Yizkor 5782 Rabbi Michael Tevya Cohen
In the Ark of the sanctuary at Midtown Park we house a Torah (MST#949) that survived the Holocaust. This morning, my colleague Rabbi Holly Cohn read from this venerable scroll, and we will have the opportunity to visit and see it this fall. The scripture of our people, blesses our efforts to create a thriving Jewish senior community here in Dallas. Not so long ago, this and over fifteen hundred other scrolls were gathered from the Jewish Communities of Czecheslovakia. The communities sent their Torah scrolls and other ritual items to a Central Jewish Museum in Prague that offered dubious safety for their treasures in the face of Nazi occupation and the future they faced in 1942. These communities of our brethren were liquidated not long after this.
The treasures placed in that museum survived the Jews, were removed to a warehouse where they sat for 20 years. During the Soviet era in the early 60’s, someone working for the Czech government tried to sell them for western currency. A philanthropist purchased the Torahs and donated them to a group in London who created the Memorial Scrolls Trust. It’s that Trust to which we owe thanks for the redemption of these treasures and placing them with Legacy and other Jewish communities throughout the world.
When our Scholar in Residence, Rabbi Kevin Hale came in July, he brought with him one of these Scrolls which he had restored for us, and he also brought a recent book of photographs by Sheila Pallay of many of the communities in Czechoslovakia from which the Scrolls come. I invite you to look at these photographs in the book at the back of our sanctuary where it will remain for the coming months.
Most of these Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia are no more. But some of the buildings have been restored. Many are beautifully portrayed in Pallay’s pictures. There are glorious buildings, like the restored Great Synagogue of Plzen, with its two spires topped with onion domes. In Ceske Budejovice, Pallay photographed a beautiful park with a pond right across from the former synagogue, where families could have taken Shabbos strolls. The sanctuary of the Synagogue of Jicin, restored in 2008, has sky blue walls set off with white gold trimmed arches, and windows adorned with stained glass stars of David.
Pallay’s photographs beckon us to imagine we might have been part of those kehillot had we lived in that time and place. I imagine children running to and from Synagogue in Rakovnik, playing on the cobblestone streets that surround it. These photographs link us to the world of Jewish souls destroyed in the Holocaust, to generations of Jews before us.
In Libochovice, an impressive Beit Din Rabbinical Court before a towering Weeping Willow is reflected in what’s known as the “Jewish Pond”. The restored interior of the Hartmanice Synagogue, now a Museum, boasts gorgeous wooden roof beams and an interior balcony painted sky blue. These pictures convey the love and care of our people, who once made their homes in these places. The photographs Sheilah Pallay created for us tell us of that world, from which our Torah comes.
This ability to visualize the communities of Bohemia and Moravia, is in some ways like bringing our own loved ones we have lost, to our minds on this Yizkor. Remembering these souls who have passed from our lives, gives more meaning to those lives, and in turn, to our own. Yizkor, this service of remembrance, invites us to stop and consider those who paved the way for us, who illuminated our lives and impressed upon us the kind of people that we have become and are still becoming. Yizkor, invites us to think back upon the moments that are treasures in our own lives. Yizkor invites us to feel the connections that bind us across the generations, to realize that we could not be the people we are, but for the hands and hearts and minds that nurtured us along the way.
Photographs and memories have the power to transport us. Our hearts and minds can be opened to moments we shared with loved ones in our past. And that can be a scary thing, for many folks. Better to not open up too much, one may say, lest the feelings overwhelm us. But Yizkor is precisely an invitation to our deepest feelings, to return to and pursue some of our work of grief.
‘Why would I want to return to grief ?’, you may ask. Getting caught up in those feelings is the last thing you may want to do. There may be so much feeling, and it may be complex. Grief is like an untapped reservoir in our midst. And it can be scary. But knowing that we do this together, can offer important support to each individual in our community.
My sense, from years of working with grief as a chaplain, is that this reservoir is there for a purpose, and Jewish tradition brilliantly invites us to visit this place throughout each year, for a reason. Grief is one of, if not the main drivers of human maturity. Grief is the process by which we humans absorb and make emotional sense of who we have been, in relation to each person whom we grieve, because we humans define ourselves in context with the others in our lives. Therefore, the change of season when a loved one passes, whether it’s a parent, a spouse or even a child, upsets our definitions, upsets our landscape, disrupts the ground around this reservoir upon which we stand.
We have to reorient, to a world without our loved one. And it’s not uncommon for us to do just enough of this reorientation to find a new footing, and then carry on. But grief remains, and invites us to go further, to explore who we are, and go deeper into encounter with what matters most to us in this world, and how we can live each moment in a way most authentic to our true selves.
In that sense, our rendez-vous with the divine at Yom Kippur, and the theological concept of Teshuva - return to our self, fits with Yizkor like hand and glove. All of these concepts are working together to invite us to encounter our deepest self, to return to the soul work that is always there for us to revisit.
Grief work cannot be done in a day and cannot be completed on a schedule. The re-occurence of Yizkor dates in our calendar serve as markers, invitations to us to permit ourselves to return to doing this soul-work.
Psalm 30 tells us: “Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes in the morning.” This verse reassures us that we can look for the strength to face grief, if only we know that joy will return to us as well. The wisdom written in this Psalm is that there is no grief, without love. The challenge to each of us is, that the reverse holds true as well. There is no love, without grief. Just as these survivor Torah Scrolls each give life, meaning and joy again to communities like our own, so too, know that God, time, and love can heal our wounds. Let grief into our life, and life will again come into us, amidst our grief. It’s not that our grief disappears. But rather, life begins again, finds a way, and invites us to join it, even with our grief during our time in this world.
As we enter this time of remembrance, I invite you to open the doors of memory, let yourself encounter the grief and love within, and know that I too, am here to visit and talk with you in the coming weeks or months, whenever you are ready, and want some company on this part of our human journey. May you each be comforted by God’s love, and that of all those dear ones in your lives on this Yom Kippur, and on each of the days of your lives.
Yizkor - Sermon for Yom Kippur- 5782 Sept. 16 2021
Rabbi Michael Tevya Cohen
Legacy Senior Communities
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