Life Gives Birth to Death and Death Gives Birth to Life Yom Kippur Yizkor 5772 (2011) R

Life Gives Birth to Death and Death Gives Birth to Life Yom Kippur Yizkor 5772 (2011) R. Yonatan Cohen, Congregation Beth Israel I remember that in Yeshiva, my Rebbe was once asked how his Rosh Hashanah was. He said, “I don’t know. Ask me next year!” Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are days of difficult personal accounting. Our rabbis referred to this as cheshbon ha’nefesh, the internal calculations and considerations of the soul. On Yom Kippur in particular, death weighs heavily on the bottom line. We remove our shoes as though we are in a state of mourning. We wear white recalling the white shrouds enveloping the deceased. The Yizkor service reminds us of the fragility of life, while the daunting words and melody of Unetane Tokef pound upon us. Who shall live and who shall die… The totality of our life seems to stream in one single direction and death is seemingly so stubborn. In this room, right now, many of us are struggling with questions pertaining to the ultimate meaning of life especially in light of its finitude. We are struggling to locate the endurance of our spiritual legacy. We wonder how and if our children or those whose lives we touched will continue to perpetrate our way of life, our vision, our mission. We struggle physically as well. Some of us are ill, some of us are not yet ill, we all know people who are sick. We struggle with health, with the shortness of life, with its fragility. 1 Through it all, we struggle with finitude – with the perceived limits of our narrative, our inability to foresee the future, to let go or to invest, to pull away or draw closer in. This morning I will share three personal experiences. There is no explicit Torah here, except for the obvious Torah of life. These are the profound truths that are revealed to us by way of focusing in on the passing shadows and listening more closely to the whispering echoes. All three are meditations on life and death, stories about finitude and the infinite. First meditation: We named our newborn son Gavriel Mendel. Mendel was my father’s grandfather. He was a simple observant Jew. Before the Shoah, he dyed hats in Romania. Later in life, after making alyiah to Israel he was the exclusive seller of lottery tickets at the Israeli Knesset. When my father was a young child, he was gravely injured and laid in bed for close to a year’s time. During this period, his grandfather, zaide Mendel, added the name Chayim, meaning life, to my father’s name. And so my father, Reuven Chayim, was bestowed with a living name. My father eventually fully recovered from his injury. It occurred to me shortly after naming our child, that just as zaide Mnedel had given life to my father through the giving of his name, so too, did we, both Frayda and I, gave new life to zaide Mendel by bestowing his name to our son. When zaide Mendel moved to Israel, his son, my beloved grandfather and teacher, Moshe Cohen, was no longer observant, nor were my father and his brother raised in a religiously observant home. Holding my son Mendel in my hands, I wonder whether zaide Mendel ever fathomed the possibility that another Mendel Cohen would emerge in our family, raised in a religiously observant home. 2 As I now hold our sweet son Mendel in my hands, I hear a comforting heavenly voice softly whisper: life gives birth to life, life gives birth to death, and death gives birth to life. The sacred circle is turning. A second meditation: This past June, our family traveled to Montreal for my wife’s cousin’s wedding. It was a wedding like no other. Five years earlier, my wife’s aunt Shirley, who is Frayda’s aunt through marriage, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctors gave Shirley three to five years to live. Only five years earlier, Shirley had lost her beloved daughter to cancer at the tragic young age of 23. Aunt Shirley was tired of life and tired of illness. At the time, at certain moments, profound longings filled her inner self; she wished to join her daughter in heaven. And yet, ultimately Shirley decided to fight. I remember a conversation we had at the time of her diagnosis. I asked Shirley to share with me what she prayed for, what she still wanted from life. Shirley wanted to see her two sons settle. She wanted to celebrate their weddings. She wanted to celebrate the birth of new life. Three years later, her oldest son was married, and a year later he was blessed with the birth of a baby daughter. Four years after her diagnosis, Shirley held a granddaughter in her arms, a faint echo of a beloved daughter she had lost. 3 And then, a year later in June, Shirley’s youngest son was set to get married as well. Only thirty days before the wedding Shirley fell into a coma. As Frayda and I packed our luggage, I will always remember packing a book about the laws of marriage and a book about the laws of mourning. During the week of the wedding Shirley miraculously reemerged from her coma. We held a private badeken (or veiling ceremony) at her hospital room in the intensive care unit as her medical condition could no longer allow her to attend the wedding itself. Shirley got to break the plate, got to bless her son and future daughter in law, and see their rings and ketubah. She also got to watch the wedding itself by using skype. While Shirley did not walk her son down the aisle, on her son’s wedding day, she got to teach her family that they can carry on without her. That the path of life, captured so aptly by the wedding procession, will continue. Sadly, on the last few days of the young couple’s Sheva Brachot, the week of celebrations following the wedding, Shirley passed from the world. Her funeral was held on the very last day of the couple’s Sheva Brachot. This contrast between life and death, wedding and funeral, may seem jarring to those on the outside. For us, the family, it felt oddly serene, fittingly Shirley. As I recall holding the two books of Halakha, of laws and customs in my hands, a book of life and a book of death, I now hear a comforting heavenly voice softly whisper: life gives birth to life, life gives birth to death, death gives birth to life. The sacred circle is turning. A final meditation: 4 A number of years ago a very dear and close friend of my family died under tragic circumstances. This was an individual who for a significant portion of my teen and young adult life was considered a sort of an adopted uncle. At the time of his death, he was struggling with a profound sense of isolation and loneliness. His struggles led him to reckless behaviors, including drug abuse, which was later cited as the most likely cause of his passing. Until this summer, close to four years after his death, I have not been able to find a proper way to begin processing his passing from this world. This summer however, I was profoundly comforted by an experience shared by one of our common friends. Earlier in the year, this friend went to the gravesite to apologize. “How do you apologize to the no longer living,” I asked this friend. “In the same way you apologize to the living. You speak to them directly, you simply speak to them,” he replied. And so this friend went to the gravesite and apologized. He lit two cigarettes, because they were both smokers, sat on the ground, and spoke to our friend. He mostly cried. He apologized for not making the phone calls, or sending the emails, for not always staying in touch. He also expressed anger and dismay at the stupid impulsive things our friend has done and said over the years. And he cried and cried. I too cried when I heard my friend share this personal experience. For the first time in many years my heart opened, something shifted, I began to process his passing, I began to mourn, to forgive both him and me. 5 It is true that our dear friend is still buried in the ground. Nothing has changed that. Also, I am a Kohen; visiting his gravesite is not a religious option for me. And yet, despite it all, I no longer believe that death is a barrier for the living longings of the heart. In the eerie silence of the heavens, I now hear a comforting heavenly voice softly whisper: life gives birth to life, life gives birth to death, death gives birth to life. The sacred circle is still turning. In his seminal work, titled Orot Hakodesh, Rav Kook wrote: “Death is an imagined vision. What people call ‘death’ is simply the intensification of life. Death appears as empty and nihilistic only because of the narrow and materialistic outlook. But a person who is cognizant of spiritual reality understands that the soul increases in strength when it is freed and separated from its bodily limitations” (Orot Hakodesh 2:474). “Teshuvah,” so writes Rav Kook, “is the only cure to making death extinct in the world” (Orot Hakodesh 2:475). HaKadosh Baruch Ho – Blessed and Holy One: Give us strength to understand that the story of our lives, our children’s lives, and the lives of those we touch does not end with us just as it did not begin with us.

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