Sunday, October 01, 2006

Rabbi Jeremy Gordon: The Eulogy

There is perhaps one person who would know what to say at a time like this. And that would have been Ester.
Ester wouldn’t have felt paralysed, numbed, dumbed by the horror of this untimely death, or maybe she would have been. But she would have carried on.
Ester knew how to stand in difficult places.
She knew how to reach people who were in pain.
She could find the right words in impossible situations.
She could balance humour and seriousness.
She had the empathy, the gentleness, intelligence, the kindness and the bravery this eulogy deserves.

Before and again after we Jews perform Taharah, before and after we prepare a body for burial we say a mochal, we ask for forgiveness for our clumsiness, for any distress caused. It seems appropriate to say a mochal now also. Not only is it horrendous to lose a child in the lifetime of the mother. Not only is there great pain in the suddenness and the manner of the loss. But this is also an extraordinary life I attempt to eulogise today.

And I feel, Ester, without you here, clumsy and not at all up to the task at hand.

Ester Brachah bat moreinu harav tzvi Hirsch v’Elka
Ani mevakesh mehilah meitech im lo eseh kevodech.

Angela, words seem so hollow right now. This is, you are right, the wrong way, the wrong way in so many many ways. I have no answers. None of us do. All I can do is offer a presence and a prayer.

But let me tell some stories about Ester.

At the age of eight, Ester felt strongly that something was wrong.
She noticed, at the age of eight, that two of her friends, Shoshi and Tamar weren’t being treated like two separate people. People would start a conversation with one, finish it with the other and not seem to notice, or care.
She was, Judith, their mother told me, the first person to insist on treating Tamar and Shoshi as individuals, not just as twins.
At the age of eight, Ester decided that they would be friends and she also decided that they would be known as SET, Shoshi, Ester, Tamar.
They became honorary sisters. Closest of friends.
Tamar told me that Ester was the only person who could tell her from Shoshi over the telephone.

Ester listened more closely, saw more deeply than most of us.

People who are outraged at the failings of the world are many.
People who are prepared to do something about it are fewer.
People who find the right way to help make this of world a more just place are fewer still.
And people who do all that with grace, gentleness and kindness of spirit are far too rare to lose.
Ester was one of those people.
She will be missed terribly.

Ester felt a strong empathy with refugees.
It was, she said, ‘written all over our history’.
She volunteered with the Refugee Council, running a Youth Club in Brixton.
She was a visitor at an Immigration Detention Centre, near Heathrow, she had recently been appointed full-time volunteer co-ordinator at the Centre.
She was outraged, she was prepared to do something, she made a difference and she did it with tremendous gentleness.


Ester felt a need to support those who lived in poverty, in the Developing World.
She went out to Ghana with Tzedek, an organisation who engage in ‘Jewish Social Action for a Just World.’
With Natalie she set up a volunteer programme, learnt Twi, and then went back the following summer to lead a group of volunteers.
She was outraged, she was prepared to do something, she made a difference and she did it with tremendous gentleness.

The list goes on.
Ester’s way was a way of action.
She used her life to live out the things she thought most important.
It says a great deal about her that the thing she did for an easy, fun time away from the other tensions in her life was take part in the Tricycle Jewish & Muslim Youth Theatre Group, where she could give rein to her remarkable talents as an actor.
Ester was a terrific mimic, she could ‘do’ anyone. But without hostility, gently.

The list goes on, of course it does, but the list doesn’t capture Ester’s way.
Ester’s way had more to do with something emotional, empathetic, intimate.
She was highly intelligent, according to Robin she could easily have had a career in academia, but her real passion was connecting with people.
And particularly people who had been cast-off by society, the powerless, the ignored.
And she would meet them heart-to-heart.

She spoke well, she spoke beautifully, but it wasn’t about a showy turn of phrase or a dazzling put down, rather she knew how to use language as a vehicle for showing kindness and caring.

She brought the same passion, and the same open-heartedness to her Jewish life.
I knew her best as a baalat koreh and shlichat tzibbur an incredibly gifted Torah Reader and Leader of Prayers at the Minyan Hadash of New London Synagogue.
It wasn’t just that she had a good voice.
It wasn’t just that her grasp of Hebrew and the technical requirements of the liturgy were excellent, though that is all true.
It was that, when she prayed, you could feel her soul at work in the room.
I’m reminded of stories told of the great Chassidic Rebbes, that during their prayers they would ascend high above and shake at heavens and demand, of God and of the congregation that we would all do a little better, work a little harder, to bring justice and decency to the world.
Being led in prayer by Ester was a little like that.

She had an innate, deep rooted connection to her Jewish identity.
Not so much the rituals, but the emotions, the intimate feelings.
Ima she would say to Angela, ani lo shomeret Shabbat, ani zocheret Shabbat.
It’s an impossible sentence to translate – Mum, I’m not one to follow the legal requirements of Sabbath, I’m one to hold the Sabbath in my heart.
From most people a sentence like that would be a bit of a kop-out, but Ester had the integrity to make it meaningful. She walked the walk with even more conviction that she talked any kind of talk.
Angela told me that one Shabbat Ester was running late to get everything ready and Angela tapped at her watch, gently prompting, ‘Ester, the Sabbath Queen is waiting.’
And Ester responded, ‘But Ima, she’s a gracious and benevolent Queen, she knows I need to finish this first.’

She had that ability to take a situation and draw the tension from it, turn it into a conversation about love and things that are important in life.

There are many people here wearing purple, it was Ester’s favourite colour.
Jenny Joseph’s poem begins ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple… ‘I shall go out in my slippers in the rain And pick the flowers in other people's gardens.’
That was Ester too, the fearless purple-wearer.
Joseph’s poem ends on a different note.
‘But maybe I ought to practice a little now?So people who know me are not too shocked and surprisedWhen suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.’

‘When suddenly I am old’ will never happen, Ester will never turn old.
She’ll remain, in our hearts and minds forever as a bright burning soul, as a deeply committed social activist, a loving daughter and a dearly beloved friend.

The circle of people she touched spreads far and wide.
Today we all mourning Ester.
And there are mourners who have come from Virginia, from Ireland, from France, from Germany. We are all broken hearted.
And there are many hundreds of others whose lives were touched by Ester, far far more than those of you who are able to be here today.
There were, at one point yesterday, eight phones all on the go at Ester’s home, Angela’s home, all broken hearted, all bereft. All touched by Ester’s life.
Our thoughts today, Ryan, are also with you, at a time that must be so hard.
You are most close in my prayers.

Of course Ester had her darknesses too, secrets, half-secrets and open wounds.
And they weighted heavily on her, on Angela, on her friends.
But she bore those pains with tremendous dignity, never bowed, never cowed.
And so often she found ways to turn that pain into action, into dedicated attempts to make the world a better and fairer place.
And that takes an almost incomprehensible strength.
A strength we will all need in the weeks and months ahead.
A strength, Angela, we pledge ourselves to share with you.

So where now.
I want to offer a Rabbinic dictum on this most horrible of days.
There are two responses to the news that has come as such a shock to all of us, the news of a death in a situation such as this.
And I want to urge us all to respond in one way, and not the other.

One way to respond to news such as this is to begin to sort through the broken pieces of the lives that lie before us as if they could be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. We are tempted to speculate, pontificate, and ask the ‘why’ question. Of course on the back of the ‘why’ question come questions about responsibility guilt and blame. On the back of the ‘why’ question comes the ‘if only sentence.’ This is the first way we could respond.

The other possibility is to hold back from asking questions that have no answer, hold back from presuming knowledge of things known only to the unknowable and today, frankly, hidden God of this broken Universe.

We can’t help ourselves getting dragged down the first path, the path of investigation, blame and self-blame. We are conditioned that way, conditioned by a culture of TV dramas and 24 hour news-cycles. And even, let it be said, conditioned by parts of our own faith tradition.

But we must resist that sliding into a dead-end.
When faced with the loss of his child, Job spends speech after speech seeking answers, only, eventually, to come to the only possible conclusion – that the answers are beyond him.
As the answers today are beyond us all.
Hen kaloti ma ashiveka
Yadi samti lmo fi
I am tiny, what answers can I give to you.
I place my hand on my mouth.

We stand here, on the cusp of Yom HaDin – the day of judgement when we read the terrifying words from the prayerbook – who will live, who will die, who in peace and who in suffering.
But at the heart of that prayer is the admittance that we, humans, don’t know, can’t know.
Chasing after this kind of knowledge is a vain and hopeless chase.
To understand what happened these past days is not a human task.
And today we must accept what it is to be a human. Fragile and mortal.

To try and find answers where there are none is a kind of arrogance that has no place today.
Many of us will know the Rabbinic concept of lashon hara – dangerous talk, talk that suggests and blackens and wounds in ways we can’t begin to understand.
I want to suggest that there we should also consider a concept of machshavah hara – dangerous thought. When we feel the ‘why’ question come, we should let it go, not go chasing after it. Not today, not yet and maybe not ever.

There are problems also, with this desire to find out more, work out what and why and when and whom.
It blinds us from what we should really be doing. And we have so much to do.
Our real tasks today are two.
We are here to offer comfort to those who mourn and we offer that comfort to you, Angela, now and in the months and years ahead.
And we hope to share a little comfort amongst all of us here, all of us who are impoverished by Ester’s death.

And secondly we are here to take a lesson from Ester’s life, a lesson that we can live out in our own lives, for if we do that, Ester will live on always in our deeds and in our hearts.

Ester who made peace, shalom - salaam, ben adam lchavero – between one person and the next. Between different people, of different social worlds, of different faiths and creeds.
Ester who was a true rodef tzedek a pursuer of justice
Ester who loved the stranger, for we were all strangers once, in a strange land.
Ester who stood up for the almanah and the yitom – the unseen and the unheard sub-strata of contemporary British society.
Ester who loved and believed in the Biblical notion of kedoshim tihiyu ki kadosh ani – You shall be holy, for I, God am holy.
Ester who was zocheret Shabbat and sang with the voice of an angel and davenned with a force that could open the gates of heaven.

There are so many lessons we could take.
In twenty four years Ester lived a life of commitment and passion and leaves hundreds of lives changed – made better.
It is a legacy that would embarrass many of us who have lived far longer.
I’m embarrassed, embarrassed because of what I fritter away, embarrassed because of opportunities I let slip because I don’t care as much as Ester did.
This time, these days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur break in my our comfort zone.
And this death, most terribly breaks in on our comfort zone.
The idea is that this encounter with the possibility of our mortality lifts us, inspires us, bullies us, even, into living a life more full. The sadness is that for most of us we would rather curl up in front of the television.
But we must do better, because Ester did better.
kedoshim tihiyu ki kadosh ani – You shall be holy, for I, God am holy.

First we must offer comfort.
Second we must find a lesson and live that lesson ensuring that Ester lives on in our deeds, not only in our hearts and minds.

Tonight we will, in Ester’s language, be zochrim and zochrot Shabbat Teshuvah.
We would usually translate the term to mean ‘remembering the Sabbath of Penitence,’ but the literal meaning of Shabbat Teshuvah is a Sabbath of Return. It is a Sabbath to commit ourselves to pay obligations we owe to our fellow human beings and the world we all live in.
It is also a Sabbath to consider the values by which we live our lives before we too return, back to the dust from which we are taken.
We get to pick which interpretation we chose.
We even get the choice of whether to take this call seriously.

We just don’t get to pick the time when our end will come.
For Ester that time has come, far too early, far too horribly, but she leaves us with lessons and memories and blessings aplenty.

Ester Bracha bat moreinu harav tzvi Hirsch v’Elka
Tehi zichronah lvaruch
May your memory always be a blessing.