Zot Nechamati for the House of Mourning

ספר זאת נחמתי לבית האבל Sefer Zot Nechamati For the House of Mourning including The Afternoon and Evening Services from Siddur Tzur Yisrael ספר זאת נחמתי לבית האבל מאת הרב מרטין שמואל כהן כולל סדר תפילות מנחה ומעריב מסדור צור ישראל ק"ק צור ישראל רוזלין, ניויורק תשס"ז Sefer Zot Nechamati A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning including the Afternoon & Evening Services as presented in Siddur Tzur Yisrael RABBI MARTIN S. COHEN Shelter Rock Jewish Center Roslyn, New York 2008 – 5769 Copyright ©2008 Rabbi Martin S. Cohen All rights reserved. No part of the text may be reproduced in any form, nor may any page be photographed and reproduced, without the permission of the publisher. Library of Congress-in-Publication Data is available upon request ISBN 000-0-0000000-0-0 Sefer Zot Nechamati A publication of the Shelter Rock Jewish Center 272 Shelter Rock Road Roslyn, New York Designed and manufactured in the United States of America by G&H Soho, Inc. www.ghsoho.com The Resnick family and Sinai Chapels of Fresh Meadows, Queens, New York, are pleased to sponsor the publication of this volume of prayers and devotional study for the house of mourning. We extend our condolences to all who mourn the loss of a loved one and pray that they be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. Preface A fter publishing Siddur Tzur Yisrael in January, 2007, I tions, and come through it all with their faith intact and their was asked almost immediately if an edition of the prayer book confidence unimpaired? Could I publish a prayer book that specifically intended for use in houses of mourning was going would also be a book of consolation? Could I create a work to follow. We considered the idea carefully, then resolved to that would speak to the unhappiness of the bereaved, and approach Si Resnick and Michael Resnick, owners of the Sinai not merely to their needs as worshipers? All these were the Memorial Chapel in nearby Fresh Meadows, to ask if they questions I grappled with as this project took shape. would be interested in underwriting the expenses involved in In the end, the book you are holding is two books at once: the production of such a work. They gave their assent, and a traditional prayer book containing afternoon and evening we are very grateful to them, and to their families, for their prayers for all weekdays of the year, and a book of stories kindness and for their generosity. The dedication page that about the last days and hours of some of our most revered appears in this volume is testimony to their magnanimity. sages, each accompanied by a commentary written by myself At first, the point was portability: we needed, as do all tra- and designed to draw lessons for moderns from these ancient ditional synagogue communities, an edition of the prayer tales. I hope that the study of this book will yield useful and book that was light enough to carry around in large enough helpful insight into the reality of loss for all readers, and that numbers to accommodate houses of mourning in which particularly those in mourning will find my work useful and often fifty or sixty people, or even more, gather to participate helpful. in the prayer service, particularly for afternoon and evening I, of course, take full responsibility for what is written here, prayers. But then, as I began to think more carefully about but I also wish to thank those who read along with me as this the project, I understood that a different challenge was pre- work was prepared for publication and whose insights and senting itself: not only the challenge of creating a book that suggestions were invaluable. They are Howard Guzik, M.D., could easily be carried from house to house, but the chal- Sarah Hyatt, Suzanne Seidel, Stuart Stein, David Stollwerk, lenge of creating one that would speak directly to the needs and Stephen Teitelbaum, M.D., and I owe them all a sincere of mourners during the dark, painful weeks that follow the debt of gratitude, as do I also the Resnick family for their gen- loss of a loved one. Could I create a volume that, in addition erous support. to the requisite prayer services in Hebrew and English, would also present material that could provide comfort to the bereaved, and which could set their own sadness in the con- M.S.C. text of so many generations of Jewish people who have dealt Roslyn, New York with the same issues, suffered the same confusion of emo- Erev Shavuot 5767 vii Preface SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI Zot Nechamati— This Is My Consolation This is my consolation in times of sorrow / Your word has granted me life. —PSALM 119:50 The great philosopher Rosenzweig was right about many different things, but among the things he was the most right about, I believe, was his notion that, in the end, religious faith finds its place in the hearts of the faithful by providing them with a con- text in which to consider the meaning of death . and, thus, inevitably, also the meaning of life. In the course of my decades of work in the rabbinate, my own experience has borne this out time and time again: people think they know what they think about religion when they sit down and cogitate about this or that aspect of their spiritual her- itage, but they find out what they really think when confronted, even not unexpectedly, by the Angel of Death. Indeed, it is the experience of being present when a father dies, or of standing by a mother’s open grave, or of facing the imminent loss of a spouse to whom one has been married for so long that the person one was before marriage seems no longer to exist in any meaningful way—it is those experiences that lead the way to the kind of intense, searing introspection that clarifies the articles of faith to which one truly does subscribe, as opposed to those to which one wishes one subscribed, or to which one feels obliged formally (or even fervently) to say one subscribes. This kind of introspection is not always a negative experience, however, because it can also bring individuals to faith. Indeed, the experience of spending time in surgeons’ waiting rooms, and in oncologists’, in wiling away long hours in ICU’s and in Emergency Rooms, in sitting in the parlor rooms of funeral chapels and wandering along ceme- tery paths that meander past not hundreds or thousands, but tens of thousands, of burial SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI This Is My Consolation 2 plots—it is in just these places that some peo- The Weekday Afternoon Service ple find the courage truly to look within and find the faith they might just an hour earlier Ashrei have insisted could never be theirs. As is the case regarding most absent things, find them Happy are those who dwell in Your house,for, in so doing, is all a matter of knowing where to look! they praise You endlessly, selah. Our tradition contains endless stories about death, about loss, about surviving loss, Happy is the nation whose lot is thus. and about what happens to the durable Happy is the nation whose God is A. human soul after death. Some of these stories are truly ancient and are presented in the A psalm of praise of David. pages of the Bible itself. Others are rabbinic amplifications of those same stories. And yet I shall exalt You,O my God and Sovereign, others are stories with no Biblical pedigree at and I shall bless Your name forever and always. all that were preserved within the vast annals Each day shall I bless You; I shall praise Your name forever and always. of rabbinic literature. There are stories about kings and queens and about prophets, and Great is A and very worthy of praise; there is no limit to God’s greatness. there are stories about great rabbis as well. One generation lauds Your works to the next, telling of Your mighty acts. But there are also stories about regular peo- Glorious is the splendor of Your majesty; ple, about ordinary men and women whose daily lives and deaths serve as the back- I shall speak of Your wondrous acts. ground against which the most famous Some will talk about the might of Your awesome deeds, accounts of life and death in ancient times, but I shall tell of Your greatness. those of people of renown, take place. There Others will attempt to express the essence of Your great goodness, are tales that seem rooted in beliefs moderns will inevitably find challenging to accept as singing joyously of Your righteousness: “A is gracious literal truths, or even beyond their capability and compassionate, long-suffering and greatly merciful. to accept that way. And there are also com- is good to all and compassionate to all humanity.” forting stories that, antique or not, any read- A er will find encouraging in the simplest and Indeed, all your creatures will give thanks to You, A, and the pious most direct ways of faith in the future, in the will bless You as well; they will talk of the glory of Your majesty inherent goodness of God, and in the and speak of Your might, so as to tell humanity about Your might indomitable nature of the human spirit. In the work that follows, I have tried to do and the glorious splendor of Your sovereignty.

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