Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
October 25, 2005

On Sunday Night, Scott Podsednik gave a gift to a generation of Chicago baseball fans. No matter how this series ends, his homerun in the ninth that give the White Sox a victory is already safely engraved on the hearts and minds of millions for their entire lives. I know - For me, my moment was in the late 80’s with Kirk Gibson. I was at that first game as my L.A. Dodgers played the Oakland A’s. Gibson came limping out and hit a slider from Eckerskly out of the park. In my mind, that ball is still sailing upwards. And the most amazing thing is that, on Sunday night, now and forever, I can still access that moment. I see the crowd, my Dad and brothers cheering next to me, and Gibson hobbling around the bases.

Baseball is the field of dreams. Both in victory and in defeat, baseball provides the promise of an eternal summer. For those of us who live in its highs and lows, there is an ever-available videotape of memories to access. And even those of you who are not fans-just think about any baseball movie you may have seen. The premise is always the same there. In “Field of Dreams” and “The Natural,” there is a distant and idealized past, tucked away in time, a frozen moment which never changes, which, if you are lucky, is a moment of glory, but, if it isn’t, is an emotional thorn for eternity. And we who experienced those moments first-hand can continue to draw on those memories throughout our lives.

Philosophers and theorizers of religion have long discussed the strange alchemy between time and memory. Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religion, divided the types of religions into two groups: those that view time cyclically and those that view time linearly. To view time cyclically is to understand that all events recur regularly, like some sort of cosmic cycle of constant regeneration. The religious consciousness of ancient peoples from the Babylonians to the Greeks was deeply tied into the natural cycle of the year. The seasons, the weather, the harvest, all occurred and recurred. Time did not progress forward for it repeated every year. And so ancient religious life was based on some mythic moment that was noted with an annual ritualized ceremony. So, for instance, the Babylonian Akitu festival was a dramatic reenactment of a primordial act of creation, and every year, a group of actors would stage the dramatic scenario between the gods with the thought of creation taking place at that very moment. In that instance, time does not move forward; rather, it is like a treadmill with different markers, which will inevitably be encountered again and again.

The other type of time, Eliade calls “linear,” which is to say that if cyclical is the treadmill model, linear time is the person out jogging indefinitely. There is history, there is past and there is future, but the past is forever irretrievable. Podsednik and Gibson are artifacts of the past but not elements of a living present. Events and people fall one after the other, and they do not recur. This more secular model of time is far more in touch with our modern sensibility. It is also a bit isolating and cold. Because while we may appreciate the steady march forward, we also become disconnected to the people, occurrences and lessons of the past. We can be historians, but we can not be practitioners of memory.

Eliade’s division of cultures into cyclical and secular time is intriguing, but to me it falls short of what I know of the Jewish concept of time. It seems to me that, for Jews, our concept of time is neither linear or cyclical, we are neither on the treadmill or jogging indefinitely. We actually occupy a third category which includes a bit of both. Jews merge the two kinds of time, the vertical and circular. We celebrate or mourn events of the biblical period as unique and irreversible. Psychologically, however, “those events are experienced cyclically, repetitively.” (Yerushalmi) Creation may have occurred once, but we ritually enact it every Sabbath. The giving of the Torah, though happening at Mount Sinai, is noted every time we say “asher kidshanu bemtizvotav” so that we ourselves are commanded to perform a mitzvah. The Passover Seder makes it abundantly clear that the Exodus from Egypt, though situated at the time of Moses, is ours to experience every year. The image that comes to mind is neither that of a treadmill or the long path but that of a circling water drawer above an inexhaustible well of tradition from which the Jew is invited to drink throughout the year for sustenance. Franz Rosenzweig saw this as the calling card of our people. He wrote: “in the history of other peoples, to reach back for what has been left behind is only necessary from time to time; for us, it is a constant, vital necessity. And we must not forget that it is a vital necessity, for we must be able to live within our everlastingness.” (The Builders)

And so it is with the festivities of the final two days of Sukkot. Today we recited Geshem, the prayer for Rain, an extended petition to God for sustenance. What is fascinating about this prayer is that our request ties the past and the future together. We ask God to remember us just as God remembered Abraham – a concept known as zechut avot, the merits of our forefathers. For Abraham’s sake, for Isaac’s sake, for Moses’ sake, we ask God to grant us the gift of rain. Even for God, present actions are tied into remembrances of the past. It is the ability of God to draw on the well of tradition that will determine our present and future.

And indeed, this idea will become abundantly clear over the next twenty-four hours as we renew the annual scriptural reading of the Torah. Inevitably, there is a cyclical quality to reading Torah, and on Simhat Torah, we will conclude only to begin the story again. And as Yosef Yerushalmi wrote, we are assured that the Joseph who lived many ages ago will again be in prison in just a few months, released and reunited with his brothers, just as he was last year and the year before. But each year when we read that same narrative, we can anticipate its ending. Each year, we read it as different people and each year it bears the potential for offering a new imprimatur onto our souls. This is what it means to be Jewish. From our Torah readings to our prayers, time is neither cyclical nor linear but a combination of the two: both retrievable and accessible but also dynamic and restorative. As Jews, we forever stand at the well of tradition-it is our sustenance. And, unlike memories of sports moments past, our reservoir of tradition bears the promise of personal growth and direction.

The time for Yizkor is upon us. It is time to go to the well of memory. Several times each year, we are given the gift of taking pause to engage in this essential Jewish act of turning to the past for present use. Only at this precise moment, we are more than just Jews. We are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters; indeed, we are people who live in the absence of loved ones taken from us. And we are painfully aware that life is precarious, each year perhaps even more alert to the truth of our mortality. We know that our task now is to let the memories well up. And we look at the model of the lives of the ones we loved, and we seek comfort in the legacy of their deeds and love that they bestowed upon us. In death, they may be beyond our reach, but their lives remain ours forever to be a blessing. Perhaps most importantly, we know that the life of a loved one is not relegated to the past but can continue to be a source and spring for our own growth in the years ahead. Indeed, the enduring lesson of Yizkor is that the power of memory really lies in its ability to orient ourselves to our present and even our future.

The time for Yizkor is now. We stand at the well of memory and we drink of its waters even with tears in our eyes. For only through the waters of memory can the landscape of our lives be renewed.