“Happy is the eye that saw all this, but our souls were anguished by what our ear heard.”

This refrain was sung in the ancient liturgy of Yom Kippur—the liturgy that has not been in use since the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed. On that highest of high days, when the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies and uttered the Divine Name, this refrain captured the dual nature of the moment: this was at once the height of splendor and the depth of anguish. For here, at the summit of the Jewish year, both the majesty of God and the depths of human frailty were held in terrible tension. This was the day when The Name was uttered, but also the day when—to atone for human rebellion—livestock were slaughtered and the scapegoat was cast over a cliff.

I read about this in a recent article by the literary critic Leon Wieseltier, who was reflecting on the many celebrity deaths we’ve witnessed this past year. And I brought it to my delightful—and delightfully Jewish—colleague, Io Salant, my internship supervisor. I quoted the ancient refrain to her: “Happy is the eye that saw all this, but our souls were anguished by what our ear heard.” And I asked her what she thought about it. She just sighed and said, “That sounds very Jewish.” And she asked me, “Do you know why Jewish couples shatter a wine glass at their wedding reception?” I was embarrassed that I had never thought very hard about it. But I took a guess: “Well… maybe it has something to do with the inevitable pain and suffering they will experience in their marriage.” (I am a couples therapist.) She laughed and said, “Wrong! It’s about the destruction of the Temple. It’s a reminder that as happy as you are today, you must never forget the suffering of your forbears, or those who suffer now.”

And so I have come to realize that among the many things we Christians have inherited from our Jewish sisters and brothers, one of their most valuable gifts is the ability to hold in creative tension both delight and anguish, happiness and grief. Which brings me to this night, this feast of All Souls, one of the most honest, terrible, and beautiful days on our calendar. I look at All Souls as the shadow image of the Easter Vigil, the white and gold replaced by black, but many of the alleluias retained. All Souls does not stand in contrast to Easter, but instead deepens it, strengthens it. Dear friends in Christ, hear this good news: tonight, we will gather at this Table for the resplendent feast of the Holy Eucharist, and then proceed to the Bolster Garden and reverence the remains of our beloved dead, recalling once again that ancient Jewish song of praise, “alleluia.” And—this is the good news—at no time, not once, will we be required or expected to feel chipper.

But however we might feel, it is good for us to open up this idea a bit more, this creative tension of joy and anguish. To that end, I invite you to revisit the story of a November death, a death story that captured in vivid color the delight and anguish of one person’s life, and his tragic departure from our midst. Here’s the story.

If you listen closely to the tape recording, you can hear the clanking sound of tumbling ice cubes, and the dry, scraping sound of matches being struck. Both the interviewer and his luminous subject were drinkers, and smokers. This second detail would perhaps have scandalized the American public at the time, because the person being interviewed was Jacqueline Kennedy, and it was 1964—the time in her life when she was most loved and admired—and she had taken care to hide from the public her smoking habit.

Mrs. Kennedy was being interviewed by William Manchester, the man she and Bobby had selected to write the authorized account of President Kennedy’s assassination. The interview experience was excruciating for both of them. Jackie would not meet him during the day because the assassination happened in broad daylight, and her sharp memory of the trauma was terrible to behold. One of her friends recalled, “[The interviews were] like expunging herself—the wound was still pretty raw.”

The journalist Sam Kashner recounted this story in the October edition of Vanity Fair, and he included William Manchester’s reflections on the many conspiracy theories that swirled around the tragic death. Manchester wrote, “In the end I concluded that [the Warren] report was correct on the two main issues. Oswald was the killer, and he had acted alone… [But] those who desperately want to believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning … if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something."

Tonight, in the dying of the year, surrounded by the darkness of a November evening, vested in our black garments, we contemplate the terrible reality of death, whether or not our beloved dead died “for something ” (usually they don’t), and whether or not our beloved dead lived lives that were notable, or even noble. Unlike Jackie Kennedy, we may not have to contend with the fame of our faithful departed. But we share with her (I think) a desire to make some meaning of all of this loss, these towering absences. Maybe we, too, want to “expunge” ourselves.

But it’s that lack of balance between a colorful life and a small death that stops me short. A bright, brilliant President cut down at noonday by a mentally ill loner, and an icon of beauty and grace scrambling over the back of a limousine—happy is the eye, anguished is the soul. The deaths of those we love too often fail to measure up to the scope and majesty of their lives. Happy is the large life; anguishing is the small death.

Tonight, once again, we will recite what’s called the necrology, the long and ever-lengthening list of names of all our beloved dead. What are the names you raise up tonight, the names you traced on the pages of the book? My names, names of immense life and small death, include Nancy, Richard, Helen, Tillie: cancer, cancer, cancer, and a fall down the stairs. And though convention and good theology prevented me from writing his name into the book, Andrew and I remember our beloved Hoshi, our puppy dog in Christ. Even the life and death of dear Hoshi is seen by our happy eyes—and remembered by our anguished souls—tonight.

This is the night when we sing many ancient refrains. “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his servants,” we sing in one of the psalms appointed for today. One need not become President, or marry one, for one’s death to be precious in God’s sight. And we are consoled in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that “death is swallowed up in victory,” and in those words, Paul is echoing Isaiah’s feast on the mountain, a mountaintop banquet that—with all its joy—is not free of tears, but nevertheless is the place where those tears are wiped away. And ultimately, we reverence the firstborn of the dead, Jesus Christ, whose death was violent and humiliating, but whose life and resurrection makes possible our own passage from death to life.

In all of this, we are not protected from anguish. But we are rescued from despair.

And finally, there is one more refrain, a refrain that echoes the ancient Jewish refrain about happy eyes and anguished souls. This is a refrain that we sing in the burial rite at graveside, and to illumine this for us, I want to take us to a certain cemetery. It was at this cemetery that John Kennedy, Jr., who as you know is now also among our beloved dead, came every November to pay his respects to his father. The journalist Sam Kashner, who wrote the article I mentioned earlier, met with John Jr. a couple of times. Here’s what he said about those meetings: Kashner said, “I met [John, Jr.] twice, and he said things that were kind of interesting. One that was sort of painful was that what made him even sadder when November came around—which of course was the anniversary of his father's murder—was that his friends kind of held back, and the only people that seemed to be around were photographers wanting to take pictures of him at Arlington. And that it was a kind of lonesome time, even more so because of that. Because no one was around. I think it was a comment on the irony of it—people never gave him much room to breathe, and when he could use some company, they let him be.”

Tonight, we have a lot of company. We have one another sitting beside us as the names of our beloved are recited, and we will walk together downstairs to reverence the remains of some of them. And there, on that holy ground, we will recall a very Christian—yet somehow very Jewish—refrain that captures both the happiness of our eyes and the anguish of our souls. There we will hear the echo of that great burial refrain, “We all go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

Works cited:

Sam Kashner, “A Clash of Camelots,” Vanity Fair, October 2009.
Leon Wieseltier, “The Trend in Dying,” The New Republic, October 21, 2009.

Back to Sermons