Just over two weeks ago, my teacher, my mentor, my friend Michael Brooks passed away at the age of eighty. Michael was my Hillel director at the University of Michigan. There are very few people in the world of whom I can say, “If not for her, if not for him, I would not be doing what I am doing today.” Michael Brooks, was near, if not at, the top of that list. Since before my arrival at Park Avenue Synagogue – in my interview sermon, actually – I have spoken of our connection. How, in my junior year of college, on my first visit to Hillel, he plucked me out of obscurity, invited me to Shabbat dinner, brought me into the fold, believed in me, and made me believe that I had something to contribute to the Jewish world. Michael practiced a one-soul-at-a-time brand of mentorship that hundreds, if not thousands, of others experienced as well. In generations to come, people will study just how many Jewish professionals, lay leaders, and philanthropists came up through the ranks by way of Michael’s mentorship. It was, and will ever remain, the most humbling of honors that he asked me to officiate at his funeral, a sacred request that I was able to honor at the end of August.
Michael, you should also know, was a man who did not suffer from a shortage of eccentricities. Some remember his bagpipe playing in the local Ann Arbor park. Others, his quirky maxims. For instance, I would close an email exchange with “Take care, Michael,” to which he would reply, “No Elliot – give care.” And Michael never called me on my birthday, but rather my mother, thanking her for giving birth to me. Sweet and appreciated; nevertheless, both my mother and I found it rather odd.
The particular eccentricity I want to focus on today is one that all those who knew Michael knew well: Michael did not like to be photographed. I recall Michael attending my wedding, when he spent the evening doing everything humanly possible to avoid being in a picture. There are a couple of pictures of him, mostly in his later years, when I think he finally realized, with the advent of iPhones, that this was a battle he was going to lose. Why did Michael bristle at being photographed? Perhaps he held some mystical belief that taking a person’s picture somehow stole a piece of their soul? Perhaps it was a form of vanity, the camera adding pounds, wrinkles, and other indignities? Perhaps it was his conviction that it was the present that mattered most, that the moment should take precedence over the need to document it for posterity?The answer, I believe, goes deeper – a window not just into Michael’s eccentricities, but into his very philosophy of living, and as we gather at this moment for Yizkor to recall our loved ones, a window into why we are here today.
The High Holiday season is about many things, but at its core, it is about the gift of creation, of being alive, of being given a place in this world, from the biblical account of creation to today. Our thoughts turn to the Garden of Eden: Adam, Eve, the serpent, the Tree of Knowledge, Cain, Abel, and everything that followed. As every Hebrew school student has at one point wondered: Why, if God is all-powerful, would God have created a world so imperfect? Not just snakes, the pain of childbirth, and otherwise, but mortality, frailty, temptation, blame, jealousy, sibling rivalry – the list goes on and on. This is God’s world, after all. Surely God, being God, could have created a world that was perfect, without blemish.
All of us, all the more so those here at Yizkor, are aware of the shortcomings in God’s creation. And yet, I would suggest that the imperfections of creation are a matter of deep theological significance: not a bug in the system but a feature of the system itself. Put differently, the world God created was never meant to be perfect. It was, in Hebrew, tov, good – what, in the days before grade inflation, we might call a B or B-plus. And were that the end of the matter, our unease would be understandable. But God didn’t end there. God’s final act of creation, before Shabbat, was the creation of human beings: lower than the angels, nevertheless in God’s image. A humanity created not merely to admire God’s creation. A humanity placed in the world l’ovdah u-l’shomrah, to work it and to guard it.
God created a world that is good, but not perfect, less a completed masterpiece than an unfinished project. Disease remains to be healed. Brokenness remains to be repaired. We are the stewards, the closeout crew, if you will, tending to the punch list. We are given the freedom, responsibility, and opportunity to make things better, to be partners in God’s creation. It is a vision made explicit in the Torah’s command, “K’doshim tihyu, ki kadosh ani Adonai Eloheikhem. You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Each one of us, created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, is called upon to be God-like in this world: To feed the hungry, to visit the sick, to clothe the naked, to give of what we have toward making this world a better place.
As for God, as the song lyric goes, God holds on loosely but doesn’t let go. In the book of Genesis, we walk with God for only the briefest of moments. From then onward, God’s presence becomes less and less present in the world; God recedes into the background. This is not necessarily a bad thing. God is not a helicopter parent in heaven. God leaves a little bit, if not a lot, to us. The point of creation was never for God to remain center stage. The point was that when God stepped back, the work of creation would nevertheless continue. The divine plan from the very beginning was an imperfect world in which an imperfect yet empowered humanity could and would take up the mantle of God.
And I think, translated from theology to biography, this is why Michael never wanted to be in the picture. Michael took a page from the playbook of Genesis, never understanding himself as the first violinist making the music, but rather as the conductor whose job it is to let others shine. A Hillel director in the image of the first Director (capital D) helping transition students from the Edenic and protected space of their childhood to the unprotected and conflicted world of adulthood. He believed that the best leaders are the ones who cultivate their successors. As taught in Pirkei Avot, raise up students of such quality and quantity that when the day comes when you quite literally step out of the picture, the vision, the work, the passion continues. Quirky as it was, Michael did not want to be in the picture because he understood that the day would come when he would no longer be here. He lived his life devoted to cultivating the people, values, and institutions he loved, so that when that day came, as it did a few weeks ago, what mattered to him most would continue. The warm shadow of Michael’s life and legacy extends beyond the finite number of his years. Much as I mourn Michael’s death, I take great comfort in knowing that so much of what he stood for in life still lives on.
When we gather for Yizkor to remember our loved ones, each of us comes face to face with the two inescapable truths of human existence. First, that our years on this earth are numbered, and second, that none of us knows when we will reach the limit of our days. Who will live and who will die? It is not abstract theology. It is fact. I have too many stories of too many people who began an ordinary day in the most ordinary way, never imagining they would not live to see the next. The brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, husbands, wives, family, and friends whom we remember in this hour of Yizkor – some were granted length of years, some less so, some tragically less so. With every one of them, we wish we had more time. With the expanse of eternity as our backdrop, we are all – as the High Holiday Mahzor teaches – a passing shadow, a fading cloud, a fleeting breeze.
Hopefully, unlike me with my late teacher, we have physical pictures of those we remember today. On our mantles, in our photo albums, or on our phones, we look at them and are carried back to a moment, a memory, a place. The present task of Yizkor is different. Yizkor calls on us to remember not only faces, but character; not only memories, but the values by which a loved one lived. The love they gave, the causes that animated them, the passion with which they ground it out to build what they built. Like creation itself, neither our loved ones nor the worlds they inhabited were perfect. They, like us, were just doing their level best given the limitations of their humanity. Yizkor is not canonization; the goal is not sainthood. The aim of Yizkor is to see a life whole – to name what was good, what was broken, and what remains unfinished.
And then, of course, comes the most important question: to what degree do we, the living, live our lives informed by the values of those we remember? Not everyone goes through life thinking about their legacy. Most people simply live – making choices, forming habits, loving imperfectly, doing their best. A legacy is formed nonetheless – in the lives they touched, the values they modeled, the patterns they passed on. Yizkor asks us not only what they left behind, but how we carry forward what they left us. I know that, in no small measure, my vocational choice to be a rabbi is a way of extending the legacy of my grandfather, a congregational rabbi who left this world at just the time I entered it. There exists a single photograph of him holding me as a baby. I have no actual memory of him, and yet his presence informs my daily being, his life extending beyond any one picture. The blessings, the qualities, the work, the passions of our loved ones need not end when their lives end. They can and must become ours to carry forward.
And yes, at a certain point in Yizkor, the thought inevitably arises that one day, we too will be remembered. Rabbi Eliezer taught, “Repent one day before your death.” His students asked the obvious question: How can anyone know which day will be their last? Exactly the point, he answered. Repent today, lest you die tomorrow – and in that way, spend every day living intentionally. The point is not to live morbidly, forever contemplating our deaths. It is to live deliberately, conscious that even now we are forming the legacy others will one day inherit. Not everyone has children. Not everyone is a parent. But every one of us has a legacy to leave. We are always planting seeds – the fruit of which will be gathered by hands we will never know.
And perhaps this is where Yizkor returns us to the very beginning: to the Garden, to creation itself. God’s greatest act was not simply creating a world. It was creating human beings capable of continuing the work of creation: teaching, mentoring, nurturing, raising up others, transmitting values that will outlive us. To be created in the image of God is to possess that same generative power, to make room for someone else to grow, to plant seedlings whose shade we may never sit beneath. Yizkor asks not only, what did those before us leave to us? It asks, what are we creating now for those who will follow? I can think of no greater tribute to those we remember today than to invest ourselves in those who will come after us: to teach, to mentor, to give of ourselves freely, so that when we, as one day we all must, recede from the picture, the work of creation continues.
There is one more lesson I carry from Michael, and perhaps it is the simplest of all. Every call, every visit, every conversation, he would end by telling me how glad he was that I was in this world, that he could not imagine it otherwise, and that he loved me. As a college student, I admit, it was awkward to hear. Today, I understand it – and appreciate it – differently. Not merely as an expression of affection, but as a supreme act of mentorship and charge to keep. He was telling me that I had something unique to contribute, that creation was not complete without me, and that I was loved simply for being in it. So too, each of the people we remember at Yizkor had something unique to contribute, they too made creation complete, they too were worthy of our love. May we lead our lives accordingly, so that one day, when we recede from the picture, our lives, our contributions, and our love will go on.