SHAVUOT YIZKOR 5781

Our tradition teaches us that love transcends time and place, and we should trust that even if we don’t understand it. Yizkor is a unique opportunity to remember and embrace our loved ones we come to shul to remember. Embrace??? Is there really an afterlife and is it possible to embrace and encounter our loved ones even after they’ve died?

Our Sages taught that the world we see is not all there is. There are 3 commandments in the Torah (Deut. 18:11) that tell us that a Jew is not permitted to initiate contact with the dead:

1.    You shall not have among you a sho-eyl ov, “one who asks ghosts,”

2.    Or a yidoni, one who knows familiar spirits by using bones,

3.    Or a doreysh el hameytim, one who consults the dead.

One conclusion we can make from this passage is that it is possible to have contact with the dead or else the Torah would not have prohibited it. We may not initiate this contact, but if our loved ones come to us, we can and should embrace them!

The Talmud contains many stories about how people in the next world see, hear and sometimes even communicate with those of us in this world. The Zohar—the great mystical Biblical commentary—teaches that, if not for the intercession of our loved ones from the next world, this world could not continue to exist.

The Zohar also speaks about how the souls of our loved ones come down to this world to participate in our simchas—our joyous occasions. They are here in this sanctuary as we recite Yizkor in shul for them. This is why Jews visit the cemetery to invite their deceased family members to a Bar/Bat Mitzvah or a wedding.   

Yes, my friends, love transcends time and place, and we should trust that even if we don’t understand it. Skeptical? Let me share with you 3 true stories of people who saved by contact with a deceased relative.

The 1^st 2 come from the Holocaust and tell us about someone who was fortunate enough to escape from the Nazis. In these stories, the contact came in a dream. In the 1^st, my mentor, Rabbi Benjamin Blech, tells the story of a congregant who, when he was a young man, lived in a small town—a shtetl—in Eastern Europe as the Nazis were approaching. The people of the town had no inkling that the Nazis were so close—as was the case with many Eastern European communities that were isolated in the mountains with no radio or newspaper. One night as this man lay asleep, his dead father came to him in a dream and said, Meyn kind, antloyft, “My child, run. Flee for your life!”

         The dream was so vivid, so real that it woke him up. He was upset, but it was only a dream, so he went back to sleep.       Again, he had the same dream. But who runs away based on a dream? He went back to sleep. A 3^rd time his dead father appeared to him in a dream and this time said, “I command you, my son, to run now!”

         He felt almost pushed and immediately woke up, packed a few things and fled into the woods. In the morning the Nazis came into town and took away all the Jews!

Cheryl Kupfner recounts how a message from her deceased grandfather saved her mother’s life in Auschwitz. Cheryl’s mother was a teenager when she and her family were sent to Auschwitz. Let me read you Cheryl’s account:

          They were greeted by the Angel of Death himself—Dr. Josef Mengele. She assumed he selected her middle-aged parents for the “showers” because she never saw them again. Cheryl's mother and her two sisters were sent the other way, to endless work on starvation rations.

          One day her mother decided to try to get a job in the kitchen where she could sneak out food to help her sisters. The night before she planned to ask the German in charge of the kitchen if she could work there, her father came to her in a dream. He warned her not to go. “My child,” he said in Yiddish, “do not go near the kitchen.” As hungry as she was, she took her father’s warning to heart. Shortly after, all the Jews who worked in the kitchen were rounded up and sent to the gas chambers! [Probably someone was caught smuggling food out.] If her father had not appeared to her in that dream, if she had not trusted that he and his message were real, she would not have survived!     

The 3^rd story is about a former congregant from my shul in Brooklyn who was a gunner on a World War II bomber. The gunner sat in a glass bubble towards the back of the plane and was super vulnerable to bullets from enemy fighters that could easily pierce the glass. He was flying a mission and—out of the blue—he heard his father call him by name right behind him. The next part is simply unbelievable. As he turned around to see, a bullet buzzed by his head just where it had been a moment before. He would have certainly been killed had he not responded to that call from his father.

My friends, these are not stories I made up for a sermon. They are true stories. You’ll probably not hear people who have had such experiences talk about them, because the experience was too personal or because they don’t want to be labeled as crazy.

The point is, it is true that love transcends time and place. We should trust that even if we don’t understand it. This is not science fiction, though it defies our understanding of what is possible in this world.

In Pirke Avot (4:21) our Sages compared this world to a lobby before the next world. Their advice? “Prepare yourself in the lobby so that you may enter the banquet hall.” A lobby has limited space and it doesn’t take much time to move from one end to the other. In the scope of eternity, our lives, even if we were to live 90 or 100 years, are like crossing that limited space. We all have so little time in this world. This is why what we do between when we are born and when we die, matters so much. 

Our Sages taught that th only things we take with us when our time comes to walk through that door from this world to the next is our good deeds and love. Regardless of the amount of time we are ultimately granted, we have the opportunity to love and be loved. We have the opportunity to show kindness and compassion, loyalty and laughter, passion and patience, wisdom and generosity—the qualities that enrich the lives of those around us and bind us together with the kind of love that transcends time and place.

Even if our loved ones lived a life full of the kind of love that transcends time and place does not remove the terrible burden of losing them. Who would not want another minute, another hour, another day or week, with a loved one?

But knowing that love transcends time and place, trusting that it does, can help us cope with the loss. Knowing that our world is not all there is or will be…trusting that our loved ones await us on the other side of the door to the next world… believing that they continue to watch over us while we are still here in the lobby of this world…helps us recognize that we are not alone—even though they are physically gone.

My friends, As we continue our journey in the lobby of this life, we have the opportunity to live the kind of life—a life of meaning and connection—that will transcend time and space when our time comes to walk through the door to eternity. Yes, love transcends time and place. We should trust that even if we don’t understand it. Amen!