Land of the Living, Land of the Dead
Friday, January 6, 2023
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
We come this week to the end of Genesis. Jacob is 147 years old, at the end of his life, and finds himself in Egypt, far from home. Jacob came to Egypt twelve years earlier summoned by Joseph. Joseph, his lost, favorite son for whom he had been grieving for over twenty years. Joseph however was not lost but turns out instead to have arisen to become the Prime Minister of Egypt. Being reunited with Joseph after so many years of mourning was the great joy and consolation of Jacob’s life. Now, as he approaches death, Jacob begins to think about a different reunion. He thinks of his parents, Rebecca and Isaac, and his grandparents Sarah and Abraham, all of whom are buried together in Canaan, in the Cave of Machpela. Jacob says to his son Joseph, “Do me this kindness and this truth. Do not bury me in Egypt. I will lie with my parents. Carry me up from Egypt; bury me in their burial place.” Joseph replies “I will do as you have asked.” But Jacob pushes harder: “Swear to me.” He is determined to be buried with his people.
Yesterday I saw our Maintenance supervisor Abad for the first time since winter break and I asked her “Abad did you go to Mexico over the break?” She told me “no Rabbi, this year I went in November on the Day of the Dead, for my mother. We stayed up all night in the cemetery, with music and many people.” Abad pulled out her phone and showed me pictures and a video of that night in the cemetery, all lit up, with beautiful canopies, and the Mariachi playing, and all the people. She pointed to one of the graves “there is my father, and there is my mother, and my brother.” I looked at Abad and said “And when it is your turn, will you be there also?” “Yes.” I said, “like the film Coco?” And Abad grinned “yes, like Coco!”
The Pixar animation film “Coco,” is set in Mexico and is all about the connections between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Coco was released in Mexico in late October 2017, the week before the Day of Dead, and that year the entire world fell in love with the beauty, the richness, the depth and spirituality of Mexican culture. The movie grossed $189.2 million in China, and $41.4 million in Japan, ….with comparable success in South Korea, France, England, Spain, Argentina, Italy, Germany. As I sat in the theater watching Coco, like people everywhere, I wished desperately to be part of that vibrant Mexican culture. But I also thought to myself: This is very Jewish. “Recuerdame, Remember Me” the song at the heart of the film expresses the deep idea embedded in our Jewish tradition of Yizkor. The redeeming power of memory. Our beloved dead depend upon us, here in the land of the living, to remember them.
Abad’s story of spending all night in the cemetery on the Day of the Dead brought me back to profound moments in cemeteries in my own life. None of them were as colorful and musical as Abad’s experience, but they were profound.
In my late 20’s I set out to find the grave of my paternal grandfather Samuel Cohen, after whom I am named. He died very young, just 31 years old, when my father was still an infant. So my father never knew his own father. But he knew that he is buried on Staten Island. I called a few Jewish cemeteries on Staten Island, asking if they had a record of a Samuel Cohen who died in 1932, and finally found him in the Baron Hirsh Cemetery. On a visit to New York City, I took the Staten Island Ferry over to Staten Island and then boarded the bus that the cemetery office staff had told me to take. It was a long, long bus ride from the ferry… about an hour, I think. I got off and stood standing at the entrance to a vast silent landscape of Jewish graves. 80 acres, and thousands upon thousands of Jewish graves. I headed over to the cemetery office, where the office staff gave me a map showing where my grandfather is buried and then I followed the map to the section they had marked.
Each small section of the cemetery is marked as belonging to a particular shul. There I found my grandfather, surrounded by the other people among whom he had lived, and worked and davened. His stone is in the shape of a cut off tree trunk, which was the custom when a person died young. Right next to him were his parents, Jacob and Dora Cohen. It had not occurred to me, but of course it made sense that my great-grandparents would have wanted to be buried next to their son, who had died before them. So having made the long journey to come close to my grandfather and to my great-grandparents, a journey which in a way began the day I was born, I stood there and began to speak out loud. There was no one else anywhere in sight, in that vast 80-acre cemetery, far, far from the land of the living.
I spoke out loud and told my ancestors about myself, who I was, where I had lived and what I had done. That I had become a rabbi, that I hoped to get married. I was only twenty-eight years old. I stood there speaking with my ancestors for about an hour, and then I walked back out, got on the bus back to the ferry, boarded the ferry and returned to Manhattan, and have never been back since. That was about 38 years ago; I think I am overdue for a return and to give them an update.
My other three grandparents are all buried in Rochester, New York, in the Jewish section of the Mount Hope Cemetery. I’ve been there many times, most recently in 2016 when we were all in town for the unveiling of my father’s gravestone, a year after he died. We walked through the cemetery on a grey day in November, and we took a family picture by the grave of Susan B. Anthony, the founding mother of Women’s Suffrage, who lived in Rochester and is buried there. It was just weeks after the 2016 presidential election, and our country had just come close to electing the first woman President in history. It began to rain and we stood there smiling and quietly weeping in the rain. We walked to the Jewish section, through a carpet of fallen yellow leaves, and saw my mother’s parents Eva and Ephraim Eidlin, and my dad’s mother Dora Goldstein and her brothers and sisters, Aunt Ida and Uncle Ben and Uncle Itch and Aunt Bert. Nearby in the same section were Marian’s family members, the Schonfelds.
Part of me wants to be buried there, with my ancestors. But Marian and I bought plots in the Santa Barbara Cemetery, together with many of you, back in 2007. It was a way of saying “This is where we live now. This is where our children and our grandchildren and God-willing our great-grandchildren can come and stand by our graves, and speak out loud, telling us who they are, and where they have been and what they have done.” We bought plots next to our closest friends, and as we left the cemetery Marian commented to me, “I feel differently now about dying.” Both of us felt differently, knowing that we will be buried with our people.
One of the great privileges of being a rabbi is to be with a person who is dying. That is a sacred time, in which the doorway is opening, from this world to the next. To the spiritual realm that we call the Garden of Eden. Years ago, I went to visit my friend Bernie Haber shortly before he died. Bernie had been an engineer working for NASA, involved in the Apollo Space Program in the 1960’s. I knew him many years later as a brilliant, kind and fiercely principled human being. He lived a long and marvelous life, and just before he died, I came into his bedroom and greeted him. He looked up and said in a whisper “Steve, I’ve been trying to work out the physics of the separation of the soul from the body.” I sat down next to him, and we talked. Bernie died. Maybe he figured something out, or maybe he saw the door open and he walked through.
To me, the mystery is not that he died, but that he is so alive, in my memory, all these years later. I still see his arched eyebrows and his twinkling eyes. I still hear his voice and remember many words and moments we shared together. A gravestone can trigger memory, but it is not essential.
There are many doorways, many passageways between the land of the living and the land of the dead. The Cave of Machpela was one such a doorway, and the Mexican cemetery in Abad’s home town is another portal; so is Baron Hirsch cemetery on Staten Island and the Mount Hope cemetery in Rochester; and so is our Jewish neighborhood of the Santa Barbara cemetery.
Our tradition has a name for the land of the dead; we call it the Garden of Eden, where all our souls come from and to where we all return. There our loved one are all alive and waiting for us, patiently. The true portal between our world and the Garden of Eden opens for us when we close our eyes, remember, and step through. Shabbat shalom.