by Howard Berkowitz, delivered at Minyan M'at

I find movie and theater ticket stubs in my pockets all the time. They bear a name and a date and a place and they serve as pocket matsevot- markers of past time, lost time, time placed in amber.

This particular stub bears the imprint of the Valencia theater within the Sony complex at 67th street where the individual theaters carry the names of grand Loews theaters of the past. The Valencia was the great movie house of my youth. When the local movie theaters would not do, my friends and I would venture into Jamaica and go to a double feature at the Valencia. When the lights dimmed in the theater you could imagine that you were in a Hollywood version of that Spanish city by starry night. But the Valencia at the Sony bears only the great name without offering any of the spectacle of the original. It engenders no fondness, no sentiment, no longing. It is a lifeless memorial plaque in a lost shul passageway. Summer afternoons at the Valencia exist only within me and others of my generation. A name, alone, preserved without a story is useless.

This is the first Yizkor for which my children have no grandparents and Dina and I had four lamps to light. In Henry James’ short story “The Altar of the Dead” the main character Stransom collects increasing numbers of memorial candles for his dead in a church side chapel he has made his second home. He finds himself more at ease relating to the people of his life encandled than embodied and of a related matter James comments: “Whatever it was, it was an immense escape from the actual.”

The ancient Greeks divided all that humans refer to in their discourse about the world into phenomena and noumena. Phenomena refer to all the concrete elements of the world that have extension in space such as a desk or chair or a body. Noumena refer to concepts and values such as love, courage, faith, goodness, kindness, character which are not visible or palpable but which are nonetheless real. Does anyone doubt that love, which cannot be CAT scanned, is as real as this body, which can? After death, the body is buried, the possessions are distributed and the apartment is sold. What then becomes of the noumena of that lost life? If, as we said, those qualities and values were just as real as the phenomena of that person’s existence, where do they “go” if they are not interred? The noumena, hopefully, reside in someone’s living memory. We recall the location of the interred body with a gravestone. But the unseen noumena are imperishable if remembered. One can sometimes feel a surge of love or experience the glimmer of a smile or feel restored somehow upon looking at the photo of a lost loved one, and so we realize that death is the end of a body and not the end of a relationship. Whenever the recollection of a lost loved one’s life causes us to pause and alter our behavior for the good, then I say in that moment the noumena, the vital values and qualities of that person’s life, are alive. As long as the reverberating circuits of memory operate, the dead retain power to do good in this world. If a child learns by their example and their teachings, then that person lives in a manner less than actual but more than metaphoric.

In the Yizkor prayer we pledge “to perform acts of charity and goodness” in the name of the deceased. Only by acting do we enable them to remain part of our lives so that they may live again. The story told in the Haggadah of Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon is to be found only there and in no other source. The story exists only because Pesach exists in us and through us and we are obligated to retell the story so that we may learn from the example of the Rabbis. Therefore, even if we were all wise, and all well-intentioned, and all psychologically-minded, and all good-hearted it would still be our duty to tell the stories of our parents and grandparents.

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel in reaction to the appearance of ornate tombstones with inscriptions declared “one does not erect nefashot to the righteous, for their words are their memorial.” If all the dead have is a candle, then it sits on the altar of the truly dead. Even if we invoke their names five brief times during the year, where are they the rest of our lives? Mishlei asserting that “the soul of man is the lamp of the L-rd” is the basis of lighting yahrtzeit lamps in memoriam. But what if we regard the lamps instead of considering the souls? It is not the actual lamp but the act of remembering for whom we light it that is important. It does not matter if the flame flickers out before its time as long as the instrumental memory does not. The naming of children for lost loved ones is no more than retaining ticket stubs in one’s pocket unless the children are imbued with the qualities of their namesakes.

Eliot wrote there is “…a lifetime burning in every moment.” Let the yahrtzeit lamps burn as we here seek to recapture the moments and give them life once again. And so we beat on at Pesach and at Yizkor, boats against the current, borne back, if we are fortunate, ceaselessly into the past.

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