Kol Nidre 5773 -
A Jewish Culture of Life
by Joshua Hammerman
Last
March at the AIPAC Policy Conference I had the opportunity to listen to Yair
Lapid, one of Israel’s best known TV journalists, who left his prime time spot
to enter the fray of Israeli politics. How
well he does remains to be seen, but like his late father Tommy Lapid, his mere
presence in the political arena will really shake things up. Yair was speaking of his new book, a tribute
to his father called “Memories after my Death,” and he told an incredible story:
It
was Feb. 1945, and Tommy Lapid, 13, lived with his mother in a basement in the
Budapest Ghetto. Early one Monday
morning, the Germans started liquidating the block Lapid’s family lived
on. At one point, as the Jews were being
forced to gather in the square, a squadron of Russian planes buzzed over head,
and in the commotion, Tommy Lapid hid behind a small public lavatory painted in
green. His mother pushed him inside and
told him, “You need to pee now.” The boy
was scared, but he listened to his mother.
It’s hard to pee when it’s cold and people are shooting all around you,
but he did. And she closed the door
behind him. The convoy left without
them.
A
few minutes later, of the 600 Jews who had gathered in the square, 598 were
dead under the ice in the Danube River.
And Tommy Lapid and his mother stood in the street in Budapest, free. But he had no place to go to. So they went back to the ghetto, to the same
basement, hoping only that the Russians would arrive before the next convoy was
rounded up.
Many
years later, in 1986, Tommy Lapid went back to Budapest with Yair. It was the first time in 40 years that Tommy
had been there. They were walking on the
street and suddenly Tommy burst into tears.
There was nothing there – except for a small public lavatory, painted in
green. He said – this is the place. And there they were, two grown men, stroking
the peeling green walls of a public lavatory.
And the Hungarians were walking and glancing at them warily, Yair says. “They
must have thought we were nuts!”
“But
we were not nuts!” he adds. “We were a statistical error. My father was supposed to be dead and I was
never supposed to be born.”
That
green bathroom became their Wailing Wall, a holy place, a symbol of the
precariousness of life. To be that close
to death is something that most of us cannot imagine. That was the precise point where life meets
death – where heaven and earth intersect.
Mircea
Eliade, the great scholar of religion, calls that point an axis mundi, a cosmic
axis – a place holier beyond all others precisely because it is where life is
elevated and death defeated. In some
cultures, it is the highest mountain, like Mt. Fuji or Mt Kilimanjaro. In others, it is a man made structure, like
the pyramids, or a pagoda, a steeple or a minaret, all reaching for the heavens,
all seeking to transcend life and defeat death.
And in some cultures it is not a place, but a time – like Yom
Kippur.
Yom
Kippur is the holiest time, when the holiest person, the high priest, would
enter the holiest place – the Holy of Holies in the temple and utter the
holiest sound – God’s ineffable name.
And at that moment, that person, in that place, hovered between life and
death. No one knew if the Cohen Gadol
would survive. No one else could go in
with him, so they tied a rope around his ankle so that if he died in there, so
they could pull him out.
There
is no known occurrence of a high priest actually dying on Yom Kippur, so the
odds were in their favor; unlike the fictitious “Hunger Games” where, in a dystopian,
Darwinian setting, two dozen teenage children are selected by lottery to fight
to the death, with only one allowed to survive.
Yom
Kippur is the Jewish version of the “Hunger Games.” The hunger is real, but fortunately, our
flirtations with death are purely symbolic, and the opponents we battle are not
other people, but our own inner demons. The white garment we wear, the kittel,
is, symbolically, a death shroud. Anthropologists
suggest that white is symbolic of death because the lifeless body turns that
color. It also symbolizes our purification in this day long trial by fire. And
the synagogue is bathed in white on the Day of Awe. The Torahs, the table coverings, some wear
special all white tallises.
In
many ways the opposite of white is not black, but red. Red is the color of blood, and blood is the
stuff of life. But with life comes
temptation and sin, with blood comes bloodshed, and with bloodshed comes
impurity. Isaiah states (1:18) – “Even
though your sins be like crimson, they can turn snow white. Red as dyed wool,
they can become like fleece.”
And
so, on Yom Kippur, the fast becomes a day-long purification ritual, a dangerous
journey right up to that third rail, that place where life and death meet, and
the fast becomes a means toward a simulated death, a death of all things physical
– and the prelude to a rebirth at day’s end.
On Yom Kippur we are born again, as we are on the wedding day, a day
when it is also traditional to fast, when our old selves die and something very
new is born.
In
a sense, our task on Yom Kippur is to channel those moments of death and
rebirth that have molded us, and return to that place, that bathroom in
Budapest, the place that in our lives marked the nexus between life and death –
our own personal Holy of Holies. That
moment in time when death was nearest, when we realized how precious life can
be. We’ve all had that place. We’ve all had that time – when we saw the
colors of the world with extreme clarity.
And then we thank God for life, and we cling to it all the more
earnestly, we hold on tight. We are that
goat, the one that won the lottery and escaped death, hence its name, the
scape-goat, the one sent out to the Wilderness. And we realize that purely arbitrarily and
through sheer luck, we survived the lottery that was Auschwitz. How lucky we are.
Tommy
Lapid went into a urinal to pee and he lived.
My grandparents decided to come to America, and I lived. And because of that, I was born, while six
million died, and because of the accident of my birth, I have a responsibility
to appreciate life and to choose life.
Time
and time again, Moses says in Deuteronomy, “Choose life, so you and your
children may live.” That, in a nutshell,
is the message of Yom Kippur. And in this post Holocaust era, we chose life
because we were selected for death- and we lived.
Somehow,
in our day, this reverence for life has gotten all mixed up in partisan
politics – so it is time to step back and take another look. At this moment when we are all closest to
death, if only symbolically, we need to affirm that reverence for life is too
precious to be politicized or outsourced to any interest group. It is an overriding value, and it belongs to
us all.
As
I mentioned last week, I visited Colorado this summer, and on a whim one
afternoon in the Denver area, we decided to visit Columbine. Another holy place, for the saddest of
reasons. April 20, 1999. Twelve students and one teacher gunned
down. The memorial is lovely, a
peaceful, beautiful homage on a hillside facing the Rockies.
For
each victim, there is a large plaque with an inscription written by family
members. On one plaque, memorializing
Daniel Lee Rohrbough, age 15, a question appears: “Dad. I have a question. Why?”
And then the answer, written in stone:
“Son, in a Nation that legalized the innocent killing of children in the
womb…in a Godless school system your life was taken….Dan, I’m sorry.”
So,
for this father, Daniel’s murder had less to do with two crazed killers named
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold than on a ruling handed down by the Supreme Court
in 1973.
I
tried to put myself in the position of this father – the anger he must feel –
anger at a country that has let him down.
And I tried to understand that. I’m
sure I would be angry too. If I were one
of the bereaved parents of Columbine, I would be angry too. I would be angry at a country that seemed not
to value the life of my child enough to make it safer. For me, the issue would be the guns – the
guns and the hatred of anyone who is different.
For him, it was all about abortion.
For both of us, though, there is a common denominator. We have a common complaint. Life has become cheap in 21st
century America.
We
have become numb to all the killing.
Whether the video games or the bullying or abortion or a society that
has gone insanely gun-crazy, or whether it’s simply because we don’t see death
the way our ancestors did – back in the day where we didn’t sweep the frail and
sick away to die in isolation. Or maybe we’ve just gotten numb to seeing
wars on TV or in the movies, where you push a button in New Mexico and an
unmanned drone kills someone in Afghanistan… where fantasy and reality blend to
the point where they are unrecognizable one from the other, where one second an
evil killer is massacring people on the streets of Gotham City on the screen and
the next, a real life Joker is spraying a movie theater with automatic
gunfire.
Oh
sure, we all pretend to be shocked. But
are we really? Or have we simply
forgotten how precious life is. Have we
become numb to all the killing?
We
need a reaffirmation of a culture of life.
It’s really not about abortion or guns or euthanasia or smoking or video
games, or Hollywood or capital punishment or teen suicide or drugs or alcohol: It’s
about all of them, and then some. It’s about life.
Our
Torah demands it: Choose life! But can
we find common ground? Can this seeming
unbridgeable canyon be spanned?
We
all know that the issue of life has dogged every presidential campaign, in one
form or another, for decades. We can’t
seem to shake it. And it’s only getting
worse. It was a rude awakening for me to
drive through Middle America this summer and see enormous billboards of dead
fetuses where one would expect to see an ad for Motel 6 or Wall Drug.
But
maybe there is a way.
Last
April, Connecticut became the 17th state to eliminate the death
penalty in future prosecutions, the fifth in the past five years. Nationally, the tide appears to be turning
away from the death penalty, as even some capital punishment supporters are
beginning to be troubled at the extent to which human error has claimed
innocent life. Since 1973, 138 prisoners
sentenced to death were later exonerated. And those are only the mistakes
that were caught in time. We have no idea how many were not.
Judaism
has much to teach on that score, and some of those lessons could help bridge
the gap between social conservatives and liberals.
Since
the days of the Bible, Jews have always been reluctant to impose the death
penalty. The Torah mandates it for 36 offenses, ranging from murder
to kidnapping, adultery, incest, rape, idolatry, apostasy, disrespecting
parents and desecrating the Sabbath. But during the rabbinic period, the
sages effectively abolished capital punishment, understanding that while most
convicted murderers may indeed be guilty, if only one innocent person is
hanged by the state, all citizens of that state are guilty of murder.
In
Israel, where Jewish law is taken quite seriously, not even terrorists with
blood on their hands are put to death. Only those convicted of crimes against
humanity can be executed (thus far, only Adolf Eichmann). But otherwise, we always need to err on the
side of life. Judaism is, in the truest
sense of the term, “pro-life.”
So
back here in Connecticut, T.R. Rowe, a Republican, crossed party lines
to support the death penalty repeal. While siding with the Democrats, he
then challenged that those who protect the “worst of the worst” should also
protect the ones who are most innocent of all, as he put it: those not yet
born.
In
this polarized political climate, one legislator’s crossing of the aisle is
nearly as noteworthy – and miraculous – as the crossing of the Red Sea. Rowe is to be commended for pushing us to step
out from behind political and denominational barricades and seek a bipartisan
dialogue, and also an interfaith conversation that aims to protect innocent
life while also safeguarding our precious liberties.
We
can find that in the Jewish approach. Judaism always seeks to defend the
imperiled, even to the point of allowing the desecration of the Sabbath when it
can save a life. But the threat to life must
be immediate, not potential or theoretical.
Even
were capital punishment proven to deter potential murderers – and that is not the
case – the prospect of potentially saving a life in the
future is trumped by the very real possibility that an innocent life, that of a
wrongly accused prisoner, might be taken now. A Jewish culture of life would
demand that the death penalty either be repealed or, if remaining on the books,
rarely be implemented.
But
what of abortion? Here too, for Judaism, the immediate trumps the theoretical.
The sages did not advocate abortion on demand. They just simply made it clear
that when the choice is between saving a real human life, in
this case the mother, or a potential human being, the unborn
child, the real takes precedence over the potential. The
prevailing Jewish view is that a fetus is not a fully realized human being until
it is born. Since it is not human at conception or while in utero, a culture of
life would imply, from a Jewish perspective, that the focus be on the life of
the mother until the moment of birth. For many rabbis, that concept extends to
less immediate but still perilous threats to the mother’s physical and mental
health. As long as the fetus remains in
her body, it is the mother’s life and health that matter most, though as a
pregnancy progresses toward birth, more consideration is given to the life of
the fetus, much like Roe v. Wade.
To
repeat, a culture of life would imply, from a Jewish perspective, that the priority
be on the life of the mother. And
on this, there is little debate among the different Jewish denominations.
It
is possible for our society to promote a culture of life, but only when there
is first a culture of dialogue and consensus building. Rep. Rowe has
courageously demonstrated that such potential exists, even in this polarized
environment. Religious groups can set an example by engaging in vigorous
interfaith dialogue rather than latching onto one political party or another
and attempting to impose their own parochial vision on the state. Where there is first consensus building,
religious values can inform public policy-making.
There
is a broad consensus that the state must protect innocent human life. No
government should be guilty of allowing innocent human beings to die. I think we can all agree on that. It’s a good place for a respectful dialogue
to begin, one where religious groups can be active participants, as voices of
conscience and wisdom, promoting reasoned argument rather than partisanship.
But
the state should not attempt to define conclusively when we become human
beings, when human life begins, since there is no possibility of consensus on
that issue. That is a matter between pastor and congregant, a question of
personal conscience and faith rather than public law. The government should never play favorites on
matters of faith.
A
culture that reveres life is a worthy goal. To get there, we must first
cultivate a culture of dialogue.
America
is ready for that. In a recent CNN poll,
only 15 percent of the population wants abortion to illegal in all
circumstances. 88% say it should be
legal if a woman’s life is in danger.
83% when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest. But only 35% say it should always be legal,
under all circumstances. So the majority
is looking for middle ground, and there is middle ground to be had. A Gallup poll reports similar results, and
the numbers have not changed much going back to 2004.
We
need to get beyond the notion of Pro Life and Pro Choice, as if those in one
camp reject all choice and those in the other are insensitive to life. After
all, Deuteronomy included both sides in one phrase. The verse says “Choose Life.”
Is
there a middle ground on gun control too?
I hope to God there is, though no one seems to want to talk about it. You know, in Israel there are hate crimes, there
has been terrorism and war, there is more pent up frustration and fear than we
can imagine, there are definitely crazy people, and you see soldiers with guns
all over the place. But you don’t see random
mass killings of the type we see here. Maybe
it’s because, ironically, Israelis are happier – as surveys have shown. Maybe it’s because they feel more connected,
that their lives are more purposeful. I
don’t know, but we need for our society to choose life.
Is
there common ground on other sensitive life and death issues, like
euthanasia? Fortunately, this is one
issue that has receded from the realm of public hysteria. There are no Karen Ann Quinlans or Terri
Schiavos engulfing us at the moment in this country, and in Israel there is
consensus on the proper course of treatment for Ariel Sharon, who has been
comatose for 5 1/2 years – so maybe this is an opportunity for reflective
conversation.
Brain
death is one of the most discussed halachic issues of our times. Tradition demands that we preserve life but
also that we show reverence to the dead.
These values conflict, especially when other lives are at stake. If a brain-dead patient is still considered
alive but we harvest his organs, have we not killed him? But if we don’t harvest
his organs, aren’t we condemning someone else to death because of our
inaction? The Conservative Movement
accepts medical definitions of brain death as sufficient to declare a patient
dead, but recently there has been a growing dispute among Orthodox rabbinic
groups. (A recent article describes how) In 1991, the Rabbinical Council of America
adopted the brain death standard, which America’s ultra-Orthodox Agudath
Israel opposed. And “in 2010 the RCA published a
110-page brief effectively reversing its previous
position. Though the document declares that it is “not intended as a
formal ruling,” its thrust is that an observant Jew should donate organs only
after the cessation of breathing (by which time many organs are medically
unusable).”
These
halachic disputes can get pretty intense, but from a rabbinic standpoint, it is
possible for more than one option to be acceptable. That’s
because our tradition recognizes something very important that every religious
system and government should recognize: we aren’t God. We really can’t know when life truly begins
and ends.
That
boundary. That boundary between life and
death. Despite all our scientific
advances, life remains the ultimate mystery. The ultimate curiosity. That rover we landed on Mars this summer is
fittingly called “Curiosity.” It’s doing a lot of research but it really has
one task and one task only – to see if life ever existed on that lonely planet,
even billions of years ago, when its atmosphere might have made life there more
sustainable. Such proof will go a long
way toward determining whether or not we are truly alone in this universe.
Life
is so hard to produce. Ask any couple trying to get pregnant. It’s not so simple. Think of that panda in Washington. Maybe that’s why God had to make and destroy
many worlds before settling on ours, to return to that Midrash I quoted last
week. Maybe it was not a moral universe that God was striving and
failing to achieve – but one that could simply sustain life. The fact that we remain the only known speck
in the universe where life exists serves as an additional reminder that life is
so holy and precious.
That
is why we revere those who are willing to risk their lives for the sake of
others.
When
we traveled out west this summer, Columbine was not the only place we visited where
life and death have intersected. In
South Dakota, we decided to take a long detour, several hours out of our way,
to a remote place near the Badlands of South Dakota. A place called Wounded Knee.
On
that spot, on December 29, 1890, the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment surrounded an
encampment of Native Americans on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. A shot was fired, we don’t know why, and in
the ensuing melee, the 7th Cavalry opened fire indiscriminately from all sides,
killing men, women, and children, including some of their fellow troopers. A few of the tribal leaders had guns and
fired away as well, emboldened, according to the marker at the site, by a
tribal practice at the time called “Ghost Dancing,” where they believed that
they were wearing magical garments that would protect them from the white man’s
weapons. They believed that they could
defeat death, that a messiah would raise them all up from the dead. By the time the dust had cleared, up to 300
Lakota were dead, and Army fatalities stood at 25. When the surviving Lakota fled unarmed, many
were hunted down and killed.
The
bodies littered the ravine below the road, and although most were later removed
and buried in a cemetery at the top of the hill, the ravine still has a lumpy,
unnatural look to it, reminiscent of the mass graves of Maidanek… Or maybe the banks of the Danube near Tommy
Lapid’s Budapest.
This
description of events on the sign at Wounded Knee was disturbing to me – it
conveyed a sense of blaming the victim.
Was this massacre in fact caused by some primitive cult of death, this
so called “Ghost Dancing?” A local museum
points the blame at the big city newspapers, which, looking to boost
circulation, painted the tribe and this practice as bloodthirsty and savage for
practicing what the called a “primitive cult of death.” Other historical accounts downplay the impact
of the ritual. But the sign that I read,
endorsed by the tribal leaders, makes clear that “Ghosting” will remain part of
the official story of Wounded Knee. In
effect, they were taking some responsibility for a massacre perpetrated upon
them.
Wow.
What
does that mean? It means that the very
descendents of the Lakota who were massacred were looking to teach their own
children, about the need, above all else, to choose life, to avoid risky
behavior, much like how we warn our kinds about the dangers of drugs and
alcohol. The crimes done to Native Americans will forever be a stain on our
nation’s conscience. But despite it all,
the message of that memorial, for all of us, is that we need to embrace a
culture of life. And a culture of life
is a culture of responsibility.
“Lo
ha metim yehalleu yah,” the Psalmist says, “The dead shall not praise God.”
There is nothing that we can do to change the past. But there is much that we can do for our
children. That is what amazed me at Wounded Knee. They chose life, so that their children may
live.
Over
the next 24 hours, this is that sacred place where life and death will
intersect, where others have died but we have been granted a reprieve, the
miraculous gift of more time here on earth. Never forget the real cult of death that we
experienced seven decades ago.
As
we journey though this day, may we recall those sacred places - Tommy Lapid’s
green lavatory, the classrooms of Columbine and the ravines of Wounded Knee. The
Holy of Holies in Jerusalem, the crowded cabins of the ships that brought my
grandparents across the sea, and wherever your life was saved, whatever brought
you to this place and time. For the next
24 hours, this sanctuary becomes our holy of holies. It becomes that place where we rediscover the
precious gift of simply being alive.
Legend
has it that the Book of Life will remain open throughout this sacred day, only
to be sealed at nightfall tomorrow. And
that sealing of the book will mark not our deaths but our return to the realm
of the normal. But even as we reenter the day to day world, as we break the
fast and end these Hunger Games, we will sit down to round foods, nourishing
our bodies with the earth’s bounty. The
round foods, the egg, the hallah, the bagel, they will bring us back into the
cycle of normalcy, of life. And they
will remind us, always, that ours is a culture of life. And they will remind us, always, that – even
as we protect the right to choose – we must choose life, so that our
children may live.
