Some of us struggle with Yizkor.

My father left when I was an infant. Custody trials dragged out in court until the judge saw fit to deny all visiting rights. We made contact again when I was in my early twenties. I only found out he died a year and a half after the fact.

I say Yizkor for him.

I say Yizkor for his archrival, my stepfather.

And together with them, I say Yizkor for the woman in between, my mom.

I say Yizkor for them on Yom Kippur, and I say it again on days of joy and celebration, on Shemini Atzeret, Shavuot, and the seventh day of Passover.

What is the celebration?

The celebration is that they are all here with me. Nothing was ever lost. The past is never sealed.

Few things are as Jewish as remembering. In the same way others live in space, Jews live in time. It’s all here, all at once.

To some, the generations are a series of broken dots, rapidly fading off into a near horizon. To a Jew, the generations form a tree of life.

Those who sleep in the earth are our roots. They nurture us and ground us. They provide us identity, meaning, and hope. They shower us with blessings and guidance from the luminous place of their souls in another world.

And we are their leaves, their fruits, their bounty. We provide that which they can no longer produce.

Because life never ends. We only change roles.

“We are day workers,” the saying goes. Our job in this world is to turn the darkness into day, to master the beast within us and turn it to good purpose, to till the dark earth, to plant seeds, to draw life out of black soil, out of thin air, and out of whatever sunshine and rain G‑d will bless us with. It is a harsh world, but it holds great treasure for those willing to put up the fight.

Then, our gig is done and our souls journey back towards their origin. There, we can no longer change, no longer plant, no longer grow. We can only ascend higher, from one realm to the next. And that ascent depends entirely on the seeds we planted in our lifetime below.

As with the tree, a single holistic entity, the leaves nurture the roots and the roots return the favor. So too, the children lift the parents upward with their Torah and good deeds, and the parents return the favor with divine light and blessing.

The kabbalists compare life to a river: You can’t clean up your segment of the river without traveling upstream to repair matters at the source. So, too, in all the challenges G‑d sends you in life: Just as you are blessed with the many good deeds of your ancestors who gave their lives for Torah, for their people, and for the G‑d of Israel, so too you are challenged to correct their blunders and settle their spiritual debts—both for their benefit and for your own.

There is no path in life that does not encounter the hurdles your parents and grandparents failed to straddle. Overcome them, and the blockage is removed. A dam of spiritual energy is released, flowing in all directions, from below to above, from above to below.

So we remember them, all of them, in Yizkor. We pledge to good causes, we dedicated ourselves to more mitzahs, more Torah—to life, to growth. They are happy. So are we.

Life never ends. We live with them, all of them. Every day.