Rabbi ari lev: I Am Mortal
Kol Nidre 5779
September 18, 2018
This is the year I realized I am mortal.
To say this is a kind of a confession unto itself.
In every draft of this Dvar Torah I have accidentally typed,
'I realized I was mortal,' in the past tense.
My subconscious somehow hoping its a passing state,
rather than a immutable truth.
This is the year that a friend my age died a violent and traumatic death. It really shook me. The randomness of his death was scary and made me scared of death. The conditions of my life have meant that I have lived this long without having seen myself as quite so vulnerable to death.
Then exactly one month ago tonight, I turned 36 years old.
It's true, on a good day I am twice as old as I look.
In Jewish tradition the number 18 corresponds to the Hebrew letters Het and Yud, which spell the word life.
18 and all its multiples are considered good luck, symbols of life.
And so it should seem that might feel like this past birthday came with an infusion of life, an everlasting elixir of sorts.
But oh the contrary. Approaching this symbolic age was like putting a highlighter on a timeline that I had otherwise been ignoring existed altogether.
Like a deer in the headlights of mortality, I decided to spend my summer reading books about death. Most notably the best selling memoir When Breath Becomes Air, written by the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who at the symbolic age of 36, months before graduating from medical residency, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. All of his dreams evaporate and he is called to describe the experience of living knowing you are about to die.
On Rosh Hashanah "...the great horn sounds in earnest one hundred times. The time of transformation is upon us. The world is once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born. The gate between heaven and earth cracks open. The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.
But you don’t know which one.”
Is that not why we are all here tonight,
packed into this aging building, reciting ancient words, pleading for our lives.
Yom Kippur is fundamentally death's dress rehearsal.
Rabbi Alan Lew, a sage of the 21st century, who himself died of a sudden heart attack while on his daily run, writes:
"For the next twenty-four hours you rehearse your own death. You wear a shroud and, like a dead person, you neither eat nor drink nor fornicate. [You recite one final shema] and summon the desperate strength of life’s last moments."
This focus on death is really more of a laser focus on life - its fragility, its evanescence - which forces us to really ask ourselves, at any age:
Whom do I want to be in the time I have left?
But how much time do we have left?
Dr. Paul Kalanithi writes,
"The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months of years I had left. Tell me three months, I'd spend time with my family. Tell me one year, I'd write a book. Give me ten, I'd get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn't help:
What was I supposed to do with that one day?" (161-2)
The beloved R' Simcha Bunim is perhaps most famous for using the pockets of his garments in order to embody the paradox of our existence.
As Martin Buber recounts, Reb Simcha Bunim would teach:
Everyone must have two pockets, with a note in each pocket, so that they can reach into the one or the other, depending on the need.
When feeling lowly and depressed, discouraged or disconsolate, one should reach into the right pocket, and, there, find the words: "For my sake was the world created."
But when feeling high and mighty one should reach into the left pocket, and find the words: "I am but dust and ashes."
There are few Hasidic teachings that are as universally understood, as thoroughly resonant as the Torah of Reb Simcha Bunim. Almost intuitively, we know there are moments in our lives where we need to be reminded that we are not as significant as we might have imagined. And, conversely, we need to have the audacity to believe that our presence here is of fundamental importance. To carry these two perspectives with us in our daily travels, might give us the balance and the integration that we strive for. [1]
But it does not absolve the deeper knowing that our existence, at least this particular convergence of cells and stories, is temporary.
The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.
But you don't know which one.
In the words of Rabbi Sharon Brous, in a sermon she delivered years ago to Ikar, her Los Angeles congregation:
"STOP. EVERYTHING. NOW. Stop everything right now. And ask yourself: Who am I? Is this who you want to be in the world? I know how busy we all are... But High Holy Days come and say: 'Hit pause. This is the only life that you are given... If your narrative is choking you, or even just inhibiting you, do something about it.'"
In truth, this is much how I experienced my 36th birthday. With the laser focused on life, I was able to see in great relief the inevitability of death.
Death is not only inevitably for humans,
Death is a universal truth.
From cells to stars, everything dies in the end.
We can look around with a childlike wonder and note the glimmerings of mortality surrounding us - dead leaves, insects, pets, disappearing grandparents, grieving parents, endless acres of cemetery tombstones.
There have been five mass extinctions on Planet Earth.
Throughout the history of life on earth, species have risen and died off over and over again.
99.9% of all species that have ever lived are gone.
At once,
We are but dust and ashes.
And we must ask ourselves, for what great purpose was I created?
Around this time last year I was talking with a Kol Tzedek member whose grandmother was dying. And she remarked that what upset her most was the way our culture's fear of death was denying her grandmother the dignity of dying peacefully.
In the words of Rebbe Nahman, "The moment of dying itself can be as painless as removing a hair from a cup of milk. The fear of death though, is eminently more painful." [2]
Confronting my own mortality has certainly surfaced my own fear of death.
Reading through the final page of When Breath Becomes Air I wept until my shirt was soaked through. As though I was grieving my own life.
His mortality showed me mine.
After receiving his diagnosis, Paul Kalanithi and his wife decide to have a child. She is eight months old when he dies. He writes:
"There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
The message is simple:
When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing." (199)
Yom Kippur is precisely this.
One of the times in our lives, built into our yearly spiritual journey,
in which we are called to give an account of ourselves.
Not largely for the purpose of external judgement, contrary to what the liturgy suggests, but in search of sated joy.
A kind of peace that comes with fully living in gratitude for what we have, in our present experience.
It would be nearly impossible to always live with the conscious realization that we might die in an hour. But, if we ignore that idea all the time, we do so at our own peril. And in some ways, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about that: At least sometimes, we have to stop and realize: You might not live beyond tonight. And what happens then?
You can't live like that all the time. But we need to realize this some of the time. Once a year, we are called to reckon with our deepest vulnerability, our mortality. To know that everything and everyone we love, our parents, our partners, our children, ourselves, will die. And in most cases, we have no control, no way of knowing when. ]
By confronting death once a year, we are meant to see death as deeply natural and intertwined with life. As always present and possible. Like any good rehearsal, it is meant to help us be less nervous when the big day comes. Perhaps we rehearse our death so that we will fear it less, both for ourselves and the loved ones for whom we care in their dying moments.
Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her new book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer,
contemporary society is "so deeply invested in the idea of an individual conscious self that it becomes both logically and emotionally impossible to think of a world without it." And yet, "there is one time-honored salve for the anxiety of approaching self-dissolution...the submergence of oneself into something 'larger than oneself.'"
Which is precisely why we are here tonight.
To submerge ourselves in something larger than ourselves and in so doing to develop a more courageous connection to life.
In truth, the Torah never says anything about death in relationship to Yom Kippur. In fact it never says anything about fasting or wearing white or not having sex. The only thing the Torah says is that "the tenth day of the seventh month shall be a day of atonement. On it we should afflict ourselves." We should come to an awareness of our own suffering.
Perhaps for the rabbis, our greatest affliction is our challenging relationship with death. Shifting our orientation to death is also about transforming our relationship to suffering, our own and others.
Writer Soha Al-Jurf shares this reflection on death and suffering:
"Why suicide?” A monk asks her. "Because you think it would end the suffering?"
"Well, yes," Soha replies. "If you cease to exist, you end the suffering."
The monk nods a few times. Pauses. Then he says, "Are you sure...?"
"In that moment of silence," Soha writes, "I started to understand something about spiritual practice and my time here on earth: whether I like it or not, there is nothing for me to do with my suffering, except to transform it. And there is nowhere for me to be right now, except here.”
Yom Kippur is an opportunity to confront our greatest vulnerabilities and in so doing allow us to become more fully human.
And we can't do this in isolation. We need each other.
The Talmud explains it this way:
Rabbi Yoḥanan's student, Rabbi Ḥiyya, fell ill.
Rabbi Yoḥanan visited him and said to him:
Is your suffering serving you?
Rabbi Ḥiyya replies: No.
Rabbi Yoḥanan says: Then give me your hand.
Rabbi Ḥiyya gave him his hand, and Rabbi Yoḥanan stands him up and restores him to health.
Subsequently, Rabbi Yoḥanan fell ill. Rabbi Ḥanina went to visit him and inquired about his relationship to suffering. Is it serving you?
Rabbi Yoḥanan replies: No.
Rabbi Ḥanina says to him: Then give me your hand.
They clasp hands and Rabbi Ḥanina stands him up and restores him to health.
The Talmud asks:
Why did Rabbi Yoḥanan wait for Rabbi Ḥanina to restore him to health?
If he was able to heal his student Rabbi Hiyya, why can’t Rabbi Yoḥanan heal himself.
To which the Talmud answers, They say: A prisoner cannot free themself from prison, but depends on others to release them from their shackles.
This is ultimately why we are here tonight.
To release each other from the shackles of habit and heart,
from the fear of death, from the suffering we inflict upon ourselves.
To let the magnetic force of ritual pull us closer to ourselves and each other;
To reflect on our humanity and our purpose.
To remember that we need each other in order to heal and become our most whole selves.
To rehearse our death and in so doing reclaim our lives.
Birth is a beginning and death a destination;
But life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage,
Made stage by stage...To life everlasting. [3]
Gmar Hatimah Tova,
May we all be sealed for life.
[1] Adapted from the words of Rabbi Jordan Braunig in his Elul Prompts.
[2] B.T. Moed Katan 28a.
[3] "Birth is a beginning" by Rabbi Alvin Fine.
September 18, 2018
This is the year I realized I am mortal.
To say this is a kind of a confession unto itself.
In every draft of this Dvar Torah I have accidentally typed,
'I realized I was mortal,' in the past tense.
My subconscious somehow hoping its a passing state,
rather than a immutable truth.
This is the year that a friend my age died a violent and traumatic death. It really shook me. The randomness of his death was scary and made me scared of death. The conditions of my life have meant that I have lived this long without having seen myself as quite so vulnerable to death.
Then exactly one month ago tonight, I turned 36 years old.
It's true, on a good day I am twice as old as I look.
In Jewish tradition the number 18 corresponds to the Hebrew letters Het and Yud, which spell the word life.
18 and all its multiples are considered good luck, symbols of life.
And so it should seem that might feel like this past birthday came with an infusion of life, an everlasting elixir of sorts.
But oh the contrary. Approaching this symbolic age was like putting a highlighter on a timeline that I had otherwise been ignoring existed altogether.
Like a deer in the headlights of mortality, I decided to spend my summer reading books about death. Most notably the best selling memoir When Breath Becomes Air, written by the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who at the symbolic age of 36, months before graduating from medical residency, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. All of his dreams evaporate and he is called to describe the experience of living knowing you are about to die.
On Rosh Hashanah "...the great horn sounds in earnest one hundred times. The time of transformation is upon us. The world is once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born. The gate between heaven and earth cracks open. The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.
But you don’t know which one.”
Is that not why we are all here tonight,
packed into this aging building, reciting ancient words, pleading for our lives.
Yom Kippur is fundamentally death's dress rehearsal.
Rabbi Alan Lew, a sage of the 21st century, who himself died of a sudden heart attack while on his daily run, writes:
"For the next twenty-four hours you rehearse your own death. You wear a shroud and, like a dead person, you neither eat nor drink nor fornicate. [You recite one final shema] and summon the desperate strength of life’s last moments."
This focus on death is really more of a laser focus on life - its fragility, its evanescence - which forces us to really ask ourselves, at any age:
Whom do I want to be in the time I have left?
But how much time do we have left?
Dr. Paul Kalanithi writes,
"The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months of years I had left. Tell me three months, I'd spend time with my family. Tell me one year, I'd write a book. Give me ten, I'd get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn't help:
What was I supposed to do with that one day?" (161-2)
The beloved R' Simcha Bunim is perhaps most famous for using the pockets of his garments in order to embody the paradox of our existence.
As Martin Buber recounts, Reb Simcha Bunim would teach:
Everyone must have two pockets, with a note in each pocket, so that they can reach into the one or the other, depending on the need.
When feeling lowly and depressed, discouraged or disconsolate, one should reach into the right pocket, and, there, find the words: "For my sake was the world created."
But when feeling high and mighty one should reach into the left pocket, and find the words: "I am but dust and ashes."
There are few Hasidic teachings that are as universally understood, as thoroughly resonant as the Torah of Reb Simcha Bunim. Almost intuitively, we know there are moments in our lives where we need to be reminded that we are not as significant as we might have imagined. And, conversely, we need to have the audacity to believe that our presence here is of fundamental importance. To carry these two perspectives with us in our daily travels, might give us the balance and the integration that we strive for. [1]
But it does not absolve the deeper knowing that our existence, at least this particular convergence of cells and stories, is temporary.
The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.
But you don't know which one.
In the words of Rabbi Sharon Brous, in a sermon she delivered years ago to Ikar, her Los Angeles congregation:
"STOP. EVERYTHING. NOW. Stop everything right now. And ask yourself: Who am I? Is this who you want to be in the world? I know how busy we all are... But High Holy Days come and say: 'Hit pause. This is the only life that you are given... If your narrative is choking you, or even just inhibiting you, do something about it.'"
In truth, this is much how I experienced my 36th birthday. With the laser focused on life, I was able to see in great relief the inevitability of death.
Death is not only inevitably for humans,
Death is a universal truth.
From cells to stars, everything dies in the end.
We can look around with a childlike wonder and note the glimmerings of mortality surrounding us - dead leaves, insects, pets, disappearing grandparents, grieving parents, endless acres of cemetery tombstones.
There have been five mass extinctions on Planet Earth.
Throughout the history of life on earth, species have risen and died off over and over again.
99.9% of all species that have ever lived are gone.
At once,
We are but dust and ashes.
And we must ask ourselves, for what great purpose was I created?
Around this time last year I was talking with a Kol Tzedek member whose grandmother was dying. And she remarked that what upset her most was the way our culture's fear of death was denying her grandmother the dignity of dying peacefully.
In the words of Rebbe Nahman, "The moment of dying itself can be as painless as removing a hair from a cup of milk. The fear of death though, is eminently more painful." [2]
Confronting my own mortality has certainly surfaced my own fear of death.
Reading through the final page of When Breath Becomes Air I wept until my shirt was soaked through. As though I was grieving my own life.
His mortality showed me mine.
After receiving his diagnosis, Paul Kalanithi and his wife decide to have a child. She is eight months old when he dies. He writes:
"There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
The message is simple:
When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing." (199)
Yom Kippur is precisely this.
One of the times in our lives, built into our yearly spiritual journey,
in which we are called to give an account of ourselves.
Not largely for the purpose of external judgement, contrary to what the liturgy suggests, but in search of sated joy.
A kind of peace that comes with fully living in gratitude for what we have, in our present experience.
It would be nearly impossible to always live with the conscious realization that we might die in an hour. But, if we ignore that idea all the time, we do so at our own peril. And in some ways, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about that: At least sometimes, we have to stop and realize: You might not live beyond tonight. And what happens then?
You can't live like that all the time. But we need to realize this some of the time. Once a year, we are called to reckon with our deepest vulnerability, our mortality. To know that everything and everyone we love, our parents, our partners, our children, ourselves, will die. And in most cases, we have no control, no way of knowing when. ]
By confronting death once a year, we are meant to see death as deeply natural and intertwined with life. As always present and possible. Like any good rehearsal, it is meant to help us be less nervous when the big day comes. Perhaps we rehearse our death so that we will fear it less, both for ourselves and the loved ones for whom we care in their dying moments.
Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her new book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer,
contemporary society is "so deeply invested in the idea of an individual conscious self that it becomes both logically and emotionally impossible to think of a world without it." And yet, "there is one time-honored salve for the anxiety of approaching self-dissolution...the submergence of oneself into something 'larger than oneself.'"
Which is precisely why we are here tonight.
To submerge ourselves in something larger than ourselves and in so doing to develop a more courageous connection to life.
In truth, the Torah never says anything about death in relationship to Yom Kippur. In fact it never says anything about fasting or wearing white or not having sex. The only thing the Torah says is that "the tenth day of the seventh month shall be a day of atonement. On it we should afflict ourselves." We should come to an awareness of our own suffering.
Perhaps for the rabbis, our greatest affliction is our challenging relationship with death. Shifting our orientation to death is also about transforming our relationship to suffering, our own and others.
Writer Soha Al-Jurf shares this reflection on death and suffering:
"Why suicide?” A monk asks her. "Because you think it would end the suffering?"
"Well, yes," Soha replies. "If you cease to exist, you end the suffering."
The monk nods a few times. Pauses. Then he says, "Are you sure...?"
"In that moment of silence," Soha writes, "I started to understand something about spiritual practice and my time here on earth: whether I like it or not, there is nothing for me to do with my suffering, except to transform it. And there is nowhere for me to be right now, except here.”
Yom Kippur is an opportunity to confront our greatest vulnerabilities and in so doing allow us to become more fully human.
And we can't do this in isolation. We need each other.
The Talmud explains it this way:
Rabbi Yoḥanan's student, Rabbi Ḥiyya, fell ill.
Rabbi Yoḥanan visited him and said to him:
Is your suffering serving you?
Rabbi Ḥiyya replies: No.
Rabbi Yoḥanan says: Then give me your hand.
Rabbi Ḥiyya gave him his hand, and Rabbi Yoḥanan stands him up and restores him to health.
Subsequently, Rabbi Yoḥanan fell ill. Rabbi Ḥanina went to visit him and inquired about his relationship to suffering. Is it serving you?
Rabbi Yoḥanan replies: No.
Rabbi Ḥanina says to him: Then give me your hand.
They clasp hands and Rabbi Ḥanina stands him up and restores him to health.
The Talmud asks:
Why did Rabbi Yoḥanan wait for Rabbi Ḥanina to restore him to health?
If he was able to heal his student Rabbi Hiyya, why can’t Rabbi Yoḥanan heal himself.
To which the Talmud answers, They say: A prisoner cannot free themself from prison, but depends on others to release them from their shackles.
This is ultimately why we are here tonight.
To release each other from the shackles of habit and heart,
from the fear of death, from the suffering we inflict upon ourselves.
To let the magnetic force of ritual pull us closer to ourselves and each other;
To reflect on our humanity and our purpose.
To remember that we need each other in order to heal and become our most whole selves.
To rehearse our death and in so doing reclaim our lives.
Birth is a beginning and death a destination;
But life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage,
Made stage by stage...To life everlasting. [3]
Gmar Hatimah Tova,
May we all be sealed for life.
[1] Adapted from the words of Rabbi Jordan Braunig in his Elul Prompts.
[2] B.T. Moed Katan 28a.
[3] "Birth is a beginning" by Rabbi Alvin Fine.