HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Prayers and Responsive Readings
Unison Reading
by Rabbi Alvin Fine
Birth is a beginning and death is a destination. And life is a journey:
From childhood to maturity and youth to age;
From innocence to awareness and ignorance to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion and then, perhaps, to wisdom;
From weakness to strength or strength to weakness. And, often, back again;
From loneliness to love, from joy to gratitude, from pain to compassion,
From grief to understanding, from fear to faith;
From defeat to defeat to defeat. Until looking backward or ahead,
We see that victory lies not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey, stage by stage a sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning and death is a destination.
And life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage - to life everlasting.
To Remember Me
by Robert Test
Give my sight to the man who has never seen a sunrise, a baby’s face, or love in the eyes of a woman.
Give my heart to a person whose own heart has caused nothing but endless days of pain.
Give my blood to the teenager who was pulled from the wreckage of his car, so that he might live to see his grandchildren play.
Give my kidneys to one who depends on a machine to exist from week to week.
Take my bones, every muscle, every fiber and nerve in my body and find a way to make a crippled child walk.
Explore every corner of my brain. Take my cells, if necessary, and let them grow so that, someday, a speechless boy will shout at the crack of a bat and a deaf girl will hear the sound of rain against her window.
If you must bury something, let it be my faults, my weaknesses and all prejudice against my fellow man.
Give my sins to the devil. Give my soul to God.
If, by chance, you wish to remember me, do it with a kind deed or word to someone who needs you.
If you do all I have asked, I will live forever.
Jewish Prayer
by Rabbi Richard N. Levy
We do the best homage to our dead when we live our lives most fully, even in the shadow of our loss. For each of our lives is worth the life of the whole world; in each one is the breath of the Ultimate One. In affirming the One, we affirm the worth of each one whose life, now ended, brought us closer to the Source of Life, in whose unity no one is alone and every life finds purpose.