5765 High Holidays: Yom Kippur

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Yom Kippur 5765-2004 - Legendology
by Shira Brisman

Tradition asks that on this day we remember the stories of our martyrs. "Martyr" is a difficult term to use in our times. How can we honor the memory of the dead with a word that has been twisted out of shape? Our newspapers are stained with stories of men who kiss their wives goodbye, strap dynamite around their waists, and run onto a bus, leaving disembodied limbs and a widow who tells her children, "Your daddy was a hero." Our televisions blare the claim of a Chechan rebel who instructed attackers to storm a school filled with children, to hold them hostage, to surround them with bombs, to point guns at their heads so that he may sign his letter of accountability, "Emir of the Martyrs' Brigade."

How can we call our dead by the same name as those who value life so little? And how can we honor their fortitude without exalting their deaths?

Release the poetic comfort that they have passed to a better place.

Let go of the notion that their souls are ennobled.

Allow death to confound us, confuse us.

Ask questions, configure and reconfigure our place in this world.

Accept what these deaths have taught us: that life is here on earth.

Let our remembrance not be a Martyrology. Let it be instead a Legendology, for the word legend has two meanings: a legend is a story, passed down from generations, which, like a star, is affixed far away, and which we gaze at with wonder. But a legend is also an index on the side of a map that helps us to decode the strange constellations of symbols on the ground on which we stand.

Reader 1: Rabbi Akiba

He was a poor, unschooled shepherd in love with a rich man's daughter. For her he left his flock to study Torah, and for him she left her father's mansion to sleep on a bed of straw. After the failed Bar Kokhba rebellion, Akiba was taken prisoner by Roman authorities who taunted him to abandon his faith. But to Akiba life without Torah was like a fish without water. He chose death over submission. While his torturers raked his flesh with burning iron combs he sang, "Shema yisrael adonai elohenu adonai echad" in a voice loud and clear, for now he knew how it was possible to love God with all his soul.
*** It is after midnight and the student looks up from his book. He has just read of the martyrdom of Rabbi Akiba. He peers out the window of the university library and begins to wonder:

What would I give up to preserve the customs of my ancestors? Dinner and movies with a girl on Friday night? Tickets to a baseball game?
What would I forsake to study the texts of my religion? A career as a concert pianist? A life of worldly fame?
What would I risk to feel comfortable in my skin? The social embarrassment of saying, 'your joke offends me'? The linguistic awkwardness of declaring, 'I am a Jew'?
What would I surrender to pray what I mean? The adherence to tradition? The comfort of saying words I don't understand?
What would I relinquish so that others might pray as they wish? My sense of superiority? A plot of land?

Together:
Eleh ezkerah venafshi a'layi eshpechah.

Reader 2: The Shoah

In the spring of 1945 U.S. and British troops landed on foreign soil to liberate the remaining victims of Nazi terror. As these men and women wittenssed total devastation, photographs from the camps horrified the citizens back home. These images burned scars in their memories: gaunt faces behind barbed wire, starved eyes bulging from sculls of corpses, figures stacked like matchsticks, gaping pits of bodies, heaps of ashes and bone.
*** Decades later, the historian will write her book on cultural memory. She will track the activity of these photographs, how they fix in the mind, offering narratives for parents to tell their children, for those children to tell their children. She will describe how, unlike the individual memory of a person, which fades over time, the collective memory of a people grows stronger with the passing of generations, exerting an unrelenting hold. The historian will search for a metaphor for this kind of memory. She will think it is like music, like the way a composer etches his notes on paper, and the notes become a song which reaches far beyond the bounds of ink on parchment, extending, permutating, even beyond the death of its author, carried by the voices of the living.

Together:
Eleh ezkerah venafshi a'layi eshpechah.

Reader 3: September 11, 2001

Stacey Sanders had started a new job. She was twenty-five and about to be engaged. That Tuesday morning she woke up early to blow dry her hair, sip coffee and read the newspaper before arriving at her office on the 106th floor of the north tower. At 9:25 a.m. she sent a hurried e-mail home reporting intense smoke. Later her mother and sister would read that e-mail, and over the next days they would read it over and over, wondering if there was some way that Stacey had survived. Stacey Sanders had started a new job. She was twenty-five and about to be engaged. That Tuesday morning she woke up early to blow dry her hair, sip coffee and read the newspaper before arriving at her office on the 106th floor of the north tower. At 9:25 a.m. she sent a hurried e-mail home reporting intense smoke. Later her mother and sister would read that e-mail, and over the next days they would read it over and over, wondering if there was some way that Stacey had survived. But they would never see or hear from her again.But they would never see or hear from her again.
*** Three years after the attacks an investigator from the National Institute of Standards and Technology will review the videotapes that captured the descents of some two hundred bodies from the windows of the towers. He will rewind and replay these tapes calibrating the velocity of the falls, trying to determine the strength and speed of the fires. He will calculate that in some pockets of the buildings the heat rose to more than 1,000 degrees. He will wonder whether the people pressed against the windows, gasping in vain for air, were pushed through the windows by force of the fire, or whether they had broken through the glass, voluntarily jumping to their deaths in desperation. At the end of the day he will switch off the monitor, remove his glasses, bend his head in his hands, knowing that his questions and calculations bring nothing more than unbearable sorrow.

Together:
Eleh ezkerah venafshi a'layi eshpechah.

Reading 4: A Suicide Bombing in Jerusalem

The team at the emergency room of Shaare Zedek Medical Center were prepared to treat those wounded in the bombing at Café Hillel. But they were not prepared for the news that the head of their emergency room, Dr. David Appelbaum, had been at that café with his twenty-year old daughter Nava who was to be married the next day.

*** On another continent, a professor of Psychology will set out on his research to study hate. He will calculate that in the 36,525 days of the twentieth century 160 million civilians lost their lives to massacre. He will create a taxonomy of hatred: he will describe the passion of Hot Hate, the disgust of Cool Hate, and the commitment of Cold Hate. Any two sides of this triangle can combine to form Boiling Hate, Seething Hate, Burning Hate. He will study patterns of aggression in primates and try to explain how humans, with our complex cognition, are capable of violence more bestial than the beasts. He will devote his life to understanding hatred. But when he reads the obituary of Dr. Appelbaum he knows that not all the science in the world can explain the perverse irony of how a man who spent his life rushing to disaster sites, treating Arabs and Jews alike, could be blown to bits and pieces by a suicide bomber, or how the events of the eve of a young woman's marriage could turn her wedding to a funeral.

Together:
Eleh ezkerah venafshi a'layi eshpechah.

Legend 5: The Siege of a School in Beslan

The thirty attackers spent ten days in the woods outside the village of Batako-Yurt planning the siege. At 9am on the first day of the new school year, children, teachers and parents are held hostage inside the gym. Without food, water or the right to speak, they wither in fear inside a basketball court strung with explosives, barricaded with desks and library books. Fifty-two hours later much of the school collapses under fire leaving a battlefield with bullet-scarred walls, bloody handprints and signs of carnage. Hundreds of children are dead and wounded.
*** Across the ocean a mother-she will soon walk her son to school-will stare at the newspaper where a Russian police officer carries a young boy from the rubble. She will not be able to stop staring at the bloody face of the boy who, though probably the same age as her son, has the eyes and expression of an old man. She will wonder what makes a boy of eight look as though he's eighty. Is it the experience of being showered with shrapnel? Sitting without food for fifty-two hours? Watching his teachers cry? What makes a boy age into a man? Watching twelve hundred people become too exhausted to fear? Looking hate in the face?

Together:
Eleh ezkerah venafshi a'layi eshpechah.

*** We students, historians, investigators, psychologists, and mothers gather to remember that our world is still imperfect. New York, Madrid, Beer Sheva have proved that terrorism is spreading and Sudan is evidence that genocide has not stopped. We pause in our questionings to consult our legends:

May we remember the great Rabbi's life-affirming love for Torah.

May we remember the feeble efforts of the camp victims to observe the Sabbath even in imprisonment.

May we remember the spontaneous acts of kindness-the supplies of food and clothing, the volunteers who lined up to give blood, the billions of cards written, the poetry read-improvisational acts of love spawned by an unexpected act of hatred.

May we remember the devotion of doctors who rush to pools of blood and torn flesh, and fathers who speak warmly to their daughters on the nights of their weddings.

May we remember the look in the eyes of a boy who has been held hostage by nationalist rebels.

May we pray that his empty gaze be nurtured into an unbounded pursuit of beauty in the world.