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September 13, 2002/Tishri 7 5762, Vol. 55, No. 3
What's in a name?
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
My Hebrew name is Chaya Sarah.
I'm named after my paternal grandfather, Chaim, who died a year before my mother and father married, five years before I was born.
I never knew my grandfather, yet I carry his name, and so does my mother, as Devorah bas Chaim. That's how her name will be listed in the memorial book at our synagogue this year.
It's the first year that we've decided to list our namesakes in the tribute book. That was something our parents and grandparents did. That and light yahrzeit candles and go to yizkor services. We were the "children," absolved of responsibility, shooed out of the sanctuary lest we remain and bring misfortune on ourselves or our families.
And that, too, we will do this year, shooing out our own kids and going to yizkor, I saying kaddish for my mother, my husband saying kaddish for his dad.
And while the rituals are painful reminders of loss, they are also poignant reminders of lives well-lived, memories that become part of who we are, who we will be.
Memory and identity, intrinsically linked.
It is not mere coincidence that on Yom Kippur we remember the dead while asking for another year of life for ourselves. Recalling the dead at yizkor is an act of piety and respect, Maurice Lamm writes in his seminal book, "The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning." But it also implies an obligation for the living to honor that memory - to bless it - through our own acts.
That imperative is ever more affecting this year as we confronted the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11, midpoint during the Days of Awe. The observance raised compelling questions: How to memorialize the dead and how to sacralize the space where so many perished?
Commemoration is both appropriate and necessary; creating a national site for such memorializing, too, is fitting.
But what will be built, or not, neither obscures nor diminishes the true work of memory.
And that will be done over and over in the circles of families and friends who are now less a precious loved one, less a special smile, less an infectious laugh, less a kind word, less a soft touch.
This is what was lost and this is what must be invoked.
The New York Times ran a continuous series of stories about the victims throughout the past year. Portraits of Grief, it called the page.
And it was.
From the very first day I pored over those pages, immersing myself in the stories of everyday lives, the immensity of the tragedy washed over me. It was the very normalcy of the lives lived and remembered, the very ordinariness of the faces and names staring at me from the newspaper page that moved me to tears.
And so it is that at this time of the year, we remember those who are no longer with us. We remember their faces, their acts of kindness and compassion, and the responsibility we have to honor what they aspired to leave behind.
Shem tov. A good name.
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