Sheryl
Sandberg's husband died this year. You may have caught the story on the news.
Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and her husband was the CEO of SurveyMonkey. Do
you remember the survey we did about the community last year - that was done on
SurveyMonkey. He was 47, their kids are even younger than that. Sandberg, some
thirty days later, posted - on Facebook, where else, some reflections on what
she had learnt. It was a moving and inspirational post, but my eye was drawn to
the Rabbinic bit.
Sandberg talked about Shiva, she talked about Sheloshim. When she
said, ' I have lived
thirty years in these thirty days. I feel like I am thirty years wiser,' I felt
that in amongst the pain and the loss, the Jewish piece had played its part in providing
a net to carry her and her family from the first moments of horror forward.
I often do.
In part I'm
telling this story about Sandberg because she posted, publically. I've got an
entire shelf of books written by people reflecting on what does and doesn't
help in the aftermath of loss; losses both appallingly tragic and less tragic.
I could tell a similar story about the losses so many of the members of this
community. I so often feel and so often am told that in amongst the pain and
the loss, the Jewish piece had played its part in providing a net to carry her
and her family from the first moments of horror forward.
Maybe I'm in
danger of overreaching a touch. Maybe there are a few of you here who were dragged
through the Jewish observances after the loss of those you have loved most and
felt nothing, or felt only anger towards our faith. To you I'm sorry, you may
well not like anything of what I am going on to say, but I want to take this
moment, on this most special of days, to unpack a little of why and how I think
this Jewish thing works, not only in the aftermath of loss, but more generally
also.
On the one hand
it's terribly hard to know what to do when someone passes away.
There are so many
different kinds of death, no two could ever be the same. There are deaths that
come at the end of a long and richly lived life, and those that come horribly
before their time. There are deaths that come at the end of a long illness, and
deaths that come suddenly.
And there are so
many different mourners, no two could ever be the same. We cover different
generations, different levels of dependence on the person who has passed away,
different levels of love - let it be admitted. There are the mourners who were
once so close, but have drifted apart and there are those who had difficult
times earlier in life, but had been successfully putting a relationship back
together until death ripped that apart again.
And there are so
many different emotions that rampage around a house of mourning. Elizabeth
Kubler-Ross, widely recognized as doyenne of the study of grief suggests five;
denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance. But I regularly see so
many others; fear, guilt, relief. I meet mourners who feel guilty because they
feel relieved and mourners who feel relieved because they feel guilty. And then
the most bleak emotional response; the emotional response which is empty of all
emotion.
If all that doesn't
make knowing what to do about loss sufficiently confusing there is one extra
dimension of complexity. When we encounter the loss of another's parent or
lover or sibling or child, God forbid, we are forced to encounter our own
mortality. That's scary.
And into all that
complexity, and variation and sheer awful pain, Judaism wades in with a
collection of observances and Halachah and customs that can seem, from the
outside, so strange and old-fashioned, but from the inside, for so many, work -
or at least help as much as any response to loss could.
We move quickly,
partly because it is felt to be an affront to the deceased to be left just
hanging around, and partly because we believe a family can't mourn while, in
the language of the Talmud, the dead lie before them.
A body is washed,
dressed with the care and a liturgy that would befit the High Priest in Temple
times, but in the simplest of clothes - Tachrichim, and placed in the simplest
of plain pine boxes. All of us dressed the same way, boxed up the same way -
death is universal and universally horrid, 'who is important, who is
distinguished [before the angel of death]' notes the Talmud.[1]
The funeral is
simple, no complicated liturgical decisions to make, two brief readings and
then a eulogy. 'Don't make your eulogy too long' counsels the Talmud - wise
advice this one for Rabbis who are called upon to speak at funerals. Don't kid
yourself you can effectively sum up a life no matter how long you go on for.
Then that most brutal of moments, when the coffin is lowered and the
mourners are offered shovels, and there is that sound of earth hitting the
coffin and the pain is palpable. It's done because the Jewish tradition isn't
designed to mollify or pacify in the aftermath of the loss of those we love
most. It's designed to bring into sharp focus the loss we have just
experienced. If the observance feels raw, that is only an attempt to match the
reality of what has taken place.
Oh, there are so many moments of detail. There is a tradition I always
take a moment to observe - plucking a few blades of grass as we leave the
grounds and letting them flutter away through my fingers with reference to a
verse in Isaiah, an image used also at the heart of our Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur liturgy, 'Yavesh Chatzir'[2] - grass
withers. For we came from dust and will return to dust.
Then comes the food - we are after all Jews, what did you expect? -
and the low chairs and the wishes for a long life, and the candles and the
covered mirrors and then the Shloshim, and the Yartzeit. There is the way the
Kaddish that starts so stiff and foreign in the mouth, even of those who know
their way around a service, and after a year becomes easier to say, just as the
tradition hopes the loss becomes easier to bear.
So many ideas all coded into ritual and practice.
This is the point.
Out of this panoply of rituals, each one attempting to hold, or honour
or confront a web emerges that can, I do genuinely believe, hold all of us, no
matter who it is we have lost, or how we have lost them, or who we are, even as
we change pinging around in the aftermath of a bereavement from one emotional
ebb to another flow.
The ritual, our faith tradition, wants to wrap us up and protect us at
the most raw moments of our journey, and gently put us down as the rawness
passes, gently ushering us back into the real world for we are forbidden from
sitting Shiva for evermore. Of course our rituals don't make all this pain
disappear in an instant, but the goal of mourning isn't 'to get over it.' The
goal is revealed slowly, over the passage of time.
What a gift. What a gift to be a Jew, to have woven into our spiritual
DNA an entire approach to death which is this sensitive and this deep. What a
gift, as a Rabbi visiting the bereaved, to know I have this arsenal. When the
words don't work, when there are no words that could possibly help, I can reach
into this treasure chest of our faith and find something that might help in a
way that no words can match.
And why does all this help? In part because these rituals have been
created by wise, compassionate elders of our faith who understand the nature of
our mortal condition. In part because these rituals have evolved slowly
becoming increasingly attuned to their ecological niche, just as any other
evolving system becomes increasingly effective. In part because underneath and
beyond all this human endeavour is a divine whisper that our human efforts have
managed to pick up like some giant radar array detecting the presence of
far-off life.
Again, if I'm overreaching I'm sorry. If you are listening to this
thinking I have no understanding of how poorly our faith tradition failed you
at your time of greatest loss, I'm sorry. But I hope, and I think I've
reasonably safe in thinking that there won't be so many of you thinking that.
There are definitely those of you who have shared that this, this whole Jewish
thing, has helped. There are those of you who didn't, at the beginning of the
journey, see yourselves wanting to sit so many nights of Shiva, or come so
regularly to Shul to say Kaddish, but, in the days, weeks and months after the
moments of greatest rawness have reflected that it did help after all.
I think this does help.
And so here's my question.
If we got it so right, when it comes to our approach to bereavement,
how come we got it so wrong in our approach to so much else of Jewish life?
Or let me try that slightly differently, if, when it comes to
bereavement there is a sense that the tradition and its rituals and observances
help us, support us and leave us stronger how come we aren't a more observant
community when it comes to Kashrut, or Shabbat, or shul attendence.
I mentioned that survey, we did last year - only 52% of respondents
ticked the box that said they kept kosher at home and a only 28% ticked the box
that said they kept kosher 'out.' That's it? It hurts.
It's not that the rituals associated with Kashrut come from a
different place from the rituals associated with bereavement. They come as
refractions of divine will and have been pored over and evolved through
centuries of wise and careful balancing.
It's not that the rituals associated with Kashrut don't hold and code
for profound ideas about the nature of food and ourselves. If we are what we
eat we should, surely, be thinking more carefully about what it is we out in
our mouths, and if we value life we should, surely, be thinking more carefully
about our consumption of meat in particular. Each time a Shochet takes the life
of an animal to produce kosher meat they say a blessing, animal life - though
different from human life - is honoured. To consume meat is an act of violence,
our tradition recognises that, and demands that we shouldn't mix milk - that
gift of life - with our carnivorous urges. An observance of Kashurt can make us
more sensitive to our place in the food chain, and our place as consumers on
this planet. Kashrut is one of the most powerful markers of Jewish identity. If
you are one of the ones who don't observe, try it - start somewhere easy. Stop
ordering the meat is easy. Milk and meat is easy. Try it, and let me know if
you think it helps.
And what about Shabbat. Almost 3/4 of respondents ticked that they light
Shabbat candles 'always' or at least 'often.' That's not bad, I suppose. But
how many of us desist from shopping, or give Shabbat more than the attention of
a brief few moments on a Friday evening? The survey didn't tell us that. But it
won't be so many. And again, it's not as if the ideas aren't powerful - Shabbat
a day to celebrate what have rather than engage permanently in a never-ending
consuming cycle of seeking more and more. We will never realise what we truly
have until we stop, and give thanks. Shabbat is about what it means to be human
in ways deeper than our choice of vegetables or movie downloads. Again, let me
offer this in the most simple way I can. Stop spending money from sundown
Friday to stars-out Saturday. Be a human being rather than a consumer. And if
you want something a little more challenging, turn the radio off, the TV, the
phone even! gevalt, how can a person possibly survive with only books and face
to face conversation - well I suppose you could come to shul. We moan about the
pressures of life, but the ability to turn the computer off is only a flick of
a switch away. Try it, and let me know if you think it helps.
We have, I suspect, the Jewish thing back to front. We start from the
perspective of it being a drag and of limited value in our oh so busy lives.
And then when we need it, it's there and we find in it meaning and relevance
and power. We don't need to wait that long. We can start to find the meaning
and the relevance and the power before then, before the gates close, before
it's too late to make a difference to the lives we live and the most important
relationships surrounding us.
If you think it helped, this Jewish thing, at the moments when you and
your family were most in need. Give it a try now, make a promise to yourself to
try the Kashrut thing, or the Shabbat thing. Frankly any of the things. Try it
and let me know if you think it helps. I hope you will. I think you will. And
in so doing, I hope, we can all become better Jews, better members of our
families, better inheritors of our Jewish tradition, and even better placed to
carry these traditions forward into the year to come.
Chatimah Tovah
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