D'var Torah

Hamvaser – Elul 5766

“ …Words Do Make A Difference in Our Moral Life”*

Language transmits culture and values. One of the Modern Hebrew words for “word” is teyvah, a chest or a box. The word appears twice in the Torah, first with the account of Noah’s Ark, and later, with the story of Moses, sent down the Nile in his basket. Both Noah and Moses float on water and rescue their world. Later, Jews will use the word teyvah in the first centuries to describe the Ark in which the Torah scrolls are contained. While Sephardi Jews still use the term for the Ark, Ashkenazi Jews prefer aron kodesh. Either way, the Ark, like words, contains meaning and significance.

Classically, Jewish languages carried underlying ideals and standards of the Jewish community. Yahrzeit is one such word. Derived from the Yiddish meaning anniversary, it is the annual date according to the Hebrew calendar on which the day of the death of a loved one is observed. In a potential case of cultural cross-pollenization, there may to be an historic connection with the medieval Christian practice of commemorating a family member’s death and lighting a candle in church in their memory on the date of their anniversarium. As an act of piety in memory of one’s beloved, yahrzeit came to be observed as a day on which gifts were made to tzedakah. Parents and other family members were recalled as their heirs and descendants went to the synagogue for religious services and the recitation of Kaddish as a way of continuing to honor parents, spouses, children and siblings.

In addition to the annual commemoration, the custom arose during the Middle Ages to observe yizkor [“Remember”] on Yom Kippur and the last day of the three pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot. Being in the synagogue and recalling the lives and teachings of one’s forebears was a way in which to assure their immortality through at least one additional generation of the living. In some communities, yizkor became the way in which to recall those members of the Jewish community who had been killed in outbreaks of violence against the Jewish community during the Crusades, the period of the Inquisition, the Chmielnitzki Massacres in the Ukraine (1648), during the pogroms and the Shoah.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes, “[H]ardkly any Jew is without some Jewish past. Total amnesia is still relatively rare. The choice for Jews as for non-Jews is not whether or not to have a past, but rather—what kind of a past shall one have” [Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, 1996, p 99]. When we place yahrzeit plaques in a synagogue, attend services on the memorial anniversary of our loved ones, participate in collective remembrances of those we have known or about whom we have known, we connect to our past, and weave ourselves into lives, past, present, and future. As we send out yahrzeit notices, we remind our community members not only to light a candle, but also to weave oneself into the communal fabric of memory, urging and encouraging them to recall loved ones through the classic pattern of sharing our loss and our memories in community and by reciting Kaddish in a minyan.

*William James, Varieties of Religious Experience [1902], lecture 3: “We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free, consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.”

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