I wanted to start by sharing an email this week from the recipient of time and energy contributed by our Hesed volunteers. Remember that our Hesed Committee (“Hesed” means love and kindness) is the group of volunteers in our community that offers support to their fellow community members in need through such actions as Shabbat Shalom check-in calls, visits to members in the hospital, meal deliveries for a congregant who just had a baby or is recuperating from illness, rides to the doctor, moments of companionship, and more.
The recipient, a member of our community, wrote as follows:
“I want to express my appreciation for the wonderful service that Hesed is for me. I have walked with [a Hesed volunteer] several times, and we will walk again (depending on the instructions from my physical therapist). We will also become good friends, I know.
I have belonged to many synagogues during my lifetime but Society Hill Synagogue is the only one I know of that has this marvelous committee. No wonder our membership is growing!
Thanks to all who started Hesed and keep it going.”
We are so appreciative of this note and we are always in need of more Hesed volunteers. If you are interested in learning more about volunteering, please email Hesed@societyhillsynagogue, which goes to the co-chairs of our committee, Julie Wilson, Laurie Krivo, Natalie Landro, and Deb Stewart. I hope you share in my gratitude for this profound act of community.
Speaking of important facets of Jewish communal work, part of the experience of being Jewish right now (and throughout Jewish history) is the way in which our experience of being Jewish implicates not only our private lives but our relationship to public life.
Public discourse right now often centers on issues that touch on our Jewish identities, whether that is through vigorous debates about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whether that is through a rise in antisemitism across the political spectrum, or whether that is through questions about what it means to be Jewish in today’s world.
At Society Hill Synagogue, it’s our belief that synagogues should be institutions that strengthen our capacity to respond to these challenges of being Jewish in today’s world, whether that’s through education, through mutual support, or through taking action steps that address the challenges we observe.
One means through which we address these challenges is by gathering people together who share passions and interests and can work towards a shared purpose.
To that end, we want to highlight the following three committees (one continuing, two new) that will be working in coordination with one another to help strengthen each of our capacities to respond to public challenges that touch upon our Jewish identities.
Israel Connections Committee: chaired by David Levine, this continuing committee works to help nurture our connection to the people of Israel by fostering education and promoting meaningful engagement with the Jewish homeland through programs and activities.
A Path Forward: Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding Committee: this new committee’s mission is to provide education about and support for Israelis and Palestinians who are building a path forward, through a range of programs and discussions for the Society Hill Synagogue Community. This committee is co-chaired by Laurie Krivo, Bob Kaufman, and Roberta Spivek.
Affirmative Response to Antisemitism Committee: this new committee’s mission is to provide a space of teaching, training, and mutual support in an affirmative response to the rise of antisemitism our members are encountering in society. This committee will be chaired by Jeremey Newberg.
If any of these committees interest you, please email Alexis Rosen, our Manager of Community Engagement and Communications, who can put you in touch with the chairs.
I hope you find this community’s engagement with these challenges and opportunities to be meaningful and sincere.
Finally, I want to share the D’var Torah with you that I delivered at Shabbat services this past Friday night:
Some of you may know that the Jewish month in which we find ourselves is known as Heshvan, and its formal name is Marheshvan. Because the word mar in Hebrew means “bitter” — think “maror,” the bitter herbs that we eat on Pesah/Passover — and because there are no holidays in the month of Marheshvan. Some people think that the name Marheshvan associates bitterness with this absence of holidays. However, if you are clergy in Jewish life, and you are coming off a stretch of what in some years amounts to 20 services in 30 days, while we love a holiday as much as anybody else, there is nothing bitter about a stretch of Jewish simplicity, weeks of no special days, no special services, beyond the specialness of shabbat.
And yet, Heshvan has always struck a very specific chord in the Jewish calendar for me. We have our collective Jewish calendar, but we all also have our own individual Jewish calendars, marking the specific dates of significance in our lives, and for me, Heshvan has always been the month associated with a word in Yiddish which literally means “anniversary,” not a wedding anniversary, but the anniversary of a death, that word being of course, yahrtzeit.
Yahrtzeits hold great significance in Jewish tradition. I can’t tell you how many correspondences we have with people to make sure our synagogue has the correct date listed for our loved ones’ yahrtzeits, how sure we want to be that people are listed on the correct shabbat. Even for people who aren’t regularly engaged with synagogue life, a yahrtzeit is an important moment.
We don’t know the exact origins of the traditions of commemorating a yahrtzeit. Passing reference is made in the biblical book of Shoftim, Judges, to an annual memorial for the daughter of the judge/chieftain Jephthah (the daughter whom he tragically killed); the Talmud makes passing reference to a custom of fasting annually on the date of our parents’ deaths; and the current practices are generally traced to the Middle Ages when the Crusades March through France and Germany led to the deaths of many Jewish loved ones and there was a collective desire among the people to ritualize and memorialize the lives of those whom we’d loved and lost.
Today, and for centuries now, we commemorate this practice primarily through the recitation of the Kaddish, an affirmation of life’s holiness even, perhaps especially, in the face of loss. We also observe it through brief acts of study and the giving of tzedakah, and, of course, through the lighting of a 24-hour yahrtzeit candle. This tradition derives from the biblical book of Mishlei (Proverbs), which contains the phrase נֵ֣ר יְ֭הֹוָה נִשְׁמַ֣ת אָדָ֑ם, “The spirit of a person is the lamp of God.”
Reb Simcha Raphael teaches that this ritual is an opportunity to truly remember and honor those who have died. “During the regular, ongoing cycle of life, it is easy to be preoccupied with the demands of daily living,” he writes, “and it is often difficult to take the time to remember the people who once were part of our life. But Judaism recognizes that death is part of life, and it is the duty of the living to remember the dead.”
Sometimes, we don’t think we should make much of it, he continues: “A widowed mother sometimes spends the anniversary of a death alone, not wanting to disturb her children with the reemergence of her grief. Adult children might avoid talking to their mother about their father, thinking that not mentioning him makes it easier. However,” he concludes, “memorialization, remembering, and reminiscing are the very activities that help the grieving continue healing, through feeling an ongoing connection with the deceased loved one.”
Further, he teaches, while often times we Jews shy away from any impressions that there is life beyond life, and and while Judaism does not have one clear doctrine for how we understand what happens to the soul after death, it very much includes notions of an afterlife and very much includes teachings about the capacity of people in this world to feel connected to souls beyond this world. Saying the Kaddish, according to Jewish mystical tradition, is a soul-guiding ritual. Saying it at the time of a yahrzeit, tradition teaches, “elevates the soul every year to a higher sphere in [Gan Eden].” “It is a process that acknowledges that the living and the dead are in an ongoing process of interconnection.” Raphael writes. “This spiritual bond,” he continues “allows the living to live fully in the present, connected through mystical kinship to those ancestors whom they have known and loved.”
The month of Heshvan, while without Jewish holidays, has still been a noteworthy month on the Jewish calendar for me, because today, the 5th of Heshvan is the 35th yahrtzeit that has passed since my father’s death, my father who died when he was 35 years old.
As you can imagine, I’ve experienced each of those 35 differently. There were probably years where I was less in touch with the Jewish calendar and so, regrettably, let it pass by unnoticed, perhaps only remembering the Gregorian date of October 24. Other years, I probably thought it important like Reb Raphael referenced above to not “overdo it,” maybe a quick candle lighting but not to dwell on the moment.
This year, however, with my daughter Lila aged seven, the same age I was when my dad passed, and my daughter Nina 4, the same age my sister Sophie was (alongside our one month old sister Henya), my wife, daughters and I did sit with it for a moment. I got out some pictures, which Caroline had collected, and we looked through them together, lingering for a few moments longer than usual.
My prayer and hope is that I have the heartspace at each yahrtzeit to do that lingering, to do that remembering, remaining in touch with my dad’s memory, even as it recedes further into the past, while also holding space for the mystical kinship, which can burn bright into the future.
Frankly, sometimes, focusing on the past and the future can feel easier than the grief of the present, and yet jewish tradition teaches that there is a through-line between the three, that they are all connected, with yahrtzeits serving as weigh stations along our journey.
May each Shabbat, during which we commemorate the yahrtzeits of so many of our loved ones, help us cherish those memories, and may we carry their legacies forward.
The recipient, a member of our community, wrote as follows:
Some of you may know that the Jewish month in which we find ourselves is known as Heshvan, and its formal name is Marheshvan. Because the word mar in Hebrew means “bitter” — think “maror,” the bitter herbs that we eat on Pesah/Passover — and because there are no holidays in the month of Marheshvan. Some people think that the name Marheshvan associates bitterness with this absence of holidays. However, if you are clergy in Jewish life, and you are coming off a stretch of what in some years amounts to 20 services in 30 days, while we love a holiday as much as anybody else, there is nothing bitter about a stretch of Jewish simplicity, weeks of no special days, no special services, beyond the specialness of shabbat.