“The Sacred Blessing of Grief,” Rabbi Elaine Zecher’s Yom Kippur Yizkor sermon and Shabbat Awakenings

Watch the video recording of the sermon at the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur afternoon, 9/21/26

September 25, 2026 | 15 Tishrei 5786

Welcome to Shabbat Awakenings, as we move toward Shabbat and this week, the festival of Sukkot. You can also listen to it as a podcast.

Though the season is called a time of our joy, it is also a time of fragility since the Sukkah itself is fragile. I share this week the sermon I offered for Yizkor on Yom Kippur day. Grief brings us fragility and also joy in our remembering.

Grief is a human condition.  None of us escape it.
When our three kids were little,
we bought a fish. They named it “Fishy.”
Kids can be so literal.
It lived in its bowl and they carefully fed it each day,
sometimes too much, way too much.
And then the inevitable happened.

One morning we found the fish floating upside down.

How could we help our kids deal with their first loss?
We decided on a “burial at sea,”
and gathered in the bathroom
where everyone had the chance to share
something about Fishy’s life.
Then we watched as Fishy disappeared
into the great sea of eternity.

Even in that sweet and dear moment,
their grief was real.
They would go on to lose a guinea pig named Pom Pom,
a high school friend who died in a tragic fall,
and other friends who died by suicide.
Then my dad was felled by lung cancer
and later, David’s mom
both of whom they loved dearly.

Each time, dealing with loss,
facing it and naming it,
took effort not to push their grief away,
but to learn about what it means.
Remembering is an intention.
It is a life lesson that we all share,
yet grief can isolate us when we hold the sadness with us.
Sometimes we feel like
we are floating in a sea of mourning and grieving
and at other times, almost like a surprise,
it breaks over us and we feel like we are drowning.
Each of us walks through the valley of deep darkness
and it is hardly a straight path but uniquely our own.

We are here because we have a front row seat
to the reality of loss for the dear ones
and relationships that we have held precious.

If we are fortunate,
nature is our first teacher about loss.
In their beauty of existence, plants still die,
flowers in full bloom are on their way
to wilting the moment their stem is severed.
Yet fallen trees become hosts to new saplings.
The cycle of life and death,
growth and decay, beginning and end
are part of the life cycle of all living things.

Remembering is an intention,
yet remembering hurts.
But it is our memories
that keep us connected to those loved ones
and keeps them a part of our lives,
not apart from our lives.
If all that is left is goodness,
it is as if they are calling to us
with the quiet power of a whisper:
I’m here because you want to remember me.

We carry that quiet powerful softness.
We hold the feeling, carry people with us,
even though they are not physically present.
Love finds us even without a body to hold it.
The soft murmuring sound of their lives
sing to us through the way we remember them,
hold them, become them.

The way Judaism understands the Divine
offers a path for us.
God cannot be seen or touched
and has no physical manifestation,
yet God can be perceived and realized
in the way our minds and souls allow.

I have found comfort with the story of Elijah the prophet
whose name we invoke at the Passover Seder;
it is Elijah who will resolve all controversy
in a different age in the future.

But Elijah didn’t start out that way.
In the Bible, he was a fiery prophet,
defending Adonai
against other gods made of stone.
In a particular moment of exhaustion
he takes refuge in a cave
where the voice of the Eternal found him
and demanded to know why he was hiding there.
Elijah responded by sharing how miserable he was.
“I alone am left, and they are out to take my life.”

When Elijah was fighting
against the worshipers of Ba’al,
he had to prove that God could be accessed,
but not as a concrete physical presence.
God offered him a way to emerge from darkness and misery.

“And lo, GOD passed by.
There was a great and mighty wind,
splitting mountains and shattering rocks
by GOD’s power; but GOD was not in the wind.
After the wind—an earthquake;
but GOD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake—fire;
but GOD was not in the fire.
And after the fire
a soft murmuring sound —דַקָּֽה ק֖וֹל דְּמָמָ֥ה.”
(I Kings 19:11-12)

Those we have loved are not the mighty wind,
mountains, earthquakes or fire.
They whisper to us
like a soft murmuring sound– דַקָּֽה ק֖וֹל דְּמָמָ֥ה.
“I am with you.”  “I love you.”

Our Jewish rituals before and after death
lead us when we have forgotten
how to walk in the world without our loved ones.
Each step along the way
from death to burial
to shiva to sheloshim
to Yahrzeit to Yizkor
creates a path to connect us
to others who can bring comfort.
Yet even Judaism, in its thoughtful
and intentional strategy of soothing us
as we mourn
can’t be with us
as we lie alone in an empty bed,
sit beside an empty chair,
wait for the check in call that won’t come
or the text, email, or birthday card.
That physical presence is no longer.

The loneliness of grief is real.

As Elijah lamented, “I, alone, am left.”

We all may be atomized in our grief,
yet we are composites of those
who have shaped us
which makes them who we are.
They are with us as much as they are us.

An early Hasidic master taught
that we only know we have encountered the divine
when we look back and gain greater understanding
that God’s presence has been with us.

And so it is with those we have loved.
We look back and know they were with us.

As we faced challenges
As we faced triumphs
As we made our way through the day
And the night.

On this day of Yom Kippur,
in this moment of remembrance,
we, too, long to have the physical presence
of our beloved dear ones
and struggle to make a place for them
in our lives with us,
even though they are no longer physically here.

Might we consider
the way we understand
God’s presence in our lives
as a way to encounter the memory
of our loved ones?
We can no longer see or hold them
but we feel their presence.

Each of us, in the story of our humanity,
received the breath, the divine within us.
That breath that we breathe throughout our lives
as way too short or even into ripe old age
went out into the universe.
Some part of us is out there
in a different shape that we cannot see with our eyes,
but we can experience and sense in our deepest selves.

At a recent Yizkor service
I asked someone how long ago her beloved had died.
She paused, took a really long breath
and she said,  “yesterday.”
I knew in that moment
it wasn’t a literal description.
It was that the feeling of loss
is a part of every day,
along with the sadness and the emptiness,
the coldness of the dark cave and weight of grief.
That feeling is the דַקָּֽה ק֖וֹל דְּמָמָ֥ה Kol d’mama daka,
as a murmur or a whisper
that we carry with us throughout our lives.
It is what keeps their presence
forever present in our memories,
even if we might not realize it until we look back
and know that our beloved, our loved one
was right there with us .
And we remember them.

We are here
because our loved ones
have not disappeared.
They continue with us
and through us
lifting, inspiring, comforting,
and strengthening us
with a belief that they are with us into eternity.

May remembering be a sacred blessing of belief for us all.

Shabbat Shalom! שבת שלום

***
Please feel free to connect with me here. I would be honored to learn of your own reflections and response. I’m grateful to the many people who have already shared their thoughts with me in this way.

Let me know what you think. Connect with me here.

Rabbi Elaine Zecher