Making Music with a Broken String: A Yizkor Talk

Rabbi Joel Fleekop

Yom Kippur - Thursday, October 9, 2008

The story is told that one night, the Israeli Violinist, Yitzhak Perlman took the stage at a concert to play a difficult and challenging violin concerto.  A few bars into the piece a loud snap was heard.  One of the strings on Perlman’s violin had cracked.  The orchestra immediately stopped playing and the audience held its collective breath.  Everyone expected for him to call for another string.  But instead, Perlman, arguably the greatest virtuoso of his generation, signaled the conductor to continue.  To everyone’s amazement, he played the remainder of the concerto entirely on three strings.

The story, perhaps apocryphal, extols the talent of a musician.  But I find in it a powerful message about loss, life, and memory.

According to one version of the story, Perlman played a beautiful concerto that night – but not exactly the piece written on the sheet music.  As Rabbi Wayne Doscick writes, “You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head.” Playing the intended piece with a broken string, with an instrument that was not whole, would have been impossible.

The same is true when the strings in our life, the strings that are our loved ones, break. The death of a loved can bring our world to a screeching halt.  Judaism honors that with the ritual of shiva.  But at the end of the shiva week, Jewish tradition teaches that the mourner should take a walk around the block, the first step in a year long process of returning to life.  As we are reminded in this morning’s Torah reading, we must choose life.  But though we choose life, the life to which we return is not the same, nor can it ever be.  Part of our former world will always be missing.  We will always be, in some way, not whole.

Though incomplete and different, life, somehow, does continue.  In Finding God, Rabbi Feinstein’s retelling of a Hasidic story, he shares the insight of a young man dealing with the loss of his grandfather.  Feinstein writes,

The boy cried with a sadness he had never felt before.  He loved his grandfather and missed him so much.  He knew no way to escape his loneliness and pain, how he could ever find a way back to life. 

But as the days went by, sweet memories of his grandfather replaced some of his pain.  And he found his way back to life, to his family to his happiness, to his rebbe. 

“Great Rebbe,” he declared, “I loved my grandfather so much.  I never thought I could ever overcome my sadness and pain.  But my grandfather taught me to love life as he did.  And so I have found a way to remember him and yet feel happy.” 

Memory plays an important role in the boy’s ability to return to life.  It plays an important part for us as well – not only in returning to life but how that life is lived.

Upon hearing the story of Yitzhak Perlman and the broken string, one of the first thoughts that came to mind is that he was only able to play the concerto because he knew what that string, now broken, once sounded like.  As he recomposed and altered the piece so that it could continue, the broken string, or at least the memory of its sound, remained his guide.

Judaism has always treated memory as powerful and the act of remembrance as instructive.  The Torah commands us to remember Shabbat, our covenant with the Divine, and the experience of slavery in Egypt.  Like the recent command of memory –the obligation to recall the Shoah, these acts of remembrance are not only about the past – but also the future.  They guide us as we go forward.

So too do the holy memories of our loved ones.  In his book, the Halakhic Man, Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik writes, “The most fundamental principle of all is that man must create himself.”  That may be true, but we are not without assistance.  We have the example of others to guide us.

I am guided by the memory of my grandfather Fred.  Fred left the Ukraine for the Golden Medina at seven years of age – but didn’t reach the shores of the United States until he was 14.  The intervening years were spent in Havana, Cuba where my grandfather – along with an older brother – survived on the scarcest of resources – living for a time beneath the stands of the Bull Fight arena.  Fred eventually made it to Philadelphia, where he built a successful business.  From the times we visited him at the office -- when he was well past retirement age -- it was clear that my grandpa worked hard building and sustaining the company.  He was a self made man who could rightfully claim that everything he had – he had earned without much help.  But he never expected others to do the same.

Each year on our birthdays he gave his grandchildren a U.S. Savings Bond – a gift that would be there for us as adults -- a gift that ensured that as we set out in the world we did so with resources he had never known.

Fred’s largesse did not end with his family.  While I know a Torah at his synagogue was dedicated in my grandmother’s memory and that he contributed to other worthwhile causes, I remember my grandfather’s generosity in more informal settings – particularly the inside of his favorite restaurants.

My grandfather loved a good meal – and had the belly to prove it.  But for him a good meal was more than just the food – it was also the service he received.  If the waiter or waitress was good and friendly, my grandfather wouldn’t hesitate to leave a tip double what most would consider generous.  It wasn’t that my grandfather was frivolous with money – rather he had an appreciation for hard work – and felt hard working people deserved a little extra.

Though he died when I was still young, I think of my grandfather often.  His example taught me not only the importance of hard work, but also to appreciate and respect those who work hard.

The memory of family guides us.  So too does the memory of others we have been blessed to know.  Listening to the kaddish list read on Rosh Hashanah – a listing of all those in our congregational family who have died this past year – I was overwhelmed by a sense of loss, but also an appreciation for having known so many incredible people -- people who taught me, and all of us, so much about life.  To face adversity with dignity and class, to cherish each visit -- each conversation -- you have with family, and to enjoy every moment of life to its fullest.

The book of proverbs teaches, zecher tzadik l’vracha – the memory of the righteous is a blessing.  The memory of our loved one is a blessing that guides us through life.  But through memory, our departed friends and family also gain a blessing, the blessing of immortality.

In the Talmud, Massechet Taanit (5b), Rabbi Yochanan asserts that “the patriarch Jacob never died . . . rather he continues to live on through his children.”  Commenting on this teaching, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, “What he has learned, what he has come to stand for, will not die with him but will live on in the children he raised and the values he imparted to them.”  And so Jacob prays, “May the Eternal who has led me all my life long to this day bless these children, and may, through them, my name be perpetuated” (Genesis 48:15-16).

Jacob’s prayer is echoed in the ethical will of Madeline Medoff.  Speaking of her loved ones, Medoff writes,

They are the me that is left behind.
They are my stake in eternity
And they matter, more than ever, . . .
They carry something of me in their lives
And in their children’s
And in the children beyond
For I have touched them! 

We, the living carry something of all those who have touched us.

It is the tradition of Ashkenazic Jews to name after deceased family members.  As Debra Nusbaum Cohen explains, “the custom is to name our children in memory of people who have died, whose positive character traits we hope our children will grow to possess.” Often children come to embody the cherished characteristics of their namesakes.  But how?    The answer is us.  When a child comes to embody the traits of a deceased loved one, it is because we did so first – because we let their example and memory guide us.

Inscribed on the wall of our Memorial Garden are words taken from the Yizkor service:  t’hiyena nafshoteichem tzrurot bitzror haChayim – May their souls be bound up in the bonds of life.  Through the bonds of love and memory, those who have touched our lives – are forever tied to life.

But while the ties to life are eternal – life itself is ephemeral.  That is one of the messages of the High Holy Days.

One day the string that is our life will break and our loved ones will be left with only the memories we leave behind.

This past year, millions of people read Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture.  Similar to Tuesday’s with Morrie before it, The Last Lecture records the memories, stories, and insights of a man near the end of his life.  Written by Pausch, a Carnegie-Mellon professor and father of three, the book, like the presentation for which it is named, is beautiful and inspiring.  Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given just a few months to live, The Last Lecture is Paush’s attempt to consciously leave a legacy.  As the professor writes, “under the ruse of giving an academic lecture, I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children.”

The desire to consciously leave a legacy is not unique to the modern world.  For millennium, beginning with the words Jacob shared with his sons, Jews have left ethical wills.  In these special wills, one bequeaths not possessions but rather values. 

In his ethical will, the 18th century Latvian Rabbi, Moshe Zelig, lists 86 instructions including the charge to “seclude yourself for a short period every day so as to contemplate the ultimate purpose of man’s existence in the world.”

Mordechai Schaechter, writing in Yiddish, urges his children, “to live not only for oneself; to remember we are part of a large family—the Jewish people—and of a larger family still—the human race.”

And in a will to her children and grandchildren, Randee Friedman, a musician and mother from San Diego writes, “with every passing year, discover new mitzvoth and do them.  Be responsible members of the world community by helping others learn to help themselves.  Your generous acts of kindness will be returned to you with even greater strength and intensity.”

In Sefer haHinuch, Rabbi Aharon HaLevi teaches that the last of the 613 commandments is to write a Torah – the record of Judaism’s holy teachings.  Writing an ethical will, a record of what you find holy, is in many ways a fulfillment of this mitzvah.

But we also create a Torah, a record of what truly matters to us by how we live each and every day.  In words familiar to us from the V’ahavta, Deuteronomy teaches, V’shinantam Levanecha – instruct your children.   Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin explains, “the best way to guide children . . . is to set the example personally.”  More than anything, it is our actions that guide and instruct.  On that unknown day, when death -- we pray peacefully – calls, it is the memory of our blessing that will be a blessing for our loved ones.

According to the story, when Yitzhak Perlman finished playing the concerto on that special night, he, lowering his violin, looked up to see the entire audience standing and applauding in appreciation.  After a few moments, the audience called for him to speak.  Walking, on legs made unsteady by childhood polio, Perlman approached a microphone.  And then, in a quiet and humble voice he said, “Our task is to make music with what remains.”

Even though we are less than whole – even though death has left so many cherished strings broken – it is our task to make music with what remains.  With memory as our guide, let us make beautiful music.  And may we live our lives so that with the guiding memories we leave, our loved ones can play a masterpiece of their own.