Rabbi Hanan Memorial

Rabbi Hanan (zt”l ) passed away on 2/3/2020.

Below are some resources (interview, songs, photos, etc.)

This page will be updated.

Additional material is on Rabbi Hanan's Yahrzeit Post (click here)

Received from India by Julian Michels

The Jewish Renewal visionary, Rabbi Hanan Sills, passed on this morning,
departing from our fellowship of the living.
He was a far-seeing mystic, a compassionate soul, an educated contemplative, a consummate storyteller,

and a courageous warrior for those oppressed by violence and injustice.
He was one of the first and greatest mentors of my spirit and my heart, and I will never forget him.

We are each here for only a short time,
and the great souls among us use that time to put their shoulders to the wheel of the universal tribe.
We are guided for awhile by the torches they,
when they were young, lifted from the hands of their own elders and ancestors,
and in the same way one day it falls to us to lift the torches that drop from their aging fingers.
So the caravan of life and consciousness winds on through the feral wilderness of time.

Hanan, you carried a bright torch, and with it you lit the flame for many others.
Your name will ring out in the songs of our hearts for many years to come.
Thank you and go in peace. Amen.

From Rabbi Hanan's colleage and dear friend Rabbi Gershon Winkler

My dear friend and colleague Rabbi Hanan Sills was arrested again for protesting, only this time by the Angel of Death who charged him with being too demonstrative in his protest on behalf of Life and those trying to live it without being crapped on.

And this time, no amount of fundraising concerts are going to be able to bail him out. Because, he's chained himself to the Gates of the Netherworld, seated next to Dov Bear of Mezeritch, the 18th-century rebbe who declared: "I wish I could love the saint as deeply as God loves the scoundrel!"

Hanan was the only other rabbi I know who unabashedly would apply all sorts of cartoonish sound effects and comedic theatrics to his orations. He'd have us laughing one moment and weeping in the next and it didn't phase him because he embodied both the tragic and the comedic in a way only a master could.

Truth be told -- before I met Rabbi Sills, I met his flute. It was the first thing I noticed in the momentous summer of 1983 the moment I entered the space where a gathering of surreal Jews were preparing to welcome the Shabbat in the northern California wilderness.

I noticed the flute first before I noticed the man playing it because I still had one foot stuck in a culture where flutes, or any other musical implement, were forbidden on the Shabbat, although -- as he whispered in my left ear that night -- the one Psalm that heralds the Shabbat also celebrates musical instrumentation (Psalm 92).

Slowly, my eyes followed the flute to the lips of Pan himself, who would over time piper me out of my spiritual quagmire into the proverbial Oasis of the Seven Palms.

Hanan came into this world during the tribal Moon of Benjamin (Adar) and chose to leave us during the tribal Moon of Joseph (Sh'vat), who was Benjamin's only maternal brother. He was that kind of rebbe, always endeavoring to bring things full circle, to sew what got torn; to piece together the shards of a broken world even as it continued to come apart. Yet, as serious as he was in his unrelenting struggle to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, it was always fun for me to encounter Hanan, not just a privilege. Because, whenever we'd meet, we'd bow to one another in classic slapstick form, each vying to surpass the other in how low the bow and in how many times, sometimes landing one or the other or both on all fours - totally oblivious to the bewildered looks we would draw from onlookers unfamiliar with either of us. And we'd grow all excited in seeing each other again, our hearts brimming with sensations clamoring urgently to find a portal wide enough for both of us to squeeze through and exchange our joy and our angst about absolutely nothing -- and there it would remain, in a silence brimming with fading gobbledygook suspended in the loving gaze locked between our squinting eyes.

Fare thee well, Hanan. Thank you deeply for reminding me through the years that I was not the only court jester in the Mosaic court. And although I've never given the flute a try, I think I'll save my breath for what you would have preferred I save it for, namely the voice of Colonel Leghorn or Yosemite Sam. And truth be told, if I were to have made it to your burial, I would probably have puckered my lips and imitated the military bugle sound of taps. After all, both us had served in the military. And you would have expected that of me rather than a quote from the Talmud -- which reminds me of a quote from the Talmud:

"My colleague is gone. And I am left as one hand clapping" (Talmud Yerushalmi, Sanhedrin 2:1)