Who Will Teach Me To Wonder? - Sermon Version Shabbat Parah, Parashat Hukkat

Who Will Teach Us To Wonder

When, Jack, you and I sat and thought together about your Devar Torah we went through the piece you read from the Torah scroll. The strange tale of a cow, killed and burnt, whose ashes are sprinkled in the water to make someone ritually contaminated by death ritually pure.

I asked you if there was anything in the story you found interesting. And you said, with characteristic insight and honesty, ‘no.’

So we changed tack, and you got to give a terrific devar torah on the terrific story of the golden calf. And though your devar torah was indeed terrific, it means I’m left with the cow ash.

Thanks.

This tale of cow ash is undeniably odd. It’s odd to imagine there is something contaminatory about death, and odder still to think that ash from a cow, mixed in with cedar and hyssop and scarlet stuff should do anything to remove such an odd affliction. The good news is that I’m not the first person to struggle for a way of relating to all this oddness.

Here’s a Rabbinic text, about a rabbi who was alive 2000 years ago.

An non-Jew asked Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, ‘This is a bit like witchcraft. You bring a cow, burn it, grind it, take its ashes. If one of you is defiled by a dead body you sprinkle two or three drops on them and say to him, ‘You are pure.’ Rabbi Yochanan asked him, ‘Have you ever seen a man possessed by the demon of madness?’ ‘Yes’ he said. ‘And what do you do? ‘We bring roots and make them smoke under him and then we sprinkle water on the demon and it flees.’ Said Rabbi Yochanan, ‘let your ears hear what you say with your mouth. It is the same for this spirit of uncleanness [and he explains the odd ritual away. But then the Midrash continues]

When the non-Jew left, Rabbi Yochanan’s students said to their master, ‘Master, you pushed off this man with a straw, what explanation will you give to us?’ he said to them, ‘By your life, it is not that death defiles, nor that this water purifies. The Holy Blessed One says, ‘I have laid down a Hok - a decree [it’s not to be understood, it’s something to be followed even though you cannot understand it].[1]

The key word is the Hebrew word hok - something that cannot be understood and isn;t designed to be understood. The ritual of the cow is a Hok. The fact that it doesn’t make rational sense isn’t because it’s stupid and the fact that we - not even Jack - can understand it - isn’t because we - and certainly not Jack - are stupid. Rather this hok is something not to be understood.

I’m interested in what it means to have things, in our lives that we understand, to have things in our lives that we strive to understand and - most of all - what it means to make a space for things that cannot be understood.

I’m aware suggesting we make space for things which cannot be understood is counter-cultural, especially for a Synagogue full of people who understand so many things and quest to understand so much more.

I’ve nothing against the quest to understand. In fact questing to understand the world and everything in it is one of the most exquisite things a person can do with their lives.

I get that there are 37.2 trillion cells in the human body, each one a direct descendent from one single zygote - that’s extraordinary.

I get that every atom in every one of these cells was already present at the very beginning of time and that therefore each of my 37 trillion cells is, in some sense, recycled star dust.

There is nothing wrong with the quest for greater and greater knowledge, and if I had one thing to say to neurologists attempting to understand the nature of brain-damage, or civil engineers attempting to work out how best to build buildings that can withstand the destructive power of an earthquake it would be to say, go, go, go, lives depend on your passion to understand more.

But ...

There is a but.

The but is that as we understand life we have this tendency to turn life into bits of data we can compute, manipulate and control.

And even if there is something out there we can’t understand yet, if we think that this thing is there capable of being understood if we just tried a little harder, we start treating everything in life as a bit of data that can be manipulated and controlled.

We start to think that life can be calibrated and controlled.

And here’s the scary thing for people who like to calibrate and control.

The really important things in life are not quantifiable, they are not measurable and they are certainly not capable of being manipulated like pixels in a computer programme or the spread of bonds and stocks in our investment portfolios.

And the reason the really important things in life are not capable of being manipulated is not that we aren’t clever enough yet.

It’s because the really important stuff in life is beyond control.

The gift of love is not manipulable.

The ability to feel joy isn’t controllable.

You can’t measure artistic worth on a spreadsheet.

Wonder isn’t something that can be programmed.

Really this is all about our ability to appreciate wonder.

There are loads of people telling us to try to understand more, and control more, and learn more. There are loads of people telling us if only we tried a little harder we would do better in these exams or that six-month performance review and all the rest of it.

But who will teach us to wonder?

Who will teach us to appreciate that the world is not ours to control.

It’s ours to protect and serve.

Who will teach us that time isn’t simply a unit of production to be set into a productivity spreadsheet, but rather the essence of human life; time is to be celebrated and marked, not put to the service of commercial gain.

We’ve got the balance wrong - too much seeking to control and not enough wonder about that which is beyond control.

We need more people to teach us about wonder.

It’s a subtle point I’m trying to make,

It’s one thing to work to wipe out polio, or tackle malaria or cure cancer, but somewhere we, in our comfortable Western existence, seem in danger of forgetting that death isn’t something to be eradicated as if it were an infectious disease. Death is at the very heart of what it means to mortal. We can eat more fruit and veg, exercise, treat and cure more and more disease, but we can’t escape what it means to be mortal, unless we turn ourselves into something no longer human. 

Death is a wonder, a Hok, something to defeat understanding. That’s why death is so scary - not because we can’t understand it yet, but because it is beyond understanding.

That’s why we need a ritual to help us deal with our inability to understand death.

That’s why that ritual, itself, needs to escape understanding.

That’s why we need a Hok featuring cow’s ash.

And here’s the real problem of forgetting about wonder and thinking everything falls into the twin categories of controllable and almost controllable;

by promoting the notion of control we strip out our appreciation of wonder from the world.

If we say the really important things in life are the things we can measure and control we are in danger of arriving at our deathbed proud, or ashamed, of the amount of money in our bank accounts.

And no-one arrives at their deathbed counting how much money they have in their bank accounts.

It’s really not about the stuff we can measure.

It’s really about our ability to wonder.

I did something I don’t usually do, when thinking about this sermon.

I googled the question, ‘who will teach me to wonder?’

And there, answer number three was a link to Psalms 119:27.

Let me tell you about Psalms 119:27.

It’s not an easy verse to translate, something like this;

Bring me to understand the path of what you demand of me and I will chat with your wonders.

The leading Rabbinic commentary Malbim points out the importance of it being the PATH of the precepts. It is, for Malbim the path up Mount Sinai, the path that leads beyond human understanding.

We seek an understand of that we know we cannot understand.

It’s a little paradoxical.

We address ourselves to the path up the mountain knowing that there are truths beyond human grasp.

And the reward is we get to be in 'siach' - in conversation - with wonder, with mystery.

We don’t get to understand, we certainly don’t get to control.

But we do get, in fleeting moments of insight, a sense of being in conversation with that which is wonder.

The great American writer, William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, tries to explain the sort of momentary encountering of the ineffable that is at the heart of great moments of religious insight. The word James uses is noetic - these are kinds of understanding that cannot be spelt out in letters, they cannot be published as respectable scientific literature or made subject to double blind testing of hypotheses and controls.

Noetic experiences are beyond language, beyond measurement, they are experiences of being in siach - being in conversation with wonder.

When an artist, when asked to explain their painting responds, ‘I can’t really explain it in words, if I could have explained it in words I wouldn’t have had to paint it.’ She is talking about a noetic truth.

And noetic truths might just allow us to make sense of our lives in ways even more important than the quest for measurable knowledge.

So, Jack, all of us, let us do lots of great, inspiring, life-saving science. But let us also keep a place for wonder. Let’s keep looking for opportunities to walk paths that don’t reveal all their secrets even under the most powerful of microscopes. Let’s lift up our eyes to wonder in the hope of a siach - a conversation with that which is noetic - beyond.

Because if we lose the ability to wonder, if we lose the ability to appreciate that which cannot be comprehended, we lose the ability to treasure all that is most special about our humanity.

Shabbat shalom

---

[1] Bemidbar Rabbah 19:8

Yizkor YK 5775 - Three Ways to Face the Angel of Death

Rav Ashi saw the Angel of Death in the Shuk. He said ‘Give me thirty days and I will revise my studies’

The angel came again on the thirtieth day. Rav Ashi said, ‘What’s the rush?’

He replied, Rav Huna is close on your heels, he is to be the next head of the Academy, and no sovereignty encroaches on another by even a hair's breadth.’

This tale is one of three, from right at the end of the Talmudic tractate on bereavement. They all feature Rabbis from antiquity negotiating their relationship with the Angel of Death.

Oh, let me reassure anyone feeling too bothered by rationality to open their souls to tales about the Angel of Death – I don’t think there is a real angel with a scythe and a cowl – any more than you do. These tales are opportunities to look in the sort of places we usually turn away from. They are opportunities for our hearts to see that which our visual cortexes will never register.

So, here we are, with a tale of the head of the great Talmudic academy of Sura, Rav Ashi - who passed away in the year 427 of the common era, succeeded by his student, Rav Huna.

Rav Ashi is in the market when he sees the Angel of Death. He feels his mortality, no more than that, he feels his end coming with speed. He’s a man walking home after a particularly raw encounter with a physician in the knowledge that his full, active, purposive life is over, and all there is left to do is prepare for his end.

Remarkably he knows what he wishes for with the time he has left. He – a man who has dedicated his life to his learning – pleads for the opportunity to order his learning one last time. He’s the novelist pleading for the time to complete their last manuscript, the matriarch, who’s dedicated their life to raising a family, pleading for the time to attend one last wedding. He knows the values by which he has lived his life, he knows what will still matter when so much else has faded and the rest will just as surely fade now.

Is he like you, or me? Do you, do I, know what we would do with 30 days? What’s our unfinished project that, if only we could finish it, would allow us to feel a sense of completion in our life?

The pleading works. Thirty days are, indeed, given to Rav Ashi.

Ah, my dear rationalist friends, don’t you believe, haven’t you seen? Sure, sometimes death comes with no regard for our desperate desires to complete an unfinished piece of work. But so many times I’ve seen the other thing. A candle that continues to flicker until … just long enough to …

Maybe you’ve seen it too. So here’s my first question, on this awesome day on which we are asked to encounter our own mortality.

What would we do with the time we have left? What’s stopping us from doing that now, tomorrow. Don’t wait.

Don’t wait because the angel of death doesn’t have infinite patience. After all, we are all fading flowers, withering grass, dreams in flight.

The angel came again on the thirtieth day. Rav Ashi said, ‘What’s the rush?’

The angel replied, Rav Huna is close on your heels, he is to be the next head of the Academy, and no sovereignty encroaches on another by even a hair's breadth.

Oh I’ve seen this too. My grandmother of blessed memory, wanted nothing more than to be at my Bar Mitzvah, and she was. And the moment that was passed she announced she wanted nothing more than to be at my younger brother’s Bar Mitzvah, and she was. Then she wanted nothing more than to be at my youngest brother’s Bar Mitzvah, and she was. Then – having run out of Bnei Mitzvah celebrations – she wanted nothing more than to be at my wedding. Sadly she wasn’t.

What would we do with the time we have left? What’s stopping us from doing that now, tomorrow. Don’t wait.

Another tale.

Rav Hisda? The Angel of Death could never take Rav Hisda for he never ceased reciting his learning by rote. So the Angel went and sat on the cedar tree by the House of the Rabbis. The bough cracked. Rav Hisda stopped. The Angel took him.

Another encounter, another end, another head of the great academy of Sura. Rav Hisda died in the year 320 of the common era. And such a technique he had for avoiding the clutches of the Angel of Death.

Maybe he is the vitamin pill junkie who believes as long as we take multi zinc amino acid biofillus whatever we will escape death.

Maybe he is even the sort of person who believes giving Tzedakah, praying humbly and mastering Teshuvah will vouchsafe a year of health and vitality.

It’s not that mutli zinc amino acids or Teshuvah or Tzedakah aren’t good for us. They are. They are wonderful. But they guarantee nothing.

The problem is two-fold, firstly we are mortal, and none of us will live forever no matter how many pills we take. And secondly Death doesn’t play fair. Death plays cruel tricks, death is deceitful and foul. Death disregards poverty and wealth, death pays no attention to who is decent and who is cruel.

Rav Hisda’s encounter, for me, is about how we construct lives doing whatever we can not to have to encounter death. This Rav Hisda – who never ceased reciting his learning by rote - I’m not so sure it’s the greatest use of a life. I mean I love to learn but I’m not so sure about the utter immersion in recitation to the exclusion of all else. What about other people? What about life? My teacher, Rabbi Eliezer Diamond has written on this encounter. He suggests the Angel of Death sits outside the Yeshiva to draw Rav Hisda’s attention to the world, out there. Left to his own devices Rav Hisda immerses himself utterly in a hermetically sealed bubble of Yeshivah scholarship, but ultimately it is of no use. “Youhoo, have you noticed, Rav Hisda, outside there is autumn, the leaves are falling, winter is coming.” And Rav Hisda stops and the death takes him.

Maybe Rav Hisda is the person who works all day and all night, all week and all weekend just to …. just to do what exactly? Maybe he’s the person who works all day and all night because work is more controllable than the world outside with its annoying tendency to entropy. Maybe we all are this man, this woman, trying to control what we can, in the hope that we can stay alive without having to deal with the complexities of mortality. But to live well we need to engage with the vast breadth of everything life lays before us. To live well we can’t immerse ourselves only in that we can control. That is to confuse being busy with being fully engaged in life. That is to confuse staying alive with being alive.

So here is my next question on this holy and awesome day when we encounter our mortality.

Are we so busy staying alive that we forget to live?

This is the Torah of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes; there is a time to work, a time to learn, a time to love and a time to cry, a time to dance and a time to stare out of the window and watch the leaves become touched with the colours of autumn. To live well we need to live broadly. The opposite of this is to immerse only in those parts of life that seem under our control. Ultimately even the focus on what we think we can control will prove futile, but how much of our time is wasted on turning over the wheel, as opposed to focusing on life itself; our lives and the lives of our loved ones? How much of our time is focused on the sort of encounters that make our life richer – as opposed to our bank balance?

Are we so busy staying alive that we forget to live?

One last extract from the Talmud.

The Angel of Death could never overcome Rav Hiyya. So one day he adopted the guise of a poor man and came and knocked at his gate, saying, ‘Bring me out some bread.’ The Rabbi’s students brought out some bread to him. And the angel called out to Rav Hiyya: “Sir, don't you have compassion on the poor yourself? Why not have compassion on me?”

Rav Hiya opened the door to him. The Angel of Death revealed himself showing him a fiery sword, and Rav Hiyya yielded to him.

Death is playing trickster again, this time pretending to be a beggar. So the beggar’s needs are met by the Rabbi’s students, but it isn’t enough. Death wants more. Death always wants more. The beggar calls out the Rabbi personally, and when the Rabbi comes to show his caring for a fellow human being, the deception becomes apparent. My teacher, Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, sees the momentary threat of a face-off, death draws its sword. But the Rabbi yields.

There is something of our previous story here – the story of the Rabbi who kept death at bay by permanently reciting Torah. But here it doesn’t feel as though the Rav Hiyya is insulating himself from the world. He’s a busy man with students who seek to keep distractions away from their master, but he responds to the call of poverty. He is prepared to show compassion to the poor.

But death is such a slippery foe and when the Rabbi comes to the door to perform a sacred  act of charity – he meets only his own end.

I spoke on Rosh Hashanah of what Victor Frankl called the last of all human freedoms, the freedom “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” And this is what Rav Hiyya does in the face of the angel’s revealed sword. Of course it’s good to fight to stay alive, but not always, not in every moment. Here the Rabbi sees the drawn sword and knows there is only the one choice – to yield or to engage in the sort of bluff and counter-bluff of Rav Hisda or Rav Ashi. Faced with this choice Rav Hiyya yields.

This is the strength to accept the call to mortality once it has been received. Sure fighting for life is good. But here we are asked to acknowledge Rav Hiyya’s acceptance of death.

Here’s one last question.

Will we be ready when our time comes to yield? How will we exercise this last human freedom to meet the only end that awaits us all?

We can make fools of ourselves if we choose to pick a fight with death. Sometimes strength, courage and beauty are most manifest in a certain kind of yielding.

This is an extract from a recently published poem of Clive James, who has fought cancer bravely and is now facing his own mortality with a different kind of strength.

He wrote recently of a Maple Tree, and his own passing.

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.

Breath growing short

Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain

Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see

So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls

On that small tree?

A final flood of colors will live on

As my mind dies,

Burned by my vision of a world that shone

So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

This, I think, is what it means to yield before the unsheathed sword of the Angel of Death.

Will we be ready when our time comes to yield? How will we exercise this last human freedom to meet the only end that awaits us all?

Three questions,

What would we do with the time we have left? What’s stopping us from doing that now, tomorrow?

Are we so busy staying alive that we forget to live?

Will we be ready when our time comes to yield? How will we exercise this last human freedom to meet the only end that awaits us all?

These are my questions on this day, at this sacred moment when we face what death has taken from us all, and reflect on that which we will surely lose ourselves to a deceitful, never satisfied foe.

What would we do with the time we have left? What’s stopping us from doing that now, tomorrow?

Are we so busy staying alive that we forget to live?

Will we be ready when our time comes to yield? How will we exercise this last human freedom to meet the only end that awaits us all?

May we answer them well, and be gifted much time before we are called to account for our answers.

Chatimah Tovah – A good year

On Balance - the power of good and evil, A Yizkor Sermon

[I opened the sermon talking about walking through the cemetery and wondering whether the forces of death are indeed stronger than the forces of life, or indeed if the forces of good, in the world, are indeed stronger than the forces of darkness.]

 

After all it’s not even so clear to us down here that there is a heavenly court.

It’s not so clear that there is anything beyond the maggots that are the eventual fate of all mortal flesh, even back in Biblical times .

 

It’s an argument our tradition has engaged in over time and across distance.

 

When Jacob hears that his favoured son, Joseph has been devoured by wild animals he is bereft.

He speaks of his death, he speaks of going down to Sheol.

It’s the first time the Bible has spoken of what happens in the death, the first time this word has appeared in the Bible, and it prompts rabbinic comment.

Rashi says – Sheol is a grave – dark, closed, over.

Ibn Ezra castigates one of the great early translations of the Bible into Aramaic for suggesting Sheol could be understood as some kind of after-life.

He cites a verse from Isaiah^[1]

 

For Sheol cannot praise you, death can not celebrate you; they who go down into the pit cannot hope for your truth.

 

This is death as a pit, dark, hopeless, beyond the reach of life and of love.

The end.

 

But there are whispers of something other than the utter bleakness of Sheol that begin to emerge in the prophetic books – elsewhere in Isaiah the prophet suggests,

 

Thy dead shall live, awake and sing you who dwell in the dust, for your dew is as the dew of light and the earth shall bring to life the shades.^[2]

 

By the time of the Talmud, a panoply of differing views present themselves. At one point the Rabbis paint a picture of a great feast in the world to come where King David himself will take the cup of wine for grace.^[3]

 

Elsewhere more rational voices have articulated less corporeal images.

Maimonides, basing himself on a different section of the Talmud, suggests the world to come will be marked by the righteous basking in the radiance of the divine presence, void of body with [nothing surviving death but] the disembodied souls of the righteous, just like ministering angels.^[4]

 

Through time and space we Jews have argued about whether, after our death, we are to be involved a physical resurrection or just a survival of the spirit,^[5] whether any resurrection will be permanent or temporary,^[6] whether we have but this life in which to perfect ourselves or whether we will be granted with, or punished by another gilgul ­– reincarnation.^[7] We have argued about the nature of Heaven and about whether there will indeed be a hell with punishments or merely the deprivations of the heavenly.^[8]

 

Maimonides suggests that our ability to understand what happens after death can be compared to a blind person’s ability to appreciate colour,^[9] it’s perhaps his only non-controversial utterance on the whole subject of what happens after we die.

 

But for all the argument, and disagreement it wouldn’t be correct to say that Judaism just throws up her hands and shrugs in the face of this unknowable beyond. Modern Jews of every theological and denominational hue have largely divested ourselves of what Will Herberg called the ‘pseudo-biological fantasies’ of some of our earlier and more graphic predecessors, but we can’t let go of a belief in something that conquers death, something that stands on the other side of the end of our mortal reach.

 

We refuse to allow this world, these lives, the lives we remember, most especially on this day

We refuse to allow their deaths to be The End.

We refuse to give up on those who have passed away.

We refuse to let go when we stand and commemorate, when we light candles, when we give tzedakah, when we cry, when we call our loved ones zichrono l’vracha – may their memory by a blessing.

We refuse to let death conquer life.

What is it that binds us so tightly to this refusal to give the death the last laugh?

I think it is a position we take as a matter of faith.

 

This is our founder Rabbi, Louis Jacobs, in his tour-de-force survey of Principles of The Jewish Faith,

 

The strongest argument for [something existing beyond death] is that God is good and will not allow His creatures to spend their lives in efforts at attaining goodness and perfection only to be snuffed out like a candle. Men may work at improving the conditions of life here on earth and earn the blessings of posterity, but posterity itself will die. The earth itself will one day become inhospitable to life and all man’s dreams and achievements will vanish like smoke. Shakespeare’s vision of the ‘cloud-capped towers’ is true. Of what use is man’s elevated soul if this life is all there is? For all Judaism’s teachings on the values of this life can we believe that God, who created this wonderful world, will allow man to die forever with his spiritual powers at the best only just beginning to develop? Judaism never tires of assures us of the justice of God, but how can this justice be realised unless all who have striven for the good eventually find it?^[10]

 

For Rabbi Jacobs this conviction that something outlasts death is predicated on the belief that God is indeed good and kind.

If God is indeed ultimate good then, indeed, there must be something other than Sheol and its attendant maggots.

But we should be brave enough to ask the question that Louis’ articulation begs.

But who is to say God is good, who is to say that justice will, in the end, win out over the powers of chaos or destruction? Looking at the devastation and the heartbreak, the loss and the fear, bearing the memories we bear on a day like this, it’s not so clear cut.

 

And this brings me to where I left off last night.

Last night I spoke about faith – I spoke about what a person can rely upon when there is no material, corporeal substance on which to lean.

And I think we are in the same place today.

When faced with the question of what is there that is capable of competing with death we ultimately come back to a question of belief not so much in the precise nature of an afterlife we can never see, but rather a belief in the nature of the Divine.

 

I suggested that faith whispers its truths to us in a place beyond the material.

And I shared two of faith’s whispers with those who were able to join us last night.

And this is the third whisper, the third credo of my belief.

 

Hodu ladonai Ki tov, ki leolam hasdo

Praise God for God is good, God’s loving kindness is eternal.

 

The verse appears a number of times in the Book of Psalms, but I have in mind its appearance as the first and last lines in Psalm 136. Indeed the second half of the verse – the piece about God’s eternal loving kindness appears in every line of the Psalm. Every line adumbrates one great success of God or another and then in comes the chorus ki leolam hasdo.

 

For God brought Israel out of Egypt; ki leolam hasdo;

With a strong hand, and an outstretched arm; ki leolam hasdo

For God who parted the Red Sea ki leolam hasdo;

And lead Israel through it; ki leolam hasdo.

And on we go until we end were we began

Praise God for God is good, ki leolam hasdo

 

I don’t think it is supposed to be theologically complicated. I don’t think this is a Psalm forged in the furnace of the attempt to square a belief in a good, just and kind God with our experience of death, brokenness and loss.

But, nebach, I encounter this Psalm torn. Because too often when I sing it, or hear it, there is another psalm ringing around inside my mind; an unwritten Psalm –heretical, dark and desperately sad.

 

Hodu L’Adonai ki tov Ki leolam hasdo

For all the parents who passed away before their children were ready to let go

For all the loved ones who passed away leaving their lovers behind

 

And the worst line of all

 

For all the children who passed away in the lives of their parents.

 

And it’s hard, bitterly irreducible hard, to end this unwritten psalm

 

Hodu L’Adonai ki tov Ki leolam hasdo

Praise God for God is good, God’s loving kindness is eternal.

 

And I’m scared to measure up the respective load-weights of good and bad in this world.

I’m scared to put on one side of the scale all the miracles and goodness which the Lord my God has performed for my ancestors and I, and then set on the opposing scale all the loss and the heartbreak.

I can’t sing Psalm 136 as a function of my experience of the material world.

And so I don’t.

I sing the Psalm as an act of faith.

As an act of faith I proclaim that God is good and just and fair and all the rest of it.

And as an act of faith I refuse to believe that this world is the only stage on which our lives, our essence, will be played out.

This third whisper of faith provides something on which I can build not only a relationship with God, but also a relationship with my own life – and its aftermath, as well as a relationship with the lives of those I have loved and lost.

 

Again, it’s not a claim that bears proof.

But in a world of faith the belief in the power of the good and the kind in the face of the experience of loss and destruction underpins the belief in a world to come – a life beyond. It underpins a notion that some things are indeed more powerful than death.

It’s possible, I suppose, to believe in the power of good above experience of destruction without giving the label of ‘God’ to that belief, but I think that is merely semantic. To believe in the power of goodness and meaning over the power of death is, I think, to believe in the goodness of the Holy Blessed One.

 

I don’t know what happens when we die, when I will die.

I can’t count the number of angels on the pin, or the levels of heaven or hell.

I can only lean on a belief that there is something beyond this.

I can only have faith in the notion that despite all the loss, the power of good, and decency, the power of love and kindness are stronger.

Even despite all this, I believe.

---

^[1] 38:18

^[2] 26:19

^[3] Pes 119b

^[4] MT Tesh 8, based on Ber 17a

^[5] Jacobs, Principles of the Jewish Faith suggests that Maimonedes, Seliger (with an approbation of Rav Kook) and Hertz can be counted among those who, at the very east, are deeply uncomfortable with notions of physical resurrection, preferring instead the Aristotelian notion of spiritual immortality. Hertz suggests that Ha-Levi can be counted in this group too, though Jacobs isn’t convinced.

^[6] Maimonedes Maamar Tehiyat HaMaetim vs Nachmanides Shaar Ha Gemul

^[7] Luria, see Vital Shaar Ha-Gilgul

^[8] Nachmanides Shaar Ha Gemul vs Maimonedes Maamar Tehiyat HaMaetim. See also Jacobs’ discussion of Dessler’s use of images of hellish flame and fury. (loc cit p.431)

^[9] See Jacobs p.451 and sources cited there

^[10] Principles p. 449

Dying Well, Debbie Purdy and the Shema

Week when read Shema

Want to talk about death.

Warn

 

From the Talmud

When R. Akiba was taken out for execution, it was the hour for the recital of the Shema’, and while they combed his flesh with iron combs, he was accepting upon himself the kingship of heaven. His disciples said to him: Our teacher, are you prepared to accept the Kingship of Heaven even now?

He said to them: All my days I have been troubled by this verse, bcol nafshechah ‘you should love God with all thy soul’, [which I finally understand to mean, you have the love God,] ‘even if He takes thy soul’. And now I have the opportunity of fulfilling this? Shall I not fulfil it? He prolonged the word ehad as he died, and died saying it. A heavenly voice went forth and proclaimed, ‘Happy are you Akiba, that your soul has departed with the word ehad!’^[1]

 

This recitation of the Shema is the classic death-scene of the Rabbinic period.

What the Rabbis would consider the ultimate a good death.

And there are others.

 

Moses, who, we are told, dies with the kiss of God – the original kiss of death.

And Rav Hiyya who is trapped by the angel of death who appears at his door begging for bread. First the great Rabbi sends out a minion. The angel insists Rav Hiyya hiself comes out.

He angel reveals himself to the Rabbi and the Rabbi amtzei lei nafshei - ‘yields his soul’^[2]

 

Judaism knows such a thing as a good death.

 

Reflecting on this in the context of the reports of last ever decision of the House of Lords, sitting as a court.

Debbie Purdy, who has MS, wanted to get the Director of Public Prosecutions, to be clear about what her husband could and could not do if he wished to safeguard himself from prosecution if he assisted his wife in taking her own life.

And the Highest Court in the land has agreed that the DPP has an obligation to set out the situations in which it would or would not consider prosecuting someone who assisted a relative to die in what has been referred to as ‘circumstances of compassionate assisted suicide.’

 

It appears that religious pressure groups as revolting and protesting this decision.

Protesting at what they see is the legal world removing the absolute sanctity of life.

But, and it’s not for the first time, I find myself siding entirely on the opposite side of the argument from these so-called religious pressure groups.

And for entirely religious reasons.

 

Of course start from position that Jews love life and life takes pre-eminence over much else

 

1. Leviticus 18:5

And you shall keep the laws and ordinances and by doing them, live by them. I am GOD.

Sifra

And not die by them.

 

Every human life is created in the image of God and you don’t need to tell a Jew what can happen when governments begin to suggest that some lives are worth more than others.

You don’t need to tell a Jew about the dangers of genocidal euthanasia.

 

But, and it is a huge BUT, we cannot view every religious decision from the crucible of Auschwitz.

Because the reality of our lives, and our deaths, thankfully free of the horrors of genocidal mania, is that end of life is complex.

 

Some nine years ago, right around this time of year, I was embarked on a training scheme at New York Presbyterian Hospital, as a Chaplain, and I would wander the wards and the waiting rooms listening to those who were suffering, and their loved ones.

I encountered a medical specialism I had never heard of before – the palliative care consultant whose job was not to cure the patient, but rather reduce pain, suffering, severity of symptoms.

And sometimes choosing to alleviate the severity of symptoms means that death will come on more quickly than if one continued to aggressively treat for cure.

 

I became involved in many of these conversations and found them always deeply moving, holy encounters.

Palliative care physicians, in my experience, are men and women of deep and serious spirituality. They spend a lot of time experiencing life and death at their sharpest.

And they care deeply. And they never walk away.

In many cases, though palliative care is of course more broad than this, they are trying to give their patients a good death when the other choice is not more life, but a worse death.

 

I’m aware that for many of us these terms are can feel meaningless.

If we’ve never been in these hospital rooms.

If we’ve never been part of these conversations on behalf of our loved ones.

We would rather pretend that these conversations don’t exist.

We would rather pretend that decisions never have to be taken.

And there is nothing wrong with a bit of this kind of innocence.

But the reality, like the Angel of death who came to visit Rabbi Hiyya is not easily put off.

 

Another tale, from the Talmud.

This one tells of the death of Yehudah ha-Nasi, known as Rebbi.

He died at the start of the C3.

 

On the day Rebbi died the Rabbis decreed a public fast and offered prayers for heavenly mercy. They announced that whoever said Rebbi was dead would be stabbed with a sword. Rebbi's handmaid went up to the roof and prayed, ‘The heavenly want Rebbi and the earthly want Rebbi. May it be Your will that the earthly overpower the heavenly.’

[The handmaid is, in contemporary terms praying for cure, but the story goes on]

When, however, she saw how often he had to go to the toilet, and take off the tefilin and put on the tefilin in pain, she said, ‘May it be your will that the heavenly overpower the earthly.’

[The handmaid starts to pray for Rebbi to be taken, she’s making a judgement about the quality of his life, at the end of his life]

And the Rabbis kept on with their prayer for mercy, she took a jar and threw it down from the roof to the ground. They ceased and the soul of Rebbi departed.^[3]

 

I hope the technicalities of the story don’t detract from its message.

To me it feels like hospital bed-side with the patient and the one person who is able to understand what the patient is going through.

And the world outside refusing to see that the end of the patient’s life is coming.

I’m sure it’s a message poor

 

It’s a message about offering care and companionship to a person who is dyeing.

It’s a message about being willing to overturn a well meaning, but ultimately unhelpful piety of the praying students, replacing it with another kind of piety; one more dark, less obviously safe from heavenly prosecution, but ultimately a better kind of piety.

 

Let me be clear I am certainly not advocating open season on anyone who might have a disability, but who is not facing the end of their life.

I am certainly not advocating that, as soon as an end of life issue appears on the medical horizon cure care should be abandoned.

I am not even advocating doing away with the crime of assisted suicide. I am quite sure that certain acts, currently criminalised under the 1961 Suicide Act should remain criminal.

But not every act of accompanying a dyeing person on their last steps in this world should be criminal.

Certainly not every act of accompanying a dyeing person on their last steps is halachically illegitimate.^[4]

This last statement is not only one I feel able to make from a halachic perspective, but also from an emotional perspective, a spiritual one.

 

The notion of standing with a person who is dyeing is incredibly important.

So many Jewish attitudes towards end of life are shaped by this notion of providing an escort.

The great mitzvah in the context of illness is bikkur holim – visiting, turning up, escorting a person through illness even if, especially if cure is not a possibility.

Escort – in Hebrew the term would be leviyah – the very term we use for a funeral.

 

Maybe this explains why the shema has come to so connected with the last moments in life.

As we are forced to leave behind those who have accompanied us on this planet, so we place our lives in the hands of God who we pray will accompany us in the World to Come.

 

 

One last thing.

When I began my Chaplaincy training we were asked to write down some learning objectives.

I wrote, and I dug out the paper this week, that I wanted to know what it meant to die a good death. How it was possible.

 

I remember my supervisor, a woman of incredible insight, responding, that people tend to die the way they live.

She wasn’t saying that good people live longer – or that good people don’t get ill or injured.

But rather that when the time comes to accept that which must be accepted people who have lived well find ways to do this well too.

In my experience since then it’s an insight that has occasionally failed, but it remains one of the most important observations I know, and certainly one well worth sharing here, amongst the living.

To die well, one must first learn how to live well.

 

Shabbat shalom

 

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^[1] Brachot 61b

^[2] Moed Katan 28a

^[3] Ketubot 104a

^[4] AZ 18a, Sefer Hasisim 234, AZ 27a and Tosafot ad loc. DHM Le Chai Shah

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