Memory is about looking back and looking within

Yom Kippur Yizkor 5774

Michael Meade, a teacher and author on matters related to the men’s movement in the 1980s and 90s and soulful growth, spoke in an interview: “When I was growing up, I liked big questions: What is life all about? Why are we here? Eventually, I learned that the key question involves the meaning seeded within each individual life.

Almost all cultures have the notion that there is a judgment when we die. Some kind of accounting has to be made of one’s life. I believe God – and to me “God” is just shorthand for the ineffable divine presence – has only one question for us at the end: “Did you become yourself?” We have a seeded self that begins to germinate at birth. Our true goal in life is to become that self.

There’s an African proverb: “When death finds you, may it find you alive.” Alive means living your own damn life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live. That’s the way to evaluate whether you are an authentic person or not.

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We gather on the holidays of Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, Pesach and Shavuot to remember our loved ones – not only because we are missing them in a unique way at those moments when we gather as a community but also because we recognize our own mortality and need to take time to assess who we are in light of the days and years that pass. We remember in Yizkor those souls that touched us most deeply and as we remember them, we remember ourselves in connection, in relation with them. And our hearts are simultaneously: heavy and light – as our minds wander through remembering. On an afternoon already heavy with prayers for forgiveness and seeking to find our inner-selves, we dig into the banks of memory to find that very seed Michael Meade mentioned: the seed that has been growing inside us and which we, in our few days on earth, must water, nourish, and allow to grow.

Yizkor is without question about remembering our loved ones and giving them honor: which we do through prayers, donations to the synagogue, reading names, lighting memorial lights. But Yizkor seems to have a second layer to it: we must remember ourselves as individuals who have had to move on past the deaths of loved ones. When that first grief struck, for many, it feels there can be no way to move on. How often clergy of all stripes hear these words from mourners: “How can I live without …?” “I’ll never be the same…” “What am I supposed to do now?”

But live we must. The strength to carry on and live – not without memory, mind you – comes from that seed that is implanted within each of us to define and nurture the self. To become our fullest selves…such that death finds us: ALIVE. Certainly a part of us dies when someone close leaves this world – but we do not die. Our self is very much in tact … we are tasked with being in touch with who we are at our core and living from there – not defined by anyone else.

And Michael Meade is quite right when he says that nearly every culture has the notion that there is some kind of judgment when we die. For us, as Jews, there are six questions we will be asked.

1.            Were you honest in your business?

2.            Did you have fixed times for study?

3.            Did you have (or create a world worth living for) children?

4.            Did you expect salvation?

5.            Did you use all your mental abilities to achieve wisdom?

6.            Did you make use of your intellectual powers for all the ‘right’ purposes?  

I believe the rabbis propose those questions to give our lives shape and help us determine how we live so as to be ready to answer adequately when the time comes that we face that moment of judgment. But we know all along the Chassidic message: God will not ask us why were not more like Abraham or Sarah, Moses or Miryam but rather…why were we not more ourselves? Why did we not use our precious lives to nurture the seed that God gave us and the life-breath that the Source of Life restores in us every morning of our days?

We remember in order to consider those lives that have touched ours but our own lives as well and how we can be the very best, that we can be in light of – and despite – the losses that surround us.

May the memory of our loved ones be for a blessing and may we make our lives a blessing.