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Rabbi Janet Marder June 13, 2008 A Letter From Your Rabbi Dear Friend, You don’t talk about it much, but I know that it’s on your mind sometimes. Especially when you go to a funeral. Those are hard for you, I know. As you get older, and your friends get older, there are more and more of them. You always go; you always do your best to extend your support to the bereaved, but it takes a lot out of you. All those losses have to take their toll. So many of your friends, it seems, are facing challenges these days. They’re coping with pain: a bad knee, a bad shoulder, a broken hip – sometimes a serious, debilitating illness. Every day reminds you that they’re not the people they used to be. And you’ve changed too, of course. You try so hard to stay positive. You try, like all of us, to put such thoughts out of your mind. But you’ve had your own pain to deal with, and you can’t escape the thought that your own health is not so good just now. So I know that now and then it crosses your mind, and you find yourself wondering: When will it be? How much time do I have? What will it be like to die? You tell me, sometimes, that you envy people who have faith. “It must be such a comfort to them,” you say. For you, there is no such comfort. You’ve always been a down-to-earth sort of person: practical, matter-of-fact, focused on the here and now. Death is the end, you’ve decided. How could it not be? What evidence is there to the contrary? And of course, if it’s the end, there’s nothing to worry about. When it’s all over, there will be no “you” to worry, or feel sad, or feel anything at all. When the time comes, you tell yourself, you will accept it in peace. Sometimes, though, you do find yourself worrying. Maybe there will be pain. Maybe you won’t be ready to see everything come to an end. Sometimes you feel upset -- enraged, even…because this is your one and only life, the only chance you get, and you don’t want it to be over. Sometimes you feel afraid. How can you possibly imagine nothingness, your own extinction, the annihilation of your self? I thought about you, my friend, when I read a passage in a book called “A Tale of Love and Darkness” – it’s a memoir by the great Israeli writer Amos Oz. When he was a young man, Amos Oz studied with Samuel Hugo Bergman, a professor of philosophy at the
“That winter Bergman invited five or six of his favorite or most interesting pupils to come to his house for a couple of hours after the lectures…..Almost the only subject that concerned our teacher at these meetings was the survival of the soul, or the chances, if there were any, of existence after death. That is what he talked to us about on Sunday evenings through that winter, with the rain lashing at our windows and the wind howling in the garden. “…..’Nothing,’ he said to us on one of the Sunday evenings,…..’ever disappears. The very word ‘disappears’ implies that the universe is, so to speak, finite, and that it is possible to leave it. But no-o-thing’ (he deliberately drew the word out) ‘can ever leave the universe. And nothing can enter it. Not a single speck of dust can appear or disappear. Matter is transformed into energy, and energy into matter, atoms assemble and disperse, everything changes and is transformed, but no-o-thing can ever change from being to not-being. Not even the tiniest hair growing on the tail of some virus. The concept of infinity is indeed open, infinitely open, but at the same time it is also closed and hermetically sealed. Nothing leaves and nothing enters.’ Pause. A crafty, innocent smile spread like a sunrise across the wrinkled landscape of his rich, fascinating face: ‘In which case why, maybe someone can explain to me, why do they insist on telling the that the one and only exception to the rule, the one and only thing that is doomed to perdition, that can become nothing, the one and only thing that is destined for cessation in the whole wide universe in which not so much as an atom can be destroyed, is my poor soul? Will everything, every speck of dust, every drop of water continue to exist eternally, albeit in different forms, except for my soul?’ ‘” Nobody,’ murmured a clever young genius from a corner of the room, ‘has ever seen the soul.’ “‘No,’ Bergman agreed at once. ‘You don’t meet the laws of physics or mathematics in a café either. Or wisdom, or foolishness, or desire or fear. No one has yet taken a little sample of joy or longing and put it in a test tube. But who is it, my young friend, who is talking to you right now? Is it Bergman’s humors? His spleen? Is it perhaps Bergman’s large intestine speaking?…’ “….On another occasion he said: ‘What is in store for us after we die? No-o-body knows. At any rate not with a knowledge that is susceptible of proof or demonstration. If I tell you this evening that I sometimes hear the voice of the dead and that it is much clearer and more intelligible to me than most of the voices of the living, you are entitled to say that this old man is in his dotage. He has gone out of his mind with terror at his impending death. Therefore I will not talk to you this evening about voices, this evening I will talk mathematics: since no-o-body knows if there is anything on the other side of our death or if there is nothing there, we can deduce from this complete ignorance that the chances that there is something there are exactly the same as the chances that there is nothing there. Fifty percent for cessation and fifty percent for survival. For a Jew like me, a Central European Jew from the generation of the Nazi Holocaust, such odds in favor of survival are not at all bad” [pp.422-23]. Those words made me think about you, my friend. I like them because they open the door of possibility. Jewish faith, for me, is not simple or simple-minded, but it is all about possibility, and hope. Because I care about you a lot, I would like those two words to be part of your life. I don’t know the answers to your questions about death. None of us learns the answers until our own time comes. But there are some things about which I do feel quite certain. First: you are very much loved. You’re such a good person. You’ve worked so hard, you try so hard to do the right thing. You’re brave and generous and you’ve given your life to take care of the people you love. They know you’re a human being and you’re not perfect, but they treasure the goodness in you. When you’re gone, they’ll cry for you. They’ll think of you and remember your face, your voice, the touch of your hands. Thinking of you will give them strength. They’ll remember you as long as they live. Second: your life has made a difference. I don’t know if you’ve lived up to your own expectations – they are pretty high. But in the eyes of others you’ve been an inspiration and a gift. Pretty grand words for someone who is so down-to-earth and matter of fact, but they are absolutely true. Third: All your life you have known God’s blessings, and all your life you have done God’s work. You might not put it that way yourself, but that’s the way it looks to me. You’ve known happiness and love and fulfillment; you’ve conducted yourself with honesty and integrity and devotion. God has been present in your life even when you didn’t know it. And fourth: God will not abandon you at the end. Someone who loves you will be holding your hand and saying your name and kissing you goodbye. If you want me to, I will be there, too. If you want me to, I will say the last words of our Adon Olam prayer: words of peace and possibility and hope:
When the end comes, I don’t think you need to be afraid. When your soul steps out into the darkness, I think it will be all right. There’s more we could talk about, and I hope you will want to talk about it sometime. I am always ready to listen. Being alive is a complicated business – a tale of love and darkness -- and we all have to help one another. But even if you don’t want to talk just now, I wanted you to know that I believe in hope, and possibility, and I believe in you. |
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