High Holy Days Sermons 5783

A DAY TO BUILD OUR LEGACY

By Rabbi Ari Margolis

Friday, October 4, 2022

 

Who here loves a good sonnet? I have to admit, I’m a sucker for a sonnet - Petrarchian, Shakespearean, Spenserian - I can’t explain, but give me the abab bcbc cdcd ee rhyme scheme in iambic pentameter, and I am in! I vividly remember studying Edmund Spenser’s poetry as a youth, and one of his poems has always stuck with me - his Amoretti 75:

 

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.¹

 

This poem sets an idyllic scene of a romantic couple spending time together on the beach, but at its core, the poem wrestles with something that we are all here to consider today. Our mortality and the idea of what we leave to the universe - our legacy. 

 

As a poet, Spenser turned to his core talent of arranging the written word in order to build the legacy he wanted to leave behind. In the poem, when his beloved, Elizabeth Boylan, points out to him that such attempts are but vanity, he digs his heels into the sand and determinedly sets out to immortalize her in verse so that “whenas death shall subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.”  … And here we are … later life, nearly 500 years later … renewing the loving moment they shared in our hearts and minds. . . (although, after promising her name would live on, he did not actually write her name into the poem, which is another problem for another time…) 

 

As a high schooler, I remember this poem confronted me to think about what I am here to leave behind. . . and then I probably had baseball practice later that day and moved on to the next assignment. 

 

Which is something that we do far too often, just move on from such stark and big thoughts. It’s why we need this day of Yom Kippur - a day of forgiveness and atonement, but also, yes, a day to consider our mortality and not run away from it. A day to build the foundation of our legacy.

 

In our Machzor, we read the Unataneh Tokef prayer, recognizing the fate that awaits us in this year - “Who shall live and who shall die?” Rabbi Edward Feinstein reflected on this prayer: “I sat in shul for years reading these words before I realized the answer. The answer to each of these questions is “me.” Who will live and who will die? I will. Who at their end and who not at their end? Me. Like every human being, when I die it will be at the right time, and it will also be too soon . . .” Of course, we’d like to deflect and think of this as talking about someone else, but “The prayer is not about someone else. It’s about me. . .a frightfully succinct summary of my existence.”

 

Rabbi Feinstein encourages us to read it:
I will live and I will die, at the right time, and before my time. ²

 

The words do not have to be fatalistic or morbid, but rather, they can be motivating - a Spenserian challenge to dig our own heels in the sand and figure out how we will shape our time. As Oliver Burkeman mentions in his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, those of us blessed to live until 90 will have 4,700 weeks - that is 4,700 Shabbats³ … and since many of us are no longer at the very nascent stages of our journey, I’ll leave it to you to calculate the rest. Today, Yom Kippur, is our time to ask: How am I using my time? What is the legacy I am creating? How do I make the most of what I am given? 

 

One of the great honors and difficulties of serving as a rabbi is to be there with people in their times of loss and mourning. Sitting with families, remembering their loved ones, preparing to share words that will mark the legacy of those we love, I rarely hear about the projects or the work meetings, instead what remains in our hearts is usually the sense of how the person we are mourning has made us, their loved ones, feel. The ways they made us feel safe and supported, noticed and loved, the moments where they leaned into our relationship and made us feel special. 

 

Looking back, we do not always focus on one specific aspect of a person’s life, but rather the cumulative effect of a lot of small moments - showing up to special moments lifecycle events, concerts, games, recitals. The work ethic that somehow managed to include time with us. The meals shared with love, the time that was spent … together. We return to quality moments in time, always… the loving moments created by doing what Oliver Burkhard advises we do - by “lean[ing] into the mundane … not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life [we] already have.”⁴ He suggests that we get on the floor and play with children and grandchildren, take a different route to work and see what is around us, to break our routines so that we can be more present in our lives, with our time.

 

As we recognize our mortality on this day, Yom Kippur is crying out to us, we who are still living, to re-calibrate how we want to spend the time we are gifted to have and to lean into the moments life grants us. 

 

Over the past few years, I have journeyed alongside a few people who have had to confront their own mortality far too soon, due to illness. Even though some of these individuals have been people who had lived fully - with generosity of heart, and a spirit of adventure and love, each one has said in their own way, “I wish it did not take me until seeing my end right in front of me to make my time matter this much …” They leaned into their relationships and their passions, and started to think of their legacy.

 

They knew they were not going to make it to the moments in life that many of us look forward to - Seeing one’s child get married, leading children to the bimah to become B’nai Mitzvah, a 10th birthday party, a 20th wedding anniversary … to confront this reality, they wrote notes and recorded videos for their loved ones, so they could leave their own words and let their loved ones hear their voices and know the pinings of their hearts, instead of having to imagine the words that would have been shared. It is a heart-rending, heart-breaking, and liberating process, because they discovered that they carried the weight of not only wanting to be there for these moments, but also the weight of feeling like they needed to be there. 

 

Journeying with people I love dearly who have had to contemplate their fate prematurely, we have realized together that such reflection and preparation does not have to be a morbid activity, but rather a loving one. And it does not have to be done with a fatalistic attitude. It can be a healthy activity, a chance to dig our heels in the sand and create future memories, a process that could be beneficial for all of us, no matter how many Shabbats we have left. 

 

The next Shabbat is never guaranteed -- we remind ourselves, Who by fire, who by water … the amount of time is not fully in our control … But we can control what we do with our time. As Jewish people, we do not run away from our mortality. What if each one of us engaged in such a legacy practice, recording ourselves for those special moments we look forward to in the future? Not only would we have words to leave behind if the ineffable were to occur. Ideally, we can get a jump start on the speeches we want to give in person when we actually make it to the occasions. And this process can also become a check-in with ourselves to evaluate if the decisions I’m making today will lead to those words being true? Am I on the path to having a meaningful relationship? What might I need to change to get there?

 

This is why I am creating a new endeavor I’ve been calling the Legacy Project -- and you’re welcome to join me - monthly gatherings to explore our legacy, attempt to shape it, build the components we might want to include, make recordings and talk openly about the most pressing things that we carry -- for each of us to embrace that I am mortal… and to do what we can to shape what will transcend our physical presence. What am I leaving for those I love?

 

Let us use this day where we think of death, not to fear our end, but to create our legacy … allow ourselves to stare into the eye of every moment, helping us to rise to the occasion, creating the story of our lives decision by decision. Every interaction is a chance to live up to the person we want to become. This is why we beat our chests and ask forgiveness and let go of the mistakes we have made. It is why we renew this process always and not just rest upon glorious moments from our pasts. We don’t have to shine as brightly as our largest achievements in every moment, but we can be just and kind and loving in every waking hour, every interaction, we can be present in our time. That is how we do not wash away, but rather cement our legacy and carry on from generation to generation, l’dor va-dor. 

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¹Spenser, Edmund. Amoretti:LXXV, published 1595.

² Feinstein, Rabbi Edward. In Who By Fire, Who By Water: Unetaneh Tokef, ed Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman. Jewish Light: Woodstock, VT, 2010. pp. 145-146

 ³Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2021. p. 3

⁴Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2021, p. 241-242