The Revisitations of Yizkor

Over the next twenty-four hours, as we celebrate the festival of Simhat Torah, you might ask yourself the following question: Why do the Jewish people have not one, but two holidays to celebrate Torah? Tonight, of course, begins Simhat Torah, “Joy of Torah.” We conclude the reading of the book of Deuteronomy with the death of Moses and then, without pause, begin the story of creation in the book of Genesis. The Torah scrolls are removed from the ark, and with great joy and song, we, our children, and our grandchildren dance them through the community. And then there is the spring/summer holiday celebrating Torah: Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, observed on the sixth day of the month of Sivan. Seven weeks after the Passover liberation, we arrive at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah from God. Two holidays; one Torah. No other aspect or object of Jewish life is granted this twice-celebrated status. Why do we need both Shavuot and Simhat Torah?

I think the answer, or at least part of the answer, may lie in the fact that while both holidays do indeed celebrate Torah, they reflect two altogether different aspects of our people’s founding document. Shavuot is referred to as zman matan torateinu, the time of the giving of the Torah. It was on Shavuot that Revelation, the giving itself, happened. According to some sources, Israel received the Torah with joy; according to others, under duress. Either way, Shavuot celebrates the relationship between God and the Jewish people, with the Torah as the object bestowed by the former to the latter: an enduring sign of our covenant with God.

Simhat Torah, on the other hand, celebrates a Jew’s relationship not with God, but with the Torah itself. As we conclude one cycle and enter a new one, we embrace our status as People of the Book. Parashah after parashah, year after year, again and again, we read the same stories over and over. There are no surprises, we know that Isaac will be saved at the last minute, we know that Joseph will reconcile with his brothers, we know the sea will split at the critical moment. I am reminded of the story of two friends Abe and Sol who sit down in front of the TV to watch a cowboy movie, and at a certain point Abe turns to Sol and says, “I’ll bet you ten dollars that the cowboy will fall off his horse.” To which Sol replies, “You’re on.” And sure enough, the next scene comes and the cowboy falls off his horse. Sol reaches into his pocket to pay up, but Abe stops him, explaining that he can’t possibly take the money; he admits to having seen the movie before. Sol responds, “That’s OK, I saw the movie before, too.” Abe asks, “Sol, if you saw the movie before, then why in the world would you bet me that he wouldn’t fall off his horse?” Sol replies, “Well, to be honest, I didn’t think he would be so dumb as to do it again.”

To be a Jew means to be a member of the world’s most obsessive-compulsive book club. We read the same story over and over; we know exactly how the story will turn out, and yet we read it again. Why? Because, as any lover of the text will tell you, every time we read it, the story takes on new meaning. The story may be the same, but we are, year-to-year, different people. Some years, we identify with one sibling in a rivalry; other years, another. Some years, God’s deeds seem just; other years, cruel and unjustified. Simhat Torah teaches that it is not the story itself, but our relationship to the story, that makes us who we are. The message of Simhat Torah is not better or worse than that of Shavuot, just different. It is a reminder that it is the relationship we have to the narrative, and not just the narrative itself, that defines us as a people. And in this season’s renewal of the scriptural cycle, we come to recognize a quiet truth about Torah’s hold on us. The enduring sanctity of Torah is that, at one and the same time, it is both unchanging and ever-changing. Each one of us is empowered to find new meanings in a fixed text, an indeterminate number of interpretations, as numerous as there are rabbis and readers of the Torah. Not the Torah itself, but the overflowing cup of its interpretive possibilities – that is what we celebrate over the next twenty-four hours on Simhat Torah.

Long before literary theorists knew about reader-response theory, Jews understood that the power of any narrative, Torah or any other, lies not in the origins or historicity of that story, but rather in our ability to draw meaning from that story and apply that meaning to our own lives. As Solomon Schechter famously noted: “It is not the mere revealed Bible that is of first importance to the Jew, but the Bible as it repeats itself in history.” (Studies in Judaism, p. 15) At our Passover seders, we recall the Exodus not as an exercise in history, but as an effort to leverage that story of liberation to guide our own struggles. On Rosh Hashanah, we invoke the creation of the world not in order to establish chronology, but to remind ourselves of the creative possibilities embedded in our humanity. As the historian Yosef Yerushalmi wrote in his book Zakhor, while it may have been the Greeks who were the fathers of history, “the fathers of meaning in history were the Jews.” (p. 8) No doubt, when we read, recall, and tell our stories, we do so with an eye to what did or didn’t happen. But as much as – if not more than – the facts themselves, the Jewish act of remembrance, of Yizkor, is about making meaning; in other words, how we relate to the tale we tell, how we leverage that story into our own existence, and perhaps most importantly, the degree to which the story we recall does or doesn’t impact the narratives of our own lives.

All of which, of course, is precisely the point of Yizkor, our service of remembrance. Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters – we recall one or more loved ones, their stories all marked by a beginning and an end. The task of yizkor is fundamentally different than the eulogies delivered upon their passing, the grief-filled words spoken at graveside. At risk of stating the obvious, yizkor is as much about we the living as it is about the dead. It is here, in the Yizkor service, that we ask the question of how each one of us relates to the story of the lives of the loved ones whom we recall. Their Torah has concluded, but it continues to teach. We revisit their stories, as with the Torah, relating to them differently at every Yizkor service. Yizkor reminds us that the interpretive process continues. Each year our focus may change, a different aspect of our loved one emerges. With the passage of time, our perspective changes. We become different people and so our memories of our loved ones will inevitably change as well. Yizkor is not only an evolving experience, but it is meant to be empowering. In every Yizkor we are granted the opportunity to learn anew from the lives of our loved ones, their grace, their struggles, and yes, even their shortcomings. Their humanity, no different than our own, was marked by imperfections. The task of Yizkor is not to judge, but to understand; to understand and to learn; and then of course, to apply what we have learned. The revisitations of our Yizkor prayers are meant to spur our own growth – continued efforts not just to honor the lives of our loved ones, but towards making our own lives worthy of remembrance.

The most moving scene of all of biblical literature is, I believe, the final passage of Deuteronomy: the verses relating the death of Moses. “Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses.” (34:10) According to tradition, the final verses of his life were penned by Moses himself as his tears dropped onto the parchment below. Then a divine kiss took his soul, and it ascended to the heavens. We will read these verses, and then, seamlessly, direct our attention to the Garden of Eden, the creation of life. The same divine breath, neshamah, infused into Adam and Eve – death and life literally in the same divine breath: This is the message not only of the festival of Simhat Torah, but of Yizkor itself. To embrace those irreplaceable loved ones whose souls are now in God’s eternal embrace. They have breathed their last breaths, and we today breathe deeply, seeking to fill our own lives with meaning and purpose guided by their memory. May their beautiful neshamot inform us, guide us, and inspire us, as we unroll the next chapters of the scrolls of our own lives.