Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Pesach Yizkor Service
April 12, 2004
Time To Stop Looking back
Friends, on this last day of Passover, I would like to introduce or re-introduce you to one of the more mysterious women in our Bible. Nobody knows her name; the Torah just calls her eshet Lot - the wife of Lot. Yet in a text which never wastes words and seldom focuses on its female characters, the Bible takes the time to tell us several things about this woman. The bottom line is that when God destroyed the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, God's messengers rescued Lot and his family and took them out of their city before the fire and brimstone came. The angels instructed Lot, his wife and two daughters to flee for their lives and not look back. And then, Genesis 19:26 reports: "Lot's wife . . . looked back and she thereupon turned into a pillar of salt."
This legend has parallels in various other mythologies - for example, the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Ancient tradition thought it could fully identity the encrusted remains of Lot's wife, and to this very day salt encrusted rock formations in the area suggest all manner of shapes. But that is not the reason I tell you this story.
Why did Mrs. Lot look back? The Torah does not provide any explanation whatsoever. So generations of commentators have studied this cryptic passage and tried to figure out the reason for Mrs. Lot's behavior. I would like to offer you one possible answer today as to why she looked back and became frozen like a pillar of salt. My answer is not offered merely to help us understand an enigmatic biblical tale. The reason I am interested in this story is because I suspect that there is more than one Mrs. Lot in this world. I have a hunch that there are many Mrs. Lots, and that some of them may be sitting here this morning. If there are any Mrs. Lots here, and if I can possibly do anything to help them, I want to try.
My explanation for what happened to Mrs. Lot comes from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, well known physician and therapist. This is the story Dr. Remen tells.
Enid was an older woman, whose husband had died unexpectedly two years before she came to see me. Withdrawn and distant, she had not cried or spoken of her husband's death to anyone in all that time. She no longer cooked or looked after her garden or her house. Most of the time she sat in her bathrobe in the living room, looking out the window at nothing at all. She had been given anti-depressants by her doctor, but they had not made much difference, and after a while, she had simply stopped taking them. "They won't bring him back," she had said. She was brought to see me by one of her daughters, who told me, "I lost both of my parents the day my father died."
At first, Enid and I sat and looked at each other in silence. She was a lovely woman in her early seventies, but she seemed as lifeless as the chair she sat on, as if she were only the wrapper that had once enclosed a life.
She seemed so fragile that I wondered if she would have enough strength to stay the full hour. I opened the conversation by asking her why she had come. "My husband has died," she replied, turning her head from me to look out the window. "My daughters would like me to talk about it, but I don't think I care to."
When I gently asked her to say more about this, she said simply, "Talking seems a waste of time. No one could possibly understand."
I nodded in agreement. "Yes, of course," I said. "You have lost your life. Only your husband could understand what you have lost. Only he knew what your life together was like." At this, she turned back to look at me. Her eyes were gray, like her hair. There was no light in them. I nodded again. "If he were here, Enid, what would you tell him?" I asked her.
She considered me for a long moment. Then she closed her eyes and began to speak to her husband aloud, telling him what life was like without him. She told him about going to their special places alone, walking their dog alone, sleeping in their bed alone. She told him about needing to learn how to do the little things he had always taken care of, things she had never known about. She reminded him of times that only he would remember, old memories that no one else had shared. And then, for the first time since Herbert died, Enid began to cry. She cried for a long time.
When her tears stopped, I asked her if there was anything else she had not said. Hesitantly, she told me how angry she was with Herbert for abandoning her to grow old alone. She felt as if he had broken a promise to her. She missed him terribly and all that he had brought into her life.
"He was a teacher of love for me," Enid said. The child of rigid and suspicious parents, she had been amazed at Herbert's selflessness, his readiness to extend his hand to others, even to strangers. She told me story after story of his generosity, his kindness, her eyes looking beyond me into the past. "Herbert always went the extra mile," she said. "So many people loved him."
I was deeply touched by Herbert and by the woman he had loved. "Enid," I asked her, "if Herbert were here, what would he say to you about the way you've lived these last two years?"
She looked startled. "Why, he would say, 'Enid, why have you built a monument on pain in memory of me? My whole life was about love, not pain.'" She paused. Then, for the first time I saw the hint of a smile. "Perhaps there are other ways to remember him," she said.
Afterward, Enid told me that she felt that if she let go of her pain, she would be betraying Herbert's memory and would be diminishing the value of his life. Now she saw that she had indeed betrayed him by holding onto her pain and keeping her heart so tightly locked. She never came back to see me again. Herbert had told her everything she needed to hear.
And then Dr. Remen tells us what she learned from this encounter with Enid. She learned that every great loss in our lives requires that we re-choose life all over again. We need to grieve first, no doubt of that. The pain we have not grieved over will forever stand between us and life, if we do not face it, and work it out. When we don't grieve it out, a part of us will be caught in the past - frozen, paralyzed, unable to move, looking backwards forever.
And when I read Dr. Remen, that every great loss in our lives requires that we re-choose life over again, and that if we do not face it and work it out, a part of us will be caught in the past forever - frozen, paralyzed, unable to move, looking backwards forever - I understood the story of Mrs. Lot, and I understood why the Bible takes the time to tell us her story.
Mrs. Lot lost almost everything when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. She lost her home, her friends, even a good part of her family. No wonder she grieved. No one dare question her sacred right to grieve. But at some point, Mrs. Lot needed to turn forwards, and to deal with the rest of her life. If she didn't, if she stayed forever glued and focused on what she had lost - if she stood still forever, looking backwards - she would turn into a pillar of salt.
And so will we if we do what Enid did and what Mrs. Lot did, if we only look backwards and never face forwards. Grief , my friends, is not about forgetting. But grief requires remembering the past with love and with gratitude and not only with pain. Grief is a sorting process. One by one we let go of the things that are gone - the trinkets, the souvenirs, the mementos, even the status and self-definition - and we mourn for them, as we should. But then one by one we take hold of the things we still have and the things we still are and the things that have become part of who we are, and we use them to build again.
Dr. Remen concludes her story by reporting that about a year after we met, Enid sent me a clipping from the local newspaper about a group of widows she had organized who help elderly people with tasks that they cannot do for themselves. There was no note with the clipping, just a tiny poem she had written and signed. It was entitled "Grief" and it said:
"I pull up anchor
and I catch the wind"
"I pull up anchor and I catch the wind" - that was what Enid finally learned about grief. And that is what I would have all of us who have come here today for Yizkor to learn from and with Enid. First we sink into grief. Yes we do - there is no other way; there is no shortcut to heroically bypass grief. First we sink into grief; we wallow in our grief. We are allowed to, we are entitled to - and let no one dare deny us this right.
But then after a while - for some after a short while and for others only after a long while; nobody can hold a clock or a calendar to our heart and tell us when we should move on to the next stage. But, after a while, we do move on. We do not ever forget the pain, but we stop looking backwards. We do not let ourselves become frozen as Mrs. Lot did; for if we do, we will be a monument to death, as she was. We do not look backwards forever. At some point we turn and move forward, carrying our grief with us, carrying the love we received with us and resolving to share it and spread it to others who need it too. We re-choose LIFE!
Lot's wife stands to this day in the Negev. Guides point out the pillar of salt to all the tourists. But Mrs. Lot lives not only in the Negev. She lives in every synagogue when people come together for Yizkor - but never come for Purim or for Simchat Torah or for Shabbat or for any of the other joyous times on the calendar. Lot's wife is sometimes a widow and Lot's wife sometimes becomes a widower. Lot's wife is sometimes a divorcee and sometimes a divorced man. Lot's wife is sometimes a woman who has gone through a mastectomy, and Lot's wife is sometimes a man who has gone through the amputation of a limb. Lot's wife is anyone and everyone who has suffered a grievous loss and who mistakenly thinks that the right way to pay honor to that loss is by continually wallowing in it. Lot's wife is any one does not understand that living again and loving again is not a betrayal of love; it is a celebration and a continuation of that love.
My dear friends, there are tears of sorrow and there are tears of joy and there are tears of love. This is a particularly poignant moment for me. Exactly twenty years ago right now, I laid my beloved father to rest; and it will be 34 years next month that we buried my mother. Let me tell you what these years have taught me. We come here today not to wallow in our sorrow, not to indulge in self-pity, not to wish and yearn for what can no longer be. We come here today to remember all that was good and sweet and precious in the lives that we shared, and to resolve to honor that love by facing forward and by living for as long as life is given us to live. Our Yizkor service begins on page 546.
I am grateful to Rabbi Jack Riemer for much of this important lesson.
