Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
The other day, I realized something about Yom Kippur that I had never really thought about before: it is virtually the only Jewish holiday that gives us permission to focus on ourselves. Almost all the others aim to tie us into the larger Jewish community and into the saga of Jewish history, whether it's the Exodus from Egypt on Pesach or the story of Queen Esther on Purim or the victory of the Maccabees on Hanukkah. Yom Kippur directs us to turn away from the wider world and look into the recesses of our own soul. I never thought about that before because I have usually felt that we tend to focus too much on ourselves and need to have our attention directed outward.
But this High Holy Day season, coming as it does under the shadow of the events of September 11th, we've been focused on national concerns, international concerns for two weeks now and we might feel guilty if we stopped thinking about 6,000 innocent victims of terrorism and worried about that state of our own souls. So it's good that Yom Kippur explicitly gives us permission. And it is under the impact of that insight that I offer these thoughts.
I know that there are some members of the congregation who only come to services on Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur, and that really doesn't bother me all that much. What bothers me is that, if they see me up here conducting services, they might not know that for the past eleven years, I have not been the Rabbi of this congregation. I left in 1990 and since then have spent my time writing three books, working on the new Torah commentary and traveling around the country lecturing.
And so it happened one day that I got off the plane shortly after noon in a city where I would be speaking that evening. The rabbi of the congregation where I would be speaking, a colleague I've known for some time, met me at the gate and took me to lunch. We were seated in a very nice restaurant overlooking the water, we told the waiter what we wanted to eat, and I asked my host "how are you doing?"
He said "Do you really want to know or are you just being polite?"
I said "No, you're my friend. I really want to know how you're doing."
He told me "I've been diagnosed with cancer."
I said "Oh."
He went on, "They've been treating it and they think they've got it under control. If I don't get hit by a truck, I'm probably good for quite a few years. But you know, going through something like that teaches you to look at life differently."
I asked him "In what way?"
"A lot of things that I sort of knew abstractly, intellectually, but never made room for in my life, suddenly took on a sense of urgency. And some other things that I never would have anticipated have become important to me."
He pointed to the water a few feet from where we were sitting and said "Look around you at this restaurant. Good food, great view. You probably think I brought you here because you're our featured guest speaker and I wanted to treat you nicely. But the fact is, my wife and I come here a lot. We take nice vacations, we go to the symphony. We're enjoying ourselves. It's like that passage from the Talmud they taught us in Seminary: In the World to Come, each of us will be held accountable for all the good things God put in the world that we never got around to enjoying."
I responded, "You know, that's interesting. When I was a child, the definition of maturity, of being grown up, was deferred gratification, postponing pleasure for tomorrow instead of enjoying it right away. If someone gave you a quarter, you didn't rush out and buy a candy bar. You saved up your quarters until you had enough to buy something important. I guess that makes sense when you're young and you have a whole lifetime of tomorrows to look forward to. But when you get to be our age, maturity means savoring the moment, enjoying what you're doing today instead of postponing enjoyment for some future date. Do you remember that story from the Talmud about one of the Sages who had a set of crystal goblets that were so beautiful and so fragile that he never used them for fear that something might happen to them, until his wife said to him 'If you're going to be like that, it's as if we didn't own them. What's the point of having them if we're not going to enjoy them?"
And I told him about a story I had read about a woman who, during the Second World War, had done a big favor for someone, who showed his appreciation by giving her a pair of nylon stockings. (Some of you will remember what a big deal that was back in the 1940's.) They were so beautiful and so expensive that she never put them on. She was saving them for a really special occasion. When she died, her daughter found them in her dresser drawer, still in their original wrapper.
My friend said "That's exactly my point. A year ago, I might have told that story in a sermon, but I would never have applied it to my own life. I've learned to enjoy today because I've learned you can't take tomorrow for granted." He smiled and said "As we speak, I'm thinking about my mother. I grew up in a house where we had a living room but nobody ever lived there. My mother covered the furniture in plastic so that it wouldn't wear out. She was saving it for company. Because of the way I was raised, it always bothered me that our family room was such a mess, with toys and books all over the place. But looking back at it, I'm glad we have a house that we really lived in. I'm glad my kids didn't feel they lived in a museum where they weren't supposed to touch the valuable things all around them."
"How else has this changed you?" I asked him as our food arrived and we began to eat it.
"Well" he said, "I'm trying to hold two contradictory ideas in my mind at the same time. On the one hand, I spend a lot of time contemplating all the people in whose lives I've played an important part, starting with my family and going on to the three congregations I've served and the organizations I've been part of. That's become very important to me. The weddings, the funerals, the people I've counseled in times of crisis, the people who changed some big or small thing in their lives because of something I said in a sermon, even the kids who feel better about being Jewish because they overheard their parents say something good about me or about the shul. Don't underestimate that."
"You've probably seen the same thing," he said to me. "The people who are most afraid of dying are the people who are afraid that they've wasted their lives, that they have never done anything worthwhile. And the people who are most able to face the prospect of dying with equanimity are the people who can look back with satisfaction at what they've done. I think everybody needs to feel his or her life has made a difference. So it's not just something I think about in the oncologist's waiting room. I talk about it in my sermons. I bring it up in shiva calls. Even if you feel that you've never been anything more than a wife and mother, that was probably more important to the world than what your husband did at the office. I tell people, and most of all I tell myself, that you don't have to be rich and famous to have made a difference in the lives of people around you."
I told him "I agree with you. I think about that a lot too. That's why people get so excited when their name is in the paper, and are so disappointed when the rabbi can't remember their name. That's why a businessman who can afford to buy anything he desires will cherish a plaque given to him by his synagogue or lodge as their Man of the Year. What was your second point, the one that contradicts that one?"
He said "I need to remind myself that the world will get along just fine without me. Yes, people in this community are better Jews and are better at coping with life's problems because of me. But when the day comes that I'm no longer here, God will find someone else to do what I do. When I was younger, I persuaded myself that I was indispensable, that nothing would work right without me. The Temple Bulletin needed my editorial input, the committee planning the rummage sale would mess it up if I weren't in on the planning. I rarely took a day off, I never took all the vacation time I was entitled to. It wore me out but it felt good to be so needed. Looking back, and looking forward to a time when I won't be here, I realize what a mistake that was. The Jewish people managed for three thousand years before I came along. Somehow the Bible got written, and the Psalms, and the Talmud without my help. And they ought to be good for a few thousand more after I'm gone. And you know, you wouldn't believe how good it feels to realize that."
"What about your family?" I asked him.
He said "Yes, that will be the hard part. I hope I'll be around long enough to see my children grow up, to share some special moments with them, but mostly just to see how they turn out. I'll feel very cheated if I don't get to see that. But will they manage without me? Sure they will. As a Rabbi, I've seen it happen hundreds of times in hundreds of families, even as you have. People hurt, people grieve, and then people learn to go on with their lives, carrying with them that void, that empty space where someone they love used to be, and every day learning to live with that emptiness. It's the price you pay for loving someone, the vulnerability that you might lose that person and it will hurt a lot. You see, it's the love that makes losing someone hurt so much; if you didn't love them, it wouldn't hurt when they die. But at the same time, it's the love that makes you strong enough to get over the loss."
I asked him if he knew a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai who died last year, in which the poet wonders what happens to all the love you invest in another person. In a powerful image, Amichai suggests that our bodies absorb all the love we receive in the course of our lives, -- from parents, from friends and relatives, from husbands, wives, children. And then, he writes, when we die, "like a broken slot machine disgorging its store of coins" our bodies return, recycle all that love we have absorbed over the course of our lives. Love is never lost; love is never wasted. We return it to the people who invested it in us, and to the world that made that love possible.
And I shared with him one of my favorite passages from contemporary literature, the last lines of Thornton Wilder's novel about why good people die young, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder writes:
"Soon we shall die, and we ourselves shall be loved and remembered for a while and then forgotten. But the love will have been enough…There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
By then, we had finished lunch and he had paid the bill, and as we got up to leave, we hugged. He said to me "Thanks for listening; that was helpful." And I said to him "Thanks for giving me my next year's Yom Kippur sermon."
For what are these High Holy Days if not a challenge to us to confront our mortality, an urgent plea to think about what we are doing with our lives and a reminder that none of us is guaranteed a generous number of tomorrows? "For it is decided on Rosh HaShannah and confirmed on Yom Kippur, who shall live and who shall die."
What is the shofar that was sounded last week if not a wake-up call to remind us of the urgency of what this season would have us consider? Why do we recite Yizkor prayers of memorial later today if not as a way of clarifying for ourselves what endures and what gets forgotten when a person's life is over?
It's a truth we hide from for most of the year, but today we free ourselves of all distractions - no work, no meals, no radio or television, and we face up to this one overwhelming issue: if we're not going to live forever, how shall we live? I can't think of a more important question; Can you? But so much of the time we're too busy to stop and think about it. That's why we need these High Holy Days, not because God takes attendance, not because God looks forward to our visit, but because there are things we need to hear that we don't hear at any other time of the year.
If we're wise, we won't wait until we are confronted with a life-threatening illness to think about these things. We'll learn from other people's confrontations. And if we are truly wise, we can hardly do better than to learn from what my friend and colleague shared with me.
First, life is meant to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Not every religion tells you that, but Judaism does. Children need to learn to postpone gratification for tomorrow, because they have so many tomorrows that deserve to be filled with joy. But adults need to learn to seize the day. In the words of Ecclesiastes, "Go eat your bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy (after Yom Kippur, of course), and God will approve."
Second, identify the ways in which you have changed the world, and you will never have to worry that your life has been meaningless. And to change the world, you don't have to write a best-selling book, come up with a marvelous invention or find the cure for some disease. If you have loved someone, you have changed the world. In the Torah, the patriarch Jacob, at the end of a long and eventful life, looks back and remembers two things: he remembers that when he was a teenager and didn't think he was a very nice person, God appeared to him in a dream and told him that he would turn out all right, and he remembers that once he knew the feeling of truly loving someone. The Yizkor memorial prayers that we recite today are not simply something we owe our parents. They are a reassurance to us that if we love someone, we will be remembered.
And finally, we have to do what my friend in the restaurant learned how to do, to believe two contradictory ideas at the same time. The first is to hug life to our hearts, to love it intensely, passionately, and to love the people you share that life with, to cherish every day as a precious gift from God, to wake up every morning grateful beyond words that you have been given a brand new day. And the second is to be prepared to give it all up when you have to, reluctant and sad but without the sense that you have been cheated, to come to terms with the idea that the world will manage to get along without you, that your family will manage, that the business will manage. If you didn't get everything on your wish list, look at all you did get.
I was thinking about that the other day. The special issue of Newsweek in the aftermath of the terrorist bombings devoted its last six pages to brief sketches and photos of some of the people who died in the attack, either on the planes or in the buildings. The personal stories were heartrending, families shattered, dreams denied. But the pictures that accompanied them were all smiling faces, families together, couples on their honeymoon. And it seemed to me that that was exactly right. The events of two weeks ago were bitter and tragic, but the memories ought to be happy ones. The good days far outnumber the bad days, and we should never let the painful end overshadow all the joy that went before it. We want to remember the smiles, the laughter. It takes only a little bit of light to dispel a roomful of darkness but no amount of darkness can extinguish the light.
There is an old Jewish tale about the young man who apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith so that he could learn to be a blacksmith too. On his second day on the job, he went to his mentor and said "I'm having a problem. When I heat the iron so that it's soft enough to shape, and I pick it up with the tongs, I'm afraid I'm going to drop it. So I hold it so tight that the tongs bite into the iron and deform it." The master smith told him "you've just identified the whole secret of being a successful blacksmith. You have to learn to do one thing well: hold the iron tight but loose."
And that's what we are asked to do with our lives, not only at the end but also when we are young enough that they are still soft and malleable, still open for us to shape. We have to learn to hold them tight but loose: to cherish every day, every sunrise, every friendship, every birthday, every holiday, because life at its best is so good. And even as we hold it tight and hug it to our breast, to hold it loose and know that one day we will be asked to give it up. We're asked to realize that if we cannot control the length of our lives, we can control the depth and breadth of our lives, the quality of our years, the number of other people we reach out to make part of our lives.
Some years ago, one of the great rabbis of the American Jewish community, Milton Steinberg, leaving the hospital after a serious heart attack, delivered a sermon to his New York City congregation about what his brush with mortality had taught him. He called it "To Hold With Open Arms." It was one of the last sermons he ever gave, and he concluded it with these words:
"The sunshine is not a chance effect. It was created by the Master Painter of Eternity. And the laughter of children, precious in itself, becomes infinitely more precious because the joy of the cosmos is in it. All of life is the more to be treasured because a great and Holy Spirit is in it. And yet it is easier for me to let go, for these things are not and have never been mine. They belong to the universe and to the God who stands behind it. Life is dear, life is precious. Let us hold it tight while we may, but hold it loose also, for God made it possible for us to embrace His world with open arms."