Shvi’i Shel Pesach Yizkor, Remembering Ted Comet

On a day Yizkor coincides with a holiday as joyous as Passover, we use the festivities of coming together, to also remember those who have brought us to this togetherness, and how much of what we are celebrating is owned to them. It is during these times of memory that we tend to reminisce. We think about loved ones and the day of old, and yearn for that love and for those days. For me and many who yearn, it is all too fresh, as I remember the last holiday I was standing in this very same sanctuary, and got to look at the beautiful face and enjoy the holy radiance of our friend Ted Comet, who was 100 years old at the time.

Ted was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924 to a father who was a shochet, who passed away when Ted was just 11 years old. When WWII was over, Ted volunteered at a Jewish orphanage in Versailles, France, for children who survived the Holocaust, some of whom survived Auschwitz. Elija Weisel, a grandson of the late Elie Wiesel and a student at Yale University, shared with me the following about Ted:

“After my grandfather [Elie Wiesel] was liberated from Buchenwald, he lived in an orphanage in Paris for a while. While at this orphanage, a reporter reporting on the Jews in that orphanage took a picture of my grandfather playing a game of chess. That picture made it into a newspaper, which ended up in the hands of one of his relatives in the US. That relative informed Ted Comet, who went to the orphanage to search for my grandfather. He found a man at the orphanage and said “I’m looking for a man named Elie Wiesel.” The young man said: “I am Elie Weisel”. It was thanks to Ted that my grandfather learned that two of his three sisters, Bea and Hilda, survived the war”.

In France Ted also met a Holocaust survivor named Shoshana, who would later become his wife and lifetime partner. Upon returning to America, Ted devoted himself to the Jewish community, became a social worker, working for Jewish family services and expressing his passion for bringing healing into this world. He also became very active in various Zionist organizations.

In 1964, Ted looked around him and saw a New York that celebrates every country, and culture, but does not have any formal celebration of Israel. Ted followed the rabbinic dictum: “where there are no people, try and be the one”. Ted organized a parade called “Youth Solute Israel parade” and did not know if anyone would show up, 250,000 people showed up. This past year, on the parade’s 60^th anniversary, 100,000 people marched again on 5^th Avenue, standing with Israel.

Reading about the Exodus from Egypt, at the beginning of Parshat Beshalach, we read about how Moses took the bones of Joseph with him. “Moses took Joseph’s bones with him, for he [Joseph] had adjured the sons of Israel, saying, God will surely remember you, and you shall bring up my bones from here with you.”

Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, the Rav of Brisk, wonders why this verse appears in Parshat Beshalach, when we speak about the splitting of the sea, rather than in Parshat Bo, where it should be, in the segments we speak about the Jews packing everything up and getting ready to leave Egypt.

Rabbi Soloveitchik answers that this verse is a continuation to the verse stating that Bnai Yisrael left Egypt armed “Chamushim”, and that it was because Bnai Yisrael were “armed” with Joseph’s coffin, that the sea was able to split. “The sea saw and fled; the Jordan turned backward. The mountains skipped like rams, the hills like young sheep.” (Tehillim 114)

My late friend, Rabbi Ahron Walkin explains that the inspiration of Yosef’s extraordinary faith in God, even in the face of difficulty, was to lead Bnei Yisrael to cross the sea with similar trust and faith in Hashem.

Yet there is also a great symbolism to this. While we see the splitting of the sea as a fresh, new, spontaneous and miraculous event, what the Torah is telling us that it is only with the coffin of Joseph there, that the sea splits. On Passover we celebrate this splitting of the sea, but we must never forget why the sea split—it is those bones that are in the coffin that make everything we are doing possible.

Rashi (Shemot 14:15)adds, explaining the words of the Pasuk “Speak to the children of Israel and let them travel.” “They have nothing to do but to travel, for the sea will not stand in their way. The merit of their forefathers and their own merit, and the faith they had in Me when they came out of Egypt are sufficient to split the sea for them. “

The miracles we have seen, have all come in the merit of that coffin of Yosef.

Thinking of the loved ones we remember today in solemn memory, have our minds thinking of those great people as merely loved ones as the past. The lesson of Shevii Shel Pesach, the coffin of Yosef, and the lesson of Yizkor, is that the achievements of today are only possible because of those luminary lives of the past. Not everyone might see that. In Egypt, it was only Moshe who remembered Yosef’s coffin as they were leaving. Today as well, as we stand and remember our loved ones and those of we stop to think of today, we must make sure we remember we do not leave them in our memories, or confine this memories to Yizkor alone, like Moses, we must take their coffin—their merits and inspiration—to everywhere we go. It is in their merit that we will see our own crises resolved, and our own sea split.