"Like the generations of leaves..."

      My wife and I, along with her sister and brother-in-law, went to Starved Rock on Wednesday for Yom Kippur. We've done so once before in the past, but not recently. The park, two hours southwest of Chicago, has a certain serene glory that goes well with the solemn holy day of repentance. And you don't have to dress up.
     We picked a quiet spot in a canyon to perform a yitzkor service — a memorial for the dead. I lost two of the most important people in my life this summer — my mother died June 21. I said the mourner's kaddish for her the night before, at Kol Nidre, where we unexpectedly — for me, anyway — found ourselves at a small, century-old synagogue in Utica. I'll write about that later.  
     My cousin Harry died Aug. 31, so I said kaddish for him. I don't hold many rituals to heart, but a loved one dies, you're supposed to say kaddish — a prayer that never mentions death, but celebrates the greatness of God — for them. Because ... well, it's what you're supposed to do. Because, I guess, you die, you want someone to notice, and to do something, and saying kaddish is both.
     Two quotes came to me. The first one was a snippet of verse from the back of some reconstructionist prayer book that I read, flipping through the pages in some previous hours-long service, waiting for it to end. We have the book, and while I went looking for it before the trip, I couldn't find the lines, which didn't matter, because I knew them. In a passage about lost parents it said, "once we were their dream, now they are ours." Or words to that effect. I liked that.
     The second quote came to me standing in the canyon at Starved Rock, looking at the ground, which was surprisingly covered with maples leaves — brown and dry, from last year. "As a generation of leaves, so is that of men" Homer writes in the Iliad.

     We finished our ad hoc yizkor service, hiked around a bit, and I found myself in different canyon, where the leaves were oak, not maple. Maples are pretty sturdy, but oaks are even more long-lasting magnificent. It occurred to me that the leaves fall and die, but the tree remains. Our loved ones fall and die, but we remain. Then we too fall and die, but life — the tree — remains. Judaism is big on the "tree of life." I never quite got it before. Now I do.
     Later I went looking for the exact Homer quote.
     Book Six, lines 146-149. The original Greek:

Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη·
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.

     A 1990 translation by Robert Fagles puts is this way:

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

    I'm okay with that. Which is good, because I have to be, and if I weren't okay with it — which sometimes I'm not — it would still be exactly the same.