Yizkor: The Voice from the Empty Chair
- May 20, 2015
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- 2 Sivan 5775
Rabbi YY Jacobson
30 viewsYizkor: The Voice from the Empty Chair
Rabbi YY Jacobson
- May 20, 2015
Car Keys
An elderly woman related this personal experience:
I was leaving the store; I checked for my car keys. They weren't in my handbag. Suddenly I realized I must have left them in the car.
Frantically, I headed for the parking lot.
My husband has scolded me many times for leaving my keys in the car's ignition. He's afraid that the car could be stolen.
As I looked around the parking lot, I realized he was right. The parking lot was empty.
I immediately called the police.
I gave them my location, confessed that I had left my keys in the car, and that it had been stolen.
Then I made the most difficult call of all to my husband, "I left my keys in the car and it's been stolen."
There was a moment of silence. I thought the call had been disconnected, but then I heard his voice, "Are you kidding me?" he barked, "I dropped you off!"
Now it was my turn to be silent. Embarrassed, I said, "Well, come and get me."
He retorted, "I will, as soon as I convince this cop that I didn't steal your darn car!"
Welcome to the golden years...
In Your Absence, You Will Be Remembered
The biblical books of Samuel I and II are devoted primarily to the life story and leadership of King David, whose yartziet is on the holiday of Shavuos.
But there is one verse—Samuel I, chapter 20 verse 18—that seared into my memory.
In the story leading up to this verse, David, the young, handsome, beautiful, fearless and deeply spiritual Jewish warrior, and his best friend Jonathan, the son and heir of King Saul, are discussing the reality of King Saul’s hatred of David and his possible plan to have David killed. They come up with a plan – a feast for the new month will occur and David will be expected to be in attendance. He will intentionally be absent, and based on King Saul’s reaction they will know whether Saul actually intends to kill David or not. In describing the plan Jonathan tells David:
וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ יְהוֹנָתָן מָחָר חֹדֶשׁ וְנִפְקַדְתָּ כִּי יִפָּקֵד מוֹשָׁבֶךָ.
Jonathan said to him, “Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be remembered, for your seat will be empty.
“You will be remembered, because your seat will be empty.”
How these words capture my thoughts at these awe inspiring moments before many of us will recite Yizkor, and connect to the lives of our loved ones who are not here with us any longer.
The Same Word
There is something lost in the English translation. In the original Hebrew, Jonathan uses the same word for “memory” as he does for “emptiness.” Venifkadta, “you will be remembered,” because yipaked, “your seat will be empty.”
How can these two opposite ideas—memory and absence—share the same root in the Hebrew language? When you are absent, you are not here. When I remember you, you are here—you are present in my memory. Why the same word?
The Sad Irony
Because the Tanach is conveying to us the sad irony of life. Sometimes, what it takes for you to be remembered is to disappear… Sometimes, it is only when your seat is vacant that people start missing you and appreciating you.
How many people do you know when they were alive, nobody looked at them. They were the Les Misérables of the community. Kids may have even scoffed at them. But then whey they are gone, we feel a void in our heart. They represented something so pure, innocent, other worldly, and now it is gone.
So many things in life we only first appreciate after we no longer have them. What we have, we take for granted and don’t appreciate. It is when we lose it, that we really miss it.
Jules Feiffer captured this truth of the husband-wife relationship when he drew a cartoon strip about a woman and then put these words into her mouth: “Every night at dinner when he came home, I tried to rekindle the flame but all I could think of as he gobbled my chicken was: all I am is a servant to you. So when he announced that he would have to be away for a month on business, I was delighted. When he was away I could find myself again. I could make plans on my own and be my own person, find my own happiness. The first week I went out seven nights in a row. The phone never stopped ringing. I had a marvelous time.
The second week I became tired of the same old faces. I remembered what drove me to marry him in the first place.
The third week I felt closer to him than I had in years. I stayed home, I read Jane Austen, I slept on his side of the bed. The fourth week I fell madly in love with him. I hated myself for my withdrawal, for my failure to find my happiness with him. I could hardly wait for his return. The fifth week, he came home and the minute he came in and cried, “I’m back, darling!” I withdrew. I can hardly wait for his next business trip so that I can love him again.”
How sad. How tragic. How true! Why is it easier to say, “I miss you” on the phone than to say, “I love you” face to face? Why is it that mates, when here are mistreated, when gone they become mourned?
Is it really humorous or perhaps the essence of human tragedy when a colleague of mine tells me a story of a couple in their late 60’s who come to him for a divorce because they cannot stand each other, and when a week later the husband passes away, the wife is inconsolable and says, “I can’t go on without him.” If he’s alive, “zol er ligon in der erd,” if he’s “in der erd,” he should only be alive because I love him so!
It reminded me of a colleague who tells me that no matter what he does for his congregants it is never good enough because they are always comparing him to his predecessor. In my colleague’s words, his “predecessor’s piety and wisdom has increased year by year since he died, to the point that if he came back, not only could no one else take his place … HE couldn’t take his place!”
Children and Parents
We are like this with our children and we are like this with our parents.
Whatever we do for our children, it is never enough. Kids today can be very demanding. And at some point some of us (not all of us, but some of us) look forward to the day when they will move out, so we can reclaim our lives as individuals.
But when they do move out, we feel so empty… we miss them like crazy. And we wait with bated breath for the visit and the telephone call.
Being a caretaker for a parent can be a challenging time in life. Sometimes children complain how difficult it is. Some of them even wish it would all be over. But then they can’t get over how much we they miss mom and dad. It is in the absence that they discover the loss.
The Watchmaker’s Daughter
The Watchmaker’s Daughter, a memoir by a nice Jewish girl, Sonia Taitz, is a moving book.
Sonia is the child of two Holocaust survivors, who lost their entire families to Hitler. Her father, who saved lives within a Dachau prison, became a watchmaker in NY, and her mother, a gifted concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seize power, later joined her husband in the NY shop. Growing up under the shadow of catastrophe, their child, Sonia, is driven to achieve the highest peaks of worldly success. Her daring ambitions take her from Barnard to Yale’s Law School to Oxford University, where she meets a man outside her faith who will change her life, and her family’s, in ways she would have never imagined.
Sonia grows up speaking Yiddish and learning the lessons of Judaism. Nonetheless, as a young girl, the “American Dream” she learns about every day on the television enthralls her, even while it baffles her parents. Her mother tries encouraging her child into a more traditional Jewish feminine role despite all resistance. Sonia went her own way.
But at the end of the book she offered her “Yizkor”—her moment of saying goodbye to her mother, the woman whose values she rejected so profoundly. She writes:
For the most part, until the end, he [my brother Manny] is away in California, where he works as a lawyer and real estate developer. I am with her every day. Spooning raspberry ices into her mouth is the last thing I do for my mother. They are the last thing she tastes on this earth. I am glad they are sweet.
On her last day, she is mellow, smiling. I can see love in her eyes, and I take a chance.
“Who did you really love more? Mammy?”
“Yes, he was a boy, and I had lost my father and my two little brothers [in the Holocaust],” she says easily. “And he was always close to me.”
Then she adds, “But sometimes, you, more than anyone.”
This is even better than my father, who loved me most when I succeeded. The love she holds for me is there, even though I have failed her in every way.
She is so sweet as a dying person; she is so sweet even as she lies dead. So different from my father, who raged until the end, who took dying as a personal and undeserved final insult.
My mother Gita is teaching me something about life that until then, despite all the diplomas, I had not learned. Becoming a mother has brought me close to the secret of her wisdom. Watching her fade, as love burns constant in her heart, brings me ever closer. She is a woman, with a woman’s modest and forgiving heart. If my father’s main question to me was “What did you accomplish?,” hers was, “What can I do for you?” or, “Isn’t this a joy, sitting here with our glass of tea?”
When my mother Gita was first diagnosed, my practical brother asked her to sign a legal document called a DNR. DO NOT RESCUCITATE…
Nonetheless, I am now thinking – DO RESUCICITATE!!
If a desert can bloom, if exiles can return, if an entire people can rise up from ashes and sand, so can she. So can my little Gita. I want her even as she is – she is still our Bubbe, our soft hands, our onions and bay leaves, our story.
But she dies. There is a smile on her face in death, a radiant smile. She looks alive… The hospital lets me stay with her as long as I want, and I stay for hours.
At her funeral, I cry as I have never cried before. I cry for her sad life, and I cry for her sweet girlishness, and her cuteness, and her socks, and the endless chicken soup and kitchen pan bustling.
I cry that we were never close enough. That I never learned to cook her recipes – yes the boiled chicken and the strange cabbage chaluptzie and the mattress cake… chopped liver, flanken, or matzoh balls. All I can do is order in, and I blame feminism for that, for my contempt for her thankless domestic sacrifices. I am thanking her now as my children and I begin to try her old recipes.
My mother, whether or not she understood me, would have died for me. When the Nazis put her mother on the “death” line, my mother ran over to her side and somehow got her out. She could have been shot, but she didn’t care. Had G-d asked her to take her child to a mountain and sacrifice her, Gitz Taitz, unlike Abraham, would not have obeyed. She would have said, “Take me instead.” She would have run up the mountain and laid herself down on the altar for me, as she once did for her mother. That is what a real mother can do.
And here is her last gift to a difficult child. Her final words to me were:
“Du hast nicht keine shlechte bein…”
You don’t have a mean bone.
These final words are beautiful, and they will have to suffice me for the rest of my life. Coming from her, they mean more than Yale and Oxford put together. Like my dream of the magic mirror in Romper Room, Gita finally sees me through the glass. And I see her through mine. Even in her death, she is sweet, without specialness, or seeking specialness. She is mother, fragrant, giving.
I am not only the watchmaker’s daughter; I am hers.
Regrets
This message, too, is brought him by Yizkor. Don’t wait till the seat is empty in order to remember., Cherish, appreciate, respect and love those close to you while the seat is full. We get only once chance with our parents, siblings, friends and children. Let us not forever miss the words we could have said, gestors we could have made, embraces we could have experienced, love we could have shared, and reconciliation we could have achieved, but did not have the guts to do when they were with us.
“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been,’” Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Someone once shared this experience:
This morning, like he has every morning for the last decade, my 86-year-old grandfather picked a fresh wild flower on his morning walk and took it to my grandmother. This morning I decided to go with him to see her. And as he placed the flower on her gravestone, he looked at me and said, “I just wish I had picked her a fresh flower every morning when she was alive. She would have loved that.”
A Vacuum
But there is something deeper yet in the connection between memory and absence, in the link between “venifkadeta” and “yepaked.” It is not only that when we don’t have it, we take note of it, and we appreciate it. But rather, the vacancy itself brings forth a deeper relationship.
A story:“770” is jammed packed. Thousands of Chassidim from every corner of the earth, are here to celebrate with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. All eyes focus on the Rebbe as the Hakofos begin. The Rebbe holds the Sefer Torah aloft. His face radiates the sheer joy of the holiday as he dances with his brother in-law. It is Shmini Atzeres, 5738, 1977.
The first Hakofoh ends. The Rebbe walks, slowly, back to his place at the south-eastern wall. The second and third Hakofos are completed and the Rebbe, looking tired, has clapped his hands only a few times.
The fourth hakafah. The Rebbe turns to face the crowd. The singing stops. Silence engulfs 770. The Rebbe's face is white as chalk. The Hakofoh begins. The Rebbe strains to bring his hands together to clap. He asks for a chair and sits.
A shudder ripples through the room. Hakofos is the liveliest time of the year. The Rebbe never sits during Hakofos. Now, the Rebbe leans forward in his chair and closes his eyes.
There is shouting. "Water! Air! Back off!" Above the screams, the shattering of glass. Every window in sight becomes an escape route. Chassidim stream through them into the adjoining courtyard. Within minutes, 770 is empty. Of the thousands singing and dancing a moment ago, less than a hundred remain inside.
Doctors rush to the front, afraid, concerned. The Rebbe had just suffered a serious heart attack. His life was in danger.
They finished the hakafos, and the Rebbe returned to his room. He later suffered a second, more severe, heart attack.
The Chassidim were shaken to their core. Their happiest day was so disrupted. Yet upon instructions of the Rebbe, the dancing did not cease. They continues dancing all night.
For five weeks the Rebbe would remain secluded in his room, which became a make shift hospital room. He would make an extraordinary recovery. The world was enrich his by his presence for another seventeen years.
In middle of that first fateful night, as the Rebbe lay in bed, a doctor came in to draw blood from the Rebbe. The Rebbe asked him, "What draws the blood from the veins, the needle or the vacuum?"
The doctor explained that it was obviously the vacuum. The vacuum is what draws liquid into a syringe. He was surprised the Rebbe did not know this basic truth. He didn’t realize what the Rebbe was getting at.
On hearing this, the Rebbe responded:
A person once came to visit me and claimed that he was 'empty' and unfit for anything. He was just a “hollow vessel,” devoid of all substance. I told him that on the contrary! The vacuum is what draws liquid into a syringe. It is the voids and absences of life that compel its greatest achievements and fulfillments. An empty vessel draws into itself with so much more force. I told this man who claimed to have a major vacuum, that he was a vessel for the deepest levels of goodness and holiness!
The Rebbe concluded: "All Rabbis deliver sermons on Shmini Atzeres. I am unable to speak, so let this be my sermon…”
The Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Leibel Groner, communicated the message to the Chassidim, who were all starving to get some regards from inside the room. The message was clear: Do not allow the void to put you into despair. Do not allow the Rebbe’s absence to crush you. Never allow the empty feeling to numb you and debilitate you. On the contrary, every vacuum contains the capacity to draw forth a deeper connection, a profounder relationship. The purpose of the vacuum was to create a deeper commitment and bond, to fill your life with a level of light, depth, and truth that only the “vacuum” can bring forth.
For Chassidim, who needed to leave home with a vacuum in their heart, without the ecstasy of dancing all of the Hakafos with the Rebbe, this was a message of empowerment. It was the very vacuum that allowed for a far deeper relationship and connection.
At last, we can appreciate the deeper reason for the Hebrew language employing the same word for absence and for remembering. “You will be remembered because your seat is absent.” Every vacancy is life is there to propel us to a far deeper relationship with our loved ones, with ourselves, and with G-d. Every time you are feeling empty, you are capable of discovering deep truths about yourself, your brain, your soul, that you could have never known of without the emptiness. And you can utilize that very emptiness to welcome a flow of creativity and vitality that will surpass any you had beforehand.
My Father’s Whisper
As we are about to say Yizkor, we can hear our parents’ whisper to us:
Mourn me not with tears and grief alone. I love you and wish for you a life of song and celebration.
I may have not always told you how much I cherished you, and how safe I wanted you to feel in G-d’s world, but believe me, it was my deepest aspiration and longing.
My immortality is not in tears, blame, or self-recrimination. But in the joy you give yourself and others, in the smile you put on other faces and on your own, your loyalty to loving kindness, tzedakah, study, prayer and good deeds. Honor me with laughter and goodness, with a mitzvah, with a project that will illuminate our world. Let the vacuum draw forth an overflowing current of life, vitality, love and inspiration.
- Comment
Class Summary:
The biblical books of Samuel I and II are devoted primarily to the life story and leadership of King David, whose yartziet is on the holiday of Shavuos. But there is one verse—Samuel I, chapter 20 verse 18—that seared into my memory.
In the story leading up to this verse, David, the young, handsome, beautiful, fearless and deeply spiritual Jewish warrior, and his best friend Jonathan, the son and heir of King Saul, are discussing the reality of King Saul’s hatred of David and his possible plan to have David killed. They come up with a plan – a feast for the new month will occur and David will be expected to be in attendance. He will intentionally be absent, and based on King Saul’s reaction they will know whether Saul actually intends to kill David or not. In describing the plan Jonathan tells David: “Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be remembered, for your seat will be empty.”
How these words capture my thoughts at these awe inspiring moments before many of us will recite Yizkor, and connect to the lives of our loved ones who are not here with us any longer.
There is something lost in the English translation. In the original Hebrew, Jonathan uses the same word for “memory” as he does for “emptiness.” Venifkadta, “you will be remembered,” because yipaked, “your seat will be empty.” How can these two opposite ideas—memory and absence—share the same root in the Hebrew language? When you are absent, you are not here. When I remember you, you are here—you are present in my memory. Why the same word?
The sermon explores this anomaly on two levels. Sometimes, what it takes for you to be remembered is to disappear… Sometimes, it is only when your seat is vacant that people start missing you and appreciating you.
But there is something deeper. Why do we experience “empty moments” in life? Why must we deal with vacuums? It was the message the Rebbe gave his doctor who came to draw blood from him in the midst of a heart attack that allows us to view Yizkor in a new and inspiring way.
A memoir by a daughter of Holocaust survivors, a graduate of Yale and Oxford, who married out, describing her mom’s last moments, tells us about the power of absence. A cartoon about the woman who asks that her husband go on a business trip so she can fall in love again with him, described the irony of life.
Car Keys
An elderly woman related this personal experience:
I was leaving the store; I checked for my car keys. They weren't in my handbag. Suddenly I realized I must have left them in the car.
Frantically, I headed for the parking lot.
My husband has scolded me many times for leaving my keys in the car's ignition. He's afraid that the car could be stolen.
As I looked around the parking lot, I realized he was right. The parking lot was empty.
I immediately called the police.
I gave them my location, confessed that I had left my keys in the car, and that it had been stolen.
Then I made the most difficult call of all to my husband, "I left my keys in the car and it's been stolen."
There was a moment of silence. I thought the call had been disconnected, but then I heard his voice, "Are you kidding me?" he barked, "I dropped you off!"
Now it was my turn to be silent. Embarrassed, I said, "Well, come and get me."
He retorted, "I will, as soon as I convince this cop that I didn't steal your darn car!"
Welcome to the golden years...
In Your Absence, You Will Be Remembered
The biblical books of Samuel I and II are devoted primarily to the life story and leadership of King David, whose yartziet is on the holiday of Shavuos.
But there is one verse—Samuel I, chapter 20 verse 18—that seared into my memory.
In the story leading up to this verse, David, the young, handsome, beautiful, fearless and deeply spiritual Jewish warrior, and his best friend Jonathan, the son and heir of King Saul, are discussing the reality of King Saul’s hatred of David and his possible plan to have David killed. They come up with a plan – a feast for the new month will occur and David will be expected to be in attendance. He will intentionally be absent, and based on King Saul’s reaction they will know whether Saul actually intends to kill David or not. In describing the plan Jonathan tells David:
וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ יְהוֹנָתָן מָחָר חֹדֶשׁ וְנִפְקַדְתָּ כִּי יִפָּקֵד מוֹשָׁבֶךָ.
Jonathan said to him, “Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be remembered, for your seat will be empty.
“You will be remembered, because your seat will be empty.”
How these words capture my thoughts at these awe inspiring moments before many of us will recite Yizkor, and connect to the lives of our loved ones who are not here with us any longer.
The Same Word
There is something lost in the English translation. In the original Hebrew, Jonathan uses the same word for “memory” as he does for “emptiness.” Venifkadta, “you will be remembered,” because yipaked, “your seat will be empty.”
How can these two opposite ideas—memory and absence—share the same root in the Hebrew language? When you are absent, you are not here. When I remember you, you are here—you are present in my memory. Why the same word?
The Sad Irony
Because the Tanach is conveying to us the sad irony of life. Sometimes, what it takes for you to be remembered is to disappear… Sometimes, it is only when your seat is vacant that people start missing you and appreciating you.
How many people do you know when they were alive, nobody looked at them. They were the Les Misérables of the community. Kids may have even scoffed at them. But then whey they are gone, we feel a void in our heart. They represented something so pure, innocent, other worldly, and now it is gone.
So many things in life we only first appreciate after we no longer have them. What we have, we take for granted and don’t appreciate. It is when we lose it, that we really miss it.
Jules Feiffer captured this truth of the husband-wife relationship when he drew a cartoon strip about a woman and then put these words into her mouth: “Every night at dinner when he came home, I tried to rekindle the flame but all I could think of as he gobbled my chicken was: all I am is a servant to you. So when he announced that he would have to be away for a month on business, I was delighted. When he was away I could find myself again. I could make plans on my own and be my own person, find my own happiness. The first week I went out seven nights in a row. The phone never stopped ringing. I had a marvelous time.
The second week I became tired of the same old faces. I remembered what drove me to marry him in the first place.
The third week I felt closer to him than I had in years. I stayed home, I read Jane Austen, I slept on his side of the bed. The fourth week I fell madly in love with him. I hated myself for my withdrawal, for my failure to find my happiness with him. I could hardly wait for his return. The fifth week, he came home and the minute he came in and cried, “I’m back, darling!” I withdrew. I can hardly wait for his next business trip so that I can love him again.”
How sad. How tragic. How true! Why is it easier to say, “I miss you” on the phone than to say, “I love you” face to face? Why is it that mates, when here are mistreated, when gone they become mourned?
Is it really humorous or perhaps the essence of human tragedy when a colleague of mine tells me a story of a couple in their late 60’s who come to him for a divorce because they cannot stand each other, and when a week later the husband passes away, the wife is inconsolable and says, “I can’t go on without him.” If he’s alive, “zol er ligon in der erd,” if he’s “in der erd,” he should only be alive because I love him so!
It reminded me of a colleague who tells me that no matter what he does for his congregants it is never good enough because they are always comparing him to his predecessor. In my colleague’s words, his “predecessor’s piety and wisdom has increased year by year since he died, to the point that if he came back, not only could no one else take his place … HE couldn’t take his place!”
Children and Parents
We are like this with our children and we are like this with our parents.
Whatever we do for our children, it is never enough. Kids today can be very demanding. And at some point some of us (not all of us, but some of us) look forward to the day when they will move out, so we can reclaim our lives as individuals.
But when they do move out, we feel so empty… we miss them like crazy. And we wait with bated breath for the visit and the telephone call.
Being a caretaker for a parent can be a challenging time in life. Sometimes children complain how difficult it is. Some of them even wish it would all be over. But then they can’t get over how much we they miss mom and dad. It is in the absence that they discover the loss.
The Watchmaker’s Daughter
The Watchmaker’s Daughter, a memoir by a nice Jewish girl, Sonia Taitz, is a moving book.
Sonia is the child of two Holocaust survivors, who lost their entire families to Hitler. Her father, who saved lives within a Dachau prison, became a watchmaker in NY, and her mother, a gifted concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seize power, later joined her husband in the NY shop. Growing up under the shadow of catastrophe, their child, Sonia, is driven to achieve the highest peaks of worldly success. Her daring ambitions take her from Barnard to Yale’s Law School to Oxford University, where she meets a man outside her faith who will change her life, and her family’s, in ways she would have never imagined.
Sonia grows up speaking Yiddish and learning the lessons of Judaism. Nonetheless, as a young girl, the “American Dream” she learns about every day on the television enthralls her, even while it baffles her parents. Her mother tries encouraging her child into a more traditional Jewish feminine role despite all resistance. Sonia went her own way.
But at the end of the book she offered her “Yizkor”—her moment of saying goodbye to her mother, the woman whose values she rejected so profoundly. She writes:
For the most part, until the end, he [my brother Manny] is away in California, where he works as a lawyer and real estate developer. I am with her every day. Spooning raspberry ices into her mouth is the last thing I do for my mother. They are the last thing she tastes on this earth. I am glad they are sweet.
On her last day, she is mellow, smiling. I can see love in her eyes, and I take a chance.
“Who did you really love more? Mammy?”
“Yes, he was a boy, and I had lost my father and my two little brothers [in the Holocaust],” she says easily. “And he was always close to me.”
Then she adds, “But sometimes, you, more than anyone.”
This is even better than my father, who loved me most when I succeeded. The love she holds for me is there, even though I have failed her in every way.
She is so sweet as a dying person; she is so sweet even as she lies dead. So different from my father, who raged until the end, who took dying as a personal and undeserved final insult.
My mother Gita is teaching me something about life that until then, despite all the diplomas, I had not learned. Becoming a mother has brought me close to the secret of her wisdom. Watching her fade, as love burns constant in her heart, brings me ever closer. She is a woman, with a woman’s modest and forgiving heart. If my father’s main question to me was “What did you accomplish?,” hers was, “What can I do for you?” or, “Isn’t this a joy, sitting here with our glass of tea?”
When my mother Gita was first diagnosed, my practical brother asked her to sign a legal document called a DNR. DO NOT RESCUCITATE…
Nonetheless, I am now thinking – DO RESUCICITATE!!
If a desert can bloom, if exiles can return, if an entire people can rise up from ashes and sand, so can she. So can my little Gita. I want her even as she is – she is still our Bubbe, our soft hands, our onions and bay leaves, our story.
But she dies. There is a smile on her face in death, a radiant smile. She looks alive… The hospital lets me stay with her as long as I want, and I stay for hours.
At her funeral, I cry as I have never cried before. I cry for her sad life, and I cry for her sweet girlishness, and her cuteness, and her socks, and the endless chicken soup and kitchen pan bustling.
I cry that we were never close enough. That I never learned to cook her recipes – yes the boiled chicken and the strange cabbage chaluptzie and the mattress cake… chopped liver, flanken, or matzoh balls. All I can do is order in, and I blame feminism for that, for my contempt for her thankless domestic sacrifices. I am thanking her now as my children and I begin to try her old recipes.
My mother, whether or not she understood me, would have died for me. When the Nazis put her mother on the “death” line, my mother ran over to her side and somehow got her out. She could have been shot, but she didn’t care. Had G-d asked her to take her child to a mountain and sacrifice her, Gitz Taitz, unlike Abraham, would not have obeyed. She would have said, “Take me instead.” She would have run up the mountain and laid herself down on the altar for me, as she once did for her mother. That is what a real mother can do.
And here is her last gift to a difficult child. Her final words to me were:
“Du hast nicht keine shlechte bein…”
You don’t have a mean bone.
These final words are beautiful, and they will have to suffice me for the rest of my life. Coming from her, they mean more than Yale and Oxford put together. Like my dream of the magic mirror in Romper Room, Gita finally sees me through the glass. And I see her through mine. Even in her death, she is sweet, without specialness, or seeking specialness. She is mother, fragrant, giving.
I am not only the watchmaker’s daughter; I am hers.
Regrets
This message, too, is brought him by Yizkor. Don’t wait till the seat is empty in order to remember., Cherish, appreciate, respect and love those close to you while the seat is full. We get only once chance with our parents, siblings, friends and children. Let us not forever miss the words we could have said, gestors we could have made, embraces we could have experienced, love we could have shared, and reconciliation we could have achieved, but did not have the guts to do when they were with us.
“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been,’” Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Someone once shared this experience:
This morning, like he has every morning for the last decade, my 86-year-old grandfather picked a fresh wild flower on his morning walk and took it to my grandmother. This morning I decided to go with him to see her. And as he placed the flower on her gravestone, he looked at me and said, “I just wish I had picked her a fresh flower every morning when she was alive. She would have loved that.”
A Vacuum
But there is something deeper yet in the connection between memory and absence, in the link between “venifkadeta” and “yepaked.” It is not only that when we don’t have it, we take note of it, and we appreciate it. But rather, the vacancy itself brings forth a deeper relationship.
A story:“770” is jammed packed. Thousands of Chassidim from every corner of the earth, are here to celebrate with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. All eyes focus on the Rebbe as the Hakofos begin. The Rebbe holds the Sefer Torah aloft. His face radiates the sheer joy of the holiday as he dances with his brother in-law. It is Shmini Atzeres, 5738, 1977.
The first Hakofoh ends. The Rebbe walks, slowly, back to his place at the south-eastern wall. The second and third Hakofos are completed and the Rebbe, looking tired, has clapped his hands only a few times.
The fourth hakafah. The Rebbe turns to face the crowd. The singing stops. Silence engulfs 770. The Rebbe's face is white as chalk. The Hakofoh begins. The Rebbe strains to bring his hands together to clap. He asks for a chair and sits.
A shudder ripples through the room. Hakofos is the liveliest time of the year. The Rebbe never sits during Hakofos. Now, the Rebbe leans forward in his chair and closes his eyes.
There is shouting. "Water! Air! Back off!" Above the screams, the shattering of glass. Every window in sight becomes an escape route. Chassidim stream through them into the adjoining courtyard. Within minutes, 770 is empty. Of the thousands singing and dancing a moment ago, less than a hundred remain inside.
Doctors rush to the front, afraid, concerned. The Rebbe had just suffered a serious heart attack. His life was in danger.
They finished the hakafos, and the Rebbe returned to his room. He later suffered a second, more severe, heart attack.
The Chassidim were shaken to their core. Their happiest day was so disrupted. Yet upon instructions of the Rebbe, the dancing did not cease. They continues dancing all night.
For five weeks the Rebbe would remain secluded in his room, which became a make shift hospital room. He would make an extraordinary recovery. The world was enrich his by his presence for another seventeen years.
In middle of that first fateful night, as the Rebbe lay in bed, a doctor came in to draw blood from the Rebbe. The Rebbe asked him, "What draws the blood from the veins, the needle or the vacuum?"
The doctor explained that it was obviously the vacuum. The vacuum is what draws liquid into a syringe. He was surprised the Rebbe did not know this basic truth. He didn’t realize what the Rebbe was getting at.
On hearing this, the Rebbe responded:
A person once came to visit me and claimed that he was 'empty' and unfit for anything. He was just a “hollow vessel,” devoid of all substance. I told him that on the contrary! The vacuum is what draws liquid into a syringe. It is the voids and absences of life that compel its greatest achievements and fulfillments. An empty vessel draws into itself with so much more force. I told this man who claimed to have a major vacuum, that he was a vessel for the deepest levels of goodness and holiness!
The Rebbe concluded: "All Rabbis deliver sermons on Shmini Atzeres. I am unable to speak, so let this be my sermon…”
The Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Leibel Groner, communicated the message to the Chassidim, who were all starving to get some regards from inside the room. The message was clear: Do not allow the void to put you into despair. Do not allow the Rebbe’s absence to crush you. Never allow the empty feeling to numb you and debilitate you. On the contrary, every vacuum contains the capacity to draw forth a deeper connection, a profounder relationship. The purpose of the vacuum was to create a deeper commitment and bond, to fill your life with a level of light, depth, and truth that only the “vacuum” can bring forth.
For Chassidim, who needed to leave home with a vacuum in their heart, without the ecstasy of dancing all of the Hakafos with the Rebbe, this was a message of empowerment. It was the very vacuum that allowed for a far deeper relationship and connection.
At last, we can appreciate the deeper reason for the Hebrew language employing the same word for absence and for remembering. “You will be remembered because your seat is absent.” Every vacancy is life is there to propel us to a far deeper relationship with our loved ones, with ourselves, and with G-d. Every time you are feeling empty, you are capable of discovering deep truths about yourself, your brain, your soul, that you could have never known of without the emptiness. And you can utilize that very emptiness to welcome a flow of creativity and vitality that will surpass any you had beforehand.
My Father’s Whisper
As we are about to say Yizkor, we can hear our parents’ whisper to us:
Mourn me not with tears and grief alone. I love you and wish for you a life of song and celebration.
I may have not always told you how much I cherished you, and how safe I wanted you to feel in G-d’s world, but believe me, it was my deepest aspiration and longing.
My immortality is not in tears, blame, or self-recrimination. But in the joy you give yourself and others, in the smile you put on other faces and on your own, your loyalty to loving kindness, tzedakah, study, prayer and good deeds. Honor me with laughter and goodness, with a mitzvah, with a project that will illuminate our world. Let the vacuum draw forth an overflowing current of life, vitality, love and inspiration.
Categories
Shavuos 5775
Rabbi YY Jacobson
- May 20, 2015
- |
- 2 Sivan 5775
- |
- 30 views
Yizkor: The Voice from the Empty Chair
Rabbi YY Jacobson
- May 20, 2015
Car Keys
An elderly woman related this personal experience:
I was leaving the store; I checked for my car keys. They weren't in my handbag. Suddenly I realized I must have left them in the car.
Frantically, I headed for the parking lot.
My husband has scolded me many times for leaving my keys in the car's ignition. He's afraid that the car could be stolen.
As I looked around the parking lot, I realized he was right. The parking lot was empty.
I immediately called the police.
I gave them my location, confessed that I had left my keys in the car, and that it had been stolen.
Then I made the most difficult call of all to my husband, "I left my keys in the car and it's been stolen."
There was a moment of silence. I thought the call had been disconnected, but then I heard his voice, "Are you kidding me?" he barked, "I dropped you off!"
Now it was my turn to be silent. Embarrassed, I said, "Well, come and get me."
He retorted, "I will, as soon as I convince this cop that I didn't steal your darn car!"
Welcome to the golden years...
In Your Absence, You Will Be Remembered
The biblical books of Samuel I and II are devoted primarily to the life story and leadership of King David, whose yartziet is on the holiday of Shavuos.
But there is one verse—Samuel I, chapter 20 verse 18—that seared into my memory.
In the story leading up to this verse, David, the young, handsome, beautiful, fearless and deeply spiritual Jewish warrior, and his best friend Jonathan, the son and heir of King Saul, are discussing the reality of King Saul’s hatred of David and his possible plan to have David killed. They come up with a plan – a feast for the new month will occur and David will be expected to be in attendance. He will intentionally be absent, and based on King Saul’s reaction they will know whether Saul actually intends to kill David or not. In describing the plan Jonathan tells David:
וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ יְהוֹנָתָן מָחָר חֹדֶשׁ וְנִפְקַדְתָּ כִּי יִפָּקֵד מוֹשָׁבֶךָ.
Jonathan said to him, “Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be remembered, for your seat will be empty.
“You will be remembered, because your seat will be empty.”
How these words capture my thoughts at these awe inspiring moments before many of us will recite Yizkor, and connect to the lives of our loved ones who are not here with us any longer.
The Same Word
There is something lost in the English translation. In the original Hebrew, Jonathan uses the same word for “memory” as he does for “emptiness.” Venifkadta, “you will be remembered,” because yipaked, “your seat will be empty.”
How can these two opposite ideas—memory and absence—share the same root in the Hebrew language? When you are absent, you are not here. When I remember you, you are here—you are present in my memory. Why the same word?
The Sad Irony
Because the Tanach is conveying to us the sad irony of life. Sometimes, what it takes for you to be remembered is to disappear… Sometimes, it is only when your seat is vacant that people start missing you and appreciating you.
How many people do you know when they were alive, nobody looked at them. They were the Les Misérables of the community. Kids may have even scoffed at them. But then whey they are gone, we feel a void in our heart. They represented something so pure, innocent, other worldly, and now it is gone.
So many things in life we only first appreciate after we no longer have them. What we have, we take for granted and don’t appreciate. It is when we lose it, that we really miss it.
Jules Feiffer captured this truth of the husband-wife relationship when he drew a cartoon strip about a woman and then put these words into her mouth: “Every night at dinner when he came home, I tried to rekindle the flame but all I could think of as he gobbled my chicken was: all I am is a servant to you. So when he announced that he would have to be away for a month on business, I was delighted. When he was away I could find myself again. I could make plans on my own and be my own person, find my own happiness. The first week I went out seven nights in a row. The phone never stopped ringing. I had a marvelous time.
The second week I became tired of the same old faces. I remembered what drove me to marry him in the first place.
The third week I felt closer to him than I had in years. I stayed home, I read Jane Austen, I slept on his side of the bed. The fourth week I fell madly in love with him. I hated myself for my withdrawal, for my failure to find my happiness with him. I could hardly wait for his return. The fifth week, he came home and the minute he came in and cried, “I’m back, darling!” I withdrew. I can hardly wait for his next business trip so that I can love him again.”
How sad. How tragic. How true! Why is it easier to say, “I miss you” on the phone than to say, “I love you” face to face? Why is it that mates, when here are mistreated, when gone they become mourned?
Is it really humorous or perhaps the essence of human tragedy when a colleague of mine tells me a story of a couple in their late 60’s who come to him for a divorce because they cannot stand each other, and when a week later the husband passes away, the wife is inconsolable and says, “I can’t go on without him.” If he’s alive, “zol er ligon in der erd,” if he’s “in der erd,” he should only be alive because I love him so!
It reminded me of a colleague who tells me that no matter what he does for his congregants it is never good enough because they are always comparing him to his predecessor. In my colleague’s words, his “predecessor’s piety and wisdom has increased year by year since he died, to the point that if he came back, not only could no one else take his place … HE couldn’t take his place!”
Children and Parents
We are like this with our children and we are like this with our parents.
Whatever we do for our children, it is never enough. Kids today can be very demanding. And at some point some of us (not all of us, but some of us) look forward to the day when they will move out, so we can reclaim our lives as individuals.
But when they do move out, we feel so empty… we miss them like crazy. And we wait with bated breath for the visit and the telephone call.
Being a caretaker for a parent can be a challenging time in life. Sometimes children complain how difficult it is. Some of them even wish it would all be over. But then they can’t get over how much we they miss mom and dad. It is in the absence that they discover the loss.
The Watchmaker’s Daughter
The Watchmaker’s Daughter, a memoir by a nice Jewish girl, Sonia Taitz, is a moving book.
Sonia is the child of two Holocaust survivors, who lost their entire families to Hitler. Her father, who saved lives within a Dachau prison, became a watchmaker in NY, and her mother, a gifted concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seize power, later joined her husband in the NY shop. Growing up under the shadow of catastrophe, their child, Sonia, is driven to achieve the highest peaks of worldly success. Her daring ambitions take her from Barnard to Yale’s Law School to Oxford University, where she meets a man outside her faith who will change her life, and her family’s, in ways she would have never imagined.
Sonia grows up speaking Yiddish and learning the lessons of Judaism. Nonetheless, as a young girl, the “American Dream” she learns about every day on the television enthralls her, even while it baffles her parents. Her mother tries encouraging her child into a more traditional Jewish feminine role despite all resistance. Sonia went her own way.
But at the end of the book she offered her “Yizkor”—her moment of saying goodbye to her mother, the woman whose values she rejected so profoundly. She writes:
For the most part, until the end, he [my brother Manny] is away in California, where he works as a lawyer and real estate developer. I am with her every day. Spooning raspberry ices into her mouth is the last thing I do for my mother. They are the last thing she tastes on this earth. I am glad they are sweet.
On her last day, she is mellow, smiling. I can see love in her eyes, and I take a chance.
“Who did you really love more? Mammy?”
“Yes, he was a boy, and I had lost my father and my two little brothers [in the Holocaust],” she says easily. “And he was always close to me.”
Then she adds, “But sometimes, you, more than anyone.”
This is even better than my father, who loved me most when I succeeded. The love she holds for me is there, even though I have failed her in every way.
She is so sweet as a dying person; she is so sweet even as she lies dead. So different from my father, who raged until the end, who took dying as a personal and undeserved final insult.
My mother Gita is teaching me something about life that until then, despite all the diplomas, I had not learned. Becoming a mother has brought me close to the secret of her wisdom. Watching her fade, as love burns constant in her heart, brings me ever closer. She is a woman, with a woman’s modest and forgiving heart. If my father’s main question to me was “What did you accomplish?,” hers was, “What can I do for you?” or, “Isn’t this a joy, sitting here with our glass of tea?”
When my mother Gita was first diagnosed, my practical brother asked her to sign a legal document called a DNR. DO NOT RESCUCITATE…
Nonetheless, I am now thinking – DO RESUCICITATE!!
If a desert can bloom, if exiles can return, if an entire people can rise up from ashes and sand, so can she. So can my little Gita. I want her even as she is – she is still our Bubbe, our soft hands, our onions and bay leaves, our story.
But she dies. There is a smile on her face in death, a radiant smile. She looks alive… The hospital lets me stay with her as long as I want, and I stay for hours.
At her funeral, I cry as I have never cried before. I cry for her sad life, and I cry for her sweet girlishness, and her cuteness, and her socks, and the endless chicken soup and kitchen pan bustling.
I cry that we were never close enough. That I never learned to cook her recipes – yes the boiled chicken and the strange cabbage chaluptzie and the mattress cake… chopped liver, flanken, or matzoh balls. All I can do is order in, and I blame feminism for that, for my contempt for her thankless domestic sacrifices. I am thanking her now as my children and I begin to try her old recipes.
My mother, whether or not she understood me, would have died for me. When the Nazis put her mother on the “death” line, my mother ran over to her side and somehow got her out. She could have been shot, but she didn’t care. Had G-d asked her to take her child to a mountain and sacrifice her, Gitz Taitz, unlike Abraham, would not have obeyed. She would have said, “Take me instead.” She would have run up the mountain and laid herself down on the altar for me, as she once did for her mother. That is what a real mother can do.
And here is her last gift to a difficult child. Her final words to me were:
“Du hast nicht keine shlechte bein…”
You don’t have a mean bone.
These final words are beautiful, and they will have to suffice me for the rest of my life. Coming from her, they mean more than Yale and Oxford put together. Like my dream of the magic mirror in Romper Room, Gita finally sees me through the glass. And I see her through mine. Even in her death, she is sweet, without specialness, or seeking specialness. She is mother, fragrant, giving.
I am not only the watchmaker’s daughter; I am hers.
Regrets
This message, too, is brought him by Yizkor. Don’t wait till the seat is empty in order to remember., Cherish, appreciate, respect and love those close to you while the seat is full. We get only once chance with our parents, siblings, friends and children. Let us not forever miss the words we could have said, gestors we could have made, embraces we could have experienced, love we could have shared, and reconciliation we could have achieved, but did not have the guts to do when they were with us.
“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been,’” Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Someone once shared this experience:
This morning, like he has every morning for the last decade, my 86-year-old grandfather picked a fresh wild flower on his morning walk and took it to my grandmother. This morning I decided to go with him to see her. And as he placed the flower on her gravestone, he looked at me and said, “I just wish I had picked her a fresh flower every morning when she was alive. She would have loved that.”
A Vacuum
But there is something deeper yet in the connection between memory and absence, in the link between “venifkadeta” and “yepaked.” It is not only that when we don’t have it, we take note of it, and we appreciate it. But rather, the vacancy itself brings forth a deeper relationship.
A story:“770” is jammed packed. Thousands of Chassidim from every corner of the earth, are here to celebrate with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. All eyes focus on the Rebbe as the Hakofos begin. The Rebbe holds the Sefer Torah aloft. His face radiates the sheer joy of the holiday as he dances with his brother in-law. It is Shmini Atzeres, 5738, 1977.
The first Hakofoh ends. The Rebbe walks, slowly, back to his place at the south-eastern wall. The second and third Hakofos are completed and the Rebbe, looking tired, has clapped his hands only a few times.
The fourth hakafah. The Rebbe turns to face the crowd. The singing stops. Silence engulfs 770. The Rebbe's face is white as chalk. The Hakofoh begins. The Rebbe strains to bring his hands together to clap. He asks for a chair and sits.
A shudder ripples through the room. Hakofos is the liveliest time of the year. The Rebbe never sits during Hakofos. Now, the Rebbe leans forward in his chair and closes his eyes.
There is shouting. "Water! Air! Back off!" Above the screams, the shattering of glass. Every window in sight becomes an escape route. Chassidim stream through them into the adjoining courtyard. Within minutes, 770 is empty. Of the thousands singing and dancing a moment ago, less than a hundred remain inside.
Doctors rush to the front, afraid, concerned. The Rebbe had just suffered a serious heart attack. His life was in danger.
They finished the hakafos, and the Rebbe returned to his room. He later suffered a second, more severe, heart attack.
The Chassidim were shaken to their core. Their happiest day was so disrupted. Yet upon instructions of the Rebbe, the dancing did not cease. They continues dancing all night.
For five weeks the Rebbe would remain secluded in his room, which became a make shift hospital room. He would make an extraordinary recovery. The world was enrich his by his presence for another seventeen years.
In middle of that first fateful night, as the Rebbe lay in bed, a doctor came in to draw blood from the Rebbe. The Rebbe asked him, "What draws the blood from the veins, the needle or the vacuum?"
The doctor explained that it was obviously the vacuum. The vacuum is what draws liquid into a syringe. He was surprised the Rebbe did not know this basic truth. He didn’t realize what the Rebbe was getting at.
On hearing this, the Rebbe responded:
A person once came to visit me and claimed that he was 'empty' and unfit for anything. He was just a “hollow vessel,” devoid of all substance. I told him that on the contrary! The vacuum is what draws liquid into a syringe. It is the voids and absences of life that compel its greatest achievements and fulfillments. An empty vessel draws into itself with so much more force. I told this man who claimed to have a major vacuum, that he was a vessel for the deepest levels of goodness and holiness!
The Rebbe concluded: "All Rabbis deliver sermons on Shmini Atzeres. I am unable to speak, so let this be my sermon…”
The Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Leibel Groner, communicated the message to the Chassidim, who were all starving to get some regards from inside the room. The message was clear: Do not allow the void to put you into despair. Do not allow the Rebbe’s absence to crush you. Never allow the empty feeling to numb you and debilitate you. On the contrary, every vacuum contains the capacity to draw forth a deeper connection, a profounder relationship. The purpose of the vacuum was to create a deeper commitment and bond, to fill your life with a level of light, depth, and truth that only the “vacuum” can bring forth.
For Chassidim, who needed to leave home with a vacuum in their heart, without the ecstasy of dancing all of the Hakafos with the Rebbe, this was a message of empowerment. It was the very vacuum that allowed for a far deeper relationship and connection.
At last, we can appreciate the deeper reason for the Hebrew language employing the same word for absence and for remembering. “You will be remembered because your seat is absent.” Every vacancy is life is there to propel us to a far deeper relationship with our loved ones, with ourselves, and with G-d. Every time you are feeling empty, you are capable of discovering deep truths about yourself, your brain, your soul, that you could have never known of without the emptiness. And you can utilize that very emptiness to welcome a flow of creativity and vitality that will surpass any you had beforehand.
My Father’s Whisper
As we are about to say Yizkor, we can hear our parents’ whisper to us:
Mourn me not with tears and grief alone. I love you and wish for you a life of song and celebration.
I may have not always told you how much I cherished you, and how safe I wanted you to feel in G-d’s world, but believe me, it was my deepest aspiration and longing.
My immortality is not in tears, blame, or self-recrimination. But in the joy you give yourself and others, in the smile you put on other faces and on your own, your loyalty to loving kindness, tzedakah, study, prayer and good deeds. Honor me with laughter and goodness, with a mitzvah, with a project that will illuminate our world. Let the vacuum draw forth an overflowing current of life, vitality, love and inspiration.
- Comment
Class Summary:
The biblical books of Samuel I and II are devoted primarily to the life story and leadership of King David, whose yartziet is on the holiday of Shavuos. But there is one verse—Samuel I, chapter 20 verse 18—that seared into my memory.
In the story leading up to this verse, David, the young, handsome, beautiful, fearless and deeply spiritual Jewish warrior, and his best friend Jonathan, the son and heir of King Saul, are discussing the reality of King Saul’s hatred of David and his possible plan to have David killed. They come up with a plan – a feast for the new month will occur and David will be expected to be in attendance. He will intentionally be absent, and based on King Saul’s reaction they will know whether Saul actually intends to kill David or not. In describing the plan Jonathan tells David: “Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be remembered, for your seat will be empty.”
How these words capture my thoughts at these awe inspiring moments before many of us will recite Yizkor, and connect to the lives of our loved ones who are not here with us any longer.
There is something lost in the English translation. In the original Hebrew, Jonathan uses the same word for “memory” as he does for “emptiness.” Venifkadta, “you will be remembered,” because yipaked, “your seat will be empty.” How can these two opposite ideas—memory and absence—share the same root in the Hebrew language? When you are absent, you are not here. When I remember you, you are here—you are present in my memory. Why the same word?
The sermon explores this anomaly on two levels. Sometimes, what it takes for you to be remembered is to disappear… Sometimes, it is only when your seat is vacant that people start missing you and appreciating you.
But there is something deeper. Why do we experience “empty moments” in life? Why must we deal with vacuums? It was the message the Rebbe gave his doctor who came to draw blood from him in the midst of a heart attack that allows us to view Yizkor in a new and inspiring way.
A memoir by a daughter of Holocaust survivors, a graduate of Yale and Oxford, who married out, describing her mom’s last moments, tells us about the power of absence. A cartoon about the woman who asks that her husband go on a business trip so she can fall in love again with him, described the irony of life.
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