Transformation, Not Preservation: 8th Day of Pesah/Yizkor 5786

In many ways, Pesah is a holiday obsessed with memory. The obligation to remember the Exodus from Egypt is the festival’s raison d’etre. Yet remembering the Exodus is already woven into every single day of Jewish life — into our morning prayers, into the Shabbat kiddush, into the rationale for how we treat workers and strangers and the vulnerable. We are commanded to remember it always. So why do we also need seven days of elaborate ritual on top of that? Why the seder with its intricate choreography, its questions and answers, its symbolic foods and lengthy telling? Indeed, when the Torah commands us to observe Passover, it says that the holiday exists “so that you will remember the day you left Egypt kol yemei hayekha” — all the days of your life. If we are already obligated to call this memory to mind every day of our lives, what is the concentrated week of Passover observance adding?

A nineteenth-century Hasidic master, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, often known by the name of his book of commentaries, Sefat Emet, offers an answer that I find particularly illuminating. He understands the seven days of Passover ordained by the Torah not as commemoration — not as an annual exercise in recalling a historical event — but as a transformation. His argument is that there is a difference between knowing you have been freed and actually living as a free person. One can remember the Exodus every day and still be, in some fundamental sense, stuck — constricted by habit, by fear, by social injustice, by all the things that conspire to make us feel small, insignificant, powerless, incapable of change or growth. What Passover does, the Sefat Emet says, is help us get unstuck. The symbols and rituals of the holiday – eating matzah, participating in the seder, clearing our homes of hametz — these are not simply acts of recall. They are deeds designed to effect some manner of inner transformation. 

Eating matzah during Pesah is a perfect example. During the course of the holiday, we don't just tell the story of the Exodus. We don't just remember the legendary bread of affliction that our ancestors ate when they left Egypt. We actually ingest it ourselves. 

Rabbi Menachem Nochum of Chernobyl, often known by the name of his most famous book of sermons called Me’or Eynayim, points out that when we eat something, we don't simply absorb fuel and discard the rest. What we eat becomes part of us — part of our cells, our blood, our bodies. We are, in a very literal sense, made of what we consume. The same is true, the Chernobyler teaches, in the spiritual realm: what we take in with genuine intention and awareness doesn't just nourish us temporarily. It becomes part of who we are. It changes us at the level of our spiritual essence, not just our bodies. And that change doesn't disappear when the meal is over.

This is what the Torah is doing when it commands us to eat matzah during Pesah. It is not simply asking us to perform a rite or honor a symbol. It is asking us to take the memory of Egypt into our bodies — to let the experience of slavery and liberation become part of our flesh, our instincts, our way of moving through the world. So that when we leave Passover, we are not the same people who entered it. The Exodus becomes not just a story we know. It is something we have, in a very real sense, become.

In this sense we enter Passover one person and we leave it another. And then, every morning when we mention the Exodus in our prayers, we are not simply remembering our history. We are drawing on the transformation that Passover produced in us, keeping it alive, keeping it active throughout the year. This week of intensive ritual and the daily and weekly and monthly and seasonal practices are doing different things: the festival changes us; the daily practices keep the change from fading.

One of my mentors, Rabbi Jack Moline, preached a sermon some years ago at Washington National Cathedral that has stayed with me. He opened it by asking what sounded like a simple question: why is an apple? Not “what is an apple?” Or “where is an apple?” But “why is an apple?”

In answering the question, Rabbi Moline spoke about a poignant scene in the old John Travolta film Phenomenon. A man who knows he is dying is trying to explain death to two young children who love him and don't want to let him go. He holds up an apple in his hand and says: "I could put it down on the ground there and we could look at it, but sooner or later it would turn brown and mushy and we would have nothing to show for it. The only way for that apple to stay with us in all its beauty is for us to take a bite. Once it is a part of you, you can never lose it."

Rabbi Moline was, in part, making a point about Torah — that Jewish wisdom is not meant to be admired from a distance but consumed, taken in, made part of you. But the teaching also illuminates the point of Passover – that the rituals are designed not only to facilitate our recollection of a historical event, but moreover to enable us to make the Exodus part of us. In many ways, every pilgrimage festival — Shavuot and Sukkot as well as Pesah — are similarly designed, aimed at transforming us through practicing certain tactile rites of recall. And I think it also helps explain why all the pilgrimage festivals conclude with Yizkor, the service in which we call to mind the people we have loved and lost. 

When you think about it, it’s one of the more intriguing design choices of the Jewish calendar. At first blush, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. It feels like cognitive dissonance that specifically on our most joyous occasions, days overflowing with celebration and gratitude, we pause and recall lost loved ones. But if we consider it in the frame we’ve been discussing, one can actually start to understand the logic: When we lose someone we love, we tend to experience the loss as a loss of closeness — they are no longer here, no longer present, no longer reachable. And so we try to preserve what we had: we keep their photographs, we tell their stories, we hold their memory carefully, like something precious and fragile that might break if we're not careful. That impulse is completely understandable. Grief does that. Love does that.

But Rabbi Moline's apple metaphor suggests that preservation is not the deepest form of closeness available to us. Think about it: when someone is physically present with you, they are still, in an important sense, separate from you. They are outside you, other than you — a distinct person you can reach toward but never fully close the distance with. When you take someone in, though — when their essence, their values, their way of seeing the world becomes part of how you think and feel and act — the boundary dissolves in a way it never could when they were alive. You become closer to them through having internalized them than you ever were when they were physically present.

There is a form of union available in death that isn’t available in life. The people we have lost can be more present to us, more part of us, more woven into who we are than mere physical presence and proximity ever allowed.

The Jewish scholar Barbara Myerhoff has a name for this process. She calls it re-membering — not remembering in the ordinary sense, the passive surfacing of a recollection, but re-membering with a hyphen: the active work of putting yourself back together around the people you carry. When we re-member someone, she argued, we are not simply recalling them. We are allowing them to reconstitute us — to reorganize who we are around who they were. And she insisted that properly re-membered lives are moral documents, and their function is salvific, because when we re-member someone we are insisting that all of this has not been for nothing. That what they were is still alive, still moving through the world, still doing something — through us.

We arrive at Yizkor at the end of a season in which we have been practicing this very thing — bringing a memory into our bodies, letting it become part of us, allowing it to change who we are. And now, before we conclude our commemoration and celebration, tradition asks us to do the same thing with the people we have loved and lost.

The question Yizkor poses to each of us — the real question, underneath the recitation of names and the familiar melody of Kaddish — is not simply whether we remember the people we have lost. The question is: have we let them in? Have we allowed their lives to reorganize ours? Are they part of us? And if they are — what are they still growing into, through us?

Think of what our loved ones and ancestors gave us. The values they modeled, knowingly or not. The way they loved, imperfectly, as we all do, but genuinely. The things they cared about — the causes they championed, the people they showed up for, the convictions they refused to abandon. The jokes they told, the food they made, the songs they sang, the way they made you feel when you walked through the door. All of that is in us. All of that is in some significant way still alive.

We come to Yizkor every year not to freeze the people we love in place, but because each year we bring a different self to the memory, and each year the memory has new work to do in us. You are not the same person you were the last time you said these names. And so what they gave you will do something different in you today than it has ever done before. What they planted in you is still growing. What they gave you is still moving through the world — every time you act on it, every time you let it guide you, every time you choose, because of who they were, to be a little more of who you are meant to be.

So as we prepare to recall our loved ones in the Yizkor service: take a bite, metaphorically speaking. Let them in again. Let who they were find its way into who you are.

May we carry them not as a burden but as a blessing — their wisdom guiding our choices, their love enlarging our hearts, their unfinished work calling us forward.

May the memories of those we have loved and lost be for blessing — may they continue to grow in us, bear fruit through us, and nourish a world that is still hungry for everything they had to give.

May we honor them not only with our words but with our lives — with the kindness we extend, the justice we pursue, the love we refuse to withhold.

And may the One who blessed them in their lives continue to bless us in ours, binding us together across the boundary of death, in the bonds of everlasting life.

So may it be God's will. Amen.