Life & Death and Sacred Writing

Pesach – Yizkor

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

April 24th, 2003

While Charlton Heston may fade with Alzheimer's, his image will endure from his roles in "Ben Hur" and especially Moses in "The Ten Commandments," shown this past Sunday. His strong voice and forceful body will be ever present in our minds from these two movies, if from no others, from his long and illustrative career. But, when we watch "The Ten Commandments" or the cartoon edition "Prince of Egypt," besides the simplifications and outright errors in the script,there is something else missing. Even reading the relevant Torah portions we do not have the sights, smells andsounds of Egyptian slavery.

There is no sense of death and dying.

And yet this is the essence of the Egyptian experience and of our redemption.

The story of Moses the awakening Hebrew is when he kills the Egyptian taskmaster.

The tenth plague is the death of the first born of humans and cattle. The scene with Yul Brenner carrying his son is one of the few such vivid scenes in the movie

The Rabbinic midrashim are replete with the image that the bones of the Hebrew slaves were mixed in the mortar that built the store cities.

Slavery wasn't sterile. It was horrible!

And the ultimate moment of redemption, the crossing of Yam Suf, is essentially the destruction of the Egyptian armies and their horses, as celebrated in Moses' song at the Sea.

As much as Seder night is filled with wonderful cuisine and happy songs, the text of the Haggadah and Torah allude to the terrible reality filled with death, that was the slavery and the redemption.

Pesach is a holiday that pivots around these two opposing themes: death and birth. The first I just illustrated. For birth:

On the seder plate we have a sprig of green, usually parsley, to represent springtime and the greening of the land.

This holiday is also Chag HaAviv, the holiday of the spring, and celebrates the first harvest, of which we now bring an Omer of grain as an offering.

In the synagogue liturgy we cease reciting "Tal u'Matar," "dew and rain" and only mention "Tal" - "Dew" which is also a special liturgical poem inserted into the first day of Pesach prayers. We want the land of Eretz Yisrael and its crops to be blessed with a gentle and fructifying moistness of dew.

And we talk about this holiday as the birth of the Jewish people instead of being just a family of seventy that went down into Egypt.

The Haggadah talks about children through their recitation of the Four Questions and the next section, "The Four Children," by inference, about birth.

Lastly, Pesach occurs on the fifteenth of Nisan, the full moon, at the apex of its birth cycle, before it begins to wane.

These are the two poles upon which Pesach circumnavigates, birth and death. Pesach must include both themes. We recite these themes by reading the Rabbinic text of the Haggadah and the Torah text, specifically of Exodus. Into this matrix is woven the recitation of Yizkor on the eighth day of Pesach in the Diaspora, and on the seventh day in Eretz Yisrael. In all of the Shalosh Regalim, Three Pilgrimage Festivals, Yizkor is recited on the last yom tov day.

This Pesach Yizkor gives us pause to reflect on both of these themes and to do so from a wider perspective. A few weeks ago I had no idea how the people in Israel would sit down to seder night. Would they be attacked by Iraq? Would the attack be conventional or biological or nuclear? Would the Palestinians wreak havoc like they did last year by blowing up the hotel in Netanya? Certainly few Americans would be coming for the holidays, spelling the end of many jobs. Would the theme of death dominate their holiday observance?

And at the same time, hundreds of thousands of American men and women were encamped in the Kuwait desert and sitting on ships in the Gulf, and packing their bags here preparing to go overseas. While not being Jewish and thus dwelling on these themes from Pesach, they had to be mulling over their personal fate and fortune along these same lines: who would die in action and who would return home? As they learned to use special clothing against biological agents in the Arabian heat, they had to contemplate would they confront conventional warfare or would it be more threatening?

And yet in both these scenarios there is an element of birth hidden amongst our worries.

Ships are beginning to return to their homeports and soldiers and sailors are seeing their children and spouses and for some, baby born in their absence.

There is a birth of optimism in the fact that terrible weapons of mass destruction were not used, sparing soldier and civilian alike, and our very planet, the horrors of such destruction.

I hope that the Iraqis use this extraordinary window in time to grasp the possibility of national rebirth and create a free and democratic nation, even against all odds, wherein human rights are respected and so are other nations, particularly, Israel, with whom Iraq is technically still at war.

Iraq, at once the area of some of the oldest parts of civilization while being a young political country has the real opportunity few dictatorial tyrannical nations are given: the birth of freedom and liberty.

The consequences of America's military might and entry into Iraq without United Nations sanction and the destruction of a vicious regime that harbored, aided and abetted terrorism, following our entry into Afghanistan also affords Israel and the Palestinians a unique window in time.

The question before them both is: will the future hold more deaths than births?

America's stance is that terrorism will not be tolerated. It is threatening Syria, which instigates and supports the Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is saying to both the Palestinians and Israelis that the status quo cannot endure.

Will they now find the path to birth peace properly and totally?

Will they birth a Palestinian state that respects Israel and terminates terrorism by terminating the terrorists?

Will they afford newborn babies the best medical care and insure that they can dream of a future?

Can they link electric grids and water pipes and jointly protect a fragile ecology?

The wonder of this moment before Yizkor is the duality of life and death, embedded in the observance of Pesach, rooted in our observance as we remember the lives of our loved ones and friends who have died, and recognize the opportunities that lie before the world and particularly in the Middle East, and for Israel and the Palestinians. When I recite Yizkor I will keep in my heart and say prayers for our men and women who died giving us these opportunities for life and for peace. I will think of the innocent civilians who died in Iraq, whether they loved us or not. And I will think about the great cycle of existence where death yields to life, even as life yields to death. May all the dead we remember find repose in God's eternal shelter. May the world grasp the great opportunity for the birth of peace.

Amen.