A version of this sermon was delivered at the Yizkor service at Temple Emanu-El of East Meadow on Yom Kippur 5778
A little over a month ago, the United States
witnessed one of the great marvels of the heavens, a Total Solar Eclipse. For a few moments, everyone’s eyes pointed
upward, trying to catch a safe glimpse of the occluded sunlight, as the moon made
its pass between the light of the sun and us here on the earth. On Long Island, we had a little over 70% occlusion,
and were able to see the crescent shaped shadows from the muted rays of sunlight. But we could not look upon it with our
eyes. We needed either special glasses
or to look through a pinhole. We can
only safely see an eclipse by not looking directly at it.
Almost 100 years ago, a total eclipse was used
to prove Albert Einstein’s theory about light and the nature of space-time. Light travels through space. It comes from the sun to earth, a relatively
short distance, taking but minutes to bask us in its glorious golden rays. It comes from distant stars, taking years,
centuries or millennia to arrive as a gentle twinkle, only visible in the night
sky. Einstein suggested that the path of
light’s travel through space is changed by the mass of large objects like the
sun. The gravity of the star pulls the
light of another toward it, as it creates a curve in space. This is also impossible to see without
special instruments and without special circumstances. It is only when the sun is completely blocked
that scientists and astronomers can measure the effect that the sun’s gravity
has on the path of the light of distant stars before we see them. Einstein used the eclipse 98 years ago to
record this phenomenon, for the first time.
Einstein’s theory was proven thanks to the
solar eclipse, and it upended centuries of Newtonian thought and understanding
of the universe. An eclipse literally
changed the way we understand the foundations of the universe. This predictable dance between the two great
lights allowed humanity to come to a greater and fuller understanding of how
the universe works, and how light travels through it.
This past summer, the National Geographic
channel aired a truly magnificent docudrama biopic about the life of Albert
Einstein, called Genius. The
series was based on the biography of the same name by Walter Isaacson. Both trace Einstein’s life, his discoveries
and calculations, through the early years while he was still trying to have his
ideas accepted, until his later years, when he worked hard to fight against the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, which his calculations helped bring to
fruition. We also learn a lot about his
relationships, his triumphs and his regrets.
His life was marked, like all of ours, with love and loss, joy and
tragedy, war and peace, belief and doubt.
Toward the end of the series, in a scene near
the end of his life, Einstein comments to his friend Niels Bohr that he has
regrets in his life, and he wishes he could turn back the clock. Bohr jokes that perhaps time travel could be
his final achievement. Einstein retorts:
“There are many moments I would like to relive and many ills I'd like to fix.” Bohr ends the conversation with the truism:
“Time is a tricky thing,” while complimenting that it was Einstein who taught
him as much.
Time is a tricky thing. Often a day feels like but a moment; we blink
and it has passed us by. Then we experience
a moment that lasts for what seems like an eternity. Sometimes we move past occasions of great joy
in an instant. And sometimes we dwell in
our sadness and mourning, seemingly endlessly.
Our loved ones were at our side yesterday, it seems. We can still hear their laugh, smell their
perfume, feel their love. Our loved ones
have been gone forever, also. It’s hard
to remember what color that chair was in their house, the smell of my brisket
is never quite the same as hers. I can
never tell that joke in the same way. An
eternity has passed no matter how long it has been since they were at our sides.
Well, Einstein and Bohr never achieved the
ability to time travel with the help of a machine. Today, however, each of us becomes a time
machine. We hurtle through space-time
toward the past. It is through our
memories that we are able to do the scientifically impossible. We travel through time through the act of
memory, through Yizkor. Take a
moment and allow yourself the journey.
We
travel back to our youth and experience anew the first look we ever had of our
beloved, and we feel the love as we did then.
We travel to the moment we heard those words of wisdom our parents gave
to us, and then to the moment we passed them on to our children, and we connect
them in our hearts. We arrive at the
fight we had with our sister, or spend time reliving the trip we took with our
brother, when we became closer and began to appreciate each other as adults. We remember and experience again the joy at a
simchah, and the sadness of a loss or an illness. We travel back and forth between now and the
past in our most sacred of obligations, the obligation to remember, the
obligation to keep alive our loved ones through the blessing of their memory.
We journey through our memories, like a beam of
light through space-time, pushed and pulled by the gravity of our memories. But,
like in an eclipse, it is only when the light of the sun is blocked that we can
truly see the effect the sun has. So it
is with our loved ones of blessed memory.
As we travel through time in our memories, we come to realize that too
often, the effect they had on us can only truly be understood and calculated
after they are gone. After their light
has been diminished. It is only then
that we may truly come to appreciate what they meant to us, how they affected
us, how the course of our life was altered by their presence. Like the eclipse, we cannot look upon our
memories with our own eyes, we need special tools, the tools of memory.
When Einstein and Bohr bantered about time
travel, they knew it was only barely theoretically possible. When we speak of memory, we know it is all
very real. We know it is real because we
time travel. We travel through time on
this Yom Hakippurim and recall the relationships in our lives that were
important to us. We travel as a beam of
light, through space-time, feeling the pull of blessed memory on us and our
actions, feeling the force of those blessed memories on our souls and our
lives.
Energy.
Mass. The speed of light. These explain the expanse of the
universe. But memory, memory explains
the expanse of the heart.
Let us begin that journey to the past. Let us begin our travel through time. Let us experience the past anew, though our
sacred work of memory.
No comments:
Post a Comment