Embracing Our Time in the Face of Death  

A Sermon written for Erev Rosh Hashanah 5766/2005

by Rabbi David J. Cooper

When I was six years old, my father died from colon cancer. One day, coming back from school, I was taken onto my mother’s lap and told that my father was gone. A few days later, a well-intentioned relative tried to comfort me by explaining that God must have wanted my father to be with Him. Now until that moment, it had not occurred to me to consider that God was playing a role in this tragedy and I didn’t realize that God had any specific needs or desires about my Dad. I remember pondering this and asking myself: “God needs my daddy? Why would big powerful God need my daddy? And why would God need my father more than I do?” And although I didn’t have the words for it at the time, it seemed to my six-year-old self that God seemed a bit self-centered putting God’s needs before that of a young boy and his family. The incident constituted my first theological conundrum and it probably explains a lot about my subsequent theology or atheology.

Death it seems, always has the potential to raise the most fundamental questions.

My father died in the mid-1950’s. But when I was in my 30’s, I learned some things about my father’s passing that I hadn’t known as a child. I asked my mother about how was it for her, a young woman in her late twenties, to learn that her husband was dying. And I asked her what sort of discussions she and my father shared as they faced his passing. And here I learned something very distressing. My mother explained that the physicians had not revealed to my father the terminal nature of his illness. They only told the truth to my mother – and then they unanimously exhorted her to understand that under no circumstance should she let him know that he was dying: it would only depress him and would serve no good purpose. The few people she consulted about this – all wise and worthy consultants of that time – all agreed with the physicians. Thus during the months that followed, my father – who may well have suspected his fate – never talked to his wife nor to his father about his certain death. He died in an atmosphere of denial and silence.

To know that we are dying
A lot has changed since the 1950’s – although I think we still have a long way to go in how we deal with death and dying. Nevertheless, today our common wisdom is that people usually need to know all the possible outcomes of their illnesses including whether they may be fatal. Today, those who know that they are dying have the opportunity to draw closer to their family, friends and community and can function to complete their lives in a manner true to their life experience.

This brings to mind some of the great teachers about mortality who have been part of Kehilla. I think about three of our congregants – of blessed memory – Maxine Auerbach, Louise Taub and Judi Hirsch who have taught me so much about dying. I remember Maxine joyously bouncing around Afikomen store pulling her poll dangling with intravenous drugs. She insisted on enjoying life to its fullest until her last breath. I remember Louise in her last days sharing her love for all her friends, family and colleagues and filling her house with music. I recall how Judi Hirsch, learning of her cancer, married Oren, and how months later, weak from her illness, she was absolutely insistent that she cast her ballot concerning the Oakland teachers' contract even though it meant shlepping her out of bed and across town. Each of these wise women treated their last days as a reflection of how they had lived their lives. And so what they taught me was that if I am to die well, I had better live well, and the question is really what does it mean to live well?

The two quotes we chose this year to represent our High Holyday theme demand us to ask exactly that: What does it mean to live well, and can our awareness of our mortality actually enhance our lives?

Choosing an unscripted life
Deuteronomy 30 challenges us to “Choose life: that you and your children shall live.” There are many traditional understandings of this famous quote, but I give it an existentialist interpretation along the following lines:
If I wanted to, I could live a life that I had not chosen, that is I could conform to a life plan that was handed down to me – as if it were a script – which I would then obligate myself to follow. Go to college, find a livelihood for my entire working life, get married to someone of the opposite sex, never divorce, settle into a household and stay there, have children, persist in my work, retire, and eventually pass away. I don’t mean to put down any this per se, but I am concerned about doing this without self-reflection. If I followed the approach of simply conforming to what is expected, then my sense of success or failure would derive from how well I have adhered to the script. Many many people have lived their lives this way, conforming to what is expected of them because their environment never encouraged them to pursue their truest selves.

 But there is different model where we choose our lives. That is, I can make my life a choice, I can dispense with the script and improvise. With consciousness I can try to develop my life from a combination of my circumstances, my skills, my opportunities and from the responsibilities that have become mine to fulfill.

 If you use this unscripted approach then you will need to periodically re-evaluate your life. You will have to stop and ask yourself such questions as: “Am I just flying on automatic pilot or am I steering my life in a way that truly utilizes the unique gifts that I have in order to make my life something true and to make my life a contribution to the betterment of my community and to the healing of the planet?”

 Maybe this periodic self-examination has always been the purpose of the High Holydays. Whether it was or wasn’t, it certainly is one of the primary purposes for Kehilla High Holydays.

 But before pursuing this further, I want to consider another benefit that comes from throwing away the script: our sense of failure does not have to be triggered by the many unforeseen life changes that confront us such as losing a job, divorce or separation, or having to leave and move to a different community. Each of these is in some way a loss, but each is also an opportunity to explore a new variation in our unscripted life story. Each of these circumstances is rife with lessons on how to craft our lives better. And perhaps, even when we come to find out that our lives may be in medical jeopardy, that too may be used as yet another opportunity to improvise a design for completing our lives meaningfully – and I think that is precisely what Maxine, Louise and Judi did.

On limited time
The second biblical quote for our High Holyday theme this year comes from Psalm 90. It can be translated in several ways. In Kehilla, we sing it to Aryeh Hirschfeld’s melody as “Teach us to treasure each day that we may open our hearts to your wisdom.” But I prefer the translation:
“Remind us that our days are numbered, and thus obtain a heart of wisdom.”

It entreats us to always remember that our time is limited.

And this brings to mind the story I told at the Kehilla retreat this summer. It comes from Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. It is a story within a story that is told by the detective Sam Spade. He tells his listener that there was once a man named Flitcraft who had disappeared several years before and for absolutely no apparent reason. Detective Spade was hired by Flitcraft’s wife when she heard that her long-missing husband was spotted by a friend in a different city. The detective goes to the city and finds him quickly and asks what happened. Flitcraft explains to the detective that on the day that he disappeared, he was walking down the street when a falling beam from a construction site just missed killing him but left him unscathed. In that moment he realized that life was short and that the life he was living might be a sham. So he immediately left to find his true life. But after several years, he ended up with pretty much the same kind of job and the same kind of lifestyle. Spade concludes the story by saying that Flitcraft – having learned the hard way that sometimes beams fall from the sky – eventually accommodated himself to the idea that this doesn’t happen very often – and so he ended up unconsciously duplicating the very life that he had been trying to redesign.

 The message of Psalm 90 is quite the opposite: it says we always need to remember that life is short and that we cannot complacently allow ourselves to fall into unconscious patterns.

 If we succeed in remembering our mortality, then the psalm says we can obtain a heart of wisdom. That is, if I know that I may not be here for long, then I must use my time in a way that is meaningful. I must relate to people in a way that does not assume that I or they will be here forever. We will need – in the short time that we have – to accomplish what is ours to accomplish, and to express to each other whatever we needed to express so that nothing that must be said is left unspoken. I believe that this is one aspect of the heart of wisdom promised by Psalm 90.

Facing my own mortality: beyond probabilities
Now I have had my own confrontation with mortality this year. I’m not sure that it has given me a heart of wisdom, but I did learn from my experience in a way that enabled me to deal with my circumstance as well as I could. I’m not sure that any of this is a good model for anyone else, but I’ll share it with you anyway.

 I decided that I could not relate to the standard probabilities of survival prognosis that people become attached to: the percentage probability that one would survive five years or more. For one thing, my particular case was so unusual, it was not clear that a specific probability could be assigned to it. And not only is my case unique, everyone’s case is unique. And then I thought as follows: if my chances of survival were, for example, 10%, that may be scary, but it would not deprive me of hope, because I could be in that 10%. On the other hand, if my chances of survival were 90%, that wouldn’t relieve me of the fear that I might be the 1-out-of-10 that did not survive.

 So an optimistic prognosis still left me with fear and a pessimistic prognosis still left me with hope.

 I mean what can you do with thinking like this? I realized that it meant that I had some possibility of dying and some possibility of living. Well DUH! The reality that I was mortal is something I should know whether I have cancer or not.

 My partner Marilyn asked me where I had come to in my thinking about all this, and what I said to her may or may not represent the heart of wisdom.

 I said simply, “I’ve decided to live… until I die.” What else can I do?

 As a practical matter, I worked to minimize the negative impact of my treatment on the Kehilla community. And I continued with my plans for my life and my work under the assumption that my survival will be long-term. But at the same time, I began a process of putting my affairs together: reviewing my will, checking my medical directive, making plans to assemble my writings and to file my effects so that my survivors are not left with a mess. And I also arranged for getting rid of the contraband.

 All joking aside, many of the things I did are things that all of us should do whether or not we have any prognosis confronting us. Having a testamentary will is a given and if it leaves a bequest to Kehilla, so much the better. Making provision now for your survivors is not something that should wait. A medical directive or power of attorney which specifies your guidelines for your final care and appoints the person who will make your medical decisions if you cannot is extremely important as the Schiavo case made so clear this year. 
 
Leaving an Ethical Will
And as for collecting my writings, this is my personal way of leaving – what Judaism has come to call – an Ethical Will. My writings make clear what I believe and what I value. But the tradition requests that even if we are not writers we should leave behind a statement of our values and of what we stand for – to act as a spiritual legacy for those who survive us. We plan to have a class in Kehilla this year to read and discuss some of the ethical wills from the Jewish past to enable each of us to write our own ethical wills. But the reality is that we change and evolve during the course of our unscripted lives. So perhaps we need to update or write a new ethical will periodically. My recommendation is that every High Holyday season – when you are reviewing your life goals and evaluating whether you are missing the mark – that you review your ethical will and determine where it needs to be amended and changed.

In the context of community
Much of what I have spoken about until now is about how we personally deal with our own death and dying. But, as I have learned during my treatment and surgery, we do not face illness or dying in an isolated context. There are at least, family and friends who are involved. But optimally there is more than that – there is a community. Having a community that is wider than your circle of friends and family is extremely healing. It gives support in a myriad of ways to those of us who are ill, to those of us who may be dying, and especially it gives support to those who are in mourning.

I have seen truly tragic deaths mourned by families who were deeply hurt and I have seen those families heal much faster as a result of the support that a much larger community than a family or friendship circle can provide. So one way to prepare for your eventual passing is to join a synagogue or other spiritual community which you feel confident would handle your memorial and the caring for your survivors in a manner you’d approve.

 I feel this so strongly that I once discouraged a couple from switching to Kehilla from their long-time synagogue because when I asked them which community they would prefer to die in and to be mourned by, they realized that it was their old shul. They still visit Kehilla, but pay their dues to their own synagogue.

 There was a time when everybody in a synagogue had the same understanding of what their mourning rituals were. In traditional communities the body was ritually cleaned by the chevra kaddisha or burial society and placed in shroud in a coffin. People from the community took turns sitting by the body or the coffin so that it wasn’t left alone. Burial happened usually within a day. The immediate family sat in their home for seven days, a process with many rituals called shiva. During shiva, a prayer service was held at the house every morning, afternoon and evening. And while the family sat shiva, anybody from the community would drop by at any time during the day to bring food and comfort.

Mourning in a time of evolving rituals
But that time is past. Today, family members often die in another part of the country. Each Kehilla household has a different relationship to the various traditions associated with mourning. Many of us choose to be cremated rather than buried. Mourners may prefer to designate only one evening for a shiva gathering.

 Jewish mourning rituals are undergoing evolution in our modern times. In Kehilla we are a living embodiment of that evolution. And I believe that it is a good thing that we are trying to accommodate such a large spectrum of practices and spiritual sensitivities. But I do find that often our families have little background in Jewish mourning practice from which to knowledgably design the variations that work for their spiritual needs. Kehilla’s Chevra Kaddisha has put out a highly recommended booklet which we sent to all member households that gives some background. And this year we have decided to do a series of educational forums about death and dying in Judaism to better enable us to share a common vocabulary about our diverse practices. We will also share much of this material in Kol Kehilla, our newsletter. These forums will examine many different aspects of death and mourning. One interesting segment will be on how Judaism at one time or another has embraced as well as rejected ideas like heaven and hell, resurrection, reincarnation, and also the more modern belief that with our deaths our consciousness ends. We want to look at shiva rituals and the evolution of Jewish burial practices. Perhaps we will hold sessions to encourage people to draw up their wills and do medical directives that reflect their desires and values.

Facing the Political Issues
But as we grow more prepared as a community to take care of those of us who are ill, and those of us who are dying and those who are in mourning, I expect and hope that we will become more mobilized about the political issues attendant to these circumstances as well. Much work needs to be done on healthcare and homecare issues. As most of you know, the US remains one of the few countries without universal healthcare and 45 million Americans are going without any medical coverage at all while almost 100 million were without coverage for some part of the year. These numbers will rise as employers shed their healthcare coverage. And the death rate for those without coverage is 25% higher than those who do. This is a shanda: a national shame. And these figures are even more meaningful to me when I contemplate what my fate would have been in regard to my illness had I not been covered.

 There are other spiritual/political implications in the themes we have raised these High Holydays – especially concerning the exploitation of our planet’s limited resources – which we will explore further during these services.

 But I want to finish this evening by considering the way that we as the survivors of those who came before us can best honor their memories and further their work. But first a little background.

Karma, Kaddish and Tzedaka
There is an old traditional Jewish superstition that holds that if we say the mourner’s kaddish and donate to tzedakah in their memory, the dead will have a better chance of being considered worthy enough to be resurrected in the proverbial world to come. But strangely, even those of us who do not believe in a life after death, and who do consider those we mourn to have been worthy people, we still say the mourner’s kaddish and donate to tzedakah in their memory. And I want to suggest why we might be doing this. The kaddish is a prayer that says nothing about death, it is a simple prayer which affirms that there is some ineffable divine presence which continues in the face of everything. For me the kaddish implies that on the personal level too, that some aspect of ourselves persists beyond death. Perhaps it is the soul as some traditions maintain, but even if it is not, there is something which does persist that the Hindus call our karma, that is to say those ripples that we have set into motion during our lives which continue to spread and to affect our world even after we are gone. And when we donate to tzedakah and add an extra measure in contemplation of the lives of those who have died, then we have made their karma manifest, and thus their contribution to the betterment of the world continues through us. So I ask you to contribute to Kehilla’s tzedakah not just because it is a nice thing to do on High Holydays, but also because it is an act which spiritually ties our actions to the persistent karmic presence of those who have died.

Let’s do it while we can
So I expect that after I’m gone my effectiveness in the world will somehow continue. But that assumes that I’m doing something now that is worthy of being continued after I’m gone. I’ll have to hope that that is so. In any case, I’d like to end this sermon with a song from Phil Ochs which I think restates an important part of our theme:

 The days of our lives are finite;
 The time which we have in order to make our lives meaningful is limited;
 The time that we have to love and support each other is also limited;
 So then, let us do it while we can.

Shana Tova

WHEN I'M GONE

by Phil Ochs

There's no place in this world where I'll belong when I'm gone
And I won't know the right from the wrong when I'm gone
And you won't find me singin' on this song when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

And I won't feel the flowing of the time when I'm gone
All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I'm gone
My pen won't pour out a lyric line when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

And I won't breathe the bracing air when I'm gone
And I can't even worry 'bout my cares when I'm gone
Won't be asked to do my share when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

And I won't be running from the rain when I'm gone
And I can't even suffer from the pain when I'm gone
Can't say who's to praise and who's to blame when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

Won't see the golden of the sun when I'm gone
And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I'm gone
Can't be singing louder than the guns when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

 All my days won't be dances of delight when I'm gone
And the sands will be shifting from my sight when I'm gone
Can't add my name into the fight while I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

 And I won't be laughing at the lies when I'm gone
And I can't question how or when or why when I'm gone
Can't live proud enough to die when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

[Extra verse by Shulamit Wise Fairman]

There's someplace in this world where I'll belong when I'm gone
In the hearts and minds of those I'll leave behind when I'm gone
I want them to feel my presence in their lives when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here.

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