My mother used deep red lipstick. I remembered this because of a siddur that I picked up the other day. I opened it and saw a lipstick smudge where someone had kissed the page. I recalled my mother kissing the prayerbook as she closed it. Although I no longer have her siddur or mahzor, the alchemy of memory brings her before my eyes.
What about you? What do you remember? A rub on the head or a potch on the tuches? The odour of tobacco or the scent of sweat? Soft skin or a scratchy beard? The squeeze of a hug or the pinch of a cheek? Do you remember a hat or long gloves? A particular bag or a china plate? Isn’t it amazing how traces of items can trigger meaningful memories?
When it’s all over, what is remembered?
Some of you may have seen the YouTube video of a little boy at the kitchen table. His mother asks him to say one sentence for which American Presidents are known. The Mom says:
George Washington and the boy says “I cannot tell a lie”.
Abraham Lincoln: “Fourscore and seven years ago”.
Harry Truman: “The buck stops here”.
Ronald Reagan: “Tear down this wall”.
John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.
Richard Nixon: “I am not a crook”.
Bill Clinton: “I didn’t have relations with that woman”.
George H.W. Bush: “Read my lips, no new taxes”.
George W. Bush: “Fool me once, shame on you”.
Barak Obama: “Yes we can”.
I imagine that if I were to ask you for some memorable quotes that define Canadian Prime Ministers, many of you would cite these:
Wilfred Laurier: “This will be the Canadian century”.
Lester Pearson: “Peace or extinction”.
Pierre Trudeau: “Masters in our own house we must be, but our house is the whole of Canada.” Or
“The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Kim Cambell: “I'd be prouder to say I was Canada's 10th woman prime minister”.
Jean Chretien: “I had a responsibility. Canada would never again come close to the precipice”.
Paul Martin: “Governments promise more than they can deliver and deliver more than they can afford”
Stephen Harper: “I believe in small government and I don’t believe in imposing values on people”. Or
“I don’t know all the facts on Iraq, but we should work closely with the Americans”.
Going to leaders abroad, for Winston Churchill it might be: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”.
For David Ben-Gurion: “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles”
Menachem Begin: "When an enemy of our people says he intends to destroy us, the first thing we have to do is to believe him.” OR: "No more wars, no more bloodshed. Peace unto you. Shalom, salaam, forever.”
Imagine: these great people, lives devoted to the service of their countries, often recalled by one or two sound bites. We do something similar in a eulogy, taking a whole life and offering a few brush stroke images. When we place an epitaph on a gravestone, we freeze one thought about a loved one who will be “forever in our hearts”. I like to find a Biblical quotation or a paraphrase from the siddur to place on the monument. It has a classical sensibility and a rootedness in our tradition.
Yom Kippur is a day when we think about life and death, mortality, the deaths of those we loved and how to live our days. How would you like to be remembered? For your financial success? Your tzedakah? Your golf game? Your integrity? Your cooking? Your family life? Your kindness? Are there any memorable comments that you have said to family or friends– which can be repeated in polite company? Could someone in your family clearly state what your core values are?
We recite the words of Psalm 27 throughout the months of Elul and Tishrei, this entire penitential season. One line comes back to me:
One thing I ask of the Eternal - this I seek:
to dwell in the house of God all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Eternal and to visit in God’s sanctuary.
The author of this Psalm seems to be asking for two things. He wants to be in the sacred space of the Sanctuary or synagogue and to experience the Presence of God. Yet this is really one request: to lead a life of holiness and awareness, always in the Presence of the Holy One.
What would you ask for? Health? Long life? Peace of mind? Nakhas fun der kinder? Would your hopes be for peace for Israel? Peace on earth? An end to hunger or violence? The eradication of hate? My teacher, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that “prayer may not save us, but it may make us worthy of being saved.” I think he meant that our dreams and prayers disclose much about who we are, for what we truly yearn, and whether we can add our own efforts and actions to reach for those hopes.
On Yom Kippur, we speak of the transformation of our sins and mistakes through the alchemy of teshuvah. The sincerity of our remorse and the honesty of our efforts to define new attitudes and relationships have the power of recycling our past into a new future. The regret that characterizes the penitence of teshuvah is not only a looking backwards, but is very much future oriented. What will I do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow?
In this effort, we should not imagine that God is calling us to perfection. Detroit pitcher Armando Galarraga was denied a perfect game in baseball by a missed call by the first base umpire Jim Joyce. But what happened after the game showed something much greater than perfection on the field.
The umpire apologized profusely and said he just felt terrible. They hugged each other and the pitcher, Galarraga said, “I don't know why life works this way, but sometimes life just isn't fair for people. He's a good umpire. He understands. I give him a lot of credit for coming in and saying, 'Hey, I need to talk to you to say I'm sorry.' That doesn't happen. You don't see an umpire after the game come out and say, 'Hey, let me tell you I'm sorry.' He apologized to me and he felt really bad. He didn't even shower. He was in the same clothes... I know nobody's perfect.”
The Torah does not call us to perfection. Perfection is static. It can’t be better and it can’t get worse. It just is. But Avraham is told by God, Walk before Me and be simply whole (Gen 17.1). The Torah calls us to seek simplicity and wholeness: You should be simply whole with the Eternal your God (Deut 18:13).
Another word for whole is שָׁלֵם, related to the word shalom. In Genesis, we read that after leaving his father-in-law’s home, after the encounter with his brother, Esav, after the wrestling with the angel, then Yaakov arrived shalem in Shekhem (Genesis 33:18). Rashi, the great French-German scholar, commented: despite all these challenges, Yakov was whole - physically and spiritually.[from Beresheet Rabbah 79:5, Talmud Shabbat 33b].
Yakov had a limp. Yakov had problematic relations with his brother. Yakov had a double personality that displayed both spirituality and duplicity. Yet the Torah tells us that he was whole. He had come to terms with his family and his body, with his past and his future. Wholeness means to live with our imperfections- to integrate them into ourselves. For some of us, that means coming to terms with the imperfections in our parents or children, our spouse or siblings, our friends and family, even with ourselves.
Judaism describes two ways that people sin: intentionally (b'mezid), and inadvertently (b’shogeg). At the start of Yom Kippur, the bet din associated with Kol Nidre makes a legal decision that all the sins of the community are to be considered without intent, errors of judgment, “kee le’khol ha’am beshegagga”. The alchemy of teshuvah has transformed our defiant or conscious act into one that was inadvertent.
You will recall that alchemy is the legendary process of turning common metal into gold. Teshuvah is the spiritual alchemy by which we turn our slips into strengths, our vice into virtue, our errors into assets. It is the taking of imperfection and its transformation into wholeness.
What are the two or three core values that direct your lives? Do your family members know them? What is written on the memorial stone of those we remember today is not as important as what is engraved in our hearts. What will be engraved in the hearts of those you love? Hopefully we can feel whole with them- with their flaws, and with ours.
How do we make ourselves whole? By acknowledging that we are not. By accepting our imperfections and resolving to improve ourselves.
Sometimes we have help on the path.
Sara Yoheved Rigler writes about her father, Yisrael Irving Levinsky. Yisrael became Irving and the immigrant boy became a pharmacist, in the days when pharmacists actually ground chemicals and made up prescriptions.
Although my father never revealed to me his secrets, a recurring experience of my youth hinted that, in addition to the family man, pharmacist, and synagogue trustee that I knew, my father played other roles in his clandestine life.
There were clues. I would often come to the drugstore in the afternoon, make myself an ice cream soda at the soda fountain, take a pile of movie magazines from the magazine rack, and spend a couple hours poring over them in a booth in the luncheonette. When I was ready to go home, I would find my father engrossed in conversation with someone I had never seen before and would never see again.
I would interrupt and ask if Jimmy [the delivery man] were available to drive me home. My father would turn to the man -- each time someone different -- and ask him if he were going in my direction. The man always eagerly assented. Dad would turn to me and say, "Marty (or Jack or Roger or Arnold) will take you home." When I got out of the car, I would politely say "Thank you." Then he'd reply with some version of: "Don't thank me. I could never repay all that your father did for me."
On my way into the house, I would wonder: What could my father have done for that guy who isn't a relative or even a friend of the family? But when I would later ask my father, he would answer like a wizard [alchemist] protecting his secret formulas: "Nothing."
That only corroborated how much I didn't know about my father. The "Memory Book" we asked relatives and friends to write in honour of his 80th birthday celebration divulged some secrets, [and] while sitting shiva, I heard a lot more.
How did this man become a spiritual alchemist, turning the wildness of his youth into a life devoted to decency and responsibility? How did he help transform others, helping them to find their way? Sara writes: “Although I don't know [the alchemy of] how he made it, I inherited my father's gold. The most precious of it is the conviction that a human being can become whoever he decides to be.”
We are called to become spiritual alchemists, to take the dross of our everyday actions and to turn them into gold. My mother’s lipstick in the siddurwas not simply what she had placed on her mouth. It was also what she brought from her heart.
What about you? What alchemy of teshuvah might you still perform? What are the common acts that will be treasured? What will you create for your family and friends through the alchemy of the soul?
“My Father, The Alchemist” http://www.aish.com/sp/so/48960546.html
