From the Rabbi
Yom Kippur 5764
Rabbi Ellen Lippmann
Kolot Chayeinu
Astonishing things happened on my summer
vacation. A hawk flew right by our porch, close enough to touch, and
moved me to tears. I saw a coyote for the first time, thrilling and
terrifying. I saw the first blue heron I’d seen in several years, just
as the summer ended. And I had a strange dream that has stayed with
me. In this dream I said, and clearly it was I speaking, “This is
the year I stopped thinking about politics and started thinking about
death.”
I put some stock in what happens in my
dreams. We are, after all, descendants of both Freud and Jacob, Jacob
who dreamed those angels going up and down a ladder that was planted
on the ground, and heard God reassuring him. This dream seemed more
in the Jacob line than in Freud’s. So I paid attention. But what did
it mean?
I knew that I had been taking a break
from the news, which was and is so often filled with the violence of
our world, and for some weeks, beginning in the spring and continuing
even now, I read and listen to much less. I bought the paper regularly
while on vacation only so I could follow the Tour d’France and the tennis
matches at Wimbledon. So in a way, like many of you, perhaps, I had
stopped thinking about politics, if by politics I meant the actions
of governments and armies, large and small. News fatigue, someone
called it. Violence fatigue is more like it.
But had I started thinking about death
this year? I decided I had, though immediately after the dream
I understood that somehow death in that phrase actually meant life.
This was the year I started thinking about life. Death is what defines
life, after all; life’s endpoint is what provides our intensity, our
drive, our need to do what we call really living. Leon R. Kass, in
an article called “L’Chaim and Its Limits,” outlines four reasons that
our mortality is good for us: First, as I just suggested, he says life’s
limit enhances our interest and engagement in life’s joys and sorrows.
Second, he says that we develop seriousness and aspiration as a result
of being mortal; he quotes the psalmist, “Teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.” When our days are numbered, they
count more. Third, Kass says, beauty and love are deepened and enhanced
by the fact of their death, and fourth, he tells us that the human possibility
for virtue and moral excellence are due to mortality: We rise above
what he calls “our mere creatureliness to attain courage, generosity,
devotion to justice.” And finally, Kass speaks of the soul and its
deep truth: “the human soul yearns for, longs for, aspires to some
condition, some state, some goal toward which our earthly activities
are directed but which cannot be attained in earthly life. Our soul’s
reach exceeds our grasp.” [L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?
in Best Spiritual Writing 2002]
My soul has been yearning. Hasn’t yours?
This is the year my soul was yearning, maybe that’s what my dream self
meant. It yearned to fly with the hawk, run with the coyote, break
out of its confines. Last week as we walked to tashlikh, two very active
members of this community said, “We’ve had enough of organized religion.”
I knew exactly what they meant. Yet here we are in the belly of the
beast, as it were: The Yom Kippur service, which owes so much to the
highly structured sacrificial service conducted by the High Priest of
old. My soul years for that too, for the chance to give up something
important to get something crucial, the chance to spill a little blood
to avoid major bloodshed. Sacrifice too is death, meaning life; it’s
death to get life, to rid life of its hindering baggage, the fear, bitterness,
cynicism that prevent us from living. All that the ancient priest
would place on a goat, and then send the goat into the wilderness to
a mysterious place called Azazel, where perhaps some demonic being lived
and gathered up human impurities. This was the wilderness, a place
barren of life; life’s garbage heap, if you will. And there went our
goat, the one with all our sins on it, trotting out to wander or die,
but it took our sins with it. This is the year my soul was yearning
for a way to take out sins away and be done with them.
Yet I know that life is not so simple,
that ridding of sin requires engagement in life, not just a reluctant
goat. “See, I set before you this day life and good, death and evil….Choose
life so that you and your children may live…” Those are the brilliant
words our Reform ancestors chose to replace the goat and Azazel on Yom
Kippur. Choose life. A Hassidic commentator called Ohel Yaakov reminds
me that the intention of the desire for life is not just physical life,
but rather the love of and service of God. Be engaged with life and
its source. This is why we beseech God during these High Holydays,
“Zokhreinu l’chaim, melekh hafeitz ba’chaim, v’khotveinu b’sefer
ha-chaim, l’ma-ankha Elohim chaim.” Remember us for life, O king who
delights in life, and write us in the book of life, for the sake of
the God of life.”
This is the year I started thinking
about life, because I was thinking about death. Kathryn’s mother
had an accident during our vacation that sent her to the hospital and
it became clear that she was no longer able to live alone in her home
of 52 years. We were luckily able to find an assisted living facility
herby that had a vacancy, and she moved there right from the hospital.
She loves it, feels cared for in a way we hadn’t realized she needed,
eats well, has company and activities of all sorts. And we, mostly
Kathryn, have been cleaning out her house of those 52 years of life’s
accruals. It is a death of sorts, though we are in fact lucky to be
doing this before her death: death of the way life was, death of home
and family, death of independence, death of her children begin children
in any way. Choose life that you and your children may live.
Yehuda Nachshoni, in a traditional commentary on our portion, says,
“Forefathers are possibly not able to saddle their descendants with
an obligation, but they can certainly take a positive step to benefit
their descendants.” My father moved this year into a continuum of care
facility, long before he needed to, a step I admire and am deeply grateful
for.
The result of all this caring about our
parents, which I know so many of you have and are experiencing, is that
Kathryn and I are planning our own demise. We have told our daughter
that we will try never to be a burden to her, though she sees that this
is something that may be expected of her. My friend Judith says one
honors one’s parents by being good parents, not by being good children.
Choose life, that you and your children may live.
This is the year I started thinking
about death. The writer Michael Ventura, in an essay called Fifty-Two,
says, “For most of human history, to be old has been a mark of honor.
Today it’s a source of fear, even shame.”
“One difference between being young and
no-longer-young is: the young don’t know they are going to die, not
really; the no-longer-young know.” But there is help: There is an Old
One inside that helps with this. Says Ventura, “One of the tragedies
of America today is that it ignores and shames this Old One…. The Young
One seems the only part of you that our commercial culture takes seriously…the
most insidious result of our buying into this cult of the Young One
is that we insult and shame the Old One,” though “The Old One has been
in us from the beginning, just like the Young One.”
“When I turned fifty-two,” says Ventura,
“my Old One came to me…. He bade me to respect him, feed him, sing to
him, speak to him, listen to him, walk with him…to make a place for
him to occupy, so he can do his job, when it’s time. For time doesn’t
kid around. It will come soon enough, the day when I’ll awake and be
very lonely and frightened if the Old One isn’t there or isn’t able.”
[from Best Spiritual Writing 1999]
This is the year I started thinking
about death. And it stopped me thinking about politics as usual
because thinking about death meant thinking about people and their humanity.
So the two American soldiers who died Wednesday in Iraq are real kids,
including one young woman, who for many reasons put themselves in harm’s
way. Their death is about politics, but if it is only about politics
we are lost. If candidates to be president of the United States can’t
see beyond the competition of the next debate to the needs of elderly
people like Kathryn’s mother who spends $1600 per month on prescription
drugs, why would I want one of them to be president? If they can’t
see that there are real children living in real poverty who cry real
tears when they are hungry, why wouldn’t I stop thinking about politics?
The writer Annie Dillard describes spending
time in the obstetrics ward of a city hospital, and seeing the newborn
babies being washed, one after another, each handled with the greatest
of care. “There might well be a rough angel guarding this ward,” she
writes, “or a dragon, or an upswelling current that dashes boats on
rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators,
or a well, or a ruined shrine where people still hear bells. Should
we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths? For this is surely
the wildest deep-sea vent on earth: This is where the people come out.”
[from “Acts of God,” in Best Spiritual Writing 1999]
There was a pregnant Israelite woman
slave in Egypt, after Pharaoh’s harsh decree to kill all male Israelite
newborns. When she felt her time of delivery was near, she went outside
and delivered her child on a dungheap. Immediately the Kadosh Barukh
Hu (The Holy One of Blessing) came down and bathed [the baby] and nursed
it and clothed it, as it is written, “I bathed you in water and washed
the blood off you and anointed you with oil…Your food was choice flour,
honey and oil…[Ezekiel 6:9,13, in Pesikta Rabbati 48:2]”
God shows us how to care for a baby,
just as it was God who, visiting Abraham in his elderly infirmity, showed
us how to visit the sick. What do we learn? First, how to care for
immediate needs: To bathe and nurse and clothe and feed. Stepping
back, though, we realize that we also learn that we are to care for
the child of someone unable to do so herself. The Israelite slave,
trapped in the desperation of slavery, can see no other alternative
than to give birth outside, away from family as well as the prying eyes
of the Egyptians. And because she is a slave living in slave quarters,
what she finds outside is a dungheap, from which God lifts her child.
Why God, and no one else? It is written, “When you were born, your
navel cord was not cut, and you were not bathed in water to smooth you;
you were not rubbed with salt, nor were you swaddled. No one pitied
you enough to do any of these things for you out of compassion for you.
[Ezekiel 16:4-5]”
The worst part of the story of this Israelite slave and her baby is not that she gave birth alone, desperate, on a dungheap, though all of that is terrible enough. No, the worst part is that only God came along to help and to rescue the baby. No passer-by, no relative, no neighbor took any notice of this desperate woman and her child. A human need was left to God to fulfill — this is an indictment. Thinking about humanity and not about politics, I hope that it will no longer be an indictment of us. [adapted from a sermon for Children’s Defense Fund Sabbath, by Kathryn Conroy and Ellen Lippmann]
See, I set before you today life and
good, or death and evil. Choose life that you and your children may
live. Time doesn’t kid around, so we have to engage in life.
Annie Dillard says the newborn babies,
washed already and not yet washed, “are keenly interested. None cries.
They look about slowly, moving their eyes. They do not speak, as trees
do not speak. They do seem wise, as though they understood that their
new world, however strange, was only another shade in a streaming marvel
they had known from the beginning.”
If we stop thinking about politics and
start thinking about death and life, we will see that we live in a streaming
marvel of a world. The God we pray to daily and on this Yom Kippur
is “nora tehillot, oseh feleh,” awesome in splendors, doing marvels.
It is marvelous to see a wild hawk fly by the window as though we could
fly together. It is marvelous to imagine a world where newborn babies
would get care as good as God’s. It is marvelous, as Kathryn’s mother
described it, that there is a place where a woman who made a home for
her mother, and raised three children, and created a long and happy
marriage, can get care and good food and companionship late in life.
And it is marvelous to be able to join together to get rid of our sins
in this organized religion we somehow still love.
This is the year I stopped thinking about
politics and started thinking about death.
Copyright 2003 Rabbi Ellen Lippmann
