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Yom Kippur 5766-2005

Life and Death: A Personal Confrontatuion
by Rabbi Yael B. Ridberg

I’m going to share something with you that I don’t think I’ve really told anyone about.  Sometimes I imagine I am dead.  I can see my funeral, my loved ones grieving, and like the film It’s A Wonderful Life, I wander through my Loved one’s reactions to my absence.  In this moment, I feel myself falling over the edge of sadness, and then snap myself back, realizing that I am very much alive.  I shake my head in disbelief and then try to make the next moment meaningful.

It’s kind of a crazy dream, and yet, I have had it more than once in my life. Ok, maybe more frequently since being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer 2 years ago.  I don’t imagine my dying, just my already being dead. It’s a little like Woody Allen who once said, “I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

So I imagine the world without me – and honestly that’s not what distresses me, it’s how much I would miss being in the world that makes me so sad.

Many times during my treatment I thought, I really should write an ethical will -- my values, prayers, memories, dreams for the future, what I hope most for my child.  When confronting my own death, shouldn’t I have offer something about life?  I felt guilty about it for a time, and then realized as raw as death seemed to me then, I simply was not ready to really accept or even anticipate my own demise.  Yes, I would die, but it wasn’t going to be then.

This is a common reaction and feeling about death, but I am not sure I was right.  I just prolonged the dance with death, put it off another year, now two thinking of course, I have time to worry about it. And maybe I do, I hope I do.  But on the other hand, maybe I don’t.

On this day, on Yom Kippur, tradition tells us it is an actual rehearsal for our death.  We abstain from earthly pleasures – food, sex, bathing, wearing leather, and we wear white, the color of purity and grace.  We recite the vidui – the confessional – only one other time besides Yom Kippur, ideally just before we die.

To me there is now something strangely comforting and simultaneously terrifying about this ritual.  The terrifying part is obvious – who wants to die, and too soon?  It’s the comforting part that intrigues me.

Of course, I don’t want it to be painful or tragic.  I want to drift off having the faces of those I love be the last thing I see.  And of course I want to have resolved all the entanglements and unburdened myself of the grudges, readying myself for whatever awaits me with a clean slate and a pure heart.

I don’t have a crystal ball, so I can’t really say that because of my fervent efforts, I will die “a good death.”  But it is time to prepare for the inevitable and that’s where I draw some comfort.  Because in may aspects of life, preparations for certain experiences can in fact, make those experiences easier to bear.  I’m not only talking about the technical preparations like living wills, health care proxies, and a last will and testament, although we saw quite clearly this year in the Terry Schiavo case how some of those preparations that were not made might have saved the family a good deal of grief.

I am talking really about seeking and finding peace with the time we have on earth.  Each of us will die – leaving others to remember us, the smell of our perfume, the feel of our embrace, the sound of our voice, the touch of our hand.  These preparations can take the form of looking closely at how we live our lives now.

In a sermon I recently read by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, he talks about the fact that he doesn’t wear a watch.  He stopped wearing one when he read a book about how overly time-conscious people can drive themselves into an early grave.

But Rabbi Shapiro says he has been reconsidering wearing a watch since he heard of a patent on a watch called, “Life expectancy timepiece.”  The watch has a tiny computer into which you feed your age, medical history, lifestyle, eating habits and exercise regimens.  The watch then uses actuarial data to compute your life expectancy and begins counting to zero.

Imagine, he says, walking down the street and someone asks you the time –you glance at your watch and say, “Oh about 37 years, 110 days, 21 hours, 4 minutes and 42 seconds until I die.  Isn’t that more interesting than saying 3:45?”

He counters the expected argument that this would be depressing by saying how liberating it would feel, how it would open up possibilities to do the things you most want to do in your lifetime.

The effect of this timepiece is obvious – it would be shocking of course, but in a good way; it would focus our attention on the acts of kindness and love rather than hatred and jealousy, the present not the past, and we could relax, experiencing the years as they come.  But in the absence of such a watch, we have to do the work ourselves.

In a few minutes we will rise for yizkor. How many of us will shed tears for  our loved ones because of what we sweetly remember of them?  How many of us will shed tears of suffering because they left us too soon?  How many will shed tears in anticipation of our own death? How many of us will be unable to cry – unable to let go of anger and disappointment for what was left unsaid or undone before a loved one died?  Or, to afraid to go down the path of vulnerability and talk about our own death, really think about it, even plan for it.

I admit that my fear of a recurrence of breast cancer is actually stronger than my fear of death, because I don’t know if a recurrence will happen – but I do know that eventually I will die.

This “unknown” that we all have lurking in the shadows of our life, gets tangled up with the sorrows of the mind and we wonder how might we unravel them?  How might we arrive at the liberated heart?

Judaism teaches us to repent one day before we die.  Of course, we don’t know when that day will come, but if it really could be tomorrow, what do you need to say right now, what do you need to do today?  Can you turn back the clock and make a difference in the way you live now?

Rabbi Marshall Meyer (z”l) taught that “if life inexorably ends in death, What is the meaning of life?  If before we are born we are nothing, and if death returns us to nothing, what is life?  What does it mean to be human?”  This time in the service, just before yizkor, these are the questions that shake our souls – what is life when confronted by death?

When we discover how the stories of our life block us from so much love and connection, we can learn to untangle them.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel slaughterhouse five, there is a description of what happens when one night a World War II movie is accidentally shown backwards:

“American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England.  Over France, a few german fighter Planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.  They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames.  The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes.  The containers were stored neatly in racks…there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair.  Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to the base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the US, where factories were operating day and night, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.  Touchingly, it was mainly women who did the work.  The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas.  It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

So If we could roll backwards the movie or our life, would we see the connections as vividly as Vonnegut describes?  Could we connect the dots so directly that we might arrive at a place of peace around our confrontation with our own death?

Just this past Shabbat, in Parashat Vayelech, we read how Moses announces his impending death to B’nai Yisrael.  He knows he is in his final days, and he calls Joshua to his side and says to him— Hazak v’ematz´-- Be strong and have courage.  No matter what is to come, no matter that I won’t be with you, carry on.

God then tells Moshe to write down a song – a poem for the people to learn, commit to memory and carry forward as an eternal Yizkor prayer for all that the people went through and all that Moses meant to the people.  In confronting his death, Moses also embraced life to come without him.

Everyone must die, including Moses. But he died with God beside him. The midrash tells of how God heard Moses’ prayer to stay alive, and understood his fear.  God replied to Moses' fear "I have heard your prayer. I myself shall attend to you and bury you."  And when Moses beheld the Holy One he fell upon his face and said "In love You created the world and in love you have guided it. Treat me also with love and deliver me not into the hands of the angel of death."  And the heavenly voice sounded and said "Moses be not afraid. Your righteousness shall go before thee. The glory of God shall be your reward." God took Moses soul by kissing him upon the mouth. God then wept for Moses and mourned him. (R. Harold Schulweis)

We cannot know the day of our death, we can only think about how, in anticipation of that day, we will live, and love, and learn how to make a difference in the lives of the people we care about.

It is not possible to conquer death, but it is more than possible to live, really live – and knowing that can make death easier to bear.

May we remember all that we have forgotten about our loved ones. May we remember all that we have forgotten about ourselves.

May we remember to celebrate the gift of life even in the face of death.

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