It has been a tragic week for our community as we mourned the loss of Josef Pessah, alav hashalom, or as we knew him, Yossi, who passed away at the young age of twenty after a nine month battle with cancer. The Pessah family, and the entire community, both our congregations and others in Boca Raton, family here and in Israel, young friends and a college campus are heartbroken. After his passing, the family asked if we could ask our congregation to perform a very important mitzvah, from the time of death to the time of burial. I wanted to share the story of a sacred act that our congregation took part in last week after Yossi passed: shimrah. As I explained in a letter to our community, "One of the most important mitzvoth/commandments in the Jewish tradition is K'vod HaMet - showing respect for the dead. In his article, The Centrality of Kavod HaMet(Honoring the Dead), Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman writes: "Unlike us, the rabbis did not begin with the idea of a self who disappears at the moment of death. They held instead that despite the body's demise, the essential person housed in the body still enjoyed some beyond-the-grave existence, so that proper burial and continued respect for the deceased were required. Funeral ritual is thus preeminently designed as an act of k'vod ha-met, 'honoring the dead.'" A way of showing respect for the dead is not leaving the body unattended from the time of death until burial. It is accomplished either by family members and friends taking turns attending the body or by engaging a guard, called a shomer or shomeret (plural: shom'rim), to remain with the body until the funeral begins. It is traditional for shomrim to recite Psalms and other appropriate readings."
I included a link to a sign up sheet, which held spots for three days of shmirah, twenty-four hours a day. I honestly did not know what to expect, would people sign up to perform this important, but very emotionally and even physically difficult mitzvah to perform? I surely did not expect people to sign up for the midnight shifts. Within two hours, all the spots will full, all hours, for the three days. In fact, there were people who called me every hour asking if they could sit with Yossi even though the spots were filled. I visited from time to time, day after day, to sit with community members and family who sat, praying and reciting Psalms and readings. It was heartbreaking, and yet, heart warming at the same time. People were broken, and yet, they were whole. As I said in my eulogy, "our community watched over Yossi, and in turn, Yossi watched over us."
In this week's parashah, we read about the episode of the golden calf, which led to Moses breaking the two tablets of the Ten Commandments in front of the people's eyes. A plague ensued, many died, and the people were heartbroken, begging for forgiveness. They eventually received atonement, but the damage was done. Arguably, the greatest tragedy of this incident was the loss of the tablets, made by God. A second set was eventually made, but what happened to the first set that were broken? Were they simply discarded, added to the trash heap of history? Our sages tell us that the first set were not lost or thrown away; they remained broken and shattered. The shattered pieces were placed in the Ark of the Covenant along with the whole tablets. The tablets that were in the Ark of the Covenant became the focal point of the camp - the people surrounded the Ark, it was the heart of the camp - when it moved, so did the people. When the Holy Temple was built, the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies, the Kodesh HaKodeshim, the heart of the Israelite community.
The question is, why did they keep the brokenness and imperfection of the first set of Tablets with them, both in the Wilderness, and then eventually in the Temple, when they had perfection at their center? Why keep the broken and the whole together? Because as Jews, we believe in Shalom. Shalom comes from the word Shalem which means whole. The whole things in our lives, and the brokenness that we carry with us are in our hearts; one cannot be separated from the other. I could not think of a better way to describe our tradition. Chancellor Arnold Eisen of the Jewish Theological Seminary wrote the following in his book on Conservative Judaism:
"Jews continue to turn to Judaism in search of such meaning and purpose. I am a devoted Conservative Jew largely because, time and again, I have been vouchsafed the precious experience of meaning under Conservative auspices; I have long been shaped by the conviction, central to Conservative Judaism, that the Jewish part of myself need not be-indeed, should not be separate from the rest of who I am. The Torah demands and offers wholeness. In our day it requires all that 21st-century men and women can bring to the task. Thanks in part to that conviction, imbued in me since childhood, my love of family and friends is inextricably intertwined with love of God and Torah...It (the Torah) aims to impact the entirety of life, individual and collective, and not merely the aspect of it that other scriptures and traditions call "religion." The Torah offers a way called mitzvah that-if we walk it diligently-guides and transforms all of life: when we rise up and when we lie down, when we sit at home and when we walk upon the way. It follows that Conservative communities must be more than synagogues, and our synagogues must offer more than worship."
Out of this unimaginable tragedy came the realization that our community is much more than a place of worship. It is a space that transcends our walls, and extends to homes, to public spaces, and even to funeral homes in the most difficult of times. Our community is not just about verbally reciting prayers, but acting the prayers out in the world, for those whom we love even if we do not know them well, if at all.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk famously said, "There is nothing more whole than a broken heart."
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Erica Brown wrote the following commentary on these words: "Many experiences in life try to break us: illness, loneliness, the death of those we love, rejection, insecurity, loss. But such experiences also make us more whole as human beings. They expand our range of consciousness and compassion. They enlarge our capacity for inclusion. They make us stronger and help us reach out to others with greater empathy and concern. When we acknowledge that we are broken, we enter a universe where we are not measured by perfection but by our willingness to repair ourselves and the world."
After his bar mitzvah, Yossi led a congregational wide initiative to help fix our Torah scrolls which were in badly need of repair. Our congregation came together at that time and fixed what was broken. He taught us a Torah of repair, Tikkun Olam, healing the world.
As we journey to a Shabbat where we are reminded of the reality of brokenness, let us also remember that we live a Torah of repair, a tradition and faith that demands our whole selves, and our whole hearts, including the broken.
Shabbat Shalom
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