April 30, 2024
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Pesach Day 8
What Can We Control? A Yizkor Sermon
April 30, 2024 — 22 Nissan 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Yizkor sermons tend to be challenging for rabbis because we give a lot of them. We say Yizkor four times a year. If you do the math year after year, that is a lot of Yizkor sermons, and what is there new to say? What is there to say that we haven’t said before? That you haven’t heard before?
I wish we had that problem again this year. Unfortunately we don’t. This is a Yizkor with an entirely fresh angle. The last time we said Yizkor was October 7. I don’t need to tell you that the months since October 7 have been, and continue to be, the most harrowing for the Jewish people, since the Shoah. What is the impact of this hard new chapter on our private Yizkor mediations now?
Those of you who have attended our evening minyan know that in between mincha and maariv, we invite anyone who is marking a yahrtzeit who would like to talk about their beloved departed to come up and do so. Most nights we have 1, 2 or 3 people come up and share something from their heart. We have been doing that for years. But in the months since October 7, we have heard a recurring refrain, something like this:
I just want to say I feel so grateful that my father died before October 7. My father loved Israel. My father believed in Israel. If my father knew about the deaths on October 7, if he knew about the hostages, if he knew about the war in Gaza and the death of soldiers, and how long it is going on, if he knew how sad Israelis are, it would have broken his heart. I am so glad my father lived and died when Israel was strong and at peace.
Here is another version: My mother loved America. She believed in America as a place where Jews could at last be at peace. My mother always taught us that anti-Semitism could not happen here unlike in Europe, which was a graveyard for Jews. She always said: There were real French people–and Jews who lived in France. Real Germans–and Jews who lived in Germany. Real Brits–and Jews who lived in England. But in America we all have a hyphen. We all came from somewhere else. That means anti-Semitism can never happen here. She actually believed that. I am so grateful that she died before October 7. If she had lived to see what happened to the American Jewish community, it would have broken her heart.
These kinds of reflections, which have been shared repeatedly in the Gann Chapel over the last almost seven months, resonate deeply with me. My father in love died before all this grief. The America he lived in for 74 years, and the Israel he lived in for his last 20 years, were all pre-October 7—and free from the hatred, rancor and vulnerability that we all know all too well. Thank God he never knew it.
What do we do with this thought that our loved ones who died before October 7 did not know from this pain? I think there are two responses to it.
The first is gratitude. Truly, we can be grateful that the stories and frictions that are giving us sleepless nights did not afflict those whom we love and remember this morning. If the people whom we recall now lived out their adulthood after 1945 and before October 7, truly they were the most blessed of Jewish generations. They lived in the golden age of American Jewry. After the Shoah. Before Hamas’s attack. That they got to live in peace and serenity was a blessing for them–and a historical anomaly when you consider the persecutions, pogroms, and blood libels that have afflicted the Jewish people for 2,000 years before the founding of Israel.
But there is a second move as well, which to my mind is more important.
One of the hallmarks of this time is that there are so many things we cannot control that cause us sleepless nights. Basically every news story is something we cannot control. From what happened on October 7, to Israel’s response, to the outbreak of Jew hatred on college campuses today—none of that is something we can control, and all of it causes us pain. We care a lot. We control little to nothing.
That is where Yizkor can come in so handy.
We can’t control our relationships with the people who have died. They have passed on.
We can’t control Hamas, the war with Hamas, or anti-Semitism.
What can we control? We can control the most important thing in our lives, which is the quality of our relationships. At the end of the day, what defines a successful life is successful relationships. One of my father-in-love’s most important teachings is: If you have made it with your family and friends, you have made it in life. It does not matter what else you do or do not accomplish. And if you have not made it with your family and friends, you have not made it in life. It does not matter what else you do or do not accomplish.
So here is my question to you this morning of Yizkor. What relationships do you have that need and deserve mending? Here we can be granular. There are two different kinds of mending.
There is the problem of a break in the relationship. Some misunderstanding happened—the other person said something or did something, or you said something or did something—and as a result you are not talking to somebody that you used to love. Before you know it, the years go by, and the break has become ossified and seemingly impossible to heal.
And there is the problem of drift. We used to be close. We used to be connected. We didn’t have a falling out, exactly. We just fell out of touch. We just got out of the habit of connecting. We all know the reality that the more we talk to people, the more we have to say to them. The less we talk to people, the less we have to say to them. When you call the person you speak to every day and ask what did you have for dinner, and they say a deli sandwich on rye, and you say, what kind of mustard, you can talk about that sandwich for 20 minutes. But if you see somebody you have not seen in years, you don’t even know where to start.
So, what relationships need mending? Healing that break, arresting that drift, is the one thing in this crazy world post October 7 that we can still control.
The story is told of the person who comes to the rabbi and says: I feel so lost. I don’t know what to do. My sister died. She is my last sister. From my family of origin, I am all that is left. My sister and I were very different from one another. But we were close in our own way. We stayed in touch. When her husband died I really tried to see her, to stay connected with her. But I suppose I could have done more. Perhaps I should have done more. And now I can’t do more. Now I just live with regret for what I could have done but did not do.
That is the pathos of death. We can’t do more when they are gone.
And that is the promise of life. We can do more while they and we are still here.
We could say to the other person: We’ve all lost so much since October 7. We could all use positive energy. We could all use a booster shot of healing and blessing and peace. Can we begin again? Can we strengthen what we used to have?
Let’s get rid of all regrets where we have control. Where we have control, let’s live regret-free.
Please rise.