I have this powerful memory of my grandmother that pops up often, in fact, every time I’m cutting strawberries for my kids lunch, but also every time I take something for granted or don’t appreciate one of life’s small joys like a juicy tomato or a nice sunset. Once many years ago, when my grandmother’s hand was no longer steady and she could use my help in the kitchen, I was cutting the tops off of the strawberries for us, and she complained that I was cutting away too much of the usable good red fruit. I said grandma, its mostly the white part and the leaves I’m cutting. And she said ‘cut closer to the stem. Don’t waste any of it.’
Now, this was of course a practical request - my grandmother hated waste and was exceptionally frugal. She clipped coupons well past the point when she financially did not have to clip coupons. She stripped every bit of meat off of chicken bones. She put towels over the couch in the den so that it wouldn’t wear out or get dirty.
But there is something about being careful to cut a strawberry so as to maximize eating every bit of the sweet part and not waste any of the goodness that stays with me, both literally and as a metaphor for life that will stay with me always. My grandmother was constantly expressing, in ways big and small, that life is a gift, and every moment in life is a gift, and being alive is to be present in those moments, big and small. And of course a lot of that was because, as a holocaust survivor, she had known loss and deprivation in a way none of us do. But also she was just a really special person. She had an unflinching joie de vivre that has always inspired me in how to live. I am who I am today because she, and so many other wonderful people, instructed me by their example how to live a life of purpose.
A shul community is not just a place that a person terms for friendship or camaraderie, or a semi-anonymous prayer space where folks can find 9 other people to help them say kaddish or a free plate of tuna pasta salad – even though those things are important. A shul community is also a place where we live our values, and witness other people’s values rub off on us. It is not a place of Torah in principle, but a place of Torah in action, and in doing so, it becomes a place where we instruct one another about how to live a life of purpose in a million little lop-the-top-off-the-strawberries-but-not-too-much ways, day after day, week after week, year after year. We do it alongside Torah and Mitzvot, and in the presence of Torah, and in the name of mitzvot like prayer and study. But the main way in which we transmit and re-affirm the eternal values of God and the Jewish people is in the memories we create for one another in this place that give our lives lives of purpose.
And you have all done that for me these past five years as a rabbi here, not to mention the total 8 years I have been here as either member or staff. You have made memories for me that illustrate how to live a life well and with intent.
You do it in so many ways. Sheldon Catz does it by trilling the repetition to the amidah in precisely the same comforting way, each and every time he does it. Audrey Glickman showed me how the little things matter at a funeral a few years ago when the temperature at graveside was somewhere around 8 degrees, and yet she insisted on staying until all the other mourners had left. Barbara Rosenstein did it by giving me a tour of her house on a visit a few years ago and putting out the tea kettle for me and asking about how I was doing, even though I was the one who was supposedly doing a pastoral visit. Rich and Helen Feder and Chris Hall and Ronna Harris did it a few years ago when we created a small medical gemach - a medical devices lending library - in our basements and garages a few years ago. We have picked up and dropped off, receiving and given wheelchairs and walkers, kneescooters and rollators to 60 people in need over the years, but those interactions and loans have also allow me to console folks cleaning out their mother’s apartments after a passing or more importantly to let Chris or Helen do that work of consoling and connecting.
Kenny and Max Steinberg show me their zest for life in their epic 3 hour walks on saturday mornings together. Dee Selekman does it by making sure we all have breakfast every morning in minyan. Ira Frank does it by carrying someone’s child around the sanctuary to give that parent a little break now and again, not to mention showing up to morning minyan as often as he can and handing out honors. Paula Eger and Judy Bardack - excuse me - RABBI judy bardack, inspire me to be the best teacher I can by faithfully coming to as many Torah classes as they can and always asking sharp questions.
I have learned about life and how to live it from the roughly 35 benei mitzvah speeches I have helped our kids prepare. I have seen how impactful our religion and our tradition is in the 20 or so conversion students I have worked with. I have learned how to grieve and to be present and how to be consoled from the two dozen funerals I have performed. I have moments of laughter and song, and sometimes wanting to bang my head against the wall for lack of any hair left to tear out when working with the 120 or so religious school children I have taught. It’s in the religious services and youth tefillah meetings that I have attended - watching people argue for hours over whether the yahrtzeit list should be made shorter or longer, whether women should either emphatically encouraged or merely strongly directly towards putting on a tallit at the bimah, or how to best have children’s programming during covid. All of these small moments of lopping-the-top-off-the-strawberry have taught me something, about people, and reciprocally, about myself - what values I have, and what values I must adopt. Who I am, and how I must grow.
I love to find the perfect hassidic text, but also I don’t have the worlds greatest memory, so sometimes I entrust that God will reveal to me the right text in the near term that my imperfect brain can recall for the right moment. So while this may not be the greatest hassidic text of all time, it is, at least by Divine provenance and the limits of recall, the right text for now. A few weeks ago when we learned parshat Tazria Metzora, the text opens with the words “When a woman conceives and bears a male child, she shall be impure seven days; like the days of her menstrual infirmity she shall be impure.” The Sfat Emet, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger, uses that text as a pivot to talk about the forming of the human body as a material thing in contrast to God’s body, which the midrash teaches is effectively all the matter of the universe. But of course, if humans are created in the image of God, than the first human, Adam, was also the sum total of all the matter of the universe - if not in size, than definitely in shape.
He says ‘In the midrash it is taught ‘ “Front and back you made me” (Psalm 139:5); for the human is the form of all the world (Vayikra Rabbah 14:1). And thus, one human is the collective sum total of all.’
The Sfat Emet continues by saying:
ובאמת חומר האדם גם מכל הנבראים.
In truth, the physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created.
כי האדם נברא שישלים את עצמו במעשיו.
But a person was created such that they make themselves complete by their actions.
וע"י שישלים חומרו הגרוע מכולם.
And this is done by improving the deficient nature of everything and everyone [around them].
יביא וימשיך קדושה לכל הנבראים מגדול ועד קטן.
One brings and continues holiness for all creation around them, from great to small.
לזאת כולם קדמו לבריאת האדם. רק אם זכה ובא לשורשו.
As such, everything came before the creation of Adam/the human. Only if one merits it will they come to The Source.
In other words, we were essentially made the same as all the other animals, and our bodies are crude and unelevated material. But. By lopping the tops off of the strawberries, and teaching the children, and making breakfast for morning minyan, and helping people grieve by showing up for their shivahs, and by living our lives in ways that we honor and remember how our departed loved ones made breakfast and showed up to shivah and taught children, we elevate our own crude matter into something greater, something befitting of the Divine image in which God fashioned us.
וע"י שישלים חומרו הגרוע מכולם.
And this is done by improving the deficient nature of everything and everyone [around them].
יביא וימשיך קדושה לכל הנבראים מגדול ועד קטן.
One brings and continues holiness for all creation around them, from great to small.
ובא לשורשו.
And they will come to Their Source - to God.
This all is reflective of a line we will soon say in El Male Rachamim, the ‘God full of mercy’ prayer, the penultimate prayer of the Yizkor service.
בַּעַל הָרַחֲמִים יַסְתִּירֵהוּ בְּסֵתֶר כְּנָפָיו לְעוֹלָמִים, וְיִצְרוֹר בִּצְרוֹר הַחַיִּים אֶת נִשְׁמָתוֹ
Master of mercy, shelter my dear departed loved one under your wings forever, and may their soul be bound up in the bond of life.
That line – may their soul be bound up in the bond of life – hangs upon me every time I sing it. It is so prescient and impactful that I literally feel it tingling in my arms and feel it heavy on my chest even before I come to it when I sing it in morning minyan or at a shiva or a funeral or an unveiling. And now I will tell you all something I’ve never told anyone before - although I think Mindy probably knows because she and I have a bizarre ability to communicate telepathically during morning minyan to the degree that she can raise an eyebrow and I know it means ‘rabbi you moved the belt for the torah too far on the bimah and now I can’t reach it.’ Here’s the thing I’ve never told anyone. When I started leading Thursday morning minyan at beth shalom four years ago Ira Frank paused the service and said ‘does anybody have an el male’ and I froze and thought ‘what in the fresh hell is this?’ Now, here’s the thing I know after 20 years in the rabbinate - every conservative synagogue thinks they do things exactly like every other conservative synagogue. But the reality is that while some have been saying page 87 faithfully every week since 1951, others have been skipping from 160 to 164 without fail every week, and generally the reasons for such things are because a religious services committee, after two and a half years of arguing about it, mandated it back in 1951 and moving forward everyone thinks it was handed down from Moses at Sinai. And so, in all of the other Conservative shuls I’ve been to, mostly on the West coast mind you, those who are observing yahrtzeit don’t come up for el male. But here we do.
And that means I sing el male a lot. Which is hard, because its an intense prayer, and of course it might then have a tendency to lose its intensity if I have to say four of them back to back to back to back. But because this is a person that someone loved very dearly, someone elses ‘lopped the tops off of strawberries’ taught me a life lesson person, I must say it with presence and meaning for them. So here’s the thing I’ve never told any of you. I sing the prayer slightly differently every single time, for every single person. I stretch a syllable for this one, and squish it for another. I pitch up in a spot for that persons mother but pitch way down for that persons husband. I warble the word rachamim for Chaim Yankel but hold the note on that word a little longer for Sarah Frumah. It gives the prayer a little more meaning - if not for the mourner, then at least for me.
And I feel like I have to, because those words ‘tzor bitzor hachaim’ - to be bound up in the bonds of life - demand that each of our deceased be treated like fingerprints, or like snow flakes. They were all somebody’s lop the tops off the strawberry person, and they each taught us how to live with purpose, and so they deserve the smallest kindness from me in trying to find a way to make them special. Because
ובאמת חומר האדם גם מכל הנבראים.
In truth, the physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created.
כי האדם נברא שישלים את עצמו במעשיו.
But a person was created such that they make themselves complete by their actions.
…
That is a big reason why so many of you are here today to remember, to pray the holy and sacred prayer of yizkor. Someone in your life who was very special to you taught you something very foundational to who you are. And maybe that was something equally small like the right way to cut the top off a strawberry. And yizkor is about giving thanks and binding up in the bonds of life our departed, by remembering the lessons they taught us - that memory of them is tzarur - bound - to us in our actual lives bitzror hachaim. And also, each and every day the ways in which we live towards each other - with kindness and compassion, with acts of justice and righteousness, in honesty and sincerity - we honor our departed by the lessons they taught us, which we will invariably pass on not only to our children but to everyone around us in the ways we listen to another person patiently when they are down or go out of our way for each other when we need it - or when we show courage or leadership.
Because as much as we are, in the words of the sfat emet, physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created, we are also made up of stardust and strawberry tops and Divine matter and we are bound up in the bonds of life by every one around us now and everyone that came before us. We remember to get the most out of life, every last bit of the red part of the strawberry, by remembering those who taught us to live with intention, and we honor their memory by living our lives as they would, or maybe even a little better, each and every day. Good yontiff, shabbat shalom.
Now, this was of course a practical request - my grandmother hated waste and was exceptionally frugal. She clipped coupons well past the point when she financially did not have to clip coupons. She stripped every bit of meat off of chicken bones. She put towels over the couch in the den so that it wouldn’t wear out or get dirty.
But there is something about being careful to cut a strawberry so as to maximize eating every bit of the sweet part and not waste any of the goodness that stays with me, both literally and as a metaphor for life that will stay with me always. My grandmother was constantly expressing, in ways big and small, that life is a gift, and every moment in life is a gift, and being alive is to be present in those moments, big and small. And of course a lot of that was because, as a holocaust survivor, she had known loss and deprivation in a way none of us do. But also she was just a really special person. She had an unflinching joie de vivre that has always inspired me in how to live. I am who I am today because she, and so many other wonderful people, instructed me by their example how to live a life of purpose.
A shul community is not just a place that a person terms for friendship or camaraderie, or a semi-anonymous prayer space where folks can find 9 other people to help them say kaddish or a free plate of tuna pasta salad – even though those things are important. A shul community is also a place where we live our values, and witness other people’s values rub off on us. It is not a place of Torah in principle, but a place of Torah in action, and in doing so, it becomes a place where we instruct one another about how to live a life of purpose in a million little lop-the-top-off-the-strawberries-but-not-too-much ways, day after day, week after week, year after year. We do it alongside Torah and Mitzvot, and in the presence of Torah, and in the name of mitzvot like prayer and study. But the main way in which we transmit and re-affirm the eternal values of God and the Jewish people is in the memories we create for one another in this place that give our lives lives of purpose.
And you have all done that for me these past five years as a rabbi here, not to mention the total 8 years I have been here as either member or staff. You have made memories for me that illustrate how to live a life well and with intent.
You do it in so many ways. Sheldon Catz does it by trilling the repetition to the amidah in precisely the same comforting way, each and every time he does it. Audrey Glickman showed me how the little things matter at a funeral a few years ago when the temperature at graveside was somewhere around 8 degrees, and yet she insisted on staying until all the other mourners had left. Barbara Rosenstein did it by giving me a tour of her house on a visit a few years ago and putting out the tea kettle for me and asking about how I was doing, even though I was the one who was supposedly doing a pastoral visit. Rich and Helen Feder and Chris Hall and Ronna Harris did it a few years ago when we created a small medical gemach - a medical devices lending library - in our basements and garages a few years ago. We have picked up and dropped off, receiving and given wheelchairs and walkers, kneescooters and rollators to 60 people in need over the years, but those interactions and loans have also allow me to console folks cleaning out their mother’s apartments after a passing or more importantly to let Chris or Helen do that work of consoling and connecting.
Kenny and Max Steinberg show me their zest for life in their epic 3 hour walks on saturday mornings together. Dee Selekman does it by making sure we all have breakfast every morning in minyan. Ira Frank does it by carrying someone’s child around the sanctuary to give that parent a little break now and again, not to mention showing up to morning minyan as often as he can and handing out honors. Paula Eger and Judy Bardack - excuse me - RABBI judy bardack, inspire me to be the best teacher I can by faithfully coming to as many Torah classes as they can and always asking sharp questions.
I have learned about life and how to live it from the roughly 35 benei mitzvah speeches I have helped our kids prepare. I have seen how impactful our religion and our tradition is in the 20 or so conversion students I have worked with. I have learned how to grieve and to be present and how to be consoled from the two dozen funerals I have performed. I have moments of laughter and song, and sometimes wanting to bang my head against the wall for lack of any hair left to tear out when working with the 120 or so religious school children I have taught. It’s in the religious services and youth tefillah meetings that I have attended - watching people argue for hours over whether the yahrtzeit list should be made shorter or longer, whether women should either emphatically encouraged or merely strongly directly towards putting on a tallit at the bimah, or how to best have children’s programming during covid. All of these small moments of lopping-the-top-off-the-strawberry have taught me something, about people, and reciprocally, about myself - what values I have, and what values I must adopt. Who I am, and how I must grow.
I love to find the perfect hassidic text, but also I don’t have the worlds greatest memory, so sometimes I entrust that God will reveal to me the right text in the near term that my imperfect brain can recall for the right moment. So while this may not be the greatest hassidic text of all time, it is, at least by Divine provenance and the limits of recall, the right text for now. A few weeks ago when we learned parshat Tazria Metzora, the text opens with the words “When a woman conceives and bears a male child, she shall be impure seven days; like the days of her menstrual infirmity she shall be impure.” The Sfat Emet, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger, uses that text as a pivot to talk about the forming of the human body as a material thing in contrast to God’s body, which the midrash teaches is effectively all the matter of the universe. But of course, if humans are created in the image of God, than the first human, Adam, was also the sum total of all the matter of the universe - if not in size, than definitely in shape.
He says ‘In the midrash it is taught ‘ “Front and back you made me” (Psalm 139:5); for the human is the form of all the world (Vayikra Rabbah 14:1). And thus, one human is the collective sum total of all.’
The Sfat Emet continues by saying:
ובאמת חומר האדם גם מכל הנבראים.
In truth, the physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created.
כי האדם נברא שישלים את עצמו במעשיו.
But a person was created such that they make themselves complete by their actions.
וע"י שישלים חומרו הגרוע מכולם.
And this is done by improving the deficient nature of everything and everyone [around them].
יביא וימשיך קדושה לכל הנבראים מגדול ועד קטן.
One brings and continues holiness for all creation around them, from great to small.
לזאת כולם קדמו לבריאת האדם. רק אם זכה ובא לשורשו.
As such, everything came before the creation of Adam/the human. Only if one merits it will they come to The Source.
In other words, we were essentially made the same as all the other animals, and our bodies are crude and unelevated material. But. By lopping the tops off of the strawberries, and teaching the children, and making breakfast for morning minyan, and helping people grieve by showing up for their shivahs, and by living our lives in ways that we honor and remember how our departed loved ones made breakfast and showed up to shivah and taught children, we elevate our own crude matter into something greater, something befitting of the Divine image in which God fashioned us.
וע"י שישלים חומרו הגרוע מכולם.
And this is done by improving the deficient nature of everything and everyone [around them].
יביא וימשיך קדושה לכל הנבראים מגדול ועד קטן.
One brings and continues holiness for all creation around them, from great to small.
ובא לשורשו.
And they will come to Their Source - to God.
This all is reflective of a line we will soon say in El Male Rachamim, the ‘God full of mercy’ prayer, the penultimate prayer of the Yizkor service.
בַּעַל הָרַחֲמִים יַסְתִּירֵהוּ בְּסֵתֶר כְּנָפָיו לְעוֹלָמִים, וְיִצְרוֹר בִּצְרוֹר הַחַיִּים אֶת נִשְׁמָתוֹ
Master of mercy, shelter my dear departed loved one under your wings forever, and may their soul be bound up in the bond of life.
That line – may their soul be bound up in the bond of life – hangs upon me every time I sing it. It is so prescient and impactful that I literally feel it tingling in my arms and feel it heavy on my chest even before I come to it when I sing it in morning minyan or at a shiva or a funeral or an unveiling. And now I will tell you all something I’ve never told anyone before - although I think Mindy probably knows because she and I have a bizarre ability to communicate telepathically during morning minyan to the degree that she can raise an eyebrow and I know it means ‘rabbi you moved the belt for the torah too far on the bimah and now I can’t reach it.’ Here’s the thing I’ve never told anyone. When I started leading Thursday morning minyan at beth shalom four years ago Ira Frank paused the service and said ‘does anybody have an el male’ and I froze and thought ‘what in the fresh hell is this?’ Now, here’s the thing I know after 20 years in the rabbinate - every conservative synagogue thinks they do things exactly like every other conservative synagogue. But the reality is that while some have been saying page 87 faithfully every week since 1951, others have been skipping from 160 to 164 without fail every week, and generally the reasons for such things are because a religious services committee, after two and a half years of arguing about it, mandated it back in 1951 and moving forward everyone thinks it was handed down from Moses at Sinai. And so, in all of the other Conservative shuls I’ve been to, mostly on the West coast mind you, those who are observing yahrtzeit don’t come up for el male. But here we do.
And that means I sing el male a lot. Which is hard, because its an intense prayer, and of course it might then have a tendency to lose its intensity if I have to say four of them back to back to back to back. But because this is a person that someone loved very dearly, someone elses ‘lopped the tops off of strawberries’ taught me a life lesson person, I must say it with presence and meaning for them. So here’s the thing I’ve never told any of you. I sing the prayer slightly differently every single time, for every single person. I stretch a syllable for this one, and squish it for another. I pitch up in a spot for that persons mother but pitch way down for that persons husband. I warble the word rachamim for Chaim Yankel but hold the note on that word a little longer for Sarah Frumah. It gives the prayer a little more meaning - if not for the mourner, then at least for me.
And I feel like I have to, because those words ‘tzor bitzor hachaim’ - to be bound up in the bonds of life - demand that each of our deceased be treated like fingerprints, or like snow flakes. They were all somebody’s lop the tops off the strawberry person, and they each taught us how to live with purpose, and so they deserve the smallest kindness from me in trying to find a way to make them special. Because
ובאמת חומר האדם גם מכל הנבראים.
In truth, the physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created.
כי האדם נברא שישלים את עצמו במעשיו.
But a person was created such that they make themselves complete by their actions.
…
That is a big reason why so many of you are here today to remember, to pray the holy and sacred prayer of yizkor. Someone in your life who was very special to you taught you something very foundational to who you are. And maybe that was something equally small like the right way to cut the top off a strawberry. And yizkor is about giving thanks and binding up in the bonds of life our departed, by remembering the lessons they taught us - that memory of them is tzarur - bound - to us in our actual lives bitzror hachaim. And also, each and every day the ways in which we live towards each other - with kindness and compassion, with acts of justice and righteousness, in honesty and sincerity - we honor our departed by the lessons they taught us, which we will invariably pass on not only to our children but to everyone around us in the ways we listen to another person patiently when they are down or go out of our way for each other when we need it - or when we show courage or leadership.
Because as much as we are, in the words of the sfat emet, physical matter of a person is more crude than all that was created, we are also made up of stardust and strawberry tops and Divine matter and we are bound up in the bonds of life by every one around us now and everyone that came before us. We remember to get the most out of life, every last bit of the red part of the strawberry, by remembering those who taught us to live with intention, and we honor their memory by living our lives as they would, or maybe even a little better, each and every day. Good yontiff, shabbat shalom.
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