Yizkor 2025
© Rabbi Robert L. Wolkoff
It was right after Octover 7, and people were putting up posters of kidnapped Israelis. Men, women, children, babies. And at the same time, swarms of people were tearing them down as quickly as they could be put up. And I remember asking myself, with burning anger: if it had been a poster of a beloved missing dog, how utterly contemptible it would have been for someone to tear it down. But as long as it was a picture of a Jew, even a Jewish baby, tearing it down was politically correct. I even remember hearing someone make the statement that putting up the posters in the first place was “an act of violence.”
And what suddenly came to my mind was Jonathan Schell’s term, “the second death.” I frankly had not thought about this concept for forty years, until this horrible, perverse and grotesque, indeed ghoulish anti-Semitic act brought it back to me. Jonathan Schell, in his classic work The Fate of the Earth, describes the consequences of an extinction level nuclear war. One of the most devastating is that “second death.” The first death is obvious, all the victims, killed in a variety of grotesque ways. But the second death is worse. It is the death of death itself. When humanity is gone, gone with it is any consciousness that there ever was any life. There would be no memorials, no legacies, no traditions. No memory. No gratitude. Under normal circumstances, when someone dies, there are those who come after, those who can mourn and praise, learn and love, condemn or contemplate. Death, as emotionally challenging as it may be, is not absolutely crippling and overwhelming because there is memory. Because of memory, death is not paralyzing. One finds, I know all too well, some kind of equilibrium.
You see this clearly at the cemetery. I’ve experienced it hundreds of times. Before the burial, the mourners are in absolute shock, verging on despair. By the time the burial is complete, most of the tears are gone, and even a little laughter can be heard. Technically, those grieving the dead shift from being “onanim”—literally, “nothing people”, to “avelim”—mourners. The pain is still there, of course. In some sense, it never goes away. But that first death is mitigated by the life that comes after. And with life, there is memory. And with memory, there is life.
There is a classic midrash, a Jewish legend, of a king who has a precious jewel that got scratched. He begs his wise men to remove the scratch, but none succeed. Then one elderly man comes forward and says he can fix the jewel. Desperate, the king entrusts the jewel to him. He returns a few weeks later, and when the king looks at the jewel, he sees that the scratch wasn’t removed. Instead, the wise old man had etched a rose into the jewel, using the scratch as the stem. And the rabbis explain, the jewel is life, the scratch is death, and the rose is memory.
But… if there is no one to remember, then not only is the deceased truly dead and gone, but the very concept of death mitigated by memory is gone. Death becomes absolute, a spiritual black hole from which no light emerges.
So back to the desecrated posters. What was going on there? It was a second death in miniature. Not only were our hostages, alive and dead, buried in the bowels of Gaza. Removing the posters was an attempt to bury with them even the awareness of the crime, the sadness and yearning, the fury and outrage we experienced.
And then it struck me—this was precisely the opposite of Yizkor. The forced hostage taking, and the forced removal of even the mention of the kidnapping victims, is an attempt to take the still living and cast them into oblivion. Whereas Yizkor is the opposite. It is an attempt to take the dead and bring them back into our presence.
We seek to make our loved ones present, even though they are, we know all too well, profoundly and tragically absent. How do we make them present? By living full Jewish lives. When we plant another tree in Israel, or plant the love of Judaism in a child’s heart; when we wear our magen david or our chai necklace openly, with pride, not fear; when we reconcile with others in this life because life is just too darn short, or when we reconcile with those who have left us, because from the bottom of our hearts we seek forgiveness, or offer it, and eternity lasts a long, long, time; when we learn Torah or when we learn to love our fellow Jews and our fellow humans–especially when we don’t agree with them; when we, (in the beautiful formulation found on the website Future of Jewish.com) “Live so proudly Jewish that your ancestors would recognize you — and your grandchildren will thank you.” That’s how we make them present.
Through all this, and perhaps most of all, when we say kaddish we make them present again. Because when we say kaddish, and magnify and sanctify the Name of G-d, what we are proclaiming is that we will not allow a second death for those who meant so much to us. And to those that have been trying to erase the hostages, and the very lives of the hostages, we say we will not allow a second death for them, for American Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and 86 year old Arie Zalmanovich, and 9 month old Kfir Bibas and for all the rest—we will not allow a second death for them. And that’s why we have provided you with names of the victims of Oct. 7 so you can have the privilege of saying kaddish for them.
Saying kaddish for our own loved ones is on us. Saying kaddish for the victims of Oct. 7 is on every Jew in the world. And saying kaddish for the victims of the Shoah has been on every Jew in the world, every year, for an entire lifetime. So there will be no second death for them either. And I am very happy to report that finally, after 80 years, the world Jewish population has grown to pre-Holocaust levels. 80 years. And now, we are back. Yesterday, I promised you a symbol of hope. What could possibly provide us with a greater symbol of hope? We have gotten past the gates of the ghetto, emptied the burial pits of Babi Yar, risen from the ashes of Auschwitz. We have survived the greatest crime ever perpetrated. And not just survived. We are stronger than ever. Indeed, the world and the future are open before us.
Such, such… is the power of memory. And as we rise for Yizkor, to remember our own, and the victims of Oct. 7, and the victims of the Shoah, we are graced with the opportunity to rise above the confusion and challenges of our current time and recognize that, as the classic ghetto partisan song goes, “Wir lebn ewig”—”We live forever.” We are the eternal people of the G-d of eternity. Nothing will stop us, nothing will erase us, nothing will take our life away. Or our death.
Instead, we will remember.