Grief Calls Us To Life (Erev Rosh HaShanah 5785)

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Grief Call Us To Life
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, Erev Rosh HaShanah 5785

When my friend Nissimmi is on reserve duty
in the Israeli army,
no one ever wants to see him.
That’s because his job is to be a
“casualty informer,”
the dreaded person who knocks on your door,
bringing news of the unfathomable.

How do you even deliver the message? I ask him.
We speak the bare truth, and carefully memorize every word, he answered me.
We are not allowed metaphors like: ‘he’s fallen,’ or
‘he is in the hands of the Creator.
We say it straight: ‘we found him dead.’
‘He was killed in battle.’
When I listen to Nissimi, I remember:
honesty is compassion; it mitigates the inevitable disbelief and denial.

Nissimmi knows that he is delivering the most
devastating news that a family will ever hear,
and that he cannot prevent the anguish.
“The grief is necessary,
there is no way around it,” he said.
“My job is to sit with them,
in their unbearable sorrow,
to prevent any more pain, and to stay with them,
until the community steps in and takes over.”

This accompaniment is not just for a few hours.
He is there from the moment of notification,
through the end of shiva – for every single death.
That is the protocol.
Even secular families,
who want nothing religious in the funeral,
will still sit, for seven days.
It is so Jewish.
Our tradition understands that we need
mechanisms for mourning that will hold us up,
encourage us to grieve,
surround us in community,
and teach us to have a living relationship
with our dead.

As you can imagine, after Oct 7,
Nissimmi’s already difficult job
became nearly impossible.
He wasn’t sleeping, barely eating.
But his work has changed him,
it’s put what is most essential into hyper-focus,
As if the world around was suddenly and newly
in technicolor.
Francis Weller, a wise grief psychotherapist described:
“There is some strange intimacy
between grief and aliveness,
some sacred exchange
between what seems unbearable
and what is most exquisitely alive.”

I saw this aliveness on my 3 trips to Israel
of the past year.
Despite all the trauma and the sorrow,
I was astounded by Israelis’
grit, vitality, and generosity,
and how much more comforting it felt
to be there, than here.
They have learned to make grief their companion,
to build memory into the fabric of their society.
Nissimmi said that for most Israelis, Memorial Day
is more sacred than Yom Kippur.

Contrast that to the culture we have here.
Memorial day is for BBQ’s and appliance sales.
And have you noticed:
no one says the D-word anymore.
Instead, we say someone has passed, departed.
He expired.
The #1 bestselling book of last year was entitled: “Outlive.”
There is an entire industry
profiting on outsmarting mortality,
and distancing us from death.

In the 1950’s, 90% of Americans died at home.
But by 1990, 80% of us died out of home,
in institutions; death has become increasingly
private and unseen.
We hide it, and hide from it,
hoping it won’t find us.
So when death inevitably comes,
we are taken so totally by surprise.
We treat sorrow like a contagious disease
and don’t want to draw close.
We diminish bereavement,
allowing ourselves mere days to mourn.
We fear memory, even the uttering of a name,
lest it trigger the pain.

But what happens
when you don’t get to properly mourn?
When there is no ritual closure?
When we don’t allow ourselves time
to digest our loss?
Or the community around us ignores
or denies our grief?
Then loss becomes a trauma, an exile,
a wound that cannot heal.

For many of us,
this was our experience after October 7—
we were all mourners in limbo.
As we learned more and more about the magnitude
and the brutality of the massacre,
it was nearly impossible to absorb the event.
Within days came shocking denial
and blame from so many corners,
deafening silence from our friends and allies,
that magnified our isolation.
There was no time to grieve,
as we turned our attention
to hundreds of hostages in captivity
and to a war in Israel.
Some of us also wept for the loss
of innocent life in Gaza.
And some of us didn’t,
causing ruptures in communities, and families.

This Rosh Hashanah, I knew I needed to begin
with our grief
and address the heaviness
that each of us carry into this sanctuary.
I buried the parents of two of my closest friends.
I co-officiated a funeral for a sparkling 28-year-old
who died just as he shared plans to propose
to the love of his life.
I have beloved congregants who are facing
a terrifying diagnosis,
a divorce they never wanted,
the loss of a job.
I’ve spoken to so many of you
about the existential loss of safety and security
as a Jew in America.

Tonight, as we called in the new year
with the first Tekiah;
the shofar was like a collective wail
for a grief that leaves no one untouched.
But tomorrow, as we begin this reset,
we will hear the ram’s horn three more times,
and each section of the Shofar service
will help us walk forward,
teaching us three essential elements
for moving through loss:
Acceptance. Remembrance. And Revelation.

The first section of the Shofar Service,
Malchuyot, is translated as “Sovereignty.”
Put another way: I’m God. And you’re not.
It illuminates the first step of bereavement—
acceptance.
When Jews learn of a death,
the traditional response is:
Baruch Dayan Haemet,
“Blessed is the true Judge.”
These can be very difficult words to say,
especially in the face of tragic loss,
but it forces us to humbly acknowledge
that when it comes to death,
we are not in charge.

How fitting that during the main prayer of the
Malchuyot section, the Grand Aleinu,
we prostrate ourselves all the way to the ground.
Isn’t that what the death of a loved one
should do to us?
Bring us to our knees?
We are accustomed to being in control,
to having polite feelings.
But grief can be wild, raging.
Francis Weller wrote:
“I have heard how fearful people are of
dropping into the well of grief.
The most frequent comment is
‘If I go there, I’ll never return.’
What I found myself saying [back to them] was rather surprising.
‘If you don’t go there, you’ll never return.’”

And how can we support someone we know
who is grieving?
Let them go there.
There is a story from the Talmud:
when Rabbi Yochanan’s son died,
his friends think the best way to console him
is by sharing stories of the Biblical Adam, Aaron,
and Job, who also lost children:
Yochanan’s response to these words of ‘comfort,’
was, essentially:
This is not helping.

Rabbi Yochanan lived 2000 years ago, but
well-meaning people still do the same thing today.
In an effort to connect, empathize or cheer up,
they will remind you that everyone has suffering,
or they will tell you about theirs, saying:
I also lost my Dad, I know exactly how you feel.
My sister also had that disease, but she’s ok now.

But a mourner in pain,
feels like no one could possibly
hurt the way they do.
It’s a heartache that’s all theirs.
Don’t move immediately to assurances
that they will be alright,
instead, hold them in their sorrow,
as long as it takes, so that one day,
they can be alright.

Rob Delaney, a comedian whose 3-year old son
died, said of the people who truly walked with
him in his agony:
“They don’t have to say anything,
but if they sit there, and keep eye contact with you,
and don’t hold their breath,
and let it in, you can move through it…
And then you can talk about what to order for dinner.”

The world is full of beautiful
and devastating things.
We cannot experience our full humanity
if we do not allow ourselves
to feel all of it.
And sometimes, to be brought to our knees.

But we do not remain there.
The second section of the Shofar service—
Zichronot, “Remembrance”—
is the next essential element of mourning.
The shofar service speaks of how God
remembers each one of us
and how remembering is itself an act of love.

After her mother died, my friend committed to the
traditional Jewish practice of saying daily Kaddish for a year.
When she traveled, she found minyanim in France, Israel, Michigan.
It took effort, and some compromises,
but it felt appropriate, even good,
that it wasn’t always convenient.
She connected to this ancient practice, felt the
support of Jewish communities she didn’t even know, and carved out a moment,
every day, to remember her Mom.

I spoke with a couple who lost their tenderhearted,
musical son Alex when he was just sixteen.
A few months after his death,
they started donating regularly
to organizations and causes that Alex
would have loved and supported.
Each gift in his name was another opportunity
to remember their son, to share his story.
They’ve been doing it now for over thirty years.
“Some day,” they said, “when we leave this earth,
we will meet up with Alex again. And we want him
to be proud of what we did in his name.”

Burial, funeral, shiva, shloshim,
unveiling, yartzeits, yizkor services…
Judaism instructs us to
build monuments of memory together,
for each of our loved ones.

The power of rituals like these,
is how they create the space for remembering,
but they are also contained, bounded.
The concern that we will get lost in grief is real.
Our tradition guards against excessive mourning
which pulls us out of the world indefinitely.
After a year, our tradition gently reminds us
that it is time to move to a new stage of memory.

The third section, Shofarot, “Revelation,”
speaks of how God was once revealed to us in thunder, lightning and shofar,
and is still being revealed to us today.
And I’ve learned that this also happens
with our loved ones who have died.
Their reverberations echo back to us
in surprising ways,
beckoning us to sense them in our lives,
even after they are gone.

Last January I got a call out of the blue
from Rabbi Delphine Horvillour,
a French rabbi who interned here at Central
over 15 years ago:
Angela, the strangest thing happened to me.
I received an email from Rabbi David Ellenson!

Rabbi David Ellenson had served
as president of Hebrew Union College
during our time in seminary
and was a cherished teacher
and mentor to both of us.
The thing was – he had died a month earlier,
in December.

Are you sure it was from him? I asked. What did it say?

“It was a beautiful note.” Delphine described,
“He wished me mazel tov on my last book
and said how proud he was of my rabbinate.”
She stopped, full of emotion.
“I had been feeling so bereft after he died,
his death was so sudden.”
“So..." I asked. What did you do?”
“I wrote him back.”

Whether this email ended up in her inbox
through a mystical contact from beyond the grave,
or due to some technical glitch,
Delphine knew better
than to waste the opportunity.
She shared gratitude with her beloved rabbi
and found great comfort in knowing that their relationship had not ended with his death.

I think of Rachel Goldberg Polin, whose son Hersh,
was brutally executed by Hamas after surviving
for nearly eleven months of captivity in Gaza.
At his funeral, she began her eulogy, remarkably,
with words of gratitude to God.
Rachel ended by speaking to her beloved Hersh directly:
“I will love you
and I will miss you every single day of my life.
But you are right here, I know you are right here.
I just have to teach myself how to feel you in a different way.”

How do we teach ourselves to do that?
We have actually been learning this all our lives.
When we are infants, it takes many months before we understand that our mother still exists,
when she is just out of sight in another room.
When we are children, we learn that a parent is still there for us, even if they are at work all day.
As adults, we can hear the advice a loved one would give us, even before we pick up the phone.
And after they’ve died?
They are still right here.
We just have to teach ourselves how to feel them in a different way.

Rosh Hashanah,
with its recounting of the creation story,
reminds us that each new year
holds the possibility of rebirth.
And Yom Kippur,
with its dreaded knock on our door,
comes to deliver the bare truth: that eventually—
we all lose everything we love.
We must accept that grief is a fundamental experience of being human.
It’s a reflection of our love.
But if we allow grief to be our companion,
and our community accompanies us in memory,
we can find our love deepened,
maybe even transformed,
and our hearts awakened to the beauty that endures.

I am often asked
what happens to people after death.
I do not have a definitive answer.
Some religions do.
Judaism does not.
But we do believe that while bodies die,
souls remain.
Just as energy can never be created nor destroyed,
the life force that animates us when we’re alive
does not extinguish when we die,
it just changes form.

When we hear the shofar bring in this new year,
its blasts will be fleeting.
But the soundwaves will resonate long after,
vibrating within us, calling us to return—
to acceptance, to mourning, to memory,
to life.