Rabbi Miriam's Yom Kippur sermon - delivered Saturday 12h October 2024
This week I watched an extraordinary documentary, called “Living Every Second; the Kris Hallenga Story”.
Kris Hallenga, a vivacious, gorgeous young woman with great style, and a zest for life, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, at the age of 23. Her doctor originally dismissed the tumour on her breast, leading to a late diagnosis. As a result, she had stage four breast cancer. The cancer spread to her liver and bones, and a lesion on her brain required full brain radiotherapy. Kris lived for 15 years after her diagnosis, passing away on May 4th this year.
The documentary opens at Kris’ fun-eral (not funeral), the party she designed to celebrate her life as her options for treatment narrowed, because when she thought about her funeral she decided she wanted to be there. The fun-eral takes place in a repurposed glammed up Cathedral. There’s a silent disco, speeches and drinks are flowing. Dawn French herself gives a spoof introduction in character as the Vicar of Dibley. And Kris, whose hairless scalp is painted in the most gorgeous silver sparkly swirly design, tells the camera man at the end that the party, because this was a party, was “on point” - just what she hoped for.
This story is moving and curiously uplifting enough on its own, but what is truly exceptional is that within her 15 years of life with cancer, Kris became turbo fueled with the drive to act, to do something with her diagnosis to help others not be in the same position as her - diagnosed too late to give her a long term future. So Kris became an activist for raising awareness about the disease among young people and founded the charity CoppaFeel to encourage women to check themselves regularly and see a doctor early with any concerns. CoppaFeel visited festivals, schools and concerts, projected messaging on the Houses of Parliament, successfully lobbied for cancer awareness to be on the school curriculum, and managed to become a charity which could run without Kris herself at the helm. For those who heard my sermon last night, Kris is an incredible example of living out hope as an active verb.
Kris recorded much of her journey herself, on her phone, and over the years, invited camera crews to chronicle her life. In one session, she dictates a letter to her 23 year old self - what she would want herself, at the beginning of her cancer journey, to know.
Dear 23 year old Kris - she writes:
“In the darkest of moments, I want you to remember one thing. Life will go on in the most spectacular of ways.
It won’t be long before you become someone with a purpose… you will rope countless friends and then hundreds of strangers to your committee. You will get cancer on the school curriculum.
You will experience pain. So much pain.
You won’t get married. You will accept death.
You were not offered cancer but you were offered an opportunity to learn so much from having it.
It means you can accept it and the life you’ve shaped around it.
In doing so, you’ve accepted that life is fleeting.
You accept that cancer is going to kill you.
In accepting your illness, you start to let go of so much and just be.
In accepting your fate, you give yourself space to live.”
Kris’ words speak so perfectly to Yom Kippur, particularly this moment as we approach Yizkor.
“You will accept death. In accepting your fate, you give yourself space to live.”
Jews have a seemingly strange way of celebrating our new year. The Western world, as one comedian observed, starts the new year with drinking and dancing with wild abandon, then spends the next morning regretting their choices and contemplating mortality. For Jews, it’s the other way around. On Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, we regret our choices and contemplate mortality, then a little later we do the drinking, dancing and wild abandon thing (that’s Simchat Torah) .
Why is our New Year so focused on death? Why do we wonder, in Unetaneh Tokef, which we say on RH and YK, “who will live and who will die” in the coming year? Rabbi Alan Lew even says that Yom Kippur is about rehearsing our own death - not eating or drinking and wearing white, like a shroud. Why? Why do we say Yizkor on Yom Kippur, remembering the souls we have lost?
And death is a deeply unfashionable thing to talk about. We live in a grief and death-phobic society, even living in this time of violence, when so many precious souls have been taken from the world. We hardly ever talk about death. Freud believed that death was our greatest fear.
The Professor of psychology Dr David DeSteno suggests that there is a good reason for our focus on death at this time of year:
“Contemplating death helps people make decisions about their future that bring them more happiness”
he says.
Furthermore, he says, studies show that older people are happier.
He explains that:
“happiness starts decreasing in one’s 20s, hits its nadir around age 50 and then slowly rises through one’s 70s and 80s, until and unless significant health issues set in."
Why the turnaround at 50? That’s when people typically start to feel their mortality. Bones and joints begin to creak. Skin starts to sag. And visits to the doctor become more frequent and pressing. Death, hopefully, is still a good way off, but it’s visible on the horizon.
You might think this morbid prospect would further decrease contentment, but it ends up having the opposite effect. Why? Because it forces us to focus on the things in life that actually bring us more happiness. Research by the Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has shown that as we age, we move from caring most about our careers, status and material possessions to caring most about connecting with those we love, finding meaning in life and performing service to others.”
And this, I believe, is the effect that Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur have. Far from being morbid times, they’re times when we embrace life, we celebrate with family. And perhaps that’s because we’re not just at an end point of the year gone, we’re at a beginning point of the year coming. So we review the year past and plan for the year ahead. These days make us more resilient, give us clearer priorities, and help us step into a fuller life.
You might well say that this Yom Kippur is different. There has been such an inconceivably huge amount of death this past year. The biographies of people lost on October 7th that we’re going to hand around for Yizkor - and collating them was easily the toughest part of my Yom Kippur preparation - and their sheer quantity, and the horrific circumstances of their deaths… how can this ever, ever have a positive spin? And to this I am silent. There is no positive spin.
To this - Yizkor - may Hashem remember these souls. May we remember them. But if, by our remembrance, we are dragged down into a low and nihilistic place - that does their remembrance no service. What we can do to honour their memories is live our lives more fully and passionately than before.
And so, without a shred of positive spin on the unfathomable loss of the past year, I think we can say in Rabbi Sharon Brous’s words, that an
“ever present awareness of loss is the foundation of a strong heart”.
We honour loss, by living.
If anyone can confirm this to be true, it was the remarkable Kris Hallenga. In her own words in the documentary:
“You don’t need to be afraid of drying. But, you need to be afraid that you’re not living.”
“You will accept death," she tells her younger self. “In accepting your fate, you give yourself space to live.”
And so I hope that a sermon focusing on death, just before Yizkor, can actually be an uplifting thing. Because we honour loss, by living.
Yizkor introduction
For today’s Yizkor service, I ask that everyone stay in the room, as is our community’s tradition and there is a prayer in our Yizkor booklets to be said by people with one or two living parents. But sadly also because, particularly this year, there are so many to remember. For those who don’t have a relative to remember - or even for those who do, there are biographies of people lost on October 7th. Please pick one up, and also please circulate the Yizkor books.
We’re going to read the opening passages together in English. Then have 5 full minutes of quiet time to read personal Yizkor, poems and reflections, then we’ll come back together for the communal Kel Malei Rachamim, including for victims of October 7th.
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