I will be giving a talk to introduce the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur at the little shul where I usually daven when I am in Toronto, where I am at this time. Located on Markham Street (and hence known universally as the “Markham Street Shul”), it was founded in 1902 and occupies a converted house. I appreciate the warmth and haimish quality of this little shteibel and that’s what motivated me to offer to contribute to the service in some way, to lend a hand.
Like me, the several dozen people who attend this shul are Jewish spiritual orphans, Jews who came of age in the post-Holocaust Jewish world with little or no inkling of our Jewish spiritual ancestry. Me, I had a Jewish family, good Jewish home, a bar mitzvah, but no access whatsoever to the guidance for inner living we call spirituality, not from Jewish sources. In that, I am typical of the post-Holocaust generation of North American Jews who are, by and large, spiritual orphans.
Because of that, few of the people in shul will have heard the name Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel. Nevertheless, we have all seen his influence. He led a small yeshiva in Lithuania in the 19th century that produced the founders of almost all the yeshivas that have achieved prominence in the modern world, including Ner Yisroel, the Chofetz Chaim yeshiva, Lakewood, the Mir and many others.
The Alter of Slabodka, as Rabbi Finkel came to be known, gave regular talks that have been collected and published as the book Ohr HaTzafun (The Hidden Light). In one of his essays that I learned recently, he talked about the difference between the generation of Moses and later generations. The key factor that he isolates is that in the generation that received the Torah at Mt Sinai, they heard and saw the presence of God with their senses – b’chushim – while that was not the case for later generations, who were therefore distanced and differentiated from the generation that stood at Mt. Sinai.
But there were exceptions, and he draws from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 20a) to single out the 2nd century generation of Rabbi Yehuda bar Illai for special mention. He says:
Very many generations passed from the time of the giving of the Torah and the sensory feeling of receiving it was much duller [and in] the generation of Rabbi Yehuda bar Illai – we find them in exile and many pains and much suffering were upon them … Nevertheless, the students of Rabbi Yehuda bar Illai were not ruled over by the pain and poverty and by all the spiritual decline, and they overcame all the difficulties and the afflictions and … they engaged in Torah to the greatest extent, that there was in [that generation] a renewal of the sensory acceptance of the Torah.
You hear what he is saying? Here was this generation that was distant in time from seeing and hearing the experience our people had at Mt. Sinai, but who worked hard and cultivated sensitivity and awareness to the point that “there was in it a renewal of the sensory acceptance of the Torah.”
Their lofty spiritual level is defined by their ability to reawaken the direct experience of the past.
This is a lesson that applies to Yizkor. The word Yizkor (יִזְכּוֹר) means “May [God] remember” and in the service, worshippers call to mind the members of their family, community, and our people, who have moved beyond this world, and pray for their souls.
But in Jewish tradition, memory is not meant to be invoked merely as a nostalgic backward glance to the past, frozen in amber. Our goal, as we say in the El Maalei Rachamim prayer, is that those whom we are remembering should be tzror b’tzror ha-chayim (צרור בצרור החיים) – bound up in the bonds of life.
The Alter of Slabodka gives us the key for how to accomplish that. He teaches that the highest way to remember the past is through re-enlivening the sensory experience.
The point is not just to remember those who have left us by reciting their names or nodding to their role in our lives. The point is to relive the experience of being in their presence.
When we call to mind the image of someone’s face, or their hands, or other visual features that are strong for you, or focus on hearing their voice, feeling the touch, smelling the scent, those sensory experiences bring back to life your loved ones who have passed beyond.
The generation of Rabbi Yehuda bar Illai has taught us that reawakening sensory experience defeats the effects of time – and even death itself – because when we re-experience the feelings in our senses, that person has come to life within us, and we will have succeeded in binding up our loved ones in the bonds of life.