(Congregation sings together “Try to Remember” as we get settled in for the sermon) This is a day of calling upon memory remembering our departed beloved ones in yizkor remembering our place in the world as we bow down remembering all that we have done as we beat our breasts remembering all that we have hoped for as we see ourselves pure and forgiven Z’chor HaShem, we read in the verses of slichot in each of our services Remember O Lord thy tender mercies and thy loving kindness for they are everlasting Remember us O Lord, with favor, and grand us thy salvation Remember thy congregation which thou has redeemed and Mount Zion wherein thou hast dwelt Remember O Lord the devotion of Jerusalem, and never forget the love of Zion Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel Remember unto us the covenant of the patriarchs Remember unto the covenant of our ancestors. . . Z’chor zchor zchor remember, remember, remember like the beating of a drum. It is our plea it is a core of our prayers today. What do we mean when we ask G-d to remember? Do we think G-d has forgotten? Do we think that the all-knowing power that was is and will be has items that sink down to the bottom of a pile that need to be noticed, remembered? I like to look at our prayers through this lens: that everything that we ask of God

is actually something that we ourselves wish we could do our glorious descriptions of God are our fantasy of seeing ourselves in our fullest glory being able to do wonderful things. Upon the verse which tells us u’vo tidbakun cling to God Our rabbis ask how can a person cling to G0d? G0d is not something to hold or to cling to rather, cling to G0d’s attributes, they teach. and just as G0d is merciful–so should you be merciful just as G0d is forgiving gracious and loving so too must you be forgiving, gracious and loving. Our Torah tells us that we are created in God’s image and modern psychology (and some might even say early medieval Jewish philosophy ) suggests that it is God who is created in our image it is our projections our dependancy upon language our own imagination that sees God as we do. And so when we spend so much attention today imploring God to remember everything we are actually urging our own selves to remember. It is we, not G0d who are distracted and who require reminding.

When we urge God – “remember the covenant” We are urging ourselves to remember the covenant When we urge God – “remember your love for us” we are urging ourselves to see our own selves as loveable and good and worthy When we ask God– “remember your tender mercies for they are everlasting” we are reminding ourselves that within us we have an everlasting capacity for mercy. The act of remembering implies that what is being remembered is ALREADY KNOWN yet it is somehow hidden or not yet in the light of awareness. Our memories go back very far we carry everything. Memory is in our brains in our minds in facts and stories. Memory is also in our bodies in our cells we carry our sins and regrets in our chronic ailments we carry our disappointments and hurts in our emotional patterns we carry our love in our healthy behaviors ain shich’cha lifnei kisei kvodecha “nothing can be forgotten in your realm” we say to God. Nothing evades the light with you, God. and we are saying, hoping within ourselves that although our knowledge is somewhat obscured from our consciousness we do have access to the truth. And you know, when we do discover or uncover a truth The feeling we feel is not of finding something new,

rather, it is a feeling of recognition which means it is something old, something lost and retrieved. Today we are asking for kapparah atonement, purification. We are going through the ritual to have sin undone. washed away cleansed But not memory. Memory is never washed away. This is an interesting puzzle. Being rid of our sins actually reworking our past changing our story and recreating our reality and yet remembering everything. . Erasing sins but not erasing memory. Many of us make the mistake that erasing sin is equivalent to erasing memory. Upsetting things happen and we tell ourselves: don’t think about it. Put it aside. Think of other things.

This afternoon we will read the book of Jonah the reluctant prophet. Jonah is called upon by God to go to Nineveh and he runs away– or at least tries to. The storm finds him, the sailors identify him as the culprit for the storm through a lottery,

the fish finds him sinking in the sea and swallows him. Reading the tale metaphorically, the word of G-d haunts Jonah. He tries to escape, to sleep, even to die but he cannot because he knows what he has heard. he cannot erase from his consciousness what has been revealed to him. We all have leanings like Jonah to not know what we have come to know about ourselves maybe some of us have fantasized about magically erasing embarrassing or painful experiences or maybe some of us have tried to numb our memories with alcohol or drugs so that we don’t have to know what we know hoping for fleeting bliss of fleetingly empty mind, but none of this works. We can’t un-know what we know. this means we have to encounter pain and sadness there is an e-mail joke or parody going around It’s the tshuva hotline for automated forgiveness. You punch in your sins, using different numbers for the different categories of egregiousness. then you punch in your numbers which describe exactly how sorry you are (from not so sorry and I have a good lawyer to really sorry and I have a bad lawyer) and then step three you receive your kapparah, atonement. The email ends with “thank you for calling the tshuva hotline and remember: we know everything.” All joking aside,

these last words are really what Yom Kippur is about “Remember, we know everything” there is nothing unknown before God and the truth of our selves is known to us as well on some level. This is a day of facing utter truth In English the word “remember” connotes piecing together it means that the pieces are in us but the puzzle is not together. When we put it together re-collecting re-membering suddenly we own and claim and see what was lying inside us in secret. We have shined a light into a dark place Lurianic kabbalah which developed in the 16th century in Israel just two generations after the Spanish expulsion describes the creation of the cosmos. It speaks of the shattering of the vessels. The material world is made of broken vessels with a little light adhering to each shard. In this scheme by doing good in the world through every mitzvah we perform we are collecting broken pieces and redeeming some light. (interesting that this cosmology is articulated and expounded when the Jews themselves were regrouping after having been being scattered and sprinkled all over the globe) This cosmology is a psychological metaphor as well: we are filled with broken pieces many sharp edges, pieces of junk but each piece is imbued with some light, some love, some connection, some

longing. Each piece had a beautiful origin an origin of wholeness. We go through our ‘stuff’, touching the “slivers of mirror that cut and remind” (in the words of poet Jill Pettitano) so we are cut and we are reminded and we retrieve our image finding just one more piece of our truth each time. Linguistically in Hebrew, the word “remembering” relates to eternity. z’chor–remember, is the same root as the word zachar “male, masculine” Your son, your male child, is your zecher, your remembrance in the world, your continuation. The z’chor form, “remember”, describes a reaching way back to the past The zecher or zachar form “lasting memory”, male progeny, describes a reaching out to the future. It is through the act of reaching back to truth that we create the possibility of continuing forward in meaning It is actually through our power of memory that we can be forgiven at all. Memory is part of tshuva because tshuva is coming back to the same place a second time and not making the same wrong choice. We need memory for that We need the power of recognition. Through our power of memory we can revisit and transform we can shift our lives from one direction to another. Through the power of memory we can take a sin and turn it into a warning, we can take a mistake

and as long as we remember it it becomes valuable knowledge and not a liability. Shame can shift from being an enemy we seek to avoid to being a teacher of humility. The pain of loss which we may run from can be a reminder of our open heart and our capacity to love. In G-d’s memory nothing is lost forever. The whole picture is there waiting for us to see it and use it as we can. In just a few moments we will be saying yizkor asking G-d to remember the souls of our departed beloved ones in asking for G0d to remember we reach simultaneously to the past and the future knowing that “without the hurt the heart is hollow”. Through the power of memory our past is not gone at all it is here right now in this moment.