Blog Archives

Yizkor Yom Kippur 5785 - Only In Dreams

10/13/2024

Yizkor 5785

The question we all ask about death, of course, is ‘where do we go?’ And of course the answer is ‘nobody knows’. Of course, our tradition gives a variety of answers. Avraham is discussed as ‘going down to Sheol’. Isaiah talks of an end of days where God returns and those that have passed return to an eternal life. The rabbis of the talmud believe in an olam haba, a world to come, in which the righteous live lives of ease and torah study. The kabbalists believe in gilgul hanefesh, the reincarnation of souls, in which the total number of souls at sinai of 600,000 are fractionalized and constantly recycled for all eternity.
A few years ago I told the story of the test of the caterpillars and the butterfly - that researchers flashed a light and then sprayed a nasty smell at caterpillars, and then after they went into a chrysalis and turned to goo and recombobulated and were reformed into butterflies, they flashed the light and the non-control group ran away, because they were afraid of the spray, but the control group did nothing. The test indicated that even though caterpillars go through an incredible transformation in which nothing of the orginal creature except the base cells remain, and yet they persist beyond the chrysalis. But, at the end of the day, we don’t really know what happens after we die.

There’s one other hint in the Talmud about what it maybe is. The Talmud tells us ‘sleep is 1/60th of death.’ It does not elaborate. But sleep - and dreams - are a fascinating way to imagine the world beyond.

When we sleep, elements of our waking life pop up in haphazard fashion. Long dead friends are there, at an age we recognize them. We dream dreams of calm but also anxiety - many of us still wake up worried about the test we showed up for unprepared in 8th grade, only upon waking to remember that we graduated high school, and college, and graduate school. Our dreams are out of time and beyond reason, but when we are in them, that doesn’t bother us. We are in communication with the present, the past, and the future, all at once. The dream world is its own world with its own rules, and we don’t really understand them. And when we dream we are totally unaware that any other world exists.

And then there is the waking world, which we consider a more primary world. The waking world is linear and interactive, but also busy and demanding in ways the dream world is not. There are wonderful and terrible things about the physical waking world. We sometimes retain things that happened in the dream world, but they remain hazy, foggy. Sometimes we tell them to our spouse or our therapist, or maybe we keep a dream journal by the bed - which can be really fun. And most of us we think of the waking world as real, and the sleeping world as imagined. But when we are in those worlds, we don’t really feel that way. We’re in the now, and it is real, and there is no other world.

What if the world beyond was like that? What if it is all too real when we are in it, and perhaps the notion of another world is a drifting idea, or a faint echo? Our loved ones are there - safe, comfortable, unaware of us. Maybe that’s because the soul persists beyond death. Maybe it’s more organic than that - all our cells began in the big bang as stardust, and all our atoms rejoin the universe after we pass. Maybe its more metaphysical than that - that there are other dimensions and states of being - a true olam haba. That world might be shades of this one, as the waking world is to the sleeping world. Maybe, true to some of my favorite movies like Inception and The Matrix, this world is actually the dream world, and we only discover that in the next one. And all the loved ones we ever encounter in this world, rather than being a faint memory in the next world, are actually a faint memory in this one, and a stronger reality in the next. Imagine that in a dream your mothers love is warm but hazy, and in this world it is very real, and the next world it becomes 1000x stronger. Maybe.

We miss our loved ones. We call to them through the dream world on this day, at yizkor, whispering ‘ we love you and we miss you and we wish you were here.’ But like a dream, we remember them, and they come alive in our memories and in our dreams.

0 Comments

YK 5785 - Chaos and Order; The Two Goats and the Garbage Disposal

10/13/2024

0 Comments

Shanah Tovah

There are many ways to approach the measure of what it is we do each day, each week, each year of our lives. We can see ourselves on the grandest of scales - one line in the chain of humanity, and our tradition, building a family, trying to be good people, living lives of meaning. Or we can analyze things with a more concrete and utilitarian approach: we worked 277 days last year, took 14 days of vacation, earned X amount of dollars, had a cholesterol count of 197, average 7,000 steps a day. Each year at this time, we say ‘shanah tovah’; a good year. And maybe we mean ‘it should be a good year’. Or maybe we mean that we will make it a good year. In Israel this year they’ve taken to saying shanah yoteir tovah, may this year be a better one. It’s a nice sentiment in that it recognizes the collective trauma of this past year for the Jewish people. It’s not a great evaluative statement, though, because it denies each of us the agency to ask if last year was really so good or so bad individually for each of us. Maybe last year was a good year for us - a new job, a new grandchild, a great vacation, a happy healthy family, a year of personal meaning and growth. Who are we, then, if our lives are so good, to say ‘shanah yoteir tov?’ On the other hand, a good year could always be followed by a better year. Or perhaps if our own lives are good, we can wish that our blessings overflow onto the collective Jewish world around us, which is so troubled and in such pain.

My paradigm for the world recently, has revolved around doing the dishes in the morning. I make the kids dinner and clear the table and Noa and I help them with their homework, and I am usually too tired to do the dishes at night. So I stack them and leave them till morning, feeling a twinge of guilt. In the morning, both because the dishes need to be done and because I can’t reach the hot water pot over the stack of plates and bowls, I clean the pots and pans and unload the dishwasher and fill the dishwater and wipe down the kitchen by the time the kids come down for breakfast at 7:15. The kitchen is clean, which is a small reward. As an additional reward, I get to drink a cup of coffee at 7:25. This is arguably the best part of my whole day. Everything is ordered. I have a brief pause. It is calm and quiet. The stresses of the day have yet to descend upon me. At 7:25 is order. From that point onward, as the kids bring dirty bowls to the sink and emails begin to get answered and meetings are had, the world is subjected to the basic force of the universe called entropy - the moment you finish making something orderly, it immediately begins to get messy, chaotic, and disordered. It is that way with dishes, and email in-boxes, and sidewalks and backyards, and the cells in our bodies.

A couple weeks ago my order was interrupted by entropy, the fancy word for ‘the force that decays things from order into chaos.’ I was cleaning my turtle’s tank, and a couple of small, hard rocks slipped down the drain. I fished them out, or so I thought. The next time I ran the garbage disposal as I was doing the dishes, I heard an awful grinding sound - a sound so horrible it would be considered a war crime against the Geneva convention to subject POWs to. And then the garbage disposal was jammed. I tried to clean it and unjam it, clean it again and unjam it. No luck. Entropy was victorious.

A fundamental aspect of my belief in God comes from my belief in a force that orders the natural world. Creation does not seem not entirely random to me, because there is so much order in the world. The perfect motion of waves crashing on the beach, and the way electrons spinning in orbit around protons mimics how the planets orbit around objects of larger mass like stars. The annual cycle of trees going from green to red to brown to bare and then flowering in their glorious spring rebirth, year after year. The way salmon magically return up to rivers where they were born, to leap mightily against the current, fighting their way upstream, find the right spot, and then lay their eggs as their final act, and then die. It all seems so orderly - at least until something comes in to interrupt it all.

Yom Kippur is the day of atonement - the day in which we wear white, and fast, as symbols of our death; and then at days end, we are reborn into the new year, with a clean slate, fully forgiven. Each year, we start in order. Our mistakes, our sins, our errors, are in a sense just the process of making things chaotic, one small act a time. A few weeks from now, maybe one of us is engaged in innocuous small talk. Maybe we misuse a phrase or share a small detail that wasn’t meant to be share. Maybe that little verbal miscue causes the person we are speaking with a moment of pause - maybe it hurts them. Maybe they worry that we think little of them - they’re not good looking enough, or smart enough, or rich enough. We create anxiety or sadness or insecurity for them. We introduced chaos into their life, in a subtle and small way. We make those little errors all the time, every day. To paraphrase the liturgy, we do harm to others knowingly and unknowingly, intentionally and unintentionally, in large ways and in small ways. We put rocks in other people’s garbage disposals. Other people put rocks in our garbage disposals. We hope they do not break us.

A strange ritual of the Yom Kippur service is the ritual of the two goats, described in the Torah portion for Yom Kippur tomorrow. The high priest - the Kohen Gadol - brings forth from the community two goats. He casts lots on them. One is selected to be the sin offering - a chatat - to Adonai, to be sacrificed in the Temple on behalf of our sins. The other is set free into the wilderness - the Torah says לְכַפֵּר עָלָיו - as atonement. It’s a strange ritual. The goat that goes free is called the goat of Azalzel, which in modern Hebrew becomes a euphemism for hell or the bad place. But for that goat, they are spared and get to go off to live out their life in the desert.

One of the hassidic rabbis I study often, Rabbi Avraham Bornsztain of Sokachov, who died in 1910, taught the following:
He starts by quoting Rashi, the medieval French sage, who said: ‘One stands to his right, and one to his left.’ (Rashi)
Bornsztain continues:
And in Talmud Yoma 39a it says: ‘It is a good sign [siman tov] if the goat whose lot falls to י״י (God) is on the right side.’ The meaning is that the goat for Azazel is there to expel the klipot, the external husks, and to take out the waste. And the goat for God is there to draw close the souls of Israel to the core [makor] of holiness and to return them to the source.

Let me take this apart for you. For the mystics, the world is the world of the spiritual, and of prayer, and Torah. The physical world is perhaps an inconvenient reality, but it is also the world God created. And so the kabbalists understand the interplay between the physical and the spiritual world by a metaphor of a nut and its shell, or a fruit and its peel. The nut is the yummy thing that we want, but to get to it, we need the shell. The shell, or husk, in hebrew, is called a klippah. And the good stuff inside is the makor, the core of the matter. God, spirituality, is the central thing, but to get to God and soulfulness, we need bodies, and our bodies need food, clothing and shelter, etc.

But additionally for the kabbalists, while the insides are always good and pure, the external husks can either be neutral and a pathway to soulfulness, or can be, essentially, trash. Imagine shelling a bag full of peanuts and then eating the shells instead of the nuts. It’s bad. It tastes bad. This would be the metaphor for a Jew that derives from life all the junky parts - to only focus on the material world of fancy cars and luxurious vacations - is missing the spiritual side of things. But, of course, peanuts are yummy, and you need the shell. In other words, the chaos and the order, the bad and the good, are both intertwined.

And this is the symbolism the rabbi is applying to our two goats of Yom kippur - klippot and makor - husk and core. One understanding of the two goats of Yom Kippur is that the goat for God is the goat of order - the world that God orders, and the other goat is the goat we want to discard and unload, the goat of chaos.

But wait, there’s more. The text notes ‘It is a good sign [siman tov] if the goat whose lot falls to י״י (God) is on the right side.’ In other words, it is understood that sometimes, the goat of chaos is on the right, and goat of order is on the left, which would be in the language of the talmud, a siman rah - a bad sign. Meaning, sometimes our year, despite our best intentions, are chaotic. The two goats are called up before the high priest, and then they draw lots or roll the dice or something, and one gets sacrificed and the other goes free. But the rabbis understand that which goat is on the right and which is on the left tells us a lot about our coming year - perhaps that it portends chaos, much like our last year, with our friends in Israel coming up the phrase ‘shanah yoteir tov’ - a better year.

But lets go a level deeper. We all know two things. One: that a whole year cannot be boiled down to a simple characterization - good, bad, chaotic, ordered. There will be many moments of chaos and order and good and bad in a given year. On balance, we hope, the good will outweigh the bad. But secondly, and more complexly, order is not always good, and chaos is not always bad. There’s lots of good chaos. There’s spontaneous road trips, and surprise birthday parties. There’s messing up a recipe that actually produces something really delicious, or at least produces a really great memory.

And then of course, there’s literally the raising of children - which is the willful human act of saying ‘I have a stable job, and free time, and a neat and orderly home, and a little extra money in my pocket at the end of each month. But you know what I should do? I should create a tiny person who costs a lot of money and is loud and destroys things as part of their natural way in the world.’ Having children is the deliberate decision to introduce additional chaos to your life - to speed up entropy. And those of us who have done it generally think it was a great decision.

This idea that chaos can be good is also a deep rabbinic debate. In the second line in the Torah we learn ‘and the earth was unformed and void’ - tohu vavoho. Another translated, Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, translates that line ‘and the world was chaos -shmayos’. He does that because while tohu may mean ‘un-formed’ or ‘chaos’, vohu is simply a poetic echo to emphasize the first word, kind of like ‘itty bitty’. So the rabbis ask: what is the chaos, the un-formed? Is it nothingness? Or is it disordered something-ness from which emerges the universe? Rashi, the 11th century sage from France, states that the root of these words is ‘astonishment and desolation’, because quote ‘one would be shocked and astonished at seeing the sheer emptiness of it.’ In other words, Rashi thinks God created something from the nothing.

On the other hand both Ovadia Sforno, a 16th century sage from Italy, believes that the tohu vavohu was a mixture of unformed raw materials with potential to be something if organized. In other words, they were chaos; but out of the chaos there is the potential for order to emerge. The world emerged from chaos, because God is the great order-er. Although, perhaps, God just felt the way I do when I come downstairs in the morning to a counter full of dishes. God just needs to order it. In fact, there is most definitely a theological school of thought in which God is not the thing that orders the cosmos - God is the order in the cosmos. The things we call light and gravity and newtonian physics and dark matter and black holes - the forces that order and drive the universe in its course - that’s God. This understanding actually belongs to an entire branch of Judaism itself called reconstructionism; but if you like this philosophy, I’ll tell you a secret: I do too, and they haven’t come to kick me out of Conservative Judaism yet.

Nonetheless, To be both colloquial and slightly flippant, simply put, chaos sucks. It sucks! Even though something good might ultimately emerge from it - even though you might have a wonderful conversation with the tow truck guy after your car breaks down or you might have a good growth experience when your flight is canceled or your girlfriend unexpectedly dumps you right before the family Thanksgiving - yes that actually happened to me - taking order and breaking it, or having something that is totally without order from the beginning - is no fun. Chaos is anxiety inducing and messy. In its unpredictability, it is tiring and stressful. It’s cathartic for me to do my dishes each morning. It is not cathartic to dirty them up.

The world has a lot of mess and chaos and disorder right now. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that the war in Israel and Gaza and Lebanon, and all wars, are the intentional attempt for one civilization to introduce chaos into another, through death, destruction, and suffering, to the point that they get to conquer or impose their will upon the other civilization. But. The chaos does not persist. Out of the chaos, eventually, comes order. We are not necessarily the ones that will instigate the reordering, but hopefully, we can plant a seed, or put a nail into a board, or lay a brick of rebuilding.

Our original two goats - the idea of these two goats are a powerful concept - one carrying away the chaos, one staying behind as the guardian of order. They are also two understandings of the nature of sin - that it is both a bad thing that one should avoid, and hence the need to confess it upon the head of a goat that we then slaughter and burn, but also that it is a thing that happens, and we cast it away, knowing that inevitably, it comes back. Sin and chaos and mess are the thing we wake up each morning resolving to improve, and yet it’s never quite clean, or the minute it is clean, it begins becoming messy again. We make order – and it is immediately beset by the forces of chaos.

That’s ok. We live between chaos and order, constantly trying to bend one into the other. We sometimes find God in these moments where everything is ordered, my quiet cup of coffee at 7:25. We sometimes find God in these moments of chaos - the lesson learned when the car falls off the jack when you are changing a tire. We sometimes find God in the movement towards order - the creating of a collage of something out of the box of scrap paper and cut up magazines. And sometimes what we think is chaos is actually a form of order if we step back. Think of the paintings of pontillist George Serrat - up close it looks like random flecks of paint. From afar, though, its a landscape of folks in their sunday best at the park by the lake. We are constantly between chaos and order, and sin and error are part of the organic process of making a mess and cleaning it up, making a mess and cleaning it up.

The garbage disposal stayed broken for about two weeks. I kept rinsing out the trap and cleaning it. And then one time I flipped the switch and behold! It worked. All it took was a little patience, and a little effort, and the chaos returned to order. Our Yom Kippur is us taking a moment to ask ‘What is broken? What needs to be fixed? How do I get from chaos to order, in my life, in my relationships, in my soul, in my emotions, in my body?’ We confess it, it is carried away, we move forward. The chaos is now order. The dishes are clean. I bless us all with a 5785 of clean dishes, of two goats, and garbage disposals that get unjammed, both methaphorically and literally. Gmar Chatimah Tovah

0 Comments

Yizkor Yom Kippur 5785 - Only In Dreams

YK 5785 - Chaos and Order; The Two Goats and the Garbage Disposal

Divrei Torah

Archives

Categories