"UNBROKEN CIRCLE?"
A Memorial Sermonette for the Eve of the Seventh Day of Passover 5763
April 22, 2003














Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana


Studs Terkel wrote a fine book in which he interviews about seventy individuals from every possible calling in life, asking them to reflect on death, the hereafter and their hunger to believe. Studs titled the book:
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
In his introduction Terkel fills us in on what's been happening in his own life and his personal reasons for writing this book. He tells us:
All in all, it's been a good one. Going on eighty-nine, I was born the year the Titanic went down. Who would want to live to be ninety? Churchill is reputed to have replied: "Everyone who is eighty-nine."

Standing at the open grave is a harsh moment which dissolves all strategies of denial. You know then, without a doubt, that your beloved is gone. Stud tells us about his own introduction to death's reality upon discovering his own father dead in bed.
I was remarkably calm until, seated on the Grand Avenue streetcar the next day, heading nowhere in particular, I surprised myself by breaking into uncontrollable sobs.

The young Terkel hurried to the rear of the car, hopping off at whatever stop, just to escape his show of grief.

Only to have that same grief return 100-fold when, 68 years later, he was interviewing individuals for this book. Her name was Antoinette, and she described aiding a man having a heart attack on a bus. Says Terkel of that interview.
She told me the man didn't want to be trouble. He was embarrassed that he was "holding up the whole bus."
The tears and deep grief he felt were touched off in the once 19-year-old boy now grown up, how uncomfortable he had been at daring to grieve out loud for his father.

In another chapter of Terkel's book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, Myra MacPherson refers to "disenfranchised grief," a term referring to society's conviction that it is better if you and I not feel and certainly not show our grief. Says MacPherson:

I was in my late fifties when my mother died. She was eighty-one. People came up with the usual platitudes, "After all, she lived a good life," "You shouldn't feel so full of grief. . . ." We want a sort of drive-by grieving. Nobody wants you to carry on about it. They want you to deposit it like you do in a bank.
That's not the Jewish way, is it? We participate in services such as this in order to take our grief out of the closet and to become a community of mourners. We can't ever hope to so much as begin to strip death of its fear, if we never allow one another to speak of it or to express our sense of loss. Our tradition prescribes stepping back from life for a while to acknowledge that yes, something has assaulted you, and wounded as you are, business, as usual, is out of the question.

My parents were strict about my lineage as a Cohen (a Biblical priest), and Cohens are forbidden by Jewish law to enter a funeral home or step foot in a cemetery. I remember once when I was 11 or 12, sitting in the car, while my mother and father attended the unveiling ceremony of a distant relative's tombstone. Why I didn't object to being so relegated while my father went into the cemetery, I still don't know. After all, wasn't he as much a Cohen as was I?

So what was the result? I developed an insatiable desire to learn about cemeteries and funerals. I sat by my bicycle one summer afternoon, watching with fascination as caskets were delivered to our local funeral home. Once I left home for college, I made sure to walk across every cemetery I ever came near. I have been a cemetery-lover ever since. Such places speak to me of death's peace and of its end of pain. They give assurance that you and I are God's children-and as such-we are more than physical bodies that die and are buried.

This poetic whimsy of an unknown source can't help but amuse us:
I wake up each morning and gather my wits,
I pick up the paper and read the obits.
If my name is not in it, I know I'm not dead,
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.
Death is an inescapable fact of life. Without the knowledge of life's farthest horizon, we'd have no reason to maximize our limited time here on earth. So we seek to uplift our lives with loving devotion to dear ones, and to worthy purpose, and to participating in organizations and projects that will outlive us and testify to those beliefs and values we held sacred and dear.

Despite our earnest efforts, at the last no one knows the details of life's inescapable mystery which awaits us all. Yet, we are not bashful to lift up the lives of those who have loved us, and set them with honor and respect as examples of what it means to be a worthy child of the Most High.

We are comforted by the realization that those who have given us life do in surprising ways continue to accompany us along the way.

Our everlasting gratitude to them is made clear by our presence here this day and by our resolute and determined efforts to similarly live our lives true and loyal to the best as we know they would have us do.

So let us strive to live with faith and clean conscience, day by day and season by season, until at that time yet unknown, we too shall say with the ancient Seer:

B'yado afkeed ruchi.
Into God's hands do I entrust my spirit.
Adonai Eli, v'lo eerah.
The Lord is with me, I shall not fear.

Amen.