The blessing of a yahrzeit

This past week, everyone and their dog (including quite a few Jewish dogs -- see my companion post on the winter holidays) celebrated Christmas.

But December 22nd-23rd had an additional meaning for me and my family: it was the one-year anniversary of my father's death, known in Judaism by the Yiddish word יאָרצײַט‎ = y'artzayt, usually anglicized as "yahrzeit."

Now, for those readers of this blog who are not yet Jewish, you have probably been trained as I have by our Western Civilization to think of memories of death as something to be avoided at all cost - or, when unavoidable, to be gotten through with as quickly as possible and perhaps even apologized for. That has always been my family's way. When my father died last year two days before Christmas, we did what I have always taken to be the standard Western/Christian mourning rite: the women in my family pushed back their tears until those few moments when they could not be contained, the men and boys stoically sucked up any grief we had, we all consoled each other a few times, and then we pushed on with a "normal" Christmas that just happened to not have my father in it. The priest at the Episcopal Church we visited for Christmas services offered to do a brief memorial service so the boys could have some closure about their grandpa's passing, but we declined. I can't speak for anyone else, but it didn't work. The feelings we stuffed so carefully just kept coming back up. And they would almost certainly have ruined this year's Christmas if we had not made some room for them.

Cue the yahrtzeit candle.

Now, in Jewish civilization, unlike most of America, death and its remembrances are a *big* deal. Had we been Jewish a year ago, we would have been asked/obligated to "sit shiva" -- a seven-day ritual of mourning in which all family members are encouraged to let the grief out and to put off any and all joyful celebrations (okay, that would have flown like a lead brick with my family). What a help that would have been! Half a year later, when I finally began this Jewish journey, I found out how important it is to Jews to remembered their departed. So I had my father's name read in synagogue on Yom Kippur. I said kaddish for him every Shabbat that we went to synagogue after that. Two Friday nights ago, I listened intently as the rabbi read the list of yahrtzeits to hear my father's name (our kindergartener was so thrilled to hear grandpa's name read that he shouted it out in echo - the rabbi handled it with surprising grace). And last week on the evening of the 22nd, I read a couple of poems from the Reform rabbinate's Mishkan T'filah and my sister and I lit his yahrtzeit candle together:

The effect was incredible. It created a space for all of the memories to flow, all of the pent-up emotions to come out, all of the tension of a holiday completely without Dad to be resolved. Yes, we cried. But we also celebrated. I cooked some of the favorite recipes that I had learned from Dad. We watched one of the movies he had always found most meaningful (ironically enough, the Jewish classic Fiddler on the Roof). The boys and I built a dancing robot out of Lego Mindstorms borrowed from my engineering lab, wrote a few simple programs for it, and played dodge-the-robot. We enjoyed my father's memory instead of fearing and avoiding it.

As a result, we had one of the best winter holidays we've ever had, instead of one of the worst.

And I think I finally understand the meaning of the words we say at synagogue every week after the mourner's kaddish: זיכרנם לברכה = zikhronam liv'racha, "may their memories be a blessing".