Rabbi Janet Marder

October 4, 2007

To Everything There is a Season:  Shemini Atzeret Yizkor 5768

“To Autumn”: by John Keats

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease…”

This is the poem of someone who must have spent hours sitting quietly and looking at what was around him. These opening lines are full of intense images of the earth and its beauties: ripe fruit, swelling gourds, fragrant grapes on the vine, trees heavy with the apple-harvest, plump nuts to be gathered and savored, bees swarming over the last bright flowers, never dreaming that the warm days won’t go on forever.

John Keats lost his father, a stable manager who died in a riding accident, when he was 9 years old. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14. He nursed his beloved brother, Tom, through months of illness before he, too, succumbed to tuberculosis , when John was 23. While he was caring for his brother, Keats immersed himself in poetry, hoping, he said, that the writing would release him from the pain of watching his brother gradually slip away.

The winter that Tom died, Keats met a young woman named Fanny Brawne, fell in love and was engaged to her, but found himself too poor to marry. For five months, in an astonishing burst of creativity, he wrote his greatest poems – including “To Autumn” in September of 1819.

But he himself began feeling unwell – it seemed that he had caught tuberculosis while nursing his brother. Keats put aside his writing for 8 months on the advice of doctors. His lungs began to hemorrhage and in August, 1820, he was told that he could not survive another English winter. A friend went with him to Italy , where Keats spent the last three months of his life -- poor, in pain, and suffering the knowledge that he would never be with the woman he loved. He died in Rome of tuberculosis at the age of 25. In his despair he asked that his grave bear no name – only the words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

His friends’ accounts of Keats’ last days suggest that he died with courage, always thinking of others, and even with occasional flashes of humor.

Yet the epitaph he requested shows us his fear that he would pass away and be forgotten, having accomplished nothing of importance in his few short years.

He could not know that two centuries after his birth we would still be reading the poems he left behind, stirred by the way they juxtapose beautiful images of nature with the steady consciousness of death and decay.

Like Keats’ ode “to Autumn,” the book our Sages gave us to read during Sukkot evokes the bittersweet mingling of joy and sorrow. Ecclesiastes, Kohelet in Hebrew, is autumnal in mood. Written, according to tradition, by King Solomon when he was an old man, it reflects a sensibility that has seen and done everything. It speaks from the end of life, offering a quiet, hard-won wisdom.

“To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”  So begins the third chapter of Kohelet.

A time to be born,

and a time to die;

A time to plant,

a time to pluck up that which is planted;

 A time to kill,

a time to heal;

A time to break down,

a time to build up;

A time to weep,

a time to laugh;

A time to mourn,

a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones,

a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace,

a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek,

a time to lose;

 A time to keep,

a time to let go;

A time to rend,

a time to mend;

A time to keep silence,

a time to speak;

A time to love,

a time to hate;

A time of war,

a time of peace.

Set forth here is the complete arc of a human life, all-encompassing, embracing every experience without judgment. “A time to love, a time to hate” – reflecting, our Sages say, the choices we make to remain in relationships or to end them. “A time of war, a time of peace” – reflecting the circumstances of the larger world beyond our control, the situations we’re born into that shape our life in profound ways.

“ A time to mourn” – that is the public ceremony of grief and remembrance shared with the community. “A time to weep” – that is the private grief we carry within, whose depth no one else could ever suspect. “A time to embrace, a time to refrain from embracing” – words that evoke intimate memories of hugs and kisses we shared with those we loved, and of the times when we rejected those we loved and pushed them away.

Times of celebration and joy, the birth of babies, the birth of new hopes; prosperous times when we built and planted – a home, a garden, a family, a business, a life together. Times when we talked for hours with someone who made us feel safe; times when we could sit together without saying a word, contented in our silence. Times when we danced cheek to cheek with our beloved, sometimes in the privacy of our own kitchen, when there wasn’t even any music playing.

Times when everything fell apart or slipped away or broke down; times of loss, times of separation; times of letting go even when we desperately, desperately wanted to keep holding on. Kohelet has known all of it; he tells us to expect all of it, for these are the times and the seasons of a human life.

And what has he learned, after passing through everything that life has to offer?  A few simple lessons. “Tov shem mi-shemen tov. A good name is better than fragrant oil.” “It is better to listen to a wise man’s reproof than the praise of fools.” “Better a patient spirit than a haughty spirit.” “In a time of good fortune, enjoy the good fortune; in a time of misfortune, reflect.”  “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong” [chapter 7, verses 1,5, 8,14; 9:11].

 A poignant wisdom, embedded in real and concrete things: “Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine with joy, for God has already accepted your works. Let your garments be freshly washed; let your head never lack for oil. Enjoy happiness with the one you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted to you.…Whatever is in your power to do, do with all your might.” [9:7-9]. And as he reaches the end of the book, Kohelet writes: “Sweet is the light. What a delight for the eyes to behold the sun!” [11:7].

On September 21, 1819, John Keats went for a walk near Winchester , where he was then living, already ill and alone. His ode “To Autumn” was written about that walk; so also was this letter, written to his brother George, who had emigrated to America :

“Now the time is beautiful. I take a walk every day for an hour before dinner and this is generally my walk: I go out at the back gate across one street, into the Cathedral yard, which is always interesting; then I pass under the trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the Cathedral, turn to the left under a stone door-way – then I am on the other side of the building….I pass on through two…squares….garnished with grass and shaded with trees. Then I pass through one of the old city gates and then you are in…College-Street through which I pass, and at the end thereof crossing some meadows, and at last a country alley of gardens….Then I pass across St. Cross meadows till you come to the most beautifully clear river.”

Keats had seventeen months to live. As long as he could, he did what was in his power to do. He went outside; he looked carefully at what was around him; he took pleasure in the grass and the trees, the gardens and the meadows, the path that led to the clear flowing river. “How beautiful the season is now,” he wrote in another letter that same day. “How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it…”

He knew that the sun was fading and the warm days would be over soon.  Strolling in the sunshine, he already felt a slight chill in the air, a hint of approaching winter – the last English winter he would know. Still, he savored the day. He came home from his walk and wrote something beautiful – letters to a brother and a friend, a poem that would live on for centuries.

We ponder his words on this warm and golden autumn day; we ponder the words of Kohelet, who learned everything there is to know about the seasons of a human life. Eit laledet v’eit lamut, he wrote. A time to be born, a time to die.  A time to grieve for those who are gone; a time to hold fast to the life that is ours.  A time of anguish and sorrow, loneliness and pain; a time, someday, when it will not hurt so much. A time of peace.

When all is said and done, wrote Kohelet, there is only today. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – how beautiful the season is now. Sweet is the light -- what a delight for the eyes to behold the sun! Whatever is in your power to do, do it with all your might. This is the day that God has made -- let us rejoice and be glad in it.