Rabbi Noah Farkas Sermons

About two months ago, an airplane was scheduled to fly from Kuala Lampur enroute to Beijing.  There were about 300 people onboard. The flight took-off at midnight heading southwest. And at some point, for whatever reason, all indications - all the beeping things - all the things that tell the world where that plane is and where it’s supposed to go, how it’s doing, turned off. After several hours, the plane disappeared. It flew off into the night never to be seen again.

For the last two months, the entire world—every country, every newspaper, every navy has been searching diligently day and night for where it went. What happened to that plane and those people? How did it just disappear? How did it slip away from the world of the known into this other place? For weeks and weeks and weeks, and at the cost of millions and millions and millions of dollars, we have been chasing down the answer to these questions. And even now with all of our technology, with all of our satellites, with all of our submarines, with all of our airplanes, with all of our ships, with all of our chemical testing, with all of our imagery, we still cannot find this plane, its people, or its black box. Thousands upon thousands of square miles of ocean, have been searched.  Thousands upon thousands of miles were flown in the air.  Thousands upon thousands of leagues plumbed under the sea.  And we haven’t found it yet.

We see the families of those who are on this flight, Malaysia 370, and they’re still in the same room, holding out hope that they’ll be able to find something. That they will find a little black box that contains all of the answers to their questions, bringing this flight into the unknown back into the known, bringing the mystery of the world back into some recognizable schema and order that makes sense.  

And for weeks and weeks, whether we heard it or not, there was a pinging.  There was a calling out into the darkness saying, “Here I am,” and only in the last moments possibly,  maybe, did we hear that call. Alas that too went silent.

In that little black box, there are all sorts of data. There are logs of how long the airplane was in the air, how high it went, where it turned. In that little black box, there is data that tells us about the engines, whether they were working properly, whether there were any indicators of lights going off or whether anything happened inside the computer on the airplane. But also in that little black box, there are recordings of voices. The pilot and the copilot, maybe even the passengers. Inside that little black box is a keepsake of the memory of the people who disappeared into the darkness. And we search and we search and we yearn to find them, to bring them back. Even though well never see them again, we search to just spend a few seconds, a few moments with them.

The Passover Seder is a moment kind of like this. At the very beginning of the story, we peer into the past, and we take a matzah and we break it in half. We call this Yachatz.  We keep one piece for ourselves and we wrap a second piece up and send it off into the world somewhere to be hidden. But we know that we can’t complete the Seder unless we find that piece and bring it back. To bring it back. To bring the afikomen back and try to put it together with that other piece of matzah. To make whole that which was broken, for that is the cycle of the Passover story. That’s the cycle of the Exodus.

We go down into Egypt, we go down into a place of brokenness and of sorrow and with God’s help, we come back out and look for redemption. And we turn the page, we finish the meal, we celebrate together. 

It’s nice that the children search for the afikoman. They search high and low—they search in between every book, under every couch cushion. They try to go into the kitchen until the moms shoo them out, because it’s obviously not in there. We shoo them out, we send them around to find this little thing, this little afikoman. We bring it back and feel redeemed and complete the cycle of the Exodus, to move from sadness and sorrow to a place of gladness, to move from a place of brokenness to a place of wholeness, to move from the past to the future.

We search. And it’s the searching that is the requirement. It is the same yearning to bring the unknown back into the known. To bring that little piece of redemption and closure back into our lives. For anyone who has ever hidden the afikomen, knows that getting it back in one piece is a miracle unto itself. Especially if you were ever to try to put it back together rather like a puzzle, anyone knows that you cannot put a piece of matzah back together that has been broken apart. This reminds me of a wonderful commercial about Fig Newtons. I guess it’s the end of Passover, and I’m thinking about all of the Chametz stuff that I want to eat. So Fig Newtons were the most amazing cookie. Why? Because you could take them apart and put them back together again. There was a commercial with little kids doing that over and over again. Taking Fig Newtons apart and putting them together again. Or Oreo cookies, where you could just take out the middle and start stacking the middle parts, up and up of the cookie. I’ve seen commercials like that. It’s not true with matzah. We go and we search, and we try to bring back that little piece. To try to make whole that which is broken.  Even though we know… we know that we can’t fix the breach. That Yachatz at the beginning of the Seder is final. That it is an end of wholeness. And that bringing it back together is nothing more than a repair. It’s not complete anymore. It’s not whole anymore.

The same is true with all of our lives. And in our memories of those we’ve loved, we can spend time with them again, just for a moment. We can bring that little piece of them back, and feel a little bit of wholeness in the face of a broken world, and a broken life. We remember the father that tucked us in, and taught us to play ball. We remember them, and we can spend time with them in our memories. We remember the mother that held us when we were cold, that held us when we cried, and we spend time with them. We remember a husband or a wife, with whom we could share our deepest secrets. We spend time with them even for just a few moments when we remember them. We can bring them back. We remember our precious children, taken from us too young.  And we remember our friends and our relatives, and the people we care so deeply about, who slipped off deep into the night. We can bring them back, when we spend time with them in our memories.  

And so we say Yizkor, and we remember them. For a just a few minutes, a few moments, we can hear their voices in our ears, feel their breath on our neck, and take comfort in their love. For just for a few fleeting moments. We rise now, and open our yellow books, and we take out our sefrei torah to spend a few minutes, with those we loved, and those that continue to love us, whose presence we feel even in our darkest times.

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