Yom Kippur Yizkor 5769

Rabbi Randy Mark w/David Hartuel Material from Rabbi Jack Reimer

The Yizkor service begins with the recitation of Biblical verses, “Lord, what are we humans, that You have regard for us, mere mortals, that you take account of us? We are like a breath, our days are like a fleeting shadow. Teach us to number our days, that we may attain a heart of wisdom.” Cognitively we understand that life is tenuous, but emotionally, we don’t like to face this reality. We live our lives with thoughtless, monotonous repetition. But every once in a while, something happens that upsets our apple cart and causes us to really focus on what is important.

Last spring my mother began to speak to me about a Carnegie Mellon professor named Randy Pausch and his “Last Lecture”. The story sounded interesting, but I didn’t give it too much thought; but then for Father’s Day, I received two copies of the book and I thought there might be something to this after all. This summer when Randy Pausch died there were responses everywhere and they were clearly heartfelt; it was in the news and all over the internet. I went online and read about him and then read his book and watched his lecture and realized that here was a special person who had used his “15 minutes of fame” do something extraordinary and he got people to refocus on what is important in life.

For those of you who have not yet been part of the Last Lecture phenomenon, the concept is to ask a professor what they would share if it was their last lecture. Prof. Pausch taught computer science and was invited to give a “last lecture”, ironically, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and so it truly was a last lecture. He entitled it, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. At the end of his life he reflected on what makes life worth living. He put together a PowerPoint slide show of pictures, events and favorite sayings from his life. He opened talking about his cancer and shared his first pithy saying, “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” Indeed, words to live by, spoken by a realist.

He shared with the audience of 400 and ultimately with the world his list of childhood dreams – six items – and how he managed to do most of them in his short life. He shared that he was a dreamer who looked for ways to make his dreams reality. One of his goals was to float in zero gravity. He found a way to do it and then learned that his plan wouldn’t work; so he looked for a way around what he called a “brick wall” he said that obstacles are brick walls put in our way to enable us to show how much we want something. He overcame his brick wall and floated in zero G.

Another of Randy Pausch’s goals was to play in the NFL something he did not manage as a player, but he shared the life lessons learned from football. One was the “head fake” – you move you head one way while intending to go the other way, faking out your opponent. But Randy Pausch used it as an educator; he’d teach his students one thing while his intent was to teach them something else more important. He said that is the point of football, you think you are learning to play the game, but in reality you are learning teamwork, sportsmanship and dealing with adversity; much more important lessons than the rules of football.

Randy Pausch teaches time management, you can go to www.TheLastLecture.com and watch it. Here are a few of his simple rules: Time must be explicitly managed. You can always change your plan, but only if you have one. Are you spending time on the right things? Develop a good filing system. Rethink the telephone. Delegate & Take a time out. “Time is all that you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that we live in two realms: space and time. In Bereshit/Genesis we read, that in six days God created the world and it was “good.” So when we create it is also good. However, on the seventh day God rested and that wasn’t just good, it was kadosh/holy. Heschel taught that the meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Its that time out that Pausch was talking about, we have an opportunity once a week to step away from work, creation, space; and try to focus on the holy, the kadosh, on time.

There are some scary statistics coming out about internet use. I read recently that there is a percentage of the population that claims that they’d choose their Blackberry over their spouse. There are people, perhaps some sitting in this room, that check their email just before going to sleep and then first thing in the morning and if they should happen to get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night – well, that is another opportunity to check emails. We are plugged in and logged on to our computers, our iPods and the vast array of electronic gadgets that we use daily; we need Shabbat, so that once a week, we can log off and unplug; so that we can spend time enjoying the people who are actually around us, time focusing on God, time on prayer, time on community.

To be a community, you need to work on your group skills. Here is Randy Pausch’s list: Meet people properly; find things you have in common; try for optimal meeting conditions; let everyone talk; check egos at the door; praise each other; phrase alternatives as questions & look for the best in everybody. Community is not easy, but it is worth it. We don’t do community well because we are usually focused on what we want and what we need that we miss what the other wants and needs. To communicate well means to listen carefully and we don’t do that very well either. We are so busy wanting to share what we have to say that it is not easy for most people to stop and listen.

Randy Pausch using his slides and then in his book in brief little chapters tells various stories about his life. He shares the value of tenacity, the importance of responsibility, but the chapter that stands out for me is the one on having fun. He says, “As I see it, there’s a decision we all have to make, and it seems perfectly captured by A. A. Milne. Each of us must decide: Am I a fun-loving Tigger or am I a sad-sack Eeyore? Pick a camp.” Life is a matter of perspective; we all know cup half-full and cup half-empty people. Yom Kippur is a very good to ask ourselves what kind of person do I want to be? Life isn’t always easy, but life can be fun, life should be fun. Professor Pausch wrote, “I’m dying and I’m having fun.” He chose life, in the words of the Torah “Biharta Bihayim”.

An important question is: How can we choose life, and why should we choose life, when life is sometimes so cruel and so harsh? How can we choose life, and why should we choose life, when life sometimes comes with such a high price tag attached to it? How can we choose life, and why should we choose life, at those times in our lives when everything inside us screams out: No way! Death is surely preferable to this kind of a life. This is the question—is it not---that you and I have wrestled with more than once in our lives. This is the question that I suspect that some of us who are sitting here today are wrestling with at this very moment.  And so I want to tell you the story of David Hatuel.

David Hatuel’s name is still known throughout Israel, but most of us in America have forgotten who he is, even though we knew his name, and knew his story a few years ago when it happened. So let me refresh your memory. David Hatuel was the principal of an elementary school in Ashkelon, and he lived in the religious community of Moshav Katif, in the Gaza Strip. He was married, and he had four small children.

The months that led up to the Israeli government’s decision to take the Jews out of Gaza was a controversial time in Israel. The Likud party scheduled a referendum on whether to disengage from Gaza or not and so the people of Moshav Katif decided that they would stand outside the polling booths, holding signs protesting against the withdrawal.

The night before the referendum, David Hatuel told his wife that he would go to the polling booth by bus, since he was already in Ashkelon, and that she should pick up the children at school, and go to the polling station with them, as soon as they got out of class. David’s wife, Tali, was nine months pregnant and she had an ultrasound scheduled for that day, also in Ashkelon, so it seemed like a perfect plan. She would pick up the kids, Hila, Hadar, Roni and Merav at their school, and take them with her to the doctor’s office, and then meet up with her husband at the polling booth.

Unfortunately, however, she and the children never got there. As Tali and the girls drove along the main Gaza thoroughfare, near Kissufim, terrorists opened fire on their car. Tali was instantly killed, and the car skidded to a sudden stop. Witnesses report that the terrorists then approached the car, opened the door, looked inside, saw the children sitting in the back, and then shot them, one at a time. This was not a bombing, where the person who throws the bomb has no idea who is in the car, and who he is killing. These terrorists went right up to the car, opened the door, looked inside, saw that there were four small children inside, the oldest was eleven years old, the youngest was three and shot them one by one.

David Hatuel was at a faculty meeting when it happened. Someone came in and said that there had been a terrorist attack near Kissufim, but they had no more details. He left the meeting at once, and tried to call his wife on her cell phone, but there was no answer. So he borrowed a car, and drove as fast as he could towards the scene. And when he got there, someone told him the news. In one brief moment, he had lost his wife and all four of his children. In one brief moment, his life had come crashing down around him.

“I couldn’t comprehend it at first,” David Hatuel says. “I kept asking: ‘What do you mean---EVERYONE? Surely somebody must have been saved.’ I couldn’t get my head around the fact that it was really ‘everyone’ that my entire family had been wiped out in one instant. It took me a while before my mind could register the enormity of the disaster.”

The whole state of Israel was shocked and stunned by this event. Very few Israelis, even today, can forget the sight of this man, standing and weeping as he tried to say the Kaddish, in front of five, freshly dug, graves, four small ones and one that was regular size. Thousands of people, government officials and Knesset members, religious and secular Jews, hawks and doves, people from Israel and people from abroad, came to pay their respects during the shivah, even though most of them couldn’t think of anything to say that was in any way adequate.

What would you do? What would I do? If God forbid, God forbid, something as horrible as this happened to us? What would we do if in one brief moment, in one fell swoop, we lost our entire family? Would we not be entitled to say: Why live? Why choose life, if this can happen? Would you blame David Hatuel or anyone else who went through what he did, if he said: to Hell with life? Who wants it? Who needs it?

“I felt like a tree all of whose branches and leaves had been cut off by an axe. All that remained of me was the trunk,” David Hatuel said. “And for the first two days of the Shivah, all I wanted to do was die, so that I could be with my family. All I wanted to do was die, because what sense does it make to live if life can be as cruel and as senseless as this?” During the shivah, David Hatuel excused himself one evening, went into the bathroom and cut his wrists. But somehow, someone noticed that he had not come back, and broke into the bathroom, and found him, and saved his life.

When he woke up in the hospital, he said to that man: “Who asked you to save me?” “Who gave you the right to interfere with my decision?”

And then, after the shivah ended, David Hatuel took some of his closest friends aside, and told them that he had decided to live, at least for a while longer. But he told them that he would need their help.

“I told them,” he said, that “I was willing to try life again, at least for a while longer, but only on condition that they would help me find the strength that I needed, and that they would never leave me.” He told them that he felt as if he was climbing up a slippery wall without a rope to hold on to and every few yards that he was sliding back down again.

There were a great many difficult and painful days: there were the birthdays of his children, and there was the anniversary of his wedding, and each one of these occasions sent him spinning back into depression. But he had set himself a goal, and he was determined to make it. He had told himself that if he still hurt this much at the end of a year that he would give up on life and he would quit. But until the end of the year, he said that he was going to keep on trying, and see what happened.

Today, four years later, David Hatuel is remarried, and he is the father of a one year old girl, whose name is Techiya, which means: redemption or reborn. Sometimes, when he wakes up at night to feed her, he says that he has to shake himself to realize who she is. “I have to stop myself and ask: ‘who am I preparing this bottle for?’” he says, for the pictures of his daughters who died: Hila, who was eleven, Hadar who was eight, Roni who was six and Meirav, who was three, are always in his mind.

When David Hatuel met Limor, his new wife, the first thing he said to her was: “I want to build a new home, but in no way do I want to erase the family that I once had. I am simply building a second floor on the foundation of the old building.” And he says that Limor understood that and she was very respectful and very accepting of what had happened before they met.

“Limor is very good to me,” he says. “Even though she never met Tali or the children, she knows everything about them. We talk about them openly, and don’t pretend to each other or to ourselves that they never existed. She sits with me when I look at their photographs in the family album. And what is nicest is that Tali’s mother and her sisters have welcomed Limor warmly, and they treat her as a member of the family.”

I will not say that David Hatuel has been healed, and that he is no longer in anguishing pain. He says that it is still sometimes very difficult for him to come to terms with what happened. Sometimes, he will be walking down the street, and he will see a schoolgirl from behind, with a bookbag on her back, and he will think that it is one of his girls. And then, he realizes that it isn’t, and he cries.

David Hatuel says, “I’m a believer, and so I say to myself: this is what happened, it was decided, and that’s it. I have lots of questions for God, and sometimes I have real anger in my heart towards Him, but I have managed to move on, and start a new family. I chose life after what happened, and I have stuck to that decision.”

How did he do it? How did someone who surely had every right and every reason to curse life and die decide to choose life instead?

Let me tell you David Hatuel’s three answers to this question, and then, let me ask if any of his answers contain any wisdom and any guidance for us. David Hatuel says that the first thing and perhaps the main thing that got him through this ordeal was the fact that he lived in a close-knit village like Moshav Kativ. “I don’t know if I would have gotten through this ordeal if it were not for the people of my village. They stuck by me. They kept in touch. They made sure that I had a place to go for Shabbat every single week. They held on to me, and they helped me get through this period of depression and pain.” “If I had lived in an apartment building in Tel Aviv,” he says, “I doubt if I would have made it. For the first six months after what happened, I was never alone. I had two escorts with me at all times. They made sure that I was taken care of on Shabbat and Yom Tov. They organized my schedule. They fought off the paparazzi who tried to interview me. They kept the politicians who wanted to use me for their own purposes away. It was their concern that gave me strength.”

That is the power of being part of a community. This is why, when the people of Gush Katif were taken away, the one request that they made to the government was that they wanted to stay together, wherever they were sent. And they were. Right now, they are living in trailers, somewhere in the Negev, but at least they are all together in one neighborhood and this is what gives them the strength to carry on and to adjust to their new situation.

The second thing that David Hatuel says gave him the ability to live was his decision to go back to work right after shiva. A lot of people told him it was too soon, that being around young people would be too painful, but he wanted to get back to his daily routine. And it turned out to be the right decision, at least for him. He says that “when I first returned to school, many of the kids came running up to me, saying that they had heard what happened, and that they had drawn a picture of my children for me. It was very hard. However, if I had just sat at home, and not gone back to my job, I think that it would have probably been even worse.”

The third thing that happened that enabled him to go on living was that he received help from the One Family Fund. The very same One Family Fund that Marty Radnor works for and for whom we did a fundraiser last year. The One Family Fund got David Hatuel through this ordeal and therefore, now that he has rebuilt his life, at least to some extent, do you know what he is doing? He works with the One Family Fund so now he can bring help and comfort and solace to others who are in pain, as they did for him.

I have a hunch that it will be precisely by means of helping others that David Hatuel will find help in dealing with his own pain and loss. Someone asked him: “How can you bear to be around people in grief after what happened to you? Doesn’t being around these people bring back painful memories of what happened to you and your family?”

And his answer is: “I don’t need other people’s grief to remind me of my grief. Tali and my girls are on my mind every single day. But when I am with these people, I really feel that I am giving some strength to them, and that gives me strength. I know that some of these people look at me and say: ‘if he can deal with his tsores and still stay strong, then maybe we can too.’ And that makes me feel good.”

One of the lessons that comes out of this story is the saving power of being part of a community. I feel sorry for those people, who live in these great big apartment houses, where no one knows anyone else, I really do. That is why being part of a synagogue community is so important. For this is what it means to be part of a synagogue: it means to be part of a caring community, a community that shares with you and cares about you in good times and in tough times. That is what kept David Hatuel going in his time of loss, and that is what has kept many of us going in our time of loss.

You have a loss and so you go to the daily minyan which is a fraternity of mourners. And when you first walk in, you have no idea what is going on. You don’t know when to stand and when to sit, and you don’t know what page they are on, and you don’t know how to keep up, because they go so fast. And somebody notices you, and comes over and sits with you and shows you the ropes. And soon you catch on, and after a while, you are the one who welcomes and guides the newcomer. The daily minyan is one of the most powerful support systems that any people has ever created. And we need it now, we need it now more than ever before because now most of us live in these big and impersonal developments, where no one knows anyone else, because I moved in yesterday, and you are moving out tomorrow. The minyan and the synagogue are for us what the people of Moshav Katif were for David Hatuel.

Another lesson that comes out of this story is the saving power of giving of yourself. David Hatuel could have withdrawn into himself, after his great loss. But instead, he chose to become involved in the lives of other people who are in pain. He chose to become involved in helping others who are going through what he went through and in the process of helping others; he is regaining his own desire to live as well.

Randy Pausch at the end of his presentation shared with the audience that there had been a head fake in his lecture, “It’s not about how to achieve your dreams. It’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.” There is a second head fake, but I’ll let you watch or read it for yourself.

And so, if there is anyone sitting here right now, whose heart is heavy, and whose portion has been painful during this past year, or if there is anyone sitting here right now, whose heart may become heavy, and whose portion may become painful in this new year, let me offer you the lives of David Hatuel and Randy Pausch and let me offer you my help, you can call on me. So that God willing, after long deliberation, after considering the pros and cons of living versus dying, you will chose life.