|
|
 |
|
|
Matza of Memory
Matza of Memory
by Rabbi Susan Grossman
Beth Shalom Congregation, Columbia, Maryland
Memory is a funny thing.
Cleaning out my cupboards for Passover, I came across the piece of afikomen I had placed there the year before. As I lifted the matza, I could hear my mother’s voice saying, fur mazal, for luck, in my ear.
My mother had a tradition:
At the end of the second seder, my mother, would take a piece of the afikomen, put it away behind the dishes in the cupboard, and announce it was fur mazal, that we should have mazal , or good luck, in the coming year. It is a tradition she learned from her mother, who had learned it from her mother in their shtetl in Europe. Each year, one piece of matza would be taken out of the cupboard during the Passover cleaning, to be replaced by a new piece after the seder, fur mazal.
This is the fourth Pesach that I have observed this tradition: the third year since my mother’s passing.
That first year, just a brief month after her death, I placed my first piece of matza in the cupboard. It now seems so long ago, the aching desire not to let her go quietly into the night of memory. I embraced this tradition as one way to ensure she lived on, not only in memory, but in something concrete, touchable, even though I could no longer touch her. It was a way her words still could speak to me, though I could no longer hear her voice.
Life is so busy, I forgot about that piece of matza until I found it while cleaning for the next Passover, a month after my mother’s first yahrzeit, the first anniversary of her death. I remember that I picked up the matza and felt such an incredible sense of loss and longing as I envisioned her saying, fur mazal, for luck, that my eyes filled with tears.
That is how it is during the first year after the loss of a parent. That is how it is especially around the first yahrzeit. Any little thing can open the pain of loss, the floodgates of longing, even after we think we are past that point in our mourning. But we are not. That first yahrzeit is the hardest because it brings us back to the first flush of our loss.
Last year, the third Passover and the second after her death, I again found the afikomen behind the dishes where I had placed it the year before. Unbidden tears threatened to well up as I reached for the phone and then stopped myself. With a pang of regret I remembered I could not call my mother up to recount my cleaning progress as I used to do when she was alive. I could not share my discovery of the matza with her. But the moment passed easier than it had the year before and I again replaced the matza with another piece after the Seder.
It has been over three years since my mother’s death. I have celebrated four Passovers since she has been gone.
This year was different from the rest. Something has changed. My heart seemed less heavy when yahrzeit came this year. Somehow, three plus years after her death, her life has finally begun to eclipse her death. I think that is why finding the afikomen meant something different to me this year, than the previous three.
This year it meant, not that she was gone, but that she lives on. A little broken piece of matza evoked not my sense of loss but my sense of her continued presence in my life: her smile, her voice, serious and playful saying– fur mazal – for luck. I could almost feel her on the other side of the veil that separates this world and the next – where those who live and love on see us though we cannot see them. I could almost feel her present with me as I lifted the matza from its place behind the dishes. Instead of a tear, I felt a smile on my face, joyful in finding something so small and ordinary – a cracked piece of matza -- which could trigger such a warm memory of my mother in me.
Sophocles once wrote that “time eases all things.” That seems particularly true of bereavement. Grief gets easier to bear as time passes, not because the memory of the loved one lessens, but because the memory is reordered: the singular memories of loss recede in the face of the numerous memories of a life lived.
I think this is part of what our Sages meant when they honored our loved ones with the phrase: zichrono, or zichrona, l’vracha: his or her memory should be for a blessing: Of course, on the surface, the phrase means that their lives should inspire us to deeds of kindness, tzedakah, generosity, good works, mitzvot. But I believe it also means that a time can come when our memories of our loved ones no longer cause us pain, but rather grace us with a sense of joy and satisfaction in seeing how their influences live on in us.
Gaps will always exist in our lives. Faces at the table will remain missing. However, as the years pass we will find that the pain of those gaps will recede even as the memories of our loved one’s lives continue to warm us.
Every time we recount their stories they live on in us. Every time we reenact their traditions, they live on in us. In these ways the memories of their lives take on a life of their own which overshadow the memory of their loss, for they are never really lost to us, as long as we continue to remember them. That is what time, and only time, brings us: the blessing of memory which softens the pain of loss.
As time passes, may their memories continue to bring us joy for having known them and inspiration for having their lives as a model for our own.
|
| Back |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
