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Rabbi Karp's Sermons ... AFTERLIFE Last
July, my family and I journeyed to Atlanta for two reasons.
One: It was the site
of the annual convention of the Autism Society of America, and Two:
Atlanta is the home of my sister, and of one of her four children.
In this all too hectic and demanding world, it was nice to be able
to combine the two purposes into one trip.
The convention ended, but we stayed on, and had a wonderful visit
with our family. Just
a few days after our visit, my sister was scheduled to go into the
hospital. She was suffering
from sleep apnea and was going to have corrective surgery.
Of course she was concerned about that surgery, but it wasn’t
life threatening. The
surgery went well, and she came home to recover.
However, there was something that simply wasn’t right.
She started having a whole constellation of apparently unrelated
problems, and wound up back in the hospital.
In fact, she went back a couple of times. One thing led to another - I know that many of you have
traveled down this path - and in the course of their testing, the doctors
discovered lesions on her liver and a mass in her stomach. It was cancer. It
was serious cancer. They knew
that the cancer did not begin there, but search as they might, they could
not find the originating tumor. But
even if they did, it would not truly matter, for her cancer was so
advanced that it was inoperable. Before
finishing their tests and presenting their final diagnosis, the doctors
did not offer my sister much hope. But
still, in spite of the fact that they had prepared her for the worst, the
death sentence diagnosis was still a stunning shock to my sister.
They gave her maybe a year. Maybe
18 months. I
spoke to my sister on that day, and as you can imagine, she was mightily
upset. Her complaints were many, and justified.
It was all so unfair. She
was only 56 years old. Her
family was just coming back together after 9 years of strife following my
brother-in-law’s suicide. She
had 5 beautiful grandchildren whom she would never see grow up.
She had suffered so much in her life already, why would it have to
end in such profound physical suffering?
I sat on the other end of the phone and listened and agonized with
her. What else could I do? She
was right. The
next day, I called her again, and the conversation took another turn - a
theological turn - and quite frankly, she caught me off guard.
I never expected my sister to ask me questions of theology, for my
sister is not at all a religious Jew.
Thinking back on it, I should not have been surprised because the
questions she asked are natural questions for anyone facing death, whether
they live a religious life or not. My
sister asked about what happens after death.
Is there an afterlife, and what is it like? Now
let me tell you. When someone
who just received a terminal diagnosis asks you such questions, with a
trembling voice, filled with the panic of confronting one’s own
mortality, it is not a time to delve into deep philosophical reflections
on the meaning of death and of life.
That is not what they want to hear.
They do not want to twist their minds around the mysteries of
eternity. What they want are
ready answers. Understandable
answers. Comforting answers.
But for us, as Jews, that is somewhat of a challenge. It
is a challenge because Judaism does not have a ready supply of simple,
comforting perspectives on the afterlife.
For our tradition has always held it to be the ultimate of
mysteries. In the midrash,
the rabbis ask why the book of GENESIS and the story of creation begins
with the letter bet, the second
letter of the Hebrew alphabet, rather than with alef, the first letter? While
one of their answers is based upon the fact that bet
also has the numerical equivalent of two, and therefore it indicates that
there are two worlds, this world and the world to come - the afterlife -
another of the answers considers the shape of the bet. For the bet is
closed on three sides - the top, the back, and the bottom - and is only
open in the front. From this
shape, the rabbis say, we learn that we cannot investigate that which is
behind us, above us, or below us, but only what is before us.
In other words, we can only know what we can see and experience.
As far as anything else is concerned - including what is above us,
an afterlife - without any concrete knowledge, we should not speculate
about it.[1] No.
This was not something I could tell my sister in her moment of
need; in her moment of fear. So let me share with you what I did say.
It seems appropriate to do so at this moment of Yizkor. I
truly do believe that there is life after death.
I believe that we possess both a body and a soul, and we need both
in order to live our lives. While
the life we live, we live through
our bodies, the life we live, we live because
of our souls. Our souls are
our life source and our life force. They
are the seat of our knowledge and our personality.
They are the source of all that makes us unique.
Physically, we are all very much alike.
It is not our bodies which make us different, each from the other.
Rather, there is something within us that makes us different; that
makes us special and singular. That
something is our soul. Our
souls are not of this world. They
are of God. They are the
sparks of divinity which we carry within us.
They are God’s very special gift to each and every one of us.
Being of God, they are what raises us above and beyond the level of
the animals. When we say we
are created in the image of God, it is the presence within us of the soul
- our own personal piece of God - which bears that image. Death
is the separating of the body from the soul.
Because our bodies are mortal, death marks the end of our physical
existence. But unlike our
body, our souls, coming from God and being a part of God, are immortal.
They live on eternally. They
return to God. They are
reunited with the source of their being. Though
the soul is reunited with God, it never loses the uniqueness of its
character, which is, in effect, the uniqueness of our character.
Therefore, our consciousness continues beyond the body’s death.
We literally do live forever. The
soul’s reunion with God is not just a reunion with God.
It is a reunion with all those souls that came before us,
especially those who meant so much in our lives.
For like our souls, their souls too have retained their unique
character. It will not be lost for us.
It has not been lost for them.
They are there, waiting for us, just as we will be there, waiting
for those who follow us. At
this point I must tell you that my sister, who wanted the assurance that
death is not the end, and who also worried that immortality might be a
lonely, isolated existence - who wanted to know that our parents would be
waiting for her - also feared, dreadfully feared, that her husband might
be waiting for her as well. For
as I shared with you on Rosh Hashanah, he was a manic depressive, whose
illness ultimately led him to suicide.
But that was not the only path his illness led him down.
When in his depressions, he could also be quite an abusive husband.
And as a result, my sister was petrified that for her, eternity
might mean an eternity of abuse. I
told her that I did not believe this to be the case.
Yes, Norman would be waiting for her.
But it would not be the manic depressive Norman, the physically and
psychologically abusive Norman. For
the soul, coming from God, is pure. And
when it returns to God, it returns to a state of purity.
Our soul is our unique self, but it is also our ideal self.
Our imperfections, our flaws, no matter how great they may be, do
not reside in the soul. Rather
they are born of the interfacing of the immortal, perfect soul with the
finite, imperfect world. Sometimes
the chemistry between the soul and the body just doesn’t work as well as
we would have hoped it would. There
is something about that particular mix which diminishes us, which weakens
us, which restrains us from being able to reach our fullest potential.
This is only exacerbated by the many challenges served up to us by
life. Sometimes the
dark forces of the outside world are more than our body and soul can
manage. They are overwhelmed
by them. Physical life may
present us with too much pressure, too much pain, too much fear, too many
temptations, burdens too heavy to bear, and if the partnership between the
body and the soul are not strong enough, are not healthy enough, both
succumb to them. They evoke
of us behaviors that make the soul scream; sometimes scream helplessly. For such souls, death can indeed a liberation, for it is
returning to a far higher state of existence. No,
she would not encounter her abusive, spiritually wounded husband.
Rather, the soul of the man who would be awaiting her would be
Norman at his best; the way he always wanted to be; Norman existing at his
fullest potential. And that
is how she would be as well. Freed
of the forces that drag them down, his soul, her soul, all souls can, and
do, soar to their magnificent heights. At
this hour of memorial, let me leave you with the following true story. Colonel
David “Mickey” Marcus was an American Jewish soldier who almost
singlehandedly was responsible for bringing military order out of the
chaos of Israel’s first army, during the Israeli War of Independence.
He also was the last victim of that war, accidentally shot by one
of his own sentries, after the ceasefire.
On his body was found a page with this text, which he authored: “I
am standing upon the seashore. A
ship at my side spreads her white sails in the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean. She is an
object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length
she is only a ribbon of white cloud just where the sea and the sky come to
mingle with each other. Then
someone at my side says, ‘There! She’s
gone!’ Gone where? Gone
from my sight -- that is all. She
is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my
side, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of
destination. Her diminished
size is in me, not in her, and just at that moment when someone at my side
says, ‘There! She is
gone!’ there are other voices ready to take up the glad shout ‘There!
She comes!’ And that
is dying.”[2] “And
that is dying.” Well said,
Colonel Marcus. AMEN [1] MIDRASH RABBA 1.10. [2] David “Mickey” Marcus, “The Ship”, as reported in
WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL: JEWISH INSIGHTS ON DEATH AND MOURNING, Jack
Riemer, ed., p. 313
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