A Letter to George: Shmini Atzeret 5769

A wise Hasidic scholar, Rabbi Yisrael of Ruzin, notices that the Torah gives a clear reason for each of the shalosh regalim, the three pilgrimage festivals, but it is noticeably silent about the reason behind today’s holiday of Sh’mini Atzeret.

About the holiday of Pesach the Torah states it is “Zecher Litziyat Mitzrayim” in remembrance of the exodus from Egypt. With regard to Shavuot the Torah explains that we should gather our first fruits and present them to God “Ki Vati el Ha-Aretz Asher Nishba Adonai La’Avoteinu Latayt Lanu,” “Because I have arrived in the land which the Lord promised to give to our ancestors.” And of course the reasoning for Sukkot is equally as clear: “Ki b’Sukkot Hoshavti et B’nei Yisrael,” “In order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I am the Lord your God.”

And so it is with all the other festivals mentioned in the Torah, save one, today’s holiday Sh’mini Atzeret. In fact the Torah seems to mention this holiday only in passing. At the end of the twenty-ninth chapter of Bamidbar, after it has painstakingly listed all of the sacrifices we are required to offer the Lord on each day of the Festival of Sukkot, the Torah “mentions” an additional festival to be held on the eighth day, called “Atzeret.” So what does this holiday mean?

Well one explanation comes in a sensitive understanding of the word “Atzeret,” which literally means “a stopping.” But Rashi and the other traditional commentators understand this word “Atzeret” to connote a separation of some sort. Rashi explains it as a word which demonstrates the God’s love for the people of Israel and he explains using the following parable:

The Torah is taught according to the way of the world: Just as when children are ready to leave their parent’s home, the parents say to them, “your leaving is just too difficult for us, please stay one day longer,”

Or to put it in modern terms, “your college orientation doesn’t start until Tuesday, please stay with us one more weekend at home, we will drive you to school on Monday instead.”

So in other words, according the Midrash, God has some separation anxiety. God has enjoyed our presence throughout the entire festival of sukkot, our songs and prayers have been so meaningful to God that God asks us to stay just a bit longer.

I think we all can relate to God.

Each of us knows the intense feeling of knowing we have to leave something or someone behind, but nonetheless dreading the moment when we have to let go.

Which brings us to Yizkor of course. Yizkor is an exercise of allowing ourselves to feel the anxiety of separation. It is about acknowledging the bitterness of loss, while attempting to remind ourselves of the compassion of memory. It is a moment when we as humans, like God, try and hold our loved ones near for just a moment longer.

Today I would like to tell you a story which illustrates the immense power of memory. I hope that it will demonstrate to all of us that Lizkor, to remember, is to give eternal life.

The story begins a little over a year ago in Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. I had begun my training as a chaplain in a program known as CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education.) It was an intense internship program 400 summertime hours spent in the labyrinthine halls of sprawling modern hospital.

I remember an incident that occurred on one of our first days on the job. We were walking around as a group on our first official tour when our Supervisor, noticed a woman who looked distraught. He asked us to hang tight for a moment while he approached this woman, a complete stranger, to ask her if she was alright. He sat and comforted her for five or ten minutes as we waited in the hall. This was my first lesson of chaplaincy, and indeed my first lesson as to the definition of true humanity: We as humans are obligated to notice the pain of the other, and furthermore we must offer them a forum to express their suffering.

A few weeks later I had such an opportunity. I was leaving one of my floors, the Surgical Intensive Care Unit, when I noticed a woman who was softly crying by one of the elevators. I remembered the teaching moment that my supervisor had demonstrated and I decided to approach her.

I introduced myself and I asked if she was alright. She was not ‘all-right.’ Slowly as we talked she began to share more about her situation. Her name was Yvonne, and she was crying because her husband George, of nearly sixty years, had just had emergency brain surgery. Apparently, he had come through a successful bypass surgery, but Yvonne could tell that he wasn’t himself; his words were slow and slurred and then all of a sudden he couldn’t squeeze his hand. The next thing she knew, the doctors were taking him into surgery to try and contain a hemorrhage that had begun to bleed in his brain, but by the time they got there it was too late. He was stable now they said, but it was unlikely that he would ever regain consciousness.

We talked for about a half-hour there in the hallway. I was amazed at how much she was willing to open up with me; it was my first real lesson in the incredible power contained in the simple words “Are you alright?”

That was the beginning of a conversation that would continue for nearly two weeks. You see Yvonne refused to go home to her apartment in Brooklyn, she wanted to be by George’s side and besides it felt too empty without him there. But seeing as George was in an intensive care floor there was no way she could sleep next to his bed. So she set up camp in the waiting room. Nurses brought her some blankets and pillows and each night she stretched out on a couch and went to sleep.

Each morning she was my first visit.

Early on, our visits centered on George’ health, had anything changed overnight? Did the doctors have anything hopeful to say? She remained positive and we prayed for George’s recovery together in that waiting room. After a week or so had passed, her positivity gave way to pragmatism and she began to discuss the likely but the absolutely intolerable decision she would have to make in the coming days.

She spent nearly every moment of those later visits reliving her favorite memories of her husband George. How they met, how they spent their summers, his relationship with her parents, his demeanor and even his taste in clothes. I felt as if I was growing to know, and indeed to love, George with each passing day.

But eventually the day came when Yvonne made the difficult decision to remove him from life support. The whole family was there: Yvonne, her children, her grandchildren, and me, the fresh-faced Rabbi. I told her that I would stay and wait in the waiting room for her and her family to return, she said to me, “No. You’ve been with me since the beginning and I want you here for the end. I want you to hold my hand.”

And so I did. We watched and we waited after the breathing apparatus had been removed. And I sat and I listened as his family told stories describing George’s essence as his breathing softly slowed. Eventually the moment came and George passed from this world into the next. I asked the family to rise and as we stood around him holding hands, I raised a whispered voice in prayer.

I would like to share with you now, two poems that I wrote about this truly life-changing experience. The first is about the power of memory, and the second is a realization of the awesome power of God. The first is entitled “A Letter to George”

A Letter to George

I never got the chance to meet you
While you could talk, or see, or feel.

But I know about that day of serendipity
When you met your wife on the sweltering Subway car.

And those summers at Brooklyn beach,
When you wore a knitted-blue sun shirt.

And I know how you liked your silence,
Quiet and understated – always deferring to your ‘Darlin’ Queen’.

And how you dressed impeccably,
The cuffs just so, the links just so.

Or those many conversations with your
Mother in-law, about baseball managers and Mozart.

And that time when your wife got sick,
How you cared for her, your smacking kisses still Echo in your home.

And I know about that one day in the hospital,
When you could no longer make a fist –
And you slipped into neither here nor there.

And I know how your wife clung to you, Refusing to leave the hospital for twelve days.

And I know how she held out her last hope,
Until hope became hopeless and folly.

And I was there, George,
Holding her hand as she went in to see you,
How she watched your breaths, how she counted Your rhythms.

She touched you so gently on your battered head,
As she tearfully whispered: ‘It’s ok to let go.’

How your grandchildren stood around you,
As you breathed your last shake and shudder Breath.

And I was there when your soul left your body,
No longer fettered to this halfway world.

And it was there when I asked this one thing of God:

That you should dwell in the house of the Lord forever.


The second is poem entitled “The Moment.”

The Moment

With his very last breath-
The death rattle;
The shiver-shake end

Now I understand this truth:

The Lord Gives,
The Lord takes away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.


I read you these poems today to make clear to you two certainties that I have: The first is about the incredible power of memory.

I never met George! Not really anyway, not while he could meet me, and yet I knew him. I knew his likes and his dislikes, I knew the way he talked, the pet-name he called his wife, the way he blew his kisses. And now, after today, all of you know him as well.

This is the power of memory, this is the definition of the phrase we use when we sing the El Maleh prayer, “u’Tzrur b’tzrur ha’hayim et Nishamto,” “May the soul of our loved one be bound up in the bond of life.” We have the incredible power to give life to our loved ones even after death. We do so by the memories we keep and by the stories we tell. If you have a story, I urge you to tell it, and by doing so we have the ability to bind the lives of the departed with the lives of the living, and that is the greatest gift we each can give.

Lastly, I want to leave you with the message that I sought to transmit with the final poem. Yes death is scary, yes death is tragic, and yes death leaves a hole in our lives. But it is also part of God’s world. And when we understand that the lives we lead are precious, and when we understand that those around us are to be cherished, and when we understand that death is a return to God, then we are left with no other possible response other than:

Adonai Natan,
V’Adonai Lakach
Y’hi shem Adonai M’vorach

The Lord gives
And the Lord takes away,
Blessed be the name of the Lord.

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