Rabbi Dr. Aaron Panken, z"l

In a beautiful essay describing his experiences leading High Holiday services, my friend and colleague Rabbi Dr. Aaron Panken, z”l, wrote about how difficult the High Holidays were for him as a congregational rabbi:

“Year after year, my voice would crack, my eyes tear up, and in some years, it was all I could do just to get through the parts that I read aloud.

“It was impossible to stand before the families I knew and loved and avoid the deep, intimate sadness provoked by the demanding litany of ‘Who shall live and who shall die . . .’ in all its many variations. It was all too much – knowing the family over here who lost an infant daughter that year, the young woman over there struggling to survive what had been declared a ‘terminal’ cancer, the dear friends in the back row coping with the deepening dementia of parents, and those many individuals in the sanctuary whose lives were constantly in the throes of turmoil. To lead these words was to immerse and reimmerse oneself in the anguish enveloping so many of us that day and, inevitably, all of us – eventually. Leading Un’taneh Tokef meant giving explicit voice to it all and dipping a toe into the fear and trembling attendant with it.” (“The Eternal and the Ephemeral,” in Who by Fire, Who by Water – Un’taneh Tokef, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman, pp. 206–7)

It’s a painfully beautiful essay, one that I recommend reading to address what Rabbi Panken describes as the challenge of living “under the ever-present specter of dying.” It’s an essay that has taken on new and urgent meaning as I’ve read it over and over again since Aaron, a recreational pilot, died in a plane crash this past May 5. Survived by his wife Lisa and his two children, Aaron was a slightly older contemporary of mine, the President of Hebrew Union College, the training ground for the Reform Movement’s rabbis, cantors, and educators.

There are those in this room who knew Aaron well. He and I were friends, but not intimates. My Debbie and Aaron worked together at Rodeph Sholom on the West Side years ago, and because both Aaron and I had both rabbinic ordination and a PhD, we always had plenty to talk about. During my sabbatical in the spring, I wrote daily at the HUC library. Aaron and I actually had a lunch planned the week in which he passed, and the four of us were hoping to make plans later that month.

Aaron was an institutional leader, a lover of the Jewish people, in my mind the embodiment of the ideal rabbi-scholar, and a huge mensch. He believed in the importance of civil dialogue, that people should listen and learn from each other, and he believed in the importance of scholarship, that we need to keep raising the bar for the next generation of rabbis, educators, and laity. Most of all, he believed in the infinite dignity of every human being. I will miss Aaron, as will the entire Jewish world.

So at this moment of Yizkor, it will not surprise you that I've been reading much of Aaron’s work, and it is by way of his legacy that I want to frame my reflections at this time. Heschel once wrote that the wisdom of a philosopher is not a mirror reflecting other people's problems, but a window allowing us to view the author’s soul. (God in Search of Man, p. 6) Aaron’s writing likewise undoubtedly revealed his passions and his soul.

Aaron’s doctoral thesis is called The Rhetoric of Innovation: Self-Conscious Legal Change in Rabbinic Literature. Aaron would have been the first to tell you that it’s not exactly a page-turner. In fact, I spoke to Aaron’s wife Lisa earlier this week and I asked her about the thesis. She responded, “Elliot, I never read that.” But Aaron was the chief intellect of the Reform Movement. It’s not surprising that his major work should be a study of how Jewish law has developed, transformed, and reformed itself over the ages. Specifically, his thesis is a study of three terms, three terms that I’d like to lay out to you at this time.

The first term is ba-rishonah, translated as “at first” or “in the beginning.” Aaron characterizes this as the reflective tendency which appears over four hundred times in rabbinic literature. The term is used when rabbis want to describe how things were done in the past, how things used to be, how a practice first arose, as in: “things aren’t the same now as they were ba-rishonah.” The term self-consciously differentiates between then and now for the rabbis, giving them permission to change.

The second term Aaron studies is the word takkanah. Takkanah literally means “a repair” or “an enactment of the law.” This is an explicitly innovative move by the rabbis, an announcement that a break with the past is happening, that it is time to introduce new prayers, new laws, new practices, customs, or regulations.

The third term is, to a certain degree, just the opposite of the second. It’s gezeirah, which means “a decree.” A gezeirah is an act of conservation, a declaration to preserve an older law and to prevent violation of that law. A gezeirah can reflect something new, but it’s an innovation made only in order to protect and preserve that which came before. A gezeirah signals that no matter how much things change, there are some values, some practices that are eternal and must be protected.

Three terms: ba-rishonah, meaning “back in the day,” takkanah, the innovative tendency, and gezeirah, a measure to preserve the past. Three rabbinic terms worthy of study that shaped the intellectual mindset of my late friend. But today, at this time of Yizkor, these three terms can shape our own task at hand: how we recall, mourn, and honor the memories of those loved ones in our hearts and minds at this moment.

The first step of Yizkor is undoubtedly that of ba-rishonah, back in the day. Let’s begin by turning our attention to our loved ones and appreciate them in the moment of their lives, in the context in which they functioned. We often make the mistake of judging people according to the standards of our own day, our lives, and our own standards. But that’s not really fair, is it? We have to ask ourselves, what was it like for them to be children of immigrants? What was it like to grow up in the Depression, to be a Holocaust survivor, to live in a time of war, to face uncertainty and fear? What was it like to grow up in the household in which my father, my mother grew up? What were their challenges? What were their pressures? What were their failures?

We often don't grant our loved ones the courtesy and the grace of appreciating their circumstances. Our loved ones, no different from us, were doing the best they could under oftentimes difficult circumstances. It’s not fair to judge them according to our own. Their lives should be appreciated ba-rishonah, as they were. At Yizkor we walk through the gallery of our loved ones’ lives, the relationships we nourished, the decisions that challenged them, and the sorrows we face. The first step of Yizkor is a reflective one: appreciating, understanding, honoring, and, most of all, remembering. Ba-rishonah.

And then, perhaps the second step is takkanah. Yizkor is not only a reflective, passive activity. It requires action on our part. The fact that we appreciate our loved one’s context doesn't preclude us from realizing that we live in a different context, in a different time. It's okay to ask, “How will my choices differ from theirs? How is my value system different? How is my life not just an extension of theirs, but also a reaction to it?” We study their lives, we are grateful for them, but we also know that we ourselves, no different than they did in their own time, get to chart our own path. Takkanah comes from the root meaning “to fix something.” For many in this room, the act of Yizkor is not solely an act of remembering but is also the act of fixing, differentiating our lives from theirs to form our own identity. In another essay, Aaron makes the point that every act of memory in the Bible – with Noah, with Abraham, with Rachel – is also an act of creation. We remember, but we remember in order to create our lives. We know that we need to live lives that are authentic to who we are and thus one day worthy of remembrance.

And then, finally, comes gezeirah. Maybe at this time of Yizkor, there are measures we need to take to preserve memory, to preserve the past. Every day, but especially on this day, we know that we are links in a chain of tradition. There are the customs, the recipes, the traditions, and most importantly, the values that were dear to those in our hearts that are worthy of being protected and perpetuated beyond the lifetimes of our loved ones. In another of Aaron’s essays, he explains that none of us know the length of our days, only that this world is an ephemeral one. And yet, he maintains, our actions help us live in such a way that when we suffer life’s starkest deprivations, we will have ways of coping with them. Our actions don’t change the ultimate outcome, but they alter our attitude, bolster our ability to withstand challenges, help us to handle unavoidable misfortunes better, and see life’s value amid chaos and dismay.

Aaron’s aforementioned essay concludes by pointing out the dialectic of the holiday season – the ephemeral and the eternal – that while our human lives are fleeting, by reaching out toward God and the bounty of our lives and the values that transcend any one life, we can, in our own small way, protect the past and reach and enter eternity. This is our ultimate task right now. We must appreciate our loved ones’ lives, ba-rishonah, in their moment. And yes, we must be willing to change, takkanah; we are not them, and they are not us. But our task and responsibility in the short time we have on earth is to be worthy vessels of preservation for the highest values of those whom we remember today. Our parents, our siblings, our children, our spouses, our family, and friends who are in our hearts always, and especially now. We honor them by living their values. We honor them by making those values real for ourselves and for generations to come.

Aaron Panken's life touched eternity. He preserved the past, and he wrote his own script. I wish to God he’d had more than fifty-three years, but he didn’t. So in the wake of his passing, I ask in this Yizkor, how will I, in the lifespan allotted to me, help perpetuate the values by which he lived? And as we recall our loved ones at this sacred hour of Yizkor, each of us must ask: how shall I reach out to touch eternity? It is a time to remember, a time to create, a time to honor those who came before us, a time to honor the living; it is time for Yizkor.