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David Lerner

From Grief to Gravestones of Goodness: Yom Kippur Yizkor 5785

Photo credit: Wikipedia

On October 7th, Deborah Matais and her family were at their home in Kibbutz Holit. It was a Shabbat morning, with the added joy of the Shmini Atzeret and Simhat Torah festivals.

Suddenly, they awoke to the horrific sounds of a rocket barrage, unlike other frequent rocket attacks that have rained down on them and other Israeli kibbutzim, towns, and cities for the last 17 years since Hamas violently seized power from the Palestinian Authority. 

Photo credit: Wikipedia

And then, as in a nightmare, Hamas terrorists attacked and came into her kibbutz. The terrorists were trained and prepared to unleash horror. They broke into kibbutz members’ homes and safe rooms with explosives and set their houses on fire so that anyone who survived the initial onslaught would run out, and the terrorists would shoot them.

Deborah called her father, Ilan Troen, around 6:30 a.m. Dr. Troen is a well-known Israel Studies scholar who taught at Brandeis. I have heard him speak quite brilliantly about Israel and its history.

He is also a close friend and colleague of our member, Rachel Fish, whom I thank for sharing this narrative. Troen is now retired and lives in Omer, a suburb of Be’er Sheva, 30 minutes from his daughter’s kibbutz.

Deborah told her father that they could hear gunshots and people speaking Arabic outside the window of her home. She then reported broken glass… these were the last words he heard from her…

Then Deborah’s son, Rotem, Professor Troen’s grandson, called him and said: “They’re dead…”

His parents had been shot and killed, but they saved his life by lying on top of him. One of the bullets had gone through them and hit him. He was covered in his parents’ blood, and he was wounded.

Professor Troen and other relatives helped him through the excruciating hours as he waited for help through a family group chat because they did not want him to speak lest anyone outside the house hear him and realize that he had survived. 

Rotem survived after hiding for 12 hours. 

Rotem’s two sisters, Shir and Shakked, who were not home, lost their cell service in the chaos of that horrific day and found out about their parents’ deaths only in a six-word text message from Rotem, as he tried to preserve his battery while hiding: “Mom and Dad are dead. Sorry.”

Such loss and such grief and such love.

* * *

There are so many stories from October 7th. 

Stories of heroism like Deborah’s and her husband Shlomi’s giving their lives to save their son and of Hirsh Goldberg-Polin’s friend Aner Shapira tossing back seven grenades that Hamas terrorists had thrown into their packed bomb shelter until the eighth one took his life and part of Hirsh’s arm. 

Photo credit: Bring Hersh Home

And there are stories of tragic loss like Leora Fishman’s friend, Vivian Silver, who was a peace activist murdered by Hamas on that Shabbat Hashahor – the Black Shabbat of death.

But it’s not only about those who were murdered on that day. The grief has deepened as more hostages have been murdered, as was Hirsh. 

And there is no end in sight. We do not see leaders who can protect our people or have a vision for peace.

* * *

And now, we pause in the intensity of Yom Kippur to recite Yizkor

Amidst the awareness of the fragility of our lives, amidst all the asking for forgiveness, amidst the atonement, praying that God will grant us a clean slate for the new year, a new beginning, amidst a day with a clear vision a goal of introspection, of searching our souls, of healing our relationships, of beginning again, of looking toward the finale as evening descends, of hearing the shofar and celebrating with food and friends, amidst all of that, we stop and turn around.

We remember. 

On Yom Kippur, it occurs twice. 

We grieve twice.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

The first time will occur in a few minutes in the Yizkor Service. After the butchering of our people during the Crusades, the Yizkor service was created to help cope with the overwhelming grief of entire communities that were wiped out. It was a way to remember so many.

Yom Kippur invites us all to rehearse our own deaths, and as our entire community comes together, we recite Yizkor.

Over time, Yizkor expanded to become a service to remember our own loved ones as well as the Jewish martyrs.

An exercise in memorializing grief.

Later this afternoon, we will recite another service that was added to Yom Kippur: the Martyrology service, which was inserted into the Musaf Amidah after the Avodah service. 

Photo credit: Temple Emunah

In the Avodah service, we re-enact the service of the High Priest on Yom Kippur—this is when the Kohein Gadol would enter the Holy of Holies and recite God’s ineffable name, and all the people fully prostrated on the ground, reciting Barukh Shem Kvod Malkhuto L’olam Va’ed – Praised be God’s glorious name forever and ever. This is the same line we recite silently after the opening line of Shema throughout the year and today, we speak it out loud to recall that ritual.

After this reenactment of the peak of the holiness of this day, after this climax, we go back and remember the martyrs, the great rabbis who the Romans killed in the Second Century of the Common Era. 

Even amidst that intense moment, we pause to remember the centuries of losses. Or perhaps davka—specifically, because this is the most sacred moment—we return to remember them.

Such is the importance of memorializing grief.

* * *

As we gather today, we are just over a year after October 7th. Although the horrors continue, rockets rain down, Israelis were killed by Hezbollah missiles this week in Kiryat Shmoneh, terrorist attacks and the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and the frightening and potentially very serious war with Iran, we need to stop and remember.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

How do we memorialize amidst all of this?

We try. 

We owe it to our friends and family, our people, and even ourselves.

* * *

The Yizkor service contains two central pieces, and a third was added more recently: our private Yizkor prayers for each of our loved ones, which we recite silently, and the El Malei Rahamim—the Memorial Prayer. And in some communities, like ours, there is also the Mourner’s Kaddish—not the regular Kaddish that only mourners recite, but a unique and eerie communal recitation with no Amen.

I want to look at these moments to see how we can use them this year to memorialize our grief.

First, the Kaddish.

I will never forget the first time I led the Mourner’s Kaddish. It was the first of what would become thousands of times I recited it as a prayer leader or a rabbi and then as a mourner.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Thirty years ago, standing at the ruins of the Sobibor death camp close to the border with Ukraine, in the middle of nowhere, I gathered my group of 80. Ten staff members – mostly college students from the US and a couple of Israelis just out of the army, two Polish translators, and seventy 16 and 17-year-old USYers who had applied for the “privilege,” and I say privilege with all seriousness, all of us holding a memorial service at a place where almost no one ever came to remember those who were murdered. 

We prayed, and I recited the El Malei memorial prayer for the 250,000 Jews who were kidnapped from their homes, brought on trains to the middle of the forest, and gassed to death; their corpses burned into dust so fine that it laid in a memorial mound in front of us. 

I broke down under the weight of the sadness of the loss, eventually finishing the memorial prayer. 

And then I led the Kaddish. 

I was not the immediate mourner. 

I was not a descendant of anyone who was murdered there.

Neither was anyone in my group.

But we were still family. 

As Jews, we are responsible for protecting, helping, and remembering one another. 

That’s one of the ways we have survived thousands of years of hatred and persecution. 

We still remember to always hold out hope, contribute to society, and bring goodness in the face of evil.

* * *

It is such a strange prayer to recite after losing someone.

It is a prayer that praises God, or rather, as my cousin, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, points out, it is a prayer that asks for God’s name to be made great. After a loss, we do not feel God’s greatness, but we hope it will return. Yitgadal V’Yishtabah Shmei Rabbah – May God’s great name become magnified and sanctified.

Photo credit: Rabbi Elie Kaunfer (used with permission)

And that’s how a mourner feels, that God, God’s ideas and ideals, and the experience of the Divine are not so great after becoming a mourner – may God and what God represents be repaired, and may God become holy again.

Rabbi Kaunfer reinforces this idea by pointing out that the Kaddish does not contain God’s name: Yod-heh-vav-heh, Adonai – it just says in the Shmei Rabbah – His great name, but the actual name is never mentioned. 

This central line, the congregational response, is Y’hei Sh’mei Rabbah M’varakh L’alam Ul’almei Almaya – May [God’s] (His) great Name be blessed forever and for all eternity.”

Kaunfer writes, “This is a prayer that is acting out the reality we live in: a world in which God’s name is diminished.”

So, the Kaddish is kind of where I am right now, and maybe where you are as well—a bit lost with a diminished God among the losses.

* * *

The Memorial Prayer we will recite also contains a powerful teaching for this moment. The El Malei Rahamim refers to God as the One Who is full of mercy. The word rahamim – compassion is from the root rehem, the womb. 

Here, we need a mother’s love, the love we felt in the womb, bathed in the healing, protecting, amniotic fluid, the life-sustaining waters. 

That love is what we need as we ask that our loved ones rest in peace under the wings of the Shekhinah, the feminine, immanent aspect of the Divine.

The text continues: May their souls rest in the idyllic wonder of the place of Original Perfection—the Garden of Eden. May they be sheltered forever and bound up in the bond of life—existing in realms beyond and forever within our hearts and souls.

Today, we will recite a version of this prayer specifically for the victims of October 7th.

* * *

Beyond the eleven months of Kaddish and the Memorial Prayer are our personal Yizkor prayers. They are reminders of the finality of death.

Once we lose a loved one, they become added to our litany of losses.

We inscribe their memories into souls, remembering them during this time, and their names are literally inscribed in our Yizkor books.

The Yizkor prayer is different from the memorial prayer. It doesn’t ask only that God bind their souls in the bond of life, but it asks us to do something.

Here, we don’t just hold our grief, asking for our loved one to be lifted up, to protect their soul, but we commit ourselves to act.

We recite: “Hineni nodeiv tzedakah b’ad hazkarat nishmatam—I am here, and I pledge to give tzedakah to memorialize their souls.”

Photo credit: Temple Emunah

It’s so interesting—we take our grief, and as we memorialize our departed loved ones, we declare, “Hineni—I am here.” 

I am ready to respond to their death in a life-affirming manner. I will perpetuate their values and their ideals by contributing to making our world a better place.

“May I prove myself worthy of the many gifts they blessed me with.”

This is what we do. 

We make memorials of goodness.

* * *

And now, a year out from October 7th, we are ready to put up a matzeivah—a gravestone. 

We are pausing and marking a moment on the journey from death—along the winding, bumpy road of healing, remembering, and consoling, toward continuing our lives.

For me, this feels like a moment when we must try to put up a gravestone. 

A marker for ourselves and for future generations – even if we are still in the middle of this. 

The dead deserve this.

So, we take the year of Kaddish, with its last line asking for peace, and pledge to create more goodness. 

We take a diminished God, a broken world, and our fractured selves and bring them to this moment of Yizkor

We know that grief doesn’t take us somewhere unless we find a way to remember. 

So, we are invited to rebuild God, to restore the greatness of God as we say in the Kaddish, to bring forward the memories of the dead, to elevate their souls, and to recreate the goodness that should permeate the world.

Kaddish, Memory, Yizkor.

Grief to Gravestones of Goodness

* * *

Let me return to the Troen Family.

They focus on goodness as much as they can.

They lift up the positive stories like the Bedouin men from Rahat, a Bedouin city about 15 minutes away from the Troens. Those men told them about how they saved people from being massacred, how frightening it was, and how their commitment to other human beings and to life helped them overcome their fear. 

And, of course, there are also many times when they feel sad and realize how sad they are. 

And then it came time for the family to put up matzeivot – markers, tombstones. 

Intense conversations followed.

Burying Deborah and Shlomo in their kibbutz would have made the most sense.

But their community, Kibbutz Holit near the Gaza border, was out of the question. It was still enveloped in war.

The family wrestled with another question: what to write on their gravestones.

Troen said: “It was the children who decided that they would not put on their parents’ gravestones what some other people have done… ‘may God avenge their blood.’

“They wanted nothing of that.”

Instead, their three children inscribed the gravestones with musical notes: the opening bars of Brit Olam, or “Everlasting Covenant,” a classic Israeli love song that Deborah had sung with Shlomi at their wedding.

Troen said: “It’s a way of saying that in the years to come…they will not focus on the tragic, but rather on the beauty in their lives.”

May their memories and all those killed along with our loved ones be for a blessing, and let us say: Amen.

About the Author
For the past seventeen years, David Lerner has served as the spiritual leader of Temple Emunah in historic Lexington, MA, where he is now the senior rabbi. He has served as the president of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis and the Lexington Interfaith Clergy Association. He is one of the founders of Community Hevra Kadisha of Greater Boston, ClergyAgainstBullets.org and Emunat HaLev: The Meditation and Mindfulness Institute of Temple Emunah. A graduate of Columbia College and ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary where he was a Wexner Graduate Fellow, Rabbi Lerner brings to his community a unique blend of warmth, outreach, energetic teaching, intellectual rigor and caring for all ages.
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