Every year, just before Thanksgiving, the president of the United States pardons a turkey. It is usually covered by the Today Show and other news media outlets, and I smile. It is a sweet tradition…

It is a sweet tradition but it is about serious stuff.  It is about pardoning, sparing the turkey’s life. In this country only the President has the authority to do so. He is the highest authority in the land.

We used to do that too. On Yom Kippur, the high priest would select two goats, one would be for the Lord and the other for Azazel. In the Mishnah (Yoma 39a), we learn more: two goats were procured, similar in respect of appearance, height, cost, and time of selection. Having one of these on his right and the other on his left, the high priest, who was assisted in this rite by two subordinates, put both his hands into a wooden case, and took out two labels, one inscribed “for Yahweh” and the other “for absolute removal” (or “for Azazel”). The high priest then laid his hands with the labels upon the two goats and said, “A sin-offering to Adonai” (thus speaking the ineffable name of G-d); and the two men accompanying him would reply, “Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.” He then fastened a scarlet woolen thread to the head of the goat “for Azazel”; and laying his hands upon it again, recited the following confession of sin and prayer for forgiveness: “O Lord, I have acted iniquitously, trespassed, sinned before You: I, my household, and the sons of Aaron Your holy ones. O Lord, forgive the iniquities, transgressions, and sins that I, my household, and Aaron’s children, Your holy people, committed before You, as is written in the law of Moses, Your servant, ‘for on this day God will forgive you, to cleanse you from all your sins before the Lord; you shall be clean.'”

This became the central part of the Avodah service. One the head of one goat we would place all the sins and send it out into the wilderness. We would spare the life of a goat, the very word scapegoat came from this very ritual designed for this very day of Yom Kippur.

Once a year on Yom Kippur the High Priest, the Kohen Hagadol would enter the Holy of Holies and proclaim the divine name. We know that name as Adonai. Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanun. We know how to spell it, Yud, Hay, Vuv, Hay. But we do not how to say it. Adonai is not it. Jehovah is not it. Yahweh is not it. Only the High Priest knew how to utter this most holy of holy names. Only one time a year, on Yom Kippur, on this very day did he dare to utter this most holy of holy names in the most holy of holies on the Temple mount in Jerusalem, the most holy of holy places.

This ceremony was the most anticipated part of the Yom Kippur service and the High Priest would prepare for weeks, practicing that Ineffable Name. It was a moment of real dread. If he did it wrong, he could die. If there was just one sin he had not atoned for he could die. In fact, the people would tie a red sash on him in case they would need to pull him back out.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor wrote a book from the point of view of the Kohen Hagadol,
“Avodah A Yom Kippur Story”. While it may sounds like a Dr. Seuss book with its rhyming scheme and rhythm, it is really quite deep. Listen: “The work I was trained for, well it had me quite scared. My family, my People, all watched me prepare…for this one special place, for this one special time, for the most special Word from one lonely voice…mine.” After the Kohen Hagadol had finished his ritual he says, “We know that we matter. We know we’ve survived a difficult year, as each one is in turn.”

Why does this ritual still matter? Why do we still read about it, year after year? Why, after much discussion here with Paul, with the ritual committee and at a Chicago Board of Rabbis Meeting, can I not quite throw it out?

While this ritual may seem ancient, there is a sense that is really important. Since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, Jews have wondered how we can achieve atonement without the Holy of Holies. We talk about our homes being a mikdash me’at, a little sanctuary, and the husband (always the husband!) being the high priest. When we “make Shabbat”, light the candles, say Kiddush over wine, bless the bread, we are imitating the ritual done in the Holy Temple, our homes become our temple. Our actions of linked to our collective memory. We say Kiddush to remember both Creation and the Exodus from Egypt. We eat challah to remember the challah in the Bible. All of our festivals remind us of other events that have taken place before.

In the Talmud, Sukkah 49z, two rabbis are lamenting the destruction of the Temple. Once, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was walking with his disciple, Rabbi Yehoshua, near Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple. Rabbi Y’hoshua looked at the Temple ruins and said “Alas for us!! The place that atoned for the sins of the people Israel lies in ruins!” Then Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai spoke to him these words of comfort: “Be not grieved, my son. There is another equally meritorious way of gaining ritual atonement, even though the Temple is destroyed. We can still gain ritual atonement through deeds of loving-kindness. For it is written ‘Lovingkindness I desire, not sacrifice.'” (Hosea 6:6)

So we can still repent by doing acts of love and kindness. That is true of the Bar Mitzvah project goat rescue and that is true of what you have done that here today. Your bringing can food to fulfill Isaiah’s vision of what a fast is, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, free the fettered, are acts of love and kindness. That is the fast that Isaiah says G-d desires. So w have met our obligation for atonement. As they would say in the Talmud you are yotzei, fulfilled. This brings us comfort and hope. And since you are all fulfilled, you can do home now.

The Avodah service is still a mysterious concept to us today. Can we make any sense of it? Most of us don’t have contact any more with goats. Now I know that recently one congregational family bought a goat for a Bar Mitzvah project. I am told that the cost of a goat, two zuzim, is about $75 plus food. And I understand that this goat will be dedicated, set aside, spared, in order to help children with disabilities. It is, in fact a goat, for Adonai, even if it came with the name Obama. It is a way to make this concept of goats and turkeys real. Or you can go online and buy a goat from Heifer International. For about $100 that goat will be given to a family in a third world country as part of  its microfinancing programs. That goat will help an impoverished family by giving it milk, some for them, and some to sell in the marketplace. That goat too will be spared. These maybe modern examples of avodah, service, work, offering of your heart.  Or perhaps the Jews who act out kaparah, the swinging of a chicken over their head on the eve of Yom Kippur, as a sin offering, is a visceral vestige of this ancient rite.

Yet even though you have met your obligation you are still sitting here. Why? Simon Jacobson describes Yom Kippur as entering your own personal holy of holies. This is the inner sanctum. Everything had to be pure.  If the High Priest had not atoned for even one sin he could die. How does one prepare for such an awesome task? How does one become pure?

Echoing the high priest’s own preparation, we have been working on it for weeks. The chairs were set up, books put out, linens changed to white, silver polished, flowers ordered. Everything needs to be just so. Books read and reread, sermons written and rewritten, Hebrew practiced, bimah rehearsals scheduled. For the high priest and for me, part of the preparation involves immersing in the mikveh. This week I went to the mikveh, preparing to do Divine Service. I have gone to the mikveh any number of times before Yom Kippur. It is a ritual that resonates with me deeply. On the way there this time it was not clear to me why I was going. What was I expecting from this experience this year? I called my chevruta partner in New York. She said I would know. On the way there I made a wrong turn and got lost. A metaphor perhaps. Once I got finally got there (only 5 minutes late!), I began to understand. I knew already that the drive time gave me a chance to think, to prepare. It was a personal act as opposed to the communal leading I would do. First me, then my household, then all of us together. What does mikveh have to do with any of this? Mikveh offers hope that we will be pure, embraced in the womb and coming out reborn, cleansed of our sin.  It is something we go into and come out of, and back into, like the Holy of Holies.

As Jacobson said, “Today we have no High Priest and no Temple. But the Holy of Holies still exists—in the depths of our own soul. On Yom Kippur we attempt to reach the purest part of our selves and to connect with G-d there. We might not be able to stay in that pure place for a long time. It might be only for a few minutes. But as we know the most special experiences last only a moment. We prepare for these most special times for hours, years, even decades, and the effort of the preparation is well worth that split second”.

Part of the function then of this ritual today is retelling the story since we don’t actually do Seder Avodah any more. This is about memory. We tell the story again and again so we remember, so we can reconnect, in the hope that it will happen to us as well, that we will be able to enter that very special place, that holy of holies, that Makom Hakadosh, even if it is only for an instant.

Makom is another name for G-d.  Rabbi David Paskin wrote a song after his daughter Liat died of a brain tumor before her second birthday. He explains how we comfort a mourner saying “Hamakom yenachem etchem. May The Place comfort you.” He asks the question, why The Place. Why use that name for G-d? Why not call G-d, The Compassionate One, the Merciful One, the Comforting One? Why call G-d at that moment the Place. He discovered that it is because when you lose a loved one, all you have left is a space, a place, an emptiness. Now we try to rush into to fill that emptiness. We are scared of it. We organize shiva minyans, bring deli platters, anything to fill that space, that place. I know, when Liat died I was the one to buy the deli platter! What the comforters are saying is may that space that hurts so damn much comfort you. May you learn to live with that space. “May the One who fills our space, give us hope and give us strength. In our silence may we hear the voice of G-d. HaMakom yenachem etchem.”

We may not have the Holy of Holies anymore, but we can still go into our own personal holy of holies. And we come back into it and come back out of it. We can still proclaim, as did the High Priest one time a year, just like today, “Baruch shem kavod, malchuto l’olam va’ed, May the Name, however we pronounce it, be praised for ever and ever.” As Creditor says in the name of the Kohen Hagadol, “And while the this time the voice that was needed was mine, perhaps the next time that one voice will be yours… The challenge that day is to walk through your door…so come. Hold my hand. Stand with me. Do your part.  Close your eyes. For to dream all you need is your heart.”

Sometimes it is hard to dream. Sometimes we feel all alone. Sometimes we are sad, so Creditor is reassuring when he says, “For to dream all you need is your heart.” We are about to enter the part of the service that is about remembering. Yizkor. Yizkor Elohim, May G-d remember. May G-d remember our loved ones the central prayer of Yizkor says. I always thought it was about us remembering our loved ones, our parents, our sisters and brothers, our children, other relatives and friends. Why do we need to ask G-d to remember our loved ones? Doesn’t G-d already know?

Our prayer also includes a promise of giving charity in the names of the persons we are remembering. Perhaps this another one of those acts of lovingkindness. Or perhaps it is because our tradition teaches that even our dead need atonement on this Yom Kippur day. That this giving of tzedakah helps avert the severe decree. That we are somehow coming before G-d with a gift, an offering, our own mincha offering, our own avodah, in the names of our relatives.

Yizkor is a newer liturgy, probably from the time of the Crusades when entire Jewish communities were being wiped out and it was important to remember that we survived and to remember the names of those who did not. Yizkor is short. The central part is a single paragraph beginning Yizkor elohim, May G-d remember. Because of my pledge of tzedakah may G-d remember. May their souls be bound up in the “bond of life,” together with the souls of all our ancestors and all the righteous people in the Garden of Eden. May they be sheltered in the divine wings of the shechinah, in peace.” Our acts of tzedakah will contribute to redeeming a soul.

We have to redeem our parents’ souls? Why? Memory is a very powerful thing. We remember our parents fondly. We are even nostalgic about them. We may be nostalgic about the Holy Temple and we weren’t even there. But sometimes, our parents did not quite finish their own repentance, their own teshuva. That is part of the reason for saying Kaddish for 11 months for a parent, to redeem their souls and make their teshuva complete. To heal our own relationships with them. 11 months and not 12 because we wouldn’t want anyone to assume that our own parents had that much teshuva to do. It is our obligation as children to heal those wounds. That is how we break the chain in the full list of the 13 Attributes, G-d forgives sin, transgression and iniquity, granting pardon, and visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation.’ This very verse is the central part of our high holiday liturgy, except the Talmudic rabbis truncated the verse in the liturgy. We don’t think that the sins of our ancestors are visited on the third and fourth generation. We are only held accountable for our own actions. Thank G-d.

Yet Yizkor exists. We want G-d to remember our parents for good. We implore G-d to do so. We even promise tzedakah on their behalf. Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, the head of the Chicago Rabbinical Council, the Orthodox rabbinical court and the people who bring you Kosher certification, including Coca Cola, taught this very important lesson at a recent Chicago Board of Rabbis meeting. Why does yizkor say “Avi mori, my father, my teacher”, why not my beloved father? Because our parents are our first teachers.

However, he added, some parents are well meaning, well intentioned but not practical. A light bulb went off for me. They may have lots of book smarts but don’t know how to raise children. They maybe distracted. Their focus maybe on making money and not on spending time with their families. Perhaps they had very high standards and they didn’t want praise to go to your head. Perhaps they could never say that they loved you or that they were proud of you. For that they should atone. For that we should forgive them. Perhaps they were even worse and actually inflicted abuse, emotional, physical, sexual. If that is the case, then Yizkor can be painful. Maybe even impossibly difficult. Forgiveness may seem impossible. But we need to remember their sins, so that we can eventually over time forgive, and not repeat the sins in the third and fourth generation. This then becomes the purpose of Yizkor, to remember the good and the ugly. To allow our relationships to heal so that G-d, through our prayer and our charity will take note of and remember our ancestors.

I was moved by a quote of Vladimir Jankelvitch, in his book Forgiveness. Le Pardon in case any of you want to tackle it in French. This Russian Jew living in France was asked to write about forgiveness as it related to France reconciling with Germany in 1967. He said, “Forgiveness undoes the last shackles that tie us down to the past, draw us backward and hold us down…Nothing could be more evident: in order to forgive, it is necessary to remember.” At first I rebelled against this quote. I even disputed it at the meeting. Having worked on domestic violence hotlines, I know that some people are not ready to forgive. It can be even dangerous. I know what the statistics are therefore I am sure that there is more than one person sitting here who has wrestled with these very issues. I did not want to be the one to stand up here and say, “You have to forgive.” No victim needs added guilt because they cannot forgive.

So often in popular culture, we are told that we must forgive, that forgiving is forgetting. Nothing could be further from the truth in Jewish thinking. In order to forgive we need to remember. That is part of the function of Yizkor. Forgiving happens slowly over time. Listen to the language carefully, “Forgiveness undoes the LAST shackles.” It is not done all at once and we are done. It is more like a spiral staircase bringing us ever closer.

Many yizkor services include this reading from Abraham Shlonsky’s A Vow: “I have taken an oath: To remember it all,
to remember, not once to forget!
Forget not one thing to the last generation
when degradation shall cease,
to the last, to its ending,
when the rod of instruction
shall have come to conclusion.
An oath: Not in vain passed over
the night of the terror.
An oath: No morning shall see me at flesh-pots again
An oath: Lest from this we learned nothing.”

Most of us sitting here today were not in the Holocaust. We certainly cannot remember the Crusades or the Plague. We were not there when Rabbi Akiva were tortured and yet we need to remember too. Our history as Jews and our own personal sadnesses, traumas and tragedies.  Memory of even the most painful things teaches us something. That is the first step in forgiveness, in teshuvah. We have to remember in order to heal. People who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Sometimes it is impossible to forgive.

Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book, How Good Do We Have to Be, a New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness, talks about the role of memory, funerals and yizkor. If you have not read this book, I urge you to do so. It is one that I find I return to again and again in my own life, particularly at this time of the year. Kushner tells one of his congregants that the father who cannot say “I love you” is an emotionally constricted man, not that the son was not loveable. He counsels a woman whose father is dying of cancer who says that she hates her father and doesn’t want to go to the funeral, because he left her family when she was nine and then refused to go her wedding unless he walked her down the aisle. “First of all, if you go the funeral and decide afterward that you made a mistake, that you would have been better off not going, that is just a mistake and you will get over it quickly enough. But if you stay away from the funeral and afterward realize you should have done, I’m afraid you will carry the burden of guilt much longer. But more importantly, this is your opportunity to mourn the father you never had.”

Kushner concludes his book with part of his own Yom Kippur sermon given the year after his son died. He knew he had to have answers for himself and his whole congregation. He came to the conclusion after his year of grief, that G-d does not ask us to be perfect or to never make a mistake. G-d wants us to be whole. That is what we do on Yom Kippur. That is the function of both the Avodah service and the Yizkor service. They are helping us in our imperfection, in our sin, in our brokenness, in our sadness, to become whole.

That is what the Day of Atonement means, to be at one, at peace, with whatever hand life has dealt you. It may require hard work. To be whole before G-d, to be one with G-d, means to stand before G-d, acutely aware of our faults but also aware of our virtues. To do a heshbon hanefesh, an accounting of our souls, both the Vidui alef bet version of sins and our own positive heshbons that we did at Selichot. To hear the message of our acceptability, even if we are not perfect, especially if we are not perfect. We will not be rejected for not being perfect. To be ourselves, as we talked about last night, not Moses, and not Zusiya, just ourselves, good enough. At a recent Weight Watchers meeting they taught a similar thing. We are all worthy, capable, active, healthy.

Remember, as Kushner tell us, that life is not a trap set by G-d so that we can be condemned for failing. Life is not a spelling bee, where you make one mistake and you are out. Life is more like a baseball season. Even the best teams lose 1/3 of their games, and even the worst teams have days of brilliance over the long season. Even the Cubs and the White Sox, especially the White Sox and the Cubs.  Our parents may not have been perfect either. But they were good enough. They brought us into this world and we are here today to remember them and to remind G-d to remember them.

Part of yizkor then is to provide the space to mourn the relationship you did not have the opportunity to mourn. Maybe your parent died when you were still a child and you miss them. You long for them to see your own children and grandchildren. Maybe you had a child who died and you mourn the possibilities of what that life might have had. Maybe you had a relationship that withered or a spouse who died and you miss the quiet moments and the simple dinners. Maybe you had a sibling who died and you miss basketball games or family dinners. Maybe you wish you could just pick up the phone and call.

We want our loved ones to have mattered. I am reminded of two songs, Empty Chairs at Empty Tables from Les Mis.

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.
There’s a pain goes on and on.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone.

Here they talked of revolution.
Here it was they lit the flame.
Here they sang about tomorrow
And tomorrow never came.

 From the table in the corner
They could see a world reborn
And they rose with voices ringing
And I can hear them now!

The very words that they had sung
Became their last communion
On this lonely barricade at dawn.

 Oh my friends, my friends forgive me
That I live and you are gone.
There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.
There’s a pain goes on and on.

Phantom faces at the windows.
Phantom shadows on the floor.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more.

 Oh my friends, my friends, don’t ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will sing no more

 

Look around this room. There are people who were here last year who are not here now. Pearle Brody, Paul Maring, Don Lesser. Parents. Aunts and Uncles. Grandparents. Even a baby yet unborn. We remember them. They enriched all of us and our community. Their lives had meaning. If they were here they might use Peter, Paul and Mary’s words,

Carry on my sweet survivor
Carry on my lonely friends
Don’t give up on the dream and don’t you let it end!

Yizkor is that phone call. Yizkor is that empty chair. Yizkor is remembering the dream and carrying on. Yizkor is that holy of holies, that makom kadosh, that holy place, that we can go into and out of, even if as David Paskin said, it hurts so damn much. Yizkor is part of what makes us whole and at one. Yizkor heals.

Using Kushner’s words, “Ultimately, in the end, if we are brave enough to love, if we are strong enough to forgive, if we are generous enough to rejoice in another’s happiness, and if we are wise enough to know that there is enough love to go around for us all, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other living creature will know.” This then, is the function of Yizkor, to implore G-d to remember while we do the same as we sit meditating on it. This then is the power and the function of memory. To help us to lead a meaningful life, even when some of the circumstances are painful, especially when the circumstances are painful. Then we can enter the Holy of Holies like the High Priest and come back out again. Then we enter Paradise, Gan Eden, the world to come.

We continue with Yizkor.