Rabbi Janet Marder

May 29, 2009

Resurrection: Shavuot Yizkor 5769

There was an old tree in our yard. On the far edge of the front lawn, inches from the fence, it stood in all its gnarled stubbornness – its trunk a weathered gray, its branches almost bare of leaves all year long. I love trees, but this one was a naked, ugly thing. “That’s a real eyesore,” the tree-trimmer commented. “Hazardous, too. A dying tree like that can blow over, soon as you get a real strong wind.”

He was there to prune back the redwoods, to cut down the lush palm fronds and clear out the underbrush. We asked him to take down the eyesore, too, and so he did. Now, two years later, there is a stump in our front yard – but as we learned, you can’t always kill a tree just by cutting it down. The stump has been very busy. It continues to send out tangled roots all over the yard. Little green shoots continue to pop up out of the wood, all around its perimeter. I get a kick out of that stump, so short and stubby and plain, so persistent and resistant and determined to survive.

The life force is surging through the little square of our yard – colorful blossoms bursting out on the bushes, birds and bees and butterflies hovering in the sunshine, slim blades of grass pushing their way through cracks in the concrete.

It is hard to be in mourning when all around you the world is coming vibrantly to life. Grief is a wintry emotion, an interior state as bleak as clouded skies and short, dark afternoons – incongruous with the long, light-filled days of spring. 

You have lost someone you love. The world is different now. One mourner described the death of a loved one this way: it’s like having a tree that has been growing in your heart suddenly yanked out by the roots, leaving a gaping hole or wound [Judy Tatelbaum, The Courage to Grieve p.28].  If the loss is very bad, you wonder if you will be in darkness forever, if the wound will ever heal, if the bright flowers and the blue skies will ever penetrate your soul. You wonder if you are ever going to feel whole and good, less miserable, less uncomfortable, normal again. 

The question that mourners ask – “will I ever get over this loss?” – is a question best answered by faith. No one can give you proof that your heart will heal and your pain will subside. To believe that it will, to believe while you are still in the depths of grief, is the first audacious act of faith. Recovery begins with the conviction that it is possible.

A poem by Delmore Schwartz, called “The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year,” begins with a vision of springtime:

As I looked, the poplar rose in the shining air

Like a slender throat,

And there was an exaltation of flowers,

The surf of apple tree delicately foaming.

All winter, the trees had been

Silent soldiers, a vigil of woods,

Their hidden feelings

Scrawled and became

Scores of black vines,

Barbed wire sharp against the ice-white sky.

Who could believe then

In the green, glittering vividness of full-leafed summer?

Who will be able to believe, when winter again begins

After the autumn burns down again, and the day is ashen,

And all returns to winter and winter’s ashes,

Wet, white, ice, wooden, dulled and dead, brittle or frozen,

Who will believe or feel in mind and heart

The reality of the spring and of birth,

In the green warm opulence of summer, and the inexhaustible vitality

  And immortality of the earth?

    --Delmore Schwartz (“The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year” in Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge)

To be trapped in the deceptive present is to believe that what you feel now will exist forever. It is to deny the reality of “the phoenix year” which rises from the ashes, again and again, each time the barren cold gives way to springtime.

Delmore Schwartz knew all about the effort it takes to believe in better times when you are in the depths of winter – “dulled and dead, brittle or frozen.” He was a man who could not look at the smooth pale bark of poplar trees and the frothy white apple blossoms without remembering the icy winter that came before.  In the “green, glittering vividness of…summer” he is already anticipating the winter to come.

When Delmore Schwartz published the volume in which this poem appears, in 1959, he was a successful, celebrated writer, as he had been since he burst upon the literary scene at the age of 25. But he was also suffering from manic-depressive illness – a struggle that consumed the last 20 years of his life and led, in time, to a lonely death in a shabby New York hotel.

Depression, as he knew so well, robs you of hope – the ability to imagine yourself in a happier future. Yet he left us those beautiful words, with their poignant faith in the eternal power of the life force – “the green warm opulence of summer….the inexhaustible vitality and immortality of the earth.”

Resurrection – the persistence of life, the rebirth and regeneration of what looks cold and dead; that is the message of springtime.  It is the gentle promise of the Book of Ruth, which we read on this springtime festival of Shavuot – a story of barrenness redeemed; a widow remarried, re-awakened to love, with a new baby in her arms; a story of famine ended and fruitful fields of grain

To believe in resurrection means you know that death is real but it cannot vanquish life. In the bleakest cold you remember that the spring will come, and it will be beautiful. 

Naomi, an old woman consumed with bitterness and grief, finds her life renewed through the loyal companionship of Ruth, who does not desert her. In my front yard, the stubby little stump of an old tree survives, and grows anew. And every day green shoots poke their way out of the dark earth and frozen hearts melt and sad souls find some gentle moments of peace.

The year is a phoenix and so is the human heart, rising up from the ashes, healing in time from its pain, propelled by the same steady, insistent power that pulses through my garden, and yours. Our Sages would say it is the power of God, calling us forever into life, back to life and love, calling us to go forward, and to praise life as long as it is ours. How will we know when we are healed? When we can think of the ones we love and the pain has eased. When memory blossoms within us, bringing us comfort and beauty rather than hurt. When we feel intensely, in mind and heart, “the reality of the spring and of birth.” When we wake up once again to the wonder of being alive.

One day at the beginning of May I went to visit one of our members, a widow who is fighting her own courageous battle with depression. On my way out, she pointed to a tiny, nondescript plant in her front yard. “You’d never know it,” she said, “but right there is a bulb that my husband planted, sometime before 1970, when he died. Every March a beautiful little blossom comes up, and whenever she sees it, my daughter always says to me, ‘Look, Mom, there’s Daddy’.”