How to feel on the anniversary of unthinkable things?
Here today
Remembering my father, my sister
You: your mother, brother, partner, child.
Us: the thems who touched our lives.
Why is this Yizkor different from all other Yizkors?
Because on the others—Yom Kippur, Shavuot, yes Passover too—we enter this space of memory carrying our own grief.
But today, on Shemini Atzeret of all days, we must dip twice. Grief within Grief.
The images and stories that have come to define a generation have a date and a name:
October 7.
But today, 22 Tishrei, is their yahrzeit. The 1200 who were shot, stabbed, smothered, burned. Brutalized before these things. Or during them. Who fought or hid or sheltered little ones with their bodies. In homes and fields, in shared dining halls.
The enormity of loss on this date threatens to overtake us, like reverse ripples in a pond, zeroing in
We brace for impact.
Where do we locate our pain? And our joy for lives lived well? And good deaths at a ripe old age?
Today I light two candles.
One for my people and one for my people.
One for my family and one for my family.
One for my loss and one for ours.