Rabbi Janet Marder

April 6, 2010

Song of the Spring: Pesach Yizkor 5770

I am trying to learn the names of the plants in the garden we put in last June.  They are low-water plants, most of them, so they do not usually expend much of their vital energy on sending out showy flowers. But in a year like this one, when there’s been a lot of rain, they can put on an amazingly good show. Every day there’s a surprise. A modest cabbage-like plant – rounded, low-lying, leafy green – suddenly sprouts a forest of tall, graceful pink blossoms.  A nondescript little shrub over in the corner turns brilliant orange overnight. A dark green bush is all at once covered with sprays of tiny trumpet-shaped flowers that are almost psychedelic in their intensity.

Our garden was planted in early summer – as it happened, in the very week when my mother-in-law, Frances, passed away. She was a lover of flowers, and I know she would have enjoyed this year’s spectacular springtime display.

I do not know what most of our plants are called, though I have a chart with all of the multi-syllabic botanical terms. I am slowly working my way through it, looking up the pictures of the plants online. One of them, I discovered, called “syringa” on the chart, is actually the beautiful lilac. Because it typically blooms right at the time of Easter and Passover, in some places its name is “paschalia.”

Pesach is the holiday for lovers of flowers – or, to put it another way, Pesach is the holiday for lovers and flowers. The Song of Songs, the biblical book we read on this festival, is replete with images of springtime – roses and lilies and new grain on the stalk; apple trees and fig trees, sweet-smelling beds of herbs and spices, blossoming vineyards, pomegranates in bloom. The exuberant young lovers in this poem embrace and caress each other in verdant gardens; they compare each other to leaping stags and graceful gazelles.

The very essence of the song seems to be its proclamation that the spring has come:

“Ki hineh ha stav avar…
For now the winter is past,
The rains are over and gone.
The blossoms have appeared in the land,
The time of pruning has come,
The song of the turtledove
Is heard in our land.”       [JPS translation]

And this, of course, is what links the song to Passover – a festival whose essential message is that the long, dark winter of suffering has ended. As light and warmth now return to the landscape, as sap runs through the bare trees and clothes them once again in beauty, so a forgotten and despised people comes forth from slavery into a new life.

Pesach – the spring-cleaning festival – celebrates all that is fresh and new and sweet. As the biblical poet sings of flowers and the blossoming of love, our Sages saw in Passover the renewal of tender love and devotion between God and our people, who discovered that they were not forgotten or despised, after all, but cherished in a way they could never have imagined.

Our Sages teach us to say Yizkor, the prayer of remembering the dead, in this season of blossoming gardens. And this has its own kind of logic, for plants and flowers are poignant links between the living and those who have passed away. Fragile and lovely, carried to cemeteries, laid upon coffins, planted in our own back yards; speaking to us in some way we cannot articulate of imperishable things; of what death cannot take away from us.

The little blue flowers called “Forget-me-not”; the bamboo and lotus, evoking long life, birth and rebirth; the fragrant herb that Shakespeare wrote of: "There's rosemary; that's for remembrance. / Pray, love, remember."

But most of all there is lilac, the Pesach-flower, the one that comes forth in April, as Eliot said, “out of the dead land.” The great American poet Walt Whitman made of lilac a powerful symbol of what it means to mourn for the dead at a time when the land is clothed in springtime beauty.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
 And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
 I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”

This is Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, written shortly after his assassination in April,1865.  “I remember,” he wrote in a later prose recollection, “where I was stopping at the time, the season being advanced, there were many lilacs in full bloom...I find myself always reminded of the great tragedy of that day by the sight and odor of these blossoms. It never fails” [Prose Works 2:503]. 

A trinity – a threefold association – returns to the poet each spring, he writes: the lilacs, with their extraordinary beauty and evocative fragrance; the “drooping star in the west” – that is, Venus, the bright evening star, which shines close to the horizon in April, and to Whitman symbolized the fall of a great president; and, most painfully, the aching loss of that man -- “thought of him I love.”

The poem is, first of all, an intense encounter with the natural world. Listen:

In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle -- and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.

The motion of the poem is slow and winding, like the great funeral procession Whitman recalls, in which Lincoln’s coffin was carried by rail from Washington D.C. across the country to its final interment in Springfield, Illinois. The poem moves gradually through a series of emotions, circling repeatedly around returning themes and symbols. Its movement has been likened to music, or to the mourning process itself.

Lincoln’s name, strikingly, is never mentioned in the poem. And it turns eventually from an elegy for the dead president to a lament for all the dead, and a meditation on mortality. The poet imagines himself holding his sprig of lilac, standing amidst a vast crowd of mourners. "Nor for you, for one alone," he says, "Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring."

The form of an elegy dictates that it move from grief to consolation. In earlier elegies, like John Milton’s “Lycidas,” written for a young friend who was drowned, consolation comes from thoughts of eternal life in heaven for the beloved. Whitman’s poem takes a different path.

The poet shows us himself, unable to sleep, walking alone at night among cedars and pines by the river. 

“In the swamp in secluded recesses,” he writes.
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.”

He imagines two shadowy companions there in the darkness with him – the thought of death and the knowledge or experience of death. He walks in silence between them, holding their hands, grieving in “the transparent shadowy night.” He imagines Lincoln’s coffin passing by fields and grasses and woods, past violets and apple trees and “yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark brown fields uprisen.”

He imagines throngs of people mourning for the dead all over the land, “over the breast of spring”; he imagines the thousands lost during the Civil War, their suffering over now.

What brings the poet consolation in the end? Simple things he can see and hear and touch and smell. The haunting scent of the flowers. The still evening and the low-lying star in the sky. The song of the solitary thrush in the darkness.  These lead him, at last, to a calmer mood, a quiet coming to terms with what is. Gently they lead him to accept and embrace death’s place in the universe. For a moment, a great moment of clarity and vision, he understands: death comes to all things. The flowers return but our loved ones do not; and even so, this life is to be praised.

Listen:

From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love….

Finding strength to take in death while praising life, the poet concludes his solitary evening walk. For a moment, at least, the pain has eased; his inner turmoil soothed by the tranquility around him, he can let go of his grief and turn away.

Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades' hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
….With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands -- and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

What is left to the poet is what is left to us. Lilac and star and bird remain; and memory of love, sweet love --“retrievements out of the night”; speaking to us in some way of imperishable things; of what death cannot take away from us.

And so moves the poet from sorrow to consolation, from dark solitude to kinship with all who live – a slow and winding path, like music. And so comes the message of Yizkor at Pesach, the season of new grain and blossoming plants, when light and warmth return to the landscape, sap runs through the trees and clothes them once again in beauty.

We think of those we love – we miss them and we ache for them. But we plant gardens, also, and we listen to the song of the spring:

Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away!
For now the winter is past,
the rains are over and gone,
Flowers appear on earth
The song of the turtledove is heard in our land  [Song of Songs 1:10-11].