A man walks out to the street and catches a taxi just going by. He gets into the taxi, and the cabbie says, “Perfect timing. You’re just like Frank.”
The Passenger asks: “Who?”
The Cabbie says: “Frank Feldman. He’s a guy who did everything right all the time. Like my coming along when you needed a cab, things like that happened to Frank Feldman every single day.”
The Passenger comments: “There are always a few clouds over everybody.”
The Cabbie replies: “Not Frank Feldman. He was a terrific athlete. He could have won the Grand Slam at tennis. He could golf with the pros. He sang like an opera baritone and danced like a Broadway star, and you should have heard him play the piano. He was an amazing guy.”
The passenger says: “Sounds like he was something really special.”
And the cabbie goes on: “There’s more. He had a memory like a computer. He remembered everybody’s birthday. He knew all about wine, which foods to order and which fork to use. He could fix anything. Not like me. I change a fuse, and the whole street blacks out. But Frank Feldman could do everything right.”
Passenger: “Wow, some guy, then.”
Cabbie: “He always knew the quickest way to go in traffic and avoid traffic jams. Not like me, I always seem to get stuck in them. But Frank Feldman, he never made a mistake. He never forgot his wife’s birthday or their anniversary. And Frank really knew how to dress; his clothing was always immaculate, and his shoes were highly polished too. He was the perfect man! He never made a mistake. No one could ever measure up to Frank Feldman.”
Passenger exclaimed: “Frank was an amazing fellow. How did you meet him?”
The Cabbie responds: “Well, I never actually met Frank. He died, and I married his wife.”
Sometimes it is hard to live up to expectations!
The section of the Torah that we read today on Yom Kippur comes from the Torah portion known as ???? ??? Acharei Mot. It describes the rituals of atonement that were performed in the Temple on Yom Kippur to secure God’s forgiveness. The Torah portion that follows ???? ??? Acharei Mot is ?????? Kedoshim, which offers us a path to holiness through the performance of ethical mitzvot. ???? ??? Acharei Mot means after the death, as in after the death of Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s sons who brought a strange fire to the altar and were struck dead by a consuming fire. It is after those events that we read about the rituals of Yom Kippur. ?????? Kedoshim means, Holiness. In some years, these two Torah portions are read together as a double portion, and we refer to them as ???? ???-?????? Acharei Mot- Kedoshim. If we read those words as a sentence instead of as two separate parashah names, it would mean ???? ???, ?????? Acharei Mot, Kedoshim: “after death, holiness.” In other words, after death, everyone is considered holy.
Rabbis often invoke this phrase to teach that we should not speak ill of the dead. We should instead focus on the things they did right in life, the goodness and love that they shared, and not dwell on their character flaws or misdeeds. After all, no one is perfect. As we say in today’s confessional prayers, no one is so righteous that they can say they have not sinned. We have all sinned. That is why at the graveside, during a funeral, it is customary to ask forgiveness from the deceased for any hurt we may have caused them and proclaim our forgiveness of them for any wrong they committed against us.
When we die, our tradition teaches that the soul goes through a stage of punishment, cleansing and purification. This intermediate stage, half-way, so to speak, between this world and the next, lasts up to a year, during which our soul is slowly rising to its final place at God’s right-hand side, enveloped in God’s loving embrace, restored fully to the flow of God’s light and spirit. That is why we say ???? kaddish for a parent during this time. Every time we say ???? kaddish, it is as if we are testifying to God about the goodness of the deceased. God hears our praise and elevates the person’s soul a little higher.
We call this an ???? aliyah – a going up, or an ascent – the same word used to describe ascending to the Torah reading to recite blessings or ascending to the land of Israel. There are other ways you can effect an ???? aliyah of your loved one’s soul: by engaging in Jewish study or performing new mitzvot you had not done before, or by dedicating yourself to new acts of ?????? ????? gemillut hassadim in their memory. There is even a custom among some that when you return from the cemetery following the burial, you make a ????? l’chaim over schnapps, and before you drink, you say: it should be an ???? aliyah for their soul.
That process of the ???? aliyah of the soul takes up to 12 months. That is why we only say ???? kaddish for 11 months. If we said it for 12 months, it might – God forbid – imply that our loved one was so bad that they needed the absolute maximum punishment and cleansing. We stop short of the full year as if to say that our loved one can get there on their own; we just did this to support them in their soul’s journey.
What does that 12-month period look like? I am particularly fond of the way it is described in the Zohar, the core text of Jewish mysticism. It says that two angels take your soul and dip it into the River of Light that is the never-ending stream of God’s spirit that flows through all creation. (Think about pre-soaking a garment before it is washed to loosen the dirt). Then the two angels stand at opposite ends of the universe and toss your soul from one to the other and back again. It is a very loving image. It reminds me of two parents standing close together and gently tossing their child between them, each time grabbing and embracing the child. As they toss you back and forth, all the crust on your soul – the baggage from this world, your hurts and your wrongdoing – falls away until all that is left is the pure soul that God had implanted in you.
That pure soul is who we really are. It is our best selves. And that is what we generally should remember. Recalling our loved one’s best qualities and most shining moments allows us to honor the true essence of who they are. It also serves as an inspiration to us, motivating us to reach higher in our own lives, as we seek to live up to their legacy.
Take a moment, close your eyes, and think of the most wonderful qualities of the ones that you are remembering today. Picture in your mind’s eye an experience you had with them that made you feel loved, or comforted, or supported. That moment that set an example for you. What about them inspires you? In what ways do you want to be like them? Ask yourself, what can you do this year to honor your loved one by emulating them? How can your life in the coming year be an ???? aliyah for their soul?
Yes, there is a reason we say ???? ???, ?????? Acharei Mot, Kedoshim – “after death, holiness.” But at the same time, that notion of remembering only the good can be problematic for two reasons.
First, when we idealize those that we love who are gone, we create an image of them that so dims their flaws and so magnifies their good qualities that we feel small in comparison. Like the cabbie in that story, we can never live up to their imagined perfection. We can never be good enough. As a result, we feel shame, and we feel disempowered. It would be far better to be able to hold up our loved weaknesses and strengths, failures and successes, flaws, and virtues together.
The fact that they were imperfect is all the more reason to admire them. It means that they face the same kinds of temptations and weaknesses that we do but still were able at the same time to overcome them. The sages say that a ???? ???? a completely righteous person who has never sinned cannot even stand in the place a ??? ????? baal teshuvah stands. The completely righteous person never knew from temptation, so what is the great merit in their doing right? The person who feels temptation and resists merits our admiration. If you hate the taste of chocolate, maybe it even upsets your digestion, and you avoid eating it, that’s no big deal. But if you love chocolate and constantly crave it and yet you don’t touch it, that is much more praiseworthy. You can love imperfection. After all, God does. That’s why we are here today.
The second reason over-idealizing our memories of loved ones is problematic is that there are circumstances for some of us when our loved ones have wounded us so deeply that we cannot simply pretend those hurts are not there. If your parent – or any other family member or friend who has passed on – was physically, verbally, or emotionally abusive, it is neither easy nor healthy to block out those memories and that pain. True healing can only come after we confront those experiences honestly and come to terms with how they have affected us. Sometimes that inner struggle leads us to forgive, but never to forget. Sometimes the hurt was so egregious that it is not possible to forgive, and the most we can hope for is that God will give us the strength and peace of heart to move on, learning from the hurt so it can make us stronger.
Our member, Jill Zimon, wrote a beautiful, stirring column which appeared last week in Tablet Magazine online. In that piece, she shares her own painful experience of being abused by her father, and how she has grappled with her emotions, trying to square the hurt he inflicted with Jewish mourning practices and find peace within herself without denying the past. It’s a painful but beautiful piece. I urge you all to read it. At the end of the article, she shares how she found solace in a prayer found in our Machzor Lev Shalem (the new Conservative machzor), on page 292: “A Yizkor Meditation in Memory of a Parent Who was Hurtful,” by Rabbi Robert Saks. For some, this prayer is the most meaningful way to remember:
Dear God,
You know my heart. Indeed, You know me better than I know myself, so I turn to You before I rise for Kaddish.
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 grief that 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, who raise up slaves to freedom, will liberate me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place.
Jill writes about her experience standing in the sanctuary for ????? Yizkor and finding this prayer:
“I’d say my stomach dropped but I was fasting. Here, in a siddur intended for the days when we ask for forgiveness and are expected to forgive those who ask us, was a passage that offered an alternative. It supported me where I was—in a place of tension, and in doing so made me feel accepted, struggle and all. Moreover, the words and the sentiments allowed me to be soothed by the passage of time if not calmed by forgiveness. As embraced by this meditation, the beautiful flexibility of Judaism recognized that things are complicated, and that is OK.”
(https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/289231/mourning-an-abusive-parent)
Yes, things are complicated. Life is complicated. Relationships are complicated. And yes, Judaism gives us room to honor those complications in death as in life, in grieving as in celebration, in all our relationships.
The rabbis tell us that the broken shards of the first set of tablets – the ones that Moses broke when he witnessed the people sinning with the golden calf – were kept inside the holy ark of the covenant right along with the new, intact tablets. We do not have to discard that which is broken. On the contrary, those broken pieces are also holy. They remain a part of our story.
A little girl asked her mother, “How did the human race appear?”The mother answered, “God made Adam and Eve, and they had children, and this was how all humankind came into being.”
Two days later, the girl asked her father the same question. The father answered, “Many years ago there were monkeys from which the human race evolved.”
The confused girl returned to her mother and said, “Mom, how is it possible that you told me that God created the human race, and Dad said the human race evolved from monkeys?”
The mother replied, “Well, dear, it is very simple: I told you about my side of the family, and your father told you about his side of the family!”
Whether you think your family is simply divine or you think they are a bunch of animals, you don’t have to idealize them or whitewash them to honor them and love them. Love them, warts and all, for who they truly were. They were not perfect. Neither are we.
As we rise to recite Yizkor, may we remember our loved ones clearly, embracing the gifts they gave us, their love, their kindness, their values, while – when we can – forgiving their flaws, and – when we cannot – finding peace, strength, and healing within ourselves.