This past summer, I read a book that changed my life. I don't mean that it was the best book I ever read. And, I don't mean that the first thing you should to do at sundown is pick up this book. For all of you who are not pregnant and who are fasting, I suggest the first thing you do is eat. What I do mean is that this book, a new novel by Dara Horn, called The World to Come, had a profound impact on the way that I think about life.
Horn tells the fictional story of two young adults, Benjamin Ziskind and his twin sister Sara, who live in New York City. The book begins, "There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone...Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead, that he was a citizen of a necropolis. While his parents were living, Ben had thought about them only when it made sense to think about them, when he was talking to them, or talking about them, or planning something involving them. But now they were always here, reminding him of their presence at every moment. He saw them in streets, or turning a corner, his father sitting in the bright yellow taxi next to his, his mother - dead six months now, though it felt like one long night - hurrying along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning, turning into a store just when Ben had come close enough to see her face."
The story unfolds as Ben and Sara come to terms with the loss of their parents, Daniel and Rosalie Ziskind, and face the family legacy that has been passed down to them through generations. Part of the family story is told through the eyes of the unborn child in Sara's womb, the baby boy who will be named, Daniel Ziskind Shcharansky. We will return to the unborn Daniel in a little while. For now, though, the opening of this book alone is enough to make us ponder our own existence in this world, and the possibility of what follows.
The question of eternity is fitting for today. We just read in the Torah portion, "Atem nitzavim hayom - You stand here this day, all of you before Adonai your God...I make this covenant not with you alone, but both with those who are standing with us this day and with those who are not with us this day." (Deuteronomy 29:9, 13-14) "I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your offspring shall live." (Deuteronomy 30:19) This Torah portion speaks to the eternity of time. This Torah portion speaks to the eternity of our lives. We do not stand here today alone. We stand with all those who came before us and with all who will follow.
To stand for twenty-four hours where birth and death meet - this is Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur, we look back at life with eyes of memory. On Yom Kippur, we look ahead at another year in the Book of Life with eyes of hope. For these twenty-four hours, we ask ourselves - What, in the end, really matters to me? Will I be blessed with moments of vision to glimpse the core of eternity within all life?
Yom Kippur urges us to contemplate these ultimate questions of meaning by drawing us nearer to the world of death. My grandmother does two things on Yom Kippur - she lights a yahrzeit candle and goes to Yizkor. As in our final moments, we stand today revealed before God, our sins confessed, our souls laid bare, our bodies hungry and unadorned. Yet, on Yom Kippur, birth and death are twins. The traditional white synagogue garment worn on Yom Kippur is the kittel, a long, flowing, white, loose-sleeved robe. At the end of life, a Jew is buried in his kittel. Yet the very same kittle is worn by the groom at his wedding to symbolize the new life beginning for him and his bride. We wear white, the color of the burial shroud, but also the symbol of purity, forgiveness, and beginnings. On Yom Kippur, we survive a near-death experience in order to experience rebirth on the other end, and to cling more tightly to the world of life.
Most of us probably already know how it often takes an encounter with birth or death to lead us to face our own mortality. I discovered this in a rather odd way just a few weeks ago. In the midst of all the wonderful preparations for the impending birth of our children, Micah and I recently found ourselves sitting at our dining room table face to face with a life insurance agent. As we contemplated how much insurance to take out on each of our lives, she asked us two difficult questions. How much are you worth? What would your children and their caregivers need in your absence?
Our agent was, of course, referring to monetary value, but the questions suggest much more than money. We can only answer these questions when we consider what is truly lasting. On Yom Kippur, we face our death and, God willing, our rebirth into the New Year. On Yom Kippur God is the insurance agent asking us the question - What are our lives worth? What do we truly value? Yom Kippur begs the question, what about our lives is eternal?
This morning I want to explore with you how our tradition understands the meaning of eternity. I want us to consider how we bring eternity into our lives, day by day, year by year.
Our tradition has a rich imagination when it comes to contemplating eternity. Dara Horn's book title comes from the rabbis of the Talmud who called eternity, "the World to Come, Olam Haba." For the rabbis, olam haba was not a heaven filled with halo-clad angels, or an oasis populated by seventy virgins. No, it was the study hall, the beit midrash. They imagined the world to come crowded with scholars studying Torah. This is their ideal world. It is their version of the "I would rather be fishing" bumper sticker, what they would like to do with all of their time. They imagined that their lives would become eternal through their ability to continue to attain knowledge.
For the rabbis, the meaning of 'olam - world' went beyond the physical world; it signified the world of time. We will not find in their speculations of eternity elaborate details of heaven or paradise. Rather, 'olam hazeh - this world' and 'olam haba - the next world' flow together on a continuum of time. Their relationship is best expressed in the Talmudic statement, "Better is one hour of repentance and good deeds in olam hazeh than a whole life of olam haba." (Avot 4:17) In other words, this world, olam hazeh, is the time to perform good deeds and acquire merit.
The rabbis believed that in our final moments there would be an accounting of our deeds. Several questions will be asked of us. Raba, a fourth century rabbi, thought we would be asked, "Did you conduct your business honestly? Did you set aside time for Torah? Did you cultivate your mind? Did you hope for redemption? Did you revere God?" Or, take the well-known Hasidic tale of Rabbi Zusya, who, on his deathbed, said, "In the world to come they will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?'" If you think about it, both Raba and Zusya's ideas of what we might be asked at the end of days really do not tell us anything about the afterlife. They are both about this life; what we did in this world. When Jews talk about the world-to-come, we have a tendency to really be talking about a better here-and-now.
It follows, then, that some of the most powerful images of eternity in our tradition are actually more about birth than they are about death. Let us return to Dara Horn's novel and the unborn Daniel Ziskind Shcharansky in Sara's womb. Horn imagines the world of the womb, the world before birth, as another kind of eternity. The already-weres and the not-yets, the mortals and the natals, are somehow bound together in a knot of eternal life. She describes this pre-world as a busy place. Ancestors teach an unborn generation family history, timeless values, secrets of life. The young Daniel sits at the feet of his namesake, his grandfather, and a beautiful woman, his grandmother. He eats and drinks their words. All the not-yet borns fly from one lesson to the next. They have only a short nine months to soak up invaluable stories and family lore.
Horn's world of the womb is based on an ancient midrash that explains why it is that we each have an indentation on our face just below the nose and above the lip. According to the midrash, the day before the child's birth, an angel scoops up the child and takes him on a tour all over the world, from morning until evening, showing him everything he will ever see - the place where he will be born, the places where he will live, and, at the end of the long day, the place where he will die and be buried. The unborn child sees all this in a single day. The angel reminds the child that he will someday have to give a full accounting of everything he had done with all that was given to him. And the child is frightened - not of dying, but of living. He is so frightened that he refuses to be born, spitting on the angel's hand. The angel smacks the child across the face, removing his memory, and casts him out of the womb. This explains the mysterious dent below our nose. This explains why so many people wander the world, forgetting to account for where they have been and where they are going.
According to this midrash, in the womb, each of us gets a taste of eternity. But then we forget. We must spend our days in this world trying to regain that sense of eternity, that sense of lasting meaning and purpose. How do we do this? How do we discover what is lasting, establish our legacy, and make our lives eternal? We ought to consider two steps that can help bring eternity into our daily lives.
The first step is to identify our core values, to know what it is that we hold dear. To some extent, our values differ for each of us, based on our individual family history, the formative events in our lives, and the choices we make. But, we are not alone in this search. As Jews, we live in a community of people who hold shared values. We turn to Torah, to prayer, to one another, to discover our deepest principles. The synagogue, the place that Jews have turned for thousands of years, is a place to continually encounter these building blocks to eternity. Our synagogue teaches us to think beyond the bounds of the self because we are responsible for others. Our synagogue teaches us to cultivate our minds through study, and put what we learn into deeds. Our synagogue teaches us that family is important - our individual families and our collective family of Israel. Our synagogue teaches us to nurture our spiritual growth through communing with what is holy. It is these values, among others, that are eternal.
The second step that brings eternity to our lives is the transmission of our values. One very Jewish way we do this is through the creation of an ethical will. Just as we would write a will to ensure that our heirs inherit our material possessions, we can do the same with our values. An ethical will is a statement of eternity - what you achieved during your lifetime, the important lessons you learned from life, the formative events and people who influenced you, the values you want to pass on, your hopes and your dreams.
Judaism has a vast tradition of such ethical recordings. We might even consider the entire book of Deuteronomy to be one long ethical will from Moses to his people. Knowing that he would not enter into the Promised Land with his fellow Israelites, Moses recounts all of God's values and laws. Even without their fearless leader, the children of Israel would be able to live on with the promise of his legacy from generation to generation.
I discovered one of the most touching examples of an ethical will in another book I read this past summer. The book was given to me by one of our temple members. He wrote on the inside cover, "This is a wonderful story about how thoughtful people dwell on the profoundest mystery of life." The novel is called Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. In 1956 in the prairie town of Gilead, Iowa, Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, an accounting of himself and his ancestors, just after he learns that his heart is failing and his days are numbered. The father writes, "I'm trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you...What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope? Well, as I have said, it is all an ember now, and the good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again...I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep."
Like the Reverend John Ames, we, too, can get lost in the ordinary course of things and forget what truly matters. But, like his letter, we, too, can find ways to transmit our values through our words and through our actions. It is not only from parent to child. We all have the potential to be teachers and mentors. We influence others through our choice of work, through our loving relationships, through our friends. Our embers will never go out when we ignite another life with what we have to teach: our wisdom, our drive to achieve goodness.
One of the most humbling experiences I face as a rabbi is giving a eulogy. In a matter of moments, I am called upon to capture a person's essence and help a family commit their loved one to memory. Nearly every time, it is the deceased's core values, and how they passed on those values to others, that family and friends remember. While sitting in living rooms with grieving families, I have learned that it is how we live in olam hazeh, in this world, that guides us into olam habah, into eternity.
If you want to really bring eternity into your life, think about how you want to be remembered. Think about your eulogy. What would you like your family members to say about you and your life? What kind of spouse or parent would you like their words to reflect? How do you want to be described as a son or a daughter? What kind of friend were you? What kind of working associate? What qualities would you like them to have seen in you? What did they love about you? What contributions would you want them to remember? What difference would you like to have made in their lives?
These are fitting questions for today. For on Yom Kippur, not only do we stand for twenty-four hours where death and birth meet, we stand between hindsight and foresight. Like the not-yet born child, we have looked back, and we have seen what lies ahead. Rebirth can be a little frightening. But this time, Yom Kippur is the angel gently pressing a finger to the space above our lip reminding us to go forth. This angel tells us to go out and create the world-to-come in this world. The angel whispers, search hard for what truly matters. With a gentle touch, this angel reassures us that we can attain eternity.
