A Multitude of Memories

A Multitude of Memories

Shavuot Yizkor 5786 | Rabbi Andrew Kaplan Mandel

To his son Michael,Marshall Lowe was a sports legend. Marshall would be the only dad jumping in with the boys on the basketball court at summer camp visits, and he was the only parent who would brave the snow and freezing cold with his son’s friends during Thanksgiving Weekend marathon football games.

I was struck at Marshall’s funeral, that his daughter, Michele, never experienced this side of her dad. She remembered him as a hard-working furniture salesman when she was growing up. But she didn’t really know him – until after his retirement.

Then, they found real connection, through history and books and long conversations. He would tell her outrageous stories, claiming straight-faced that he had worked in the CIA, with tons of details to back up his claim. She was sure he was making this up, or was he?
Regardless, Michele cherished her dad’s little eccentricities, his zest for life.

Two children. Two experiences. Both true. Each precious. Neither interchangeable.

And I have come to see—again and again—that this is how it is when we mourn.

In my work as a rabbi helping congregants process the death of those dear to us, I have found that friends and family can typically name certain core characteristics that the deceased embodied. The person was serious or funny, generous or stingy. And those mourning their loved one have stories at the ready that reflect these traits as we seek to make meaning and coherence of a life.

Yet while it is neat and efficient and not untrue to describe someone in a holistic way like this, it would be incomplete to do so.Because we don’t simply mourn people. We mourn relationships.

A spouse knows something a child does not. A sibling knows something a friend never will. And vice versa. We talk in Jewish tradition about the seven relationships that obligate mourning—mother, father, sister, brother, spouse, daughter, son—but even within the categories, each bond is utterly unique.

The private language of a relationship—the nickname, the rhythm of conversation, the unique shared experience, the silence that said everything—that is what we mourn. Whenever I go to the spice rack, I think of my grandmother, who let me have free rein over hers during a notorious soup-making lesson. The culinary result was a hilarious disaster. The bond was indelible and just ours. I relive it each time I reach for paprika.

On this Shavuot festival, we remember Moses, who received the Torah on Mount Sinai.

To the Israelites, he was Moshe Rabbeinu, our great teacher. To his kids, he was … Dad? To his wife, he was … Mo?

We learn precious little about Moses’ relationship with wife and kids in Torah. The two boys are named – Gershom and Eliezer – but that would be a $1000 clue on Jewish Jeopardy, not a $200 one.

We know his father in law Yitro visited Moses right before the trip up Mount Sinai, bringing the immediate family with him, and offered advice about delegation, perhaps to make sure that Moses made time for family.

But the Talmud teaches that Moses more or less separated from his wife because he needed to be at G-d’s beck and call.

So much for work-life balance.

In Genesis, we see family members actively grieving – Twelve sons surrounding their father Jacob at his deathbed; Isaac and Ishmael who put aside differences to attend Abraham’s funeral, Oh, the stories they must have swapped! We know that the children of Israel bewailed Moses for 30 days. But his biological kids?

The Torah is silent.

So we might imagine a voice we never hear. We might imagine Gershom standing to speak:

I want to thank you all for coming to my Aba’s funeral. It was always the rule in our house to honor your parents, so here we are.

As many of you know, my Saba Yitro had to bring us to camp because it was kinda crazy escaping from Egypt and all, and Aba left us behind. It’s part of the job, Ima always said. And we did understand that we needed to share him. People have asked us: Did he talk about work over dinner, or did he just collapse when he got back to the tent? Are we annoyed that we don’t make more of an appearance in the book? Being a public family, people assume they know everything. Not everything important makes it into the story.
The truth is—you knew a version of him. And we knew a version of him too. And there are things about him that belong only to us.

***

And that is true for all of us sitting here today at Yizkor. No one else can fully mourn the person you lost—because no one else had your relationship.

I once went to a family funeral, and people whom we had never met described our relative in glowing terms. What a kind and funny person he was! And we were like—are we at the wrong memorial?

No disrespect—but he was a complicated character. And the diversity of experiences people had with him only underscored that truth.

In that moment, I realized: it wasn’t that they were wrong. It’s that they had a different relationship.

As Walt Whitman wrote, we contain multitudes.

And so the very specific way in which our loved one taught us, touched our hearts, shaped our lives, and, yes, drove us nuts sometimes—that was our glimpse of who they were.

And maybe even more than that—a glimpse of how the divine can live and move in this world.

And we honor that glimpse not only by remembering it, but by carrying it forward—by letting those qualities, those virtues, those values echo in the way we show up for others.

Michael carries forward his father Marshall in the way he shows up–jumping in, playing hard, being present as a team coach himself.

And Michele does so in a different way: In the inventive stories she weaves as a playwright, And in her belief that it’s never too late for a second act.

In the end, we do not mourn a life in the abstract. We mourn the place that life held in ours. May that memory be for a blessing always.