Post by Rabbi Neil on Jul 8, 2022 22:08:08 GMT
My first real encounter with death was when I was 6 years old, when my maternal grandfather died from a heart attack. I loved Grandpa Joe and fondly remember sitting on his lap in his favorite armchair being tickled by him. When he died, I remember being in school and drawing a picture of a dinosaur because I couldn’t concentrate on my schoolwork, and I remember the teacher supporting that because she knew that I was in shock because my world had been turned upside down. Nearly twenty years later, when my paternal grandfather died, I was in a very different place emotionally. I had spent the evening with him and he was animated, reading the Haggadah, singing Pesach songs, tapping his feet, but when I drove him home and brought him into the house, his frailty once again became dominant and, as I left his home, I knew I would never see him again. He died hours later from a heart attack, and when my mother came into my bedroom the next morning to tell me something important, I remember saying that she didn’t need to say it because I already knew. The two deaths were profoundly different – the first exposed a great hole, an incomprehensible loss, a dismantling of my world, while the second seemed right, almost appropriate or fitting, an almost lovely death at the end of a lovely evening.
After that second death, I thought that I had started to come to terms of grief and loss, but that was shattered when, in July 2002, my close friend Student Rabbi Andreas Hinz was brutally murdered. The Friday after he went missing, I led a prayer in the Reform Chavurah asking God to protect him, if possible. I finished the prayer and a single giant thunderclap came out of nowhere and the whole room felt that my prayer had been heard on high. Once Andy’s body was found a few days later and it was clear that he had been murdered, I then went to Kabbalat Shabbat services at the synagogue I was brought up in. I needed to return to a safe place. Rabbi Simon Franses, who himself would die exactly 7 years later, kept a very close eye on me during the service. I prayed, and then at one point I stopped, and I couldn’t open my mouth for the rest of the service. When the service was over, Simon gave me a hug and asked, “What was it?” He had seen that something in the liturgy had hit me hard. I said it was Hashkiveinu. He nodded understandingly, continued the hug and then without saying another word, I went on my way. Hashkiveinu is the prayer that asks God to help us lie down in peace, and specifically to turn away from us every enemy – disease, violence, hunger and sorrow. I only got as far as the word “violence.” Andy had died very violently, and I was for the first time confronted with the thought that the liturgy was a lie. Days later, I remember a news story of a little girl around 4 years old who was jumping in puddles in a country lane when a sinkhole opened up and she died instantly. The conflation of these sudden deaths of young people finally broke my soul. Except for shopping and eating, and the funeral services that we held for Andy, I spent weeks of that summer almost catatonic in my bedroom. Countless people called but I didn’t have the strength to pick up the phone. I literally sat there listening to them leave messages because I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know it at the time, but my whole world was collapsing.
Months later, I went to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College where I learned about Spiritual Direction, which is essentially relationship counselling with God. In the weeks that followed, I discovered that the depth of my grief was connected with my theology. I came to learn that I had until that time held onto an underlying belief of God on high, of some sense of justice in terms of reward and punishment, and I had subconsciously believed in a Divine plan in which good ultimately triumphs. Rage grew inside me, a murderous vengeful rage that wanted to cause prolonged and profound harm to the person who had betrayed and murdered my friend. Over time, I came to realize that that rage was my last subconscious attempt to hold onto some kind of Deuteronomic concept of justice that was rapidly proving itself to be nonsensical. But at the time I had nothing else to hold onto in my grief, I had not yet learned enough from my grief to reconstruct my now deconstructed worldview, so rage became a convenient way to hold onto the familiar.
Eventually, any simplistic concept of reward and punishment and of there being a Divine plan that ultimately led towards goodness was all swept away with Andy’s death because nothing about it could be considered good. At first, no liturgy could console me, no traditional texts other than perhaps Psalm 23 could speak to me. I particularly started to abhor the traditional Rabbinic idea of trials and tribulations in this world being tests as being sadistic and cruel, a theology of abuse and why we must tolerate it. I also didn’t care for any concepts of an afterlife which seemed like wishful thinking, like a fantasy to help people deny the excruciating pain of the moment.
In my mind, a theological struggle to try to make sense of the world started to develop. One midrash (Targum Yonatan 4:8) rather perfectly describes this struggle. It explains the fight between Cain and Abel as being based on theology – Cain acknowledges that the world is created with mercy but says that there is no justice, while Abel says that there is justice and good deeds are rewarded. Cain goes further and said, “There is no justice and there is no judge; there is no world to come and the righteous are not rewarded nor the evil punished.” Abel disagrees and the two fight. For a long time, Cain’s expression of pain in the face of apparent injustice - “There is no justice and there is no judge; there is no world to come and the righteous are not rewarded nor the evil punished” - resonated totally with me as I grieved. As it did, I found myself in a deeper existential crisis for there I was, a third-year student Rabbi, becoming an advocate for a religious system whose development was predicated on justice and on a judge, on a world-to-come, on reward and punishment, and I no longer believed in any of them. To me, there was no theological justification for Andy’s murder - the world was an infinitely better place with him in it, and an infinitely darker place without him. If that were part of some cosmic plan, I wanted nothing to do with it. Andy was a mensch, and the reward of his good deeds was seemingly a violent death.
I was being undone, just like when Grandpa Joe died when I was six years old. Everything that I had assumed to be true was proving itself no longer to be true. Slowly, new theologies started to present themselves. Grief was becoming a learning journey that I did not chose but nonetheless started to embrace. I started to wonder if grief is one of the ways in which people can potentially acquire wisdom. I remembered the words of an Auschwitz survivor I met at university, who said that God was with him crying in the mud in Auschwitz. At the time, I thought that was weak anthropomorphic apologetics but after Andy’s murder this theology started to resonate with me. Was God in evil as much as in goodness? What would that mean? That God was in death as much as in life? That if God is in creation, then God is in destruction too? That entropy was Godly? That doesn’t mean that to destroy, to kill, is a godly act – of course not – but that if God is to be relevant and real, God has to be as intimately involved in death as in life. And what did it mean for God to cry with this man in the mud in Auschwitz? Is God present not on high, but in our moments of immense joy and immense pain – is God in our smiles and in our tears?
Judaism has always wrestled with the challenge of theodicy, of trying to find God in the presence of evil. It’s harder for Judaism than in some other faiths because we don’t have the concept of a Devil, allowing God to be the source of good and the Devil to be the source of evil. Maimonides held that because the universe is not God and is therefore imperfect that our universe must necessarily contain loss and destruction…for Maimonides, natural evil is part of the very fabric of being. That also resonated with me, coming from a scientific background in which the second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system everything breaks down to entropy. My theology was starting to change. Martin Buber’s theology of not defining God but instead experiencing God started to make more sense. Theology stopped being descriptive, scientific and convenient explanations for impossible things, and it started becoming emotional, real, and this-worldly.
Just as I was transformed by Andy’s life, so I was also transformed by his death. Grief is the journey through the dismantling of our world, through what we know to be true, and the journey of restructuring our world in the face of the profound loss. It is the journey after being confronted by a reality from which we hide - that life is profoundly precarious and that we live on the precipice of profound pain in every moment. We constantly walk through the valley of the shadow of death (Ps. 23), it’s just that most of the time we focus on walking on “green pastures” or on “laying down by quiet streams.”
What I first learned from my personal grief journey is that justice is not built into the world – if anything, the world seemed inherently unjust and cruel and we could give in to our yetzer hara, our evil inclination, and accept and participate in that injustice and cruelty, or we could use our yetzer hatov, our good inclination, to actively impose justice upon this world. Later in my journey, I instead started to think instead that perhaps death itself is just in that it is inevitable to us all, the great equalizer. Even though the manner of someone’s death might be disturbingly violent and the timing may seem totally unjust – in that it doesn’t feel fair that some terrible people live long lives and some wonderful people are taken early - maybe the justice of death is in revealing to us that our final moments are less important than who we are while we live. Einstein was once quoted as saying that there is a “certain satisfaction that natural limits are set to the life of the individual, so that at the conclusion it may appear as a work of art.” With this in mind, I started to think that Cain was in fact wrong – that there is justice in life, but not in the petty tantrum of someone who wants a reward for doing good but doesn’t get it. We are owed nothing. No-one is owed a good life by God or by the universe because life itself is already an incomprehensible miracle. Anything after that is just icing in the cake. Every moment of life is more reward than we could ever deserve, even the moments of extreme trauma and deep profound pain. No good deed deserves a cosmic reward, a Divine pat on the head for being good little children. Deuteronomy sets up that infantile relationship and the High Holy Day liturgy all too often repeats it, but the Book of Job clearly challenges that and says that righteous people suffer all the time. In Pirke Avot (4:2), Ben Azzai teaches “mitzvah goreret mitzvah” – the reward of a mitzvah is a mitzvah, “averah goreret averah” – the reward of a transgression is a transgression… and that’s it. That, I came to believe, is the extent of universal justice – one good deed leads to another, one bad deed leads to another, so you can either fill your days with good deeds or not, but one day – perhaps soon, hopefully not - you will have no more opportunity to do good and you will be remembered by your choice of actions. That is justice.
Of course we would like our loved ones to have more time with us, unless, of course, they are suffering. Of course having our loved ones around us for longer gives us a stronger sense of stability and helps us forget about the profound fragility of life. It especially helps us to avoid even thinking about our own mortality. It helps construct the idea that there is a plan of goodness and long life that we deserve, when I came to believe that the plan is merely that we live and we die, and that we are given the choice of how to respond to every single moment.
Loss is a terrible, terrible thing. Rav Kook said that “the pain when [someone we love] dies cannot be dismissed any more than the physical suffering when a limb is amputated from one’s body.” (Horeb, vol. 1, p.205) Loss is the moment of separation, of everything we assume being suddenly taken away. Grief is the process of rebuilding, of reconstructing a new life, or, at least, it can be. Talmud (Moed Katan 27b) warns us of excessive grief, in which Rav Huna correctly warns a woman that excessive grief for one of her sons would ultimately end up in her own death. But who is to say what is excessive grief? Our tradition sets times for the journey of grief – in this week’s Torah portion, Aaron dies and the people mourn for thirty days (Num. 20:29). Similarly, at the end of Torah, when Moses dies, the people mourn for thirty days (Deut. 34:8). Thirty days, then, is seen as the traditional time to mourn and then one should return slowly back to normal life, while still reciting Kaddish for nearly a year. Any intense mourning beyond that thirty day period, and certainly beyond the year, is deemed excessive. But that kind of prescription for an emotional journey has the potential to be extremely damaging. I remember one woman who mourned her son being told by someone a few years later that she should be over it by now! I remember a well-meaning Orthodox colleague suggesting that I talk to a community member and tell her that her mourning had gone beyond the allotted time! Interestingly, in this week’s portion Miriam also dies (Num. 20:1) and the length of the mourning for her isn’t mentioned at all. Is that because Torah didn’t consider it to be relevant because she’s a woman, or was it in fact shorter or longer than the prescribed time and so had to be hidden to avoid potential embarrassment from a society which even regulated the timing of emotions?
I don’t think excessive grief is marked by time, though, but by what can sometimes happen when grief stalls. If grief is the journey through the deconstruction of the self and then subsequent reconstruction of the self, then it becomes excessive when the person is stuck in deconstruction, when they feel like they have nothing left. We don’t help people buried in excessive grief by telling them that their time for grief is up, we do it by helping them reconstruct their world. Grief is the unwelcome and inevitable teacher, and some people cannot handle the immense pain of the lesson. Grief holds up a mirror to ourselves, it reveals our core beliefs, it exposes what and whom we really value, and what it means when our world profoundly changes. Every journey of grief is personal, starting and ending in a different place for every person. Our tradition can guide us by opening up new possibilities of reconstructing the world for the person who is grieving, but it can never insist on an end-point. The most profound thing that my grief journey taught me is how much that journey is affected by underlying theological beliefs. Theology is not an abstract exercise but it’s something that we all engage in, consciously or subconsciously, to make sense of the world around us. If that theology is robust, then the loss of someone we love or a dramatic change in our lives will still make sense and the grief journey will be shorter. If it is not, though, the grief journey can be profound, even life-changing, as a new theological framing of the world takes place. The Kotzker Rebbe said that there is nothing a whole as a broken heart. We would never ask for heartbreak, but understand its inevitability as a consequence of love. Undoing and redoing, deconstructing and reconstructing, the journey of grief, is identical to the journey of teshuvah, of repentance and atonement. It is a profoundly Jewish act.
This Shabbat as we pray, then, let us ask ourselves what we really believe about the world around us. Let us take some time to celebrate those around us – members of our community, friends, family, all our loved ones, and support those currently experiencing grief. Let the ever-present inevitability of loss not be something that we hide from but rather something that we use to inspire us to good deeds and to truer moments of connection. And may the reality of grief highlight the extraordinary blessing of life, and let us say, Amen.
After that second death, I thought that I had started to come to terms of grief and loss, but that was shattered when, in July 2002, my close friend Student Rabbi Andreas Hinz was brutally murdered. The Friday after he went missing, I led a prayer in the Reform Chavurah asking God to protect him, if possible. I finished the prayer and a single giant thunderclap came out of nowhere and the whole room felt that my prayer had been heard on high. Once Andy’s body was found a few days later and it was clear that he had been murdered, I then went to Kabbalat Shabbat services at the synagogue I was brought up in. I needed to return to a safe place. Rabbi Simon Franses, who himself would die exactly 7 years later, kept a very close eye on me during the service. I prayed, and then at one point I stopped, and I couldn’t open my mouth for the rest of the service. When the service was over, Simon gave me a hug and asked, “What was it?” He had seen that something in the liturgy had hit me hard. I said it was Hashkiveinu. He nodded understandingly, continued the hug and then without saying another word, I went on my way. Hashkiveinu is the prayer that asks God to help us lie down in peace, and specifically to turn away from us every enemy – disease, violence, hunger and sorrow. I only got as far as the word “violence.” Andy had died very violently, and I was for the first time confronted with the thought that the liturgy was a lie. Days later, I remember a news story of a little girl around 4 years old who was jumping in puddles in a country lane when a sinkhole opened up and she died instantly. The conflation of these sudden deaths of young people finally broke my soul. Except for shopping and eating, and the funeral services that we held for Andy, I spent weeks of that summer almost catatonic in my bedroom. Countless people called but I didn’t have the strength to pick up the phone. I literally sat there listening to them leave messages because I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know it at the time, but my whole world was collapsing.
Months later, I went to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College where I learned about Spiritual Direction, which is essentially relationship counselling with God. In the weeks that followed, I discovered that the depth of my grief was connected with my theology. I came to learn that I had until that time held onto an underlying belief of God on high, of some sense of justice in terms of reward and punishment, and I had subconsciously believed in a Divine plan in which good ultimately triumphs. Rage grew inside me, a murderous vengeful rage that wanted to cause prolonged and profound harm to the person who had betrayed and murdered my friend. Over time, I came to realize that that rage was my last subconscious attempt to hold onto some kind of Deuteronomic concept of justice that was rapidly proving itself to be nonsensical. But at the time I had nothing else to hold onto in my grief, I had not yet learned enough from my grief to reconstruct my now deconstructed worldview, so rage became a convenient way to hold onto the familiar.
Eventually, any simplistic concept of reward and punishment and of there being a Divine plan that ultimately led towards goodness was all swept away with Andy’s death because nothing about it could be considered good. At first, no liturgy could console me, no traditional texts other than perhaps Psalm 23 could speak to me. I particularly started to abhor the traditional Rabbinic idea of trials and tribulations in this world being tests as being sadistic and cruel, a theology of abuse and why we must tolerate it. I also didn’t care for any concepts of an afterlife which seemed like wishful thinking, like a fantasy to help people deny the excruciating pain of the moment.
In my mind, a theological struggle to try to make sense of the world started to develop. One midrash (Targum Yonatan 4:8) rather perfectly describes this struggle. It explains the fight between Cain and Abel as being based on theology – Cain acknowledges that the world is created with mercy but says that there is no justice, while Abel says that there is justice and good deeds are rewarded. Cain goes further and said, “There is no justice and there is no judge; there is no world to come and the righteous are not rewarded nor the evil punished.” Abel disagrees and the two fight. For a long time, Cain’s expression of pain in the face of apparent injustice - “There is no justice and there is no judge; there is no world to come and the righteous are not rewarded nor the evil punished” - resonated totally with me as I grieved. As it did, I found myself in a deeper existential crisis for there I was, a third-year student Rabbi, becoming an advocate for a religious system whose development was predicated on justice and on a judge, on a world-to-come, on reward and punishment, and I no longer believed in any of them. To me, there was no theological justification for Andy’s murder - the world was an infinitely better place with him in it, and an infinitely darker place without him. If that were part of some cosmic plan, I wanted nothing to do with it. Andy was a mensch, and the reward of his good deeds was seemingly a violent death.
I was being undone, just like when Grandpa Joe died when I was six years old. Everything that I had assumed to be true was proving itself no longer to be true. Slowly, new theologies started to present themselves. Grief was becoming a learning journey that I did not chose but nonetheless started to embrace. I started to wonder if grief is one of the ways in which people can potentially acquire wisdom. I remembered the words of an Auschwitz survivor I met at university, who said that God was with him crying in the mud in Auschwitz. At the time, I thought that was weak anthropomorphic apologetics but after Andy’s murder this theology started to resonate with me. Was God in evil as much as in goodness? What would that mean? That God was in death as much as in life? That if God is in creation, then God is in destruction too? That entropy was Godly? That doesn’t mean that to destroy, to kill, is a godly act – of course not – but that if God is to be relevant and real, God has to be as intimately involved in death as in life. And what did it mean for God to cry with this man in the mud in Auschwitz? Is God present not on high, but in our moments of immense joy and immense pain – is God in our smiles and in our tears?
Judaism has always wrestled with the challenge of theodicy, of trying to find God in the presence of evil. It’s harder for Judaism than in some other faiths because we don’t have the concept of a Devil, allowing God to be the source of good and the Devil to be the source of evil. Maimonides held that because the universe is not God and is therefore imperfect that our universe must necessarily contain loss and destruction…for Maimonides, natural evil is part of the very fabric of being. That also resonated with me, coming from a scientific background in which the second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system everything breaks down to entropy. My theology was starting to change. Martin Buber’s theology of not defining God but instead experiencing God started to make more sense. Theology stopped being descriptive, scientific and convenient explanations for impossible things, and it started becoming emotional, real, and this-worldly.
Just as I was transformed by Andy’s life, so I was also transformed by his death. Grief is the journey through the dismantling of our world, through what we know to be true, and the journey of restructuring our world in the face of the profound loss. It is the journey after being confronted by a reality from which we hide - that life is profoundly precarious and that we live on the precipice of profound pain in every moment. We constantly walk through the valley of the shadow of death (Ps. 23), it’s just that most of the time we focus on walking on “green pastures” or on “laying down by quiet streams.”
What I first learned from my personal grief journey is that justice is not built into the world – if anything, the world seemed inherently unjust and cruel and we could give in to our yetzer hara, our evil inclination, and accept and participate in that injustice and cruelty, or we could use our yetzer hatov, our good inclination, to actively impose justice upon this world. Later in my journey, I instead started to think instead that perhaps death itself is just in that it is inevitable to us all, the great equalizer. Even though the manner of someone’s death might be disturbingly violent and the timing may seem totally unjust – in that it doesn’t feel fair that some terrible people live long lives and some wonderful people are taken early - maybe the justice of death is in revealing to us that our final moments are less important than who we are while we live. Einstein was once quoted as saying that there is a “certain satisfaction that natural limits are set to the life of the individual, so that at the conclusion it may appear as a work of art.” With this in mind, I started to think that Cain was in fact wrong – that there is justice in life, but not in the petty tantrum of someone who wants a reward for doing good but doesn’t get it. We are owed nothing. No-one is owed a good life by God or by the universe because life itself is already an incomprehensible miracle. Anything after that is just icing in the cake. Every moment of life is more reward than we could ever deserve, even the moments of extreme trauma and deep profound pain. No good deed deserves a cosmic reward, a Divine pat on the head for being good little children. Deuteronomy sets up that infantile relationship and the High Holy Day liturgy all too often repeats it, but the Book of Job clearly challenges that and says that righteous people suffer all the time. In Pirke Avot (4:2), Ben Azzai teaches “mitzvah goreret mitzvah” – the reward of a mitzvah is a mitzvah, “averah goreret averah” – the reward of a transgression is a transgression… and that’s it. That, I came to believe, is the extent of universal justice – one good deed leads to another, one bad deed leads to another, so you can either fill your days with good deeds or not, but one day – perhaps soon, hopefully not - you will have no more opportunity to do good and you will be remembered by your choice of actions. That is justice.
Of course we would like our loved ones to have more time with us, unless, of course, they are suffering. Of course having our loved ones around us for longer gives us a stronger sense of stability and helps us forget about the profound fragility of life. It especially helps us to avoid even thinking about our own mortality. It helps construct the idea that there is a plan of goodness and long life that we deserve, when I came to believe that the plan is merely that we live and we die, and that we are given the choice of how to respond to every single moment.
Loss is a terrible, terrible thing. Rav Kook said that “the pain when [someone we love] dies cannot be dismissed any more than the physical suffering when a limb is amputated from one’s body.” (Horeb, vol. 1, p.205) Loss is the moment of separation, of everything we assume being suddenly taken away. Grief is the process of rebuilding, of reconstructing a new life, or, at least, it can be. Talmud (Moed Katan 27b) warns us of excessive grief, in which Rav Huna correctly warns a woman that excessive grief for one of her sons would ultimately end up in her own death. But who is to say what is excessive grief? Our tradition sets times for the journey of grief – in this week’s Torah portion, Aaron dies and the people mourn for thirty days (Num. 20:29). Similarly, at the end of Torah, when Moses dies, the people mourn for thirty days (Deut. 34:8). Thirty days, then, is seen as the traditional time to mourn and then one should return slowly back to normal life, while still reciting Kaddish for nearly a year. Any intense mourning beyond that thirty day period, and certainly beyond the year, is deemed excessive. But that kind of prescription for an emotional journey has the potential to be extremely damaging. I remember one woman who mourned her son being told by someone a few years later that she should be over it by now! I remember a well-meaning Orthodox colleague suggesting that I talk to a community member and tell her that her mourning had gone beyond the allotted time! Interestingly, in this week’s portion Miriam also dies (Num. 20:1) and the length of the mourning for her isn’t mentioned at all. Is that because Torah didn’t consider it to be relevant because she’s a woman, or was it in fact shorter or longer than the prescribed time and so had to be hidden to avoid potential embarrassment from a society which even regulated the timing of emotions?
I don’t think excessive grief is marked by time, though, but by what can sometimes happen when grief stalls. If grief is the journey through the deconstruction of the self and then subsequent reconstruction of the self, then it becomes excessive when the person is stuck in deconstruction, when they feel like they have nothing left. We don’t help people buried in excessive grief by telling them that their time for grief is up, we do it by helping them reconstruct their world. Grief is the unwelcome and inevitable teacher, and some people cannot handle the immense pain of the lesson. Grief holds up a mirror to ourselves, it reveals our core beliefs, it exposes what and whom we really value, and what it means when our world profoundly changes. Every journey of grief is personal, starting and ending in a different place for every person. Our tradition can guide us by opening up new possibilities of reconstructing the world for the person who is grieving, but it can never insist on an end-point. The most profound thing that my grief journey taught me is how much that journey is affected by underlying theological beliefs. Theology is not an abstract exercise but it’s something that we all engage in, consciously or subconsciously, to make sense of the world around us. If that theology is robust, then the loss of someone we love or a dramatic change in our lives will still make sense and the grief journey will be shorter. If it is not, though, the grief journey can be profound, even life-changing, as a new theological framing of the world takes place. The Kotzker Rebbe said that there is nothing a whole as a broken heart. We would never ask for heartbreak, but understand its inevitability as a consequence of love. Undoing and redoing, deconstructing and reconstructing, the journey of grief, is identical to the journey of teshuvah, of repentance and atonement. It is a profoundly Jewish act.
This Shabbat as we pray, then, let us ask ourselves what we really believe about the world around us. Let us take some time to celebrate those around us – members of our community, friends, family, all our loved ones, and support those currently experiencing grief. Let the ever-present inevitability of loss not be something that we hide from but rather something that we use to inspire us to good deeds and to truer moments of connection. And may the reality of grief highlight the extraordinary blessing of life, and let us say, Amen.