Rabbi's Blog

How do you fall asleep at night after a long, hard day?  Music, candles, a little prayer? Curled up with your loved one?  Hugging your favorite pillow or stuffed toy? On Rosh HaShanah, I asked about how you wake up and spoke of grateful awareness and a wakefulness to a day of service to the world.  Going to sleep is more of a letting go, a kind of surrender into the darkness.  Some people have the tradition of saying “Source of the Universe, I hereby forgive anyone who has angered or hurt me, in this incarnation or any other. May no one be punished on my account.” This forgiveness ritual is repeated every night, every year at Yom Kippur and just before we die.  An essential part of letting go is being able to forgive; letting go of a day, a year, a whole life.  Some of us also have the nightly ritual of summoning the protective light of angels and singing them into being, as well as saying the shema, all of which prepares us for a kind of divine embrace with the ultimate mystery.

On a warm July day in 2012, at the bottom of my yard by the creek, three members of Boulder’s hevre Kedishe, the holy fellowship of the burial society, and I gathered to perform a once in a life time ritual, usually done on a dead body.  Reb Zalman, our very own, iconoclastic Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, who has been so present in these High Holidays and who died at the beginning of July, decided in his inimitable way that he wanted to experience taharah, the ritual washing of a body, while he was still alive.  This was partly because he was a Kohen, a descendent of the priestly line who traditionally do not have contact with the dead except at very specific times, so he had never experienced this beautiful purification rite; it was partly because he had holy chutzpah and creative curiosity, but the primary reason was most likely because Reb Zalman was very consciously preparing himself and, in a sense, all of us, for death.  He wanted to experience what it was like to be a corpse while still in his body!  Reb Zalman, who was a spiritual and intellectual giant with a mighty presence, and a mentor and zeyde for thousands of people around the world, looked so vulnerable and frail in his bathing suit with his dentures removed, as we lifted him up onto a massage table.  It was about one month before his 88^th birthday and we were all very aware of the delicate nature of what we were doing here; we were performing the ritual and yet we were not. Reb Zalman, who had always had a certain theatrical quality to his radical leadership, was playing the role of a corpse to experience more of this ultimate transition.  It turned out that it was almost exactly two years before his actual death.  We washed and bathed him with warm water as we recited various verses praising the physical vessel that had housed a soul.  We sang and soothed and created a sacred space while Reb Zalman surrendered utterly and imagined himself as pure soul looking down at us below, and his own body.  In spite of my initial resistance to this whole thing, I will never forget that afternoon and its intense beauty.  The location where it took place has become very special for me and I often pray or sit there.  There’s a description of the ritual in chapter 24 of The December Project, Sara Davidson’s wonderful little book subtitled An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life’s Greatest Mystery, which was published earlier this year.  The book is an account of several years of Friday morning meetings to talk about death and dying, which had been initiated by Reb Zalman himself.  Reb Zalman has brought so much to the world, beyond the Jewish world, about what he calls “spiritual eldering.”  He talks very consciously about this term eldering, rather than getting old, as he acknowledges that eldering is about an accumulation of wisdom and an acceptance of the changes in the body and mind and situation.  Reb Zalman talks about a life’s work as the months of the year and the seasons, hence the “December Project,” is about the work of the end of life.

The weekend that was to have been a celebration of Reb Zalman’s 90^th birthday became a memorial weekend instead, with hundreds of his students, disciples, family members and colleagues from across the religious world, gathering to remember and celebrate the extraordinary life of this man whose “heart was bigger than the world.”  The primary Jewish speaker at the Sunday’s memorial at the Boulder Theater, was to be Rabbi Professor Arthur Green, the founder of the rabbinical program at Hebrew College in Boston, known by most people simply as Art.  A few days before, Art emailed me to ask if I would take him to Reb Zalman’s grave, which I of course gladly agreed to do.  These two very significant figures of Twentieth Century American Judaism went back at least 50 years and were very close.  I picked Art up from his hotel in Broomfield and we drove to the cemetery.  We were just a few minutes away when Art asked me if we were going to pass a toy store on the way.  It was Friday afternoon and I did not have time to drive too far out of my way.  Art said, “I have this desire to put a yoyo on Reb Zalman’s grave.”  We got there and it was tender and emotional sharing this moment with Art who was very moved to be there at the final resting place of his teacher and his friend.  Art then told me about the impression that Reb Zalman had made on him when he first met him as a very religious 16 year old.  The next time they met, Art was struggling with all kinds of issues and he looked to Reb Zalman, who said, “hashem is playing with your neshama like a yoyo.”  Art was greatly offended by the comment and did not talk to Reb Zalman for 4 years.  When they met again at the Jewish Theological Seminary where Art Green had just started as a rabbinical student, Art told Reb Zalman how hurt he had felt when he said that God was playing with him like this.  Art looked at me, teary-eyed and said, “that’s when our relationship began. And that’s why I want to put a yoyo on the grave.”  Art Green gave a magnificent tribute to Reb Zalman that Sunday morning and then had to leave early due to a family emergency.  I emailed him to thank him for him for his words, to wish him well in the family situation and I offered to fulfill the mitzvah of getting a yoyo to Reb Zalman’s grave. I got an email back in Rabbinic Hebrew with a formula that empowered me b’shelichut b’inyana d’yoyo – appointing me as an emissary in the matter of the yoyo.  I went to Grand Rabbits, Boulder’s only toy store I think, and asked for the yoyos.  They directed me to the right section and the first yoyo that I saw was a classic wooden yoyyo, painted purple, with the words “Begin Again” on it.  How perfect.  I delivered it to the grave, placing it close to Reb Zalman’s heart and next to a rock that had the word “Love” on it.  I took a picture of it and sent it to Art.  Mission accomplished. Begin again.

President Barak Obama had a Rosh HaShanah message to the Jewish community, a video, wishing us all a shanah tovah from him and Michelle.  In it, he said “my good friend Elie Wiesel once taught me that God gave human beings a secret and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again.”  The President continued that this Rosh HaShanah is an opportunity for us to give thanks for the secret, for the miracle of being able to start again.  Begin again.

A few days ago, I took a drive on the Peak to Peak Highway and the changing colors are so breathtakingly beautiful; those golden yellows, oranges and fiery reds of the Aspens all nestling in the green of the pines.  This stunning beauty is actually the transition from life to death, and nature does it with such grace and poignancy, without the fear and suffering. We know those trees are going to revive in the spring; to begin again.

My parents recently moved from a house to a flat in London and early in the summer I went there to help them sort through years of accumulated stuff and then I went back a few weeks ago to help them actually move.  We emptied two garages full of stuff, most of it went in the back of a big truck and to a local city dump that carefully sorts the different types of waste and the rest went to local charity shops.  My father found it so hard to get rid of it all and yet there was something very healing and deep about the process.  I then found boxes and boxes of old hand-written letters, photographs and vinyl records from my past that was like rediscovering lost and forgotten pieces of myself.  That’s who I was?  Who am I now?  On the one hand this whole process was about letting go, shedding layers that we don’t need anymore, even letting go of old, worn out stories we tell; and on the other hand, it was about reintegrating forgotten fragments to help me tell new stories from the old ones.  I am so grateful that I was able to be a part of this transition with my parents while they were still alive and in good health, and yet the positive nature of this seems similar to a healthy release that can be associated with death and with Yom Kippur.  According to the rabbis of the Talmud, death and Yom Kippur both have the power to atone, to wipe our slate clean.

In his chapter on Yom Kippur in This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, Alan Lew writes:

“We need a taste of this emptiness, to give us a sense of what will go with us, what will endure as we make this great crossing. What’s important? What is at the core of our life? What will live on after we are wind and space? What will be worthy of that endless, infinitely powerful silence? And what are we clinging to that isn’t important, that won’t endure, that isn’t worthy?”

Since co-officiating at Reb Zalman’s funeral at the beginning of July, I have been back to his grave about six times, taking people there or going on my own and each time I see him smiling, hear him laughing and blessing me with strength.  It has reminded me so much of trip I made to Ukraine just a few months before sharing the taharah ceremony in my garden; the journey to visit graves of some of Europe’s greatest rabbis, the Baal Shem Tov and his spiritual descendants, a trip that Reb Zalman helped us plan. In his book “Davening – A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Prayer,” which won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice, Reb Zalman wrote:

“What was the power of praying at the graveside?  Reb Schneur Zalman once wrote to comfort people after Reb Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk died.  He quoted the Zohar, which says that “when a tsaddik departs, he is to be found in all worlds more than during his lifetime” (Zohar 3:71b).  During his lifetime he was only in his body.  He couldn’t be everywhere at once!  But once a righteous person is no longer on this plane, he is available in many more dimensions than he was during his lifetime.  Many of the mystics among our people have ascribed a special power to the places where the righteous are buried or to Rebbes’ yahrzeits, the anniversaries of their deaths, to draw down blessings.”

If Reb Zalman is available to us in all these different ways, which I feel he is, then what might he be continuing to teach us?  In his dying and his death, he has taught many how to embrace it, be ready for it even.  For most of us, fear of death is the greatest fear we have.  The fear of not being here anymore and of merging into infinity, to become forgotten and irrelevant is pretty terrifying and yet Reb Zalman somehow reframed it.  The last chapter of the December Project, before some extraordinary exercises at the end, is called “the Ultimate Letting Go.”  Sara Davidson acknowledges her own intense fear of death and writes; “when fear strikes, I like to listen to a poem Zalman created spontaneously when asked to record some inspiring words for people facing death. Lying down, he closed his eyes and imagined he was about to depart. He began by thanking God for being with him through his years, then said:

It was a wonderful life. I loved and I was loved

I sang, I heard music, I saw flowers, I saw sunrises and sunsets,

Even in places when I was alone,

You, in my heart, helped me turn loneliness into precious solitude…

What a wonderful privilege this was!

I still have some concerns for people in the family, for the world, for the planet,

I put them in your Blessed Hands.

I trust that whatever in the web of life that needed me to be there is now completed,

I thank You for taking the burden from me,

And I thank You for keeping me in the Light,

As I let go, and let go…and let go.

Yom Kippur, in many ways, is a spiritual exercise in letting go, of confronting death and daring ourselves to look it in the face and ask ourselves, “am I ready?” So many people struggle with some of the liturgy of these Days of Awe.  I do.  U’netaneh tokef is very challenging for many of us with the horrifying idea that who will live and who will die and how is written on Rosh HaShanah and sealed and Yom Kippur.  Our fate is being decided right now.  Pretty frightening, terrifying to imagine God somehow playing dice with the universe and writing or not writing us in some mighty, mythical book. But what if we reframed it to be about the willingness to let go to such an extent that we are able to embrace whatever life throws at us, including our death, with grace, compassion and love.  We pray so hard for rich, healthy, meaningful lives, as well we should, but we have to be open to the reality that there are no guarantees and being at peace with what we have might be the best we can do.  Letting go, letting go, beginning again, beginning again….

According to Rabbi Eliezer in the Talmud (Shabbat 153a), we are supposed to make teshuva, to repent or return, one day before our death.  The question is asked how we know when that will be and of course we cannot know, so really we have to be conscious in this way every day.  So on this day when we look death in the mirror, wearing white shrouds and transcending our physical needs, we ask the scary question; “what would it be like if this was the last day of your life?  What would you do?  What questions might you ask? How complete would you feel?  What do we need to do to let go? What if this was the last day of your life?

I have been imagining a special gathering in a different dimension. Reb Zalman is in a circle of souls recently departed and they are trying to figure out how to help us down here, how we can get it together, together, sending us down some healing and wisdom for our suffering world; helping us be ready and accepting of our lives as they are and giving us the courage to do the best we can with the tools we have; inspiring us to begin again. Nelson Mandela and Robin Williams are sharing stories of political and personal struggles.  “Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma,” Robin Williams tells Mandela, who replies “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” Joan Rivers chips in and says, “I enjoy life when things are happening. I don’t care if it’s good things or bad things. That means you’re alive”
and B.K.S. Iyengar, founder of the very popular Iyengar yoga school reminds everyone to breathe and stretch. Alice Herz-Sommer smiles and laughs and plays beautiful music to remind everyone that art can elevate us too. She says, “when I play Bach, I am in the sky!” Alice was the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor and concert pianist who died this year at 110 years old.  At 108, she said “every day is a miracle. No matter how bad my circumstances, I have the freedom to choose my attitude to life, even to find joy.  Evil is not new. It is up to us how we deal with both good and bad.  No one can take this power away from us.”  She also said “when I die I can have a good feeling. I have done my best. I believe I lived my life in the right way.”  Reb Zalman and Alice embrace and laugh and ask “how can we help them down there know that they are living the right way and that when it’s time to let go, they can?”  There is plenty of laughter in this group up there.  Not just because Robin Williams and Joan Rivers are in the mix!  A lightness that comes from beginning again.  And then, in my imagination, I hear another familiar laugh and realize that our beloved Sandy Cohn is there too, bringing her goodness and love of people to the group.  “I know these people,” she says, “they’re going to be fine.”