A year ago, I lost my grandma. Elaine Gordon was the most loving, special, and incredible grandmother. She always looked 20 years younger than she was and wore the most stylish clothing. Dinners were extremely important. At any restaurant, whether we were 4 or 12 people, we’d always sit at a round table. A glass of wine would be ready with a toast that she’d make: “to good health.”
Elaine Gordon loved her family and held us close. She never forgot to send a birthday card. She’d ring me on the phone and end every call with “I love you, bye dear” and because she never wanted the call to end, she’d repeat it, “I love you, bye dear.” It’s been a year and a half since her death, I still miss her dearly.
Tonight, on Kol Nidre, we remember. There’s something about this evening, this service, whether the haunting music, the darkened sky, the empty ark, that summons us to remember.
This Kol Nidre, we are each grieving our own losses. For some, its relatives and loved ones who’ve been gone for months or even years, who are in our hearts tonight. There are many other losses as well. Our country has changed so dramatically since January. Too many of us lost jobs, lost grant money, lost colleagues, lost our voices. Too many of us lost faith in our country, lost hope in our future.
Throughout our history, we Jews mourn
individual losses, but also communal losses too. Over the centuries, we faced so much
destruction. Our Temples were in ruins,
and our beloved Jerusalem decimated. We
were expelled from our homes, our shtetls ransacked, our future unknown. As a community, we gather to grieve, to
mourn, and to support each other during the challenging times.
This moment is also a difficult one. Each of us is unique not only in our beliefs, but also in how we respond to these changes. Some of us are angry, some ready to fight, some fearful, a few might be uninformed or unaware. All of these are important emotions. But, one Jewish response is to grieve. We mourn individually, communally, and as a country.
Over the course of these High Holy Days, I seek to answer the same question in different ways, “How do I be a Jew in this moment?” Over Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about the importance of being in community and of wrestling. My answer tonight: “to be a Jew is one who grieves.”
Not long after my grandma’s death, my family looked to me for guidance. I am “the family rabbi.” The question that kept coming up was around shiva. Did we really need shiva? My grandmother was 94 when she died, my grandfather is 96. They have a small home. Would anyone come to the house? If they did, would everyone fit?
Luckily, with a little prodding we did sit shiva. I’m so glad we did. My extended family came together to eat, to comfort each other, and to share memories. Old neighbors who moved away stopped by for a shiva call. Second cousins from California called on the phone to check-in. Shiva was a strange confluence of sadness and laughter, tears and joy. Shiva allowed us to remember my grandmother, to mourn our loss, and to begin the process towards healing.
Unfortunately, my family’s experience seems rarer these days. We are more disconnected than ever from our Jewish mourning rituals. I’ve heard so many good excuses. “My family member wasn’t Jewish. My loved one lived out of state. No one knew them here. Everyone already said their goodbyes. We’re just too busy now.” These excuses, although valid, quickly turn to inaction. Too many of us forego some, if not all, of our Jewish mourning rituals.
There are consequences when we refrain from mourning. We don’t give our bodies and our souls the time needed to grieve. Losing a loved one is extremely difficult with many emotional ups and downs. We aren’t doing ourselves any good when we jump immediately back to normal life. We also aren’t providing a space for our family and friends to comfort us. They aren’t sure how best to support us and to show us they care.
These well-crafted rituals: gathering quickly after death, cutting a kriyah ribbon, sharing memories at a funeral, burial, sitting shiva, praying at a minyan, reciting kaddish, and yahrzeit are for us, the living. These rituals[i] help acknowledge our pain, to share our emotions, to be in the presence of others, to rely on friends and family, to find the support we need, and to turn our grief into a positive experience. If we arrive at the Mourner’s Path, may we take the time to grieve; and when those in our community do walk in the Shadow of Death, may we do our part to support them in their sadness.
Over the centuries, our rabbis also created
rituals to help navigate communal grief.
When the First Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE, many of our ancestors
were taken by force to Babylonia. It was
there, in a strange land, that they wrote these famous words from Psalm 137:
“By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung up our lyres”[ii]
Our ancestors created rituals to mourn together communally. They even foregoed playing their instruments to mark this moment of sadness. Powerfully, some of these rituals continue to be observed today. At the conclusion of a wedding, we still break a glass to mark our communal grief.
While in the Middle Ages, during the height of the Crusades, the Christian armies marched across Europe to “free” the Holy Land. As they reached the Rhineland, these armies massacred the Jewish communities living there. It was our Jewish survivors who crafted new rituals to mourn the loss of their communities. The Kaddish became a prayer of mourning while the yizkor memorial service was created to mark communal grief.
We too need rituals to mark this moment of a changing America. There are already kernels of ideas bubbling up like Park Rangers hoisting upside down American Flags in our National Parks signaling an SOS or brave athletes who kneel during the National Anthem. I honestly am not sure which of these or other rituals will be the most meaningful to us. But we need to create rituals together, to help us journey through grief towards healing.
One of the most important mourning rituals in the mourning
process is the sharing of stories. As I sat shiva in my grandparents’ house, my
family and I began to tell stories about my grandmother. Elaine Gordon would make sure her salmon was “very,
very well done.” When you came to visit,
there’d always be bagels and lots and lots of rugelach! Whenever there was a simcha, a birthday or
major anniversary, she would plan a big party.
Family was so important. We’d
gather for Rosh Hashanah dinners and Passover seders. But the highlight was Thanksgiving. Every other year, we all gather in one big house, all 27 of us,
four generations, for a full extended weekend together. The stories we shared about my grandma that
day were the first crucial step towards healing.
As a Jewish community, we also tell the stories about our
past. It inspires me that year after
year, we continue to read the same stories from our Torah. Each time we arrive at Leviticus, there’s
always one person who asks, “Why do we read all these rules about animal
sacrifice? We’ll never again offer
animal sacrifices as part of our ritual observance!” My answer: we read these words to remember
our past and to never forget our history.
A Jew is one who remembers.
Without our past, we have no future.
In our country, too many are trying to take away our past. Whether good or bad, our American history is being censored, stripped away, or cancelled. The Enola Gay airplane and its brave pilots erased because of the word Gay. Harriet Taubman deleted from the National Park Service website about her role in the Underground Railroad. Transgender Activists Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera silenced from their brave actions in the Stonewall Uprising. Slavery, Civil Rights, Women’s Suffrage, LGBTQ Pride, especially the T, are being deleted from the history books. As we mourn, we must never forget our past.
As we grieve, we walk the Mourner’s Path. Sometimes that path is short, sometimes more winding, but hopefully it leads us in the direction of healing. We mourn to begin the journey forward.
After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, our rabbis recognized that what was would never be rebuilt. The Temple was the central meeting place for the Jewish community. Pilgrimage holidays, sacrifices, Levitical worship, all occurred in the Temple in Jerusalem. Once the Temple was destroyed, our community was without its heart and soul. Our rabbis had an answer. They transformed our Jewish way of living by creating new alternatives to Temple worship.
Torah study became so central to rabbinic Judaism that it equaled all other commandments. Acts of loving kindness were considered by our ancient sages to be even greater than Temple sacrifices. While the dining room table became our communal altar expressing the centrality of our Jewish homes. Jewish worship in the synagogue became a way to repent for our mistakes and to gather in prayer.[iii] The Temple was gone, but a new path was set for future generations.
One reason we grieve is to reflect upon what comes next. I know that my grandmother will never again have dinner with me, but every time I’m seated at a round table, I think of her. I’m always thoughtful of how best to keep her legacy alive, whether it’s saying, “to good health” whenever we clink our glasses, celebrating with gusto at every birthday, sending a card, calling a loved one, or marking holiday celebrations. She won’t be there with me, and I miss her dearly, but her presence is always felt. Her memory propels me forward.
We too must begin this difficult work for our country. Taking time to grieve provides us with the opportunity to dream dreams. Our country was never perfect, but we must envision what a country “For the people, by the people, and of the people” could truly become. What could our country’s future look like? What should it look like? I have no idea what we will create, but we must dream in order to bring it to fruition.
I know that many of you are not ready to grieve. You might be too angry to grieve. You might feel that mourning is giving up. Plus, we will grieve differently. But, our sages teach that grief and mourning are the first steps towards healing.
Tonight, Kol Nidre calls us. We are called to grieve. We are called to remember. We are called to hope. May we take the time to mourn our losses, to
gather in community, to comfort each other, and to turn towards a new day. Amen.
[i] Based
upon the ten guidelines for grieving by Rabbi Earl Grollman found in K’vod
HaMet edited by Rabbi Stuart Kelman
[ii]
Psalm 137:1-2
[iii] “From
Time by Time: Journeys in the Jewish Calendar” p. 313-315 by Rabbi Dalia Marx,
translated by Rabbi Peretz A. Rodman.
