L-I-V-E!

Mari Chernow

If I could only have one phrase from the entire corpus of Jewish literature, it would be uvacharta bachayyim – “and you shall choose life.” To borrow a concept from Rabbi Hillel, to my mind that is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary. Now go and learn it. We read it just this morning - uvacharta bachayyim, lema’an techiyeh, – choose life that you may live. It’s a surprising concept, really. It should be obvious because of the way our tradition values life. Today, for example, we pray, we beg, to be written into the book of life for one more year. Every morning we thank God for restoring our souls to our bodies and for the nisim b’chol yom – the miracles that happen as we wake up – our consciousness returns, our eyes open, our feet hold us up. All of this is the Jewish way of saying every single day, “It’s quite a thing being alive.” It’s really something. How strange, then, we are commanded to choose life… Our tradition must be worried about some way in which we choose something else, or we resist or reject life. In rabbinical school, I studied the Biblical characters who question and doubt the value of their lives. These figures - Moses, Elijah and Jonah, to name a few - don’t take their lives, but they turn to God and say, “You end it for me.” The Bible views every minute here on earth as a gift bestowed by God. And yet, some of its greatest prophets and leaders try to return the gift. No thanks, they say. You take it back. I’ve had enough. They’re frustrated, disappointed, exhausted. They feel rejected by their

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people. Their burdens are too heavy to carry. They see projects fail – the great efforts of their lifetimes. And so they wonder, “what am I doing here?” God basically says to them, “Get back in the game. You’ve got more living to do.” Now I’m not suggesting this as a suicide-prevention strategy, but I suppose that if God says to you directly, “Get out of your head and get into your life,” then that’s what you do. You see, choosing life is not only about staying alive. In the Talmud, we read: The righteous are considered alive even after they are dead; the wicked are considered dead even when they are alive.1 There is much more to being alive than the blood running through our veins, the oxygen through our lungs. We already know that a person’s impact can go far beyond his or her lifespan, but here the Talmud teaches that we can be physically alive and yet barely living. Outwardly, all systems can be up and running while inwardly we are dying, we can feel dead. In the darkly comic cult film of the 70s, Harold and Maude, Harold is a young man who is obsessed with death. He drives a hearse, stages elaborate fake scenes of his own death and has one hobby – attending funerals. There he befriends Maude, a vivacious eccentric 79-year-old woman. Though Maude also enjoys funerals, she is quite the opposite of Harold. Deeply taken with every stage of the life cycle, she is in this lifetime to live it. She models nude for an ice sculptor, “plays” the player piano, has audacious run-ins with the law. She is the self-appointed liberator of plants and animals and the slightly crazy grandmother we all wish we had.

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Berachot 18 a-b 2

As their friendship grows, Harold explains his fascination with death. “I haven’t lived” he says, “I’ve died a few times.” And he talks about the time when he accidentally caused a chemical explosion. In the chaos that ensued, he was presumed dead. The misunderstanding highlighted the emptiness in his life and he tells Maude sadly, “I decided then that I enjoy being dead.” To which she responds, “I understand. A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. Play as well as you can. Go team, go. Give me an L! Give me and I! Give me a V! Give me an E! L-I-V-E, LIVE!” She thinks for a minute and then adds coyly, “Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.” At that moment, Harold gets in the game. He decides that death will have to wait. There is life to be had. For many of us, though, it is not a traumatic past or an obsession with death that prevents us from living. It’s much more simple - the our minds are always somewhere else. Believe it or not, I have a favorite curse. It is from the book of Deuteronomy. In a long litany that describes the worst-case scenarios of human existence, the curse reads, “In the morning you will say, ‘if only it were evening’ and in the evening you will say, ‘if only it were morning.’”2 The classic understanding is that God will rain misery down upon those who don’t follow the commandments. Their lives will be so filled with suffering and terror that they will always seek escape. But 2

Deuteronomy 28:67 3

I think this curse has nothing to do with what is happening around us. I think it is entirely internal. What a tortured way that is to be – constantly wishing it were any time other than right now. And we’ve all been there, right? It’s not often, but there are days when I feel pulled in so many directions, so overwhelmed by the needs I am trying to meet that I want desperately to be home alone without the phone ringing. When I’m finally home alone, it’s so quiet that I’m bored out of my mind. I’d give anything for a call from one person who seems to need me. Imagine feeling that way all the time, if only it were morning, if only it were evening, if only it were morning a dreadful curse indeed. Contrast this to the story told of Rabbi Moshe of Kobryn. After he died, someone asked one of his students what were the most important things to him. The answer: “Whatever he was doing at the moment.”3 He didn’t miss a thing, because he was there, in it. All the time. I am not an expert on mindfulness, which is “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment...”4 But I’m pretty sure there is something to slowing down, staying in the present, cultivating consciousness. I’m pretty sure that mindfulness traditions, including those found in Judaism, deepen the experience of living. I have been on a few retreats where meditation and silence were part of the practice. These periods were very challenging for me, but also very powerful – they really do heighten perception. At one such recent retreat, we ate all of our meals in I first read this story in a sermon by Rabbi Janet Marder, The Best of Times, given September 8, 2010. 4 “..and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience, moment by moment.” Jon Kabat-Zinn 3

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silence. It was at a beautiful oceanside conference center where the dining hall had wide glass windows. While I was slowly eating, focusing on my breath and on paying attention, the scene outside the window looked like one of those allergy medicine commercials where someone peels the blurry-ing filter off of the screen. The green of the leaves seemed a brighter green, the fog a denser fog. The omelette tasted more omelett-ey, if you will. An omelette sounds pretty good right now, doesn’t it? That may be part of the point of this day. When we long for something we come to appreciate it. The first bite of food we eat after sundown tonight will explode with flavor. We’ll taste it like we didn’t taste our dinners yesterday. When I stepped outside early the other morning, I was struck by the most strange sensation – my skin felt cold. After months of our Arizona heat, it was startling, and delightful. But we don’t always have to be deprived of a feeling to notice and appreciate it. We just have to wake up. In one of the most famous scenes in the Torah, Jacob dreams of a ladder that is planted in the ground and reaches up to heaven. Angels ascend and descend on the ladder. He hears the voice of God and when he wakes up he says, Achen yesh Adonai bamakom hazeh veh anochi, lo yadati. God was in this place and I didn’t even know it. Most commentators assume that the dream is a vehicle for revelation, that without it Jacob might not have heard the word of God. But Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has a different take.5 He imagines Jacob in the morning, suddenly realizing the significance of the night and remarking, “If I had known God was here I wouldn’t have gone to sleep!” It’s not sleeping that got him in touch with God. It is waking up. 5

In God Was In This Place and I, I Did Not Know.

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Now I’m not knocking sleep. I LOVE a good sleep. But let’s leave it to the times when we are...well, sleeping. The spiritual quest is about waking up. And staying awake. My friend and colleague Meir Feldman used to tell the story of two new fathers. If you ask one what was the most spiritual moment in his life he would say, “The moment my child was born. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve experienced. I felt like God was standing right next to me.” If you ask the other, he would say, “The moment my child was born. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve experienced. I’m not sure God had anything to do with it.” And here’s the thing: It might not matter all that much which one you say. In the very same breath that I tell you it is imperative that we thank God 100 times a day, I’ll also say that God can probably take or leave the credit. The heretic is the one who doesn’t notice, who doesn’t recognize the staggering magnitude of what just happened. It might take time and patience for us to notice something significant. Rainer Maria Rilke’s beautiful book Letters to a Young Poet is advice on writing and living as an artist. He urges the young writer to slow down, to allow thoughts to fully form. He writes, “All things consist of carrying to term and then giving birth. To allow the completion of every impression, every germ of a feeling deep within… to await humbly and patiently the hour of the descent of a new clarity…to be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow.” Stay in “right now” says Rilke, take your time there. When we do so, we’re not just seeing, hearing, smelling. We’re actually forming, shaping and giving birth

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to a thought as original and unique as a new life. And the surest way to destroy it is to rush through the moment. To worry that summer might not come. That’s not just advice about writing. We don’t have to be poets, and we don’t have to be young to stand unshaken in the storms of spring. It’s not just the lovely moments that are worth noticing and living in fully. Some of our deepest experiences come with a sadness or a sting. In another letter, Rilke warns against drowning out what hurts. “Like illness treated superficially and incompletely, [sadnesses] retreat and after a short pause, break out even more intensely….they [become] life unlived, ridiculed, scorned.” And the stings – they go right to the heart, and they’re so important. When was the last time someone who really cares about you offered tough and honest critique? I mean about something meaningful, something real, some gem of truth revealed that is suddenly obvious and undeniable? When it happens to me, once I get past the initial shock and urge to fight back, I settle in and feel profound gratitude for the rawness of the encounter, for the refinement of myself that will surely come. This is living. And it certainly fits right in with this season of scrutiny and forgiveness. I’ll never forget the time I nearly started a forest fire. I was taking a backpacking course and I didn’t quite remember how the instructors had taught us to set up the stove. It was a small valve and a big mistake. When the fire was put out, everyone was safe and sound and I decided to spend the rest of the ten-week course in my sleeping bag, an instructor came by to console me with these words, “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”

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Reach out, take a chance, get hurt even. Make a colossal mistake. L-I-V-E, live! One final thought from Rilke - he charges us to develop “a relationship to life greater than just being alive.” That’s what we’re going for. A relationship to life greater than just being alive. U’vacharta bachayyim. Life, in its fullest, deepest, most gripping form, does not just come. We have to choose it. We have to tolerate its discomforts. We have to live it. We have to get out of the sleeping bag. That is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary. Now go and learn it.

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