YK Yizkor  The Red Dress

There’s a story that Cheryl Strayed tells about her mother that has stayed with me, and I believe it speaks to something profound about love, hope, and the mysterious ways our departed continue to guide us.

Cheryl was home for the summer after her freshman year of college, wandering through a yard sale with her mother in rural Minnesota. The offerings were so uninteresting that the homeowner didn’t even bother coming outside, just watched and waved from the window. As they were about to leave, something caught Cheryl’s eye – a red velvet dress in a toddler’s size.

“You want that dress?” her mother asked, glancing up nonchalantly.

“Why would I?” Cheryl snapped, more perturbed with herself than her mother.

“For someday,” said her mother.

“But I’m not even going to have kids,” Cheryl argued.

“You can put it in a box,” her mother replied. “Then you’ll have it, no matter what you do.”

“I don’t have a dollar,” Cheryl said with finality.

“I do,” her mother said, and reached for the dress.

That red velvet dress traveled with Cheryl through college, through her twenties and thirties, packed away in a trunk that followed her from apartment to apartment, a small prophecy wrapped in tissue paper. Years later, when her daughter was born – this woman who had declared she would never have children – Cheryl unpacked that dress and put it on her daughter for her second Christmas.

She described the moment as being “like being slapped and kissed at the same time.” Her mother had been dead for a decade. And against all odds, she, the rebellious, anti-child woman, was a mother.

This story moves me because it captures something essential about the nature of love and memory, something that resonates deeply with our Jewish understanding of how the generations are bound together across time.

Our tradition teaches us “Zachor” – remember. But Jewish memory is not passive. It’s not simply the act of looking backward with nostalgia. Jewish memory is active, creative, transformative. When we remember, we are not just honoring the past – we are allowing the past to shape the future, to prepare us for moments we cannot yet imagine.

Cheryl’s mother, insisting on that dress despite her daughter’s protests, was practicing a kind of holy faith. She saw beyond her daughter’s certainty, beyond the present moment’s declarations. “For someday,” she said – two words that contain the entire mystery of parental love. How many of our own parents and grandparents did something similar? How many times did they plant seeds they would never see fully bloom, make preparations for our joy before we even knew we needed them?

I think of the grandmother who saved her wedding china for “special occasions” that turned out to be her grandchildren’s first Shabbat dinners in their own homes. The father who taught his daughter to change a tire, not because she needed to know it then, but because he somehow knew she would need that confidence decades later on a dark highway. The parent who insisted on Hebrew school when their child protested, knowing that one day those prayers would comfort them in their grief or bring them joy at their own child’s bar mitzvah.

This is the profound mystery of how love works across generations. Our beloved dead prepared for our lives in ways we are only beginning to understand now that they are gone.

In our tradition, four times a year we observe Yizkor, the memorial service where we speak the names of our departed aloud. “Yizkor Elohim et nishmat…” – “May God remember the soul of…” And as we speak their names, something remarkable happens. The sanctuary fills not just with our voices, but with their presence. The boundary between past and present becomes thin, permeable.

When we say their names, we are not just asking God to remember them. We are remembering them ourselves, and in that act of remembering, they live again. The wisdom they planted in us, the love they invested in our futures, the dresses they bought for children not yet born – all of it comes alive in that moment of sacred remembrance.

But Yizkor asks more of us than just speaking names. It asks us to become the bridge between their love and the future they will never see. We become the ones who carry forward their teachings, their values, their dreams for the world. We become the ones who, like Cheryl’s mother, prepare for futures we cannot yet imagine.

The Hebrew word for memory, “zikaron,” shares a root with the word “zachar,” which means male. But this is not about gender – it’s about generation, about the power to create new life, new possibilities. When we remember our departed, we give birth to their continued presence in the world. We become pregnant with their wisdom.

Today, as we gather in memory of those we have loved and lost, I want us to think about the red velvet dresses they bought for us when we insisted we didn’t need them. What did they see in us that we couldn’t yet see in ourselves? What faith did they hold when our own faith wavered?

Perhaps it was the way your father always insisted on truth-telling, even when it was uncomfortable, and now you find yourself speaking up for justice in ways that would make him proud. Perhaps it was your mother’s fierce loyalty to family, and now you discover yourself being the one who gathers everyone for holidays, who keeps the connections strong. Perhaps it was your grandmother’s quiet faith, and now, in your darkest moments, you find prayers on your lips that she taught you decades ago.

The red velvet dress that traveled in Cheryl’s trunk is a metaphor for all the ways our beloved dead prepared us for futures we couldn’t imagine. They saw us before we saw ourselves. They believed in versions of us that we hadn’t yet become. Even when we argued, even when we declared our certainty about who we would never be, they quietly reached into their pockets and said, “I do” – I have faith, I have hope, I have a dollar for your someday.

And now it is our turn. Now we are the ones who must reach for the red velvet dresses at yard sales, who must say “for someday” when our children or grandchildren protest. We carry their memory forward not by living in the past, but by practicing their kind of faith – the faith that sees beyond present certainties to future possibilities.

When we say their names in Yizkor, we are doing more than grieving. We are promising. We are saying: “Your faith was not misplaced. Your someday came to pass. The red velvet dresses you bought for us fit perfectly, and now we are learning to see the somedays that others cannot yet imagine.”

In their memory, may we live with their wisdom. In their honor, may we love with their generosity. And in their name, may we prepare the way for futures we cannot yet imagine, trusting that love, like memory, transcends the boundaries of time.

Zichronam livracha – May their memory be for a blessing. May their memory be our blessing to the world.

Amen