The Sanctity of Letdowns and Limitations

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March 03 2013
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“Did she smoke?”


There has been a lot of sad news of late. One such piece is the tragic demise of a wonderful woman in her prime, who died of lung cancer. When people asked me what happened and I told them, they asked me, “Did she smoke?”




 The question is a fair one. But I think it also tells us something about our own inability to cope with our mortality. I feel immortal when I hear that someone who perished from lung cancer was a chain smoker. I’m almost saying to myself, I am not susceptible to human frailty because I don't smoke. They died because they smoked (she didn't). Actually, they died because they were born, because Adam and Chava sinned and because we all must die.




I remember a difficult shiva visit I once made to a former congregant. He is a brilliant cardiologist at the National Institute of Health. He is one of the cardiologists in the country paid to try to push the envelope. He’s given a lab and research dollars to try to unlock the secrets of the body’s pump and ultimately to save lives. Heart disease is still the number one killer in the US. He was distraught because he was observing shiva for his mother, who died of a cardiac-related episode. He was inconsolable because he could not save his own mother and it was in his hands to do so.




But it really isn’t. And he knew that! As brilliant as we are, we still have not found the fountain of youth or the antidote to seek immortality. We still every so often realize that we are not in control.




We can’t realize our mandate to come close to God and improve this world if we don’t understand that we may run out of time, and it may be in the middle of something or really at an inconvenient time.




Chazal singled out the laws of the Red Heifer – our Maftir and Haftarah topic – as perhaps the most mysterious in the entire Torah. The Midrash (Bamidbar Rabbah 19:14) records that King Shlomo, the wisest man who ever lived and breathed, could not understand the esoteric notion of the Parah Adumah. It was slaughtered outside the Temple perimeter, which was forbidden for all other sacrifices. It simultaneously purified those defiled by the ritual impurity of contact with death while defiling those who prepared it. The non-Jews at the time of Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakai learned of the intricacies of the Red Heafer and summarily accused the Jews of practicing sorcery (Bamidbar Rabbah 19:4)!




Rabbi Soloveitchik offered a novel approach to this paradox. Is it so hard to comprehend the laws of the Red Heifer? Is that harder than some of the more difficult passages in the Talmud or to master other aspects of the laws of ritual impurity? The Rav taught that the paradox that King Shlomo could not comprehend was the question of death itself. That which just can’t be understood is how a living, breathing, and spiritual creature crowned with intelligence, free will and empathy just stops existing physically. One minute an image of God, and BAAAM, the next minute carbon returned to the earth, its mother.




The very same King Shlomo write in his book of later years, Koheles:




 


"כי מי אשר יבחר אל כל החיים יש בטחון כי לכלב חי הוא טוב מן האריה המת" (קהלת ט:ד)


“For whoever is joined to all the living has hope, for concerning a live dog it is said that he is better than a dead lion” (Koheles 9:4). The king of the forest is not very useful if it’s not alive! 


Rabbi Abraham Besdin, who transcribed the Rav’s lectures and prepared them for consumption to the non-erudite and less lettered public, writes his Rebbe’s words (Reflections of the Rav vol II) as such:




Death is a mocking fate which awaits us all, a trauma of human helplessness which disturbs our existential serenity. It is an absurdity which undoes all of man’s rational planning, his dreams and hopes. We wonder, why should the foremost of God’s creations have an awareness of his mortality and, therefore, live in constant dread and distress in face of its inevitability?




Rabbi Soloveitchik then quotes the Zohar which states that death deprives the Jew of Hashem’s holiness and the Rav noted that the Egyptian civilization was obsessed with death and spent their entire lives preparing for their post-mortem journey, which was facilitated by their clerics. In contrast to this, the Jewish priest must avoid death at all costs; the kohen may not even be under the same roof as a dead body.




Parshas Parah is most often read the same week as Ki Sisa, the story of the Golden Calf. One could argue that this is the lowest moment in the history of the Jewish nation, where the decline into idolatry rears its ugly head. Moshe Rabbeinu immediately transforms into the greatest Defense Attorney of all time, and convinces the Almighty to save the nation and forgive them, culminating in an annual Day of Atonement.




During this low point in the spiritual narrative of Moshe’s leadership, he asks God to show him His glory; Moshe confesses that He wants to experience God. The Talmud (Brachos 7) understands this interchange as Moshe asking God ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ Hashem informs Moshe that he will never understand this and this will always be a mystery.




Rashi quotes Rabbi Moshe Hadarshan that the Red Heifer comes to atone for the sin of the Golden Calf. They are linked. But the linkage goes further. The Red Heifer, which defies all logic, is linked to Moshe’s request to see HASHEM’s glory, which took place during his sojourn on Sinai to receive forgiveness for the sin. The Parah Adumah is connected (via the Talmud) to the Divine secrets of the world and the mysteries of our mortal existence.




We’d rather hear that a victim of lung cancer was a life-long chain smoker, because we then believe we are immune from life’s underbelly. We can preach all we want about making every moment count and spending more time with our families, but it doesn’t sink in because we have plans to do it some other time. We often forget that we are not in control of the some other time.




If we understood that every harsh word we stated, every angry epithet we threw, every tantrum we concocted and each word of lashon hara could be our last words, we would think twice. We often forget that we are not in control of time and that later is not always possible.




So yes, there is a time to cry and a time to laugh, a time to eulogize and a time to dance (Koheles 3:4). Funerals are the only time – if then – that you can hear a pin drop. It's the only time that hundreds of people who know each other and care for one another will sit quietly looking at their shoes, or more accurately, introspect on the meaning of life. They look at their soles and into their souls. Because it takes a pine box, salty tears running down our cheeks and often the lugubrious chants of one of King David’s dirges to finally let us understand that life is holy, not its opposite.



Rabbi Pesach Krohn wrote a powerful story about the Klaussenberger Rebbe, who lost his wife and 11 children in the Shoah. He came to the US after the war and rebuilt the Klausenberg dynasty on these shores. People asked him how he was able to survive the unbelievable grief of his losses? He answered that there's a verse from Yechezkel that we say at a bris: through our blood we live. b'damayich chayi. He taught don't read b'damayich as 'your blood' but rather as 'we live with our silence of submission.' When Aharon the Priest was informed of the demise of his oldest two sons, he remained silent and catatonic: vayidom Aharon. The Klaussenberger Rebbe instructs us not to try to understand the mysteries. We can only move on if we are silent.


The Mishna famously proclaims that we increase our joy in Adar – mishenichnas Adar marbim b’simcha (Ta’anis 29a). Rashi’s comments on the famous line:


 


"ימי נסים לישראל פורים ופסח" (רש"י ד"ה 'משנכנס אדר' תענית כ"ט.)




These are miraculous days for the people of Israel, Purim and Pesach.



The implication of this commentary is that we rejoice not only in Adar but in the next month of Nisan well, as it hosts Pesach. 


Our redemption is built on our ability to rejoice, to have faith, to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Redemption is based on knowing that we must act now for the betterment of our families, our people and our God because there are no guarantees that we can do it tomorrow.


Parsha:
Parah 

Description

the paradox of life, death and the Red Heifer.

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    Learning on the Marcos and Adina Katz YUTorah site is sponsored today by Judy & Mark Frankel & family l'ilui nishmos מרדכי בן הרב משה יהודה ע"ה and משה יהודה ז"ל בן מאיר אליהו ויהודית