painful memories.
In my opinion, the most interesting of the memory-loss movies was called "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." (If you were planning to rent the video of it this weekend, I'm afraid I'm going to spoil it for you.) It's the story of a young man and a young woman who meet, are attracted to each other and have a brief, passionate affair before they break up. They find their breakup so unbearably painful that first the girl, then the young man agree to undergo a radical procedure to erase their memories of each other. The premise of the movie is that a psychiatrist has found a way of locating precisely where in the brain a specific memory is stored and destroying that memory. At one point, as he is undergoing the treatment to erase his memories of the girl, the young man summons up a memory for erasure of a time they were together and he was saying to her, "This is the happiest I have ever been in my life." The thought suddenly occurs to him, "Why do I want to erase the memory of the happiest I have ever been?" and he begins to fight the treatment.
That's the challenge the ghosts of Yom Kippur set before us: the painful memories of love and loss are inextricably tied to some of the most precious memories we own, and we can't hold on to one without letting the other into our minds as well. It's like the passage in the prayer by Rabbi Morris Adler that we sometimes read at the Yizkor service:
Naomi Shemer, the beloved Israeli composer who died last year, is best known for writing Yerushalayim shel Zahav, Jerusalem of Gold, shortly before the Six-Day War in 1967. A few years later, she wrote another very popular song called Al HaD'vash v'al Ha-Oketz, For the Honey and the Sting. The title comes from a story in the Talmud about a man who sticks his hand into a beehive to take the honeycomb and is stung by the bees. He walks away muttering, "I can do without the honey and without the sting." Naomi Shemer says just the opposite. She says, No, I want the honey. I want to taste the goodness, the sweetness of life. I want to know the joy of love, of family, of trying to do things that matter. And if the only way I can have those things is to leave myself vulnerable to the bees, I welcome the honey and the stings."
In the same vein, the ghosts that come to visit us on Yom Kippur are saying to us, "We bring you memories of honey and of bee stings, memories of days that warm your heart and days that break your heart. And we come to remind you that you can't have one without the other."
Finally, the ghosts that haunt the synagogue on Yom Kippur have one more message for us, perhaps the most important thing they would say to us tonight: Don't envy us. Don't be in a hurry to join us, just because we inhabit a world where there is no pain, no disease, no conflict, no betrayal. Don't ever be in a hurry to join us. No matter how painful, no matter how frustrating or unsatisfying your life may be, cherish every day of it, because once you let go of it, there is no getting it back. You've never been dead, they are saying to us, but we've been alive, and believe us, alive is better.
I remember a cartoon I saw some years ago. It shows a husband and wife who have died and gone to heaven. And heaven is bright sunshine and soft music and it's so peaceful. The husband turns to his wife and says, "Just think, if we hadn't given up smoking and eaten all that oat bran, we could have had all this ten years sooner."
The ghosts of Yom Kippur come to tell us, "Don't believe that. Given our choice, we'd rather be alive in a world of love and a world of pain, in a world of achievement and a world of disappointment and frustration, in a world of honey and a world of wounds. Alive is better."
Last spring, when the tragic case of Terri Schiavo was dominating the news, someone asked me what I thought about it, and I answered that I thought everyone was wrong. The parents were wrong for persisting in their denial as to how sick their daughter was, refusing to listen to doctors because they didn't like what the doctors were telling them. The voices of the religious right were wrong for saying, in effect, "we own the government, we own the Congress and the courts, and when we tell them to jump, they better jump or else." The politicians were nothing short of despicable for jumping on command and then, when the poll numbers came in, jumping the other way.
But I thought the most wrong of all were the people who said, "Anytime life becomes too painful for a person, he or she should have the right to end it." I'm not talking about someone in an irreversible coma, in a persistent vegetative state, a person who has essentially finished living and is in the process of dying. My own living will states that, should I no longer be aware of what is happening to me or around me, should I no longer be aware of the people around me, with no chance of recovery, I don't want the dying process to be prolonged. Carried to extremes, the right to die leads to incidents like the writer Hunter Thompson or his role model Ernest Hemingway taking their own lives for no reason except that life wasn't fun any more. Who guaranteed that life would always be fun? That sense of giving up so readily underestimates the strength of ordinary people, their ability to live with pain and to keep going despite the pain. Whom do we admire more, Hunter Thompson who despairs of life and leaves his family to pick up the pieces of what he did, or Christopher Reeve who was in a much worse situation and found the strength to go on because he was surrounded by people who gave him a reason to get up every morning. And the good news is that you don't have to be Superman to do what Christopher Reeve did. Many of us have seen instances of that in our own families and they have inspired us to resist the message that when life gets hard, give up.
The voices from the other world come to tell us, "A life of pain is still a life, full of things too precious to give up on. Turn to the people around you to ease the pain, to remind you of why you want to live through the night and wake up again tomorrow morning, because your world contains people who are important to you," because this world is under the sovereignty of a God who is MELECH HAFETZ B'HAYYIM, a God who treasures life and who wants us to treasure life. They would urge us to see every day, no matter what kind of day, no matter the weather, no matter the prognosis, as a gift. "What we would give," they are saying to us, "for one more day of food and sunshine, of hugs and embraces." The rabbis of the Talmud tell us that one hour in this world is worth more than eternity in the World to Come.
My friends, there will be moments during the Yom Kippur service when the voices you hear will not be my voice or the cantor's voice or the voices of several hundred people chanting around you. They will be voices from your past, voices from beyond, not urging you to join them but pleading to join you, asking to be remembered, speaking of love and memory and forgiveness, of pain and courage. Listen to those voices and may they be the voices, more than mine, more than the cantor's, to which we will answer AMEN.