What Brings Them to Shul
Dec. 2nd, 2008 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ymarkovIt has frequently occurred to me that the few things that bring the largest numbers of otherwise unaffiliated Ashkenazi Jews to the synagogue - mourner's Kaddish, Yizkor, and Kol Nidrei - are all medieval inventions. Two have to do with death, and all three have to do with guilt. This latter may be the prime motivator. But why not anything of a more ancient origin?
Here's an excerpt from Samuel C. Heilman's "When a Jew Dies" that touches on this aspect in the second-to-last paragraph. Note also how he says, without quite saying so, that the Yizkor is a direct imitation of the Catholic "Memento" service.
In substance, the Yizkor prayer, which appears to have its origins in twelfth-century western Germany in the aftermath of the martyrdoms of the First and Second Crusades, is a petition to God for the repose of the souls of the dead “under the wings of the Divine presence, in the exalted heights reserved for the holy and the pure.” At its outset, this prayer appears to have been dedicated to recalling only those who had died in the preceding year, but in time worshipers began to include all those dead they wished to remember.
The practice of recalling martyrs and praying for their souls’ “repose and peace,” as both Yizkor and the El Maleh Rahamim prayers do, had been a common feature of church services from at least the fourth century. During mass, the martyrs’ names would be read from two boards folded together like pages of a book. When this was developed into a longer service, it became known as the “Memento,” from its opening words, “Remember (memento) O Lord thy servants male and female who have preceded us.” The parallel with both the El Maleh Rahamim and the Yizkor is remarkable. Clearly the Jews, no less than their Christian neighbors, collectively wanted to remember their dead – especially after those very neighbors had added to the number of dead.
Unlike Kaddish in which no dead are mentioned, in the traditional version of the Yizkor the petitioner, commonly but not necessarily a relative, enumerates the names of those whom God is being asked to remember “along with the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (or Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, in the case of women). A collective Jewish bond is being expressed here: my dead and all Jewish dead, my loved one and the patriarchs and matriarchs of all of us. My dead, I shall recall on the yahrzeit; all our dead, we shall all recall at Yizkor.
Along with the mention of names, the worshiper promises to give charity in their memory. There is a kind of covenant here: one good deed will lead to another, and when the charitable pledge is fulfilled, God will likewise grant the enhanced repose for the dead. As the text of Yizkor put it, “By virtue of this vow to charity, may his (or her soul be bound up in the bond of life, together with the rest of the righteous who are in the Paradise of Eden.” The institution of Yizkor provides the living a chance to act as this-worldly agents for their dead, effecting otherworldly improvement. Often, the synagogues within which these Yizkor “agreements” are pledged provide a concrete opportunity for giving by accompanying the prayers wish formal appeals, during which worshipers are encouraged to make specific promises of donation to a particular charity. In other words, charity will save us all from deathly oblivion.
The vows to offer charity were apparently not part of the original versions of Yizkor. While there were customs, some going back to the ninth century or earlier, that associated charity with prayers for the dead, based as we have already seen on the conceptions (drawn from Proverbs 11:4) that the poor are like the dead and therefore “charity saves one from death” and its horrors, Yizkor was initially a separate service whose primary goal was remembrance rather than redemption. However, “the combination arose at a later date in consequence of the fact that the commemoration of the year’s dead, with the accompaniment of vows, happened to coincide, on the Day of Atonement, with the Yizkor service proper.” To be sure, the connection to charity and the mutual obligation between the living and dead that it seals as part of the memorial occasion serves also to differentiate Yizkor from its Christian counterpart. Accordingly, the connection to charity became religiously, and culturally essential. Without the giving or the pledge, Yizkor remained incomplete.
Yizkor remains among those traditions that even those who hold on to very few Jewish practices tend to maintain. As such, synagogues have built on it, and Yizkor, while strictly speaking a prayer that can be recited by the solitary individual in any place, has become the occasion (perhaps, more accurately. the excuse) for many Jews to return to the synagogue and the Jewish community. This power to attract and recall even the most distant individuals to the precincts of Judaism may be explained by the fact chat Yizkor is located at the conjunction of aroused memories of the beloved dead, the obligations that the living still feel they owe them, the emphasis on community, anxieties about mortality, “the obscure sense of guilt which has been common to man since prehistoric times,” and the power of collective attachments. If nothing else, Yizkor provides an opportunity for everyone to assuage their feelings of guilt for continuing to live, as well as to express their connection to the dead, the community, and the Jewish people at the same time. The increasingly common practice of including a special Yizkor for all victims of the Shoah, along with other Jewish martyrs, has added to this emotional power and transformed the prayer, for some, into an occasion for expressing the desire to demonstrate Jewish solidarity as well as “never to forget,” both of which have become important elements of assertive forms of contemporary Jewish identity. Additionally, the almost universal inclusion in today’s synagogues of a special Yizkor for soldiers who have fallen in the “defense of the State of Israel” attracts Zionists, as well as Israeli expatriates in the Diaspora and many secular patriots in Israel, where the national desire to remember dead soldiers remains powerful. The coincidence of Yizkor with the yahrzeits of many soldiers who fell in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 has also added to the number or people who come.
Most compelling, however, are the personal attachments between the bereaved and the dead that Yizkor recalls. The association and coincidence of this recollection with holidays is also emotionally appropriate, for the Jewish celebration of holidays is closely tied to family gathering. Deaths are always breaches in the family, and chose ruptures are always felt most keenly at holiday time. It is, after all, an ancient idea among many peoples that “at seasonal festivals the dead return and rejoin the living.” Yizkor gives expression to the longing that the living still harbor for sharing relationships and encounters with those who are dead. Moreover, Yizkor does all this in public so that the bereaved can witness the fact that they are not alone in the feelings of loss and rupture which they experience at this time. The common custom of all those who do not recite Yizkor leaving the sanctuary during its recitation reinforces this sense of a common experience among those who remain inside. They are all part of the congregation of those wounded by death.
Here's an excerpt from Samuel C. Heilman's "When a Jew Dies" that touches on this aspect in the second-to-last paragraph. Note also how he says, without quite saying so, that the Yizkor is a direct imitation of the Catholic "Memento" service.
In substance, the Yizkor prayer, which appears to have its origins in twelfth-century western Germany in the aftermath of the martyrdoms of the First and Second Crusades, is a petition to God for the repose of the souls of the dead “under the wings of the Divine presence, in the exalted heights reserved for the holy and the pure.” At its outset, this prayer appears to have been dedicated to recalling only those who had died in the preceding year, but in time worshipers began to include all those dead they wished to remember.
The practice of recalling martyrs and praying for their souls’ “repose and peace,” as both Yizkor and the El Maleh Rahamim prayers do, had been a common feature of church services from at least the fourth century. During mass, the martyrs’ names would be read from two boards folded together like pages of a book. When this was developed into a longer service, it became known as the “Memento,” from its opening words, “Remember (memento) O Lord thy servants male and female who have preceded us.” The parallel with both the El Maleh Rahamim and the Yizkor is remarkable. Clearly the Jews, no less than their Christian neighbors, collectively wanted to remember their dead – especially after those very neighbors had added to the number of dead.
Unlike Kaddish in which no dead are mentioned, in the traditional version of the Yizkor the petitioner, commonly but not necessarily a relative, enumerates the names of those whom God is being asked to remember “along with the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (or Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, in the case of women). A collective Jewish bond is being expressed here: my dead and all Jewish dead, my loved one and the patriarchs and matriarchs of all of us. My dead, I shall recall on the yahrzeit; all our dead, we shall all recall at Yizkor.
Along with the mention of names, the worshiper promises to give charity in their memory. There is a kind of covenant here: one good deed will lead to another, and when the charitable pledge is fulfilled, God will likewise grant the enhanced repose for the dead. As the text of Yizkor put it, “By virtue of this vow to charity, may his (or her soul be bound up in the bond of life, together with the rest of the righteous who are in the Paradise of Eden.” The institution of Yizkor provides the living a chance to act as this-worldly agents for their dead, effecting otherworldly improvement. Often, the synagogues within which these Yizkor “agreements” are pledged provide a concrete opportunity for giving by accompanying the prayers wish formal appeals, during which worshipers are encouraged to make specific promises of donation to a particular charity. In other words, charity will save us all from deathly oblivion.
The vows to offer charity were apparently not part of the original versions of Yizkor. While there were customs, some going back to the ninth century or earlier, that associated charity with prayers for the dead, based as we have already seen on the conceptions (drawn from Proverbs 11:4) that the poor are like the dead and therefore “charity saves one from death” and its horrors, Yizkor was initially a separate service whose primary goal was remembrance rather than redemption. However, “the combination arose at a later date in consequence of the fact that the commemoration of the year’s dead, with the accompaniment of vows, happened to coincide, on the Day of Atonement, with the Yizkor service proper.” To be sure, the connection to charity and the mutual obligation between the living and dead that it seals as part of the memorial occasion serves also to differentiate Yizkor from its Christian counterpart. Accordingly, the connection to charity became religiously, and culturally essential. Without the giving or the pledge, Yizkor remained incomplete.
Yizkor remains among those traditions that even those who hold on to very few Jewish practices tend to maintain. As such, synagogues have built on it, and Yizkor, while strictly speaking a prayer that can be recited by the solitary individual in any place, has become the occasion (perhaps, more accurately. the excuse) for many Jews to return to the synagogue and the Jewish community. This power to attract and recall even the most distant individuals to the precincts of Judaism may be explained by the fact chat Yizkor is located at the conjunction of aroused memories of the beloved dead, the obligations that the living still feel they owe them, the emphasis on community, anxieties about mortality, “the obscure sense of guilt which has been common to man since prehistoric times,” and the power of collective attachments. If nothing else, Yizkor provides an opportunity for everyone to assuage their feelings of guilt for continuing to live, as well as to express their connection to the dead, the community, and the Jewish people at the same time. The increasingly common practice of including a special Yizkor for all victims of the Shoah, along with other Jewish martyrs, has added to this emotional power and transformed the prayer, for some, into an occasion for expressing the desire to demonstrate Jewish solidarity as well as “never to forget,” both of which have become important elements of assertive forms of contemporary Jewish identity. Additionally, the almost universal inclusion in today’s synagogues of a special Yizkor for soldiers who have fallen in the “defense of the State of Israel” attracts Zionists, as well as Israeli expatriates in the Diaspora and many secular patriots in Israel, where the national desire to remember dead soldiers remains powerful. The coincidence of Yizkor with the yahrzeits of many soldiers who fell in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 has also added to the number or people who come.
Most compelling, however, are the personal attachments between the bereaved and the dead that Yizkor recalls. The association and coincidence of this recollection with holidays is also emotionally appropriate, for the Jewish celebration of holidays is closely tied to family gathering. Deaths are always breaches in the family, and chose ruptures are always felt most keenly at holiday time. It is, after all, an ancient idea among many peoples that “at seasonal festivals the dead return and rejoin the living.” Yizkor gives expression to the longing that the living still harbor for sharing relationships and encounters with those who are dead. Moreover, Yizkor does all this in public so that the bereaved can witness the fact that they are not alone in the feelings of loss and rupture which they experience at this time. The common custom of all those who do not recite Yizkor leaving the sanctuary during its recitation reinforces this sense of a common experience among those who remain inside. They are all part of the congregation of those wounded by death.
