In memory of Rabbi Aaron Panken

Yizkor 5779
Rabbi Steven Moskowitz

As you know my classmate and friend Rabbi Aaron Panken died in a plane crash this past May.
Although Aaron’s death still gnaws at me—as but one example, every day when I receive the
Daf Yomi email in my inbox, explaining the day’s page of Talmud learning, I think of Aaron and I
am reminded again of that great first year in Israel and our sons’ graduations from
Northwestern, and how he will be absent from every future class picture and every rabbinic
gathering and I can no longer even email him to double-check a Talmudic citation or argue with
him about some Reform movement decision or laugh with him about some past mischief that
once seemed so significant but now only offers the laughter of one or stand together, each with
swelling smiles of pride as we look out at our sons’ successes. The list is—it seems—endless.

Nonetheless I thought I might avoid this hour’s pain and not mention him, but then I read his
sister Melinda’s poem. Melinda is also a colleague and she recently posted these words. So, I
have come to think, such pain is perhaps best embraced in community. That is Judaism’s
counsel. As we recall our loved ones at this Yizkor service, I share her words because her poem
might be instructive about our own journeys of grief and the continued pain of mourning.
Rabbi Melinda Panken writes:

For Aaron:
Your death was not a one-time event,
like a tornado or a bad first date
that harden into memory the minute they’re over.
No, you die over and over, every day, in more ways than I can count.
It happens when I expect it and especially when I don't.
I lose you all over again when I eat a salad with tangy blue cheese dressing
or a bowl of cold borscht,
and when I notice the nubby knit of an argyle sweater vest,
and when I hear the buzzing of a Cessna kissing the clouds beneath a blue sky,
and when something makes me laugh and I think you would have laughed too.
I lose you again on birthdays and anniversaries,
when your dependable, sweet call never comes, no matter how much I expect it.
I lose you at Passover, when your bowls and bowls of charoset from around the world
are missing from the table,
and now there will never be enough charoset on the table ever again.
I will lose you again and again, when your children get married,
and my children become bar and bat mitzvah,
and your grandchildren are born and you can’t hold them, and love them, and make them
laugh.
You are so absent now where you were always present,
and your death isn’t in the past.
It happens over and over again, every day,
in ways both tiny and enormous.
You keep dying, and I keep grieving.

And so I am left to ask, what are we left to do? I have come to understand, we can do nothing
else but, stand together. Cry together. Pray together.

Congregation L’Dor V’Dor

September 19, 2018