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Yom Kippur Yizkor 5784, Oct 12, 2024
This is Yizkor. It is a time to reflect and to re-member; to experience memory in the body; to re-inhabit lived experience, to feel the presence of our deceased loved ones sitting with us, holding us as we hold them.
Each of us has someone. Each of us carries at least one name. Each of us has a tale, a story of who that special person was and hopefully, an anecdote or two to share. For each of them we say, “zichronam livracha,” may their memory be for blessing. And if you don’t have some one, your fellow travelers do. Your presence gives them strength. In time, they will do the same for you.
For certain invididuals we can say more than just Zichronam Livracha, May their memory be for blessing. For certain people we can say, “Zecher Tzaddik L’ivracha, may the memory of the tzaddik, of the righteous be l’ivracha, for blessing.”
Here, in this sacred space of memory, I want to focus on tzadekket, on one righteous person. Her name: Vivian Silver. I share her story because, davka, she was murdered by the people she had spent much of her life reaching towards, helping, empowering.
Her death was a tragedy. It has also given meaning to many, including her son Yonatan.
Vivian grew up in an observant Jewish home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In the 1970s she moved to New York where she became a feminist activist. In 1974, at the age of 25 she moved to Israel and helped found Kibbutz Gezer as part of the Habonim Dror youth movement.
In 1990, Vivian, her husband Lewis and sons Yonatan and Chen moved to Kibbutz Be’eri, a name that is now all too familiar. There, she became better acquainted with the local Bedouin community, with Gazans and their needs. This one-of-a-kind visionary, this hands-on driving force, this lighthouse of a human being quickly realized that if more Jews could understand the distress of their Arab neighbors, the next generation would be more willing to strive for peace.
In 2000, Vivian helped create the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation,and, with her Bedouin colleague Amal Elsana Alh’jooj became its co-executive director. The center grew to be one of the largest nonprofit organizations in Israel devoted to equal rights. It created jobs in impoverished Arab communities and brought Arab and Jewish young people together to volunteer.
As a mother, Vivan taught her sons Yonatan and Chen how to nurture relationships, reminding them to text “mazel tov” to old friends getting married and to keep track of birthdays. While she nudged them to call each other more often, her politics formed the backdrop of family life. Chen remembers riding on his father’s shoulders at the peace rally where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.
The boys went with Vivian to visit friends in Gaza, with its densely packed streets, the sights of meat spinning on sticks and the smell of the hookah wafting in the air. Rabin’s assasination may have dimmed the diplomatic prospects for peace but not for Vivian. She was a person who would never surrender. Not to hatred. Not to despair. Not to supremacism. Never to darkness.
As he got older, Yonatan felt that his mother was becoming too caught up in the emotions of her job. When she met with Arab families whose homes had been demolished by the Israeli government, Vivian’s face couldn’t conceal her anguish. “It can’t be this way, it can’t be this way,” a colleague remembered her repeating through her tears. “She identified very easily with people,” Yonatan said. “I would scold her a lot of times, that other people’s pain isn’t hers… And, that if you feel another person’s pain the same way they feel it, then you can’t help them.” She replied that he needed more empathy.
In the summer of 2014, Israel went to war in Operation Protective Edge, a seven-week battle in Gaza. When the fighting ended, Vivian told Yonatan and Chen that she was working again, this time to start a movement called Women Wage Peace, because, as she said, women understood how to compromise.
At the time of Vivian’s death, Women Wage Peace had over 50,000 members. This silver haired grandmother with an infectious laugh and a great smile was continuing to march for peace and to drive Gazan children to the hospital herself despite the constant threats. As she said in a 2022 interview, “I am a conditional Zionist. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to have a state as long as we give the same right to the Palestinain people. All that those people [in Gaza and the West Bank] want, is to live in dignity and to be recognized as a national people… This could be such a haven for both of our people. We have human resources here that are incredible.”
In a piece about Vivian’s son Yonatan that ran in last Sunday’s New York Times Magainze and how he has turned his grief into action, these words caught my eye. “There are borders that crop up in the landscape of a person’s life. On one side is the country of before, and on the other is the land of what comes after, rockier and unmapped.”
Perhaps, Yonatan thought, his grief about his mother’s death could be expressed only through political action, by leaning into what is now called the sixth stage of grief: meaning making. After all, how could Vivian’s memory be separated from the stances she took?
How could he mourn her without continuing her activism? Like others who lost family members on October 7th, Yonatan decided that grieving his mother would mean remaking his life. He quit his job as a social worker to become a full time peace activist. He is dedicating his life to continuing his mother’s work. He says that taking on this work has been a balm. “When I’m active, I maintain hope…. If I sit at home, it seems less plausible.” He understands why Vivian clung to her optimism all those years: It’s better than any alternative.
At Vivan’s funeral, the some 1,500 mourners gathered on the lawn at Kbbutz Gezer: Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, urbanites and kibbutznikim. It was a testimony to Vivian’s life and work, speaking a shared language of long hugs and clear respect. Avrum Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset and a founder of a new Jewish-Arab political alliance/party called All Its Citizens, was there. He was scanning the diversity and the cohesion of the crowd, nodding at what it could mean, and what it already meant. “Vivianism,” he said.
Yizkor is a time of memory but it can be more than just a trip down memory lane. It can serve as a moment for transformation. The only way to get there, as David Kessler writes in his book, is by finding meaning. “Ultimately,” he writes, “meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you’re moving forward with your life.” It doesn’t mean you’ll stop missing the one you loved, but it does mean that you will experience a heightened awareness of how precious life is. … In that way we do the best honor to those whose deaths we grieve.… Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen. (p. 16)
Of course, there are those who say they don’t want to find meaning in their loss. To find meaning in it would be to sugarcoat it and they don’t want to do that. They just want to sit in the pain, to carry it around like a millstone. I think they are afraid that if they let go of the pain, they think they will lose the connection to their loved one but they won’t. The pain is theirs and no one can take it away. But if they can find a way to release the pain through meaning, they will still have a deep connection to their loved one —through love itself.
Just like a broken bone that becomes stronger as it heals, so does love, as the Psalmist declares, “love is stronger than death.”
This is precisely what has happened in just a year between Yonatan and his mom. It is happening all over Israel. It can happen here.
One year ago, on October 7th, 2023, Yonatan woke up in Tel Aviv to the sound of sirens. Opening WhatsApp, he learned that hundreds of Hamas militants had crossed the border. Many of them had surged into his mother’s kibbutz. Vivian, that morning, was utterly herself. Hiding in her safe room, as fighters came down her street, she cracked god-awful jokes in text messages to Yonatan. “Say something,” he wrote. “Something,” she replied. “I’m trying to keep my sense of humor.”
From her safe room, Vivian did a radio interview with the public broadcaster Galei Zahal, insisting the attack showed the urgent need for a peace deal. Afterward, on the phone with Yonatan, she was frustrated, recounting how the interviewer had dismissed her. In the background, he could hear gunfire and militants shouting. It sounded like his petite, 74-year-old mother was standing on a battlefield.
“Do you want to continue speaking, or should we say goodbye?”
“Let’s say goodbye,” Vivian told him.
When she texted Yonathan that men were inside the house, she wrote: “I’m afraid to breathe.”
“I’m with you,” Yonatan wrote.
“I feel you,” Vivian replied.
Vivan, we still feel you. And we will work to see that your memory is truly a blessing just as we work to ensure that the memory of all those we loved is for blessing. Zecher Tzadeket Livracha - may the memory of this righteous one be for blessing. And may we all be inspired to not accept the world as it is but to strive to create the world as we want it to be. In a word, “Vivianism.”
As we sit here in silent reflection - and I invite you to come place the stone you hold on the tables here at the foot of the bima - spend a few moments asking yourself, “who inspired me to lead a life of meaning?” And then ask, “who looks up to me?”
As we remember…
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