Yizkor 5758

Gut Shabbos, Gut Yom Tov, G’mar chatima tova!

Last week I mentioned Professor Liviu Librescu who died this past year while protecting his students But a famous Jew who did not make it into my Rosh HaShana sermon – and perhaps into no Rosh Hashana sermon - was the unforgettable Leona Helmsley, the hotel baroness who married billionare Harry Helmsly. Now is not the time to debate her life; may she rest in peace. But I did find something fascinating and Jewishly significant in her will, regarding money bequeathed to of her two grandsons, the children of her only son, Jay Panzirer.
Each grandson got a trust of five million, with a caveat: To receive money from the trusts, the grandsons were required to visit the grave of their father each year. The will states “If DAVID or WALTER fails to visit the grave [of their father] during any calendar year, the separate trust established for his benefit shall be terminated at the end of such calendar year,” as though the grandson “had then died”.
“It’s quite unusual,” said Jonathan J. Rikoon, chairman of trusts and estates. “The forfeiture for failure to visit the grave of the predeceased son is very unusual, but the circumstances are unusual.” In fact, quite sad: Her son died when he was just 42, and his mother, Leona, was devastated.

Well Leona was also one tough woman, and, as would be expected, she left a tough will. But she is right about the custom to visit the grave of a deceased – it is well established in Judaism. To tell you the truth, I feel guilty that it has been more than a calendar year since I have visited my own parents, who are buried in Boston – just feet from Rav Soloveitchik… Rachel would love for me to go, but I always prefer to visit the living – my brother and his family in Boston or my other relatives or Rachel’s relatives or even close friends – rather than visit those whom I love so much, but who are in heaven, not residing in the graveyard anymore. But still, there is the minhag. In fact, as a teenager, I worked as a “maleh man” helping people say the Kel Maleh Rachamim prayers over the dead in that same cemetery where my parents are burried, prayers that people said yearly as they visited their loved one’s graves.

I still rationalize that my parents are living in heaven and not at the Beth El cemetery in Boston; but there is something concrete about a visit to a grave, with its rootedness in reality, in things we can touch and feel. It makes this custom compelling and important.

I have wanted to bring my children, especially Shayna and Cara – ages 6 and 4 – to see where their Grandma Carolyn and Grandpa George are buried. It is difficult to describe to the kids where my parents or Rachel’s mother is, or how or where they exist. But despite our difficulties, I am fascinated by how real they are for the kids. When we think of death, we think of someone leaving the scene, leaving reality. Children seem to know intuitively, that you don’t just disappear.

In fact, when I was talking about books my mother enjoyed reading, Cara remarked, “And she will again enjoy reading them when she comes back.” I had talked to her about t’chiyat haMeitim, about the resurrection of the dead, and the eventual return of Grandma Carolyn made perfect sense to her. And why shouldn’t it? There is so much comfort in believing those we loved so much, or those we admired so much, are not really gone, and even if they are temporarily gone, they will come back.

For some, resurrection is a way of dealing with the injustice in this world of someone so beloved, so precious, being taken away from us before their time, before they could enjoy the life they deserved. I think this a frustration we all share. I just can’t forget about Dr. David Applebaum and his daughter, Nava, blown up by terrorists in Café Hillel, the night before she was getting married.
Rabbi Richard Sarason writes that the Book of Daniel, from the period of the Maccabean wars (167-163 B.C.E.), is bothered by the tragedy of those righteous martyrs who fought for Judean victory against the Syrians but did not live to experience its fruits. The solution? “At the time of the end . . .many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). This may be the earliest explicit mention in Jewish literature of t’chiyat Hameitim, of the resurrection of the dead.
But I don’t think Cara believes that her namesake, Grandma Carolyn, will return because it provides a solution for unfair death in this world, which the Book of Daniel seems to imply. Actually, the theodicy rationale of the t’chiyat Hameitim, the resurrection, believing that people come back to life to make it all better, is even rejected by the Talmud according to our great thinker, Maimonides. For us, in the post Holocaust era, how could we ever say that the resurrection of all our brothers and sisters who were murdered by the Nazis or their accomplices will make up for the horrors of the Holocaust?

In fact, a careful read of the rulings of the Talmud demonstrates that t’chiyat Hameitim, resurrection of the dead, is in no way a whitewash for God’s justice: It states in Sanhedrin 91b that the dead will be “resurrected with their blemishes” Bereishit Rabbah states that: "Just as a person departs, he will return. If he departed blind, he will return blind...” Meaning that resurrection does not put aside all the pain and sadness experienced before our loved ones, or our martyrs, died. As Rabbi Yaakov Haber points out, the Rambam believes that the resurrection is only temporary – people will return physically after being dead, and then will die again. Resurrection is not identified with the world of reward.

Perhaps Cara accepts resurrection of the dead so easily because she understands life in a different way than a 21st century adult does – and closer to the way the Torah does. Professor Jon Levenson explores the origins of the Jewish doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, of t’chiyat Hameitim, in his book which came out this past year, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life. He writes, “In the Hebrew Bible, the people are embedded in communal structures, especially the structures of family, in ways that … are so foreign to the individualism of the modern West…” In fact, Levenson names the sixth chapter of his book, “Individual Mortality and Familial Resurrection.” He argues that while the individual inevitably falls victim to death, it is the family that provides for resurrection, and, immortality. In the Bible, resurrection comes about all the time through the biblical promises to Israel, right from God’s promise of the Land and the Nation to Avraham. Levenson writes that it is “the dominance of liberalism and Protestantism … in biblical studies over the past few centuries” that makes us forget that “salvation [- and resurrection - ] in the Hebrew Bible is…the restoration of the natural family that is the Jewish people.”

Levenson is arguing that resurrection is natural when individuals are not atomized, broken up, but are part of a family; if they are part of Am Yisrael, they do not leave this world permanently. They are constantly being brought back to life by – us – by the family. And to Levenson, as opposed to many other “Protestantized” scholars, the Torah and Tanach are all about resurrection because they are all about the Family of Israel and our Peoplehood. The rabbinic view of Resurrection of the Dead may emphasize the power of God to perform miracles, or to make everything right, and we do believe this: God is just! God is all powerful! But from the Torah the Resurrection is all about us, as a people, as a family, remembering and living in order to make those who have left our world live again.

Yes, the person who is disconnected from Am Yisrael, and from Eretz Yisrael for that matter, and refuses to share in the destiny of the Jewish people, that person may not have anyone to bring them back to life. Everyone needs family or friends or the destiny of the Jewish people for t’chiyat Hameitim. Leona Helmsly, by her demand that her grandsons visit her son, in a sad way understood this.

Every time someone in Jerusalem walks by Café Hillel, or goes in for coffee, the Applebaums, who were so cruelly taken from us, are resurrected. The Applebaums gave their lives for Israel, and they are resurrected through the life of Israel.

Those whom we love or revere are alive in our tears; they are alive in our laughter. Rachel has a custom on her mother’s Yarzeit to get her nails done: She can see her mother getting nachas because that is what her mother did for a treat – and that is what she would want Rachel to do when remembering her. I try to watch old episodes of Colombo which my mother a”h loved.

The individuals we remember are alive in the mitzvot and customs that we perform. They are alive in the political positions we take or avoid. Whenever I see an article about dinosaurs really being birds and not reptiles, I remember my father arguing for that position when everyone else thought he was crazy.

Those who have left us come back to life when we connect with the promises made to the Family of Israel – by connecting to our community, to our shul, or to our schools, and ultimately to the Land of the Promise –to Israel. This summer I had one of the most moving experiences in my life when I stood on the tarmac of the old Terminal 1 of Ben Gurion Airport with hundreds of others to welcome my best friend and his family and 200 other people as they made aliya. Nefesh B’nefesh has resurrected the old terminal which all of us who have visited Israel remember. And like in the old days, years ago, the plane landed and the passengers got into those crowded buses, and bus after bus came up to us with new immigrants – from… New York. As my friend and his family came off the third bus, I was balling. I felt like I was greeting immigrants from Yemen and Iraq and Ethiopia to the land promised to our family, to the family of Israel. Here was a real resurrection of Abraham and Sarah and their children and children’s children. This resurrection was real and joyous. Not like the sad request of a hotel baroness to her grandchildren to visit a grave every year. Like Leona Helmsley’s son, my best friend’s father died young, when Mark was not yet a Bar Mitzvah, and he and his younger brother were alone with his mother until she remarried. I know little of my friend’s father, alav HaShalom; except that it was a tragic early end to a promising life. But on the tarmac at Ben Gurion, I stood greeting my friend with his brother who had made aliya ten years ago, and I realized that Mark’s father had been brought back to life: his two children and all his grandchildren were living out our People’s dream of living in Israel. Mark and Jonathan were resurrecting their father, a”h! He was brought back by his sons to be part of the eternal destiny of the Jewish people.
On Yom Kippur we have to connect our individual lives with our community, with the family of Israel. We declared last night that we want to daven with everyone – im ha’avaryanim – bring the sinners in – let us all be part of Family Israel. “Venislach lechol adat B’nai Yisrael…” God will forgive the whole people of Israel. On Yom HaKippurim we walk not as individuals, but as a people.

And by coming together as a people with a united destiny, we meet the challenge of Un’taneh Tokef head on: There the image is all about God’s power, and God judging the individual – kivnei maron – as sheep, one by one. God will determine who will live and who will die, and what kind of a life they will be given. But we, as a collective, connect to those who have left our world, either by our connection to Yiddishkeit, or Torah, or Israel or our community, or our own families, we have to be the ones who resurrect those who pass on in Netaneh Tokef, and make them once again real in our world.

On this Yom Kippur day, a day given to the People of Israel to cherish as a family, and at this moment of remembering those who have left us, we have to believe in resurrection not just as a metaphor but as a reality, something that we make happen, as part of our own existence.
And as we face a scary world around us – the world of the Netane Tokef, the world of losing those so dear to us and to our People, we ask God to remember and to shelter our departed ones; and we ask each other to bring them to life again through the family of Israel, through the great mission of the Jewish people, through our shared eternal heritage of the Land of Israel, and through our own lives with which we honor them.
Ani ma’amin – I believe we can do it when cry together and daven together, one unending, enduring Family of Israel.