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Click here. Rabbi Karp's Sermons ... YOM KIPPUR YIZKOR 2006 NOTHINGNESS As a rabbi, many have been the times when terminally ill congregants have asked me to sit with them and discuss death. Obviously, such conversations are very difficult, for only the hardest of hearts would remain untouched by the pain, fear, and doubt of those facing their imminent demise. However, if I can offer even a modicum of comfort; if I can in any way lower their level of dread, then being able to do that is greatly rewarding. More often than not, when I sit in conversation with these congregants, they share with me that while they know that I believe in an afterlife, to be quite honest, they are unsure. It is hard for them to believe that they will experience some form of continued existence after their death. And they are very afraid. I most certainly can appreciate where they are coming from. For even I - I who firmly believe in an afterlife - even I have my moments of doubt. Even I find myself occasionally wondering, "What if my beliefs in an afterlife are just a fantasy which I have embraced in order to make death less frightening? What if death really is the end of existence, and after death there is nothing but nothingness? What if death is like a deep sleep, not a rem sleep in which we dream, but a deep sleep in which we have no consciousness but become at one with the darkness of the night? A deep sleep from which there is no awakening. Not now. Not ever. Eternal nothingness. The end of who we are." Eternal Nothingness. What a frightening thought. I love life. We all do. Of course we all experience bad times and there may be elements of our lives that we would gladly do without. But still, in the final analysis, at least for most of us, the good outweighs the bad. Living is better than dying. And we do not want to let life go. We do not want it to end. We do not want ourselves to end. We especially do not want ourselves to end. After all, God created us with this wondrous gift of self awareness. From the very day we were born, we have sought out physical and emotional stimulation. Even the most charitable among us, even the most self-sacrificing among us, even the most self-effacing among us considers themselves and their lives as important; believes that there is meaning and purpose to their lives. We vigorously deny any validity to Shakespeare’s statement that life "is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."1 No! Life is not nothing. Our lives are not nothing. They are more than a meaningless, futile exercise between birth and death. So how can our existence simply end? How can we slip from meaning and purpose into nothingness? Nothingness after death would be the cruelest of ironies for a life of self awareness. No wonder in the face of such a possibility, we stand petrified with fear. There are those who have difficulty embracing a belief in a personal afterlife, a personal continued existence after death, yet in their flight from the alternative of nothingness, choose to embrace a belief that we continue not on any spiritual realm but rather solely here on earth, through the loving memories of those whose lives we have touched and through whatever impact we have had, positive or negative, upon the world we leave behind. Such an ideology can most certainly be comforting. It is so tangible. The evidence stretches out before us. We see it in the faces and hear it in the voices of our loved ones. We have touched their lives and they will not forget us. They will remember us. At times they will talk about us. And at times they will even tell their children and their children’s children about us. So we will live on. I believe that this is an important part of our immortality but still only a part of it. Not all of it. For unless we are fated to become some major historical figure - a Moses, a David, a George Washington - still memory eventually fades. Our names are forgotten. Our deeds are forgotten. And only the slightest morsel of the memory of our very existence is recalled. We eventually enter the realm of nothingness; not immediately but eventually. I only knew one of my grandparents, my mother’s mother, Marie Frank. As far as the other three were concerned, they were stories told by my parents and graves which we periodically visited, somewhere out on Long Island. For the life of me, I could never find those graves today. They exist in some cemetery, lonely and unvisited. Perhaps my children will retain at least the memory of their names and, God willing, one or two of their stories. But what of my grandchildren? What of my great grandchildren? If I cannot find the graves, will they even be able to recall the names? To maintain that immortality resides solely here on earth within the power of memory is to consign the deceased, eventually, to the realm of nothingness. To maintain that immortality resides solely here on earth within the power of memory is to comfort us for the moment; is to console us that when we die, we will not be immediately forgotten, but forgetfulness will eventual come, and with forgetfulness comes the end of such immortality. Nothingness. We are more than bio-mechanical entities that generate memories within others. We are more than the sum total of our words and our deeds. Each one of us possesses a body of flesh and blood, made of exactly the same elements as everyone else. Yes each of us has a look all our own, that is unless we are identical twins, or triplets, whatever. But still, physically, when we get down to basics, we are all the same. Yet there are no two of us that are truly the same. No two people living on this planet at this time. No two people living on this planet at any time. Each of us is truly unique and what makes us unique is not to be found in our height or our breadth or the color of our hair, the color of our eyes, or the sound of our voice. What makes us unique is not something you can touch or point to. What makes us unique is something within us. It both animates us and it individualizes us. It is both our life force and our personality. It is seen, if it can be seen, in the glow on our faces and in the twinkling in our eyes. It is heard, if it can be heard, in the lilt of our laughter and in the varied tones of our voices, whether they be tones of joy, anger, compassion, satisfaction, or grief. It makes us everything that we are as a person. And when it leaves our body, we die. When it leaves our body, all that is left is that physical shell; that physical shell that is no more us than a mannequin, than a replica in a wax museum. For the essence of who we are is not to be found in the body, but in what we call, for lack of a better term, the spirit or the soul. Medical science continually studies the body in its quest to unravel the mysteries of its workings. Yet the greatest mystery of all remains a mystery which no scientist, no scholar, no theologian will ever unravel. It is the mystery of very nature of that which imbues our body with life and makes us unique. No one truly knows where it comes from and no one truly knows where it goes. Indeed, the most science can tell us about it is that, based upon what is does to and for the body, it most likely is some form of energy. Could it be a life energy? Could it be a personal energy? Could it be a God energy? This we do know from science. The physics principle of the Conservation of Energy states that "the total amount of energy (including potential energy) in an isolated system remains constant. In other words, energy can be converted from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed."2 So it must be with this energy force we call our souls; this energy force which makes us who we are. Like all other forms of energy, it can be neither created nor destroyed. It exists, it always existed, and always will exist. It would be in complete contradiction to the physical laws which govern the universe in which we live, for it, upon our death, to evaporate into nothingness. Yes, it’s form may change but its existence cannot be terminated. Our existence - the existence of everything that makes us the people that we are - can never be terminated. One day our bodies will die. That is unavoidable. But we will live on. The bodies of all those we knew and loved, who we memorialize today, have died, but they live on and will continue to live on. They will continue to live on long after there is no one left who will carry their names and their memories into Yizkor services such as this one. They will live on and we will live on because what makes us who we are can never die. Such is the law of physics. Such is the will of God. AMEN |
