Every year I can remember, as we approach Yizkor, the rabbi implores even those who have not lost a loved one to stay and daven with those who have. In my early youth, those thirty minutes were my lunch break and, for the decades that followed when I was old enough to fast, I would take walks around the block with my brothers and mother, while my father remembered his father in the sanctuary. There was a mystery to the prayers being recited and a relief in not needing to participate.
Then on the high holidays of 5772, everything changed. I was among the mourners. I expected myself to stay, to daven, to grieve, and I was petrified. My brother and mother were with me, in the balcony of the Ansche Chesed sanctuary. When my daughters and husband left for their walk and lunch, I clung to my pouch of Kleenex, ready to lose it. As I read the El Malei and Mourner’s Kaddish, I was drawn to the margin of the Lev Shalem where I found what would soon become my favorite reading of the High Holidays service: a poem called “Though I Stared Earnestly at My Fingernail” by Merle Feld.
It was not only because my father z”l had beautiful fingernails, just like the ones the poem describes, nor because the verses are in the voice of a little girl in a skirt, which reminded me of myself and my young daughters, that the poem captivated me. It was the ending – the fact that a small cuticle could summon a whole man, who then, in an instant, could be gone – that resonated.
My father’s life was all too short. I see him in every small thing. And it is in his memory that I found our precious Ansche Chesed community which is a great source of comfort, each Elul and all year long. So whether or not you stay in the sanctuary this Yom Kippur for Yizkor, I urge you to flip to page 291 where you can find a poem about love, loss, and legacy that I keep in my heart all year long.
L’shana Tova.
Photo of Juliet and her son by Melanie Einzig
