June 1989

LIVE BODIES AND DEAD SOULS:

It was on the eve of the last
days of Passover, several hours before the onset of Yom Toy, when a news
bulletin interrupted the regularly scheduled program on my car radio: General
Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev announced the volun­tary resignation of 106
members of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, fully one
third of its membership. In that self-same bulletin, they were already dubbed
the dead souls, after Gogol's famed classic of that name, and akin to what we
would describe as dead wood.

Dead Souls is reckoned as
one of the truly great works of Russian litera­ture. Its amazingly vivid
pictures of Russian society which are unforgettably por­trayed by Gogol have
become a fundamental part of the experience of all Russians who read and know
their language. Few figures of speech resonate so surely in the Russian
consciousness as Dead Souls.

Nonetheless, as I see it, to
call those hapless members of the Central Com­mittee who willingly gave up
their high positions dead souls is not an altogether precise analogy. For in Gogol's
tale the dead souls were actually dead in body as well as in spirit. The hero
of the story is an adventurer who goes about Russia making fictitious purchases
of dead souls, serfs who have died since the last census, with the intention
of pledging his imaginary property to the government.

What is true of the victims
of the Kremlin shake up, is that only their souls are dead. Their bodies,
however, are still alive.

A more apt description would
have been to call them Nadavs and Avihus. Nadaw and Avihu, of
course, were the two sons of Aaron who were tragically stricken dead in the Mishkan
(Tabernacle), on the very day their father was inducted as Kohen Gadol
High Priest and, they, as priests, for having brought strange fires into
the Sanctuary. Our tradition tells, us however, that they didn't actually die
physically. There was Srayfos Ha Neshama V'Goof Kayam (Sanhednn 52:).
Their bodies remained alive and intact, only their souls were consumed in
the fire: dead souls and live bodies.

And, indeed, Nadav and Avihu
have become chilling metaphors for our time and place which abounds with live
bodies and dead souls spiritual zombies.

I heard a black preacher say,
after the gang-rape of  the young woman in Cen­tral Park last month, We don't
rear children anymore. We just let them grow up wild. And the harvest is a
generation of moral illiterates. live bodies and dead souls!

But there is a curious irony
in Judaism with regard to this notion of live bodies and dead souls. Our
faith just as surely believes that there are no dead bodies without live
souls. The soul can be extinguished only while, and so long as, the body is
still alive. But once the breath has gone out of the flesh, then the soul
revives and returns to its eternal state.

We are told that even the
likes of a Menashe who was perceived to have been the most flagrant idol
worshipper among Israel's Kings has a share in the world to come (Sanhedrin
103:). His soul still is.

Ours is a twin challenge: To
exorcise from our earthly habitat these ghastly and untenable hybrids of live
bodies and dead souls. And second, to lead the kind of existence which is
powerfully moved by the knowledge that the soul lives after the body and is
everlasting!

Rabbi Zevulum Charlop