Kol Nidre 5768
Therefore Choose Life
Rabbi Mark H. Levin, D.H.L.

A disaster occurs. A man stands at the open grave, rather like a ruined merchant. He has lost everything. He has no reason to live. He stands at the edge of the pit and presents his bill, his accounting for the damages, to the Lord of the Universe. He is furious. He shakes his fists and he vilifies the heavens. And next to him, behind the tombstone nearby, Satan squats and lies in wait for this moment, when the man at the grave explodes with curses, when he declares openly, once and for all: “Excuse me, Lord of the Universe, but you are capricious and cruel and coarse. And also stupid. Be gone! I refuse to know you!” This is what Satan has been waiting for. As soon as he hears these words, he takes them down carefully and precisely, and with his transcript of blasphemy he races to the Garden of Eden, and addresses God: “See what you get for your goodness! And see from whom: from a Jew! From your own agent and representative on earth! So go on quietly, old man. I am in charge now.” This is the devil’s plan. But the businessman standing at the grave, he is no fool, he guesses Satan’s game. He asks himself: “Will I really delight the devil? Will I really allow evil to rule the world? No! It shall not be! I’ll show him, darn him,”—and at this point—now do you understand?—the man begins to list all those praises of God, to run through all those compliments [in the kaddish prayer]. Without reason: but who needs reasons? It is reason enough to lay the devil low, to drive him into dust, to strike him until he is a heap of bones. To say, in other words: “You, Satan, keep out of this! Whatever grievances I have against God—that is our business. We have been partners since ancient times. Somehow we will settle the manner between ourselves. But don’t you poke you nose into this.” Now do you understand? It is the same idea as Job’s: God and the Jew are partners. (Wieseltier, Kaddish, p. )

What a story! And I will bet astounding to some. Do Jews even believe in an afterlife? Well, to Jews this life is more important than the next, and death has a purpose. Surprisingly: death illuminates for us the path to God.

This story encapsulates and articulates a profundity that eludes rational explanations. The man beside the grave rails against God because his world has been crushed by loss of his beloved. He cannot abide what he perceives as God’s unfairness in ordaining death. To the man’s mind suffering and dying either contradict God’s existence or prove that God is not good. Either way: what’s the purpose of worshiping an evil or nonexistent God? The only God worth worshiping is a good God.

The man complains, but refuses to deny God, as a child rebels against a parent she loves. To merely rebel against God’s ways may lead to falling into evil’s embraces. Here is the central religious question: how to deal with loss and mortality, our own and others, while maintaining our faith in God? Death drives us to examine life.

I am standing here all dressed in white on this most important day of the year. There is a reason.

White is intended to remind us of the shroud in which we Jews are buried. Am I just being morose? Why would anyone symbolize death on the most spiritually cleansing day of the year? Not to grieve certainly, but to emphasize that we choose life. Simulating death reminds us of the life’s urgency, that our time here is limited. It’s like saying to a child: “We are going to be at the amusement park for seven hours. Choose your rides carefully and the order of your rides. Choose which rides you want to do multiple times, because when your time is over we are going home. I have brought you here for your satisfaction. So figure out what you want to do and go do it; don’t waste that most precious commodity, time, because your seven or eight hours in the park are not going to go on for.

Now we all know that at the end of the day, that kid is going to plead for more time, and maybe you’ll cave or be nice and give him or her an hour. But eventually, and s/he may not be ready, you’re going to go home.

Not only is life short, you have to know the rules. Religion is supposed to tell us the rules God embedded into life, the natural laws by which the world operates. You may not murder. You may not steal. Love your neighbor as yourself. Those are the rules.

What happens if we learned the rules incorrectly? What if we shouldn’t love our neighbors as we love ourselves? What happens if our expectations describe the world not as it really is, but as someone wrongly perceives it? Suppose you read the park rules wrong, and therefore you missed half the rides? You’d be pretty frustrated when your parent says it’s time to head home.

If we misunderstand life we will make some very bad decisions that will come back and bite us later.

We believe the world runs by natural laws. That’s a rule we get. But we purposefully ignore life’s fragility. When the writer Joan Didion lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly, she wrote about the natural order of losing your most significant other,

Dolphins … had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate. Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost. Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response. They searched. They stopped eating. They forgot to breathe. .(The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion, p. )

Part of natural law is that extreme loss turns orderly life into chaos. Not just humans, but other living things pair with mates. When the mate dies, it’s as if a part of them has been lost, and the resulting chaos prevents their understanding of what is happening to them.

Didion’s account of her grief is called The Year of Magical Thinking because she was so disoriented after her husband’s death she lost rational thought. She wrote toward the end of her account,

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it … We do not expect to be literally crazy ... In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” …. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be … a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself. (ibid.
Death robs life of its significance. We view it as a toxin requiring an antidote. We do everything imaginable, everything we can, to avoid loss and the resultant chaos. Woody Allen famously remarked, “I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” We fear death so much that some of you may even be uncomfortable with this sermon. “Why does he need to talk about that?” people say. But we need to prepare early and often. As Yom Kippur illustrates, we must constantly remind ourselves to choose life correctly. Know the rules. Judaism’s job, as it were, is to give meaning where meaninglessness threatens life. Judaism must provide the antidote to death.

Judaism gives us three antidotes for the toxic disorder we call death: the community, the kaddish prayer, and afterlife. The entire shiva week recognizes that we are outside of the norm. We stay home. The community comes to us for prayer. When life falls apart, surround yourself with loved ones. Our friends should organize to serve us food in our own homes. The event of loss, any extreme loss, disrupts our world and makes life feel random. It naturally throws us off balance. Even though we fail to admit it today, we need others to take care of us, both physically and spiritually.

Many people today attempt to survive death by themselves; or with just those others who are also survivors, their immediate families. So many people have shortened shiva from a week to a day, and suffer even that as an intrusion. We are supposed to buck up under death; we are even embarrassed and ashamed to be mourners: ashamed before our friends and the community of our so-called weakness. To attempt experiencing loss alone misperceives the rules of life. Important life experiences require a community.

Community feeds us, prays with us, coddles us, helps us to remember our deceased, and just holds our hand in tragedy. Companionship in grief provides the most comfort. Community is critical to surviving loss.

Kaddish affirms that even though Joan Didion is right about experiencing chaos in death’s wake, the world is nonetheless an orderly place. Eventually, after the most intense grief of loss, we will return to feeling order and sanity. The park and the rides in it all make sense. The time comes when either we or our loved ones go home; and we may not be ready. But, even though we may be frustrated and angry that the day in the park of life is over, even though we may yell at the heavenly parent that God can wait just a few more minutes, we will not deny God and give the world over to disorder. We will challenge the wisdom of God’s rules but we will not condemn God’s existence. We do not understand the reason for everything, but we are not gods such that we can insist that our order must be God’s order. Even non-believers recite kaddish.

Afterlife makes sense of the seeming disorder. We believe that we change form but do not disappear into oblivion. We prove that to ourselves with an analogy from what we truly unfailingly believe: science: As earthly matter is neither created nor destroyed in the physical world, so souls are neither created nor destroyed in the spiritual world. The body dies. The spirit returns to God who gave it. If it’s true in the physical world, why not in the spiriual world as well? Three antidotes to the toxin of death: community, kaddish and afterlife.

But even Moses, whom the Torah says “knew God face to face,” did not relish dying. We cannot imagine the world without ourselves somehow in it. We, too, will drink the poison. How do we deal with loss and mortality, our own and others, while maintaining our faith in God? If death is a haven for the weary and a relief for the sorely afflicted as our siddur says, why do we so dread the end of life for ourselves and our companions? And why in our day, are we so bad about supporting others in our community who are going through the experience of death and grief, and about saying kaddish?

Life, remember, is orderly. But misunderstanding how that order works, following the wrong rules in the amusement park, causes extreme distress and confusion. I believe the order of the world is different than commonly p

Wherever we look in nature: colonies of ants, flocks of birds, herds of cattle, we consider them as groups. Yet, human beings we insist are primarily individuals and therefore different than the rest of the animal kingdom. This is our narcissism at work, convincing ourselves that we are ultimately important. Copernicus proved that the earth is not the center of the universe; and Freud proved that you and I are not the center of the universe either, no matter what we tell our children and spouses.

Consider that humans may be the same way as other creatures. Indeed, in the Bible and human thought until the Renaissance, people were thought of as part of their communities, not as individuals. Individuality has reached its height in the United States, where everyone does his or her own thing and considering community first is for heroes only. Individuality not only leads to narcissism and focusing on the self to the exclusion of others, it’s just a plain inaccurate perception of nature’s rules.

Acting upon our individuality we spend a lot of time protecting ourselves and our families from fragility. We use our funds to insulate ourselves. We buy health insurance for ourselves and not for others. We send other people’s children off to war. Many even want to purchase education only for their own children and forget about everyone else. We have our immediate family groupings and many have no loyalties beyond that, if the loyalties extend even that far.

When we force ourselves to act contrary to our individuality, to reach out altruistically to others, we lose our exclusive focus on our own needs. Tonight we are distributing Darfur wristbands. We could not acquire enough for everyone, but we do have one for each family on the ulam (foyer). Focusing on the needs of the human family connects us to others and emphasizes the reality that human lives are inextricably tied together. Those ties become more and more evident each year, as global warming so aptly illustrates. We too are essentially communities or colonies, and thinking of ourselves as individuals results in exaggerated grief at our mortality. Let me explain how.

Individuals die, but the Jewish community does not. If our primary existence is that we contribute to our people, then we do not die. Our lives continue on in the impact we have through our actions. Our bodies perish, but our souls continue with God and the community to which we have given ourselves continues on enriched by our actions. Our forbears live in us, not only through our genes, but through our thoughts. And our wasteful actions will certainly live on for generations, and very possibly will become a legacy to our selfish individualism that will be our grandchildren’s sepulcher.

The reality of our continuity in time, so different from the way Americans normally see things, is much easier to appreciate in Israel, where Jews literally walk in the dust of our ancestors. We are their direct continuation, as our descendants eventually will carry us forward. I remember feeling this for the first time when I stood above the Zin Valley, which the Torah describes as the place where the Israelites crossed from Egypt to Jordan in order to enter the Promised Land. There I stood, their direct descendant over 3,000 years later, testifying by my presence to their immortality. They bequeathed the Torah to me; I am them alive today.

Thus, gathering to say kaddish as a community demonstrates that the transition is taking place. The community, so touched by the member whose body has been placed in the earth, continues as the bearer of that life. We gather again each year at the Yahrzeit, to reassert that they live in thought and deed among us; to bear witness to their physical lives even as we maintain their spiritual lives. Those of us who lit traditional Yahrzeit candles tonight carry our families with us into this sanctuary. As they live on, we will continue as well, millennia beyond our very short 70 to 80 to 100 years.

And how do we know how to live our lives, which rides to choose in the amusement park? This is also a learning resulting from the fact of death.

Time is limited. Examining how to spend our time enables us to hone our choice of activities so that we only choose those that are most meaningful. The reality of death forces those who survive to examine our own lives. Sit in front of the computer or love a friend, spouse or child? Which will it be? What places us more in the moment? Which gives greater lifelong satisfaction? Which accords with natural law?

For months I have been reading a variety of authors’ accounts of their personal grief. Catholic, Protestant or Jew, they all have one thing in common: examination of the meaning of their lives and the life of the deceased. Confronting the reality of death, natural law compels us to examine the meaning of our day-to-day lives.

And so, my final and most important assertion. Death proves the existence of God. I know that this is counter-intuitive. People say that death proves there is no God. But the reality is the opposite.

Universally, death forces us to do exactly what we are supposed to do on Yom Kippur: examine our actions. Hence traditionally we symbolically wear a shroud on Yom Kippur. There is a system here. Death not only renews life, creating new beings to constantly evolve and make it better. Death also forces the living to examine life and decide how best to live. God has provided us with a compelling reason to narrow our options to choose only the best ones. Death forces us to do what tomorrow’s Torah portion will command: Choose life!

This is part of the natural order. There is not only an orderliness to life, but to the manner in which we react to death. The very existence of an order implies a Creator of that order, and that Creator of the order of life and death we call God. Our reaction to death impels us to make life more meaningful. May this new year enable us to set aside our insistent individualism, to view ourselves within communities, to know clearly and certainly that the wear and tear on the body simply provides greater proof of the command: therefore choose life!