Bound Together (Yom Kippur Yizkor 5786)

Bound Together
Cantor Dan Mutlu, Yom Kippur Yizkor 5786

I often think back to the last conversation I ever had with my father. It wasn’t long. It wasn’t profound. It was rather ordinary. I told him I was about to make a tuna fish sandwich. And he said, “Yuck.” He hated seafood.

That’s it. That was the last thing I ever said to him.

Sixteen years later, I carry that moment with me every single day. And sometimes, I wish it had been different. I wish I could have said something deeper, something filled with love and gratitude. But all I have is that small, ordinary exchange. Yet it reminds me of something important: our relationships are not defined by one final sentence, rather they are defined by a lifetime of connection and by a bond that doesn’t end with death.

Our tradition can help us find the way to think about where our loved ones are and how we might continue to be with them. When someone passes, we say: Tehi nishmato tzerurah bitzror hachayim, “May their soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.” This blessing appears on many Jewish gravestones, but what exactly does it mean?

We learn in the Talmud that our souls are pure at birth and return to God in purity when our life ends. Our bodies, however, are bound by the laws of nature. Gravity, literally, pulls us down, ties us to the earth, and in the end, draws us back into the dust from which we came. God tells this to Adam rather bluntly in the third chapter of Genesis, “For dust you are, and to dust shall you return.” But our souls–our souls resist being held down. They always want to rise, ultimately going back up to their source. They go back to God, who, as it says in the previous chapter, “breathed into the human being the breath of life.”

We feel this soul lifting in our lives all the time. When we witness the birth of a child; when we fall in love; when we hear a piece of music that moves us to tears, or stand before a breathtaking sunset, or laugh so hard with a friend; it’s in those moments that our souls rise, and our bodies feel light, almost floating.

And of course, when we pray, instinctively, we look up. For millennia our ancestors have lifted their eyes toward the heavens, reaching for God. In the days of the Temple, they placed their offerings on the altar and watched the smoke billow upward, praying that God would receive their gifts in good favor. The soul is like that smoke; it aspires, it lifts, it seeks to return.

As much as the soul wants to rise up and go back to God, it also longs to stay connected here, with other souls we love. This is part of what makes grief so difficult and heavy. We are pulled in two directions: our souls reach for heaven, and they reach out for each other down here.

When we reflect on the impact of a loved one’s life, the goodness and love they brought into the world, the memories we made with them, the experiences we shared, everything we learned from them; those things do not sink into the grave. They rise. They endure. They continue to live through us. When we carry their values, when we live by their lessons, when we laugh at their jokes or cry at their absence; it’s in those moments that we can feel their souls still here with us, bound with ours.

This is our sacred obligation: to grieve. Crying out is holy work. We are taught that God gathers our tears because they are precious in heaven. When we mourn we prove that love lives on. We declare that the souls of those we have lost are not forgotten or erased. While they are now bound up with God, here, on solid ground, our hearts continue to yearn upward to them. Between heaven and earth, their presence lives on.

I hold onto that truth when I think of my father. I think of the conversations I still want to have with him. I think of the things I never got to say. One thing is certain, with those we love, there is never enough time. We all long to say just one more thing, to share one more laugh, or simply to say goodbye.

But coming here to mourn and to recite these Yizkor prayers, we are reminded that death does not silence those conversations. We can continue to speak to our loved ones through prayer, through memory, and in those quiet moments when their nearness is felt. Their souls are bound up in eternity, through God’s everlasting love that we sing about in our evening prayers, but they are also bound up with ours right now.

These words, “May their soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life,” are not just about eternity–when we are grieving that feels so unattainable, so far away–these words are also about right now. They remind us that our loved ones’ lives are woven into the fabric of who we are, carried forward with us into the future, rising always toward God, love and life.

May the souls of our loved ones truly be bound up in eternal life, bound with God, lifted beyond gravity and this earthly realm, yet still bound with us and in us. May we find strength in knowing that our grief and our tears are precious gifts in heaven.