Yizkor 5785 - Number Our Days

In a few moments, when we turn to our Yizkor prayers, we will chant several verses from Psalms to introduce this portion of the service. The first couple of verses ruminate on the fleeting nature of human life, a fitting focus for prayers we say in memory of those who are no longer with us. But then we read : לִמְנוֹת יָמֵינוּ כֵּן הוֹדַע וְנָבִא לְבַב חׇכְמָה׃ / “Teach us to number our days rightly, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom.” (Psalms 90:12) This verse, in contrast to the previous ones, focuses on us, instructing us to cultivate an awareness of our lives, which will allow us to attain wisdom. In his commentary on this verse, the 12th century scholar Abraham ibn Ezra explains that the verse reminds us that our days may be very few; therefore we should be inspired to appreciate the lives we have and live whatever days we are granted in the fullest way possible. 

In this way, the opening verses to our Yizkor prayers are like a conversation within our hearts. “I know life is like a breath, a passing shadow,” we say, as we stand in memory of someone we’ve lost. “But I’m still here right now - how can I honor the days of my life, however few or many they may be?”

This past summer, I picked up a book that had been sitting on my shelf for a while, The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. The story centers around a woman, Nora Seed, who is going through a devastatingly difficult time. Her relationship with her brother is tense and nearly non-existent. She has a broken-off an engagement that she is not over. She is fired from her dead-end job. The final blow – her cat dies, seemingly hit by a car after it got out of her flat without her noticing. She decides she doesn’t want to be alive anymore. 

As her last day on earth comes to a close, she suddenly finds herself in the Midnight Library, a mysterious place filled with shelves and shelves of books as far as she can see. Soon she meets the librarian, who explains, “‘Between life and death there is a library. And within the library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices…if you had the chance to undo your regrets.’”

The librarian goes on to describe how the library works, that the life she was attempting to leave is really one of infinite parallel universes, that each book on the shelf will transport her into one of those alternate lives, dropping her into herself at this exact moment, allowing her to try on that life and see if she likes her new path better, if she wants to stay there and pick up the thread of her life in this different version of herself. If she doesn’t want to stay in that life, she will simply return to the library, where she can pick a different book off the shelf and try again.

How will Nora decide which lives she wishes to inhabit? She will want to choose ones that do not include the problems and challenges that made her want to leave her root life altogether. And to know how to make this choice she will need to examine her Book of Regrets. 

Nora’s book of regrets is massive and she is overwhelmed by the choices and circumstances of her life that she wishes were different. As she encounters the regrets that speak most to her, she leaps into those life paths where they don’t exist, where she has made different choices. While living each of these lives for a time, she discovers that, in some cases, circumventing regrets simply makes room for other, more painful, ones. And in some cases, living free from the pain of certain regrettable decisions actually makes Nora feel happier, more actualized. 

As the story progresses and Nora explores more and more possible life paths without settling on one where she truly wants to live, we see her grow weary of the process. She finds it hard to believe that in some lives, she struggles to pay the rent and in others she’s an internationally renowned rock star, that the same decisions can have such wildly varying consequences. At the same time, she notices that her book of regrets is starting to grow shorter. Some of the alternate lives she has tried out helped her resolve and let go of regrets that had previously haunted her, even when those lives turned out not to be ones in which she wanted to stay.

We begin to see that exploring these unlived lives is a kind of conversation Nora is having with herself. It is not an easy conversation; it has her visiting and revisiting the consequences of her choices, many of which are quite painful. It forces her to look critically at her past, to confront her missteps and mistakes, to acknowledge how she has been hurt and how she has hurt others. 

While The Midnight Library is not a book specifically authored for this moment of Yom Kippur, it lines up pretty evenly with what’s on our minds right now. Regret, resolution, seeking a better, more fulfilling, life, particularly in this moment when the fragility of life is so present for us. 

I’ve been talking a lot about difficult conversations over these High Holidays. The story of Nora Seed points us to another kind of difficult conversation that we ought to be having, especially on Yom Kippur – a conversation with ourselves. Like Nora, we need to examine our lives closely, acknowledging those things we regret, the ways in which we have made choices that have caused our lives to veer off course, or led us to hurt others. And we need to find our way out of or beyond those regrets, so that we can continue our lives with renewed purpose, on the path of renewal and repair. We need to count our days, guiding ourselves toward wisdom.

While we can’t jump from life path to life path across infinite parallel universes, the lives Nora explored highlight some of the areas of our own lives that can become topics for these kinds of conversations.

In her root life, Nora was a talented swimmer, who gave up the sport as a teenager. Her father strongly disapproved of her choice and they were never able to resolve their disagreement before he suddenly died. Swimming features prominently in several of her new lives, but in one, she is a decorated Olympian swimmer who now is sought after as a motivational speaker. She sees what it might have been like for her to stay with swimming and push herself to develop her talent and skill more fully. What professional paths have we not taken? What talents or skills have we moved to the margins of our lives? What would it be like for us to pursue them?

Nora is also a musician - she plays piano and sings well. But just as the band she’s in with her brother seems like it’s about to take off, she collapses under the pressure and leaves the group, destroying her relationship with her brother. In many of the lives she tries on, Nora’s brother is there. In some they’re still estranged, in some he’s reluctantly part of her life, in some, he has tragically succumbed to addiction. Not until the very end of the book does her relationship with her brother begin to take a more hopeful turn. In all of her alternate lives, the opportunity to reconnect with her brother is *this* far away, but she never gets there. What are the relationships in our lives that are in need of attention? What quarrels are due to be resolved or forgotten? What opportunities have we missed to deepen our connections with those who are closest to us?

Nora, as I mentioned a bit ago, was devastated by the death of her cat. She blamed herself for his demise, thinking that he got out because she was neglectful and that’s why he was hit by a car (he had been found by the side of the road). In one of her earliest leaps, Nora learns that her cat actually had a fatal congenital condition. In her root life, he was not hit by a car; it was simply his time. She had it all wrong. Instead of being the reason he died, Nora realized that she was why he had a warm, loving home, delicious food, and companionship while he was still alive. What are the situations in our lives that we see wrong? How will the reality of these situations finally get through to us, and what will we do with that new knowledge?

These contemplative conversations are ones we can have as individuals, and they are also ones we can have as a community. As a shul, a spiritual home and place of connection for our members, it behooves us to look within ourselves and examine our book of regrets, for of course, we have regrets. What have we gotten wrong? How have we caused pain? How could we have lived our mission more thoroughly? 

Regret is inevitable; repair is a choice. So, once we can see our regrets clearly, we want to resolve them. What can we do to address any hurts that still exist? What new paths can we explore that will help our community feel more connected and cohesive? 

One area where this model of regret and repair feels especially salient for our community is our ongoing conversation about how we welcome and serve multi-faith families, where one member of a couple is Jewish and the other is not. 

The Conservative Movement and indeed, the Jewish world as a whole, has had a long and difficult journey when it comes to how we respond to interfaith relationships, a journey that is full of regrets. The epicenter of those regrets is the way that the Jewish communal world held multi-faith families responsible for any and all problems, real or imagined, with Jewish continuity and flagging membership numbers.

The National Jewish Population Survey of 1990 was the cause of many of these alarmist responses. This was the study that found that a whopping 52% American Jews were marrying people of other faith backgrounds. In response, prominent voices in Jewish communal leadership began predicting our demise. “We are probably witnessing the last generation of Jewish life in America as we now know it,” a leading rabbi wrote in the Los Angeles Times. Literary critic Leslie Fiedler predicted ‘an end to a separate Jewish identity, whether defined racially, religiously or culturally.’ And…Alan Dershowitz warned that Jews were ‘in danger of disappearing.’ Intermarriage, he wrote, was a ‘threat to our survival as a people.’”

It was also emotionally devastating to the Jewish community overall. We were constantly assailed by news articles and op-eds discussing the study and decrying that one statistic. The study took American Jewry “from a community that was appreciating its successful rise to the upper echelons of socioeconomic status to one that was concerned about its very survival.”

The response to the NJPS frightened us about our future and told us exactly what was to blame for our feeling of instability. Fearing that the children born to intermarried parents would simply disappear from the Jewish community, synagogues and organizations went about trying to woo these families and give them reasons to stay Jewish. At the same time, they put up high barriers to true inclusion. Using the Conservative Movement as an example, some synagogues would not even congratulate interfaith families celebrating weddings or births with the words “mazal tov,” reserving those for endogamous families. People in interfaith relationships were not allowed to serve as synagogue presidents, or in professional roles in movement organizations. Non-Jewish partners could not be considered members of the synagogues where their families worshiped and where their children were educated. It’s hard to be fully welcoming when you see interfaith marriage as a mortal threat.

We know that our prior stance on interfaith marriage has caused a great deal of pain. We carry that regret and we feel the responsibility to work toward repair.

It also turns out that the fears about interfaith marriage were significantly exaggerated. Interfaith marriage rates have indeed continued to increase. The 2020 Pew study of Jewish Americans found 72% of non-Orthodox Jews married since 2010 are in interfaith marriages. However, children of interfaith families are increasingly identifying with their Jewishness. “Among Americans older than 49 with one Jewish parent, just more than 20% identify as Jewish. But among Americans ages 18 to 49, nearly 50% identify as Jews.” Pew and other Jewish population studies have also shown that the population of Americans who identify as Jewish has increased 35% since 1990; 10% of that over the past 7 years. 

This growth has been fostered and allowed space to develop thanks to organizations, such as 18Doors, who understand that interfaith families aren’t going anywhere and deserve our attention, respect, and sincere engagement. As Jodi Bromberg, head of 18Doors has said, “Interfaith families aren’t a drop in the ocean. They are the ocean.”

Our movement has also begun to make significant changes to our approach to interfaith marriage. In addition to removing some of the barriers for full inclusion (for example, the USCJ, our parent organization, officially allowed partners of other faith backgrounds to be synagogue members in 2017), we are actively taking steps to rethink our approach to interfaith marriage, training clergy and community leaders to embrace inclusivity more fully. 

I’m sharing all of this with us because our community has been thinking and talking about matters of interfaith inclusion for quite some time. We have taken some small steps in the past couple of years to be more welcoming to people in interfaith relationships, but I believe it is time for us to have a larger conversation about how we will face the realities of the Jewish world. We are a community with an abiding respect for tradition and we are a community with a tremendous ability to love and care for each other. I want to see us link those values and join other synagogues in our movement by learning about possible approaches and newer pathways for making interfaith families feel truly welcome at Chevrei Tzedek. 

Over the course of this year, we will learn together about these approaches and have opportunities to engage in deep conversation about this topic. I am so looking forward to being together as we examine where we’ve been and envision where we are going. May this process help us to number our days and acquire hearts of wisdom, finding true appreciation for the possibilities that lie ahead for us.