We begin this morning with a painting – another one of my favorites. It was painted in 1915 by an artist born Moshe Segal in Vitebsk , a center of Zionism and Hasidism in Belarus , Russia . He was the eldest of nine children, and he grew up poor, but well-loved, in a devout Jewish family. His father was a fishmonger’s assistant. As a boy Moshe learned to play the violin; he was given singing lessons; and from an early age he loved to draw and write poetry. Against his parents’ wishes, he chose to become an artist.

         In 1906, when he was 19 years old, he left home for St. Petersburg , and a few years later he made his way to Paris , where he made friends with other expatriate artists, including Modigliani. There he changed his name to Marc Chagall. 

         In 1914 he went back to his home town to visit his girlfriend, Bella Rosenfeld, whom he had met 5 years earlier; and in 1915, the year of our painting, he married her. She appears often in his works.

         The painting shows a dark-haired young woman in a black dress with a white collar, caught in mid-stride. She is leaning forward on one leg; the other, behind her, barely touches the ground, as if she is poised to take flight. In her arms she holds a bouquet of fresh flowers and greenery. Above her, hovering in the air, is a man, his body bent backwards in an impossible arc, parallel to hers. Her head turns up to him; his head stretches down to kiss her.

         Around them are the details of an ordinary room – a table with plate, cup, knife and some fruit; a bed with a decorative quilt hanging on the wall behind it; a lace curtain; a small black stool. But your eye is fixed on the two lovers, the two of them defying the laws of gravity, caught in that blissful, impossible kiss.

         They stand on a vivid red carpet; the man’s coat, bottle-green, picks up the color of her spring bouquet; the image is tender and exuberant, alive with passion and delight. It is one of those Chagall scenes where characters float in the air, soaring above humdrum earthbound reality, in a realm where constraints are released and logic is overturned.

         The painting is called “The Birthday,” or sometimes, “The Kiss.”  Most people imagine that it is Bella’s birthday; she is the one holding the flowers. The man and woman were walking in opposite directions; you can tell by the direction in which their feet are pointing.

         The man gives the flowers to the woman, and as she heads off to put them in a vase, he realizes that the flowers weren’t quite enough for such a momentous occasion. He bends over backwards to kiss her, as we all bend over backwards for the sake of the ones we love. The experience of the kiss lifts him up off his feet; she, too, is about to take off. The painting captures them joined in that ecstatic, exhilarating moment when just touching the one you love is all the excitement you need.

         There is another way to read this painting as well. Some people focus on the woman’s black dress, the man’s somber black pants and blurred white face, the table set for one. They see, instead of a happy young married couple, a memory of love. The man and woman are separated by death. He is gone now; she is alone. She imagines him, on her birthday, come back to be with her again. She imagines his kiss, and how it once made her feel. He hovers above the ground, not quite real. But even so, he is with her, and for a moment’s dream, she is young and in love and sadness cannot touch her.

         A painting, we know, is more than oil on a canvas. It is more than forms arranged in space, a composition in colors muted or brilliant, more even than a complex allegory of symbols or a story we try to decode. Paintings stop time; they freeze an instant and preserve it for our contemplation.

         Walk through a museum of representational art and you will see the panorama of moments arrayed before you: a little boy in a torn straw hat fishing on a summer’s day; a young lady in a frilly pink dress enjoying herself on a swing; a prosperous merchant in a fur collar in the very prime of life; a bowl of rosy apples; dawn breaking above a tranquil misty river.

         All of them accomplish the impossible: they immobilize incessant movement; they push the pause button on life; they hold life itself confined within a frame, static and still. The little boy will never grow up, have to put on shoes and go to work; the girl in the pink dress will never lose her bloom; the apples will never grow wormy or rot; the sun will never go down on the river; the confident merchant will never pass away.  Paintings are acts of fierce rebellion; they make war, as we yearn to make war, against the unstoppable progression of time.

         To look at a painting is to see the crystallization of memory and imagination – a picture of the past, still vivid and alive; a dream of what never was, made solid and real on the canvas before our eyes. As Chagall himself once said, reflecting on the countless images he painted of Vitebsk – complete with floating cows and fiddlers on the roof – now destroyed, like so many others, in the Holocaust: “My little town may have vanished long ago, but I carry its images always in my heart.”

         What is the painting called “The Birthday”? It celebrates one moment out of a lifetime, a spring day when a young man and woman were so happy together that their feet didn’t touch the ground. It is an image carried in the heart, preserving the memory of Chagall’s first great love -- the wife who was his companion and inspiration, who died in 1944, just before the end of World War II. Decades later, long after the artist and the woman he loved are gone, we can still bask in the radiance of that birthday kiss. We can still share the sublime power of a love that lifts your heart into the stratosphere.

         Pesach, too, is about the power of remembered love. Throughout this week we focus on an image of celebration and release. As Jews have always remembered – in wilderness, in exile, in despair, in ghettoes and camps and tenements and complacent suburbia – we too remember an extraordinary moment when we knew that we were loved, and that we mattered to Someone greater than ourselves. Somehow, remarkably, remembering that moment has kept us from giving in to despair; it has kept us alive as a people.

         At Yizkor, all of us are museum-goers, gazing at the pictures that are all we have left of the people we love. The tangible pictures, captured on film and preserved in albums; and the intangible ones -- just as real, but kept to ourselves; carried, privately, in our minds and hearts.

         Memories of ordinary, beautiful moments when we were happy together; memories of kisses and hugs, hands we held, the texture of a particular cheek against ours. Memories of our mother’s voice on the phone; memories of our dad at the head of the table; memories of our family complete; memories of our sister or brother young and healthy and full of life. A panorama of moments arrayed before us.

         We focus on a picture, we enter the picture, and for a moment, the wall that separates the living from the dead dissolves. Through the gift of imagination, we do the impossible. Time stops. The past comes alive, and we are with the people we miss so much.

         It cannot last, of course. We cannot remain there, and they cannot remain with us. But for a moment we are victorious. We have them back again; we hold them in our arms – cherish them, perhaps, as we never cherished them before – feel what it was to love and be loved by them.

         After losing his wife, Bella, Chagall grieved for many months, unable to paint anything. Then, in time, he fell in love again, married again, and went on to create some of his greatest works, including the radiant stained glass windows of Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem; the ceiling of the Paris Opera; the murals of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York; the America Windows at the Chicago Institute of Art, commemorating the U.S. Bicentennial; and a series of remarkable scenes from the Bible. He died in 1985, at the age of 97, leaving behind the art he’d made: astonishing, vibrantly colored, dreamlike, gentle, haunting, joyful, incandescently alive. 

         Memory is our salvation; it keeps us from giving in to despair; it forever gives us a way back to the ones we love. But today we celebrate Pesach, the time of our liberation -- the holiday that speaks of going forward, out of the darkness, into a new and uncharted place. That is the great teaching of this festival: the story never stops unfolding, and none of us knows the future. For all of us are artists, still engaged in creating the works of our lives. The canvas is before us, waiting for us to create something beautiful with the time we have left.

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