March 1, 2009
 It will be one year since my father died this Wednesday. Last year at this time I was sitting by his bed, holding his hand and watching him. This past year has been one of great pain but also great growth. I have come to appreciate all that I have and have become because of this experience. My love for my wife and children has grown as has the respect and love I feel for my mother and brothers. We all learn from tough times and all of these people have helped me immensely. So has the community of Beth Or - my friends colleagues and congregants who supported me and held me up. And to the children - your children - whose prayers and smiles, hugs and joy kept me going, a large and well deserved thanks. I offer this meditation and this prayer as I enter the end of the traditional mourning cycle and enter my next year without my dad. Much love and thanks.
Be well,
Rabbi David Burstein
A Meditation Before Saying Kaddish
At each moment of our lives we encounter gates behind which beckons the unknown. We have little choice but to enter, and, as we do, the gate swings shut behind us. We can never go back. The known, the comfortable, the safe, all these are in the past; only the unknown, the dangerous, the mysterious and terrifying lay ahead. Moving on makes us human; doing so lightly and at peace makes us divine.
But, eventually, we come to the final gate, the final closing. The trail ends, leaving behind only memories of steps taken, leaps tried, grace achieved and shared. How do we mark this final gate? With tears and stories, with memories and love, with food and friends.
And with silence. Silence is the heart of death, and silence alone can do it justice. But silence does not mean passivity, and our tradition speaks of four virtues which form the core of silence.
The first is hearing: Hearing the inner voice of our pain and love; rejoicing that nothing, not even the grave, can rob us of that supreme human emotion.
The second is memory: Reclaiming the past by refusing to forget the joys once held. He or she who once lived among us now lives within us, and there our loved one cannot die.
The third is action: We mush honor our dead by continuing to live ourselves. Their memory is quickened only in the fullness of our own lives, our own futures: our ongoing struggles to make sense out of an often senseless world.
The fourth is wisdom: Every life is a teaching, every person a guide to truth. We must allow the wisdom that was our loved one to become a part of ourselves, that memory might lead us to an even greater wisdom of our own.
Hearing, memory, action, wisdom… May each of these find a place in our silence, our grief, and our moving out again into the world where yet another gate beckons wide.
-- adapted from Rabbi Rami Shapiro
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