Remembering to Forget. I know what you re thinking: this is not our usual Yizkor Rabbi. It s true, usually

Transcription

1 / Yom Kippur Yizkor5778 ים כיפור יזכור תשע''ח Rabbi Micah Peltz Remembering to Forget I know what you re thinking: this is not our usual Yizkor Rabbi. It s true, usually this is Rabbi Lindemann s slot. But this year we decided to switch it up. Last night, Rabbi Lindemann noted that it was the first time in 13 years that he gave the Kol Nidre sermon. Today, I am giving the Yizkor sermon for the first time in.it doesn t matter. But what does matter, is that he shared an article with me that made him think of Yizkor. It s from the Wall Street Journal. The headline reads: Haze the Dead! Obit Writers Tell It Like It Was, Warts and All. 1 It tells about a growing trend in obituaries to avoid clichés, such as soand-so was courageous, charitable, and devoted to his family. Instead, you have obituaries like this one, for Wayne Brockey, a retired wood-plant manager in Klamath Fall, OR. In it, his grandson wrote: On September 28, 2016, QVC lost a loyal customer in Wayne Brockey. He goes on to say, in retirement, many could describe Wayne as an old grump. An obituary for Allen Lee Franklin said he was genuine and kind, but also probably the biggest tightwad in the mid-atlantic region. Additionally, a survey of obituaries over the past few years found that deceased relatives were described as cantankerous, grouchy, demanding, sore loser, and a pain in the you know what. Now, I called Bernie Platt to see if this was a trend that he has seen in our area. He said no, people he meets with still go with words like devoted, loving, and caring. My intention is not to change that trend. But I do think this piece from the Wall Street Journal makes us consider what we choose to remember about our loved ones. The article goes on 1 The Wall Street Journal April 13, Front page. By James R. Hagerty 1

2 to wonder if these warts-and-all obituaries are the result of a social media culture that has conditioned people to share more with strangers. Perhaps. The truth is that this really isn t a new trend, especially when you think about all of the warts and all stories we have in the Torah. On Rosh Hashanah, we read about how Sarah kicked Hagar and her son Ishmael out of the house, and how Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. Not such happy memories. Though there are some that come closer to humor. When Sarah is told she is going to have a baby, she laughs, because her husband is so old. There are more examples of unflatteringly stories: Rebecca fell off a camel, Jacob tricked his blind father, Leah impersonated her sister and married Jacob, and Joseph s brothers threw him into a pit and sold him into slavery. In Judaism, our heroes are not infallible, they are not saints who we remember as perfect. Rather, our heroes are human beings they do some things right and they so some things wrong. Just like us, and just like our loved ones we remember today. At Yizkor, we become gratefully aware of the blessing of memory. It is through the memories of our loved ones that they continue to teach us, to inspire us, and to comfort us. Remembering is a mitzvah Zakhor. The Torah commands us to remember all sorts of things: Shabbat, Creation, that we were slaves in Egypt, how the nation of Amalek attacked us. Additionally, as Jews, we have taken upon ourselves the responsibility to remember the Holocaust, fallen Israeli soldiers, and the lessons of history. Zakhor remembering is a mitzvah. But shikh chah forgetting -- is also a mitzvah. Listen to this midrash: When God finished creating the world and was about to release it, God suddenly realized that He had forgotten an indispensable ingredient, without which life could not endure. God had [as it were,] forgotten to include shikh chah the ability to 2

3 forget. So God called back the world and blessed it with shikh chah. Then God was satisfied that the world was ready for human habitation. 2 Only a world with shikh chah, with forgetting, it habitable. Forgetting is what makes life possible. Many of us complain that our powers of memory are not as strong as they used to be. Without realizing it, however, many of us suffer from the fact that our powers of forgetting are not as good as they should be. Sometimes we have to forget in order to forgive, and to move on. But what should we remember, and what should we forget? It would seem that the answer to this question is that we should remember those things that are most likely to make us better people, and allow us to live. And we should forget those things which make us small, or hold us back from being the type of person we want to be. But we know it s not so simple. We all remember family fights from years, or even generations, ago. The dirty look someone gave us, the way so-and-so insulted us, or who didn t invite whom to that family simha. The insults, the offenses, the wrongs, they are the hardest to forget. I came across a cartoon in the New Yorker that shows a group of people at a wake. They are standing around the coffin looking at the face of the deceased. And one of them says, I don t want to remember her like this. I want to remember her for the mean thing she said to me in 1981! How many of us hold onto those painful memories? How often do we allow something that hurt us years ago continue to hurt us today? Sometimes, in order to allow life to go on, we need to forget. We can learn this from an extreme example. A few years ago, a woman named Jill Price wrote a book called The Woman Who Can t Forget. Price suffers from hyperthymesia, 2 Cited in Remembering and Forgetting by Rabbi Sidney Greenberg. Adding Life to Our Years, pgs Much of this sermon is inspired by Rabbi Greenberg s words. 3

4 which means overdeveloped memory. It is a rare condition that has been diagnosed in only 80 people. People with hyperthymesia are incapable of forgetting any detail of anything that ever happened to them. While we all know the frustration of not remembering something, people who have this condition actually suffer terribly. As Price writes, Imagine being able to remember every fight you ever had with a friend, every time someone let you down, all the stupid mistakes you ve ever made I was always correcting [people] about things they claimed I had said, or that they had said to me, which, as you can imagine, didn t go over very well. 3 Price s inability to forget made her life uncontrollable, distracting, and totally exhausting. Some things are best forgotten. What should we remember, and what should we forget? People should be held accountable for their actions. If we forget, don t we let them off the hook? It doesn t seem fair. A central theme of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is that remembering is not only something we do, but something that God does as well. We ask God to remember the merit of our ancestors, His promises to our people, and the mitzvot we have done over the past year. Our personal Yizkor prayers begin the words Yizkor Elohim, literally, God will remember. We assert that it is not only we who recall our mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters today, but God does as well. And yet, according to another midrash, we are not the only ones who need to both remember and to forget. Even God forgets, and sometimes, God even forgets on purpose. A midrashic collection called Tanna De-Vei Eliyahu explores a well-known saying from Pirkei Avot. 4 A zehu Ashir? It asks: Who is truly wealthy? HaSamaeh B helko One Tanna De-Vei Eliyahu 1:2 4

5 who is happy with his portion. We usually understand this teaching to refer to us. One is truly happy when he realizes that it is not material things that make us rich, but a sense of contentment with what we have. The midrash, however, says that this teaching actually applies to God. God owns the entire world and everything in it, including us human beings. If God were to remember everything we did, then God would remember our shortcomings, our bickering, our pettiness all of the ways we don t measure up to our potential. How could God be happy if God were burdened with all these unfortunate memories? So the midrash tells us that God actually does not remember everything! It says, God deliberately remembers the good, and deliberately forgets the bad, and for this reason, God is happy with God s portion. Because God forgets, God remains happy with us. Reflecting on this midrash, Rabbi Brad Artson, the Dean of the Ziegler Rabbinical School in LA, talks about the need for deliberate, holy forgetting. If we are not able to forget slights, to forget being overlooked, to forget the hurtful words that someone said to us, then we become trapped by life s every disappointment. How many relationships could survive if each partner remembered everything? As Rabbi Artson writes, Knowing when to remember and when to forget is a necessary God-like trait. And for us to be able to connect to each other, we also have to be able to forget, because if you are so locked into everything that happens, it is impossible to feel community, [it] is impossible to build connections... 5 The mitzvah of shikh hah, of forgetting, allows us to let go of those things that hold us back, and that keep us from moving on. Otherwise, we can hold on to these hurts forever. 5 Holy Forgetting Rabbi Brad Artson Ordination Charge to the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies Ordinands 5

6 There is a story about two monks on a pilgrimage who come to the ford of a river. There they see a girl dressed in all her finery looking confused, for the river was high and she did not want to ruin her best clothes. Instantly, one of the monks takes her on his back, carries her across, and sets her down on dry ground. Then the monks continue on their way. Soon after the other monk starts complaining, What were you thinking! It is against our rules to have close contact with women and you just carried her across?! How can you go against the rules for monks? The monk who carried the girl walked along silently, finally he replied, I set her down by the river, why are you still carrying her? way to let go? What are you still carrying? What hurts are you holding onto? How can you find a We need to be able to forget, in order to move on, and to live more content and peaceful lives. But what happens when we remember someone who committed a serious offense? Not just a slight or an insult, but someone who was abusive, violent, or cruel? If we have had someone like this in our life, then Yizkor can be an especially difficult time. Still, what, and how, we remember is our choice. Rabbi Robert Saks reflects on this in a Yizkor meditation to be recited in memory of a hurtful parent. Though it really could apply to anyone we remember who was hurtful to us. Here is his prayer for Yizkor: Dear God My emotions swirl as I say this prayer. The parent I remember was not kind to me. His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and of dismay that a parent could hurt a child as I was hurt. I do not want to pretend to love, or to grieve that which I do not feel, but I do want to do what is right as a Jew and as a child. Help me, O God, to subdue my bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden, and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time. I pray that You will liberate 6

7 me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place. 6 Powerful words when we remember warts and all. Yizkor presents us with the dilemma, the choice of what to remember, and what to forget. What guides our choice is thinking about what memories will help us heal, and make us better people, and what memories will hold us back. The truth is that none of us had a perfect relationship with the people we are remembering today. Like with our heroes of Torah, even the best of people had their moments. This does not make them any less important to us, it only makes them human. And the fact that our loved ones made mistakes, and we still remember them for good, means that we can overcome the mistakes that we ve made in our relationships over the past year, or years. For this to happen, we need to be able to accept, and to forget. There is an old joke about a man who complained to his friend that whenever his wife gets angry she becomes historical. You mean hysterical, the friend corrected him. No, said the husband. I mean historical. She starts listing everything I did wrong for the last 27 years! We all have a tendency to get historical, to remind others of the wrongs they did to us. Or to let those offenses effect our relationships, or even our memories, of those close to us. That s because these wrongs can be the hardest to forget. This is why God needed to make shikh khah, forgetting, a mitzvah. Sometimes we have to purposefully try to forget. This is a lesson that the great philosopher Immanuel Kant once learned. Kant learned that his servant, Martin Lampe, whom he had trusted with all of his business affairs for many years, was stealing from him. Kant had no choice but to fire him. Despite what 6 Rabbi Robert Saks A Yizkor Meditation in Memory of a Parent Who Was Hurtful in Mahzor Lev Shalem 292 7

8 happened, Kant missed him terribly. Yet Kant knew that he had to move on. We know this because he wrote in his journal: Remember to forget Lampe. Sometimes we have to remember to forget. This is not only true for those we remember today. It is also the case for those living relatives and friends from whom we have become estranged. Some of us have permitted ties to family and friends to be broken because of an argument or an incident. Should we choose to remember the bad moments instead of the good moments? Which should we forget? All of us during the past year have suffered wrongs and inflicted them. Yet we easily recall the times where we were the victim and not when we were the offender. Should we choose to remember only the times we were hurt, and not the times that we hurt others? We each have helped others, but we each also have benefited from the kindness, the generosity, and the goodness of someone else. Should we choose to remember only our own goodness, and forget the goodness bestowed up on us by others? What should be subject to holy forgetting this year, while we still have the chance to make new memories? While we still have the opportunity to celebrate, to share special moments, and to pass on a legacy of forgetting and forgiveness to those who will come after us? This is an essential message of Yom Kippur. When we confess our sins today, we give ourselves permission to move on, to let go, to forget. We need to do this in our relationships with others as well. We all carry with us past insults, hurts and slights. Things that weigh on us, but that, for our own good, are best forgotten. At the beginning of a new year, we get to decide what to remember, and what to forget. What to hold on to, and what to let go of, so that we can move forward into a better new year. 8

9 I d like to share with you a story about a father and a son. It is from the book Small Miracles: Extraordinary Coincidences from Everyday Life. According to the introduction, this book is a collection of true stories. This story describes for us what is at stake if we are not able to forget. Listen: Joey Riklis was born to a privileged life in Cleveland, Ohio. But at the age of 19, he rebelled fiercely. He dropped out of college and announced to his father, Adam, that he was going to India to seek enlightenment. This was a blow to his father, a widower, who was the sole survivor of his family. The rest had perished in the Holocaust. Adam had withstood three years of unbelievable hardship and had vowed that the religion his relatives had died for would not die with them. Joey s rebellion upset Adam, but his son s next announcement put him over the edge. Joey said he was leaving Judaism. Adam snapped, as he felt like this was a betrayal of all he had lived for. He screamed at Joey: You are not my son! Get out of my home and never come back. Joey screamed back, I never want to see you again either. Then Joey stormed off, and boarded a plane for India. In India, Joey traveling from Guru to Guru seeking wisdom and spirituality. He wanted concrete answers to life s mysteries. After three years of seeking in India, Joey ran into a childhood friend, Sam. They embraced happily, and then Sam s eye s clouded and he said, I was so sorry to hear about your father. What do you mean? Joey asked. Sam told him that his father had died three months earlier from a heart attack. Joey was devastated. Deep down he had always thought that one day he and his father would have a loving reunion and he would be forgiven. Now, that would never happen. Joey was heartbroken. He didn t know what to do. He felt lost and alone. Suddenly, he felt the need to go to Israel. He couldn t explain it, he just felt he had to go. When he arrived in Israel he decided to go 9

10 straight to the Kotel. He needed to pray. He got a ride to Jerusalem, entered the Old City, and walked down to the Western Wall. As he approached the Wall, tears welled up in his eyes. He placed his head on the Wall and began to pour his heart out all of his guilt and pain came flowing out with the tears from his eyes. He remained like that for a while, until he couldn t cry anymore. He looked over to a table and saw a stack of papers and a pencil. He picked them up, and started writing a note to place in the Wall. Dear Father, he wrote. I beg you to forgive me for the pain I caused you. I loved you very much and I will never forget you. And please know that nothing that you taught me was in vain. I will not betray the memory of our family who perished in the Holocaust. I promise. Love, Joey. When he finished, he folded the note, and carefully placed it inside one of the cracks in the wall. As he did this, he accidentally knocked out another note. He bent down to pick it up. Suddenly, he was overcome with curiosity. He knew it wasn t right, but he opened the note to examine its contents. Here is what it said: My dear son Joey, If you should ever happen to come to Israel and somehow miraculously find this note, this is what I want you to know: I always loved you, even when you hurt me, and I will never stop loving you. You are, and always will be, my beloved son. And Joey, please know that I forgive you for everything, and only hope that you in turn will forgive a foolish old man. Signed, Adam Riklis, Cleveland, Ohio, Joey s father. 7 Don t we always think that there will be more time? That things will work out? The truth is that hurts left unhealed, arguments left unsettled, and offensives left unrepaired, can live on for a lifetime. Too many of us know this, for we have experienced it with our own 7 Adapted from Small Miracles: Extraordinary Coincidence from Everyday Life. Yitta Halberstam & Judith Leventhal. Pages

11 fathers or mothers, children or spouses, siblings or friends. And my guess is that, for most of us, our stories of conflict and tension do not end like this story ended for Joey. There is no note miraculously found that heals the hurt, that brings closure. Yet there is Yizkor. Yizkor is our time to pass notes, in the form of our prayers, our thoughts, and our memories, from one world to the next. It is our opportunity to decide what we will remember, and what we will forget, so that we can move on, and live better, in the year ahead. If we weren t able to do this in life, then Yizkor gives us the opportunity to do it now. As we remember our parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, we are left with a choice of memories. Will we remember the loss or the love? The death or the life? The painful moments or the joyous ones? In the book May God Remember, Rabbi Shoshana Gelfend writes that Yizkor provides us our own private ongoing relationship with a loved one. It encourages an evolution of that relationship as opposed to allowing it to be frozen in time. Remembering someone over and over again enhances the parts of that relationship that prove sustaining, but allows us to forget those characteristics that are not. 8 Forgetting is a necessary part of the process by which we maintain meaningful memories. Though the people we remember today are no longer with us, our relationship with them continues to evolve. By reciting Yizkor privately, without having to rely on family and friends to remember, we interact with our own memories, and we choose what to remember, and what to forget. In making our choice, let us remember that we will be what we remember. Our memories will mold our action, and what others will remember of us will be determined by what we choose to remember today. 8 Yizkor: May God Remember Hoffman, Lawrence, ed. p

12 To guide our choice, let us consider a poem entitled Old-Year Memories by Susan Gammons. Listen: Let us forget things that vexed and tried us, The worrying things that caused our souls to fret, The hopes that cherished long were still denied us-- Let us forget Let us forget the little slights that pained us, The greater wrongs that rankle sometimes yet The pride with which some lofty one disdained us-- Let us forget But blessings manifold, past all deserving, Kind words and thoughtful deeds, a countless throng, The faults o ercome, the rectitude unswerving, Let us remember long The sacrifice of love, the generous giving, When friends were few, the handclasp warm and strong, The fragrance of each life of holy living, Let us remember long We are here today to do the mitzvah of remembering as well the mitzvah of forgetting. We remember our loved ones successes and their failures, their triumphs and their defeats, their good qualities and their rough edges warts and all. Some things we have come to understand and to accept, some we can only forget and forgive. We honor those who came before us, so that we will live up to their best qualities. By doing so we hope, in time to come, that those who love us will forget or forgive our mistakes, and remember and emulate our joy and our goodness, just as we do now for those who came before us. It s time for Yizkor. 12