Tangible Memories

Yom Kippur Yizkor 5779 / 19 September 2018

Every Shabbat, my son Azzi wears the same kippah when he comes to BZBI. It’s white with a thin purple border, and has an embroidered “tree of life” design in the center. I have one just like it; we gave them to all of the men in the family at my wedding. Azzi wasn’t at the wedding, of course. The kippah that he wears had been my father’s, and was handed down to Azzi after my dad passed away.

Azzi loves that kippah and, as many of us do when we’re excited, he talks about it a lot. I noticed that he consistently refers to it as “a memory of grandpa.” The first time I heard him, it took me a minute to work out what he meant. As I assume is true for many of us, I had come to think of memories as a kind of brain picture, an intangible record of some past event. But for Azzi, at six years old, a memory is something concrete: his kippah; my father’s tefillin in a velvet bag, to be passed down to Odelia at her bat mitzvah; my dad’s Penn rowing jacket from 1961, hanging in the closet waiting for cooler weather to come.

We differentiate between our memories of loved ones and the objects, places, occasions, and activities that remind us of them — but how distinct are they? Somewhere in the bins of Pesah dishes sits a wide, flat wooden bowl and a curved, bone-handled chopping blade. The wood is a medium-brown all over except on the inside, where maroon runs so deep it almost obscures the wood grain. Each year we use the bowl, handed down all the way from Rebecca’s great-grandmother, to make haroset for the Seder, a century of red wine leaving its indelible mark on the wood itself. One year we were in Israel, without the bowl, and the haroset just didn’t taste right. I know there is no scientific basis for that claim — we wash the bowl thoroughly each time it’s used — but we ate the haroset, and it wasn’t the same that year. There is something in that bowl, beyond the color or some faint flavor held over from last year. Memory.

 Among the art hanging in my office is a piece my dad’s father made in his woodshop. Every time I look at it I feel the hot Alabama air on my neck, I smell the tang of sawdust in the air, hear the whine of a saw. There’s no cause and effect here; there’s no perceptible time between seeing the wooden magen david in its frame and being transported back to my childhood, to the wonder and mystery that lived in my grandfather’s garage. Are those memories stored in the carving itself, or perhaps in the space between my eye and the aged wood veneer? How do we explain the unique value that some objects hold for us, that they could not possibly hold for anyone else?

I am reminded of a teaching by Reb Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the founder of Chabad-Lubavitch. Regarding tzedakah, he writes that we should not make the mistake of thinking a person gives only money; rather, that money contains all of the vitality and energy that the person expended in the labor necessary to earn it. The life-force remains bound up in the coins themselves until the act of giving tzedakah sanctifies that energy. In the same way, I feel a connection to my grandfather in this thing that he made with his hands. He envisioned it, touched it, shaped it. It bears his spiritual fingerprints just as much as it ever bore the physical ones. When Odelia sits with Rebecca to make haroset, they pour more than wine into the bowl. They are the fourth and fifth generations to hold that blade in the days before Pesah, and each downward stroke links them to the women who came before, and who, God willing, will come after. The objects left to us by previous generations — things they cherished, things they made, things they used — contain little sparks of their souls within them.

Today we all have just such a memory right in front of us. For twenty-eight years, Bernice Meyers co-chaired our Book of Remembrance with Bonnie Nierman. Bernice passed away a few weeks ago, just as these books were coming back from the printer. It’s not hard to see the significance of these books, with their pages listing the family and friends we remember today. But the Book of Remembrance contains more than just these names, more than just the prayers we will recite in a few minutes. Woven among the pages of our Book of Remembrance you will find the love and care that Bernice brought to her editing work each year. Although she is no longer with us, the fruit of her devotion sits in our hands. This year especially we feel her loss, notice her absence among us, but even next year and for years to come her influence on the book’s form and style will continue to carry her memory.

For me, all of this raises a fundamental question: what am I putting my love into? What memories am I creating that will last beyond my time on this earth? Yom Kippur, with its rituals of abstention and reflection, offers us glimpses of both mortality and immortality. The white kittel evokes the shrouds in which we traditionally bury our dead; like angels, we set aside food and water and bodily pleasures. Both paradigms helps us focus on the true work of this day, חשבון הנפש, our spiritual inventory. As Simon Critchley writes in The Book of Dead Philosophers, “It is in relation to the reality of death that one’s existence should be structured.”^[1] On this day we dance between the certainty of our own eventual departure and our intuitive understanding that, though the body may die, the soul and spirit live on. Yom Kippur reminds us that, so long as we draw breath, we make choices that shape the legacy we leave behind: where we will pour our love and devotion, who we will mentor and care for, what we will learn and teach, whose lives we will enrich and bless.

In a moment we will continue with yizkor. As we bless the memory of those we loved, those who shaped our lives and helped us grow toward this day, let us also remember that yizkor ultimately belongs to us. May those we remember inspire us to reflect on how we live best — and may we leave here today with a renewed commitment to craft a legacy that will one day bless those who remember us.

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