Yizkor: Yom Kippur 5768
Living on the Edge
Rabbi Mark H. Levin, D.H.L.
September 22, 2007

Yizkor offers a strange departure from the rest of this sacred day. Our prayers and thinking today are in first person: We think, “I have sinned,” and “We have sinned.” This service is about second person: me in context with a loved one. For this worship we exist in human pairs. The rest of this day the relationship is between God and ourselves.
Only the Ashkenazi half of the Jewish world recites Yizkor prayers on Yom Kippur. Our forebears inserted it into the morning worship after the Torah and haftarah reading, before the Torah returns to its resting place in the ark. These are sacred and sensitive moments, when we intuit God’s presence.
The Sephardi communities never suffered the Crusades, and therefore avoided the reason Ashkenazi Jewry began this sad custom. Existential grief after being ferociously and meaninglessly murdered so overwhelmed the Rhineland communities that they felt they must grieve for their martyred family and friends at Yom Kippur. Their prayers were meant to help the slain souls repent their sins and achieve eternal life. The prayers expressed both the loss and the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages.
But we gather for very different reasons. Our spiritual expressions reflect our perspective on the world, not a previous generation’s. Judaism is not a museum to visit occasionally; we are a living congregation gathered to nurture and express the longings of our 21st century souls. We share with our ancestors the relationship with God that gives us our reason for being. But our daily circumstances and aspirations, as well as our view and knowledge of our world, differ vastly from past generations.
Not only did our ancestors recite Yizkor to remember and help their martyrs into afterlife, they developed self-help motivations. They came to believe that focusing on those who had died would soften their own hearts and stimulate repentance. If death is our mutual end, and if ultimate reward depends on our deeds, why would we sin? Why forfeit eternity for the sake of momentary pleasure? Yizkor on Yom Kippur can return us to the proper path, as it did for our righteous who have been called home.
The truth is that we are not here for the reasons our ancestors came. Neither their martyrdom nor our afterlife drive us to remember today. Rather, we have a third reason: We are survivors. We have survived the shock of death, the loss of someone with whom we meaningfully shared life. We are here because, as current medical research explains clearly, we truly are social animals who exist in relationship. Recent scientific studies demonstrate that parts of our brains are actually molded in response to our connecting to others. So impactful are our contacts with one another, and the more we love the more impactful the contact, that living in relationship changes how our brains function! We exist in a context: the context of those whom we have loved. We come to this place remembering the life that once was, and grieving its loss.
What is the lesson of the crusades? For some it is anti-Semitism. But for me it is the lesson of catastrophe: it comes suddenly and changes everything. Writer Joan Didion’s husband died sitting in a chair while she prepared dinner. One moment he was there. The next moment he wasn’t. Her book, The Year of Magical Thinking opens with these words, “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Literary critic Sandra Gilbert, whose husband died suddenly after a routine surgery and a medical error, wrote, “For the first six months after he died, death suddenly seemed plausible, not a far-off threat but urgently close, as if the walls between this world and the ‘other’ had indeed become transparent or as if a door between the two realms had swung open. For the first six weeks after he died, death seemed not only rational but right, or at least appropriate, as if I were already standing in its doorway and need merely keep walking toward where my husband now was.” (Dearth’s Door, pp. 1-2) Death alters our perspective on living.
For most of the time we close the door to death. Modern suburbanites attempt to exclude what formerly was a very present reality in every home. People died at home and at all ages, with family present. Now we do everything we can to avoid death’s presence. But for you and me it is unavoidable; death is very real to the survivors. The angel of death opens the door, and once the angel walks through he cannot close it. Yizkor recalls the open wound of death. Through remembrance and repentance we get to the essence of ourselves, as when we first considered the meaning of our lives in the aftermath of death; and when we penetrate to the essence we recall those who are meaningful to us. Connecting to our essential selves, it becomes possible to reinvigorate our inner core. At the same time we restore through memory, even though they are dead, those whose lives sustained us.
Yom Kippur’s repentance avoids the extraneous titillations of life and aims for life’s vitality, what Joan Didion saw disappear that changed everything in a moment; what Sandra Gilbert saw vanish that opened her to the world of death. That sensitivity, a feeling we reject until it comes insistently knocking on our door and will not be refused, reminds us that all life is infinitely precious. Ironically, facing the limitation on life raises its value. Death creates a heightened sensation of life itself, and opens us up to the realm of the dead. Through memory we stay connected to the deceased. But we also have responsibilities to them. We light Yahrzeit candles. We maintain their values. We tell their stories. We hold on to them in this life, keeping a piece of them with us. We also maintain our responsibilities to the living. Whatever turns us to the quivering presence of life, we accept. Death urges us to live in the present.
Consider where we are in this most sacred day. In the past Jews believed that their souls were on the line. Unetaneh tokef … “who shall live and who shall die; who by fire and who by water; who by hunger and who by thirst…;” my soul hangs in the balance. We ask ourselves, “Can I adequately repent in order to what? Stay alive.” Ironically, life is the issue that we confront here, not death.
Death is modern leprosy for some, if it doesn’t involve a close friend or family member we don’t go near it. How many people tell me they don’t know what to say to someone? They find it embarrassing to offer compassion. Part of that, I am convinced, is that for us death is utter termination of life. It is the absolute end, and we fear it. For our ancestors death was expiration; we expired and the soul crossed the divide into an afterlife. But for so many moderns death is termination: the body returns to the earth as it was, but there is no spirit to return to God who gave it.
I beat my breast. I know my inmost heart, as does God. I have not been the self I might have been. I imagine I need to remove my heart from my chest, to wash it clean, to remove the stains. To whom do I turn then? I turn to those with whom I shared life, and so we have come back to this very moment. Mother, who taught me kindness; why did I not listen? Father who showed me the strength to live with integrity: how have I failed you? All those who supported me, on whom I could rely in my moments of weakness, on whose shoulders I could lay my head or with whom I could share my troubles, why are you not here when I search my inmost being and explore the trash I have deposited there. I investigate my inmost self trying to find the path to be good to life, to feel life’s vitality in return.
It turns out that death gives life itself meaning, that is the open secret that the young cannot, or ought not know that has been revealed to those who have lost the loves of their lives. We live on this edge – connected to the next world through those who have crossed over. Yearning to live in this world, and with a keen awareness of the beauty of the essence of life itself.
The traditionalists insist on what rationalists have trouble believing: that there is absolutely an afterlife. We want that, that certainty, but are embarrassed by what we want. We suspect but are disappointed that we terminate, enter into oblivion. Death no longer contains salvation for us. It truly is a plague that continues forever.
But there is another way: to remain ever close to death is to remain ever open to the preciousness of life for its own sake. In Gilbert’s open door to death is the sensitivity to the pain of loss alongside, the wonder of life, and the willingness to die nonetheless when our time is up. We live on the edge of wonder, and there we stay balanced, whether there is an afterlife or not.
And so we return to the thought that this service is somehow a departure from our day; it takes us away from the focus on repentance and our relationship with God. But in fact, the essence of the day is concentrated in this hour. We come to understand that we spend our lives on the cusp between life and death, that death for ourselves or others may be just around the corner. Living in relationship to God who asks the best of us; living in relationship with those who have gone before who remind us that our time also is limited; living with those who mold and share our lives; we insist that now, this moment, is the only time we have. This moment is infinitely precious, as is all life. I will repent constantly, love insistently, and appreciate time to its fullest. Yizkor enables us to experience the blessing called life.