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by Rabbi Dana Saroken
It’s Been A Bad Year….
A congregant called me the day after Rosh Hashana. “Rabbi…We haven’t really met, yet, she explained on the telephone but I have a story to share with you…do you have 15 minutes so that I can pop over?” Within minutes, she was in my office and began her story: My daughter came home for the Holidays from Manhattan, she shared. She had two young children and is a working woman so she did some shopping here in Baltimore, during her time at home. When it came time for her to head back to NY though, she had about 10 bags and packages and both of the kids and was making the trip by herself and we were concerned. She needed her bags and her packages though so she left us promising that as soon as she got into the city, she would find a red cap service person to help her with her belongings and to ensure she and the kids made it back to their apartment. So, she made it back. She got off the train in Grand Central Station just as she had planned but when she looked around, there were no red caps anywhere. So with two kids in tow and all of her things, she asked if there was anyone who could help her but to no avail. And then she heard a strange voice: A man, with bags of his own was beside her: ‘Let me help you’. He offered. She respectfully declined his offer but the stranger was insistent. “Let me help you. You’ve got your kids and all of these things…how about this: You take care of your children. I’ll carry your stuff.” So the woman, her children and the stranger all walked together city block after city block. It wasn’t until the woman reached her destination that she learned that the stranger had not been going in the same direction at all…Grand Central was just his transfer point to get from Baltimore back to his home in Westchester. He had left the station only to help this woman and her children. He would head right back to the station and get on a later train instead. It turns out, though, Rabbi, said the woman in front of me that this stranger was your father.
I called my dad that night. I asked him how his trip back was. “Fine.” He said. “Anything exciting?” “Nope” he said. “We’ll that’s funny, dad, I said…because I had a lovely conversation with a woman today who said otherwise… he laughed, “it was nothing…she needed help. And I could help her.” “How are the kids?” he asked changing the subject…
My dad is admittedly a great guy and the best dad I could ask for. He loves sports, he loves the financial market, he loves his card games and he loves us – his family and his 20 best friends. He spends his days at his Madison Avenue office and his weekends at the casino. But in between, in the moments when no one is looking – he lives his life with quiet acts of generosity. I remember one of those acts clearly – I had overheard him making arrangement one night. My grandmother was dying of cancer and my dad had gone to a support group meeting. One of the people in the group was sharing that her husband wanted to live out his final days at home – not in the hospital. But she wasn’t sure how she could manage. He needed a bed that went up and down, a refrigerator nearby so he didn’t have to move to far, without these things and more, she didn’t think bringing him home would be a possibility. My father just listened. But that night, I heard him on the phone. Everything this woman needed to bring her husband home to die was on its way. No fanfare. He didn’t share his acts with us, nor did the family ever know from where these gifts came. “It’s no big deal.” He would have said, “They needed help. I could do it”.
Now, to my dad…the whole incident with this woman at Grand Central Station really wasn’t such a big deal. But to my children – to my 5 year old and my 3 year old. They’ve been having me re-tell the story ever since. Whenever we go somewhere and they see someone who will listen: a neighbor, a teacher, a friend’s parents, anyone who will listen…Noa has whispered in my ear in her remarkably loud 31/2 year old whisper: “Tell him the stranger story, mommy” and then inevitably, when we get to the part about the stranger she would squeal with delight, the hugest smile would appear and her eyes would sparkle with happiness… “the stranger was our grandpa!” she blurted out in pride and absolute delight revealing the true beauty of the story, in her eyes. As I went about my life I couldn’t help but think …“Please God, it should be 40 years from now, but that story will be in my dad’s eulogy some day.”
(change this around and transition) This past week, I read a galley copy of Mitch Albom’s almost published book called, “Have A Little Faith” which should be released at the end of the month. The book begins with a strange request. Mitch Albom is back at his home-town synagogue as a grown up visiting for a special occasion and his life-long rabbi asks him a favor: “Will you do my eulogy?” he asks. Albom is perplexed and caught completely off-guard: “I don’t understand.” “My eulogy” he repeated…when I’m gone.” “Are you dying?” asked Albom. “Not yet” said the rabbi smiling. “Then why?” asked Albom. “Because I think you would be a good choice and I think when the time comes, you will know what to say.” Albom reflected on this request saying: “Picture the most pious man you know. Your priest. Your pastor. Your rabbi. Your imam. Now picture him tapping you on the shoulder and asking you to say good-bye to the world on his behalf. Picture the person who sends people off to heaven, asking you for his send-off to heaven. Albom reluctantly agreed and spent the next 8 years getting to know Rabbi Albert Lewis this larger than life figure who he had run from in fear and awe as a youth. “As is often the case, he said, I thought I was being asked a favor when in fact I was given one.” For eight years, Albom gets to know Albert Lewis so that he can eulogize him when he died… someday.
As a rabbi, it is a tremendous privilege to honor someone’s life at the time of their death. We spend time with the family of the deceased: we listen to their stories, and try to learn about the essence of each person so that we can capture their life and create a lasting tapestry for everyone to learn from and for their loved ones to hold onto. Sometimes the lives of those we’re eulogizing are painfully short. The image of the babies that I’ve buried dressed in shrouds in their tiny little coffins are forever inscribed in my heart. We’ve buried the babies along with the hopes and dreams of their loved ones and a piece of their hearts is buried, as well. And sometimes, we have the opportunity to learn about a person who may have lived beyond a century. While it seems that these deaths might be easier because they were given the gift of many years but anyone who’s lost someone that they loved knows – even 100 years isn’t enough. So through the stories that the family members all share with each other and with us – we try to make sense of a whole life – to listen for their defining moments, for the highlights of their life. To learn about their greatest challenges and how they overcame them or endured. To learn about the things they loved, the people that they loved, to clarify what it was they cared about most and the values they held most dear and the values that they hoped to pass along to their loved ones.
Sometimes, in the aftermath of the loss though, I wonder....I wonder if the person who died would have agreed with the family’s description of them? I wonder if we took the opportunity to write our own eulogies if they would have told a different story…? Yet by the time the family is sitting with the rabbi talking about their parent, child, sister, brother, grandparent, husband or wife…they’ve already lived out the entirety of their lives… and the interpretation of their life and their life story is left to those who live on. Maybe they misunderstood what mattered most to us, maybe they forgot the story that we believed defined our essence and maybe they remembered stories that were anomalous. We have no way to know what will be remembered and what will be forgotten.
As the years of our lives pass, we all wonder, what will be said about us when we die and after we die. Many people wonder who will speak at our funeral and what they will say. Mark Twain addressed this human curiosity in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: and he created a perfect scene: Tom and Joe realized that the townspeople were searching for them and that they thought they had drowned. But instead of revealing themselves, they instead spent some time considering the people who might be missing them. Then Tom travels back to town to see, first hand, how the community was reacting to their absence: After swimming and ferrying back home, he hides under his bed to listen to what his family had to say about him. And then, the next day, he and Joe snuck through a side door to listen to their own funeral service at the church. They wanted to hear how the townspeople would remember them and to get a sense of how they felt after the boys disappeared from the world. Morrie Schwartz from Tuesdays With Morrie had the same desire but instead of hiding in the church, he decided to hold a “living funeral” for himself so he could hear all the nice things that people had to say about him while he was still alive. Somehow, just knowing that people will care enough to show up for your funeral, that people will cry when you leave the world and that people will promise to remember you and keep you alive through their memories and stories – makes a big difference as we face our death and also to the ones who remain.
We have a tradition in my house. When we light our yartzeit candles, we all share memories. We tell stories about the person who we light the candle for and we thank God for bringing them into our lives and allowing their light to continue to burn bright in our hearts and in our minds forever. And when we tell our stories…it always amazes me what we share. We share how uncle frank used to give the wettest kisses ever and used the hug the breath right out of you. We share the stories about how grandpa used to wrap us up in newspapers when he didn’t have a diaper nearby and how he fed us hotdogs before we even had teeth to chew with. We share the memories of grandma’s kitchen cupboards. And how my other grandma, still alive but suffering from severe dimensia, used to always serve me a bowl of matza ball soup before the family sat down for our holiday meals. “Come be my taster” she would say. What lives on of the people we have loved and lost? What breaks our hears when we think about them? What do we miss so much that our heart aches? (Rabbi Alan Lew). We have lots of stories but there are some memories that we always come back to.
Sometimes, the vision of our funerals and the thought of our deaths, can inspire us to live out our days differently. More deliberately. To live out our days as better people: Dr. Blair Grubb shared one such story: He and his pregnant wife and their young son had just moved to a new town when a neighbor named Tom came by to welcome them to the neighborhood, to help them unpack and to give them the lay of the land. Tom was a retired business man, with a great sense of humor and a particularly good nature and it didn’t take long for the Grubb family to learn that they weren’t the only ones who were recipients of Blair’s kindness. The children in the community used to refer to him as “grandpa” as they sat at his feet to listen to his stories of the war and about life. When anything broke, Tom was the first person you would ask about it. He somehow seemed to know everybody and with a single phone call he could have a repairperson there in minutes. When a baseball shattered the glass of the front door, Tom was the first to help pick up the broken pieces, to disappear with the frame and reappeared later with a new window refusing to take any money. “The storeowner owes me a few favors” he would say. When there was a local blood shortage, he was the first in line. When a windstorm came through town, he was there to help clear away the debris. When I got too busy to mow the lawn he did it. He held court at the local coffee shop and if you needed someone to talk about anything he would listen. Tom seemed to be the very embodiment of goodness. But it wasn’t always so.
You see, for most of his life, Tom was anything but saintly. He had war wounds and physical pains that left him cranky. He was a heavy smoker, a hard drinker and a ruthless businessman. He was not, in his own assessment, “a nice man.” But one day, his life changed when he attended the funeral of a childhood friend who had been a particularly kind and caring person who was beloved. Hundreds of people had shown up to pay their respects profoundly moved by his death. ‘I realized that day [said Tom] that if it were my funeral, at that moment – not many people would have bothered to show up. I had become a drunk, cruel brute and I didn’t want to be that guy anymore.
He stopped smoking and drinking that day, sold the business, joined every civic organization he could find, started giving significant amounts of money to charity and devoted himself to the community with a passion that made those who had known him question his sanity. “I had a lot of lost time to make up for [he said]… My only wish was that at least a few people would some day show up at my funeral.”
Not too long after, Tom had a heart attack while helping an elderly neighbor clear away a fallen tree and he died the next day. The community was stunned and the children cried incessantly. On the weekend of the funeral the bell of a small nearby church next to the cemetery began to ring in a slow rhythmic tolling. On and on it tolled. Slowly, one by one, people stopped what they were doing and began to walk to the graveyard. Stores closed, restaurants emptied, and the playgrounds fell silent. Soon a multitude of people had gathered around the side of his grave and more continued to come. The police showed up to keep order but they were not needed. They joined the throng. People that rarely showed emotion wept openly. The bell continued to toll unendingly until nightfall and the crowd did not dissipate for hours. (pause).
I imagine that they didn’t talk much about his days in the business world that day, I imagine they didn’t talk much about his financial success, my hunch is that it was the other stories – the stories of the times that he had helped others that kept them by the graveside until nightfall.
Many of us have similar hopes and thoughts as we sit in the pews of Levinsons. We hope that when our time comes to die, we will be mourned, cried for, and talked about in ways that will express the unique way that we made a difference in the world and in the lives of those we loved.
When I think about life, from the vantage point of death, I think about how often we lose sight of what really matters. Rabbi Harold Kushner poses that human beings have two primary desires: The desire to be important and successful is one and the desire to be good and to be perceived as good by other good people is the other. Throughout our lives, we strive to fulfill these needs and goals. Our need to be recognized as someone who is important and successful is what makes job titles, the size of our offices, the cars we drive, the size of the homes we live in so important to some people – because they are understood to be symbols or signs of success and import. And yet, we also strive to be recognized as someone who is “good” and worthy of respect by other good people. It is this need that motivates many people to make a difference in the world, to give tzedaka and to contribute to a cause greater than themselves. But we also have a deep rooted need to matter and to have our lives matter. We want to believe that our lives are imbedded with meaning and that in some way, our legacy will live on even after we’ve left this world. It’s the people that in the end of their lives feel that there life had meaning, had purpose, that they made a difference in some way, that there life mattered – that have the greatest sense of peace going into their deaths. Those who aren’t sure, oftentimes struggle – they need more time, more time to live – more time to get it right.
But despite all of our striving…in most of my eulogies… a person’s profession rarely gets more than a small fraction of the eulogy. It’s usually mentioned at some point of the meeting by the families but I’ve yet to sit down with a family for whom one’s professional life or even professional success felt central to their life story. A part of their life story… but rarely, if ever central. Maybe it’s because some people have been retired for a while already, maybe they stayed home with children, or maybe, with death comes the perspective that mostly, we celebrate a persons accomplishments in their relationships more than anything. We honor the way they lived and the way they loved.
While RH is all about births. YK is all about deaths. We wear white shrouds similar to the ones Jews are buried in, we recite the vidui as our traditions calls upon us to do before we die, we even abstain from sex, eating and all life affirming activities. All of these rituals are associated with death because – more than anything YK is supposed to bring us so close to death that we can taste it, feel it and fear it. Because when we get close to death we realize how much we value life and we’re clearer about our priorities, our actions and about what really matters.
So throughout the day, create the eulogy that you’d like to be given and spend the rest of your life trying to live up to it. For at the end of our days…we have no way of knowing what they’ll remember about us when we’re gone and so we live out all of our days – thinking that any moment could be the moment that gets captured for eternity – that any moment can be our defining moment that will get passed down from generation to generation.
Gamar Chatima Tovah – May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life! |
