Rabbi Janet Marder

April 9, 2007

The Bones of Joseph:  Pesach Yizkor 2007

            Our daughters, who live in Boston , came home for Passover this year. When they are back home our missing pieces are restored; our family is together again, at least for those few days. But Betsy and Rachel are aware, as we are aware, that our family is not quite whole. Not anymore. When our daughters come back to California they always want to visit the grave of their grandfather, Jack Marder, who died three years ago. Jack is buried in Los Angeles , so yesterday we all flew down to make our annual visit to the cemetery.

            When Shelly’s mom and dad picked out their gravesites his mom, especially, was very particular: she wanted their resting place to be near a tree. She knew the broiling sun in LA; she said that she wanted a shady spot, so that when we came to visit, we would linger there. We always do. We sit down on a low stone wall nearby; sometimes we walk around and talk; sometimes we stand by the stone and look at it and remember.

            It was so hard to decide what to put on that stone. How can you sum up an entire life – 80 years, a multi-dimensional character – in the usual phrases put on tombstones? Beloved husband, father and grandfather – Jack was all these, but they cannot capture who he really was. 

            We decided to put the scales of justice on his stone, because he was a lawyer who loved practicing law, and because he was the most honorable, fair and balanced person we ever knew. But there wasn’t room on his memorial stone to talk about his handsome, noble face, or his gentleness with his grandchildren, or his dry wit and aptitude for cartooning; or his strong hands, so skillful with tools or with a paintbrush, or his heroism during the Second World War, or the quiet steadiness of his love.

            You try to summon up the essence of a person – the things that stay with you, the qualities that endure, like stone itself, when life is gone. You want to hold on to the one you love, but in the end, all you have to guide you for the rest of your life are memories and words.

            On this last morning of Passover tradition brings us together to remember those we’ve lost. We gather in this way four times a year, on all the great festivals, but Pesach speaks especially to those whom death has touched. The rituals of the Seder are for mourners a daily practice. We taste bitterness. We taste the salt of tears. We know the flat dry bread of affliction, the feeling that life itself has lost its flavor and juice. We know hunger and deprivation; we know the plagues in a personal and intimate way.

            Some of those here today have been mourning for a long, long time – watching for years as a person who was precious to you slowly moved farther and farther away, growing weaker in body and mind. Some were surprised by death, which came like a sudden stab of pain into the middle of your life, leaving you bereft. Everyone who mourns has his or her own Egypt , a place that is narrow and dark, a place where you are sometimes lonely, sometimes afraid.         

            How can it be that you are a grown man, a mature woman -- competent, successful, well established in life -- and you feel so sad because your Daddy is gone? Why does it suddenly come back to you, with a sharp rush of tears: how it felt to stand on his shoulders in the swimming pool, knowing that you were always, somehow, standing on his broad shoulders, no matter where you went in the world, and now you are standing on your own?

            Why does it hurt so much to remember your mother, to remember the way she loved you, or couldn’t sometimes love you in the way you longed to be loved; and to know that now there is no one left in the world to love you that way?

            To be in Egypt is to remember with aching clarity exactly how it felt to hold in your arms someone who meant everything to you; or to lie awake alone in a bed you once shared; or to wake up, over and over again, to the stunning realization that your time together is over and done.

            For those who live in Egypt the festival of Pesach comes with a promise: our sojourn here will not be forever. The Israelites depart from Mitzrayim, that place of narrowness, darkness and death; they set out for a new place where they will stand up as free people.

            After hundreds of years of enslavement, the end of their time in Egypt comes suddenly. They must flee by night, for their captors will soon be in pursuit; they must race to pack up all that they can carry. Amid the noise and chaos of the Israelites’ departure that night, the Torah includes one telling detail: Moses takes time to gather the bones of Joseph, his distant ancestor, to take them with the people as they leave [Ex.13:19].

            They cannot go without Joseph. On his deathbed Joseph made his children promise that when they left Egypt , they would bring up his bones for burial in the land of their fathers. They cannot go without Joseph. He is part of them; he is their history; he is their connection to the past. They are who they are – they are Israel , grown into a people on this foreign soil – because of all that Joseph did. And so they carry with them ‘atzmot Yosef, the bones of Joseph, for all the 40 years of their journey in the wilderness.

            Our Sages say in a midrash that it was not ‘atzmot Yosef, not literally the bones of Joseph, that the people carried out of bondage, but ‘atzmut Yosef, the essence of Joseph, that they brought with them in memory.

            Memories that are too heavy, too dense with pain and anguish, resentment or guilt, can crush us body and spirit. Bent down under their weight, we cannot see the path in front of us; we cannot get our legs to move.  We stand frozen, bearing the burden of the past on our backs.

            But it doesn’t have to be that way. Some memories are light and easy to bear; we can pick them up, we can hold them close and be with them and they do not hurt. They may come with tears but they are good tears -- healing, cleansing tears whose flow dissolves the knot of grief inside us. Such memories nourish us; they soothe and comfort us; they inspire us to go on, and to be our best.

            The Passover story reminds us that the task of the mourner is to pick up the bones of Joseph – to carry memory with us lightly, as a blessing, not a burden -- and to go forth out of Egypt , out of the place of sorrow and death, to find our way back to the land of the living.

            No one can teach you how to let go of memories that hurt; no one knows a magic formula for leaching the pain out of loss. The journey out of Egypt is different for all of us. But there is this faith: that with time the weight of remembrance will ease and our burden will lift – just as the body, in death, returns to the ground and grows light, loses solidity and substance, thus freeing the living to go on.

            We will go forth from Egypt , all of us; someday we will stand upright and free in a new place, but the past will travel with us always. Carrying the bones of Joseph, holding good memories close, gives us the courage to head into an unknown future. Perhaps that is why at the beginning of a new year, Jews traditionally visit kever avot, the graves of their parents and other loved ones.

            Perhaps that is why my children, who now live their own lives thousands of miles away from here, return each year to their grandfather’s stone. They feel its gravitational pull, drawing them back to deep and precious memories of their childhood. They cling to those memories, knowing somehow that they need their beloved memories in order to go forward with strength.

            Who are you carrying today? Who are you holding close to your heart on this day of remembrance? And when the springtime comes and you leave Egypt behind, what will give you strength for the journey?