Recent Sermons

Yizkor 5786
October 2, 2025
Congregation B’nai Jacob

As we prepare to say yizkor today, I want to begin by acknowledging that all of us are sitting here with broken hearts. Many of us have suffered personal losses this year, and I will speak about that in a few moments, but I want to begin with our collective heartbreak, heartbreak for our broken world. I personally feel an overwhelming sense of grief for the loss of the world we once knew, for the ongoing suffering in Israel, and for our own country which seems to be slowly slipping away. Krista Tippett, whom I heard speak a few weeks ago, described humanity at this moment as experiencing distressed nervous systems on a species wide level. That sounds right to me.

For Jews, add to the heartbreak, October 7 with the layers of geologic trauma it surfaced. The heartbreak of the hostages and their families, held captive now for 727 unbearable days. The heartbreak of Israel still at war, almost 1000 soldiers dead, exhausted reservists returning to the front for months on end, worried families at home muddling through without them, Gazans lacking shelter, healthcare, and food, and a war with no end in sight. And outside Israel, our own families torn apart by their conflicting views of these events.

And then our own country: Democracy at risk; science under assault; immigrants rounded up without due process and sent off to alligator-infested concentration camps; millions of Americans who will lose access to healthcare; the unending drumroll of gun deaths; the profound and seemingly intractable polarities that have come to characterize our country; the steady creep, perhaps sprint, toward authoritarianism.

And the world. Where summers grow hotter, storms more severe, glaciers melt, and optimism about the future gives way to dread. Antisemitism and fascism, twin brothers, on the rise across the world. The sense that in the face of challenging times we are rudderless.

It is good, I think, to name this heartbreak and tend to it, to acknowledge that whatever side of the political spectrum you fall on, we are heartbroken people and we can sit here, heartbroken together. I feel grief and fear for this country and the world that I was born into, that I took for granted as my birthright, and that feels as if it is slipping from our grasp.

When we acknowledge our grief together we can remember that on the other side of grief is love. We only ever grieve that which we loved whether it is the beauty of this world, the love someone planted in our hearts, or the ideals of a nation we cherished and still cherish. Tippett noted that we often shortchange feeling our pain — it hurts too much. But pain lives on the other side of anger. Anger is usually easier to access, seemingly safer to feel, but sitting here, together, we can actually surface and sit with our fear, our pain, and our grief. It is something we share despite our differences and despite the different things we may be grieving, just as we say yizkor for different loved ones. When we can name the things that break our hearts, we can get under our feelings of panic, and hopefully activate other feelings like agency, possibility, even hope.

I am struck in this moment by the wisdom of our ancestors, how grateful I am that they created these holidays which sustain and carry us, their intelligence about healing, especially about the things we cannot fix. Our tradition gives us a container in which we can dwell together in our shared heartbreak and remember who we are to one another, because it is these connections, first and foremost, that will sustain us through this time.

When I zoom in on our congregational losses, I am struck by the overwhelming sense of absence I feel. When I came here, twelve years ago, I didn’t know you. I buried mostly older people whom I did not know well and certainly had not known in their youth. Today, it is entirely different. I see the chairs where those who are gone used to sit, the family members they used sit with, the things they did in our synagogue — chanting Torah, making sure everything was done with care and love, teaching our children, inspiring us with their generosity, their goodness, their gifts — and I feel bereft. Their absence is so palpable. The writer Kathryn Schulz, whose amazing book, Lost and Found, I commend to you, writes, “To be bereft is to live with the constant presence of absence.” “It is not a neutral blankness, but instead like a tree by my house where an owl used to sit. The tree has fallen, but I still look up automatically when I walk by, looking for the owl. That is something like the nothingness left behind after death: the place in the tree where the owl is not.”

After Schulz’s father dies, she describe how, “being his daughter now is like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string. His absence is total; where there was him, there is nothing.” Although we tend to imagine grief as some version of sadness, Schulz found that sadness often got buried under louder emotions and could not be conjured at will: “I could love my father, but I could not make myself sad about him when and where I chose…” Instead, grief often sneaks up on us when we least expect it; we are often undone by seemingly small things — watching a soppy commercial, finding an insignificant object or a snippet of handwriting lying about, overhearing a stranger in a coffee shop casually talking about his daughter and realizing yet again that your father is no longer sitting somewhere else talking about you.

I remember a week or two after David’s father died. We had pulled into the driveway of our home after an ordinary outing, and when I got out of the car, David just sat there. “Are you getting out?” I asked. “I can’t,” he said. To my alarmed look, he responded “I just feel so heavy, so weighted down, as if I cannot move.”

“Part of what makes grief so seductive,” Schulz writes, “is that it seems to offer us what life no longer can: an ongoing, emotionally potent connection to the dead. And so it is easy to feel that once that bleak gift is gone, the person we love will somehow be more gone, too.” I remember Barry Zaret telling me that one of the most painful parts of mourning was canceling the credit cards, removing the name from the bank accounts, getting rid of their books, their clothes, their shampoo. All you want to do, he said, is remain connected to your loved one, and instead every action you do severs the connection a little bit more.

In the end we realize that although we are filled with memories of the past, what we are really mourning is the future, all the things that will happen — weddings, babynamings, graduations, sunsets — and they will not be here to share them with us. Grief fades but the absences — the chair they sat on, the place you walked together or had coffee — they remain. For Schulz these absences become like memorial candles: “They are still here, unlike him, and I assume that they always will be, as enduring as the love that made them. This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.”

Fortunately for us, loss is not the whole of it. Kohelet famously said, “A season is set for everything, a time for every purpose under heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot; a time to slay and a time to heal…” Kohelet makes it sound as if life divides itself into neat little compartments, this one for war, this one for peace, kind of like those plastic plates you ate off when you were little with their dividers between the protein, the starch, and the vegetable assuring that the different foods never touch.

Yehuda Amichai wrote a poem countering Kohelet:

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the
same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and
to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love…

I love this poem. It is such a perfect characterization of how we feel — moments of joy and ecstasy, moments of pain and sorrow — all wrapped up together, all at once. You would be surprised to know how often someone dies at the same time as a child in the same family gets married or a grandchild is born. Even on a more mundane level, we carefully plan a vacation only to get terrible news while we are away that leaves us bereft when we had planned to be so happy. We go on a picnic, lovingly packing wine and strawberries into the cooler, imagining ourselves lying on a blanket in the sun, only to get into a stupid argument because someone forgot the silverware or misread the map. We are sitting shiva for a beloved parent, mired in grief, and we suddenly find ourselves laughing until the tears run down our faces about something funny thing they did.

This confluence of events is so frequent that the Talmud actually makes provisions for it. If a wedding procession and a funeral procession meet at a crossroads, the wedding procession goes first. Life takes precedence over death.

That may be the practical solution, but feelings are rarely practical. We are sad and happy, fearful and confident, laughing and crying all at once. All the feels, all the time. No plate with compartments. Everything everywhere all at once.

Perhaps the story of the wedding and funeral procession meeting is meant to illustrate something more than a practical solution. Perhaps it is there to remind us that life and death exist on the same continuum. Death is an inevitable part of life; everything we know will die, and new things will be born. Dead trees fallen in the forest shelter new life, home to small animals and birds, insects, networks of fungi, bacteria used for medicine. In a culture which denies death, a culture in which people often die in hospitals away from the places they have lived, and green astroturf covers the grave so that we look away from the gaping abyss, the Talmud’s story of the two processions reminds us that we always live at the crossroads of life and death.

What do we do in the face of this knowledge? I think we are meant to follow Amichai’s advice, to remember that life is lovely, fragile, and fleeting, filled with longing and gratitude and a kind of anticipatory grief that comes from knowing that everything and everyone we love, all this beauty will fade into the earth. This is what it is to be human.

In the end we are not best served by our grief nor our acquiescence to life’s inevitable losses, but by our attention. Everything will be lost, this perfect moment will fade, because every moment fades, everything fades. But loss is also an ever-present goad, reminding us to notice, to make the most of this moment before it is gone. Schulz writes, “Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”

When my children were small, I remember thinking with some regularity — remember, remember, remember. Hold on to the feel of a tiny hand in yours. Remember their high-pitched voices, their sweaty pajama-clad bodies climbing into bed with you, reading bedtime stories while they wound my hair around their tiny fingers. Truth is, I have mostly forgotten. I remember those things happening, but I can’t quite conjure up the tactile feeling. Of course I have also blessedly forgotten the feeling of exhaustion, the endless meals, the fighting, the laundry. It is all kind of a blur now and even though I know it was far from perfect and often difficult, the abiding memory is just love, all love. The moments are in fact gone even as I did my best as often as I could to be present to them. But the scent of the memory lingers with me, and I hope with them.

The poet Mary Oliver writes:

*When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.*

In the end, there isn’t time for everything. In the end, we hold life and death, joy and sorrow, and everything in between in our hands. In the end our hearts break at the enormity of our collective losses and we still have to pay the bills, comfort the crying child, water the flowers, make soup for a sick friend, and protest the injustices of the world. In the end, we are held by one another in this container of Yom Kippur, a ritual bequeathed to us by our ancestors, a moment in which we grasp life and death at both ends, a moment when we ask God for just one more year, knowing, acknowledging, that we too will return to the earth from which we came, from which new life will be born. We too, each of us, a wave, a particle in this great ocean of pain and love.