reflections on the holidays

by Larry Rosenwald

There’s a Philip Larkin poem I love, called “Church Going.”  Not an obvious poem to turn to in reflecting on the experience of the chagim, but I found myself thinking about it as I did that reflecting this year.  This is the passage I had in mind, especially its last line.  The speaker is himself reflecting, in his case on what it means to enter a disused church, why he does it, why others might:

Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

It’s hard, for me at least, to feel every year the same intense, renewing energies that the chagim often bring – the joy, the buoyancy, the clarity of vision and purpose.   Things change from year to year, what was fresh becomes routine, the necessary tasks (which are also honors) of ushering, caretaking, leyning, leading can occupy us so intensely that we haven’t much room left for experiencing.  (When I lived in New York, I had a job in the choir of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  The choirmaster there, a wonderful musician named Alec Wyton, used to say that no one who was making the service happen had any business being moved by it.)  It was cold outside this year, and rainy, and we were together but apart, masked, more distant from the leader and leyners than when, in the days before the pandemic, we were crowded together, shoulder to shoulder, voice to voice, face to face; we were not, at the moment of the priestly blessing, standing with arms linked, hands on heads, swaying.
         
None of this, though, affected my experience of the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur.   We are invited to name the dead we are recalling, and we say a few words about them.  They are our friends, parents, spouses, partners, teachers, students, public leaders and inspirers, even sometimes, alas, children.  We put aside the liturgy and hear the voices of those present.  Mourners tell stories – comic, heartfelt, poignant (a word that by its etymology means, appropriately, “piercing”).   Affection is stated, but candor is possible, difficult relationships can be frankly recounted, the good parts of a difficult person clearly and lovingly recalled.  And what we hear, telling these stories, are the voices of mourners – not, as so often, our voices together, but a voice by itself.  (This particular year, when it was so hard to see people, and some of us were on Zoom and some of us were in the backyard, it was the voices in their variety and distinctiveness that also carried identity – “I know that voice,” I kept thinking, and rejoiced at the knowledge.)  And when it was over, the we said kaddish together, I felt more serious (not more gloomy), more reflective, more deeply connected to all other mourners, more aware of how varied we are, and at the same time of what we have in common:  our mortality, the mortality of those we love and are bound to, the power to mourn and to comfort and be comforted.  I felt that this place of mourning was, in Larkin’s word, a place “proper to grow wise in, / If only that so many dead lie round.”

Havurah member Larry Rosenwald is an Americanist, translator, performer (music, theater), verse-writer and pacifist.