Dan Ornstein
Dan Ornstein is rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer. He lives with his family in Albany, NY. He is the author of the forthcoming children's book, Four Bright Lights: A Hanukkah Tale Of The Underground Railroad, which will be published by Ben Yehuda Press.
Contact Information
Rabbi Dan Ornstein
E-mail: ohavrab@gmail.com
Blog: danornstein.blogspot.com
Contact Information
Rabbi Dan Ornstein
E-mail: ohavrab@gmail.com
Blog: danornstein.blogspot.com
SOUVENIRS.
A Sermon For Yizkor By Rabbi Dan Ornstein.
Congregation Ohav Shalom, Albany, NY
A picture postcard
A folded stub
A program of the play;
File away your photographs
Of your holiday.
And your mementos
Will turn to dust,
But that's the price you pay.
For every year's a souvenir
That slowly fades away.
Every year's a souvenir
That slowly fades away.
(Billy Joel, “Souvenir” from the album Street Life Serenade.)
Billy Joel, the bard of Long Island, wrote some pretty depressing –and some pretty true- things about mortality. Year by year we grow, accumulating fond and not so fond memories like so many souvenirs. First, they shine brightly on our mantelpieces, as we proudly display to ourselves and others the rich experiences we’ve had in life. Slowly, slowly they gather the dust of time and forgetfulness as we age, and like us they finally wither into dust. Every year –and every life- is a souvenir that slowly fades away.
And yet, is there nothing about us, our lives, and our memories that has any lasting value once we’re gone? Is death really the final frontier, the absolute determinant of permanence and ephemerality? According to our teacher, Rabbi Neil Gillman, in his wonderful book The Death of Death, our biblical ancestors likely felt that after death, when God has taken back from us the breath of life that God gave us at birth, nothing else about us remains, save for the temporal memories of our immediate survivors. One look at the Hallel prayer that we chanted this morning validates Rabbi Gillman’s assertion. The psalmist asserts that “Lo ha metim y’hallelu yah, v’lo kol yordei dumah”: the dead –those who go down into the depths after they die- do not praise God. Though the Bible emphasizes that when we die we go to some shadowy netherworld, nothing happens there, at least nothing that we could call human, or soulful, or meaningful. Rabbi Gillman then discusses how Jews of the very late biblical and rabbinic periods began to develop ideas like the immortality of the human soul and resurrection of the dead at the end of time under God’s supreme universal rule. These ideas became classic Jewish beliefs. They remained thus until they came under fire in the 19th and 20th centuries from Jewish rationalists and modernists- many of whom could not accept such graphic and (to their minds) primitive, unscientific ideas that would embarrass Jews within the non Jewish societies whose acceptance they sought. They turned these beliefs about immortality and especially resurrection into souvenirs that they smashed to bits rather than letting them fade away.
What do we do with these very graphic, perhaps uncomfortable and possibly counterintuitive ideas such as, “Those who have died will come back to life in bodily form when God decrees it,” or “When you die your soul remains alive forever”? In line with Rabbi Gillman’s insights, let me suggest –as I do ad nauseam- that all of these beliefs should be taken seriously, yet none need be taken literally. What does this mean? Ideas such as the soul, immortality, and resurrection in Judaism are metaphors pointing to the very deep intuitive insight that being human means being more than one’s body, one’s physical self. Science is not particularly well equipped to ask the great questions about life’s meaning. All science can and should do is describe the ways in which we are born, we live, and we die. It can show how old life gives way to new life within the ongoing cycle of life, in keeping with the impulse of all genetic material to replicate itself. However, metaphors such as immortality that are found within Judaism and other faiths have been developed precisely to ask these big questions of meaning. We use them to take the bold, risky step into the faithful conviction that we are about more than simply being born and expiring. To be human –any and every human- is to create this precious thing called an individual life, whose lasting value is underscored precisely at the moment of death. Were our lives about nothing more than the bodies of animals doing physical things until they expired, we would not grieve the loss of a loved one, remember him, or seek to carry on her legacy meaningfully.
This is why, when people argue with me about whether immortality really happens to us in the afterlife or it is simply a human construct for remembering the deceased, I tell them that both approaches are right and wrong. As insights into the mystery of being human and human attempts to give meaning to death and grief through memory, both approaches have validity and meaning. Both are very serious. As literalist dogma about what a person must believe concerning death, the greatest of all human mysteries, neither approach makes much sense. That is because until each of us dies, we cannot really know what death and the immortal afterlife truly mean.
As we prepare for Yizkor, let me suggest a melding of both Jewish views of immortality and remind you that I take them both seriously, without taking them literally. Please understand that these suggestions come from me, someone who believes fully in the existence of the immortal soul of every person yet who also has no idea about what to make of resurrection. We know that our bodies –and those of our loved ones- will die. That has been incontrovertible human fact since the day that we left the Garden of Eden and the tree of eternal life to pursue lives of adulthood and meaning in the context of mortality. And yet, who we are never dies. Like energy that can never be destroyed, we return to God in purest form, and we continue forever to flow along on the river of light as a part of God’s eternal creativity and love. Are we conscious after death? Do we love after death? Are we still a powerful presence to our loved ones after death? I say very seriously, yes, even if I can never prove this to be literally true. How do we the living, grieving survivors experience the truth and substance of our loved ones ongoing presence after they have died? Through great rituals of memory like Yizkor, yahrzeit, shivah and avelut. Memory is a bridge between the purely physical world of neurons, chemical reactions, and brain function on the one hand, and the not- so- transcendent spiritual world of God and the soul on the other hand.
As we rise for Yizkor, my hope is that we will be comforted by its words, its rituals, its silence; yet mostly by its laying out for us that beautiful bridge between this physical world and the spiritual world of our loved ones’ undying souls: it is our bridge, yet we really are that bridge. We, along with our memories, have the power to resurrect the substance of their minds, hearts, tears, and actions: all of the things that, unlike souvenirs, really never fade away.
A Sermon For Yizkor By Rabbi Dan Ornstein.
Congregation Ohav Shalom, Albany, NY
A picture postcard
A folded stub
A program of the play;
File away your photographs
Of your holiday.
And your mementos
Will turn to dust,
But that's the price you pay.
For every year's a souvenir
That slowly fades away.
Every year's a souvenir
That slowly fades away.
(Billy Joel, “Souvenir” from the album Street Life Serenade.)
Billy Joel, the bard of Long Island, wrote some pretty depressing –and some pretty true- things about mortality. Year by year we grow, accumulating fond and not so fond memories like so many souvenirs. First, they shine brightly on our mantelpieces, as we proudly display to ourselves and others the rich experiences we’ve had in life. Slowly, slowly they gather the dust of time and forgetfulness as we age, and like us they finally wither into dust. Every year –and every life- is a souvenir that slowly fades away.
And yet, is there nothing about us, our lives, and our memories that has any lasting value once we’re gone? Is death really the final frontier, the absolute determinant of permanence and ephemerality? According to our teacher, Rabbi Neil Gillman, in his wonderful book The Death of Death, our biblical ancestors likely felt that after death, when God has taken back from us the breath of life that God gave us at birth, nothing else about us remains, save for the temporal memories of our immediate survivors. One look at the Hallel prayer that we chanted this morning validates Rabbi Gillman’s assertion. The psalmist asserts that “Lo ha metim y’hallelu yah, v’lo kol yordei dumah”: the dead –those who go down into the depths after they die- do not praise God. Though the Bible emphasizes that when we die we go to some shadowy netherworld, nothing happens there, at least nothing that we could call human, or soulful, or meaningful. Rabbi Gillman then discusses how Jews of the very late biblical and rabbinic periods began to develop ideas like the immortality of the human soul and resurrection of the dead at the end of time under God’s supreme universal rule. These ideas became classic Jewish beliefs. They remained thus until they came under fire in the 19th and 20th centuries from Jewish rationalists and modernists- many of whom could not accept such graphic and (to their minds) primitive, unscientific ideas that would embarrass Jews within the non Jewish societies whose acceptance they sought. They turned these beliefs about immortality and especially resurrection into souvenirs that they smashed to bits rather than letting them fade away.
What do we do with these very graphic, perhaps uncomfortable and possibly counterintuitive ideas such as, “Those who have died will come back to life in bodily form when God decrees it,” or “When you die your soul remains alive forever”? In line with Rabbi Gillman’s insights, let me suggest –as I do ad nauseam- that all of these beliefs should be taken seriously, yet none need be taken literally. What does this mean? Ideas such as the soul, immortality, and resurrection in Judaism are metaphors pointing to the very deep intuitive insight that being human means being more than one’s body, one’s physical self. Science is not particularly well equipped to ask the great questions about life’s meaning. All science can and should do is describe the ways in which we are born, we live, and we die. It can show how old life gives way to new life within the ongoing cycle of life, in keeping with the impulse of all genetic material to replicate itself. However, metaphors such as immortality that are found within Judaism and other faiths have been developed precisely to ask these big questions of meaning. We use them to take the bold, risky step into the faithful conviction that we are about more than simply being born and expiring. To be human –any and every human- is to create this precious thing called an individual life, whose lasting value is underscored precisely at the moment of death. Were our lives about nothing more than the bodies of animals doing physical things until they expired, we would not grieve the loss of a loved one, remember him, or seek to carry on her legacy meaningfully.
This is why, when people argue with me about whether immortality really happens to us in the afterlife or it is simply a human construct for remembering the deceased, I tell them that both approaches are right and wrong. As insights into the mystery of being human and human attempts to give meaning to death and grief through memory, both approaches have validity and meaning. Both are very serious. As literalist dogma about what a person must believe concerning death, the greatest of all human mysteries, neither approach makes much sense. That is because until each of us dies, we cannot really know what death and the immortal afterlife truly mean.
As we prepare for Yizkor, let me suggest a melding of both Jewish views of immortality and remind you that I take them both seriously, without taking them literally. Please understand that these suggestions come from me, someone who believes fully in the existence of the immortal soul of every person yet who also has no idea about what to make of resurrection. We know that our bodies –and those of our loved ones- will die. That has been incontrovertible human fact since the day that we left the Garden of Eden and the tree of eternal life to pursue lives of adulthood and meaning in the context of mortality. And yet, who we are never dies. Like energy that can never be destroyed, we return to God in purest form, and we continue forever to flow along on the river of light as a part of God’s eternal creativity and love. Are we conscious after death? Do we love after death? Are we still a powerful presence to our loved ones after death? I say very seriously, yes, even if I can never prove this to be literally true. How do we the living, grieving survivors experience the truth and substance of our loved ones ongoing presence after they have died? Through great rituals of memory like Yizkor, yahrzeit, shivah and avelut. Memory is a bridge between the purely physical world of neurons, chemical reactions, and brain function on the one hand, and the not- so- transcendent spiritual world of God and the soul on the other hand.
As we rise for Yizkor, my hope is that we will be comforted by its words, its rituals, its silence; yet mostly by its laying out for us that beautiful bridge between this physical world and the spiritual world of our loved ones’ undying souls: it is our bridge, yet we really are that bridge. We, along with our memories, have the power to resurrect the substance of their minds, hearts, tears, and actions: all of the things that, unlike souvenirs, really never fade away.