The Sunflower

Much to my surprise, it was the image of a sunflower that entered my mind as I read Father Patrick Desbois’ book, The Holocaust by Bullets. In a narrative both horrifying and redemptive, Father Desbois, our speaker at this Wednesday evening’s Holocaust Day observance, relates his journey to uncover the truth behind the murder of two million Jews in what is now post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Armed with archival material, metal detectors to uncover the bullets and bodies, and the eye-witness accounts and confessions of witnesses now in their 80s and 90s, over the past dozen years Desbois and his team have painstakingly identified the previously forgotten mass graves of nearly two million victims of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen killing machine. In explaining his work, Desbois notes the well-kept German cemeteries not far from the unmarked mass graves: “While the mass graves of the thousands of Jews who were shot are untraceable, every German killed during the war has been reburied and identified by name. Thus under the ground, everything is still in order according to the hierarchy of the Reich. We cannot give a posthumous victory to Nazism. We cannot leave the Jews buried like animals. We cannot accept this state of affairs and allow our continent to be built on the obliterated memory of the Reich.” (p. 34) In Ukraine, in Russia, in Moldova, and most-recently in Iraq, Desbois’ work is a true Kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of God’s name, as he and his team work tirelessly to restore dignity posthumously to those souls whose final resting place would otherwise be consigned to oblivion.

So why the sunflower? Because as I read Desbois’ account, I could not help but think of a book I first read in high school, Simon Wiesenthal’s famous The Sunflower. Wiesenthal’s book, which you may recall is a meditation on the limits of forgiveness, takes its name from a recurring image shared by Wiesenthal from his days as an inmate in a concentration camp. Wiesenthal tells of the day when his work detail encountered a German military cemetery, and “on each grave there was planted a sunflower, as straight as a soldier on parade.” Spellbound, he stared at each flower stretching forth to the heavens absorbing the sun’s rays, butterflies fluttering from flower to flower. “Suddenly,” Wiesenthal writes, “I envied the dead soldiers. Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave. For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would ever dance above my dreadful tomb.” Desbois never mentions Wiesenthal by name, but I cannot but read his book and his life work as sort of coda to Wiesenthal’s Sunflower. Both men are acutely aware of the inextricable relationship between mortality, memory, and human dignity. In life and in death, human self-worth is measured by a future generation’s ability to remember us – each and every individual one of us. The monuments bearing our names or the lack thereof are posthumous indicators of our purpose or purposelessness here on this earth.

Our days, the Psalmist wrote, are like a breath . . . a fleeting shadow. Given the backdrop of eternity, we know that human life span is but a momentary flicker of existence. Whether one’s life is short or long, concluded in an act of violence or in the comfort of home hospice, the sole and shared truth of the human condition is the common fate that awaits us all. No differently than Desbois and Wiesenthal, we too seek our sunflower. We want to know that our lives, our loves, and our labors have meaning and impact beyond our all too few years. We want our individuality affirmed. It is, after all, but a short step from anonymity to oblivion. We want to be assured that were it not for our singular existence, the world would somehow be different, diminished, or reduced. For lack of life eternal, we seek measures that would grant us a mark of permanence and perpetuity and thus, purpose. The headstones and monuments that may one day bear our names, these are the sunflowers, the compensatory acts that serve as a balm against the inescapable and brutal truth of human mortality.

Notwithstanding the sacred work of Father Desbois, when we arrive at this moment of Yizkor, we measure the infinite dignity of a human soul with an altogether different set of assumptions. There may well be times in our lives, times in our year, that we gather at the graveside of our loved ones. There may even be some present who have memorialized a loved one with a monument of some sort: a headstone, a window, a plaque, or some other physical marker. Noble at such gestures may be, Yizkor calls on a different muscle group, a different mindset, a different kind of sunflower by which to memorialize our loved ones. Today is not about physical monuments and markers; today is about the shrines of memory and deeds. As Jews, we know that location is almost never a determining factor for drawing forth the sacred. The Sabbath that we celebrate, as Heschel famously noted, has nothing to do with space, but with time; it can be celebrated anywhere. Yes, at one point Judaism was a Temple-based religion with God’s presence understood to be most manifest in Jerusalem. But anyone with a passing familiarity with the last two thousand years of Jewish practice knows that the seders we make, the prayers we offer and the mitzvot we perform are never contingent on any single location. 

The same holds true for sacred remembrance. No individual is more revered to our people than the hero of this Passover season: Moses. Yet the text of the Torah makes clear that nobody, to this very day, knows where he was buried. Moses has no sunflower. The Bible’s unwillingness to specify a location for Moses’s final resting place is not a sign of disrespect, rather just the opposite. Our readiness to honor Moses’s legacy is signaled not by pilgrimage to a burial site, but rather by studying, observing, and practicing the Torah he taught. And what is true for Moses is all the more so for our loved ones. Yes, of course we can visit a cemetery, but be it at a shiva house, here at yizkor, or really any day of the year, the resting place of our loved ones is never a physical place. It is right here – in our hearts; right here – in our deeds. Studying their lives, telling their stories, practicing their highest ideals – the Torah of their lives – that is their sunflower. That is how we honor our loved ones; that is how they are assured their unique purpose; that is how we grant them the possibility of life eternal.

So today, at this Yizkor service, permit me to put the question squarely in your lap. Ask yourself: what were the values, the qualities, the principles by which your loved one lived? In this moment of sacred remembrance, we unlock the vault of memory, and it is as if we had opened a flood gate. A warm wit, a personal passion or vocation, a love of family, or perhaps a gentle wisdom unique to that soul. The mentorship of a parent or grandparent, their care and love – unique and inimitable. Perhaps today we recall a loved one taken too soon, a spouse, a sibling or even a child. The sting is profound, but the task one and the same. My teacher the late Rabbi Byron Sherwin explained that if this festival of Passover is meant to teach us anything, it is that for Jews the act of remembrance is not a passive one. Memory is a prompt to action, a stimulus towards deed. As the Hasidic master Jacob Joseph of Polonye wrote: “In every place [in scripture] where one finds the commandment to remember, one is commanded to perform a specific deed whereby one links memory to action…” (B. Sherwin, Studies in Jewish Theology, pp. 145-46) Remembering our loved ones is not meant to be some sort of abstract voyeurism – solely a remembrance of things past. Today we remember in order to affirm our present and future commitments, to declare to ourselves and the world that though the lives of our loved ones are no longer, their ideals, their hopes and dreams still fill this world by way of our own deeds. Today we ask ourselves if we have succeeded in making our own lives monuments to theirs. That is the promise and challenge of Yizkor, and it is for that purpose that we gather today.

Dor holekh, v’dor ba, One generation goes and another comes, wrote Ecclesiastes, but the earth remains the same forever. (1:4) No different than the legacy our loved ones left us – seeds planted in gardens they never got to see – so, too, today we plant the seeds for future generations to reap. We know that we too want to be remembered by those who follow. At this moment of Yizkor, our love is as strong as death, if not stronger. It is by way of our deeds that we speak that love. Like a sunflower reaching towards the heavens, the lives of our loved ones call out to us in this sacred hour. We hear their voices, we recall their love, we tell their stories, and we stand committed to perpetuating their lives in our own. In doing so we ensure that their memories are for a blessing. In doing so, we ensure that their souls are bound up in the bond of eternal life.