YIZKOR Services - THE BITTER AND THE SWEET

We could come to this point in our Remembrance service, our Yizkor observance, and try to console ourselves with the truism that none of us gets out of this life alive. Although this may be true on a factual, biological level; it by no means accounts for the relational because we come to this juncture in our day with a flood of memories and a deluge of longings. Consolation does not come from rationalizing our human condition. Consolation comes, rather, from what we do with our grief.

I know that I come to Yizkor to remember…to remember, to surround myself with the memories of my loved ones and my friends. No matter that fate limits us all, I want to turn back time and visualize, especially, those moments which capture love and all that flows from its sweet and sustaining lessons. Realizing that I only have these few precious minutes that are sanctified within this liturgy, this point in this long day of prayer, I want to spend them reconnecting before I have let them go and move on.

It is this grasping and letting go. It is the joy and the sadness. It is the memory of the happiness of loving and being loved, and it is now the pain, the sting of separation and loss.

Just around the time of the First Lebanon War and the evacuation of the Israeli town of Yamit down at the northern tip of the Gaza Strip, in 1982, Naomi Shemer wrote a song that captured this essential balance that we both sense and participate in at Yizkor. If ever we ask ourselves, given the deep and shattering sorrow we feel at the loss of those we love, whether our loving was at all worth it? Shemer reminds us that this is part of the bargain that comprises our being alive. She wrote…Al Kol Eleh. “Keep all these safe, my Good God: the honey and the sting, the bitter and the sweet…. Shemer’s song realizes that life lived fully, inevitably is going to have highs and lows. It will flow with honey when we love with all our hearts and our love is reciprocated. There will also be times of sting and bitterness when we lose the ones we have loved along our life’s journey. That’s just the way it is. She asks that the entirety…the sweet and the bitter be sustained; for, she knows that it would be disingenuous and immature to ask only for the sweet. She understands that we shall all drink from the cup that contains both elements…and she prays for it! She prays for the circle of birth and death, for life and its goodness, and for death which is unavoidable if the world is to continue on in its cycles, and the agony it brings with it.

On the heels of his tribute to his father, Big Russ and Me, Tim Russert published the letters he received from so many just-plain-folks who read and were touched by his book, and who felt moved to tell of their fathers in what amounts to be touching and profoundly moving ways. As a whole, this book, Wisdom of Our Fathers, captures the essence of Yizkor. It is time dedicated in scribed stories to the memories, those life effecting, life-stirring memories that dwell within our hearts when we remember our loved ones at this hour.

We bring what we are made of to this service: flesh, bone, marrow, memories, spirit, deeds, hopes, dreams, and sorrows. The poet captures all this when she asks:

How close does the dragon’ spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

For our loved ones, time has run its course. For us, at this moment, we hold within our hands the honey and the sting. Let us pause to taste the sweet. Let us resolve to make something better of ourselves and of the world from our grief, our longings, and the sweetness of our memories.