Drashot for this Shabbat...Enjoy!

To Die Alone

Recently, someone here asked me what was the most unpleasant part of my job as Rabbi.  Now there’s an obvious answer to that:  Politics.  That is, trying to operate effectively in an atmosphere where a group of people are working to influence the actions and policies of a group – the congregation.  That would be difficult enough, but as Rabbi I’m also expected to lead while having little real authority.  Some days it seems that the task of trying to manoeuvre through the emotional attachment that people bring to various issues, is a never-ending struggle.  But as I said, this answer is obvious!  Many of you have complained to me of similar people-challenges in the organisations and companies where you spend your professional lives.  Why should a synagogue be any different?  Okay, perhaps I shouldn’t open that Can of Worms just now…

I make it my business to never assume that someone wants from me an answer that is obvious.  Therefore, I responded honestly to my questioner.  There isn’t really any one task in my portfolio that is at all unpleasant.  Of all the specific tasks I’m called upon to do day in and day out, all are rewarding in their own way.

But Rabbi, my questioner insisted, unsatisfied with my answer.  Surely there’s something you find unpleasant?  Surely you don’t think funerals, for example, are a pleasant duty?

I told my questioner that I find no particular unpleasantness in officiating funerals.  And I was telling the truth.  But had he asked the question today and not several weeks ago, I might have answered differently.  Let me explain.

          A week ago today, we received word that a Jew at large in the community had passed away, and that he had requested a ‘traditional Jewish funeral’…from a Liberal Rabbi.  No, don’t laugh…that’s actually not such an unusual request!  What was unusual in this case was that the deceased left no names of living relatives.  And, as nearly as we were able to determine, nobody in the community knew him.

          This morning I was talking about this with someone who wasn’t Jewish, and he told me it wouldn’t surprise him.  A real estate agent, this man told me he’d sold homes and flats to many elderly people who came up here from Sydney or Melbourne who then, maybe a couple of years later, in turn sold their property.  They would tell him that they were returning from whence they came, because they knew nobody here and were unable to make friends locally.

          When I hear such pronouncements, I rebel against them with every fibre of my body.  I’ve been told by a number of you, our most active members at Temple Shalom, that you were never active in a shule until you came to the Gold Coast.  And why did you change your habits when you came here?  Because you were looking for friendship, and you found it here in our congregation.

          And that’s not to say that we’re perfect.  Forgive me if this bursts your bubble, but we could do still better – far better – making newcomers to our shule feel welcome from the first minute.  All of us, myself included, are guilty of this complacency.  But generally speaking, we do a good job of taking the first time visitor and drawing them in with our warm and welcoming attitude.

          So no Jew in this community, even if they have no living relatives which is highly unlikely, has to die alone, like a stray dog in an alley.  And yet, it happened last week.  And this week, I buried him in the Queen Street Cemetery.  I and three others from our congregation.   Keith Heritage and one of his employees put the number up to six.  And it was cold, dreary, rainy day.

           Okay, I know it sounds as if I’m whining…and I guess I am.  But I’m not criticising.  Not you, if you didn’t attend the funeral.  It would have been better had more members of our funeral attended.  And I would certainly ask that, next time you receive a sudden e-mail from Jan or whoever informing you of a funeral, that you simply attend without consideration as to whether you knew the deceased…or whether you liked him or her.  Accompanying the dead for burial – leviyat hameit in Hebrew – is, according to Mishnah Pe’ah, one of the obligations without measure.  But my purpose here is not to criticise those of you who were not there.  The reality is that mobody here knew the deceased, and it was a weekday…a cold, rainy weekday.

          And my point is not to criticise the deceased either.  God forbid.  Even though he, who had apparently lived some years here on the Gold Coast, had never taken the opportunities to participate in Jewish life.  It certainly would have been better if he had.  Better for the Jewish community, which can always use more active participation.  Who knows what talents, what abilities this man had, which could have contributed in some way to making our community stronger?  We’ll never know.  But it would also have been better for him.  I refuse to believe that any person, no matter how gruff a posture they might take, desires to be alone.  Not at the end of his life, and not at any other time of life.  We are hard-wired to need the society of others.  Sure, we all have moment when hermit-hood sounds attractive.  Most of us need solitude from time to time, unless we’re an absolute extrovert.  But to live and die alone?  Again, no criticism.  Just regret at the tragedy of such a life and death.

          So, no criticism from me.  Not of you, not of the deceased.  I only speak of this experience tonight, because it teaches us an important lesson.  And that is the lesson  that we must nurture our relationships while we still have time.  If you’re listening to my voice, or reading my words in my blog tonight, I want to you make a list of those whom you avoid because you’ve quarrelled with them.  Relatives, of course, but also friends.  Or those whom, perhaps, you once considered friends but no longer do because of…whatever.  I urge you, in the next days, to reach out to them.  Every one of them.  The sibling against whom you harbour some pique.  The distant cousin with whom you have no particular quarrel, but from whom you’ve drifted over time.  The friend from whom you’ve withdrawn…or who has withdrawn from you.  Reach out to them one by one.  Don’t wait for them to reach out to you.

          Then, listen to the announcements this evening.  About the plethora of Jewish activities going on in our community.  The adult singles gathering tomorrow night.  The Hebrew reading class on Tuesday morning.  Don’t look surprised, we announce it virtually every week when it happens.  The Senior Schmoozers on Wednesday afternoon.  The Judaism for Dummies class on Wednesday night.  The family cheder activity Sunday week.  Nobody is expected to attend everything.  But ask yourselves:  if something going on sounds interesting, why am I not making an effort to attend?  Don’t drive anymore?  Call a cab.  And if you truly can’t afford a cab, then tell me and I’ll find someone to pick you up.

          None of the offerings are interesting to you?  Hard to believe; more likely you just aren’t free when they’re offered.  So tell me what interests you, and when you’re free.  And we’ll put our heads and our energies together and organise it.  Stop waiting for someone else to do it.

          I’m not here to criticise, and I ask that you do not construe anything I’ve said tonight as criticism…of you or anybody else.  But I am here to goad you on to doing good things.  And the burial of a lone Jew this week has given me cause to strengthen my sense of imperative.  So consider yourselves instructed.  Heal your relationships.  At least, try!  And don’t let another week go by without participating in something that might be interesting and uplifting.  As I have said before, Time is our Enemy.  Every day we live, is a day we will never get back.  And our days are finite.  None of us can know how many days we have.  But when today is gone, we all have one less day.  Of this, there is absolutely no ambiguity.

          Funerals are not always unpleasant.  When the funeral is truly a Celebration of Life, as they’re sometimes called, then there’s nothing unpleasant about escorting the deceased to the Next World through the simple act of showing up and remembering.  Especially when we conspicuously have positive things to say about that person.  And when they’ve lived a long and full life.

          But funerals can be unpleasant, as I can now authoritatively say.  They can be very unhappy occasions.  And perhaps the most unhappy occasion is when we must escort someone whom we didn’t know.  Whom, as far as we can determine, nobody knew.  That’s a tragedy.  Let’s all decide that our own passing, inevitable as it is, will not entail such tragedy.

Pick Up and Move On

I’m guessing that everybody in this room, or reading this on my blog, has seen Fiddler on the Roof, and probably both on the stage and on the screen.  Probably many times.  It’s a favourite not only of Jews, but of general audiences all over the world.  We’ve all laughed – and cried – along with the story and its characters.  We can all hum, and probably even sing, most of the songs.

          So everybody surely remembers the scene of the wedding of Tzeitl to Motl the tailor.  We remember how it was broken up by a group of ruffians under the charge of The Constable, who is portrayed as a more-or-less decent man ‘just following orders’ in leading ‘demonstrations’ against the Jews.  The film version of Fiddler came out when I was a pre-teen.  I remember how the ‘Cossacks’ in the scene broke and shredded a few wedding gifts but otherwise just frightened the Jews until the party broke up.  I asked my parents if that was the extent of the atrocities of the pogroms of 1905, the events depicted in the story.  And of course the answer was that the pogroms were brutal.  Many Jews were killed, and many more were injured and burnt out of their homes, synagogues and shops.  The depiction in the film was ‘sanitised’ in an era when filmmakers did not feel compelled to be as graphically realistic as they are today.  But back to my point…

          At the end of the ‘mischief’ by the Cossacks, Tevye turned to his family who were the only ones left in the yard where the wedding had taken place. “Don’t just stand there,” he growled to his wife, daughters, son-in-law and his future son-in-law Perchik the Revolutionary. “Pick up!  Pick up!”

          Indeed, pick up!  For some reason, and especially after I became more educated of Jewish history, the line resonated with me.  We Jews mourn all the misfortunes that have befallen us at the hands of others during our history.  But we also celebrate that after every disaster, after every pogrom, after every setback, we have reacted similarly.  We’ve turned to one another, sighed, and picked up the mess.  We’ve rolled up our sleeves and cleaned up.  We’ve often internalised the lessons of the disaster.  We’ve rebuilt as much as possible of what existed before.  And we’ve moved forward.  Even after 1945, when the Allied victory in the Second World War brought an end to the Nazi Holocaust.  With roughly a third of the pre-1933 world Jewish population dead, and much of the rest traumatised.  With the entire world of European Jewry literally destroyed.  We picked up and cleaned up.  We rebuilt and built anew.  The refugees, the survivors of the Shoah found places to sojourn.  The Jewish spirit rejected defeat.  Of course, we did not forget.  Now, almost 70 years on, we have not forgotten.  But still, we moved on.

          That’s what is happening in this week’s Torah reading.  Last Shabbat we read from the beginning of the portion ‘Balak.’  But at its end is the narrative of how a large group of Israelites allowed themselves to be tempted into serving the pagan gods of the Midianites.  As a result, a plague saw the destruction of 24,000 idolatrous Israelites.  While the killing was going on, a group further flaunted God’s Law by organising the public debauchery of Zimri the son of Salu, a chieftain of the tribe of Shim’on, with a Midianite woman named Cozbi daughter of the Midianite chieftain. 

Let me make it clear.  The offence wasn’t sexual immodesty.  It wasn’t that the two slept together without being married.  Rather, that they did so in front of the entire people, as a sordid exhibition, while a plague was killing off their brother and sister Israelites who had led the idolatry.  The act was not just degenerate in the sexual sense, as a breach of the boundaries of permitted behaviour.  It must rather be seen as a flaunting of the Torah in its entirety, even a clear statement that there were no longer any boundaries at all.  Pinchas, son of Eleazar son of Aaron the priest, saw the act of Zimri and Cozbi for what it is.  He took his spear and impaled both them in one thrust.  With this act, we’re told in the Torah, God’s anger was stilled and the plague ended.

So…if it had entered your mind that this narrative is a prude’s response to the stretching of sexual boundaries, you can put it out of your mind now.  This is about the utter and deliberate rejection, not only of God’s law, but about the very idea of law.  And that is anathema.  We can disagree on the specifics of law.  But there is simply no disagreeing on the idea that there must be a law.  The act of Zimri and Cozbi must be seen as an abrogation of law, period.  And Pinchas’ reaction is a defence of the concept of law, the concept that to live together we must recognise the need for restraints against our behaviour.  That anarchy is not a good thing.

          But all that was in last week’s sidra.  As this week’s sidra opens, the perpetrators of last week’s debauchery are named.  Then the Israelites are ordered to make war against the Midianites.  And then, they’re ordered to take a census.  A census of the exact same parameters as the one that opened the Book of Numbers a few weeks back.

          The instruction to take another census after the plague, sends an important message.   The actions of Pinchas stilled the plague.  Now, after all is said and done, the people Israel must get on with their lives.  They must continue with the business of forging a group of fugitive slaves into a nation.  They must continue preparing themselves to conquer the Promised Land.  In order to do this, they must take stock and see what they’ve got left in terms of human capital.  They must regroup and reorganise, as any people must after any setback.  They must not wallow in the past, but point themselves to the future.  They’ve ‘messed up’ terribly and have paid a dear price for their offences.  They have lowered themselves to debauchery and it has not availed them. And now they have business to conduct…so to speak.

          How many times must we turn away from a mess of our own making, or imposed upon us, and say ‘Pick up’?  How much resilience must we have?  How many times must we step past yesterday’s disasters and move forward with optimism?  Who knows? 

Remember at the end of Fiddler on the Roof, when someone pointed out to the Rabbi that they’ve been waiting for the Messiah all of their lives.  The Rabbi answered quietly:  We’ll have to wait somewhere else.  In other words:  Who knows when redemption will come?  Who knows when there will be no more suffering?  Who knows when we’ll have no more need for resilience in the face of life’s disappointments?  Until then…regroup, count who is left, and pick up!