Holding the Holy and the Broken

I’m sitting in a very quiet and calm airport on my way back from the funeral of the brother of a dear and cherished friend (and his extended beloved family) and reflecting on the whirlwind of my last thirty hours of going and coming, crossing the border and back, and in between marking loss of life and a limb from a beautiful tree of siblings that was cut down before its time.

The rawness and finality of shoveling earth over a pine box in the ground is always quite jarring, and perhaps even more so when it is ten degrees outside, with winds rippling the edges of the pages of kaddish that is being recited for the first time, with parents burying their child, nieces and nephews chipping away at frozen soil to cover the coffin, and five siblings interlocking arms in both a painfully tragic yet beautiful scene of loss and love.

It is the power of close family connections and friendships that allows us to be carried and to carry others through moments of grief and loss. Both watching from the sidelines as well as experiencing firsthand from the events of my own life, the way nuclear families and friends hold one another has always been palpably moving for me, and especially so at this moment. We are in a moment of collective grief that exists alongside the personal grief of so many.

In between the burial and shiva, on a bitter cold day in Quebec, while the family was getting settled, and as I was roaming around Mont Royal, watching visitors enter massive churches to prepare for mass, and taking delight in seeing children sled in the open expanse, I also went to another burial spot, that of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim.  When I saw that section marked on the map, I was moved to drive through the large and winding cemetery of rolling hills dotted with trees glistening in the snow (I’m feeling thankful for snow tires, or I would have been stuck all night among the headstones) and make my way to the plot of a community where I have never lived, but to which I feel connected.

My husband Aaron’s grandparents, after having come from Rostock and Vienna via ten years in Shanghai, arrived in Montreal before coming to New York City. That is where my father-in-law was born, his brit milah having taken place in Shaar. Walking through the gates of that section of the cemetery, I felt that that I was walking into a community and shul that was in some way a critical point in my family’s origin story of becoming who we are.

(That my college friend R. Adam Scheier is now the rabbi leading this vibrant community, and that Aaron gave a lecture series there recently on the textual allusions in the music of Leonard Cohen makes the tangle of relationships all the more textured and rich.)

Aaron’s grandfather died suddenly when his three children were very young, and so his grandmother was left, at 29, having immigrated to two different countries, with three small children to support and raise. From the stories I hear, it is the power of sibling relationships, a strong mother,  critical friendships and a committed community that allowed the siblings to flourish and become the family that I came to know and love, and make my own.

The Koller family are Kohanim (having changed their name to try and survive the war, which gratefully they did) so while in the Shaar section of the cemetery, I made my way to the Kohen section. The tribe of Kohanim I married into and birthed can’t go into cemeteries, so lately when I find myself in need of solitude and reflection I am drawn more and more to visiting graves and especially to finding the priestly headstones.

Trekking through fresh snow, I followed the one trail of footsteps that was disturbing the clean blanket of white and made my own pilgrimage to the grave of Leonard Cohen, shortly before sunset. I said Tehillim, davened mincha, put a rock on his kever, and took a peek at a letter written to him by a student of music from China. (I did not violate his privacy by reading the whole thing, just the opening to get a sense of who else was there earlier in the day.)

Thinking about that scene – pages of a letter next to a grave and tucked into the snow, rustling in the wind and echoing the sound of the pages of kaddish I heard rustling graveside – I was moved by the way relationships can transcend time, space, and geography, such as this one, where a lonely student of music pours out his heart out to a dead icon. At the same time, I also imagined scenes of my father-in-law and siblings holding one another through their own grief and loss, as I had witnessed siblings holding one another just a few hours earlier.

Through it all, thick and thin, brokenness can be repaired by the gentle touch of a family member, our friends infuse our lives with the holy, and even strangers, long dead, can bring us uplift with their poetry and music.

So at this moment of both holiday and war, of family and humanity, of love and loss, of joy and grief as we are about to enter the light of Hanukkah, I will leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen as I think about the power of relationships, family and friends:

There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken hallelu-yah

If you are broken and are in need of words of uplift, I am offering them.

If you can’t yet hear the holy, know that one day you will.

Merry Xmas this morning and Happy Hanukkah tonight.

Photos from the grave of Leonard Cohen, buried at his family plot in the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim Cemetery (1250 Chemin de la Forêt) on the northern slope of Mount Royal, Quebec.