That Yizkor Not be in Vain
Shavuot Yizkor 2015
There are many things which we take
for granted in the Jewish tradition yet for which we can find no clear origins
in the Bible or the Talmud. They are, rather, based on the power of custom: Minhag.
Minhag, custom, is so powerful, that we say minhag kedin hu, the
custom is as powerful as a law.
Jews are an amazingly conservative
people. It is not only loyalty to our law but also loyalty to our minhagim that
has bound us together so well over the course of these many centuries. In fact,
we often get to the point, where we say in Yiddish a minhig brecht a din , Custom can
violate a Jewish law.
Even as great a figure as Rabbi
Josef Karo, of Spanish ancestry, could not get the Jews of Eastern Europe to accept
his Shulkhan Aruch until it was amended by Rabbi Moshe Isserles to
incorporate the unique customs which had arisen in Germany and Poland. Shulkhan
Arukh means “The Table is Set” but it was missing, said the Ashkenazic
Jews, the table cloth, Mapah,which Rabbi Isserles provided. The Shulkhan
Arukh became the universally accepted Code of Jewish Law only when it had with it
the code of European custom.
Thus, a Yarmulka is a minhag,
a custom, not a law, and one may observe both Biblical and Talmudic law and go
about without a head covering. Nevertheless, minhag kedin, Jews have
struggled to be allowed some kind of head-covering at the workplace, even in
the military, as if it were an inviolable element of Jewish law.
Much of the rules of Kashruth
on Pesah are matters of minhag, not law. Thus, I have been asked by many
if real pasta is KP, while everyone
knows that rice is not. Yet, the Halakhah, the law, is that real pasta,
certainly, is not kosher for Passover, because it is, like bread, the result of
the mixing of flour and water, which is the heart of the process of Hametz,
and pasta is not baked, but allowed to sit until either boiled, or dried. Today,
for Pesah, you can get fake pasta, made from all sorts of ersatz elements but
no wheat flour, and certainly no good Italian restaurant would dare serve that
kind of pasta!
On the other hand, rice, as well as
peas and beans, are Hametz, which everyone knows, but only for Ashkenazim, as a
custom, whereas, by law, halachah, Sefardic Jews eat rice and legumes
and they are correctly kosher for passover.
It’s the power of custom. Minhag.
Then there is Yizkor.
Three times a year, in Ashkenazic
tradition, at the three festive holidays, and on Yom Kippur, we Jews come in
larger numbers than usual to recall those whom we love, at Yizkor.
What is this Yizkor which draws us
in in such large numbers, so that on Yom Kippur, we are packed in probable
violation of all safety regulations?
The name comes from the first
sentence of the prayer of remembrance for our dead, "Yizkor
elohim"--May God remember..." It is properly called " Hazkarat
neshamot", Memorial for the Souls.
Where is it from?
We only know that in the time of the
Maccabees and in later Rabbinic times, it was a custom to bring offerings or
prayers on behalf of the dead, to atone for the sins of the deceased.
Later on, it became the practice to
pray on behalf of the dead on Shabbat. They would pray for the dead sinners,
that after Shabbat's rest they not be returned to hell but be forgiven once and
for all of their sins.( Midrash Tanhuma).
By the early middle ages, it had
become accepted that such prayers were offered on festivals and on Yom Kippur
and this was actually opposed by the great Rabbinic leaders of the day. It is
what you do in life, not what someone else does for you when it’s too late,
that counts before God, they insisted. They insisted and lost, as they lost on
many other issues where custom overrode the law. Rabbis didn’t rule with force
of police, after all; they could only persuade.
It is an ironic example of a minhag
brecht a din, custom overrides a law. By law, one may not mourn or display
signs of mourning on Shabbat and the festivals, and by practice, one does not
recite the El Maleh prayer in memory of the deceased on a Shabbat or festival,
not even at a funeral during the mid-weeks of the Festivals for the act of
mourning detracts from the joy of the festival. Yet look! Minhag brecht a din, the
custom violates the law and we recite the prayer just when we are not allowed
to recite it. The need to remember and ease the burden of memory is greater
than the law itself.
Yizkor ultimately became embedded in
the Jewish psyche, however, by the reality of Jewish existence.
During the Crusades, and again, in
the seventeenth century, the Jews of Europe were the victims of the most
horrible of massacres, and every Jew was a survivor, afflicted with the pain of
memory of a loved lost one brutally murdered.
In our day, then, the individual
loss of a loved one has been compounded by the loss to all the people of Israel
of the great mass of the Jews of Europe who were murdered in the Holocaust, and
by the smaller, but very significant number of Jewish heroes who were killed in
the defense of the State of Israel.
Yizkor has taken on the function of
a communal dedication to our slain that as we may say in the words of LIncoln,
" That these dead shall not have died in vain".
Yizkor is more than just praying on
behalf of the dead, more than what our ancestors felt was an act of filial
piety; it becomes the event whereby we reconnect with those who trod upon the
world before us or with us, those who gave us life and love, those who taught
us, those who made our lives possible.
We ask ourselves the question: if we
gather in their memory as Jews, what is it that they stood for? Surely, if
anything, they stood for their role in the great chain of Jewish tradition and
teaching, and we in their memory must take our part in keeping that great chain
intact.
For Yizkor to have any significance
it is not enough to mumble words that we do not understand. Our lives must be
consistent with the teachings of Judaism which directed the generations before
us: A life of doing what God expects of us, as the Jewish people have
interpreted it in mitzvot and understanding and studying God's teachings, as
the Jewish people have interpreted it in the form of Torah.
Central to all this, is the
institution which has kept the heart and soul of the Jewish people together
over tens of thousands of miles and over the course of three and a half millennia--the
ancient Temple, and its successor, for 2000 years, the synagogue, the bet
knesset.
I want you to keep in mind what a
synagogue is for, especially this one, in the midst of West Hollywood, within
the heart of America's fantasyland, where dreams and vision are put to
celluloid and cds. This synagogue has gone through so many traumas, as we all
know, and has nearly folded but with the efforts of some good volunteers it is
still up and running.
Obviously, a synagogue is for praying,
which is admittedly no longer a strong Jewish profession.
We must have a synagogue for
studying in, and I try to bring that sense of study into our services
A synagogue is also the cite for rofeh
lishvurey lev--the healer of the broken hearted.
There were many times that I had to
open the chapel because someone needed to go to pray and meditate, undisturbed.
People come to the synagogue for an ear to hear.
I have had to counsel a rock and roll musician who lost his girl-friend
to an early death.
Then there was a Samoan native, son of a Christian missionary, who had
a dream that he needed to know who are the children of Israel. He sat out
front, barefoot and in US military uniform, waiting for the Rabbi, because only
the Rabbi could help him. Where else but here?
A young man was struck down in the
prime of life in a road accident. To whom could the family talk, who would
alley their pain at the funeral and afterwards if not the Rabbi ?
I bring up all these remembrances of
Hollywood Temple Beth El, but not to say Kaddish for it and not Yizkor. This is
a challenge to all of us here. Again,
we think of Yizkor. If we wish to memorialize our dead, it is up to us to
protect that which our loved ones sought to build and maintain, synagogues and
centers of Judaism and the Jewish people, past and present, here and abroad.
I mentioned Lincoln's Gettysburg
address, as an appropriate theme for the meaning of Yizkor. He concluded his
address, by taking a famous quote about the Bible, "of the people, by the
people, for the people", and applying it to the United States. I wish to
turn his words around, now, again to apply it to our message of today:
“It is for us the living, rather, to
be dedicated here, to the unfinished work which they who have fought here thus
far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be dedicated to the great task
remaining before us--that from these honored dead, we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion- that we
highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."
We highly resolve that those of the builders of this
congregation from the original Laemmles, Warners and Meyers *, down to the
newest immigrant finding his place in the New World, shall not have struggled
in vain. Amen.
***
*Some
background- among the founders of Hollywood Temple Beth El in 1922 were the
founders of Universal Studios, Warner Brothers, and MGM.
