Our Voices

Yom Kippur Yizkor 5875 | 2024

I want to tell you about my friend and teacher, Linda Mechanic. She was the woman who first taught me pottery. She inspired in me a love of shaping clay and sharing it with others. Linda ran a small pottery studio in Los Angeles called Peach Tree Pottery. After that first day of learning with her, we had so much fun that day, we kept coming back to do pottery with Linda. I even struck up a deal with her: I helped her clean the studio in exchange for time at the pottery wheel.

It didn’t take long to learn that Linda was a giver. She gave so much of herself, her time, and her energy. She hosted fundraisers for Children’s hospital, halfway houses for women, and many medical research organizations. She offered classes to underprivileged kids to give them a chance to have access to the arts. She invited us to join her in adopting families during the holidays to deliver them Christmas presents.

And then when I was about 13, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. From everything I could tell, she was going to be okay. She went on living life and we continued to see her every once in a while. It wasn’t until I was 15 that it popped into my head that maybe we should see what Linda was up to. My mom pulled up her Facebook page, hoping that we might see what was going on in her world. Upon scrolling we read posts from friends that said “I can’t believe you’re gone,” “we miss you so much Linda,” and “you were such an incredible light in this world.” And while for a split moment I was confused, I very quickly understood what had happened. My friend, my teacher, Linda, was gone from this world seemingly in an instant and it felt jarring. She was there one moment and gone the next. Poof.

On Yom Kippur, a day where life hangs in the balance, we sometimes read the story of Cain and Abel, the first pair of brothers. Their story is short, and it is heartbreaking: one brother rises up against the other in a fit of fraternal jealousy and just like that a life is gone. All we knew about Abel is that he was a shepherd. As a shepherd, he brought “the choicest of the firstlings of his flock.” For this, God rewarded him. But after that verse, the story is all about Cain. We only hear about Abel as an object of action. 

What we often do not learn though is the Hebrew name of Abel: Hevel, most literally translated as vapor—a mist, a diffused substance suspended in the air, one moment there, the next gone. It feels as though this description fits the story of his life. He was there one moment and gone the next.

 But it’s not just Abel’s life. It’s Linda’s life, and it’s the lives of so many whom we have lost. They are here one moment and gone the next. Whether we lost them quickly or over the period of a long-drawn-out illness, it feels like the vapor simply disappears. To experience life without them here is jarring.

 But I know that life is not simply like vapor. It is so much more beautiful than that. In the moment of our loss, it may feel like vapor. That’s the thing about metaphors: they’re never quite perfect and they are not meant to be. They merely capture one facet of the complex idea we hope to elucidate. If we consider how life is like vapor, perhaps we can extend that metaphor to another form of water so we can better understand life. Dr. Irvin Yalom, an existentialist psychiatrist, provides us with a helpful metaphor for understanding what else life is other than vapor. It can also be ripples, an idea he shares about in his book, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming The Terror of Death.

 He writes: “Rippling refers to the fact that each of us creates—often without our conscious intent or knowledge—concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even for generations.  That is, the effect we have on other people is in turn passed on to others, much as the ripples in a pond go on and on until they’re no longer visible but continuing at a nano level. The idea that we can leave something of ourselves, even beyond our knowing, offers a potent answer to those who claim that meaninglessness inevitably flows from one’s finite-ness and transiency.” (Yalom, Irvin D.. Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. Germany: Wiley, 2010.) 

 If life is ripples, then we are all part of some greater body of water than ourselves. Life is not simply fleeting vapor, but also a grand interconnected project of beautiful interactions between shared lives. The relationships we have with others matter and go far beyond the span of any one person’s life. When your way of being has rippled into mine, then we are forever connected. As Yalom puts it later in his book, “the truly effective message is, ‘I have taken some part of you into me. It has changed and enriched me, and I shall pass it on to others." (ibid., 135.)

Whether it is a teaching, a piece of wisdom, a philosophy of life, a trait or virtue, our loved ones have managed to ripple into our lives even though they are not alive today to share in that ripple with us anymore. For this reason, we find ourselves here today at Yizkor.

Abel (Hevel) could not have known what the fruits of his labor would be. 

Whether we realize it or not, Abel offered the first sacrifice in all of Torah. This practice would become a model for worship for Jewish people for thousands of years. It may not be the model we use today, but it has shaped our texts, our history, and the formation of our peoplehood.  Without this initial giving of ourselves to the Eternal, we never could have come to the Judaism we have today.

What’s more, Linda could not have known what the fruits of her labor would be. I’m sure she had hopes and dreams of what bringing the arts to people of all backgrounds could do, but I do not think that she could have predicted the specific effects her generosity with her time would have on me: that I would go on to find a pottery studio in every city I’ve lived in, that I would craft ceramic Judaica to develop new types of ritual objects, that I would teach people in this community about brokenness and repair in pottery as a metaphor for our own lives. She could not have known she was doing all of this and yet her influential way of existing in the world has rippled into my life in beautiful ways. So although it has felt like her life was vapor, here one moment, gone the next, her existence was also the ripples she left behind. I will be the living evidence of one of her ripples.

All of you here today have been touched by the lives of your loved ones who you came to remember today. Their ripples do not have to live on silently. You have the power to keep their ripples undulating across this world. The fact that they lived at all and that they lived within your life can go on having meaning in the world and make the world a better place for others to live in. 

Whether they taught you an important life lesson, inspired you to follow your dreams, influenced the way you speak or the types of food you eat, or guided you toward an important decision, their life became a ripple in your life. When we name the ripples, we lend meaning to the lives of the people who set them in motion. This leaves us with a responsibility to share that ripple into the lives of those who live on. That way their memory never really dies. In doing so I hope that their memory will be a blessing to you, to all you inspire, and to this world. Let us say: Amen.