- 5786/2025
- Rabbi Nickerson
Yom Kippur 5786/2025
Rabbi Joel Nickerson
Resnick Family Campus
Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles
The Voicemail
I want to play you something. It’s a voicemail my grandfather, Elliott Kapchan - I called him Papa - left on my cell phone back in 2020:
Play recording from Papa:
“Hi Joely, You and the family have a happy, healthy new year. It's Papa. Stay well, drive careful, enjoy your life, all of it. And most important, have good health and continue to have good health for you and the rest of the family. Love you all, Papa. Bye.”
I received that voicemail a few months before he died. I actually have a few just like it that I’ve saved. When I hear his voice, I’m transported back into his living room in Moraga, California. I’m putting out the Maxwell House haggadahs with him before the Passover seder. I’m cleaning fish with him in the front yard after a morning on the Bay. I hear his laugh, his shouting at the news, his delight at a great baseball play. I see him near the end of his life, walking me slowly down the hall of the care facility. And always, I hear him calling me “Joely.”
That brief 22-second message is such a blessing. A window into the past. A window into a man I loved dearly. And now, a window I was able to open for all of you.
I know I’m not alone. Maybe you have voicemails saved you can’t bear to delete but can hardly bear to hear. Maybe you lost them and would give anything to have them back. Maybe you never had the chance to save one at all – or maybe you lost your loved one before the age of voicemails - and that absence is its own kind of ache.
It’s not the big moments we return to. It’s the phrases they repeated over and over. The quirks. The chuckle. The deep breath they took before speaking. Those tiny, irreplaceable pieces of personality - that’s where the person lives.
There is something about a person’s voice that photographs cannot capture, or their handwriting - even my Papa’s doctor-style illegible scrawl - cannot preserve. A voice is breath.
Our tradition knows this: the Hebrew word ruach means both spirit and breath. At creation, God forms the first human from dust of the earth but the body just lies there. It’s when God breathes into the human that the human becomes a living being.
What makes us human isn't our bodies. It's the breath of life, the breath of God inside us. We are animated by the divine spirit that flows through us. We are, quite literally, filled with spirit.
Whenever we speak, we do what God does - we breathe life into the world. Every time my grandfather said, “It’s Papa,” he was sending his spirit into me. That’s why his voice still matters. Because it’s not just preserved sound. His spirit is captured and released each time I press play to hear that voicemail.
The prophet Ezekiel saw this too. In the valley of dry bones, with scattered remains of the dead covering the earth, God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” In other words, can the dead return? God calls the four winds: “Come, O breath, breathe into these slain, that they may live.” And the bones rise. They breathe again.
This afternoon, during our service, we’ll read Psalm 23, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me,” In those verses, we’re reassured that just as God’s presence never leaves us, neither does the presence of those we love.
Yizkor is our invitation to continue the conversation, to call them back. Our mother. Our father. Our sibling. Our grandparent. Our husband or wife. Our friend. Our child.
They left us messages on our phone or in our soul and now we respond. We tell them that we miss them. That we remember. That we’re trying to live in ways that would make them proud. That we forgive them. That we hope they forgive us. That we are still here. Still breathing. Still carrying their ruach inside us.
Whose voice do you need to hear right now?
What are they saying?
And what will you say back to them?
Papa left me that voicemail five years ago. This afternoon, I’ll tell him about his great-granddaughters. I’ll thank him for what he gave me. And then I’ll listen. Because his ruach is still here. Still breathing. Still speaking.
Yizkor Elohim. May God remember.
And may we remember - with our breath, with our voices, with the ruach that binds us to those we love, across time and space.
May their memories forever be a blessing.
And may their voices always live within us.