December 18, 2025 • 8 mins
In this special High Holy Day episode of Voices of Emanu El, Rabbi Oren Hayon leads a Kever Avot service from the quiet grounds of Congregation Emanu El’s cemetery, Emanu El Memorial Park, in the “sacred valley of time” between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. Drawing on Geraldine Brooks’ memoir Memorial Days, the Hebrew poetry of Psalm 118, and the teaching that “grief is praise,” Rabbi Hayon reflects on love, loss, and the honest, unvarnished grief that Jewish tradition embraces as part of life’s sacred rhythm. Listeners are invited into a tender space to remember parents, spouses, children, teachers, and friends, to honor the stories that live on in us, and to hear the blessing of our tradition: Zichronam Livracha—may their memories always be for a benediction.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
We've returned once more to gather in this tranquil peace
of our cemetery in this sacred valley of time,
the quiet reflective hollow between the dramatic peaks of
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
The service of remembrance,
or Kever Avot as it's called in Hebrew,
(00:21):
is a custom both tender and profound.
We gather at the holiest time of our year to visit the
graves of our loved ones, our parents and our spouses,
our siblings and our children, our teachers, our leaders,
our friends.
We come here as part of our spiritual work during the High
(00:42):
Holy Days of bringing ourselves back into alignment to
remember who we are and where we have come from and what we
owe to those whose memories we cherish.
Earlier this year,
Cantor Simmons recommended a book to me that was very
helpful to me in my preparation for this day and for my
thinking more broadly about memory and loss and grief.
(01:07):
The book is the new work by Geraldine Brooks,
whose fiction I've loved for many years.
This book is called Memorial Days,
and it's her first memoir.
Brooks wrote it after the unexpected,
sudden death of her husband, Tony, on Memorial Day in 2019.
(01:28):
She writes about her grief with honesty and vulnerability.
It's very different from her immaculately ordered and
well-researched fiction,
which is part of the point she wants to make with the book.
When we lose someone we love,
our mourning isn't tidy or well-mannered.
It's messy and chaotic, and it is often unbearably lonely.
(01:53):
Brooks is accustomed to living in the public eye,
but during the years after Tony's death,
she becomes newly aware of herself as living out an
endless, exhausting performance, as she calls it.
She feels herself tightly constricted by the facade she
presents to the outside world as a quote-unquote normal
(02:13):
person, a professional, a parent,
a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributor to the world of arts
and letters.
But on the inside, she is cramped up,
anguished and restrained.
In describing her grief,
Brooks draws on the Hebrew poetry of the Psalms.
(02:34):
She cites Psalm 118, Min hametzar karati Yah, a
nani bamerchav Yah,
From the narrow place I called out to God,
and God answered me with expansiveness.
That Hebrew word, metzar, the narrow place,
is the metaphor she returns to again and again as the most
(02:55):
potent descriptor of her grief.
A breathless inner constriction of heart and spirit.
This is the truth about grief and about the acute pain it
brings.
And it's a truth that our tradition does not shy away from.
Judaism recognizes that pain is real,
(03:17):
as real as anything else we experience.
Grief in Jewish tradition is not a weakness or a flaw in
the system.
It is an integral part of life's sacred rhythm.
One of the most arresting lines in Brooks' memoir is a
quote she brings from another author,
an American writer named Martin Prechtel, who says,
(03:40):
grief is praise.
It is the natural way love honors what it misses.
To grieve even deeply and inconsolably does not represent a
failure of our faith or an obstacle to our memory.
It is love's way of telling the truth.
Grief is praise,
(04:02):
and to mourn is to testify affirmatively that what we lost
was precious, that it was immeasurably valuable,
that it is worth remembering.
Making time to come to this hallowed ground and stand at
the graves of our loved ones is an expression of praise.
For those of us who have been carrying our grief for
(04:24):
decades,
just as for those who are attending this service for the
first time,
bearing wounds in our hearts that are still raw.
For all of us, our presence here is a kind of praise,
an acknowledgement of the lives which mattered to us,
of the love that shaped us,
of the stories that live on in us.
(04:47):
As part of her mourning process,
Geraldine Brooks traveled to a tiny island off the coast of
Tasmania to give herself time and space to grieve without
distraction, without the constriction of the metzar,
the claustrophobic need to pretend or perform.
She writes,
I am taking something our culture has stopped freely
(05:09):
giving, the right to grieve,
to shut out the world and its demands, to remember my love,
and to feel the immensity of his loss.
Our service today offers a similar pause.
It grants us, even for a short while,
permission to step out of our concerns about how our grief
(05:30):
may look to others on the outside.
Here, in the cemetery's reverent hush,
we are allowed to feel whatever we need to feel.
To this place,
we bring our authentic selves to honor those we have lost,
to praise their memory,
and to let our hearts be cracked open for a while.
(05:52):
The second part of that verse from the Psalms offers us the
consoling promise, even in the narrow places,
God answers us with broad, reassuring expansiveness.
Beyond the constriction of grief,
beyond the anguish of the mitzar,
we still find place to breathe.
(06:15):
May this visit to the graves of our loved ones help our
hearts to expand just a bit wider.
May it help our hearts to soften as we prepare to enter Yom
Kippur in just a few days,
when we will speak of judgment and renewal,
of repentance and forgiveness.
These days of awe carry us on a journey of self-reflection,
(06:37):
but it's a journey that cannot be complete without the work
of memory and the acknowledgement of the ones who made us
who we are.
And so as we make our way, may our grief, our honest,
unvarnished, unashamed grief,
may it be received in heaven as praise.
(06:57):
And on this memorial day,
when we remember all those we have loved and lost,
we say in the words of our tradition, Zichronam Livracha,
may their blessed memories always be for a benediction.
Amen.
We've returned once more to gather in this tranquil peace
of our cemetery in this sacred valley of time,
the quiet reflective hollow between the dramatic peaks of
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
The service of remembrance,
or Kever Avot as it's called in Hebrew,
(00:21):
is a custom both tender and profound.
We gather at the holiest time of our year to visit the
graves of our loved ones, our parents and our spouses,
our siblings and our children, our teachers, our leaders,
our friends.
We come here as part of our spiritual work during the High
(00:42):
Holy Days of bringing ourselves back into alignment to
remember who we are and where we have come from and what we
owe to those whose memories we cherish.
Earlier this year,
Cantor Simmons recommended a book to me that was very
helpful to me in my preparation for this day and for my
thinking more broadly about memory and loss and grief.
(01:07):
The book is the new work by Geraldine Brooks,
whose fiction I've loved for many years.
This book is called Memorial Days,
and it's her first memoir.
Brooks wrote it after the unexpected,
sudden death of her husband, Tony, on Memorial Day in 2019.
(01:28):
She writes about her grief with honesty and vulnerability.
It's very different from her immaculately ordered and
well-researched fiction,
which is part of the point she wants to make with the book.
When we lose someone we love,
our mourning isn't tidy or well-mannered.
It's messy and chaotic, and it is often unbearably lonely.
(01:53):
Brooks is accustomed to living in the public eye,
but during the years after Tony's death,
she becomes newly aware of herself as living out an
endless, exhausting performance, as she calls it.
She feels herself tightly constricted by the facade she
presents to the outside world as a quote-unquote normal
(02:13):
person, a professional, a parent,
a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributor to the world of arts
and letters.
But on the inside, she is cramped up,
anguished and restrained.
In describing her grief,
Brooks draws on the Hebrew poetry of the Psalms.
(02:34):
She cites Psalm 118, Min hametzar karati Yah, a
nani bamerchav Yah,
From the narrow place I called out to God,
and God answered me with expansiveness.
That Hebrew word, metzar, the narrow place,
is the metaphor she returns to again and again as the most
(02:55):
potent descriptor of her grief.
A breathless inner constriction of heart and spirit.
This is the truth about grief and about the acute pain it
brings.
And it's a truth that our tradition does not shy away from.
Judaism recognizes that pain is real,
(03:17):
as real as anything else we experience.
Grief in Jewish tradition is not a weakness or a flaw in
the system.
It is an integral part of life's sacred rhythm.
One of the most arresting lines in Brooks' memoir is a
quote she brings from another author,
an American writer named Martin Prechtel, who says,
(03:40):
grief is praise.
It is the natural way love honors what it misses.
To grieve even deeply and inconsolably does not represent a
failure of our faith or an obstacle to our memory.
It is love's way of telling the truth.
Grief is praise,
(04:02):
and to mourn is to testify affirmatively that what we lost
was precious, that it was immeasurably valuable,
that it is worth remembering.
Making time to come to this hallowed ground and stand at
the graves of our loved ones is an expression of praise.
For those of us who have been carrying our grief for
(04:24):
decades,
just as for those who are attending this service for the
first time,
bearing wounds in our hearts that are still raw.
For all of us, our presence here is a kind of praise,
an acknowledgement of the lives which mattered to us,
of the love that shaped us,
of the stories that live on in us.
(04:47):
As part of her mourning process,
Geraldine Brooks traveled to a tiny island off the coast of
Tasmania to give herself time and space to grieve without
distraction, without the constriction of the metzar,
the claustrophobic need to pretend or perform.
She writes,
I am taking something our culture has stopped freely
(05:09):
giving, the right to grieve,
to shut out the world and its demands, to remember my love,
and to feel the immensity of his loss.
Our service today offers a similar pause.
It grants us, even for a short while,
permission to step out of our concerns about how our grief
(05:30):
may look to others on the outside.
Here, in the cemetery's reverent hush,
we are allowed to feel whatever we need to feel.
To this place,
we bring our authentic selves to honor those we have lost,
to praise their memory,
and to let our hearts be cracked open for a while.
(05:52):
The second part of that verse from the Psalms offers us the
consoling promise, even in the narrow places,
God answers us with broad, reassuring expansiveness.
Beyond the constriction of grief,
beyond the anguish of the mitzar,
we still find place to breathe.
(06:15):
May this visit to the graves of our loved ones help our
hearts to expand just a bit wider.
May it help our hearts to soften as we prepare to enter Yom
Kippur in just a few days,
when we will speak of judgment and renewal,
of repentance and forgiveness.
These days of awe carry us on a journey of self-reflection,
(06:37):
but it's a journey that cannot be complete without the work
of memory and the acknowledgement of the ones who made us
who we are.
And so as we make our way, may our grief, our honest,
unvarnished, unashamed grief,
may it be received in heaven as praise.
(06:57):
And on this memorial day,
when we remember all those we have loved and lost,
we say in the words of our tradition, Zichronam Livracha,
may their blessed memories always be for a benediction.
Amen.
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