On the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 25, 2023, Stephen Wise Temple Rabbi Ron Stern delivered a sermon on the difficulty of mourning those with whom we have troubled relationships during the Yizkor service for Yom Kippur at Katz Family Pavilion. You can view and read our other High Holy Day sermons, music, and photos on our High Holy Day Highlights page.
Transcript of Rabbi Ron Stern’s Yizkor Sermon
I sat with the family
listening as they reminisced about their father–
we were preparing for his funeral.
Their answers to my questions were brief,
a word or two, flat,
without emotion.
Unlike most families,
there were no tears,
no smiles as of affection as stories were told.
Years of experience led me to intuit that
there was something important they were holding back.
After 20 minutes of downward glances,
terse responses focusing on business successes
but avoiding family stories,
I sensed it was time to address the elephant in the room:
“I feel like there something that you are hesitant to share with
me?
You haven’t really spoken about
his relationship with your mom or any of you.”
Silence…. and then a daughter spat out a response,
“Do you really want to know, rabbi?
He was a mean, vindictive, cold person.
He treated us like we were his employees.
If he loved us, we never knew it.”
I came to understand
that their pain was not merely over the death of their father,
they were mourning a relationship that never came to be.
Hope for any change for the better
died along with the man.
There is an assumption
that could appear to pervade the Yizkor service.
It’s that we all have uncomplicated, loving memories.
We speak about the fondness of memory,
the warmth of the love,
the kindness of their loving touches.
What if that’s not our experience?
How do we mourn the lives of those
who left us with unresolved issues,
complicated histories,
maybe even abuse?
Often in these circumstances,
our mourning is NOT for relationships that were
but ones that never came to be.
What is Yizkor for you?
Significantly, complicated, unresolved relationships
are very much a part of our tradition.
The very names we invoke in our worship
are the offspring of fraught family dynamics.
The Midrash tells of Abraham’s father rejecting his son’s life mission.
His only option is to flee his homeland
and become a desert wanderer.
Abraham, to save his own life,
then offers his wife as a concubine to the Pharaoh of Egypt.
Later, he seizes her only child and offers him for sacrifice.
Isaac, scarred by his father’s zeal
is a passive, disengaged father himself.
Leah and Rachel vie for Jacob’s love
and his compassion is wanting
when Rachel faces a period of infertility.
Jacob pits his sons against each other.
Though Moses and his wife Tziporah have children,
we hear very little about them in the story telling;
he is a man so obsessed with his mission
that his family appears to be a distant concern.
Even the great King David,
according to tradition,
the progenitor of the messiah,
engenders such dysfunction in his family
that sibling rape and other abuses are rampant.
Yes, our legendary ancestors set the bar for family dysfunction.
So here we sit.
Compelled by tradition,
by obligation,
by our moral commitment to gather for Yizkor.
Amid those who shed tears of love and loss –
we are stoic.
Or perhaps, we too are overcome,
but not for what existed,
rather, for what has painfully eluded us.
As long as they were alive,
we could hold out that something would change.
Maybe there’d be a breakthrough:
hoped for & heartfelt apologies,
commitments for change.
We imagined that all those words and actions
that left us hurting, bereft, disappointed, frustrated
would fade into the past
and a fraught relationship
would become easier and more loving.
It happens in the movies –
why can’t it happen in our lives?
However, with their death, our hope died as well.
What is Yizkor for us?
I am intrigued by the notion of the fluidity of our memories.
We often incorrectly assume that
the memories we record in our brain
are like those on a digital device.
….they are fixed, unchanging,
accurate portrayals of the past.
We are so convinced of the constancy of memory
that we call eyewitnesses to trials and
present their remembered experiences as evidence.
And yet, every astute lawyer and psychologist
knows that memory is pliable.
Refracted through the lens of time,
the distortion of subsequent experiences,
and our own unique thought processes,
our memories shift –
sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically.
If we carry complicated memories –
painful memories –
memories we’d sooner forget –
Yizkor is a reminder that even now, even here,
we can engage in a process of reworking those memories.
Not forgetting –
there are some things we can never forget –
the scars endure.
But we can work to let go of the pain,
of the despair,
of the sorrow,
the anxiety that this person brought to us in life.
We can work to acknowledge the complexity without guilt.
Did we feel unloved or unappreciated?
Do we lack love for a parent or sibling—
maybe even a child?
Judaism doesn’t fault us for our emotions,
only for our actions.
We can permit the emotions we feel
to exist within us
without a sense of personal failure
or even anger at ourselves.
There is so much to learn,
even from disappointments.
When we release the strangling hold that the past might have on us,
we can be liberated
and become more than our complex memories.
There is so much to learn from every human interaction –
even those that burden us can guide us.
So, yes, those who carry fond, loving, uncomplicated memories
have been given a gift.
They are witnesses to the eternal power of love to heal and uplift
even in loss.
But so have those whose memories our fraught.
You are witnesses to the power of recovery,
the strength of resilience,
the determination of grit,
and the capacity for healing to come.
My daughter, a therapist,
acknowledges that she is drawn
to support those whose family lives are fraught.
Their capacity to find resilience
as they work through their emotions in therapy
is inspirational.
Some of us believe in a spiritual existence after death,
you might even feel
the presence of your loved ones in dreams or other moments.
Others hold that death is the end.
I’m drawn to the words of Philosopher Samuel Scheffler.
He speaks about the “afterlife”
in a way that I think we can all agree.
Scheffler asserts that we are the afterlife.
Everyone who is touched by the life of another
and continues to live after that person has died
is their afterlife.
We carry the memories of the deceased with us
long after they are gone.
Of course, the awareness of this afterlife of memory
must affect the way that we life our own lives.
It can inspire us to live our lives
in ways that fashion a loving afterlife of memory
for those who will mourn us after we are gone.
But if those we mourn
have not left us with loving memories,
then our afterlife of complicated memory
can be our teacher as well.
It is as much letting go as it is holding on.
Letting go of the pain, the conflict, even the trauma –
and holding on to the hope,
that we can be more than our memories.
Yizkor! – Remember! – our tradition commands us.
It is not a passive exercise.
In rising for the kaddish
we are flooded with emotions
brought on by those who are no more.
The continual shaping of even difficult memories
rests in the hands of us, the living.
May our memories bring us wholeness.
May our beloved dead be bound in the spirit of everlasting rest
and may we find peace.