Yom Kippur Yizkor

Rabbi Michael Friedland
Yizkor Yom Kippur 2008

This year Yizkor has a very different resonance for me.  It is the first time I have had to actually recite it myself.
In the weeks following my father’s passing my family, mostly my brother and mother, had to engage in the ritual that all of you who have lost parents or close family and friends have had to undergo.  It is the cleaning out of personal affects from desks, closets and offices.  It is an arduous task, remarkable in seeing how much detritus a person can accumulate in the course of a lifetime. 
What is hard is not just the physical cleaning out of material and not even the emotional toll.  Just the energy of trying to decide what is necessary to keep saps one.  My father, who had an accounting degree and served as executor for many friends’ family trusts, kept files of every trust for over 30 years.  He had files from his work on the synagogue board for decades.  And he kept letters, hundreds of letters.  Now this could have been a goldmine for family history.  But my father as I have mentioned before was not the kind of person who expressed feelings or personal thoughts and opinions other than when absolutely needed.  So these were letters he sent from his office, we had the carbon copies along the lines of “thanks for helping us out on our trip” or “happy birthday, Sid”.  He kept letters that others sent to him as well.  Some were understandably sentimental – Happy father day cards from me and my brother when we were little.  But there were so many other letters he kept, letters from friends and business acquaintances just keeping in touch. 
What I found interesting was my response to such letters.  On the one hand, it was gratifying.  My dad was a quiet person but so many people adored him and appreciated him and it came through the letters.  It made me feel great to know how much he was beloved.  But a second reaction was “who are these people?”  “I never heard of them”  My mom knew some but some must have been people he knew through work.  Where were they now? 
And as I thought about how much of my father’s life I could never really know, I wondered about how much of my life, my interactions, my acquaintances, my thoughts, my ambitions and desires I will take to the grave with me.  And the proper response to this is not – I must write down my life story!  Because that is fool’s gold.  Even the most written about figures in history, no one can know everything about them.  We just cannot remember or know everything.
And so it at moments like this we concede that no one person can ever know us completely only God.  Only God can truly know each one of us.  It is only God who is aware of all my feelings, all my doubts, all my interactions, all kindnesses all my failures.  And there is comfort in knowing that all is known and that “our deeds do not disappear into the black hole of time but are recorded somewhere and judged.” (Havel)
And yet we do remember.  We remember our experiences and the characteristics of our loved ones, both the positive and the negative, but as time goes by I think the positive stands out almost exclusively.  We remember the contours of our relationships with our loved ones.  But we recognize we cannot remember everything nor do our memories recreate the whole person.  For we are limited.
That is what Yizkor is about.  It allows us to remember the impact that these special important people have made on us.  But also recognizes that while our memories are contained, in the Holy One’s eternal memory all are always alive and complete.
It is with that acknowledgement in mind that we now turn to our Yizkor service.  Let us take moments to ourselves to remember our loved ones and to appreciate that whatever we may have forgotten about them is not truly forgotten.