By Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky • October 20, 2026

For the last many years, Rabbi Hammerman spoke at Yizkor on Yom Kippur. We miss her, and wish her well as she leads her own synagogue at Congregation HaBonim.

But she’s given us a last gift, and I hope you like it. You might know that I had a big year. I lost my father. My mother is struggling. My second child got married. My youngest child finished college, and in one of the best life cycle events ever, I paid my final tuition payment. I turned 60, which means I’m still middle aged … as long as I live to 120.  And most significantly, my oldest child became a father. Which means, Amy and I became grandparents. 

Before she left Ansche Chesed, Rabbi Yael gave me an assignment. She said: I know your natural wheelhouse is texts and concepts and big themes. On Yom Kippur this year, talk about your own personal life cycle. That’s what I am going to do. Thank you, Yael, for your deep emotional intelligence. Out of the experience of one person, I will try to address the path we all travel.

I am who I am, of course, so, first a text: a brilliant short passage from the early Zionist essayist, Asher Ginsberg [1856-1927], known by his pen name, Ahad Ha’am, “one of the people.” He was known as “the secular rabbi,” so anti-religious he would not even set foot in synagogue for his own son’s bar mitzvah, which his friend, the poet Hayyim Nachman Bialik arranged. He was Theodor Herzl’s antagonist. Herzl sought to solve the problems of Jews and their place in anti-semitic society. Ahad Ha’Am’s focus was on Judaism, its evolution and its calcification. His Zionism never focused on land or politics or immigration. He never imagined large numbers of European Jews moving to the Holy Land. He was all about an intellectual and spiritual Zionism, renewing Jewish and Hebrew culture for the modern age. He famously said “one university is more important than 100 farms.” If it weren’t for the Nazis and the Soviets he would have been totally right. But … Nazis and Soviets. My family knows: What’s my favorite place in Tel Aviv? The cemetery on Trumpeldor Street, where I visit Ahad Ha’Am, buried next to Bialik, and numerous other famous and anonymous folk.

His essay Avar v’Atid, “Past and Future,” addressed national identity, not an individual’s own selfhood. But what he said applies to both. He said that a very old person stands only in the past. A child faces only the future. Both postures are incomplete. A fully rounded person is rooted in the present, because they have one foot in the past and one in the future. 

So let’s go there. Past. Present. Future.

PAST

My father was born in the Bronx in 1940. He grew up in Queens. He went to Syracuse and went to the army. He met my mother on a double date when they were with the opposite mates. Their first date was watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. They married 8 months later, and through struggles and celebrations, were married for 61 years and brought me and my sister to life. He loved Judaism and the Chicago Bears, both of which are very great gifts he bestowed upon me. His career had ups and downs. He brought us to Chicago and Louisville, KY, which I consider my hometown. Lots of good things happened there, most especially that I met Amy in 9th grade in 1980. Her family lived there more briefly, and she doesn’t consider it her hometown. 

Even though I have not lived there since I finished college in 1988, I still feel connected to Kentucky. And to its state poet, Wendell Berry, a Thoreau-like character, who retreated to his small farm, wrote about simple living with the land, who lived with deep Christian faith, who died three weeks ago. Among his writings are these short lines:

Born by our birth/Here on the earth

Our flesh to wear/Our death to bear

No matter how long we live, it’s short. We wear our flesh only briefly. It’s a rental tux. Or in the words of the book of Job:  שוכני בתי חומר. “We live in houses of clay.” Life’s preciousness depends entirely on how short it is. If it were infinite we would not savor it so much. But since it must end, love it while you can.  Near the end of the Torah, Deuteronomy says:  I place before you Good and Bad, Life and Death. ובחרת בחיים. Choose Life. Inscribe that very close to your heart. 

Saying farewell to my father, and wishing love to my struggling mother, my main reflection on this year of loss is that I have been blessed and now I have lost someone in the world who loved me to the maximum of their imperfect capacity. I hope everyone has this blessing, I hope my children feel this blessing from my imperfect capacity. Everyone succeeds. Everyone fails. You will think of things said and done, and things unsaid and undone. You may think of their vision and their blind spots, their gifts and their shortcomings. As we are about to say Yizkor, as you remember the people in your life, I hope you remember people who loved you to the maximum of their imperfect capacity.

A terrific country singer, Brandy Clark, has a song in which she is standing beside her mother’s deathbed and her mother says.  “Remember me happy when you remember what was. But most of all, remember my love.”  This year of loss, that’s what I walk away with from my past. You don’t get that from everyone. I hope you get that from someone. I am blessed that I did.  

PRESENT

Back in college, I had a roommate, Eric Mitnick. His dad was Richard.  They were members of the shul in Highland Park, NJ where my good friend Elliot Malomet is now the rabbi. In 1987, Richard said to us something unthinkable. I was 21 years old and he said: you’re closer to 30 than I am. What?!

Now here I am 60, with a son, 32, a daughter almost 30, two more kids, 27 and 23, and a grandchild who is exactly equidistant to 30 as I am. That will give you an attitude adjustment. 

On the day I turned 30, near the end of a study year in Israel, Amy, 6 months pregnant with Dassi, and Didi, recently turned 2, returned to the States. I stayed a little longer. It had been a tremendously difficult year. A classmate had been killed in a Hamas bus bombing that we were close enough to have heard. Itzhak Rabin was murdered, changing the course of Israeli and Jewish history. Still, the blessings in my life were so obvious, I felt full and confident about my future. 

Ten years later, I found turning 40 hard. I was working here. I had four children. I felt old. I was not in good physical shape. I could not sleep and went running at 6 o’clock that gray morning in 2006. I celebrated by buying everyone in the family presents. I don’t recall them all, but I remember buying the coolest, newest, high-tech thing from Best Buy: a handheld DVD player and a disc of Titanic, Dassi’s favorite movie. Twenty years later I have no device that can play a DVD.

I don’t think I really noticed 50. 

Turning 60?  Now that is something. As the Sages [Kohelet Rabbah 1.13 and 3.1] say: “No one leaves the world with even half of their ambitions fulfilled.” At 60, I find myself reflecting on work done and undone. What I have accomplished, what I still might, and what I won’t. And trying to teach myself to be at peace with that.

In one of the greatest Hebrew poems, the divine Yehudah HaLevi [1075-1141, Spain] asks his middle-aged self, “Are you still chasing youthful foolishness after 50?” He exhorts himself: Leave the behind temporary silliness! View your life from the perspective of eternity! Stop partying and boozing and seeking sensual delight and align yourself with permanent values and virtues. (In the 12th century, what was eternal was necessarily good, and what was transitory was worthless, by definition.) HaLevi develops this theme through the metaphor of seeing his own body as a ship in a sea storm. The sails flap, the masts sway, the boards crack, the deck is swamped. And there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable sinking of your own poor ship.

But then … The storm calms. The waves settle. The moon and stars emerge into the night sky. Their reflections dance in the water, drops of light and fire, wandering from heaven into the deep. HaLevi concludes with the most beautiful lines I know in Hebrew.

I do not have it all day every day, but sometimes, some days I sense my heart to be the third ocean, reflecting the starry sky above and the infinite depth below.

FUTURE

Now to the future and back to the Kentucky poet Wendell Berry. He wrote these lines about his father’s passing and his granddaughter’s birth:

We chose and do not know what we have chosen. For this is the heart’s choice, not the mind’s. To be true to the heart’s one choice is the long labor of the mind … Now comes one he chose, but will not see: Emily Rose, born May 2, 1993. [This Day, p. 142]

Let me emend that ending to match my life:
Eternity’s clock ticks, and comes Elijah Aviv, born June 18, 2026

This year our family received the greatest blessing imaginable. Elijah Aviv son of Ariel Haya and Yedidya Efraim Yonah HaKohen.  As everyone says: If I knew how wonderful grandchildren would be, I would have had them first. And the greatest delight I’ve ever known is seeing my son love someone as much as I love him. 

We cannot imagine what we cannot imagine about the life of a child born in 2026. There will be world crises. We cannot imagine them. There may be environmental devastation. We cannot imagine it. Think of the technological transformations that separate us from a baby born 1926. Radio was so new only 20 percent of Americans had one, and the discovery of penicillin was still two years away. We cannot imagine what technologies will shape your life. I fear for you, precious baby. Because my love is infinite and my power is negligible. 

But when I see you, I feel what lives inside you. Once, not long ago, my son Didi was davvening next to me at morning minyan here at AC, and we said the lines eloheinu v’elohei avoteinu. Our God and the God of our ancestors. I said to him: when you say that, I’m included among your ancestors. But when we both say avoteinu, “our” ancestors, you and I share exactly the same line stretching back into the past. In this baby, in his DNA, is the chain of one family’s life, the chain of all Jewish life, the chain of human life. 

Being mortal is painful. Everyone ever born, one day will die. Everyone will suffer. It will not necessarily feel fair. You and your loved ones will not necessarily experience what you think you deserve. 

In Jewish theology, there are two major theological responses to this fundamental tragedy of mortality: Tehiyat HaMetim, the future resurrection of the dead, and Hisharut HaNefesh, the endurance of the soul on some spiritual plane. Those two don’t exactly cohere. Will our bodies come back as they are? How old will I be when I get resurrected? Will I have lost 20 pounds? Or is my soul eternal and all our bodies and their imperfections are irrelevant? These mythic themes work because they say that the tragedies of our losses and suffering are compensated when measured along some other yardstick than the 70 or 80 or 90 years we experience on earth. You’re supposed to believe in both these ideas, and each of them are poetic and deep in their own ways. I’m a frum enough Jew to accept them both, even if they don’t make perfect sense. I’m happy to say “for death is not the end.”

But when I gaze upon my grandson, my heart needs a different spiritual theme. I’m not thinking about transcending the inevitable death of each individual. I’m celebrating the endurance of the collective life of the Jewish people. The endless persistence of Am Israel. Individuals die. And other people are born, who will say Yizkor. A baby is born and we say: Am Israel Hai. We’re not dead yet. Our people endures and remembers. 

Elijah Aviv, I pray that you find being Jewish as meaningful as your ancestors have found it. That it reminds you where you come from and points you where you’re going. I pray that being a member of the Jewish people and inheriting its Torah becomes the story of your life. And that on some Yom Kippur, decades from now, you will say my name in Yizkor, and then we will both be alive.