Rabbi Evan J. Krame
This week’s Torah portion is Tetzaveh: Exodus 27:20 — 30:10
What do you carry on your heart? I imagine the heart as a tipcart we push along a rutted road. Upon that barrow, the heart hauls a freight of emotions. Sometimes we hit a rut, the cart topples and the cargo spills everywhere. Then we are left to pick up the pieces of a broken heart. The challenge of living as caring people is to figure out the delivery system of our hearts, one that can both secure a tonnage of feeling and transform grief into love.
When life jolts us, the cart lurches and our feelings tumble out in a heap. Grief, love, anger, tenderness — all lie scattered in the road together. Yet what if the goal was not just to reload the cart and keep pushing, but to lift each piece, name it and fasten it securely over the heart? What if the heart’s burden could be worn not as unstable cargo, but as an ordered, deliberate remembrance?
The Torah describes such an image in the breastplate fashioned for Aaron, the high priest. On it were stones representing the 12 tribes. “Aaron shall carry the names of the children of Israel on the breastpiece of decision over his heart, when he enters the sanctuary, for remembrance before God at all times.”
I imagine that breastplate as exceedingly heavy, bearing the weight of the grief of all who were enslaved. The children of Israel were not only the 600,000 who escaped slavery, but also the bones of their ancestors and even the souls of their descendants still to come.
Some commentators understood that the breastplate served to remind God of these myriad lives. Aaron stood as a representative of generations past, present and future. With that adornment, he carted the grief of his people’s past, the demands of their present and the unspoken challenges of their future. His heart did not simply drag a load; it bore an intentional arrangement of names, each one engraved and lovingly remembered.
As a mourner, I am carrying grief on my heart. My mourning began as a tipped cart — memories and emotions spilling in every direction. Slowly, through prayer and the names I recite, those scattered pieces have become something closer to a breastplate: specific lives, engraved on my heart, that I carry into the sanctuary each morning. Yet, upright in morning prayer, tefillin on my head and arm, I do not rise alone. I am a representative, like Aaron, reminding God of the legacy in which I stand.
In the lineage of the mothers, my great-grandmother, born Henya Ocher, a widow, enabled her children to secure lives in the United States. My grandmother, born Sarah Kassofsky, raised a family through difficult times. My mother, born Marilyn Goldberg, lived a life of devotion to extended family. Each, in her own way, wore a breastplate that said, “To God, we are taking care of Your people here.” The names of mothers and grandmothers, children and grandchildren, were ornamented on their hearts, even if not fashioned into metal and gem-laden decoration.
When we stand alone, for ourselves, we deny the holiness in this world. When we carry others within and upon our hearts, we become God’s emissaries. Therein lies the deep meaning of saying the mourner’s kaddish, a prayer that seemingly has nothing to do with loss or the departed.
Each generation rises to recite the kaddish not only to praise God, but also as the link between our ancestors and future generations. The kaddish becomes the verbal breastplate we wear daily as we enter the sanctuary of our relationship with the Divine.
When we remember our loved ones in praise of God, we can transform our mourning from a jolting, unstable tipcart into a delivery system for love.
Rabbi Evan J. Krame is the co-founder of the Jewish Studio, former president of the Washington Board of Rabbis, and an attorney practicing estates and trusts law.
