September 21, 2007
10 Tishrei 5768
Mortality and Meaning
This past summer, I interned as a chaplain at a hospital in Seattle. I learned a powerful lesson from a pamphlet available in the pastoral care department, entitled Helping a Child Grieve and Grow. I used this pamphlet several times during the summer to help families support their grieving children. It said:
A wise writer once insisted that only death makes love possible. Because human life is fragile, it is precious. Because an individual makes but one appearance on this earth, his or her uniqueness must be cherished.Unlike God’s other creations, we humans live with the knowledge that our lives will come to an end. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, I don’t believe they brought death into the world – I believe they became aware of it. A curse at first, this morose realization was also a blessing in disguise. For with the knowledge of death came a new understanding of life: since it is finite, every moment counts. Since it is short, it is precious. In his book The Doctor and the Soul, psychologist Victor Frankl explains:
Do you really want to protect a child from discovering that truth?
How often we hear the argument that death does away with the meaning of life altogether. That in the end all man’s works are meaningless, since death ultimately destroys them. Now, does death really decrease the meaningfulness of life? On the contrary. For what would our lives be like if they were not finite in time, but infinite? If we were immortal, we could legitimately postpone every action forever. It would be of no consequence whether or not we did a thing now; every act might just as well be done tomorrow or the day after or a year from now or ten years hence. But in the face of death as absolute finis to our future and boundary to our possibilities, we are under the imperative of utilizing our lifetimes to the utmost… Finality, temporality, is therefore not only an essential characteristic of human life, but also a real factor in its meaningfulness….In one of those bittersweet ironies of the human condition, death becomes a teacher, a guide, an inspiration, even. When we ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and knew death, a new mandate came into the world: embrace life. God’s command to Adam and Eve – Be fruitful and multiply! – is an answer to the question of death. Knowing that their singular lives would come to an end, the symbolic first human beings were charged to leave something of themselves behind in this world. What legacy of theirs would be untouched by death, an immortal gift to the next generation, and the next…?
We are human beings like Adam and Eve, and we inherited those eternal questions. The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, speaks of “constructions of symbolic immortality” to describe the ways we make lasting meaning in the world. For many, children carry on that undying spark into the future; for some, their contributions to society; and for others, their community, which outlives its individual members. Each of these – children, contribution, community – puts us in contact with eternity, in relationship with immortality, in touch with meaning.
* * *
As we gather today as a community of meaning-seekers, Yom Kippur urges us to confront these questions again. The reminders of mortality are pervasive. The Unetaneh Tokef prayer and others besiege us with images of God’s Book of Life and Death, of who shall perish by water and who by fire. The fast gives us the sense of a withered body, freed as in death from the need for physical sustenance. Kol Nidrei asks for us to be absolved of vows we are unable to fulfill, acknowledging the possibility that our life might end before we live up to our promises. When we stand before the ark for this prayer, we remove all the Torah scrolls. The aron kodesh – the holy ark – without the holy sifrei Torah in it, becomes merely an aron – which is also the Hebrew word for "coffin." On Erev Yom Kippur we stand with the support of our community and stare into our own grave.
In this light, the Day of Atonement feels like a rehearsal for the last day of our life. The effect could be despair, unless we can see this day as an unexpected gift: a God’s-eye view of our life from its end. One day a year, we stare death in the face. And it turns out that death’s face is a mirror. When we stare into it, we get the opportunity to evaluate our lives as if from our final day. On that day, we will ask in the past tense what we are privileged today to ask in the present: are we living the life we should, the life we want, for ourselves and those around us?
The Sages used to say, “Repent one day before you die” (Avot 2:15). Their disciples countered skeptically, “But how can we possibly know when that day will come?” “Exactly,” the Sages replied, “Therefore repent every day, and when your last day comes, you will be ready” (adapted from BT Shabbat 153a).
* * *
One day a year of immersing ourselves in this heavy death imagery may be enough. Judaism is obsessed with life, not death, and our tradition repeatedly urges us to “choose life” for ourselves and our children, as we will read in the Torah portion tomorrow morning.
Again, the liturgy is a great teacher. As we finish the prayers for Yom Kippur, the quiet of death is shattered by the rousing sound of the shofar. As one midrash explains, the shofar is a symbol of resurrection:
And how does the Holy One, blessed be He, resuscitate the dead in the world to come? We are taught that the Holy One, blessed be He, takes in His hand a Great Shofar . . . and blows it, and its sound goes from one end of the world to the other. (Midrash Aleph Beit D’ Rabbi Akiba 3:31)When the shofar sounds near the end of Yom Kippur tomorrow, we too will be jolted out of our pseudo-death and return to life again. Looking back on our year, the good and the bad, we are called to resurrect the person we have been in our best moments. From the mire of mortality, each of us is reborn with the new year, ready to reach for the elusive embrace of eternity through our relationships and our works.
* * *
In the last week of my chaplaincy internship, I was present with a family while they said final farewells to their beloved Richard as his life support was removed. This 67-year-old man had been well respected in his community for his commitment to the arts and civic life, and in this moment he was surrounded by family and friends. I hope I never forget the image of his wife and three daughters embracing each other and holding his hand as he took his last breaths. Their tears were grief and joy intermingled: grief for losing him, joy for all the blessings that outlived him. Please God, may we all leave behind such a loving legacy.
If we are open to it, Yom Kippur’s glimpse of death may remind us of the preciousness of life. Then may it help us appreciate the sanctity of our relationships with our loved ones and with our communities who give this life its special meaning.
Ken Y’hi ratzon. Gut yontif.
*Special thanks to my teacher Rabbi Larry Hoffman for planting the seed of the idea for this sermon in our Liturgy class on September 6, 2007.
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