Yom Kippur Yizkor 5787

I want to tell you about two friends, Matt and Alex. A few winters back, they hiked into the Colorado backcountry for a ski trip. Matt had just come through a year of cancer treatment, and this trip was his way of telling the universe: you didn’t get me. I’m still here.

They didn’t get far before the weather turned. Heavy snow, hard wind, a steep climb that should have taken hours stretching into something much longer. By nightfall they were digging a snow pit with their bare hands, just to survive until morning.

I think about that image a lot. Two people, scraping at snow, building something small enough to hold them both, just to make it through the dark.

That is, in a way, what we are doing right now. Yizkor is our snow pit. 

We come together, close enough to keep each other warm, because the dark is real and we cannot survive it alone.

The next morning, Matt and Alex kept climbing. And then Alex set off an avalanche under his own feet. He got thrown, he caught himself on a tree, and when he looked up, Matt was alive but in serious trouble. His body was done. He sat down in the snow and could not go another step.

Alex made the hardest decision of his life. He left his friend there, alone in the cold, and went for help.

We don’t often talk about this part of love and friendship, the part where staying isn’t possible and leaving feels like betrayal even when it’s the only way to save ourselves or someone else. 

Alex carried that weight for years. Not anger at Matt. 

Guilt at himself. Did I do enough? Could I have stayed? Was there another way?

If you are sitting here today holding grief for someone you loved, you may know that particular ache. Not just missing them. Wondering if you did enough. Wondering if there was another way. 

Yizkor asks us to sit with that honestly, not to punish ourselves with it, but to let it be seen.

Matt, the cancer survivor, waited six hours alone in the snow, hypothermic, fighting the urge to eat snow to quench his thirst, while one part of his mind told him not to and another part begged him to. 

He said later he wasn’t thinking about dying. He was thinking about whether Alex was okay.

That’s something, isn’t it. In his own most desperate hour, Matt’s mind went outward, toward the person he loved, not inward toward his own survival. 

Maybe that’s what real love does. It doesn’t disappear under pressure. It becomes the thing you hold onto to zoom out from your challenges.

A rescue team found Matt. 

He lived, though it cost him. 

Severe frostbite, a burn unit, nerve damage that never fully healed. And for years afterward, neither Matt or Alex talked about what happened on that mountain. They visited, they stayed close, but they never said out loud what each of them had been carrying, what the near death experience had been like for them individually.

It wasn’t until Matt finally said it outloud: 

That was 100% my fault. You did everything right. You saved my life.

And Alex finally heard what he’d needed to hear for years. Forgiveness. He released some of his guilt.

How many of us are still waiting to say something to someone we’ve lost? How many conversations did we postpone, certain there would be more time? 

Yizkor exists because death doesn’t wait for us to finish our sentences. It interrupts us mid-thought, mid-argument, mid-apology, mid I love you. And we are left holding the rest of the conversation by ourselves.

This is why we gather four times a year to remember. Not because Judaism believes grief has a schedule, but because it knows we need permission to stop and feel the weight of what we’re carrying. 

Today, in this room, you have that permission.

Maybe you’re remembering a parent who you didn’t get to thank the way you wanted to. 

Maybe a friend who left this world before you could tell them what their friendship meant. 

Maybe someone who, like Alex, left you alone in a hard moment, and you’ve never said out loud how that felt, or how you forgave them anyway. 

Maybe it’s someone, like Matt, who you blame yourself for not being able to save, even though you did everything you could.

Bring all of it here today. This is the place for it.

Matt still calls Alex every year on the anniversary of that day, just to thank him. Two old friends, marking the day one of them almost died, by saying out loud what they couldn’t say for years. 

That phone call is its own kind of Yizkor. A ritual of memory and gratitude, repeated faithfully between two people who can only share it with each other, 

So as we rise for Yizkor, I want you to think of your own avalanche. 

The people who dug a shelter with you in the hardest nights of your life. The people you couldn’t save, no matter how hard you tried. 

The people who carried you when you couldn’t carry yourself.

Say what needs to be said. 

Out loud, in your heart, in the quiet of this prayer. 

I believe they are listening, even now. 

And in remembering them, by saying their names out loud, we keep them close, we remember their presence and we remember that we don’t have to carry loss alone.