The Meaning and Purpose of Yizkor: Exploring the Soul and the Afterlife

Benjamin Sommer is a Senior Fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He is also Professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Previously he taught at Northwestern University, where he was Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies. An overarching concern of Dr. Sommer's scholarship involves the close and manifold relationships between biblical thought and later Jewish theology, or, to use the Hebrew phrasing, between

The Meaning and Purpose of Yizkor: Exploring the Soul and the Afterlife in the Ancient Near East, Biblical Israel, and Medieval Judaism

What is the purpose of uttering the Yizkor prayers? From a ritual point of view, what are we accomplishing when we say the words of this prayer? Benjamin Sommer traces Yizkor’s phrasing all the way back to Aramean, Canaanite, and Babylonian texts from the first and second millennia BCE, providing a surprising view of the function of the Yizkor ritual that entered Ashkenazic liturgy starting in the twelfth century C.E. A better understanding of Yizkor’s roots in the biblical world helps highlight the centrality of the idea of resurrection in traditional forms of Judaism, and constitutes a revealing case of remarkable continuity in Jewish thought and Jewish ritual over the course of several millennia.