Av

"Woe unto the heart that is not broken,” wrote Aryeh Cohen. 

No one wants pain but no one can avoid it.   

People let us down.  

Our bodies are instruments where the parts wear out and sometimes are defective.  

The things that we expect to make our lives simpler often do the opposite.  

When life does not cooperate with our expectations it is frustrating, to say the least.

 

As we pass through time we amass a wide array of these broken experiences.  Learning how to manage life’s disappointments is wisdom.   Wisdom does not come from books or what others teach us, it what we learn as the wheel of life turns.

 

This month on August 13 is Tisha B’Av, on the Jewish calendar.  Tisha B’Av is a day of historic tragedy.  It marks when our ancestors the Children of Israel, were sentenced o forty years of aimless wandering in the desert. It is the day that marks the destruction of the both the first and second Temples in Jerusalem.  It is also the anniversary of when Betar, the last breath of Jewish independence for 2,000 years fell.  Jews all over the worlds read Jeremiah’s Lamentations and fast.

 

Why?  Why bother to remember an historic event that has no bearing on our life?

 

A story:

 

One Tisha B’Av Napoleon rode by a synagogue in small town and noticed Jews sitting on the ground and wailing bitterly.

“Why are the Jews crying?” he asked a bystander.

“They are mourning their land which was destroyed about two thousand years ago,” he was informed.

These words deeply impressed Napoleon.  “A nation that can mourn over the destruction and loss of their land which occurred two thousand years ago,” he exclaimed, “Such a people will never perish.  They may be certain they will survive and that their land will eventually be restored to them.”

 

Our memory - both individual and collective – takes our pain and uses it to become wiser in our years.  Just as a scab started out as a bleed, it becomes much more resilient when new skin forms over it.  But, and this is crucial, a scar remains to remind us and teach us how to enrich our lives through the panoply of our experiences, good and bad.

Death Date

When I give tours of the Synagogue to our non-Jewish neighbors and curiosity seekers, I point out that the boards at the back of the sanctuary list names of the deceased and their death dates- which we know as yahrzeit. 

Yahrzeit is an amalgam of two words- “yahr” meaning “year” and “zeit” which is “time.”  I go on to explain to our guests that in Judaism we commemorate a death date and place great emphasis on it.  “People come to say special prayers on the yahrzeit of their loved one.  These prayers are so old that they predate Christianity.”

“See those tiny bulbs on the brass plaques?” I ask.  “Well, if the light is glowing that means their death date is this week.”  They grow still as they wonder about this.

What I do not explain to the visitors is the meaning of the tradition of yahrzeit and kaddish. 

Generations come and go.  Despite the epochs, we recall those who have traveled this road before us.  Gazing at scrapbooks and faded pictures we remember zayde and bubbie (grandpa and grandma).  Memories float to the surface.  Eagerly, we point them out to our families, carefully explaining who each person was along with a tale of how their lives are still interconnected with ours.  Their legacy is us.  We are the possessors of their story, their lives.  When we recall them, name our children after them, they gain definition, even in death.

On the Holy Days we sing a prayer, zochraynu l’hayyim, “Remember us for life,” we plead with God.  At the same time, we also want, or need, to be remembered by the living after we have passed.  As age brings us closer to our ultimate destination a jarring question leaps to mind: “Who will remember me?”  Will anyone name their child after me?  Will anyone say kaddish when I am dead?  Perhaps it is a kind of double death to die and be forgotten.

We believe that when a person dies their body returns to the earth but their soul, being a gift of God, survives.  If this is true, perhaps then their soul still “knows” us.  What a gift to their spirit to be remembered, still cherished!  That they have not been forgotten may be the greatest balm to their spirit. 

Believe it or not we know Moses’ yahrzeit.  We know the date of Rabbi Akiva’s death.  And we read the names of the members of our congregation each Shabbat when their yahrzeits fall that week.  The list is long.  Many names are now familiar to me.  As I read the list, I smile at some of the memories and am saddened by others.

I imagine on those Shabbatot or during the week when we have evening services and someone stands to recite kaddish, a soul is nourished.  Somewhere is the vast cosmos a soul reflects, “See? I have not been forgotten.”  And that soul rises a bit higher on the letters of the kaddish as they are enunciated by the living.

The words are the same as previous generations pronounced, yitgadal, v’yitkadash… as they praise the Eternal One.  Perhaps that too is part of the gift.  “See Lord, I left a good legacy.  They not only remember me but through me they remember You.”