Passover Yizkor 2020

A version of this sermon was delivered at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation, Wantagh, NY at 7th-day Passover Festival Service.

Passover Yizkor 7th Day 2020: Coronavirus Edition

Passover is supposed to be memorable.  That’s the entire point of the holiday, if you listen to God tell it: In Exodus 12:14, in the midst of God’s instructions and forewarning about the 10th plague, we read: “וְהָיָה֩ הַיּ֨וֹם הַזֶּ֤ה לָכֶם֙ לְזִכָּר֔וֹן This day shall be to you one of remembrance: you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Eternal throughout the ages; you shall celebrate it as an institution for all time.”  Throughout the ages.  For all time.  God reiterates this just a few verses later, commanding: “You shall observe the [Feast of] Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your ranks out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day throughout the ages as an institution for all time.” (12:17)

Moses then announces this to the people twice.  After explaining placing the blood over the doorposts to cause the plague to pass over, Moses continues: “You shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants. (ib. 24) Moses repeats this commandment to the people after Pharaoh frees them.  “You shall keep this institution at its set time from year to year,” (13:10) Moses repeats to the people while reminding them about the matzot and the Passover sacrifice.
There is a heightened sense of the importance of memory to the Seder rituals as well.  You may not be able to remember all 10 plagues all the time, but you remember that there are 10.  If you’re like me, you always forget one. 

More than the facts or the story, we all remember what we do when we announce the plagues, we take a little wine out of the cup, to diminish our joy and mitigate the sweetness.  Whether with finger or with spoon, whether you make a point to discard the plague-y wine or lick your pinky when done, that’s memorable. It’s a memory that is made in the best way, by involving so many of the senses.  You hear the plague announced. You touch the wine.  You see the drop grow on your plate or spread on your napkin.  You smell the brisket.  You are completely immersed in an act of memory designed to be memorable. 

God makes the point that Passover is meant to be remembered not just by those who experienced it.  It is meant to be remembered always by all their descendants.  It’s no surprise the youngest sings the four questions.  At some point in your life, you were the youngest in your family.  Every one of us was.  It ensures we all learn the questions of this festival at a young age, so that we can work to figure out the answers as we get older.

We have done a pretty good job as a people of keeping this charge, of remembering and recalling the exodus, how God redeemed us with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. And we’ve been immensely creative over the generations trying to ensure continued success. 

Well, Passover is supposed to be memorable, all right.  I don’t think that any of us will ever be able to forget this one in particular.  It will be one of those years we all look back on and tell stories about.  “What did you do when the world stopped for Coronavirus?  How did you have your Seder when not everyone could be together?” the children will ask.  "We did what our people have always done," we will tell them.  "We recognized that the importance of sharing the memory of our history would not get, and could not get, vetoed by any pandemic.  We improvised, like our ancestors, and ensured that the story was told to a new generation."

“We focused on the important part,” we’ll say.  And, for each of us that was probably something different.  For all of us it was the same thing, a drive, a sense, that this holiday must be celebrated, that we must remember.  Just because we can’t be physically alongside each other didn’t stop us.  When normally we’d see tables set and filled with 10, 20, 30, 40 people, filling tables in every room, this year so many shared photos online of Seders set for one, two, four.  A computer or a tablet on the table.  We used the technology available to us and strove to be together when we could not.  And though there were fewer dishes to be done at the end of the night, and though we can be proud that we followed God’s commandment, we know it’s not how it’s supposed to be.  We felt it when we didn’t need to put the leaf in the table.  We sensed it when we didn’t need to use all the chairs.  We knew it when we divided the recipe in half. 

On this holiday, so focused on memory, the memory of the past pushed us to move forward, but it also pulls something at our souls.  We’re supposed to be together.  We’re supposed to be alongside each other.  And the absence of those who would have been there only heightens the absence of those who could not be there.  It’s not just those who can’t travel who we miss; it’s those who are now sheltered under God’s wings, who were with us at full tables just a few years back, or many years back which only feel like a few.  The full tables of the past are what we miss especially this year. 

The full tables of Seders past render an image of what the Seder was always supposed to be: generations together, sharing in tradition.  The full tables of the Seders of our past burst with memories of their own.  They tell the stories of our families which make us who we are.  The full tables of our past burst with love: for us and from us.  Today, as we transition to our service of memory, our Yizkor on this last day of our festival, we pause to seat our beloved departed at places of honor at the full Seder tables in our memory, our zikaron. 

These Seders in our souls burst with the blessings of those who came before us, who taught us the importance of the traditions we worked so hard to fulfill this year.  The Seders in our souls bring us closer to all those whose absence we feel every year, and whose presence we feel every year.  We feel them with us when we push ourselves to make the recipe the same way she did.  We feel them with us when we tell that joke that was told every year.  We feel them with us when we hear the familiar melody that they first taught us.  Our loved ones of blessed memory are with us at every Seder, as they are with us at all times, in our memory. 

No ZOOM password required.

Yom Kippur Yizkor 5778: The Gravity of Memory

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.