Yizkor: A Time to Remember

My dad, Allen Lipschultz, died last month after a long battle with cancer. He was 69. Thinking about my father this last month, much has gone through my mind, especially being a first born son reflecting on the many years I had with my dad. We sons start out our life worshiping our fathers as our heroes, admiring every aspect of them as a perfect father. Later, when we enter the teen years, we grow to resent them for not being the perfect dad we dreamed of when we were young. Eventually, we grow up and realize that the world is not perfect and our parents did the best they could and we hope we can be as good as them as parents, even if they were not perfect. As this month ends I am thinking deeply of my father and how I could possibly show him how important he was to me.
This Tuesday we Jews conclude the Passover holiday with the Yizkor service in which we get one last opportunity to say goodbye to those we love. Yizkor means ‘remembering’ and at this memorial service, I will stand with my people in the Jewish community to remember my Dad and others who have passed. We will try to reflect on the good memories of our times with our loved ones to give them the honor in death we often wish we had time to do while they were still alive. This Yizkor, it will be one month since I buried my father and thus I transition from the intensity of sadness to the eventual reembracing of life as my shloshim (30 days of mourning ritually prescribed by Judaism) ends and I move to the new stage of mourning my father.
The Hilchot Avelut (Jewish laws of mourning) are based on the unique insight that it is therapeutic for us to fully express our grief and then to return gradually, step by step, back to life. The law insists that for the first three days after the funeral we must weep and show visible signs of grief to embrace the cathartic experience with the sadness of loss.
Many have the custom of not greeting guests or eating meat. There is also an ancient custom that before you can eat, a person must put the food in your hand as if to give permission for you to eat because your sadness is so great you might not initiate such an action. After three days we are told to stop crying, greet our guests, eat meat but still stay home from work and sit on low stools and wait for our memorial shivah candle to expire (which is seven days after the funeral).
After a week, we are to walk around the block to symbolically show the community that we are resuming our life. We return to work but do not shave or wear new clothes or attend any festive occasion for a month. After a month we are directed to resume our normal activities but say kaddish (mourner’s prayer) daily for a year. This is to teach us that we need to find time to feel our loss but that loss should never stop us from embracing life.
The Yizkor memorial service that we Jews commemorate four times a year begins Tuesday, the last day of the festival of Passover. The Yizkor is a form of connecting to our loss four times a year at the three major holiday festivals and Yom Kippur. In order to show a completion to our morning, we should find some consolation in the thought that we are, each of us, an essential link in the endless chain of life in the faith of Jews that begins with the act of memorial through the Yizkor prayer. Tuesday is a chance for all Jews to step forward from that moment of sadness and embrace our loved one by the great honor of prayer and the concept of memory that is said in the words of the Kaddish.
I have so many thoughts about my dad and the man he was and wish I could have spoken more to him about these ideas. He had been sick for many years but he always seemed immortal to me. He was a brilliant doctor but sometimes he revealed his fear about the world he could not understand. When he graduated high school in 1959 he was shocked to find out that he had been rejected from Cornell University because of an age old ban on Jews that sadly prevented many people with merit from finding their true potential.
He never spoke of that injustice, but instead he focused on his great accomplishments at Brandeis University, being the first person from the state of Arizona to attend this exciting new college. My father never liked to focus on the past but always saw the world before him whether it was science and medicine, the career he chose, or religion which had become my interest.
There are so many loving stories I could tell of my father but I also recognize that he was not perfect. For much of my young adult life I often lashed out at him as many sons do to their fathers as they grow independent.
Now I am also a father of a son and it saddens me that he will never know the man who had such a major influence on my life, who in a sense made me that man I am today. I look at my son, Ari, and wonder if I will be like my father was to me, will he also grow up admiring me, than resenting me for my many imperfections and hopefully, someday, forgiving me for those imperfections just as I had forgiven my dad. Now that he is gone I realize that I am just as imperfect as he was but I don’t know if I could ever be as good a man as he.
When we lose a parent we never remember the many angry words of the past, only the kind words that hopefully represents the goodness of who they were. That is the ideal of the Kaddish prayer, to sanctify God’s name in the memory of the person who gave you that gift of life. The Kaddish prayer never speaks of death, only life and the love we have of God. I realize now that my father is gone that I never said I love you enough to him, and he to me.
Maybe this is part of growing up and becoming a man and thus the chain continues with the next generation, but on Yizkor we get the chance to not only say ‘I love you’ again to our departed loved ones, we show it by honoring their memory with prayer in the Yizkor memorial service.
May our memories remain eternal to those we love.
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz is the spiritual leader Beth Judah Temple in Wildwood. He welcomes your comments at dvjewish@rof.net