Yizkor: Retrieving the Past

I want to tell you a story about something wonderful that happened to me this past week, very possibly the nicest thing that has happened to me in a long time. It’s a true story, a story-inside-a-story that will require a bit of patience on your part, but I promise it will be well worth it. It will hopefully inspire you on this festival of Shavuot and provide you the tools to prepare for the Yizkor service which will begin in just a few minutes.

The story begins with an unexpected question – one that is appropriate for this time of year: What is the most exciting moment in baseball history of the last 25 years, if not ever? Not Larsen’s perfect game, not Bobby Thompson’s three-run homer over the Giants, not Mazeroski’s leadoff home run. I’ll give you a hint – I grew up in Los Angeles. The answer of course is Kirk Gibson’s ninth inning home run off Dennis Eckersley of the Oakland A’s in game 1 of the ‘88 World Series. The Dodgers were one run down. With Mike Davis on base, 2 outs, Gibson came up to bat, with both legs injured and nursing a stomach virus. Davis stole second, the count was full. The pitch was a backdoor slider, and Gibson hit it straight into the right field bleachers – a home run to win the game, a scene made famous as Gibson pumped his fists against the backdrop of all the tail lights of the disheartened LA fans who had already left the stadium trying to beat traffic. I was there that night, cheering in the bleachers. It was, without a doubt, the most exciting sporting moment I have ever watched, made even sweeter because I shared it with my dad, who is here today. Ever since then, among all my sports heroes, Kirk Gibson has always held a special place in my heart.

Some years later, I became a rabbi and as anyone who has sat in my office knows, my office is full of baseballs, some signed and some just for fun. Aside from reflecting my love of baseball, they are there so that fidgety b’nei mitzvah kids have something to hold onto, a conversation piece as they sit nervously in the Rabbi’s office.

Years ago, while I was in Chicago, one such student, her name was Jenna, came to my office. She sat there looking at the baseballs and began to tell me about her mitzvah project for her upcoming bat mitzvah. She too loved baseball, and had a hobby of collecting players’ signatures. For her bat mitzvah she initiated a letter campaign to major league players to sign baseballs – baseballs she auctioned on eBay to raise money for special needs children’s programs. She ended up raising about $8000. I recall being awed by her determination, and I told her that there was only one signed baseball I really wanted – Kirk Gibson. I regaled her with the story in much greater detail than I gave you this morning, impressing upon her the mythic place Gibson has in my heart. Now, Jenna knew her business and explained that Gibson doesn’t sign baseballs. His signature is one of the hardest to get. The two of us left the matter there.

Jenna grew up, I moved to New York and the story, I thought, was over. Until last week. Last week a box arrived at the synagogue. I had no idea what it was. I opened it and pulled out a baseball – not just any baseball, but a signed baseball: “To Rabbi. My best. Kirk Gibson.” The note that came with it was the best part, of course. From Jenna, now grown up, explaining that she didn’t forget. A few weeks ago she was at a Cubs game against the Diamondbacks. She saw Gibson, now a bench coach for Arizona. She held up a sign asking him for a signature. He saw it. Jenna explained to him what a Rabbi is and instructed him how to spell it: R-A-B-B-I. He signed it, she sent it to me… and here it is. It feels every bit as good as I thought it would.

In fact, it is even better. What a feeling! I imagined that I would always be able to recall this resourceful student, but with the passing of time and the shift in geography, the immediacy of the relationship would understandably be moderated. So what she did – retrieving our exchange, having stored it, as it were, in the active file, and responding years later with a singular gesture of kindness and generosity – is an act that I will forever treasure. The Gibson baseball is nice, as is the humbling reward that I had an impact on the life of an impressionable Jewish teen. But the ripple effect of the entire incident extends much wider, and reaches deeper. With the arrival of the gift, past and present collapsed into one sublime moment; memories from twenty-five years ago and from a handful of years ago, all brought into
sharp relief.

On this festival of Shavuot, it is precisely this feeling that we are all called on to access, in response to the arrival of a very different gift, the Torah, a sacred gift from the Divine Giver. The students of the Kotzker Rebber asked him why Shavuot is called “the time the Torah was given,” rather than “the time we received the Torah”? The Rebbe answered that “indeed the giving of the Torah took place on one day, but the receiving of the Torah takes place across time, in fact, at all times.” The festival of Shavuot, or for that matter, almost every Jewish holiday operates on a very particular metaphysical calculus. The event we are commemorating – in today’s case, revelation, the giving of the Torah – is located in our temporal past. Like the ball game, like the sharp bat mitzvah student, it happened and we are profoundly grateful for the experience. But the promise of Shavuot is not so much about revelation past, as about revelation renewed, not about history but about retrieval. When we take the Torah out of the Ark, every time, especially at Shavuot, we are asked to hear the sound of Sinai with immediacy and even with intimacy as if, in the language of Franz Rosenzweig, the voice of God is speaking directly to us.

Rosenzweig’s elder contemporary Martin Buber perhaps best understood that who we are as Jews hinges on our ability to retrieve our sacred past into the fabric of our contemporary present. For Martin Buber, the renewal of Judaism could never happen through nationalism, erudition, or by adoption of a set of creeds or ritual practices. Embedded within each of us, both individually and as a community, exists a deeper Jewish consciousness, a pintele yid, that waits to be renewed. A vital Jewish identity comes by way of the spiritual process whereby this spark is retrieved, stoked, and affirmed. For Buber, Jewish renewal has nothing to do with reconfiguring or reformulating Judaism to suit faddish needs of the present. Renewal happens by connecting the alienated Jew to the promises and events of the Jewish past and making that past one’s present. The significance of Shavuot is that it insists on reintegrating the receiving of Torah into the life of every contemporary Jew.

This reintegration, I believe, is the reason why we read the book of Ruth on Shavuot. Every other Jewish journey of note involves a journey forward to somewhere new, into the unknown. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Abraham and Sarah’s call to go forth to Canaan, Joseph’s descent to Egypt, Jonah’s ill-advised flight to Tarshish, and of course the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land. Only in the book of Ruth is the journey a story of return: Naomi going back to the land of Judah. The story of Naomi and Ruth is appropriate for Shavuot precisely because it is a story of return, geographically, but more importantly, a reconnection with the past; about how a person, alienated and estranged can be brought back into the fold, restored, and reconstituted amongst her people. This is why the Torah is called the inheritance of the house of Jacob, morasha Kehillat Ya’akov. Shavuot is not about new knowledge, it is about reclaiming something that is our birthright, a gift of Torah that has always existed in the substrata of our identity. On this holiday, we are asked to bring out what has always been ours into full view.

It is precisely this act – of receiving a past that lies within and allowing it to inform our present – that Yizkor is all about. Yizkor is certainly about the past, about loss, about acknowledging that death has forever distanced us our loved ones from us. Today we remember mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, husbands, wives, sons and daughters, all our loved ones whose deaths have forever left us un-whole. Each one of us stands incomplete, knowing that those near and dear to us are forever removed from our present. That awareness is disorienting and painful. Last week I spoke to a woman in our community who lost her father some time ago. She shared with me how difficult it is for her that the world moves forward, people move on, but she cannot, because even with the passing of time, even as the immediacy of grief subsides, the loss of a loved one remains. Death is not something that can ever be overcome. The impenetrable and terrible boundary of human mortality is a divide that we can never traverse. This is why we need this moment – this service of Yizkor.

Yizkor is our opportunity to retrieve what is ours. The memories of our past are both beyond our reach, yet ours to claim as our rightful and ongoing inheritance. The kindness and wisdom of a parent who continues to shape our moral code; the love of a life partner, who even in his or her absence, informs our very being. The wisdom of a brother or a sister who, even in death, remains our teacher. A child whose life remains for us a testament of love. Yizkor is not meant to ease grief. It does not diminish our loss. The power of Yizkor is that it teaches us that the lives of our loved ones, while lodged in our past, can and must be a legacy that informs our present and future. The memories of our loved ones can become a blessing when and only when we crack open our hearts and souls just wide enough to allow for the possibility that we can still feel the immediacy of their love, that we can still learn from them, that we the living, while separated from the past, can still draw on it as an ever-renewing source
of strength.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” At this time of Yizkor, if I were to recast Faulkner in Jewish coin, it would be “The dead even in their passing, are never past.” Who we are, what we can be, the degree to which we will live our lives in a manner worthy of remembrance, pivots on our ability to call on the memories of our loved ones, drawing sustenance from them, ever aware of our loss. It is, without a doubt, unexpected to hear that forward momentum, spiritual, personal or otherwise, is propelled by a retrieval of the past. Yet, this is the message of Shavuot, this is what it means to be Jewish, what it means to be human. The time for Yizkor has arrived. The time to draw on the past is present.