Memorial Day Relfections

I type this on Memorial Day. The rain has ceased, spring may have arrived at last, but not for them, not for America’s fallen. Some of the wars they fought kept us free, others were of no discernable purpose, either then or now, but yet they are all equally dead, the brave ones and those who cowered in fear, the enlisted men and the officers, the Jew the Christian the Hindu and the atheist. In schul this morning we paid tribute to them by reading David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan (“Oh how the mighty have fallen”) and from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (“that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”) As we did so I thought of another biblical lament, also ascribed to King David. His son Absalom, in revolt against his father, had been killed. When the news was brought to the king, I imagine he tore his clothes and cried out what all parents must feel, even if they do not know the words—“My son Absalom! O my son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you! O Absalom, my son, my son!” But it did not bring Absalom back. The war dead, all of them our sons, are gone. We concluded the service, before the final mourner’s kaddish, by singing the first verse of America the Beautiful “O beautiful, for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.” Afterwards it wasn’t just us mourners who remained standing for kaddish, but all of that small congregation.

It’s an historical oddity that both Israel and the United States commemorate their war dead in the spring, in the time of new life. In Israel, I’m told, there is no one who does not know a fallen soldier, few who do not have a brother or a son or a father or a cousin or a friend who have paid the ultimate price for keeping Israel alive. There as here some of the wars were of necessity, others could have been avoided, but the dead are equally dead, the survivors weep, the parents, widows, and orphans wonder might have been.

The First World War was a conflict that produced poets. John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields which begins as a eulogy but ends with an appeal to continue the struggle:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

From the other perspective there is Seigfried Sassoon’s Memorial Tablet:

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west ...
What greater glory could a man desire?

Shavuot approaches, the end of the Passover season, it’s said. From the Exodus to the giving of the Law at Sinai, 50 days later. It’s not biblical, you know, this association with the Ten Commandments; it’s an add on by the ancient rabbis who wanted to give some Jewish significance to an even more ancient agricultural festival, but the myth holds; we are grateful for the early spring Exodus from slavery, for the late spring law which turned us from tribes into a people. Yesterday I saw parent cardinals teaching their fledgling to fly by a tree outside our window. Spring is here; the dead are gone, new life continues.