There’s something about the sunflower. Something wild and something free. Something beautiful to learn and something beautiful to see.
There’s something about the way her eyes stay fixed upon the light. As though she knows she needs her Maker and it brings Him great delight.
And I think God knew a yellow flower would remind us we’re enough. That a joyful disposition can get us through the rough.
And even in her final days when her head is hung down low, she’s preparing all her little seeds to scatter and regrow.[1]
Life’s not fair. I wish it were otherwise, but it’s not. You can be in your 20s, the prime of life, and fatally hit by a car. You can be in your 60s, completely healthy, and then be diagnosed with metastatic cancer. Where is God in this? Does God really exist?
I will not be using examples from our congregation because they are too raw. Instead with the permission of a family, I will be going back in time 15 years to my first year working full-time as a rabbi. In my first three months of work I had 2 congregants and a fellow clergy diagnosed with serious medical conditions. All of them were under the age of 30. With the permission of the parents of one of them, I will tell her story. Anna was a woman with a larger-than-life personality. When I met her she lad lost 90 pounds and taken up running. I remember going with her one Sunday morning and getting discouraged by Sabino Canyon. As I was still going up, she started heading down. I said “I’m going to turn back” to which she replied “The turnaround is right around that bend.” That was Anna. She ran the Saguaro 8 mile run with me and then ran the Tucson half marathon the day after Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur she discovered a protrusion on her leg, which she had checked out after the half marathon. To her shock it was rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare, aggressive soft-tissue cancer that generally formed in children. Had Anna not lost the weight, she likely would not have noticed the protrusion.
I visited Anna in the hospital numerous times over the next year and a half. I remember the sign on her door, “No pity parties.” As she weakened her Annatude, a term Rabbi Yisroel “Billy” Lewkowicz coined based on her positivity and strength,[2] never wavered. That term, while still not adopted into Webster’s Dictionary, became part of the tikkun middot program at Tucson Hebrew Academy, helping students work on managing their emotions through social-emotional learning.
I found out that Anna died just before I had to go to afternoon minyan after which another congregant “redeemed himself” in a ceremony called pidyon haben. His parents did not know about such a ceremony so they did not do it for him when he was 31 days old as is customary. Therefore he did it for himself, exchanging 5 silver dollars with a Kohen in order to be “redeemed.” I had to figure out how to be present at this joyous moment in this congregant’s life while dealing with the shock of Anna’s passing at 28 years of age. I struggle with compartmentalization and do not have a poker face, qualities which would be ideal for a rabbi to have, but I did my best.
At Anna’s funeral I read the poem “The Sunflower” you just heard, after her favorite flower. Anna’s family at the end of her life gave me a book entitled Friends: The Family We Choose for Ourselves, which I still have here. The inscription reads as follows “I love you forever and forever. You are loved.” Anna Greenberg 2013. I treasure this book to this day.
So much of life is beyond our control. We hate uncertainty, like making meaning and creating rationalizations. Yet despite great advances of knowledge there will always be things that don’t make sense. In the story The Odyssey by Homer, Odysseus killed the cyclops, son of Poseidon, the God of the ocean. Poseidon took vengeance on Odysseus’ men until Odysseus was the only one left. He landed on an island with the goddess Calypso, where he stayed for 7 years. When he wanted to leave, Calypso said the following to him, as adapted in the new James Dolan movie: “You’re a man who needs to control his fate. But you cannot control this. You must give yourself to the storm. Give yourself to Poseidon. Zeus won’t let him kill you. Give up the fight. Give up control and live. It’s a leap of faith you’ve never yet made Odysseus.”
Does this justify the death of all of Odysseus’ death? Absolutely not, just as it is blasphemous for us to justify the death of all our loved ones. We see the condemnation that comes from the Almighty when Job’s friends attempt to rationalize his fate. Surrendering to the unknown is very difficult to do especially when one is angry or when s/he does not believe in God. Yet surrendering to a higher authority is what Yom Kippur is all about. When we prostrate ourselves in the grand Aleinu, we declare in Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s words a “declaration of dependence.”[3] We recognize our own mortality and do a dress rehearsal for death, not eating or drinking, having sex or putting on perfume. We recognize that life, with all the wonder and privileges it offers, may be taken from us the next day. It is crucial for us to never take things for granted and to live each and every day to the fullest.
This past December, former Congressman and President of the University of Florida Ben Sasse wrote the following: “”This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”[4] Towards the end of his post, Ben wrote the following: “I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same-the process of dying is still something to be lived.”[5] An important lesson. Yes stage 4 pancreatic cancer is a death sentence. At the same time, Ben Sasse has committed to living each moment to the fullest extent possible, even when directly in the process of dying.
For when someone dies I turn to words by Rachel Goldberg-Polin Rachel Goldberg-Polin in her book When We See You Again writes that the best words of comfort came from a Jerusalem college student, “What can we do to ease your pain?”[6] Some would not find these words comforting, for the one thing that would ease the pain is to bring a loved one back, and that is not something that can be done. Yet Rachel comes back to that theme when she discusses shiva when someone asked her “what can we do to be helpful?”[7]Perhaps the answer is nothing at the moment, perhaps it is that one’s mere presence is a source of comfort. In either event, Rachel’s main point, as echoed through the Mussar master Shlomo Wolbe, is that the most complicated of disciplines is seeing “what does this person need?” rather than “what do I imagine I would need in that person’s situation?”[8]
What does this have to do with us you might ask. For that I need to take you back 22 years when my parents asked the rabbi of my home congregation to do a mock interview with me for rabbinical school. It was not a positive experience, yet one question he asked while modeling for an interviewer I will never forget. It was “Suppose a woman comes to you and says ‘Rabbi I have cancer. Why did God do this to me? I’m a good person, and I see all these bad people who were are prospering. Where’s God?’” I was flummoxed and responded poorly, perhaps trying to rationalize the situation. The rabbi said, “No! You say the following: ‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through, but I’m here for you.’ Let religion be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.” I was choking back tears after this answer as I am very sensitive by nature and struggle with feedback. Yet 22 years later I see that he was right. There are no words other than “I’m here for you.” No advising, fixing or correcting. What matters is being present.
This is what we do when we come together for Yizkor. We mourn as a community for the lives loss and hold each other, whether physically with loved ones or spiritually as a congregational family.
I would be remiss if I ended the sermon here. We are a diverse congregation, and we come to this service in a myriad of personal and emotional states. Now I want to speak to those to whom my comments did not relate. Perhaps you are over the moon, whether from being in a serious relationship, a new job, a new child. In which case-mazal tov! I’d love to know about your simcha to the extent which you feel comfortable sharing.
Perhaps you are struggling but in a different way: you can’t economically make things meet despite prudent budgeting or you are at a crossroads in life and don’t know which way to go. Perhaps you are struggling because of domestic abuse, infertility or contemplation of a divorce. Perhaps you bring to this moment something I did not mention yet which is equally important. Whatever the situation, I want you to know that I am here for you as your rabbi to the extent you want to let me in. Some people are private, and that is to be respected. With that being said, if you ever feel you have nowhere to turn I want you to know that you can come to me on a confidential basis, and if it is beyond my knowledge I would refer you to someone else, perhaps someone in our Nehama group or another trained professional. You do not need to suffer alone. If I learned anything from community organizing while in rabbinical school and in my early years as a rabbi, it is that society often makes us feel that we are the only ones with a particular problem, and that is rarely the case.
As we prepare to say Yizkor I want to conclude with words from Mary Oliver from her poem “The Summer Day.”
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
[1] Ullie-Kaye, “The Sunflower”
[2] The term “Annatude” was coined on September 26, 2012, the Yom Kippur after Anna discovered the protrusion in her leg. After the Neilah service, Rabbi Billy said “More than an amazing attitude, Ann, you have ANNATUDE!”
[3] Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan The Condition of Jewish Belief: A Symposium (NY: Macmillan, 1966), pg. 130.
[5] Ibid
[6] Page 59
[7] Page 92
[8] Page 101.
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