Dear Friends,
The high holiday season calls our attention to the precariousness and preciousness of life. This year, we seek to offer our community a space to grieve with a sense of connectedness to each others’ grief, even as we maintain physical distance from one another. To supplement our Yizkor memorial online service, this installation will live on the grounds of Homewood Friends Meeting House from Rosh Hashana through Sh’mini Atzeret.
This blog post contains instructions and intention setting for your self-guided tour, which are also printed on-site.
Use this guide full of readings and poetry as you navigate the space: http://bit.ly/HinenuYizkorBooklet
Listen to this playlist of poetry and music performed by our members: https://soundcloud.com/hinenu/sets/yizkor
All who engage with the art installation are required to follow these safety guidelines. We appreciate your help! This document has those guidelines, as well as accessibility information: http://bit.ly/HinenuYizkorSafety
Welcome
We invite you to use this space in any ways that are meaningful to you: in quiet contemplation; in embodied, vocalized grief; in clenched, trembling rage; in skepticism or resentment about even being here; in exhaustion; in numbness. You are welcome here.
1. Naming Our Dead
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin
In this season, in this moment, on a threshold bridging years and worlds: what losses are you grieving? Whose absence is present with you?
On a ribbon, write the name(s) of those you are here to recall. Give voice to what you have lost. Using a clothespin, affix the ribbon to the twine suspended between the birch branches.
We are like a passing shadow, a cloud that drifts away.
Like a fleeting breeze, like scattering dust,
like an ephemeral dream.
Adapted from traditional Jewish liturgy
2. Placing Stones
It is a Jewish tradition to place a pebble or rock on the graves we visit, to signal that none of us is alone in our remembering. In this unique season, when we cannot gather in person or travel to far-off cemeteries, may these stones bear steadfast witness to our remembering.
Pick up a stone. Feel the stone—the weight, the texture, the shape of it. Notice the hues, the grooves, whether it is warm or cool in your palm.
Holding the stone, feel how the one(s) you are remembering touched your life: their love, their teachings, their foibles.
Placing this stone and taking leave of it, know that although we can no longer take the one(s) we remember by the hand, we can take them with us in our hearts and minds and deeds.
Adapted from Rabbi Andrew Straus
3. Handling Soil
Many of us were unable to participate in the burial of dear ones in the second half of 5780, which has left many of us without a sense of closure. It is a Jewish tradition and a sacred gesture of kindness to participate in the physical act of burial, in all of its finality: placing earth into the earth, covering our dead.
You are invited to feel this soil, to pick it up and let it fall.
Nothing. You began as nothing and you will end as nothing. And in between—everything, and nothing. In between—joy and sorrow, beauty and decay. Everything yours to partake of, yours to bear. Yours to see, to know, to give birth to—and to let go. None of it yours to have.
Not even you are yours to have. You belong to a wholeness so great you cannot even conceive of it.
No, it is not a belonging; nothing owns you. You are simply part of it. You came out of it and you will return to it. You do not ever leave it, you are part of it forever.
And this is your moment to be alive.
Marcia Falk
In honor of those we are remembering, and in honor of our remembrance, this soil will nourish a local food-yielding garden in the months ahead.
A Small Needful Fact
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.
Ross Gay
4. Departing
It is customary upon departing from a cemetery to conduct a ritual hand-washing.
The Jewish response to this potential desire to linger in Yom-Kippur-mode is the holiday of Sukkot. We are literally commanded to get up, take a long drink of the hydrating beverages of this world, and head outside with our hammers. In the Jewish tradition, we are never encouraged to linger at the periphery of this-worldliness for very long. Sukkot reminds us that all of our praying, meditating, and achieving inner peace is merely the first step in a process. The next step, which must propel us forward into messy living, is to get out there, and, no matter how flimsy the materials and how unsteady our hands, start building.
Maya Bernstein
Washing our hands helps us return to ourselves by washing away that which does not serve.
Dori Midnight
As you prepare to leave this place, or upon entering your next destination, wash your hands without a blessing, gently pouring a small amount of water over each hand.
Liturgy
We’ve attached extra liturgy and poetry to this booklet, for you to browse at your own pace. It can be recited aloud, read silently, or kept for later, printed from this pdf:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mH-LQXpLaX6RKMoK_6S8sxKp9bpb_UQA/view?usp=sharing
We’ve also prepared a Yizkor playlist that can be found at https://soundcloud.com/hinenu/sets/yizkor
Yizkor from the Rabbinical Assembly (Conservative movement) prayer book, Lev Shalem: https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/2020-04/Yizkor%20for%20Pesah%20and%20Shavuot%20SIDDUR%20LEV%20SHALEM.pdf
Interior art by Heidi Schloss and Avi Roberts
El Maleh Rachamim
El maleh rakhamim, shokhen bam-romim, ha-metzeh menukhah nekhonah takhat kanfei ha'shekhinah, b'maalot kedoshim u'tehorim, k'zohar ha'rakia maz-hirim, l'nishmot kol eleh, sheh-hizkarnu hayom l'brachah, sheh-halchu l'olamim, b'gan eiden tehi menuchatam.
Anah baal ha'rakhamim has-tirem b'seter kena-fekha l'olamim.
U'tzror b'tzror ha'khayim et nishmo-teihem.
Adonai hu nakhalatam v'yanukhu b'shalom al mish-k'boteihem. V'nomar amen.
“Each person’s origin is dust, and each person will return to the earth having spent life seeking sustenance. Scripture compares human beings to a broken shard,
withering grass,
a shriveled flower,
a passing shadow,
a fading cloud,
a fleeing breeze,
scattered dust,
a vanishing dream.
And You—You are the Sovereign, living G-d, ever-present.”
-Machzor Lev Shalem p. 144
“We humans come from dust and return to dust.
Our lives are fragile, we live hand-to-mouth.
We are like a clay pot that is easily broken,
like grass that withers, a flower that fades
like a shadow that passes, a cloud that drifts away,
like a breeze that dies out, dust that scatters,
like an ephemeral dream.
But You, our G-d and ruler, are living and eternal.”
-Machzor Eit Ratzon p. 263