Zot Nechamati for the House of Mourning

ספר זאת נחמתי לבית האבל

Sefer Zot Nechamati For the House of Mourning

including The Afternoon and Evening Services from Siddur Tzur Yisrael ספר זאת נחמתי לבית האבל

מאת הרב מרטין שמואל כהן

כולל סדר תפילות מנחה ומעריב מסדור צור ישראל

ק"ק צור ישראל רוזלין, ניויורק תשס"ז Sefer Zot Nechamati

A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning

including the Afternoon & Evening Services as presented in Siddur Tzur Yisrael

Library of Congress-in-Publication Data is available upon request

ISBN 000-0-0000000-0-0 Sefer Zot Nechamati

A publication of the Shelter Rock Jewish Center 272 Shelter Rock Road Roslyn, New York

Designed and manufactured in the United States of America by G&H Soho, Inc.

www.ghsoho.com The Resnick family and Sinai Chapels of Fresh Meadows, Queens, New York, are pleased to sponsor the publication of this volume of prayers and devotional study for the house of mourning.

We extend our condolences to all who mourn the loss of a loved one and pray that they be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

Preface

A fter publishing Siddur Tzur Yisrael in January, 2007, I tions, and come through it all with their faith intact and their was asked almost immediately if an edition of the prayer book confidence unimpaired? Could I publish a prayer book that specifically intended for use in houses of mourning was going would also be a book of consolation? Could I create a work to follow. We considered the idea carefully, then resolved to that would speak to the unhappiness of the bereaved, and approach Si Resnick and Michael Resnick, owners of the Sinai not merely to their needs as worshipers? All these were the Memorial Chapel in nearby Fresh Meadows, to ask if they questions I grappled with as this project took shape. would be interested in underwriting the expenses involved in In the end, the book you are holding is two books at once: the production of such a work. They gave their assent, and a traditional prayer book containing afternoon and evening we are very grateful to them, and to their families, for their prayers for all weekdays of the year, and a book of stories kindness and for their generosity. The dedication page that about the last days and hours of some of our most revered appears in this volume is testimony to their magnanimity. sages, each accompanied by a commentary written by myself At first, the point was portability: we needed, as do all tra- and designed to draw lessons for moderns from these ancient ditional synagogue communities, an edition of the prayer tales. I hope that the study of this book will yield useful and book that was light enough to carry around in large enough helpful insight into the reality of loss for all readers, and that numbers to accommodate houses of mourning in which particularly those in mourning will find my work useful and often fifty or sixty people, or even more, gather to participate helpful. in the prayer service, particularly for afternoon and evening I, of course, take full responsibility for what is written here, prayers. But then, as I began to think more carefully about but I also wish to thank those who read along with me as this the project, I understood that a different challenge was pre- work was prepared for publication and whose insights and senting itself: not only the challenge of creating a book that suggestions were invaluable. They are Howard Guzik, M.D., could easily be carried from house to house, but the chal- Sarah Hyatt, Suzanne Seidel, Stuart Stein, David Stollwerk, lenge of creating one that would speak directly to the needs and Stephen Teitelbaum, M.D., and I owe them all a sincere of mourners during the dark, painful weeks that follow the debt of gratitude, as do I also the Resnick family for their gen- loss of a loved one. Could I create a volume that, in addition erous support. to the requisite prayer services in Hebrew and English, would also present material that could provide comfort to the bereaved, and which could set their own sadness in the con- M.S.C. text of so many generations of Jewish people who have dealt Roslyn, New York with the same issues, suffered the same confusion of emo- Erev Shavuot 5767

vii Preface SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI Zot Nechamati— This Is My Consolation

This is my consolation in times of sorrow / Your word has granted me life. —PSALM 119:50

The great philosopher Rosenzweig was right about many different things, but among the things he was the most right about, I believe, was his notion that, in the end, religious faith finds its place in the hearts of the faithful by providing them with a context in which to consider the meaning of death . . . and, thus, inevitably, also the meaning of life. In the course of my decades of work in the rabbinate, my own experience has borne this out time and time again: people think they know what they think about religion when they sit down and cogitate about this or that aspect of their spiritual heritage, but they find out what they really think when confronted, even not unexpectedly, by the Angel of Death. Indeed, it is the experience of being present when a father dies, or of standing by a mother’s open grave, or of facing the imminent loss of a spouse to whom one has been married for so long that the person one was before marriage seems no longer to exist in any meaningful way—it is those experiences that lead the way to the kind of intense, searing introspection that clarifies the articles of faith to which one truly does subscribe, as opposed to those to which one wishes one subscribed, or to which one feels obliged formally (or even fervently) to say one subscribes. This kind of introspection is not always a negative experience, however, because it can also bring individuals to faith. Indeed, the experience of spending time in surgeons’ waiting rooms, and in oncologists’, in wiling away long hours in ICU’s and in Emergency Rooms, in sitting in the parlor rooms of funeral chapels and wandering along ceme- tery paths that meander past not hundreds or thousands, but tens of thousands, of burial

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI This Is My Consolation 2 plots—it is in just these places that some peo- The Weekday Afternoon Service ple find the courage truly to look within and find the faith they might just an hour earlier Ashrei have insisted could never be theirs. As is the case regarding most absent things, find them Happy are those who dwell in Your house,for, in so doing, is all a matter of knowing where to look! they praise You endlessly, selah. Our tradition contains endless stories about death, about loss, about surviving loss, Happy is the nation whose lot is thus. and about what happens to the durable Happy is the nation whose God is A. human soul after death. Some of these stories are truly ancient and are presented in the A psalm of praise of David. pages of the Bible itself. Others are rabbinic amplifications of those same stories. And yet I shall exalt You,O my God and Sovereign, others are stories with no Biblical pedigree at and I shall bless Your name forever and always. all that were preserved within the vast annals Each day shall I bless You; I shall praise Your name forever and always. of rabbinic literature. There are stories about kings and queens and about prophets, and Great is A and very worthy of praise; there is no limit to God’s greatness. there are stories about great rabbis as well. One generation lauds Your works to the next, telling of Your mighty acts. But there are also stories about regular peo- Glorious is the splendor of Your majesty; ple, about ordinary men and women whose daily lives and deaths serve as the back- I shall speak of Your wondrous acts. ground against which the most famous Some will talk about the might of Your awesome deeds, accounts of life and death in ancient times, but I shall tell of Your greatness. those of people of renown, take place. There Others will attempt to express the essence of Your great goodness, are tales that seem rooted in beliefs moderns will inevitably find challenging to accept as singing joyously of Your righteousness: “A is gracious literal truths, or even beyond their capability and compassionate, long-suffering and greatly merciful. to accept that way. And there are also com- is good to all and compassionate to all humanity.” forting stories that, antique or not, any read- A er will find encouraging in the simplest and Indeed, all your creatures will give thanks to You, A, and the pious most direct ways of faith in the future, in the will bless You as well; they will talk of the glory of Your majesty inherent goodness of God, and in the and speak of Your might, so as to tell humanity about Your might indomitable nature of the human spirit. In the work that follows, I have tried to do and the glorious splendor of Your sovereignty. several things. Your sovereignty is sovereignty everlasting; First of all, I have attempted to gather sto- Your governance endures throughout every generation. ries that I myself have found comforting over supports all who fall and raises up all those who are bent over. the years. I have lost both my parents, but A my mother and father died many years apart Indeed, the eyes of all are fixed on You,for it is You Who give them food and under very different circumstances. Still, when it is most needed, You Who open Your hand and Who willingly satisfy much of what I know of grief and mourning, the needs of all living creatures. and of comfort and survival, I learned from living through their deaths, and through the A is righteous in all ways and merciful in all deeds. aftermath of their deaths, and from slowly A is close to all those supplicants who call out to God in truth; coming to terms with how things were for God does that which those who fear God wish, listens to their prayers me once I had to face life, finally, without the supportive presence of my endlessly loving and grants them deliverance. parents. A guards those who love God, but destroys all the wicked. Second, I have attempted not merely to translate stories that interested me, or even For all these reasons shall my mouth sing the praise of A, and all that comforted me, but also to provide each flesh shall bless God’s holy name forever and always. story, long or short, with enough guided commentary to make the text in question a And so shall we ever praise B from this time forth and forever. reasonable jumping off point for readers seeking solace in the traditional literature of Hallelujah!

3 This Is My Consolation SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI the Jewish people. I have come truly to believe that the focused intellect is the ideal setting for the resolution of sorrow and the rationalization of grief. This composition is intended to speak directly to that belief of mine, and to show others how contemplative study can constitute the high road towards comfort. Finally, by presenting these stories and my comments about them on the outer margins of a prayer book, I have tried to say something about the relationship of prayer, grief, and consolation as well. In the end, the anxi- ety that wells up in any sensitive breast when the fragility and brevity of human life are considered thoughtfully can only be relieved, I have come to think, in the context of faith in God. This, too, I learned in the course of my many years in the pulpit. Lifting up one’s heart in prayer, however, is not the simplest task, and this is even more true than it regularly is when the heart under discussion has recently been hurt by loss. Still, the essential element is always that the unfettered intellect and the human heart (and especially the heart, broken or not, suffused with the kind of humility instilled in most people by the reasoned contemplation of death) can together create a possibility for prayer that would otherwise be elusive most of the time for the large majority of people. Mindful study, introspective contemplation, focused prayer—these are the triple skeins that together form the rope that King Solomon may well have had in mind when he noted that, although the likelihood that a rope will snap is generally a function of how thick it is, one fashioned of three intertwined smaller ropes will almost always be stronger than a single rope of the same thickness would be. And when people are drowning in unhappiness, the idea really is to toss them a rope that you feel maximally, not minimally, secure will not break until they are drawn up to safety. The stories presented below are in no particular order, and are grouped neither in terms of the ancient books in which they were preserved for posterity nor in terms of the chronological order in which the people featured in them lived. Also, the stories and texts herein presented for devotional study are not simple translations of the original text, but expanded expositions, written by

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI This Is My Consolation 4 myself, of those texts. I wish to stress to read- The Half Kaddish ers that each text includes serious amounts of incidental material presumed obvious or self- Magnified and sanctified be the great name of evident by the original authors, but which I think modern readers will probably not nec- God in this world created according to divine essarily know without being told. (Wherever possible, I have tried to mark these interpo- plan, and may God’s sovereignty be established lated passages by leaving them outside the speedily and soon during the days of our lives quotation marks that delineate the words that translate the ancient text as it appears in and the lives of all members of the House of our sources.) When presented in literal translation, these texts will all read differently. I Israel, and let us say, Amen. have tried, however, to convey their meaning adequately and, if I have succeeded, inspira- tionally and usefully. The congregation joins the cantor or baal tefillah in reciting this line. Since I have learned most of what I know about loss from the experience of losing my May God’s great name two parents, I dedicate this work to my father and mother, Joseph and Mildred Cohen. May they both rest in peace. And may their mem- be blessed forever ory always be a blessing for myself and for my family, and also for all of you, my readers, as well. and throughout all eternity. The cantor or baal tefillah continues: May the name of the Holy One, source of all When the great Talmudic teacher known as Rav died—his real name was Rabbi Abba bar Aibu, blessing, be blessed, adored, lauded, praised, but he was and is respectfully, perhaps even affectionately, known in the Talmud simply as extolled, glorified and venerated in language . . . Rav, the Hebrew word for “rabbi” because, as Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: the Talmud notes, “he was the rabbi of the whole diaspora”—and the decision was made more exalted to bury him in a different town from Sura, the Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: place in which he lived and taught, his disciples followed his bier until the cortege bearing it to entirely more exalted his grave had left town, then said to one another, “Let us go and have a meal by the banks of . . . than any blessing, hymn, ode or prayer the River Danak.” After they broke bread there, a question recited by the faithful in this world, regarding something they had recently learned presented itself for discussion. The Mishnah and let us say, Amen. notes that people sitting down to dine in the same space as others to whom they have no formal connection do not have to recite the version of the Grace after Meals intended for parties of three or more merely because they took their meal in the same physical locale. Instead, the Mishnah teaches, the rule has more to do with attitude than proximity. The way the lesson is formulated, however, is confusing: the text simply says that, if diners are merely seated, each of them may recite the Grace as an

5 This Is My Consolation SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI individual. If, however, they are reclining, then they must think of themselves as a group and must, therefore, recite the version of the Grace 120 intended for diners taking their meal together. It was this mishnah that the disciples of Rav began to discuss by the waters of the Danak, but they found themselves unable to agree about its precise meaning. Were the references to “sitting” and “reclining” to be taken literally, as actual references to being seated on a chair, as opposed to lying back luxuriantly on a fancy divan or on a couch? Surely people can dine together while seated normally! And why would not sufficient evidence that a group had been formed be constituted simply by the way the diners had come together to dine in the first place? If, for example, the party had been formed by a group of individuals saying aloud, “Come, let us break bread together,” and they had designated a specific place in which to do so—surely the meal that would ensue would be an example of a group of people dining together even if they weren’t formally reclining in luxury while they ate! Rav’s disciples could come to no clear conclusion as to the meaning of the mishnah under discussion. And this indecision was not just troubling intellectually, but emotionally as well. Rabbi Ada bar Ahavah, one of the diners, stood up and, turning his jacket inside out (and thus obscuring the rip in its fabric he had made earlier in the day as a sign of deep mourning for his teacher), tore his jacket a second time, saying, “Our teacher, Rav, has died, and we who are left behind cannot resolve the simplest dispute about something as basic to Jewish life as the recitation of the Grace after Meals!” How can it all have come to this? As he was still speaking, however, an elderly man appeared, one whom no one in the group had previously noticed. The old man waited politely for Rabbi Ada bar Ahavah to finish, then proceeded to explain the text under discussion in light of a different teaching from the mishnaic period, only one that had not been included in the Mishnah per se, but which was just as old and almost as authoritative. And he answered the question clearly and succinctly for them, explaining that, when a group of people resolves to dine together in some specific place and then proceeds actually to do so, the law considers this to be the precise equivalent of the earlier practice of defining a group dining experience in terms of the detail of whether the diners did nor did not recline on divans as they ate.

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 6 The Afternoon Amidah (A version of the first blessing of the Amidah that includes the names his simple story contains a great truth T of the matriarchs of Israel may be found on page 120.) for those who have lost someone in their lives they consider irreplaceable, someone whose role they consider to have been so great and When I call out the name of A, ascribe greatness to our God. so profound that it does not seem possible Adonai, part my lips so that my mouth might praise You. simply to imagine life going on in the wake of that individual’s demise as it has in the past. The deceased person could be a parent Blessed are You, , our God and God of or a beloved spouse, or it could be a rabbi or A a revered teacher. It could also be a friend on our ancestors, God of Abraham, God of whom one has counted for years, and on whose sage, responsible advice one has Isaac and God of Jacob, great and mighty learned to rely, or it could be an employer for whom one has worked for decades (and for God Most High, source of endless mercy, whom one had hoped and intended to work for many more years in the future). But, Creator of all, God ever willing to remember whatever the circumstances might be that apply in any specific case, all but the most the good deeds of ancestors, God Who will fortunate among us have experienced the kind of loss that appears unavoidably to sig- lovingly send a redeemer to their children’s nal a complete rupture with the past . . . and a concomitant elimination of certainty children for the sake of the divine name . . . regarding the future and what it might bring. The story of Rav’s disciples at the River Danak speaks directly to such people. The Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, add these words: disciples were gathered at river’s edge, upset Remember us for life, O sovereign God Who desires by their loss, shaken by the experience of turning away as the funeral cortege bearing that we merit life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life their rabbi’s body finally left Sura for wherev- for Your own sake, O living God. er it was Rav was to be buried, ill at ease about the future, and uncertain what their own future would now entail. Were they sub- consciously worried that they would no ...O sovereign God,our divine Helper, longer be able to move forward as a group, that the death of their teacher would Savior and Protector. inevitably lead to some of them seeking out new teachers in different places and, per- Blessed are You, A, Protector of Abraham. haps, others moving to other cities where they might find employment, or where they might end up settling for any of a dozen dif- You are forever mighty, Adonai, O God capa- ferent reasons? And was that, then, why they chose to console themselves by debating the ble of bestowing life anew upon the dead, precise definition of a group, and by attempting to decide whether an intimate circle of our never-ending source of salvation . . . friends is formed mostly by mere proximity or mostly as a function of the emotional desire to be together, to exist in each other’s shad- Between Shemini Atzeret and Passover, add these words: ows, and to live as part of a community of God, Who makes the wind to blow and the rain to fall like-minded souls? All these questions must have been lurking behind the debate about the particular text that tradition depicts occupying Rav’s pupils in the wake of his demise, but the more inter-

7 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI esting detail has to do with the way the debate was resolved. When they expected it least, they looked up and there was an elderly man in their midst. Who was he? Had he been there all along? Was he a disciple-less rabbinic sage in search of a circle of rabbi-less disciples? Or was he simply someone who came along at the right moment, and who knew the answer to the question he heard a group of bereft, lonely scholars debating? The text leaves the man’s identity unexplored, declining even to give him a name. He simply appears, says his piece, and then disappears. But nothing is ever that simple. And, other than the particular point of the law he clarifies for Rav’s students, perhaps he has a lesson of his own—and an entirely different one at that—to offer . . . to them, and to us as well. Sometimes, when things are the most bleak—when we have just returned from the burial of someone we truly loved, respected or trusted, or whose role in our lives was truly phenomenal—the overwhelming emotion that assails us, even before grief itself sets in, is loneliness. The feeling of being bereft, of being alone, of being forlorn and abandoned, of having no place to turn for succor and comfort—and the sense that no one could ever take the place of the individual whose death has affected us so profoundly— all of these are the emotions we feel first and foremost, even before grief establishes its ghostly, hollow presence inside us and inside our hearts. Rav’s disciples must have felt similarly as they sat down, exhausted by their own misery, by the River Danak. But then something happened, something unexpected. As they debated a point of the law, a man appeared. And not just any man at all, but one who had, apparently at his fingertips, precisely the information that was eluding them. This man, whoever he was, was quali- fied to be their teacher, to guide them, to step into Rav’s shoes and show them how to mine the sources of rabbinic wisdom for answers even to questions that appeared to them in their unhappiness to be unanswer- able. And the comfort he brought them—not by answering some specific question about the Grace after Meals, but by showing them that, although Rav had died, the world was not wholly bereft of wise, thoughtful scholars—must have been immense. The Talmud declines to say what happened after that. Did the man stay on to step

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 8 into Rav’s role in their lives? Did he stay with them at all, for that matter, or did he simply ...God,Who mercifully sustains the living step back into the shadows and leave Rav’s disciples to discuss his lesson on their own? and Who compassionately grants life anew Was he an angel sent by God . . . or was he simply a clever fellow who happened to wan- to the dead, Who supports the fallen and der along at precisely the right moment to provide some needed information to a group Who heals the sick, Who frees the impris- of lonely rabbinical students who lacked it? We can’t know and we won’t know, but nei- oned and Who will never break faith with ther should the Talmud’s lesson be lost on us. The world is filled with all sorts of people those who lie in the dust. Who is like You, whom we haven’t met, whose names we’ve never heard, and whom, under other circum- Author of mighty deeds? And who can be stances, we would probably not notice at all. Among them are people who can teach us all compared to You, O Sovereign Who decrees sorts of things, and who could, under the right circumstances, become friends, or even death, then grants life anew, and Who will lovers, and whose counsel could possibly sus- tain us no less profoundly than the advice we surely bring about our salvation? came to count on from the individual from whose loss we are still reeling. But the Tal- Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, add these words: mud’s lesson is not just that these people exist out there somewhere, but that the way Who is like You,O Author of compassion, Who remembers to locate them is not to search far and wide Your creations and mercifully judges them worthy of life? for them, but simply to notice them in our midst . . . and then to listen carefully as they speak to the specific problems that we are Indeed, You are certain to grant life anew to finding the most vexing, problems we supposed no one left among the living could the dead. Blessed are You, , Who grants address, let alone speak to clearly, usefully, A and succinctly. life anew to the dead. When reciting the Amidah silently, continue at the bottom of the next page with the words “You are holy.”

When Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, colloquially (but also deeply respectfully) called simply The Kedushah Rabbi—pronounced “rebbi”—by cognoscenti, fell deathly ill at the end of his life, he was living When the Amidah is repeated aloud, the Kedushah in Sepphoris, a mountain town in the Galilee is recited here.The cantor or baal tefillah begins with these words: known for its salutary air. And it was there that a famous drama took place between some of Let us ascribe holiness to Your name in this the most powerful, respected men of their time and place, and a woman who, had she not world, just as the angels do in highest heaven, as played the role she did in the story of Rabbi’s death, would never be known to us. The men it is written in Scripture, And they call out to each just mentioned were Rabbi’s beloved disciples and students. The woman was his servant. other: As he lay dying, the servant woman in question climbed up to the roof of the house in Sep- The congregation responds: phoris in which he was staying. Taking note of the vocal, heartfelt prayers of the disciples that Holy, holy, holy is A of the celestial hosts; the Rabbi’s health be restored (and his life thus prolonged), but also noting that the master was, if fullness of the world attests to the glory of God.

9 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI anything, growing weaker and weaker, the woman—unnamed in the story, but undoubtedly known by name to Rabbi and, probably, to his disciples as well, opened her heart to God in prayer and, as she did so, evaluated the situation as she understood it. “Those above—the angels and celestial creatures, as well, perhaps, as the sages of ages past gathered in paradise—want Rabbi to come to them, while those below—the disciples and students of Rabbi in this world—want Rabbi to stay here with them. May it be Your will, that those below vanquish those above, and that their prayers be answered.” That Rabbi stay among them all, no doubt, was her heartfelt prayer as well. Later, however, she saw things differently. In the course of the day, she saw several things that altered her stance. She saw how many times her master, suffering from debilitating, devastating diarrhea, had to drag himself to the privy. And she saw how, each time he went, he suffered grievously as he attempted to remove his tefillin, since it is forbidden to wear tefillin in a privy, and a man of Rabbi’s piety would never dream of not wearing tefillin in the course of his day devoted to prayer and Torah study. And so it came to pass that, after spending her day watching Rabbi suffer, his servant changed her prayer. “May it be Your will,” she now prayed, turning her heart to God in heaven, “that the prayers of those above outweigh the prayers of those below.” Complicating the situation, however, was the incessant supplication of the disciples. All men of unimpeachable piety and the deepest devotion to God and God’s Torah, it was inconceivable that Rabbi could die while they were busy praying on his behalf. And this too, the maid saw and digested. 12 Finally, unable to bear her master’s suffering another moment, the maid decided to take matters into her own hands. Carrying a huge clay jug up to the roof, she pitched it off the side. And when it hit the ground below and shattered, the disciples, shocked by the noise, stopped praying for just a moment. And it was then, in that brief moment of silence, that Rabbi finally died. Sensing that something may have happened, the disciples sent Bar Kappara to investigate. When he entered Rabbi’s bedchamber and found that he had died, he was speechless, uncertain how to impart the terrible tidings to the others. But, before attending to that, he had his own mitzvah to perform, and this he did

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 10 first, tearing a huge rip in his outer garment, The cantor or baal tefillah repeats the response and continues: and then turning his cloak inside out so that no one would see what he had done, at least not Whereupon other angels respond: immediately. This would give him the chance to tell the others what had happened without their The congregation responds: knowing immediately upon seeing him. Thus Bar Kappara came back to the others. Blessed be the glory of A “The angels on high and the righteous below from its celestial source. were struggling over the Holy Ark, but the angels overpowered the righteous of this earth The cantor or baal tefillah repeats the response and continues: and the Holy Ark has thus been captured.” The disciples, who were used to calling Rabbi And among Your sacred words preserved in “our holy rabbi,” understood immediately what Bar Kappara was trying to say, but not precisely Scripture, it is written: why he was speaking so elliptically. “Is he dead?” they asked with one voice. The congregation responds: “Yes,” Bar Kappara answered, “but you said it, not me.” A will reign forever, your God, O Zion, in every generation. Hallelujah! The cantor or baal tefillah repeats the response and continues: ew and very far between are the indi- vidualsF of whom it can reasonably be said In every generation, we shall tell of Your greatness that they personally changed the course of Jewish spiritual history through the sheer and never cease speaking of Your holiness. Indeed, force of their creativity, their erudition, and their piety. Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, whose the praises due You will never cease from our magnum opus, the Mishnah, became the basis both of the Babylonian Talmud and the mouths, for You are our great and holy Sovereign. Yerushalmi, the Talmud of Eretz Yisrael, was Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: one of those individuals. A man of unparalleled piety and learning, the son of Rabbi Shi- Blessed are You, , holy God. mon ben Gamliel II (and thus also a descen- A dant of Hillel), a student in his youth of Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: almost every one of the major disciples of Rabbi Akiba—Rabbi was all these things. Blessed are You, A, holy Sovereign. But the story of his death is not a mere encomium, and neither is it just another story The cantor or baal tefillah now continues with valorizing the way in which the truly right- “It is You Who grants” on the top of page 13. eous depart from this world. Indeed, the Tal- mud tells a different story about Rabbi’s own behavior in the moments before his death, When praying silently, continue here: relating how he lifted all ten fingers up toward heaven, then spoke to God in prayer You are holy and Your name is holy and the holy saying, “Master of the Universe, You know that I have exhausted myself by using all the ones on high sing Your praises every day, selah. fingers of both my hands in the study of Torah without searching out even a single fin- Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: ger’s worth of worldly pleasure. May it be Blessed are You, , holy God. Your will, therefore, that there be peace in A my final resting place.” That story, satisfying Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: in its own right, is about Rabbi and the thoughts that occupied him in his final Blessed are You, A, holy Sovereign. moments. In a certain sense, his need to self- justify was foreshadowed by the similar sto-

11 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI ries Scripture relates about Moses and Samuel, stories in which they too felt the need to note that they derived no personal benefit from their life’s work as leaders of Israel. But the story about Rabbi’s maid is the one I would like to focus on here, because I think it holds the promise of the deeper, more potentially important lesson for moderns facing the demise of a beloved family member or friend. Far more than Rabbi himself, the maid—a nameless servant—is, I believe, the person in the story to whom moderns will find it the simplest to relate. At first, she does what everybody expects her to do. She loves her master, has served him for many, many years, had hoped to continue working for him and in his house. Now that he has fallen prey to illness, therefore, she lifts up her heart in prayer to God and does the expected thing: she prays for his recovery, for his release from the bonds of infirmity and sickness. This detail, all readers gloss over when first reading the story. And this is entirely as it should be—what could be less exceptional than a kind woman praying that a sick individual she admires or likes, or upon whom she depends for her livelihood, recover from serious illness? And so when we begin the story and she ascends to the roof, perhaps to get a clearer line to heaven, it seems like the normal beginning to a normal story. But the servant shows herself capable of growth, and of a kind of deep kindness that even her master’s learned and pious disciples cannot quite manage. They are the ones devoted body and soul to Torah study, after all. But it is she who is the hero of the story. They may be the ones with the endless erudition, but it is she who possesses the kindness to do the right thing. They hold on, and she also holds on. But then, when she grows past her own needs and focuses instead on the needs of the individual lying on his death bed, she stops holding on and, in letting go, she finds herself capable of the ultimate act of selfless charity. She first looks and sees what the man in the bed symbolizes. Learning. Intelligence. Creativity. Decency. Righteousness. All the finest human qualities, all bundled up in one single man. She feels, as would anyone, that her job, on the unlikely chance that the Mas- ter of Healing might be inclined to listen to

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 12 the prayers of a simple woman, is to pray for her master’s recovery. And so she does. But then she looks again and sees not It is You what the man in the bed symbolizes, but the actual human being lying before her. And so, Who grants intelligence and understanding to this time, what she sees are not fine qualities, not the living embodiment of erudition and human beings. culture, not yet more evidence of a selfless life devoted to Torah study. What she sees is a Graciously grant each of us, therefore, intelli- very sick man crippled by painful, incapaci- gence, understanding and wisdom. tating diarrhea. She sees a man losing his dignity at the very end of his life and suffer- Blessed are You, A, Who grants intelligence to ing grievously and painfully as he tries not to lose it any further. She sees a man still trying humanity. to maintain the trappings of piety, a man who will not agree to spend his days contemplating holy subjects without wearing tefillin, the sign of God’s covenant with Israel and the mark of the truly pious individual at prayer or immersed in Torah study. And she Bring us back sees a man suffering grievously every time he has to remove the straps from around his arm to Your Torah, O divine Parent, and bring us to and his head, and becoming weaker and more feeble every time he has, somehow, to Your service, O holy Sovereign, and help us fully to find the strength to haul himself into the privy. In short, what the servant sees when repent all our misdeeds before You. she really looks at her master is a man in the throes of dying, a man whose life is ending Blessed are You, A, Who desires the repen- . . . and, for all that, one who cannot let go tance of sinners. and die in peace as long as his disciples are immersed in prayer on his behalf. Left unexplained in the Talmud is how exactly this works. Why can’t he die while they say their prayers? Are we to assume that God is simply unwilling to end a life while Forgive us, scholars of the level of piety and learning of Rabbi’s pupils are praying for someone to live and not to die? Or is the point of the story O divine Parent, for we have sinned. that Rabbi himself was unable to let go of the Pardon us, O holy Sovereign, for we have trans- world while they chanted their prayers, because he feared that doing so could con- gressed. ceivably lead some of his disciples to doubt, even for just a moment, that there is a God in Do this, for You are by nature ever willing to heaven Who listens to prayer and Who responds to the prayers of all humanity pardon, ever ready to forgive. offered up in selfless humility and without the hope of personal gain? Or is the moral of the Blessed are You, A, our gracious God ever story something far less lofty and far more ready to grant forgiveness. practical: that the disciples’ caterwauling was so invasive that Rabbi simply could not lie back and let go, that he simply could not die in peace when there was no peace to be had amidst the cacophony of the disciples’ cease- less chanting?

13 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI The lesson to be learned, however, does not depend on resolving that particular set of issues. This story teaches a series of lessons as profound as they are simple. That there is great kindness in letting the dying die in peace. That, while prayer is always meaningful and can always be effective, it is incum- bent on decent people to pray kindly and thoughtfully, and for things that are truly in the best interests of the individual on whose behalf they are praying, not solely in their own best interests. That impeding the death process is almost never a kindness . . . and can be a horrific intrusion in the natural course of another person’s life, and an unwanted disruption in the process that, when left to run its course, brings human life to its natural end in a dignified and decorous manner. The story of Rabbi’s maid is a story of human growth. In the beginning, she wished what she thought she had to wish, what she probably did wish. But, by the end of the story, she had grown both in terms of her insight into the dying process and the kindness she proved able to bring to bear on her master’s behalf. By throwing that pot off the roof, she allowed Rabbi to die. Could she be described as a murderess? She did, after all, do something as a result of which a man died. But no sensitive reader would take the story to mean that. Just to the contrary: her behavior was motivated by kindness, by caring . . . and by insight into the nature of life and death. By the end of the story, she knew that the task of kind people is to assist others, not to use the infirmity of those others as a lever with which to pry some personally wished for boon from the hands of the Almighty. She came to understand that, when someone lies dying and there is no possibility, or no obvious possibility, of cure, kindness lies in allowing someone to leave this life peacefully, and in as dignified a manner as possible. About eighteen centuries have come and gone since Rabbi died. His maid obviously outlived him, but even she must be gone for almost that long. The disciples too, of course, died millennia ago. Yet the lesson to be learned from their interaction on the day Rabbi died is profound. Moderns too have trouble letting go. It is entirely natural not to want to say good-bye. It is entirely normal to find it impossible to wish a dying person well

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 14 in the manner of people on a pier saying farewell to a traveler embarking on a long, mysterious journey with no clear sense of Take note when that person will return, if ever, and then turning their backs on that person and of our suffering, defend us and redeem us going home. None of these sentiments is peculiar or inexplicable, but the Talmud is speedily for the sake of Your holy name, for teaching us that there is a better way to behave, a way to behave prompted not by You are a powerful Redeemer. our own personal interests, but the best interests of a dying individual. Exerting oneself Blessed are You, A, Redeemer of Israel. maximally to find a cure to save a sick individual is a mitzvah of the highest degree. But letting someone die in peace is also a mitz- On fast days, the cantor or baal tefillah adds this paragraph: vah, also a kindness. The great challenge, Answer us, , answer us on this day on which we fast therefore, lies in knowing the difference, and A in finding the inner stamina to act according- for we are in great trouble. Do not take note of our ly . . . and kindly . . . even when it requires almost superhuman strength to do so. wickedness, and neither turn Your face from us nor refuse to listen to our supplications. Be close when we call out to You and may it be Your merciful will to comfort us. Answer us even before we call out to You in mis- In the Talmud’s version, the story of Rabbi Akiba’s death was as little complicated as his ery, as it is written in Scripture, “Before they call out, I death itself was horrific. Paam achat, gazru malkhut harashaah shelo yaasku yisrael shall answer them. Even as they are speaking, I shall batorah, the text reads: it once came to pass already have heard.” that the wicked kingdom—Rome, known for its insensitivity both to the spiritual needs and the For You are A, a God fully able to answer us in times human rights of the peoples it dominated— of trouble, a God able to rescue and save us whenever passed a special edict forbidding Israel to study the Torah. This would have occurred around the disaster or calamity threatens. Blessed are You, A,Who year 135 C.E., in the days of the emperor Hadri- an. What the whole story was about—why the answers us in times of trouble. Romans were particularly hostile to Torah study, what they hoped or expected to accomplish by such a perverse edict, how they imagined Jewish scholars would choose to fill up their empty Heal us, hours now that they could no longer study Torah—none of this is known. But the response , and we shall be healed. of the sages of Jewish Palestine is completely A well known: they refused categorically and Save us and we shall be saved, for You are absolutely to obey such a heartless piece of leg- islation. And foremost among those who the object of our never-ending hymns of refused to comply was Akiba ben Joseph, the most celebrated rabbi in a century that pro- praise. Send a full and utter healing for all duced some of the greatest legal minds the Jew- ish people has ever known. our afflictions, for You are sovereign God, our Needless to say, Rabbi Akiba was not only eager to continue his scholarly work for person- faithful and compassionate source of healing. al reasons, but also in order to set a good example for the community . . . and so that Blessed are You, , Who sends healing people might learn from his example to fear A God, not to fear human kings and their nefari- to the ill of Israel, the holy people of God.

15 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI ous edicts. This, he accomplished famously. And then, as he must have anticipated would eventually happen, he was arrested and, as could surely also have been predicted, he was sen- tenced to death. And now our story begins in earnest. The day came on which Rabbi Akiba was to be executed. The Romans, for their own reasons, chose to kill him early in the morning. To them, no doubt, this was a convenience, a way to get some unpleasant, potentially explosive act of public punishment out of the way before much of a riot could possibly occur. But to Jews of Rabbi Akiba’s holiness and devotion, the time of his scheduled execution was not merely early morning, but the specific time of day ordained by Scripture for the morning recitation of the Shema, the confession of faith in the unity of God that the Torah commands the faithful to recite twice daily. And so we begin again. When they took Rabbi Akiba to the place of execution, it was, indeed, the time for the morning recitation of the Shema. But the Romans did not intend merely to kill the saintly rabbi, but to torture him to death. (They too, it seems, were interested in setting an example from which others might profitably learn.) And, indeed, when he was brought to the place of execution, the Roman executioners did not simply behead him or crucify him, but instead set to raking his body with iron combs, thus making tears in his skin that would make his death not only inescapable, but also incredibly painful. Throughout all this, however, Rabbi Akiba had something else entirely on his mind. And as they did their work, he did his, slowly and thoughtfully reciting the benedictions ordained by the sages to introduce the morning recitation of the Shema in a mindful, focused way. This being a public execution, the rabbi’s disciples were permitted to be present. “Rabbenu, beloved teacher,” they cried out, “even now?” Rabbi Akiba looked at his students, considered their entirely reasonable question and then, with what must have been almost superhuman strength, he answered them carefully and deliberately, as he must always have done when asked difficult, thought-provoking questions. “My whole life,” he said, “I have wondered about my interpretation of the words ‘. . . and with all your soul’ in the Shema.” The lesson in question being famous, the rabbi’s pupils would have certainly known what

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 16 he meant. The Torah ordains that one must love God “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” But what is the precise dif- Bless ference between loving God with all one’s heart this year and all its crops for us, , our God . . . and loving God with all one’s soul? Indeed, the A twin injunctions sounds as though they would Between Passover and December 4, say: and grant blessed prosperity both mean roughly the same thing: with the full Between December 5 and Passover, say: and grant blessed rain and dew focus of one’s intellect, with one’s completely concentrated will. But Rabbi Akiba’s interpreta- . . . on the face of the earth. Make us fully satis- tion had, in its day, been novel. The words “with all your soul” mean, he had taught, that even if fied with Your goodness and make this year as your soul is being taken from you—if you are facing imminent death—then too does Scripture blessed for us as the best of years. Blessed are You, require you to love God and to proclaim the inef- , Who blesses the years. fable unity of the divine realm. And it was to this A lesson that Rabbi Akiba returned in the last moments of his life. “I used to wonder when, if ever, it would come to me to attempt to perform this com- Sound mandment, this elusive mitzvah, that can only be performed by someone facing imminent a blast for our freedom on a great shofar, raise a death and yet ready and able to declare God to be one. And now that I actually do have the banner to gather together our far-flung exiles and opportunity to do so, shall I not take advantage gather us together from the four corners of the of it?” It was a rhetorical question. That was how earth. Rabbi Akiba meant it. And that was, undoubtedly, how his disciples took it. And as they all Blessed are You, A, Who will surely gather the must have expected would be the case, so did it actually come to pass. Rabbi Akiba lived long dispersed remnants of Israel. enough not only to recite the preparatory benedictions, but the Shema itself as well. And he died as he held out the final word, echad, the “one” in the phrase that means not only that Establish there is only one God, and not only that the one God is wholly unique and without divine our judges as in olden times and grant us able partner in governance, but also that the one God is the sole existent example of undifferenti- counselors like those from whose sage advice we ated oneness in the world. The moment he died, the Talmud relates, a once profited. Remove sadness and misery from voice came forth from heaven and made the our midst and rule over us with mercy and com- following pronouncement: “Happy are you, Rabbi Akiba, whose one soul left his body pre- passion as our sole Sovereign, , and grant that cisely as he spoke the one word that proclaims A the truth about the one God.” we live under the rule of righteous justice. In heaven on high, however, the mood was less good. And, indeed, the Talmud relates that, even as this basically positive assessment of Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: Rabbi Akiba’s death was issuing forth from on Blessed are You, , O Sovereign Who loves high, the ministering angels themselves were A registering a bit of serious unhappiness at what righteousness and justice. had just occurred. “Is this then the reward for a lifetime devot- Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur say: ed to Torah?” the angels pointedly asked the blessed Holy One. “This is the kind of death you Blessed are You, A, O just Sovereign.

17 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI get after devoting an entire life to the study of God’s law?” And then, to make their point that much more forcefully, they cited a verse from the seventeenth psalm. It is a very forceful point, one only the Talmud itself could imagine angels daring to say plainly before God. The psalm describes a pious man facing death at an enemy’s hand pleading for his life. “Rise up, O dedi, to meet and defeat my enemy,” the psalm posits the putative victim as pleading aloud. “Save my soul from a wicked man with Your sword. O dedi, may Your hand save me from my fellow human beings . . . “ Surely, the angels meant to suggest, a man of the spiritual and moral caliber of a Rabbi Akiba should have been one of those God saved from the swords of the wicked! God, considering the words of the psalm, responds in kind, citing a few words from the same psalm out of context, but in a way that makes their innermost meaning entirely clear. “The portion of such who suffer at the hands of the wicked,” God says carefully, “is, paradoxically, life itself.” In other words, living the exem- plary life, conducting oneself according to the eternal, and eternally valid, values of Scripture, devoting one’s days and years to the study of the Torah and the performance of the commandments—that kind of life serves as its own reward. But, here too, there is more than meets the eye: the life God asserts to be the portion of the righteous is not just the pious life of the faithful in this world, but also life in the World to Come. And, indeed, immediately upon the completion of this heavenly exchange, a second voice came forth from the heavens and made a second proclamation: “Happy are you, Rabbi Akiba, for, in death, you are surely being summoned to life everlasting in the World to Come, to an eternity in God’s presence, to paradise.”

T he notion that death can be more reward than punishment is at the heart of the story of Rabbi Akiba’s last day. Indeed, the whole point of the story appears to be precisely that the truly blessed are not those who live forever—among other reasons, because no one lives forever—but rather those whose lives are lived in harmony with the values they hold until the very end, those who— even in times of the greatest outer distress or

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 18 inner turmoil—remain permanently tied to their own ethical moorings, those who have the inner fortitude always to be faithful to the May there be moral principles that have been developed over the course of a lifetime devoted to intro- no hope for those who slander us, may all spective study, to prayer, and to the performance of deeds of charity and loving kindness. evil immediately vanish from our midst and When such a person dies, the Talmud is teaching us, the appropriate emotion, aside may all Your enemies be destroyed. Indeed, from the personal grief anyone would naturally feel at the loss of a beloved relation or may You uproot, vanquish, annihilate and friend, is pleasure in the decedent’s great and difficult accomplishment . . . for living a life defeat all the wicked of the earth and may suffused with ethical value and spiritual good is not the simplest task even to attempt to You do so quickly and within our own day. undertake, let alone to succeed at, nor is it one that people can accomplish merely by Blessed are You, A, Destroyer of our wishing, even fervently, to do so. Rabbi Akiba was invited to the World to enemies and Vanquisher of the wicked. Come personally—the voice that issues forth from heaven under such circumstances serving here as the ancient equivalent of the engraved invitation delivered on a silver salver by a liveried butler—but not because only the handful of true saints in our midst merit life everlasting. Indeed, do we not May the fullness introduce every chapter of the Ethics of the Fathers by reciting a mishnah from a different of Your compassionate judgment be applied, tractate that proclaims, unequivocally, that “all Israelites have a portion in the World to A, our God, to the righteous and the Come?” So Rabbi Akiba, even had he not been who he was, and even had he not man- pious, to the elders of Your people Israel and aged to accomplish what he did manage to accomplish in the course of his lifetime, to their surviving sages, to righteous con- would have had a portion in life everlasting anyway. But the engraved invitation—the verts to our faith and, not least of all, to the voice from heaven formally proclaiming one’s worthiness and destiny to participate in life rest of us. May You grant a just reward to all beyond life, and asserting that an individual’s soul is destined not merely to endure, but to who faithfully trust in Your name and may be bound up in the bond of life everlasting— that came to him because of his unique You set a place for us among them so that worth and precisely because of his saintliness. And that reward—that public pronounce- we never come to shame because of our ment of ultimate moral worth—is the part that not everybody gets. confident trust in You. Very few of the readers of this book, if any, will be gathering in shiva houses to say Kad- Blessed are You, A, Who is our protec- dish for an executed relation who has suffered capital punishment at the hands of the tive support and a secure haven for the government after being convicted of the kind of crime considered sufficiently heinous to righteous. warrant the ultimate governmental response. But the same emotion that prompted the ministering angels to ask their bitter, pointed

19 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI question—”Is this then the reward for a lifetime devoted to Torah?”— prompts people in our world to ask similarly bitter questions of God all the time. My husband spent his entire life helping people, and his reward was cancer of the liver? My daughter was a saint, a goodhearted, kind individual who never stopped thinking of ways to improve society, and this is what she got for her trouble— being run over by some irresponsible drunk on his way home after having had twelve cocktails at a bar he shouldn’t have been at in the first place? My father was a doctor who spent his life helping people overcome catastrophic illness and this is what happened to him—mugged by some punk on a subway platform and killed—killed!—for the handful of dollar bills in his wallet? I have been a rabbi for more than a quar- ter of a century, and I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has posed a similar question in my presence, or even to me directly. But the interesting thing is that these are, at least in my experience, invariably rhetorical questions. The individuals posing the questions—the doctor’s daughter, the father of the woman killed by the drunk driver, the wife of the man with liver cancer— these people don’t really expect me to answer them, or for anyone to answer them. Being sensitive, decent people, they understand, either intuitively or as part of a larger philosophy of life, that everyone owes one death. They understand that no one wants to pay or looks forward to paying . . . but they also know that, regardless, everybody has the same debt to pay, the same chasm over which to leap, the same number of minutes in a final hour on earth. They also understand that nothing useful can come from complain- ing about the fact that life is brief, that the days of every human being are numbered, that no one lives forever. And, eventually, once grief subsides somewhat and rationality returns, even just slightly, they begin to recognize that the blessings of a life well lived are not obviated or undone by death, but merely cemented in place and, through the finality of death, made permanent. I don’t imagine Rabbi Akiba was looking forward to dying either. He had a wife, the saintly Rachel, and, although our I have only found reference to a single daughter in our ancient sources, I suppose he must have had other children as well. He also had a lot of

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 20 students, a full 24,000 of them according to On every weekday of the year except Tisha Be’av, recite this paragraph: one ancient story. That seems like a lot of students, but, even if we take the number with a grain of salt, even a huge grain, the basic principle is still undeniable: this was a man May You return with everything to live for. True, he was an older man when he died—almost certainly in with compassion to Jerusalem, Your holy city, his seventies or eighties—but why would an older man in good health with a family and and May You come to dwell there as You once with many disciples not want to continue living? No, I think we can assume safely that promised You would. May You build it up Rabbi Akiba wanted to live, but, being a tzaddik, he was able to separate his own wishes quickly and permanently within our day and from the truths he knew about the world and about life itself. He can’t have looked forward may You quickly establish the throne of a to dying, but he did anticipate fulfilling one of the commandments that only very few scion of the House of David within its walls. merit to fulfill. But there was more to it than that—a lot more, actually. Blessed are You, A, Restorer of Jerusalem. Rabbi Akiba also knew, as God is cited as suggesting in the text translated above, that On Tisha Be’av, recite this paragraph: a life lived in harmony with one’s own values is the greatest of life’s rewards. Being able to May You return with compassion to Jerusalem, Your holy city, and face oneself in the mirror, being content with may You come to dwell there as You once promised You would. what one has become, with who one is, with the man or woman one has made oneself May You build it up quickly and permanently within our day and into—and then living a life in accordance not may You quickly establish the throne of a scion of the House of with what others expect, or what one imag- David within its walls. Comfort the mourners of Zion, , our ines others must expect or should expect, but A in accordance with what one actually does God, and those who mourn Jerusalem, as well as the city that was expect of oneself—this, the story is suggest- destroyed and left bereft of her children, and the people of Israel ing is the greatest of life’s rewards. There is nothing greater, no greater pleasure in life, that were condemned to the sword, and her children who died than being oneself totally and wholly, in liv- martyrs’ deaths in her defense. Zion weeps bitterly; Jerusalem wails ing a life in which the inner and outer in misery, “My heart, O my heart is broken when I consider those selves—the invisible soul and the outer individual—function in harmony, in which one’s who died for Jerusalem. My bowels churn when I think of the outer and inner personas coalesce to express dead.” In Your boundless compassion, A, our God, take pity on one’s true essence. But the story invites readers to go one us and on Jerusalem, Your city, now rebuilt and repopulated on her step further and to imagine how much former ruins. May it be Your will, O God Who grants Zion joy in greater the pleasure must be when the inner her children’s devotion, that all who love Jerusalem might rejoice and outer lives in question are not suffused merely with worldly values—with the pursuit in the city’s rebirth and that all who once mourned her destruction of wealth, with endless acquisitiveness, with might know gladness in contemplating her renaissance. May the relentless desire to dominate others and bend them to one’s will—but with the finest sounds of mirth and gladness, and of bridegrooms and their of spiritual values, with the desire to seek brides, ever be heard in the cities of Judah and in the streets of communion with God through obedience to Jerusalem. Grant peace to Your city, now redeemed, and protect divine law, with deep yearning to know the entire Torah, with abiding hope to become her, as written in Scripture,“I shall be a wall of fire around her, says the living exemplar of the finest and noblest A, and I shall be a perpetual source of honor in her midst.” standards. To live that kind of life, and then to contemplate one’s end with one’s wits Blessed are You, A, Consoler of Zion and Restorer of Jerusa- totally intact, with one’s integrity fully pres- lem.

21 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI ent, with all one’s faculties focused intently on the attainment of one of the few goals in life one has not managed to attain, and which cannot be attained at any but the last moment of life—that is what it means to face the end of life with supreme dignity and with one’s ideals wholly unencumbered by circumstance. The question for moderns, therefore, is not whether or not Rabbi Akiba was a saint— because, really, who would say otherwise?— but whether they can learn from his example Except on fast days, individuals reciting their prayers silently continue here. and face death (either the deaths of beloved When repeating the Amidah aloud, the cantor or baal tefillah continues here relatives or intimate friends, or their own even on fast days. deaths) imbued at least mostly with gratitude to God for a life well lived. For values left intact to the very last breath an individual draws. For a life lived with a noble trajectory and a dignified end. For a life suffused with meaning, with passion, with goodness generated from within rather than bestowed from without. The story of Rabbi Akiba’s death challenges us all to ponder these questions and, if we can, to learn from them.

Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah was one of the greatest rabbis in the generation of scholars 24 that survived the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. He was a Levite by birth and, in fact, On fast days, individuals silently reciting their prayers add this pararaph: he sang in the levitical choir in the Temple as a young man, thus becoming one of the few rabbis remembered as actually having served in the Temple at all. Later, he became famous as a great scholar and was counted among the sages who formed the inner circle of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s disciples. He had many areas of expertise, but he was especially famous for knowing how to engage apostates and heretics in debate and how to answer those who denigrated Jewish tradition publicly and for the sake of humiliating their opponents rather than engaging them in open, honest, productive dialogue. When Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah lay dying, in fact, it was that latter of his abilities that claimed pride of place in his disciples’ grief- stricken hearts. “What will happen now when we are obliged to engage our enemies in debate?” they exclaimed aloud as they gathered together at his deathbed. “Who will speak on our behalf? Who could possibly possess the eloquence necessary to answer even the most

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 22 sharply put arguments against the worth, the legitimacy and the authenticity of our faith?” Was Rabbi Joshua pleased to hear his abili- May You quickly ties evaluated so positively by the people who bring forth a descendant of David, Your servant, into our knew him best? Or was he shocked to hear his students—all of them serious scholars and great midst and may his horn be raised up as a sign of his salvation rabbis in their own right—so little confident in in You,for it is precisely that sign of Your imminent salvation their own abilities? His disciples were, after all, students he himself had endeavored to teach that we await daily. over many, many years. Surely, they must have Blessed are You, , Who will surely bring forth a descen- learned something! Probably, there was some A combination of emotions competing in his dant of David to lead us to salvation. heart—pride in the respect they clearly had for him, foreboding about the future if the next Except on fast days, individuals reciting their prayers silently continue here. generation lacks the confidence to defend itself When repeating the Amidah aloud, the cantor or baal tefillah forcefully against its enemies, comfort to see the continues here even on fast days. devotion of his followers, sadness at his own imminent departure from the world and, thus, the impending end of his career as rabbi, Hear our prayers, teacher, and preacher in Israel. The Talmud relates that Rabbi Joshua, listen- A, our God and take pity and have mercy upon us. Accept ing carefully, took his students’ questions at our prayers willingly and with compassion, for You are a God face value and answered them, if not entirely plainly, then not wholly obliquely either. He fully able and willing to listen carefully to prayer and supplica- chose not to answer them in his own words, tion. May You not turn us away empty-handed, O sovereign however, but rather by citing a verse from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, words he must God, for You are a God ever able and willing to listen compas- have felt certain his disciples would have known sionately to the prayers of Your people Israel. Blessed are You, by heart: “If good counsel vanishes from the children, then the intellectual prowess of others A, Who will ever listen to heartfelt prayer. will surely be similarly diminished.” Continue with “Take pleasure” on page 259. In the Book of Jeremiah, this verse is part of a very obscure passage of doom directed by the On fast days, individuals silently reciting their prayers add this paragraph: prophet against the nation of Ammon, the Hear our prayers, , our God and take pity and have mercy upon us. ancient kingdom whose capital city, Rabbat- A Ammon, eventually turned into Amman, the Accept our prayers willingly and with compassion, for You are a God capital of the kingdom of Jordan today. What it fully able and willing to listen carefully to prayer and supplication, and means in its original context, none can say . . . may You not turn us away from You empty-handed, O sovereign God. but Rabbi Joshua apparently had his own, highly idiosyncratic interpretation in mind. Answer us, A, answer us on this day on which we fast for we are in By “children,” Rabbi Joshua had in mind the great trouble. Do not take note of our wickedness, and neither turn Jewish people, called “children of God” in the Your face from us nor refuse to listen to our supplications. Be close Torah at Deuteronomy 14:1. And by “others,” Rabbi Joshua certainly had in mind the kind of when we call out to You and may it be Your merciful will to comfort us. heretics who tormented Jews faithful to their Answer us even before we call out to You in misery, as it is written in own traditions with questions designed not to Scripture, “Before they call out, I shall answer them. Even as they are elicit information, but to humiliate the people to speaking, I shall already have heard.” whom they were directed. And, in fact, Rabbi Joshua provided his commentary on the verse For You are A, a God fully able to answer us in times of trouble, a immediately after citing it: “When good counsel God able to rescue and save us whenever disaster or calamity threatens. vanishes from the ‘children’—the Children of For You are a God ever able and willing to listen compassionately to the Israel, the ‘children’ of the Almighty, the people devoted to the service of God with fervor similar prayers of Your people Israel. in intensity to the love of children for their par- Blessed are You, A, Who will ever listen to heartfelt prayer. ents—then the wisdom of the other nations will Continue with “Take pleasure” on page 25.

23 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI also perish.” (The reference to the other nations is as pointed as it is delicate—the story is not about foreigners, but apostate Jews who, having turned their backs on their own faith and their own people, now felt free to torment the faithful with barbs and insults, with unanswer- able questions designed not to elicit information, but merely to degrade. But Rabbi Joshua, perhaps feeling a pre-posthumous surge of hope that even those who had abandoned their faith might eventually return, preferred to speak as though the issue at hand involved real non- Jews, not enemies born to Jewish parents who had turned their back on God and God’s Torah.) The disciples’ response is not recorded. Some- times, really, there is simply nothing to say. And so, having nothing to say, they said nothing at all. But I think it safe to say they were comforted by their teacher’s confidence in them . . . and by his certainty that they would rise to the occasion when challenged and that their enemies would lack the intelligence or the argumentative skill to vanquish them. And also by his lack of worry regarding a future they would have to experience without his being present to guide them, to encourage them . . . and to speak directly to their enemies on their behalf.

T he story of the question Rabbi Joshua’s disciples put to him as he lay dying is presented in the Talmud immediately after a very funny story. Rabbi Joshua, apparently, was the supreme master of dealing with the kind of home-grown enemies who devoted themselves to denouncing Jews for remaining faithful to Jewish ritual. (For what it’s worth, the story in question has its own extra-Talmudic life and is still floating around in a latter-day version as a story stand-up comedians occasionally tell to strictly Jewish audiences. I heard a version of it only a few years ago at a rabbinical convention . . . and, yes, I laughed.) Once, the story goes, when Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah was present at the home of a high Roman official, an epikoros was there as well. (The word “epikoros” is the standard Talmudic designation for an apostate, for a turncoat, for a Jew who has turned away from faith and who attempts to justify his apostasy by speaking negatively about Judaism to non-Jews.) But this was no ordinary epikoros, because he was, of all things, a

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 24 mime. He was not, however, a mute unable Except on Rosh Chodesh, continue here: to speak and so obliged by circumstance to communicate solely with gestures, but merely a mime by avocation for whom gesturing was simply a way of garnering attention, of Take pleasure, getting people to listen by speaking without providing any sound for them to listen to at A, our God, in Your people Israel and in their prayers. all. In any event . . . the man, famous for his And restore the ancient worship service to the sanctuary mimicry, had somehow wrangled an invitation to the home of a local Caesar on an of Your great Temple and accept the offerings and the evening Rabbi Joshua was also in attendance. prayers of Israel willingly and lovingly, so that the wor- It was charades night at this Caesar’s palace. The mime was there, delighted, no ship of Your people Israel will ever find favor before You. doubt, to have been invited to an evening devoted to precisely the skill he himself had May our eyes see Your compassionate return to Zion! honed over the years. That Rabbi Joshua was Blessed are You, A, Who surely will return the Shechi- there too either did or didn’t come as a surprise, but what could he do? This was his big nah, the divine presence, to Zion. chance, his big break. Flummoxed or not by Continue with the words “We affirm” on page 27. the rabbi’s presence, he proceeded with his first act. Facing the Caesar—some think this un- On Rosh Chodesh, this paragraph: named Roman must have been the emperor Take pleasure, , our God, in Your people Israel and in their prayers. Hadrian himself—the mime began his set by A acting out what must have been one of his And restore the ancient worship service to the sanctuary of Your great favorite tableaux, a charade entitled “Behold, Temple and accept the offerings and the prayers of Israel willingly and a nation whose heavenly Ruler has turned lovingly, so that the worship of Your people Israel will ever find favor away from them,” and designed solely to insult the mime’s own people, the nation before You. away from whose faith he personally had Our God and God of our ancestors, may Your recollection of us, and turned away. Your abiding interest in us, come to the fore forcefully and effectively Now it was Rabbi Joshua’s turn. He stood up and performed a counter-tableau. one and noticeably and distinctly and conspicuously and markedly ...and entitled “God’s watchful hand is over us still,” not only Your recollection of us and our needs, but also Your recollec- which he either made up on the spot or else, tion of our ancestors and Your servant, the Messiah, son of David, being supremely ready at all times to do bat- whom we await, and Your recollection of Jerusalem, Your holy city, and tle with heretics, one he had previously devised in the unlikely event he might ever Your recollection of all Your people Israel and our need for sanctuary, have to participate in this kind of disputation for prosperity, for mercy, grace and compassion, for life and for peace with a mime. on this Rosh Chodesh day. The Caesar, not presented in our story as being all that bright, was impressed but also confused. Turning to Rabbi Joshua, he asked Remember us, A, our God, on this day for goodness and visit us with him to interpret, whereupon Rabbi Joshua blessing. Save us and grant us prolonged life and be kind and gracious answered honestly what each man had acted out. with respect to Your ancient promise of salvation. Judge us with com- Now it was the mime’s turn. The Caesar passion and save us, for it is to You that we ever look for salvation turned to him and asked him the same thing, because You are Sovereign God, gracious and just. May our eyes see for his interpretation of the pantomime each Your compassionate return to Zion! Blessed are You, , Who surely man had presented. His own charade, he A could interpret easily. “Caesar,” he said, “my will return the Shechinah, the divine presence, to Zion. work should be clear. I depicted a people Continue with the words “We affirm” on page 27. whose God has turned wholly away from them, a nation abandoned by its heavenly Ruler.” And then, falling directly into Rabbi

25 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI Joshua’s trap, the mime insisted that he had no idea what Rabbi Joshua had been acting out. I can just hear him sniffing as he adds insult to injury: “You call that a charade? You call that poseur a real mime? Who knows what he meant to be acting out? Why not ask him? I myself have no idea at all!” The Caesar was not amused. “A mime who cannot interpret the charades of others should be allowed to appear before a king as an expert in signing? Who ever heard of such a thing? Off with his head!” And, indeed, paying with his life for his hubris, the mime was taken out on the spot and executed. End of story! It’s a funny story—if not for the mime, then at least for latter-day readers pleased to see an enemy so ably hoisted by his own petard—but it also suggests just how bitterly unhappy Rabbi Joshua’s disciples must have been as they gathered by his deathbed and prepared to bid farewell to their master, to their spiritual guide, to their revered rabbi and beloved teacher. This, after all, was not just a smart fellow, but a true master of tradition, one of the few rabbis of ancient times equally at home in each of the intellectual domains developed within rabbinic circles: midrash, halakhah and aggadah. (The term “midrash” refers to rabbinic exegesis of the Bible. “Halakhah” refers to rabbinic law. The word “aggadah” refers to the corpus of elaborate legends and literary traditions that formed the backdrop to much of what the rabbis had to say about the world and its workings, and about the people in it.) And on top of all that, he was also a fierce defender of the faith, one who always had the right word, who always knew what to say to thugs, bullies, epikorsim, apostates . . . and to all tormentors of various and sundry varieties. Moderns gathered by the deathbeds of others—teachers, to be sure, but also parents, spouses and other beloved relations— often feel the same sense of abandonment. No one says it. Or, at least, no one says it out loud. But, I believe, everybody feels that sense of being lost, of being uncertain how to be guided in the world when one’s guide is about to decamp for wherever it is the souls of the pious end up after their bodies are committed to the earth. It’s supposed to be about the dying person . . . but which of us doesn’t feel drawn to wonder what’s going to happen to those of us left behind

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 26 once the person in the bed is not dying, but Whe praying silently, include the following paragraph, dead . . . and gone from this sorry world? then omit the paragraph that follows: Who will pay the bills? Who will look after my taxes? Who will know when the car needs to be serviced, or the furnace? Those, however, are the simple questions. And there are also We affirm others far more difficult even to say aloud, let alone to answer cogently. Who will look after our faith in You, for You are and always shall be me as I grow older? Who will watch over me as I become more feeble, more tired, less A, our God and the God of our ancestors, the able? Who will be by my side when I go to the doctor to learn the results of my biopsy? rock of our lives and the shield behind which we Who will be there in the recovery room wait- nurture our hope of redemption in every genera- ing for me to come to after my surgery? How could this be happening to me? tion. All this we affirm freely to You as we recount Immediately, we recover. Did I really think that? Am I really wondering how could this the praises due You for the security and safety of be happening to me? What’s happening to me? It’s happening to her, to him, to the per- our lives, both of which we acknowledge are in son in the bed. He’s the patient. She’s the victim. It’s the life of the person in the bed, not Your hands, and for our souls, which are wholly the people standing around the bed, that is dependent on You, and also for the miracles that ending . . . how could I have been so base as to imagine this was about me? You perform daily for us, a never-ending series of But, of course, it is about you. It is about the survivors . . . and, in some strange way, wonders and kindnesses from which we benefit it’s more about them, or at least as much about them, as it is about the individual actu- morning, afternoon and evening every day of our ally dying. That person’s troubles, after all, are about to be over permanently. But the liv- lives. O God of goodness, Whose compassion ing are going to have not only their past never fails, O God of compassion, Whose mercies troubles to deal with, but a whole new set of issues to grapple with, to struggle with, to try never end, it is ever in You that we place our trust. to come to terms with as best they can. When Rabbi Joshua’s disciples looked at their beloved master and realized he was in When the cantor or baal tefillah, repeating the Amidah, the last stages of his life, perhaps even in his last hours, they spoke naturally when they intones the paragraph just above, the congregation recites asked, “Who will speak for us once you are this paragraph quietly at the same time. gone?” Did they feel odd the moment after We affirm our faith in You that You are A, our God and the God saying that aloud? Did they even mean to say it aloud . . . or was it one of those thoughts of our ancestors, the God of all flesh, our Creator, the Creator of you mean to keep inside and which you the world at its very inception. We offer our blessings and our speak almost inadvertently, almost despite thanksgiving prayers to Your great and holy name in gratitude for your intention to remain silent? But whether it was intended or unintentional, they spoke Your gifts of life and sustenance. In so doing, we pray that we con- . . . and he answered. tinue to enjoy those very gifts of life and sustenance and that You It is in his answer that moderns will find comfort. He spoke in that elliptical rabbinic soon see fit to gather together our exiles to the courtyards of Your way that by its very nature invites multiple holy Temple so that all of us may there keep Your laws and do interpretations, but I don’t imagine he did so Your holy will, and so that we may worship You with full hearts as accidentally. Just to the contrary—by quoting an obscure verse from the Book of Jeremiah, an expression of our sense of thanksgiving to You. Blessed be Rabbi Joshua reminded his disciples of several God, to Whom all gratitude is eternally due. things. First, he reminded them that they

27 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI were scholars in their own right, not merely the students of a great scholar. He didn’t tell them where to find the verse or in what book to look to find it in its original context. He chose an obscure oracle buried in the back of Jeremiah’s book—a verse that not one contemporary student of Scripture in a million would recognize or even recall having heard—to remind the disciples that they were ready to be teachers on their own, that they had been pupils long enough, that their moment had come to be the teachers of others, not merely the students of their own teacher. Nor did he bother telling them that the verse means something entirely different in its context and that he was using it in a very specific, highly idiosyncratic way. All this, he wished them to understand that he expected them to seize on their own. As well they did! And then we have to consider the verse itself. Not to worry, Rabbi Joshua was saying, these things come in waves. The level of calumny rises, and the level of the calum- nied party’s ability to respond rises. But things also go the other way. As the generations come and go, we are occasionally led by less able people. But other nations also have their ups and downs . . . and, somehow, the general level of culture in the world is not all that different from nation to nation. In other words, he was telling them to calm down and not to obsess. When there was the need for a man of his caliber, for a man of his learning and articulateness, he was there. In the future, if such a need should again present itself, another person, perhaps even one of the disciples to whom Rabbi Joshua was speaking, would come to the fore and take his place. In the meantime, if good counsel vanishes from among the Jewish people briefly . . . then there will surely be a concomitant diminution of cleverness among its enemies. Not to worry, the rabbi was saying from the edge of his life, God will provide. These are easy words to admire from afar, and difficult ones to take to heart as one stands at the bedside of a dying husband or wife, or at the bedside of a dying parent or teacher. The feeling of being bereft, abandoned, left behind—all of these feelings are, almost by their very nature, overpowering. But, the Talmud is teaching us, there is an answer . . . and a reasonable one, at that. People can learn all sorts of things. People who have never looked after a furnace can

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 28 find out how often it needs to be serviced, During Chanukah, add this paragraph: and by whom. People who have never paid We are grateful for the miracles and the victory, for the acts of any bills can learn how to write a check and how to keep track of payments owed and might, for the military triumphs and the successes in battle You paid. People who have never faced surgery on wrought for our ancestors at this season of the year in ancient their own can find the courage to look to a child, or to a friend, or to a rabbi, for support times. In the days of the High Priest, Mattathias ben Yochanan the one previously expected from one’s spouse. Hasmonean, and his sons, when the wicked Seleucid kingdom People unused to facing life’s challenge on rose up against Your people Israel to attempt to force them to for- their own can survive . . . and learn how to deal with the loneliness death brings in its get Your Torah and to disobey its laws so reflective of Your sacred wake without collapsing under the weight of will, You, prompted by Your unending mercy, stood by them in unbearable sadness. All this I know to be true because I have seen things play themselves their time of trouble and helped them fight their battles. You out along these lines over and over, in count- helped them feel justified in their fight and You wrought less instances of loss and restoration, of death vengeance upon those who deserved it. You helped the weak to and transfiguration, of bereavement followed by personal re-invention. vanquish the mighty, the few to vanquish the many, the pure to In the end, Rabbi Joshua’s pupils survived. vanquish the impure, the righteous to vanquish the wicked, and And the next time a heretic appeared with the goal of mocking the faith of Israel and those who remained faithful to the words of Your Torah to van- making its proponents appear foolish and quish their arrogant enemies. You made glorious and holy Your gullible for embracing faith over doubt, they own name in this world of Yours when You wrought great deliver- found it in them to know how to respond. They missed their teacher, I suppose. I’m sure ance and salvation for Your people Israel at this very season so they did—how could anyone not mourn for- many centuries ago. Afterwards, Your devoted children came to ever a teacher of Rabbi Joshua ben Chanani- ah’s erudition and insight?—but, in the end, the sanctuary of Your holy Temple. They cleansed the sanctuary of they lived through their loss and survived the symbols of idolatry and purified the Temple, then lit lamps in their teacher’s death. its holy courtyards and declared that henceforth the eight days of In a nutshell, that is the Talmud’s lesson for moderns here as well. Survival is possible. Chanukah would be a festival devoted to thanksgiving and the People do it. There is no such thing as grief praise of Your great name. so pure that it is not at least slightly seasoned with self-pity, and with at least a dollop of victimhood. Perhaps that is inevitable . . . but On Purim, add this paragraph: it need not be its decisive feature. And, in the We are grateful for the miracles and the victory, for the acts of might, for end, that is the whole point of the brief story the military triumphs and the successes in battle You wrought for our of the disciples who gathered around Rabbi Joshua’s bed as he lay dying and asked, not ancestors at this season of the year in ancient times. In the days of what was to become of their master, but Mordechai and Esther, it once came to pass in Shushan, the capital of Per- what was to become of them after he was sia, that the villainous Haman rose up against the Jewish people and their master no longer. attempted to destroy, annihilate and murder all the Jews, men young and old, infants and women, in one single day, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month (which is the month of Adar) and to plunder all their pos- Almost no other rabbi of the generation that sessions. But You, acting in Your great mercy, ruined his plans and thwarted witnessed the destruction of the Temple had as his plot, paying him back in kind for his wicked intentions by having tumultuous a life as Rabbi Yochanan ben Haman and his sons hanged on the very gallows from which they had Zakkai, the crowning achievement of whose life was something far more momentous than it planned to hang Mordechai. sounds at first: his successful attempt to elicit permission from the Romans plotting the destruction of the Holy City and its great Tem-

29 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI ple to open an academy of Jewish learning in a sleepy, distant town called Yavneh. To Ves- pasian, soon to be emperor of all Rome, it must have seemed like a trifling request, like an opportunity to permit some minuscule kindness in the context of inflicting what he must have hoped would feel like the total defeat of Judea and its Jewish population. Permission was granted. The school was established. The Tem- ple, indeed, was destroyed (although not by Vespasian, as it turned out—Rabbi Yochanan’s prediction that he would soon be emperor turned out to be correct and, after he hurried off to Rome to claim his throne, the destruction of Jerusalem was left to Vespasian’s son, Titus). And from that small school in an inconsequen- tial backwater set along a distant part of the coast of the Land of Israel . . . came forth the Torah that rescued Judaism from the desuetude into which it most certainly could easily have fallen in the wake of the destruction of its most famous shrine and its holiest city. At the end of his life, when he lay dying, Rabbi Yochanan was not alone. Indeed, he was surrounded by his disciples, all of whom must have felt the weight of their impending loss heavy on their shoulders. This was, after all, not merely a teacher of theirs, not merely a spiritual guide or a learned rabbi. This was the man who had almost single-handedly re-invented Judaism in a way that made it possible for it to survive into the post-Temple era, the man whose spiritual audacity had been unprecedented in its day and which, even in our day, far exceeds the level of legal and philosophical self-confidence even our most learned rabbis generally have the nerve to display. The Talmud tells the story of his last hours, as he lay dying in the company of his pupils. When Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai lay dying, the Talmud relates, his disciples gathered in his presence. They came, perhaps, to gather strength from the fact that their master was still among them, still present in the world of the living. But the first thing that happened must have undermined whatever confidence in the future they still possessed because, as they gathered by his bedside, Rabbi Yochanan burst into tears. This was not a man who cried easily. And this was not at all what the disciples had hoped was going to happen. Entirely used to presenting their own problems and uncertainties to their rabbi for adjudication, they chose to address the issue head on. “O Lamp of Israel, O Right-Hand Column,” they

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 30 began, hoping (perhaps) to cheer up their On Israel Independence Day, add this paragraph: teacher with a clever play on words. (The We are grateful for the miracles and the victory, for the acts of entrance to the great Temple hall in Jerusalem was flanked by two columns, each deemed so might, for the military triumphs and the successes in battle You sacred as to warrant it having a special name: wrought for our people at this season of the year. When Jewish the one on the left was called Boaz and the one on the right, Yachin. Playing on the similarity of people undertook a return to their ancestral homeland and began the names Yochanan and Yachin, the students to re-establish themselves as free people living in their own land as meant to please their teacher with a compli- in ancient times, entry into the Promised Land was suddenly ment as flattering as it was clever: he was not merely a great rabbi, but one of the very pillars denied to the very refugees who had escaped annihilation else- that supported the ongoing existence of where. But when our enemies in the land and their allies in adja- Judaism in the post-Temple world, the latter- day embodiment of the great pillar called cent countries rose up to destroy Your people Israel, You, acting in Yachin that had once graced the entrance to accordance with Your great mercies came to their defense in their the actual Temple in Jerusalem.) And they were time of most dire trouble and rendered a just judgment on their not done complimenting their teacher. “O Great Hammer,” they continued, “why ever are you behalf. You gave them the courage to rise up and to pry open the crying?” gates of the land to grant entry to those who needed it most and He answered them with a simple analogy. “If I were simply on my way to visit an earthly to repulse the enemy armies from the land. You gave the many king, a regent of flesh and blood, a mere man into the hands of the few and the wicked into the hands of the here one day and in his grave the next, a crea- righteous. You made glorious and holy Your own name in this ture incapable of doing anything truly enduring—not even holding a permanent grudge world of Yours and, for Your people Israel, You wrought great against me or imprisoning me for all time or, for deliverance and salvation on this very day. that matter, executing me in such a way that would deny me more than my life in this sorry world (but surely not my portion in the World to Come)—if I were on my way to see such an And so, for all these things, may Your name individual, someone I could easily appease with the right words or bribe with the right sum of be blessed and exalted for always and for all money, I would still be upset. I would still possibly even be in tears. time, O sovereign God.... “But, as things actually are, that is not the case, and I feel myself being drawn from this Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, add these words: world into the presence of the Supreme Sover- eign of the universe, the blessed Holy One of and may You inscribe for a good life all those Israel, a God fully present and wholly alive for bound to you in sacred covenant now and forever, a God fully capable of harboring permanent, unrelenting anger toward sinners, of imprisoning me in a prison which will hold me for all time with no hope of release, of . . . for then shall all living creatures give condemning me to death not only in this world but in the World to Come as well (which is a thanks to You, selah, and render sincere death that has no end and from which there is no respite,) a God Who cannot be appeased praise to Your name, O God of our salvation, even by the most eloquent of words, Who cannot be bribed even with the greatest, most our ever-present help, selah. Blessed are You, impressive sum of money. “But it’s worse than just the fact that I feel A, Whose name is goodness itself and Who myself being drawn to God’s judgment. Indeed, I can see two roads diverging before me in the is thus wholly deserving of all gratitude. distant light, two paths down which I might conceivably be brought . . . but without any

31 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI certainty about which of them is to be the path to follow. One surely must lead to paradise, to Eden, to life everlasting in the bosom of the Almighty. And the other—the other path, I can also sense, must just as surely lead to oblivion, to Gehenna, to a future that is no future in a place that is no place, to a life that is not life. Now, all that being the case, do you really want to ask me why I weep as I approach this dismal crossroads uncertain which path is which?” How else should I feel if not sick with worry? The disciples were stunned. They, I suppose, were used to thinking highly of themselves, used to enjoying the respect their status as pupils of the great Rabbi Yochanan must have garnered for them regularly in the world outside the academy. These were pupils in the technical sense, after all . . . but also great spiritual lead- The public repetition of the Amidah ends here. ers in their own right, all of them. And this was Silent worshipers continue on page 36. the ultimate chastening experience for all of them: if their great master himself was apparently uncertain how God would evaluate his life’s work, how could they be so proud as to feel certain that God would look with favor and pleasure upon what they themselves had done with their lives? Uncertain what to say and unwilling, perhaps, to learn the lesson their teacher, even in his last hours, was trying to teach them—that with spiritual audaciousness and halakhic daring, with religious nerve and with philosophical chutzpah, must come extreme humility, not arrogant certainty—the disciples chose to change the topic. Such a modern story about ancient people! When in doubt, punt . . . to another player with a clearer field, to another subject with a less upsetting lesson, to any other topic less fraught with unpleasant, upsetting implications. “Rabbi,” they continued, blithely ignoring the final lesson of their revered teacher, “bless us!” And stop with the upsetting lessons. Of course, you’re going straight to paradise! Where else would you be going? And, equally obviously, so are we! Where else would men of our caliber be going after death? Now let’s move on to the good part, to the part where you offer us your The public repetition of the Amidah ends here. blessing, then breathe your last surrounded by Silent worshipers continue on page 36. your distraught, but ever worshipful, disciples. Rabbi Yochanan knew his audience. And he knew that there was no point—and no real reason—to repeat himself. Instead, he lifted himself up as best he could and, addressing their request for a deathbed blessing, obliged them. They were, after all, his beloved disciples. And, at the very least, if they didn’t want to hear his

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 32 lesson, they would surely still want to hear his Other than on fast days, say this paragraph on all weekdays of the year blessing. except those that fall between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: “May it be God’s will,” Rabbi Yochanan began, “that you fear God in heaven no less than you fear mortal human beings here on Grant a great and permanent peace to Your earth.” The disciples were nonplussed. “That’s it?” people Israel, for You are the sovereign they asked, almost despite themselves. After a lifetime of study, of worshipful service to your- Bestower of peace and we pray that it seem self, that’s your blessing, that we come to fear God? We are already God-fearing people! fitting in Your eyes to bless Your people Israel Haven’t we demonstrated that every single day by our devotion to Torah study, to the academy, at every moment and in every hour with Your to you personally? That’s the best you can do? All this, they asked with just two Hebrew words. peace. Ad kan? That’s it? No more? Just that? Rabbi Yochanan looked at his disciples. Was Blessed are You, A, Who will always there sadness in his eyes? Or was it just weari- ness? Did he realize these were his final hours? bless the people Israel with peace. Or did he imagine that he was just fatigued, that he would be better once he rested just a bit. The public repetition of the Amidah ends here. For a while, he thought carefully about how to Silent worshipers continue on page 37. respond, then decided to speak openly. “It’s not a trifle, the blessing I offered you. Look around Except on Tzom Gedaliah, say this paragraph you and tell me how many sins are not committed by people because they are afraid others will between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: see, because they are afraid of being caught.” They say that they fear God, but if they thought Grant a great and permanent peace to Your God alone would know, there is no end to the terrible things people would do. No, it is precise- people Israel, for You are the Sovereign of ly because they fear being seen by mortal men and women that they keep themselves from sin. all peace and we pray that it be good in Your My prayer is therefore simply that you come to fear God in the same natural way you fear the eyes to bless Your people Israel at every time opprobrium that would come to you if another man, if a woman—if anyone at all—were to see and in every hour with Your peace. May we you doing that which you know is wrong, unjust or forbidden. It’s not nothing, not a trifle. It is and all members of Your people, the House my most profound hope for you, my deathbed blessing for your future. of Israel, be remembered and entered in the Rabbi Yochanan lay back in his bed and felt life ebbing from him. The pupils, not sure if they Book of Life, Blessing, Peace, and Great were being insulted or admonished, or perhaps even complimented, said nothing. Rabbi Prosperity, for now and for always, for a Yochanan, having said his piece, also remained silent. The hours passed. And, finally, the final good life and for peace. hour came. When Rabbi Yochanan felt that his final Blessed are You, A, Maker of peace. moments were upon him, when he actually could feel himself being drawn forward from The public repetition of the Amidah ends here. this world to the next, he spoke again. “Clear Silent worshipers continue on page 37. the pots and pans from the house, for there is about to be a dead body here (and they will become contaminated with impurity if they are under the same roof as a cadaver, which impu-

33 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI rity could conceivably require them to be smashed or, at the very least, immersed in a mikveh) . . . and bring a chair for King Hezeki- ah, who is coming to escort me as I make my way from the land of the living.”

H ere ends the story. The Talmud leaves us no clue as to how we are to relate to the last part. The detail about the pots, any who have studied a bit of Torah will recognize. According to the law of Scripture, vessels that are under the same roof as a cadaver (unless they are sealed in a certain, specific way) are deemed to have been infected with the kind of contaminative mias- ma called tumah in Biblical sources. Some such vessels—those made of metal, for example—can be purified by immersion in a mikveh. But clay pots—the simplest, cheap- The public repetition of the Amidah ends here. est kind of kitchen vessel that even the poor- est householder would own—cannot be so Silent worshipers continue on page 36. simply purified and, indeed, can only be relieved of their contamination by being smashed. No doubt, this was something any householder, but especially one of modest means, would seek to avoid. And it as to this homey topic that Rabbi Yochanan’s mind wandered as he prepared to breathe his last. This, at least, I have seen a thousand times. When considering the matter dispas- sionately, it feels like the last concerns of a very sick person ought to be with the loftiest, deepest matters. But they almost never are. I have heard people mention where they keep some specific key, where the combination to some distant lock may be found. I have heard of people finishing their time on earth with one final worry about a mortgage payment, or a payment of estimated income tax, with one last thought about a debt, about a loan, about a wedding gift left unsent, about an invitation left unanswered, about a bill left unpaid. It’s a way of holding on, of remem- bering that, for all one is about to depart on the greatest of all journeys, one is still in the world and part of the world, that one has not yet departed, that one is still alive. So Rabbi Yochanan’s last comment about the pots will not seem strange or peculiar to anyone who regularly attends the dying, just another The public repetition of the Amidah ends here. example of an individual unnerved by the Silent worshipers continue on page 36. impending end of life seeking solace in the contemplation of the commonplace.

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 34 The comment about King Hezekiah is less On fast days other than Tzom Gedaliah, say this paragraph: simple to unravel. Hezekiah ben Achaz was the thirteenth king of Judah who reigned at Grant peace, goodness, blessing, grace, mercy and the end of the eighth and in the beginning of the seventh centuries B.C.E. In other words, compassion to us and to all Your people Israel. he lived about nine centuries before Rabbi Yochanan. Was it really he in the rabbi’s bed- Bless us all together, O holy Parent, with the radi- chamber? Did the king’s ancient ghost come ance of Your countenance, for in that holy light to the world of the living to escort Rabbi Yochanan as he made his final exit as a sign did You, A, our God, give us the Torah of life of the extreme reverence due a man of Rabbi Yochanan’s spiritual and moral caliber? Or and instill in us the love of mercy, righteousness, was it merely a hallucination, merely the rabbi becoming unable to distinguish clearly blessing, compassion, life and peace. And it may between reality and fantasy as his heart slowed and the flow of oxygen going to his be good in Your eyes to bless Your people Israel at brain became less and less strong? Or could all times, at every hour of every day, with Your there be yet a different explanation? King Hezekiah, after all, spent most of his life on peace. Blessed are You, A, Who will always bless the throne wrangling one way or the other with Assyria, the great power of his day, just the people Israel with peace. as Rabbi Yochanan had had to make his personal peace with Rome in order to survive The public repetition of the Amidah ends here. and to get permission to open his school. Is it Silent worshipers continue on page 37. not at least plausible that Rabbi Yochanan imagined King Hezekiah as coming to him in On Tzom Gedaliah, recite this paragraph: his last moments because he felt that, of all his life’s decisions, the one to make personal Grant peace, goodness, blessing, grace, mercy and peace with Vespasian while the destruction of Jerusalem was imminent, a decision which compassion to us and to all Your people Israel. must have won him many detractors once it became known, was the one about which he Bless us all together, O holy Parent, with the radi- was left the most uncertain as he lay dying? To understand what he meant, therefore, ance of Your countenance, for in that holy light did required neither worshipfully accepting his You, , our God, give us the Torah of life and words at face value nor automatically reject- A ing them as mere hallucination, but rather instill in us the love of mercy, righteousness, bless- subjecting them to careful analysis rooted in the deep, thoughtful assumption that to hear ing, compassion, life and peace. And it may be the dying speak, you have not merely to listen with your ears, but with your heart and good in Your eyes to bless Your people Israel at all with your focused mind as well. When understood in this light, the whole times, at every hour of every day, with Your peace. deathbed dialogue described above begins to May we and all members of Your people, the make more sense as well. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was one of the great rabbis of his House of Israel, be remembered and entered in the day, possibly the greatest. He was revered not merely as a master of tradition, but as an Book of Life, Blessing, Peace, and Great Prosperity, innovative, daring hero . . . and as the single individual most responsible for the re-inven- for now and for always, for a good life and for tion of Judaism after the destruction of its central shrine and its holiest city. When read- peace. Blessed are You, A, Maker of peace. ing the first part of the story, the dialogue The public repetition of the Amidah ends here. with the disciples in which the rabbi speaks words that sound suffused far more with seri- Silent worshipers continue on page 37.

35 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI ous worry than mere humility, the whole point is easy to miss. But, once King Hezekiah comes into the mix, things begin to clarify. As he lay dying, Rabbi Yochanan was troubled. As he thought back on the days of his life, he was unsure about the worth even of his greatest victories, of his greatest successes. Indeed, as the specter of impending death became more and more palpable in his bed chamber, the sense that nothing was necessarily as it had always seemed grew more and more real. Any rabbi who deals with the terminally ill regularly will recognize this phenomenon as well. Business deals involving millions, and for which one has been celebrated for decades, suddenly seem unimportant, even wholly without signifi- cance. Decisions made decades earlier to compromise one’s values for, one thought, a higher good—suddenly such decisions are back on the table for re-evaluation one final time. And the supposition that what ended up well must therefore have constituted the right path in the first place, that is something that no one really believes . . . and least of all when one lies dying and has no real reason to dissemble. There must have been many who considered Rabbi Yochanan a traitor, a man who made his separate peace with the Romans, then decamped to Yavneh while the Jews of Jerusalem met their fate. In retrospect, it all worked out well—how could it have been better for him and his disciples to have been The silent recitation of the Amidah ends here killed in the siege of Jerusalem along with so many others than to be well ensconced and and is followed by its public recitation if a minyan is present. safe in their newly founded academy at Otherwise, continue with Aleinu on page 40. Yavneh? But now that the need to self-justify was waning, and the urge to dissemble absent entirely, Rabbi Yochanan lay back to reflect on what he had done. Yes, in a real sense, he had saved Judaism from oblivion. He had salvaged the system as best he could, transferred some of the Temple’s sacred pre- rogatives to Yavneh, and others to the newly burgeoning institution of the local synagogue. He had dared go where none had dared go previously, and he was widely and famously celebrated for his daring and for his success. But, as he lay dying, he no longer felt possessed of the certainty he had previously enjoyed. Had he done the right thing? Was he about to encounter the ghosts of all those who had died during the siege of Jerusalem—

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 36 and there were well over a million civilian The Prayer of Mar, son of Rabina casualties by some contemporary estimates— and be obliged to explain himself not to those My God, keep my tongue from speaking evil and my lips from who had somehow survived, but to those uttering slander. May I have the inner strength to remain silent in who had perished? Had he done something the face of my enemies’ taunts and may I have the courage to be wrong to accomplish something right? Or had he acted nobly and rightly, saving what indifferent to all who might insult or mock me. Open my heart to had to be saved regardless of whatever the Your Torah and inspire me to yearn to do Your commandments cost might later be to his own reputation? Rabbi Yochanan saw two roads diverging faithfully and properly. And may You quickly annul the plans and before him. And, by his own admission, he bring to naught the plots of those who wish me ill. Do this for the was uncertain which one was to be his, the sake of Your name, for the sake of Your great right hand, for the road to paradise or the road to perdition. He didn’t say he was unsure for effect or to sake of Your holiness,and for the sake of Your holy Torah. impress his disciples; he said he was unsure May Your right hand grant salvation as You answer our prayers because he was wholly uncertain which was to be his final path. so that those who love You might be granted relief from their bur- At the very end of his life, he saw King dens. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my Hezekiah’s ghost coming for him. This, he heart be acceptable before You, , my Rock and my Redeemer. must have felt was very good news—Hezeki- A ah, after all, had made his own compromises And may God Who makes peace on high make peace for us and with the Assyrians, had done what it took for the whole House of Israel. And to that, let us all say Amen. back in the eighth century to guarantee a Jewish future. And he had become celebrated At the conclusion of the Amidah, we append a prayer for the restoration of and remained, even nine centuries later, deeply and permanently respected by all Jerusalem and the rebuilding of our holy Temple. Jews. Surely, or at least plausibly, it too would May it be Your will, A, our God and God of our ancestors, that the holy be Rabbi Yochanan’s fate to be celebrated for Temple be rebuilt quickly and within our days. And may we all have a por- having done what it took to survive, what it took to guarantee that Judaism and Jewish- tion in Your Torah sufficient to guarantee us the merit to serve You in awe ness would survive, what it took to guarantee in that place, just as in ancient days and bygone years. May the sweet savor that it would be said of him later on that his of the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant to You, A, just as in was the path of courage and selfless dedica- ancient days and bygone years. tion, neither one of personal convenience nor self-aggrandizement. Rabbi Yochanan died at peace, escorted to The silent recitation of the Amidah ends here paradise by none other than the ghost of and is followed by its public repetition if a minyan is present. King Hezekiah. Whether his disciples under- Otherwise, continue with Aleinu on page 41. stood and appreciated his self-doubt at the very end seems to me unlikely. Their response is not recorded. Whether they thought their master was simply falling prey to hallucination or not, they remained silent, respectful, unsure (possibly) what to say, but unwilling (definitely) to risk defiling their teacher’s last moments by speaking disrespectfully to or of him. That is not, however, precisely the same thing as accurately seizing the thrust of his final words, of his strange reference to King Hezekiah come to bring him to the next life, to life everlasting. Moderns facing the deaths of parents, teachers, siblings, spouses and other beloved relations would do well to take this story seriously. At the end of life, it all falls away. The

37 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI accomplishments of a lifetime devoted to the doing of great things, to making great business deals, to succeeding in the acquisition of enormous amounts of money, to achieving great success in business or in matters of personal accomplishment—all these evaporate and erode in the shadow of impending death. None of it appears to matter. None of it feels important as one considers the finality of the moment and the imminent cessation of life. The dying often need to reassess, to re- evaluate, to rethink their lives. They do not need to be fed lines about how fabulously well their lives turned out, about how grateful they should be for all they came to possess. Nor do they deserve to be patronized by being told that none of life matters any longer, that wrongs left unaddressed and unattended to from decades earlier are just water under the bridge, just so many unimportant details now best forgotten. The dying have a real need to be quit of this world, but that is not at all the same as being told to be quit of the world. Disputes left unresolved, words spoken in haste and never taken back, instances of fractious, difficult behavior never quite dealt with, decisions made based on some combination of self-interest and hope for the greater good left unanalyzed honestly and forthrightly—all these are not unimportant details the dying should be encouraged to forget about, to ignore, to consider as irrelevant now that the end is nigh. Just to the contrary, the greatest kindness is to enable the dying to review these issues, to make peace where peace yet needs to be These two lines are omitted by a mourner leading the prayer service. made and can still be made, and even unilat- erally to resolve instances of ill ease over inci- dents left unrecorded anywhere other than on the walls of the chambers of that particular individual’s heart. Over and over, I have heard people trying to be kind as they urge the dying to forget about details, to let it all go, to die in peace. But what people don’t necessarily understand is that dying in peace can only be achieved by people who are at peace, not by people who are told to be at peace. Being at peace with the world means, primarily, being at peace with oneself, with one’s deeds, with one’s legacy. Being at peace with the world means identifying the impediments to being wholly right with the world and then, one by one, eliminating them as best one can. Being

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 38 at peace means knowing that one has The Full Kaddish repented one’s wrongdoings, that one has undone whatever one can of one’s mistakes Magnified and sanctified be the great name of God in and missteps, that one is facing one’s end imbued not with self-deception but with the this world created according to divine plan, and may purest, most unadulterated (and least person- God’s sovereignty be established speedily and soon ally self-serving) form of self-knowledge. That is what it means to die in peace . . . and it is during the days of our lives and the lives of all mem- what the story of Rabbi Yochanan’s death is all about. bers of the House of Israel, and let us say, Amen. The ancient rabbi made difficult decisions in his life, each of them fraught with poten- The congregation joins the cantor or baal tefillah in reciting this line. tial regret. Yet, because he was a man of great courage, he made those decisions and May God’s great name be blessed forever then lived with the consequences. As he lay dying, he revisited those decisions, felt uncer- and throughout all eternity. tain, saw two paths diverging before him. And then, as he prepared to breathe his last, The cantor or baal tefillah continues: because he had confronted his demons, because he had looked squarely into the mir- May the name of the Holy One, source of all bless- ror within his head and had seen himself as he truly knew himself to be—in other words, ing, be blessed, adored, lauded, praised, extolled, because he had had the courage to stare at his own life without flinching and without glorified and venerated in language . . . looking away—the ghost of saintly King Hezekiah came to escort him along the road Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: not to perdition, but to paradise. more exalted This is the great goal of those to whom it falls to attend to the dying, or it should Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: be: granting the nearly departed the strength entirely more exalted —and the courage and the ability—to see those two roads . . . and then helping them through the kind of death experience that . . . than any blessing, hymn, ode or prayer recited leads not through agonizing regret to fitful by the faithful in this world, repose, but to a peaceful transition from this world of dust to the world of truth, to and let us say, Amen. paradise. These lines are omitted by a mourner leading the prayer service. May the prayers and supplications of all Israel Among the sages of Jewish antiquity, there are be acceptable before their heavenly Parent, those whose roles in the development of Judaism were pivotal, even crucial, yet whose and let us say, Amen. names remained relatively unknown to moderns, even relatively savvy ones. Rav Ashi is one May we, and all Israel, be blessed with great peace of those scholars. Born toward the end of the fourth century C.E. and living well into the fifth, that comes to us directly from heaven, he revitalized the academy at Sura (which had previously been one of the premiere talmudic and with life, and let us say, Amen. academies of the diaspora) and served as its principal for more than half a century. More May God Who brings peace to the heavens grant important than that, however, he and a colleague named Ravina produced what, by all peace to us and to all Israel, and let us say, Amen. accounts, appears to have been the first edition

39 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI of the Babylonian Talmud, the masterwork of all rabbinic creativity. Rav Ashi is believed to have died in 427. And the story about his death I wish to tell is, therefore, set in that year, about a month before his demise. Rav Ashi is out walking in the market one day. Just for some added color, let’s fill in some missing details in the Talmud’s laconic text. It is a crisp, fall day in Sura. Rav Ashi is out in the shuk with his son, Tavyomi (later to become a great scholar in his own right who, in token of his erudition and his father’s, would only be referred to in the Talmud as Mar bar Rav Ashi, the Master who was Rav Ashi’s son). The point of this expedition is fairly pedestrian: father and son are simply out in the market hoping to buy some special treat for the Sabbath. Rav Ashi is an older man of seventy-five now—and Tavyo- mi himself is in his fifties—and they still walk arm in arm as they always have, only now it is the son who is supporting the father, rather than the father who is guiding the son. They are carrying a few parcels with them and are lost in deep conversation when, suddenly, Rav Ashi stops cold in his tracks. For a long moment, he says nothing . . . then he turns to Tavyomi and reveals to him a great secret he would naturally have preferred neither to know nor to have to reveal: the dark, mysterious figure standing before them is none other than the Angel of Death. How Rav Ashi knew this, the Talmud does not say. Was the angel decked out like the grim reaper of Western mythology, swathed in a hooded black cape and carrying a scythe? Since that image appears to have its origins in the world of Greek mythology, we can assume not. But what the Angel of Death looked like . . . and how Rav Ashi knew to recognize who was standing before him, the Talmud does not reveal. He does not panic, however, choosing instead simply to make a modest, entirely reasonable request. “Give me thirty days to review my Talmud,” he says gamely, clearly knowing that one does not simply run into the Angel of Death coincidentally or accidentally. “Don’t they say that it is a very good thing to arrive ‘there’ with one’s learning totally intact?” Of course, they do—and I, having written, or at least co-written, the book personally, or at least its first edition . . . surely I, of all people, deserve the merit of arriving “there” fresh from having reviewed my learning, my Talmud.

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 40 Where “there” is, the text does not say. Aleinu Clearly, Rav Ashi has somewhere in mind, and it must be the place to which the souls of the It is our duty to praise the Author of all existence and to declare departed go when their bodies go into the earth. But where is it exactly? And, for that the greatness of the Creator for not making us like the other matter, what is it? A heavenly paradise of some nations or granting us the spiritual bearing of other clans within sort in the sky? A Hades-style Sheol deep inside the greater human family, and for neither giving us a portion sim- the earth? Is it a heavenly academy in which the righteous spend eternity bathing in the ilar to theirs nor a destiny like that of their great populations. beneficent light of the divine presence while Instead, we all bend the knee and kneel down to give thanks they study Torah with the great scholars and sages of all ages? Or is it perhaps something far before sovereign God Who rules over even their most powerful more modest, and far more reasonably left royalty, the blessed Holy One Who spread out the heavens and undefined: a simple “there” intended to desig- established the earth, Whose holy residence is in heaven above, nate the other place, the place that is not “here,” that could never be “here.” The and Whose absolute power is revealed in the highest celestial antithesis of the world of men and women, not realms. hell or heaven, but that place to which the dead repair when, no longer alive, they have The Almighty is our God; there is no other. The Sovereign of lost the right to live in the land of the living. A truth, God is wholly unique, as it is written in God’s Torah: “And “there” best left undefined by mortals who can- above all else you shall take to heart that , alone and fully not fathom life absent physicality, to whom A space absent length, width, breadth and depth unique, is God in heaven above and on earth below.” simply cannot be fathomed, to whom only Therefore, do we place our trust in You, A, our God, so that “here” can be perceived, thus felt truly to exist. But, wherever, and whatever, “there” is, it is we may quickly come to see the glory of Your splendid power as it clearly some place one should hope to arrive manifests itself to sweep away and utterly destroy the repulsive with one’s learning intact. Perhaps Rav Ashi did idols that are worshiped on this earth, to establish the sovereignty expect there to be a great academy on high, one in which the ghosts of the sages of all ages of God on earth so that all humanity will come to invoke Your study Torah, a school in which angels partici- sacred name, and to turn the wicked of the earth toward You in pate in the disputation and dialogue that is the stuff of Jewish dialectical learning, a college in full repentance, so that all who dwell on this planet will recognize which the Almighty invested with the full glory and understand fully that it is to You alone that every knee must of the divine realm serves as rosh yeshivah, as bend and every tongue pledge loyalty. the rabbinic principal. Or was Rav Ashi just thinking on his feet, quickly coming up with a It is before You, A, our God, that they will kneel and fall pros- clever way to buy a last month on earth, a final trate; it is to the glory of Your name that they will all show honor thirty days to tidy up his affairs, to bid farewell to his children, to his wife, to his family and to as they accept upon themselves the yoke of Your sovereignty. his students? That, we can never know. The Then shall You rule over them, quickly and permanently, for story does not go there. And neither, therefore, sovereignty is Yours and so shall You ever rule over us with honor, can we. The Angel of Death is more forthcoming as it is written in the Torah,“A shall reign forever.” than modern readers might expect is going to be the case and, slightly to our surprise, he And so also is it is written in the book of grants Rav Ashi the requested final month. But Your prophet, “And it shall come to pass that no more. A month . . . but that, apparently, is A going to be it. The Talmud suggests the will be Sovereign over all the earth. Indeed, on emphatic brevity of his response by not record- ing it all, only telling us what happens when, at that day, the unique nature of A will be the end of the thirty-day period, he returns to Rav Ashi. Or perhaps the Talmud does not acknowledged on earth so totally that even the record his response because there wasn’t one, because he said nothing, and merely chose to divine name itself will be ‘One.’”

41 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI vanish from before Rav Ashi as a sign that, since he did not take the rabbi along with him when he left, the latter’s request tacitly had been granted. Thirty days later, the Angel of Death is back. How he keeps track of all the people in the world who die every single day, the Talmud does not say. Perhaps he had some sort of early PDA—a personal death assistant—or perhaps angels just have extremely good memories. But, whatever, the month is up, and the Angel of Death is back. Rav Ashi, however, is not quite ready to go. “What’s the rush?” he asks almost simply. The original—mai kuli hai?—has its own euphonic charm and suggests a bit of an edge: What’s this all about? Why are we rushing? Is this really all you have to do all day? Why not take someone else today? Did we say thirty days? Because that would really give me until tomorrow, when all thirty days will finally all be gone, whereas today is only day thirty, and, therefore, you see. . . . The Angel is unimpressed. He listens politely —this is Rav Ashi who is addressing him, after all, not some bumpkin—but doesn’t budge. Today is the day. Now is the time. You are cor- dially invited to come along to “there,” where, presumably, you will arrive with your learning intact after having had these last thirty days to revise and review your studies. Rav Ashi is about to say something, anything, in response. But, finally, the Angel of Death gets to the point: “And besides,” he says, almost as an afterthought, “Rabbi Nathan’s time to head the academy is at hand and it’s that detail that is pushing you along even more than I myself am. Don’t you know that one administration has to end before the next one can begin, that they cannot overlap even slightly?” You know that about governments, surely . . . but I suppose you must also know it about schools. He’s in. You’re out. Let’s go . . . you’re done, but I have a whole afternoon of work left ... . And, with that, the story ends. Why Rav Ashi couldn’t offer simply to step down so that his successor could step up, the text doesn’t explore. Maybe these positions didn’t come with retirement packages and you just stayed in place until you went “there” . . . or wherever. In any event, both parties in dialogue seem to agree on how the game was played. And, although the text is brief and the story ends just a bit abruptly, I think we are to understand that

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 42 Rav Ashi’s life did end on that thirtieth day and The Mourner’s Kaddish* that, as is always the case when the Angel of Death is concerned, was simply that. Magnified and sanctified be the great name of God in this world created according to divine F or someone that almost no one in plan, and may God’s sovereignty be established our world actually believes to exist in the normal way, the Angel of Death gets a lot of speedily and soon during the days of our lives press in the Talmud. On the same page that Rav Ashi’s story is told, for example, any and the lives of all members of the House of number of other stories of encounters with that same mysterious personality are also Israel, and let us say, Amen. related. Rav Sheshet, a blind sage of the third gen- The congregation joins the mourners in reciting this line. eration of Talmudic rabbis, for example, also caught sight of the Angel of Death in the shuk. Perhaps he was by nature more gruff May God’s great name be blessed than Rav Ashi, or perhaps the fact that he could not see the angel, but could only sense forever and throughout all eternity. his presence, heightened his willingness to speak sharply. At any rate, he was clearly not amused to consider facing his end in, of all The mourners continue: places, a public market. “This is where you come to get me?” he asked of the angel, the May the name of the Holy One, source of all tone in his voice making it completely clear that he meant his question rhetorically. “In blessing, be blessed, adored, lauded, praised, the market, as though I were a beast brought extolled, glorified and venerated in language . . . here to be slaughtered?” I am not nobody, not an ox being led to the abattoir. I am a great sage in Israel and “if you want to take Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: me ‘there’, you can very well come to my home and take me ‘there’ from there.” What more exalted happened next, the Talmud does not relate. But I suppose we are to imagine that the Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: angel, chastened by Rav Sheshet’s sharp rejoinder, slunk off and, after allowing a suit- entirely more exalted able amount of time for the rabbi to finish his errands, met him at his home as instructed to than any blessing, hymn, ode or prayer recited by do. Other rabbis were also able to get the best the faithful in this world, and let us say, Amen. of the Angel of Death, at least in the short run. Some of the stories are amusing, almost May we, and all Israel, be blessed with lives to the point of being funny. Rabbi Eleazar ben Shamua, one of Rabbi Akiba’s greatest great peace that comes to us directly from heav- disciples, was a kohen, a member of the en, and with life, and let us say, Amen. priestly caste, and, as such, he was entitled to eat what was called then terumah grain— May God Who brings peace to the heavens grain that had been paid as a tax by the laity to a priest in fulfillment of the Scriptural grant peace to us and to all Israel, and let us say, injunction to do so, and which had only to be eaten by someone in a state of total ritual Amen. purity. Since, both in the Biblical and the rabbinic worldviews, a human cadaver is the *The Mourner’s Kaddish appears in transliteration on page 95. supreme source of impurity, the rabbi had a

43 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI ready-made retort to the Angel of Death when he appeared suddenly to whisk him away from this world. Are you blind? he asked almost rudely. “Am I not eating terumah grain at this very moment?” If I die right now, will you not be guilty—and you, an angel, of all things—will you not be guilty of making impure the very grain of which Scripture says unequivocally that it is holy food, thus implying clearly that it is a commandment of God to preserve its purity? What the Angel of Death said to that is not recorded. I think we can assume that he slunk off, granting the clever Rabbi Eleazar at least enough time to finish his meal in peace and in purity before finally ending his days on earth. But, in the end, the angel returned. In the end, the angel always returns. Rav Chisda also gave the Angel of Death a run for his money. One of the greatest scholars of his day, Rav Chisda died as a very old man in the first years of the fourth century C.E. He was known for many things, but, foremost among them, for his deep, abiding devotion to the study of the Torah. And, although, generally speaking, Torah study is considered the most praiseworthy of activities, Rav Chisda’s admirers most definitely did not include the Angel of Death, who is not permitted to interrupt Torah study to take someone “there,” no matter how old or feeble the individual in question might be in other ways. And so, day after day, the Angel of Death had to wait. I suppose people every- where must have noted a dramatic drop in the mortality rate . . . but, thwarted and, I imagine, incredibly frustrated, the angel had no choice but to wait. And then, finally, the Angel of Death had an idea. Was it the story told above about the death of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch that gave him the idea? That, we will never know, but the story has a similar ending: the angel (or his assistant)simply flew up to a convenient cedar rafter in the study hall in which Rav Chisda was reviewing his lessons and, when the rafter cracked in two under his weight and Rav Chisda inadvertently looked up for a moment to see what had happened, the opportunity to take him “there” presented itself and, indeed, it was precisely at that moment that he died. The rabbis even told a similar story about King David. He too was wholly given over to Torah study at the end of his life, thus effectively preventing his own death. The Angel of

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 44 Death, who knew that it was futile to wait for The Evening Service him to grow tired of learning, thus had to devise a better plan. (Why he couldn’t wait God is ever compassionate, ever willing to for the king to fall asleep and take him “there” then, the text doesn’t say. It’s a better forgive sin without destroying the sinner, story this way, however.) It seems there was a garden behind the palace where King David ever willing to respond to transgression repaired to review his studies. The angel went into the garden, climbed a tree and began to without anger and without the fullness of make a racket by swaying and shaking the branches. The king, concerned something divine rage; will save us. Sovereign God might be awry, walked into the garden . . . A but without ceasing to review the lesson in will answer us when we call out in heartfelt which he had been engaged. Seeing something high up in one of the trees, he began prayer. to climb a ladder. And then, when the rung upon which he was standing broke and he fell to the ground, he stopped reviewing his lesson. It was just for the briefest of moments, but it was then that the Angel of Death took him “there.” All of these stories suppose the real existence of a real being, a real angel called the Blessed be Angel of Death. Sometimes, he appears in these stories as an executive officer of demise, sending messengers hither and yon across the globe to collect the souls of those due to leave life to the living and join the lately and distantly departed wherever “there” actually , is. Other times, though, he appears as the A Grim Reaper himself, traveling over the world and being occasionally, but only temporarily, thwarted briefly by clever people unwilling to accept that their time has come. And in still other stories, he appears not really to exist at source of all all and merely to serve as the embodiment of the principle that life is brief, that death is unyielding, that length of days is a gift that can be withdrawn at any time, and that, for all God giveth, God also taketh away . . . and usually when those whose time is up are blessing. expecting the least to die. Moderns reading these stories have a lot of points to consider. Is death, by definition, the enemy, the great antithesis of life that exists not to enhance one’s sense of wonder The congregation responds and the cantor or baal tefillah repeats: at being alive in the first place, but to punish, to chastise and to kill? Or is death a kind of threshold across which all must eventually Blessed forever and for all time step, a dramatic shift in the framework of existence but no more the cancellation of be , source of all blessing. existence than birth itself is . . . no matter A how certain the baby in the birth canal must be that life is over, that the world has col- lapsed, that the givens of life have altered so

45 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI The Blessings before the Shema completely and utterly that continued existence is basically unthinkable, unimaginable? The baby, obviously, is completely incorrect in its estimation of what is happening as it approaches the light of this world. Are we so certain that we are any less incorrect in our estimation of what happens as we approach the light of the next world? There are many stories in our tradition that speak of the continuing existence of the dead. Are these merely fairy stories to be dis- missed as simple folk tales invented solely to give voice to the most cherished of human hopes, that there is life beyond the grave? Or are they anecdotes told and retold to reveal a profound truth hiding behind their details, not unlike the way our sages imagined the World of Truth itself to hide behind, beneath and just beyond this world of mud and dust we all inhabit? Rava, the founder of the great Talmudic academy at Machoza, died about the year 350 C.E. and the story of his death is quite instructive. As he lay dying, he was attended by his brother, Rav Seorim. Eventually, it became clear to Rav Seorim that his brother’s time had come, that he was sinking into his final sleep. With what must have been great effort, however, Rava had one final request of his brother. “Tell him not to make me suffer,” he said, clearly referring to the Angel of Death, whose presence he could feel all too clearly in the room. Was it a sudden chill that alerted him to the angel’s presence? Was it the flutter of dark wings? Or was it the glint of an invisible scythe in the sunlight? It could have been any of these things, or perhaps something else entirely, but, somehow, Rava knew these were his last minutes. And his request was thus entirely reasonable, entirely normal. Rav Seorim, however, did not respond all that graciously. “You’re his best friend, aren’t you?” he asked, presumably rhetorically. “You ask him yourself!” But Rava couldn’t ask anything of the angel, and he also knew why not. “Since my name appeared on his list, I hold no sway with him.” Whatever you’ve heard about me and him—that was yesterday’s news, when he and I were talking about other people. Now that it’s me on his agenda, though . . . we’re through. You talk to him for me. Maybe he’ll listen to you about me, just as he once listened to me about others!

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 46 Rav Seorim now turns to his brother. The Blessings before the Shema Inaudibly, he agrees to beg the angel for a painless death for his saintly brother . . . but Blessed are You, A, our God, Sovereign of the universe, he also has a request to make of his brother, Who causes evening to fall with a word, Who with wis- one unusual but not entirely unprecedented. “Come back afterwards,” he says, thus fore- dom opens up the celestial gates at the appointed times, shadowing the deepest wish of so many to come who have attended the deaths of Who with sublime astronomical acumen arranges the beloved relations, “come back and tell me change of seasons and the orderly flow of the times of what death is like.” What Rava said to that, the Talmud does the year, and Who organizes the stars in their celestial not reveal. But he did come back . . . and in orbits according to divine will. It is You Who are the an unexpectedly talkative mood. So, Rav Seorim asked his brother’s ghost Creator of day and night Who rolls light away when when it subsequently appeared to him, did it work? Did you suffer any pain? Did the angel darkness falls only to roll the darkness itself back when it accede to my request? is time again for the world to be bathed in light, “Death felt to me like the slightest prick of a pin,” he said, and then, with that deathless Who causes the days to pass and nighttime to fall, Who thought recorded for all time, he fell silent makes clear the distinction between day and night, and . . . and, as far as we know, never again spoke to anyone in the world of the living. Whose name is A of hosts. The living God, fully and Rava’s role in the story of his own death was not invented entirely on the spot, how- permanently existent, shall ever reign over us. ever. And, indeed, a quite similar story is told about Rava himself and his experience Blessed are You, A, attending to Rav Nachman as he lay dying. (Rav Nachman was a great Talmudic sage Who makes the evening fall. who died about thirty years before Rava.) The set-up is almost the same. Rav Nach- man is in his final hour. Rava sits patiently by You have loved Your people Israel with everlasting love, the bed, waiting for an opportunity to serve teaching us the Torah and the commandments, divine his master as death approaches. Finally, Rav Nachman has the strength to make his final law and sacred statute. For this reason, A, our God, we request. And, turning to Rava, he makes it, shall talk of Your laws when we lie down and when we “Tell him not to make me suffer.” Rava is as little gracious to Rav Nachman awaken, and we shall rejoice in the study of Torah and in as, thirty years later, his own brother would be toward him. “Aren’t you the big man the performance of mitzvot for all time, for those com- around here?” Rav Nachman asks. Who am I mandments are our life and from devotion to them to intercede on your behalf? You’ll do much better asking for yourself. comes the gift of a long life, and so we devote ourselves Rava’s answer was immediate. “A big to their study day and night. Never take Your love man? Who is a big man when compared to the Big Man? Am I that much of a big shot? from us! Am I the kind of guy that could possibly give orders to the Angel of Death?” Blessed are You, A, Who loves Israel, The story breaks off. We are left to assume that they go a few rounds, then, finally, Rava the people of God. agrees to intercede. But he has a condition to impose . . . the same one his brother, no doubt also his student, would put on him personally a few decades later. I’ll do it, he says finally, but only if you agree to come back later on and tell me how well I did.

47 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI And, indeed, amazingly, after he dies, Rav Nachman does come back. The Talmud doesn’t give any details. Is it the next day? Or the next week? Does he come to Rava in a dream or as a ghost? Does he hover over- head during prayer, or is this a silent, one-on- one interview we are bidden to imagine? None of this is revealed . . . only that Rav Nachman returned to earth to keep his half of the bargain. “So, nu?” Rava asks him. “How was it?” Rav Nachman, we can only assume, smiles at his pupil’s naiveté. “Not all that bad at all,” he says, in the manner of someone describing an unpleasant medical procedure that produced desirable results. “What I felt was akin to what a bowl of milk would feel if someone disturbed its smooth white surface to remove a hair that had somehow fallen into it.” Then, not knowing when to stop, Rav Nachman has another thought to share, gild- ing the lily just a bit excessively. “In fact, death itself was so much more painless than the contemplation of death that, in the unlikely event the blessed Holy One were to offer me a redo and tell me I could come back to this life, I think I’d just skip the whole thing.” What Rava said to that posthumous comment of his revered teacher, the Talmud does not reveal. The Talmud presents many stories that take it for granted that the spirits of the dead may occasionally return to the world of the living. One of my favorites is cast as a kind of debate not about whether the human soul is durable and exists beyond the lifespan of the individual it most recently animated, but whether the souls of the departed are kept up to date about what transpires here in the world below. It once happened that the third century C.E. Talmudic sage, Zeiri, deposited some cash with his landlady, then departed on a journey to visit his own teacher, Rav, the story of whose death was told above. So far, so good . . . but while Zeiri was away, his landlady died. What was he to do? He didn’t have any reason to suspect the money had been stolen, but neither did he have the faintest idea where to search for it. She could have hidden it anywhere, or deposited it for safekeeping with a third party. Undaunted by the odds, though, Zeiri followed her to the court

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 48 of death—usually taken to mean the ceme- In the absence of a minyan, begin with these words: tery in which she was buried—and, standing before her grave, he asked his question God is our faithful Sovereign. directly and simply: “Where’s my money?” Her spirit was present—tradition imagines the spirits of the dead haunting their graves for at least a few days after burial—and, not wishing to be responsible for financial loss accru- ing to a saintly sage like Zeiri, she addressed the matter put to her . . . and then offered some terrific extra details. First of all, she answered the question: “Go and retrieve your money from under the threshold hard by the hole in the ground where the doorpost is Hear O wedged into the earth.” And then, having his attention, she had a favor to ask of her own. “And, since you now owe me a favor . . . would you please ask my mother to send me my comb and a pot of blue eye shadow with so-and-so who is destined—I should say, doomed—to come here herself tomorrow.” Israel, , Does that mean that the dead live on? What else could it mean? Even the opposing A viewpoint only posits that the spirit of the girl who needed her eye-shadow may have learned who was about to die from Dumah, the Jewish version of King Hades who func- tions as the regent of Sheol, instead of having learned it somehow on her own, not that the our God, spirits of the dead do not live on and possess knowledge of further goings-on in the world after they have left it for good! A similar story is told about the father of one of the greatest and most celebrated rabbis of the Talmudic era, and one of the earliest among them, the rabbi known only as is one. Samuel. (His full name was Samuel ben Abba, A but he was also known as Samuel Yarchinaa, as Samuel, Master of the Calendar, because of his keen ability to navigate the complex byways of the Hebrew calendar. But to the Add these words in an undertone: average student of Talmud, he is simply Samuel.) It seems that before Samuel’s father May the name of the glorious sovereignty of God died, some money belonging to orphans had forever be blessed. been entrusted to him for safekeeping. But, after he died, no one knew where to find it. The story is a long one, but the basic principle is the same as in the previous tale: Samuel approached the court of death and, standing at his father’s grave, asked where the money was. And, eventually, he had his answer when his father came to him and revealed that the money was buried at his mill beneath the casing that held the millstones. The money there, however, was not all the

49 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI orphans’; some of it belonged to Samuel’s father and now, presumably, to Samuel. And that, at least, was a happy ending for Samuel and for the orphans, none of whom was obliged to endure any financial loss at all merely because Samuel’s father had died. How moderns can relate to all these stories—and there are others I haven’t included here—is itself an interesting question to ponder. More than anything, most people wish to believe that the dead live on in some form or in some non-physical way after their bodies are committed to the earth. Which of us wouldn’t want to think that of a beloved parent, or of a devoted spouse? Which of us doesn’t find the corollary—that we could conceivably be re-united with our loved ones after our own time comes to go “there”— more thrilling than any other theory we could possibly entertain about the meaning of life and death, and the most comforting? The complex of stories about the Angel of Death go directly to the heart of the matter. To moderns taught to consider death the mere cessation of life—and, thus, not a truly existent thing in its own right, merely the absence of some other thing—the notion that death is not a corridor, not a wall, will come as a challenge more than as a self-evident truth simply to be embraced by any who have somehow failed to know it previously. Indeed, it almost sounds too good, too fantastic, too much exactly what we have always wished to be the case actually to embrace now as something we really could believe, as something that possibly could really be true. The way we feel about these issues will invariably affect the way we relate to the dying. It often happens that, by the time the cards are all on the table and the dissembling is all over, the patient is so little lucid that none of this appears to matter. But there are also many instances of terminally ill patients being entirely present, entirely aware, and sometimes even relatively free of pain. And then there is the possibility, almost invariably overlooked, that patients who are wholly unresponsive are still listening, still absorbing what is going on around them, still sentient beings not merely in the technical sense of not being comatose, but in the fully real sense of being alive to sensation, to sound, to the spoken word, and to the meaning of the spoken word.

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 50 Do we relate to the dying similarly to the way we relate to the characters in the final chapter of a book we have been enjoying— And you shall love A, your regretful (because we are liking the book intensely), but accepting of how things are (because it is in the inescapable nature of God, with all your heart, with books that they end with the last words of their final chapters?) and, since we are only all your soul, and with all speaking about a book, stoic in the face of our sadness? In other words, do we already feel ourselves pulling away from the dying as your might. And these words, we gather at their bedsides to prepare for their final breaths? Are we already thinking more about ourselves than about the person which I command you this lying before us, already wondering how we will cope, how we will manage, how we will live on in a world from which someone we day, shall be upon your heart, have always relied on will be absent? Do we base the way we relate to the dying—the words we say, the tone in which we say and you shall teach them them, the facial expression that accompanies them as we speak—on the supposition that this is the end, that the dead are about not to diligently to your children, matter . . . and that, as a result, it is we ourselves who are being dealt the bad hand here, not the dying (who are about to be and talk of them when you wholly out of the game anyway)? Or do these stories open up a new avenue of approach to the terminally ill, to those sit in your house, when you dying before us in hospital beds or in hos- pices or at home? What if, instead of thinking of deceased walk by the way, when you lie individuals as books about to end, we imagined them as travelers about to embark on a long journey to a distant place, to a destina- down, and when you rise up. tion we ourselves cannot even begin to imagine and which they too cannot even begin to And you shall bind them for a visualize? What if we thought of the dying as pil- grims about to begin the long journey sign upon your hand, and through the darkness toward the light that is God’s reality outside the physical boundaries of this earth, outside the length and breadth they shall be a fourfold sym- and width and depth of the three-dimension- al world, outside the relentless strictures of existence as we know it? bol between your eyes. And What if our basic approach to the dying was not to give voice to the sadness we feel at our own imminent loss, but to give you shall write them upon courage and strength to a man or a woman about to transcend the boundaries of time and space to approach a world outside the the doorposts of your house, world, to embark on a journey to space outside of space, to undertake a kind of exis- and upon your gates.

51 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI tence not only unknown, but also unknow- able, to denizens of our universe? What if we used the stories about the Angel of Death to inspire us not to fear the end of our days, but to find in faith the anti- dote to that fear? There is no one who does not fear a long journey through dark forests to a destination of which one has heard, but the precise location of which one cannot pinpoint with any sort of certainty. And there is no one who willingly embarks upon a pilgrimage to a shrine one cannot only not name, but which one can also not even begin to imagine. Nor is there anyone who would cheerfully accept passage on a boat poised to cross a vast ocean with no specific assurance that there even is another shore one might eventually reach on the other side of the sea . . . and no specific instructions on how to get there, even if such a shore does turn out to exist. All this is true, and yet the journey from this world to the next is not one that anyone may decline. Yes, if one has the inestimable good fortune to be eating terumah grain when the Angel of Death comes to call, there might be a brief reprieve. If one is the kind of intense scholar who can use Torah study as an impenetrable shield against one’s own demise, then there might be some delay before one has to sub- mit. But, kohen or sage or everyman, all people owe one death. No one wants to pay, but no one escapes from paying either. This is neither good nor bad news, but simply the way of the world, and the way things eventually end up for all who live in this world. There- fore, there is a certain irrelevancy to the discussion about whether any one of the statements made just above is true or false: since all must take the journey eventually, why carp about whether or not anyone would sign up if there were some sort of choice? In the end, death is part journey, part pilgrimage, part expedition. The Angel of Death is ever among us, sometimes appearing as a tiny tumescence in an otherwise healthy lung, sometimes morphing into a gun or a knife, sometimes channeling—or, rather, being channeled unawares by—an inebriated driver, sometimes appearing as an enemy sol- dier, sometimes working as a state’s paid exe- cutioner. The angel appears as all these things, and also as a million other things, but none of that is as relevant as the fact that the angel is not the arbiter of death or its decree-

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 52 er, but merely its agent. God alone is the Judge of Truth, as the prayer book says, and, And it shall come to pass, if you hearken diligent- therefore, it is not to the Angel of Death that ly unto My commandments which I command we ought turn to seek meaning in death, but to God alone. In the end, this is the great les- you this day, to love A, your God, and to serve son of all these stories I have told in the pre- ceding pages: that, for all we profess to fear God with all your heart with all your soul, that I death, it would be far more logical, and also far more practical, to devote ourselves to cul- will give the rain of your land in its season, the tivating the fear of God instead. former rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your grain, and your wine, and your oil. And I will put grass in your fields for your cattle, Of all the stories about the rabbis who labored to create a version of Judaism that could not and you shall eat and be satisfied. Take heed, lest only survive, but flourish, in the century following the destruction of the Temple, perhaps the your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and most tragic figure would have to be that of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos. Revered in Israel as serve other gods and worship them, and the a great teacher and a master of tradition anger of be kindled against you, and God blessed with unparalleled erudition and insight, A his strict approach to everything, combined shut up the heavens so that there is no rain and with an excessively domineering personality too little given to compromise or concession, led to the ground no longer yields its fruit and you van- conflict with his more liberal colleagues and, eventually, to his formal excommunication over ish from the good land which A is giving to an issue that had far more symbolic than practical importance. The issue itself—something you. Therefore shall you take these of My words having to do with the circumstances under into your heart and your soul, and you shall bind which a clay oven constructed in a specific way would or would not be susceptible to contami- them for a sign upon your hand and they shall be nation with ritual impurity—could not, even in late antiquity, have been considered something a fourfold symbol between your eyes. And you of crucial importance, the whole issue turning on a picayune detail of ritual law. The results of shall teach them to your children, talking of them the controversy, however, were decisive in terms of Rabbi Eliezer’s career: after being placed when you sit in your house and when you walk under a ban by his colleagues, the master with- by the way, when you lie down and when you rise drew from active participation in intellectual Jewish life and contented himself with studying up. And you shall write them upon the doorposts on his own and, occasionally, with entertaining visitors who brought him news of the delibera- of your house and upon your gates, so that your tions of the Sanhedrin and their latest decisions. As the years passed and it became apparent days, and the days of your children, may be mul- that Rabbi Eliezer was not much longer for this world, however, there was a distinct softening tiplied upon the land which A swore unto your in the attitudes that had led to his troubles in ancestors to give them for as long as the heavens the first place. His erudition was considered more important than his contentiousness; his are above the earth. stringencies, more a function of zeal than obsti- nacy. And, indeed, the Talmudic story of what happened as he lay dying, and of his death, is filled with details that modern readers can find instructive, perhaps even inspiring.

53 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI When Rabbi Eliezer lay dying, Rabbi Akiba and several of his colleagues came to call. There had been intermittent contact over the years he was under the ban, but the story as told in the Talmud suggests clearly that this was a different sort of visit than the previous ones had been. The ban was still respected, at least formally . . . but the hearts of the men involved were clearly no longer in it. And in that single detail—that the proximity of death can prompt the human heart to act kindly, and in ways that would previously have been considered impossible even to contemplate—rests the correct interpretation of the rest of the story. The visiting rabbis found Rabbi Eliezer in bed. Or, rather, they would have found him in his big bed, had they gotten that far: the text relates that he was sitting up in a large four- poster involved in a fractious moment with his son, whom Rabbi Eliezer had given his own father’s name, Hyrkanos, when his visitors arrived. And that they had not gotten past the triclinium, the combination dining room/living room that was a feature of fine houses in late Roman antiquity, when they first realized they had chosen a difficult moment to intrude upon what all concerned would undoubtedly have preferred be a private family moment, a moment of open friction between a famous, revered, dying father and his irritated son. It was a Friday when the rabbis came to call. Hyrkanos, the son, had just come into Rabbi Eliezer’s bedroom to assist his father in removing his tefillin. Modern readers will think of the donning of tefillin, the square leather boxes the Torah commands be strapped daily to the arm and the head in a symbolic act of one’s personal willingness to subjugate body and mind to the will of God, as a mitzvah generally performed as a prelude to the morning prayer service. But the rabbis of antiquity generally wore their tefillin all day long, especially when they were engaged in Torah study. A scholar of Rabbi Eliezer’s caliber, therefore, would normally have worn tefillin through daylight hours, except when it is not permissible to do so. (One may wear tefillin neither in the privy nor the bath- house, for example.) It was not permitted, however, to wear tefillin on the Sabbath either—but this was not because doing so constituted some offense against the Sabbath laws ordaining rest from labor, but merely as a rabbinic precaution lest wearing them lead to carrying them out into the street, which actually would constitute a forbidden act on Shabbat. Therefore, as the

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 54 day waned and the onset of Shabbat loomed ever closer, it would be normal even for a sage And spoke unto Moses, saying: like Rabbi Eliezer to remove his tefillin and it A was with this act of removing them that his son, Hyrkanos, was attempting to assist him. “Speak unto the children of Israel, He was not getting very far. Rabbi Eliezer openly rebuked his son, telling him (we are left and bid them make fringes on the to suppose) to get out, to look after more important matters, not to suppose his father to be so feeble as not to be able to remove his own corners of their garments through- tefillin. The rabbinical visitors had come in time to hear the father’s rebuke of his son, and to out their generations, and that they witness the son’s dejected retreat from his father’s presence. As Hyrkanos left his father’s bedroom, he put a thread of blue with the fringe first noticed his father’s visitors. Ever the loyal son—but also seeking to preserve his own dig- of each corner. And the point of nity—Hyrkanos offered his estimation of what had just happened. “I believe my father has finally lost control of his senses,” he said, thus the fringe shall be so that you look labeling his father senile and himself the victim of that senility with the same few words. upon it and remember all the com- At that, a voice came from within the chamber. “I heard that! But I’m not the crazy one in this house—that would be my son and his mandments of A and do them, mother . . . those great rabbinic sages who are tied up in knots about some minor prohibition and so that you not wander off enacted solely by sages while they have no problem ignoring offenses that Biblical law pun- ishes with execution by stoning.” after your own heart and your own What Rabbi Eliezer meant exactly is not entirely clear from the context, but the com- eyes, after which you used to go mentators fill in the blanks admirably: Rabbi Eliezer had noted that, while his wife and son were wrangling with him over his tefillin and astray, and so that you may remem- the sun was sinking ever lower toward the hori- zon, neither had looked after kindling the Shab- ber and do all My commandments bat lamps, nor had they properly insulated the food they meant to keep warm for their Sab- bath meals. (In ancient times, there were highly and be holy unto your God. I am regulated techniques for bundling up casseroles and different kinds of dishes to keep their con- , your God, who brought you tents warm until the meal at which they were A to be served.) And so, as the Sabbath loomed ever closer, Rabbi Eliezer’s wife and son were out of the land of Egypt to be your ignoring preparations that would avert real transgressions of Biblical laws in favor of bother- God: I am , your God.” ing with a detail of far less importance. A Although the rabbis must have been slightly embarrassed to be present for such an intimate moment of inner-family discord, they also felt The cantor or baal tefillah intones these words aloud: encouraged to hear evidence with their own ears that Rabbi Eliezer, for all the fragility of his , your God, is truth. health, was still fully compos mentis. And so, A now fully certain that the master had retained

55 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI his lucidity even in the face of crippling, termi- nal illness, they entered his bedchamber and sat down about six feet from where he sat before them. This they did to preserve their formal observance of the letter of the ban of excommunication that had never been rescinded (although it later would be) at the same time they were openly ignoring its spirit. Rabbi Eliezer understood perfectly well why they had come. And he understood equally clearly why they chose to sit at such a great dis- tance from where he was sitting up in his bed. And now begins a dialogue that, in its own way, says it all about how to make peace (and also how not to make peace) with someone with whom one had been on the outs for a very long time. “So what do you want?” Rabbi Eliezer opens the dialogue in his customary, brusque way. Not, “Welcome to my home.” Not “So, dear colleagues, what brings you here?” Just “lamah batem—literally, why have you come?” Left unsaid is the final word: “now.” Now you’ve come, now that it’s way too late to undo this absurd ban I’ve been under for voicing my own opinions, for having the courage of my own convictions, for being my own man. Now you come! What for? Lamah batem? Now you’re here? They answer him politely, catching his drift and blithely ignoring it at the same moment. “We have come to study some Torah with you,” they said. “And why would it be that you haven’t come here up to now to study with me?” Left unsaid: before it was almost too late to come at all, you phonies. Don’t you think I know your visit has nothing to do with your interest in my learning and everything to do with your need to feel that you are making amends while there was still time? Embarrassed—and fully sensitive to the cor- rectness of Rabbi Eliezer’s analysis of the reason for their visit—they offer the first answer that pops into their guilty heads. “We just haven’t had a free moment,” they say, rather in the manner of overburdened employees explaining to their overly demanding boss that the work scheduled simply could not be done in the time allotted for its completion. Did they realize how absurd that was to say to a dying man? After all, he was the one with a few hours left on earth and they were the ones claiming to have no free time! But what else could they say? That they simply hadn’t felt

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 56 the need to make peace while they imagined The First Blessing after the Shema there was no pressing need to do so . . . and that now, now that such a need was truly We hold these unimpeachable truths to be the essence of our faith pressing, they had finally found time in their and eternally binding upon us: that A is our God and there is none busy schedules to come by to learn a little Torah else, that we are God’s people Israel, that God is that force in history with the master? Even they could not bring themselves to say that . . . so they said as little that has always saved us from tyrant kings, that God is the Sovereign as they could and hoped the moment would of the universe who continually redeems us from the grip of cruel just pass. Rabbi Eliezer, wounded and insulted by their oppressors, that God is the source of our deliverance from our ene- patronizing answer—and it’s hard to imagine a mies and the source of the just recompense that comes to those who more patronizing excuse for not visiting than would annihilate us, that God is the Doer of endless wonders and the one offered—chose not to respond directly, but merely to muse aloud for a moment about uncountable mysteries, that God is the source of life itself and the their own eventual fates: since they were think- source of our security as we live through the years of our lives, that ing about his death (obviously), why, he must have asked himself, why not allow himself a God is the ultimate Arbiter of military success over our foes and the moment to reflect on theirs as well? “It strikes key to our unbroken string of victories against those who loathe us, me,” he said, “as wholly unlikely that any of that God was the Author of the marvels, miracles and wonders that these guests will die normal deaths.” To whom was he speaking? To himself, to them, to the occurred during our exodus from Egypt, land of the children of Angel of Death . . . to whomever! But the men Ham, and also of the exquisite revenge wrought against Pharaoh, about whom he was speaking heard him loud and clear . . . and, presumably, they understood that it was God Who smote the firstborn sons of Egypt and Who that he was rebuking them for their cowardice, brought forth Israel, the people of Israel, from their Egyptian sojourn and for their craven appearance at the next to to a life of permanent independence, that is was God Who made it last minute possible not really to serve him, but to serve their own guilty consciences. possible for the Israelites to cross safely between the two walls of Rabbi Akiba, the leader of the group, could water that formed when the Sea of Reeds parted and Who then not stand the general rebuke and, perhaps feeling especially responsible, asked the one ques- brought the sea back to its former state, thus drowning in its depths tion to which he should never have given voice. those who hated the Israelites and meant to destroy them. “And me?” he asked. “What of me?” Will I too Upon seeing God’s mighty act of salvation at the Sea of Reeds, not merit a normal death, one that comes peacefully in extreme old age after a lifetime of the Israelites, finally and fully self-aware of themselves as children work and love, after a lifetime of service to of God, sang out to God’s holy name with hymns of praise and God? I can just see Rabbi Eliezer turning to face thanksgiving. They thus willingly submitted to the sover- Rabbi Akiba directly. Akiba was the greatest of eignty of God, whereupon Moses and the Israelites sang to You in his students, the one disciple from whom he great and boundless joy: “Who is like unto You among the gods of had expected allegiance and loyalty. But Akiba too had obeyed the ban and now that Rabbi other nations, A? Which god is even remotely similar to You, O Eliezer was confronted with visible proof of that mighty One of the sanctuary, O awesome One ever worthy of reality, he felt no need to sugarcoat his comments. “Your death will be worse than theirs.” praise, O Doer of wonders? It will be worst of all, in fact: a bitter, painful When You split the sea before Moses, Your children had death inflicted when you will be wholly unready to leave this world. But thanks for coming any- their first incontrovertible proof of Your sovereignty. “This is my way. Have a nice day! God,”they sang out,“A will reign forever and always.” But one cannot unburden oneself of such vituperative rhetoric without the experience tak- And so is it written in the book of the prophet Jeremiah: ing its toll. And now we see Rabbi Eliezer dealing “For A will rescue Jacob and redeem him from a foe mightier with the consequences of having uttered his curse, of having spurned his disciples’ efforts to than he.”Blessed are You, A, Redeemer of Israel. make peace before it really was too late. Over-

57 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI come by emotion, uncertain about his own feelings regarding what death really means, suddenly feeling alone and lonely, and more abandoned than ever now that those who had previously fled from his presence were back in his personal space when their presence could only soothe their own troubled consciences and not really ameliorate his own situation, Rabbi Eliezer now speaks of himself and the deep regrets he feels welling up in his own heart as he faces his imminent demise. Crossing his arms over his own heart—in a pathetic gesture intended on some level to protect himself from the words he was about to utter, words that would reflect pain so unbearable that even expressing it aloud was bound to be as excruciating as it was deeply humiliating. And then, his arms in place over his heart, Rabbi Eliezer spoke. “My poor arms,” he began, looking down at them. “Like the twin rollers of a Torah scroll that is all wrapped up so none can read from it.” For that was, ultimately, how Rabbi Eliezer thought of himself—as a Torah scroll possessed of the deepest wisdom and learning that no one ever bothered to unwrap or unroll, from which no one ever read and which, therefore, remained only a potential, never a real, source of divine wisdom in the world. And then the rabbi, slightly emboldened, continued, saying what he meant more clearly with every succes- sive sentence. “I have learned a lot of Torah. And I have taught a lot of Torah as well.” But that was not the whole story, not by any means. “Yes, I learned a lot of Torah, but I only took in the most infinitesimal amount of my own teachers’ learning, an amount roughly the equivalent of the percentage of the ocean a dog can take away by lapping up some water at the seashore.” (Rabbi Eliezer was one of the premiere disciples in his day of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai.) “And I taught a lot of Torah as well,” he continued, looking directly now at his disciples, at men who owed a significant portion of their learning to him but who had never actually taken it upon themselves to militate for the ban against him to be rescinded. “But my students have only taken from my own learning roughly the amount those tiny brushes women use to paint blue eye shadow on their eyelids diminish the amount of make-up in those vast vats of cosmetics they sell in the shuk.” Did Rabbi Eliezer choose such a feminine metaphor to insult his pupils? He might well have! But this must be only conjecture, as both any interpretation of his own remarks he may have offered

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 58 and the way his disciples understood his The Second Blessing after the Shema remarks are left reported. Rabbi Eliezer is not through with his pathetic apologia, however. “But wait,” he now contin- Grant that we sleep in peace this night, ues, turning to face us, his audience. Wait a moment, because it’s worse than merely that. A, our God, and grant that we wake up Let me explain just how much my disciples have lost by shunning me, by ignoring my learning. alive and well in the morning, O Sover- “I am someone who knows three hundred different legal traditions relating to the single kind eign God. Spread out over us the sukkah of leprous lesion called the baheret azah (literally, “the greater bright spot”), yet not one sin- of Your peace and grant us the benefit of gle time has even one of them come to ask me even a single question about any of this.” And it’s not only obscure aspects of Torah law my Your endlessly sage advice. Save us for students have failed to learn properly from me. “I am also a man who knows three hundred— the sake of Your own holy name and or is it three thousand?—different methods of magically planting a field of cucumbers, yet no watch over us, protecting us from foe one other than Akiba ben Joseph has ever asked me a single question in that regard either.” and famine, from plague and pestilence, At that, Rabbi Akiba must have blushed slightly . . . not because he had once solicited from sword and suffering. such useful information from Rabbi Eliezer, but because of the implication that, for all he was interested in learning practical magic from his Keep Your accusing angel from spying teacher, even he had failed to display any interest in the leprous lesions of which his teacher on our comings and goings and shelter was the undisputed master. And that, as opposed to the trick with the cucumbers, was us all beneath the protective wings of real Torah. And now, in the manner of the terminally ill, the Shechinah, for You are our divine Rabbi Eliezer loses the train of his thought and becomes involved in a tangential issue. Having Protector and our ever-vigilant source of mentioned the cucumbers, he finds himself drawn to a more detailed account of the time he taught Rabbi Akiba what he knew about plant- rescue, O compassionate and merciful ing them magically. “Once, we were walking together along some road somewhere, Akiba Sovereign God. Guard us wherever and I, and he just came out and asked me plainly what he wanted to know, saying, ‘Rabbi, we go, granting us life and peace, now teach me how to plant cucumbers magically.’” I didn’t waste a moment, didn’t even respond for- and always. Blessed are You, A,perpet- mally to his question. Instead, I simply spoke a word, whereupon the field by which we were ual Guardian of Israel, the people of passing was suddenly filled to overflowing with cucumbers. Akiba was impressed. But he knew how to press his advantage when he had to God. and, yes, I allowed myself to be flattered into responding a second time. ‘Rabbi,’ he began, ‘so much for planting them magically. Now show me how to harvest them too.’ I was flattered, so I spoke another word and, in an instant, all the cucumbers were stacked up neatly by the side of the field, all ready for market.”

59 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI Rabbi Eliezer fell silent. The disciples must have been possessed by a complex brew of conflicting emotions: pity (for their teacher facing death so suffused with bitterness), regret (however he did the trick with the cucumbers, he wasn’t going to teach it to anyone else ever again . . . and who knew if Akiba would?), guilt (for having taken so long to come calling upon him), irritation (at their colleagues for being so little tolerant of Rabbi Eliezer’s quirky behavior for the sake of preserving his limitless erudition) and the deepest, most abiding sadness (as they contemplated the end of a life that could have ended so differently, that should have ended so differently). Then, in a moment of clarity, the fog lifted and the disciples understood that the sole way they could create a decorous atmosphere in which Rabbi Eliezer might face death calmly and with dignity would be not to pester him with questions about magic cucumber fields, but to ask him questions of real Torah, questions that any true students of the Torah would be pleased to ask their master when the opportunity presented itself. They chose an obscure topic, the better (they must have hoped) to flatter their teacher by supposing his ability to respond clearly and correctly without any preparation, without sufficient time to consider the issues carefully or to consult books or other teachers of the law. “What,” they asked, possibly proudly, “is the situation of the stuffed leather ball, the shoemaker’s last, the amulet, a pouch of pearls, and a small weight wrapped in leather with respect to their susceptibility to ritual impurity?” These are clever questions, good ones that would challenge any student of the law. To explain the issues involved would take us far from the story of Rabbi Eliezer’s death, but the basic concept is simple enough to set forth briefly. According to the Torah, vessels made of leather are only susceptible to impurity if they have an interior cavity. All of these things mentioned were made of leather in ancient times, and all were stuffed with something inside them (leather balls with cotton batting, lasts with human hair, amulets with parchment scrolls, pouches of pearls with pearls, and the leather coverings that hold small weights and prevent them from being damaged or chipped with the metal weights themselves), but none of these had empty cavities before being stuffed. In other words, the act of stuffing them created the interior space, which could not really be said to have existed priorly (and which also did not

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 60 exist once the outer covering was stuffed with its inner contents). So the question is: is that kind of interior cavity that only comes into existence once it is filled (and thus, in a certain sense, which never really exists at all on its own) sufficient to make the item in question susceptible to ritual impurity. That was the question put to Rabbi Eliezer by his disciples. The rabbi must have brightened up considerably at this turn in the conservation. Finally, he was being asked for some real Torah, for an answer that only a true master of halakhah could give without having to research the matter endlessly, without having to take counsel elsewhere. Rabbi Eliezer’s answer was as suc- cinct as it was definitive: Unclean! (By which, he meant not really unclean, but merely susceptible to contamination with impurity, as opposed to a vessel not deemed susceptible.) And then, in the style of any rabbi who realizes his congregation is still listening, he added another law for good measure. “And when it comes to their purification—in the event of real contamination, not just susceptibility to contamination— they can be immersed in the mikveh as they are, that is, without their inner contents having to be removed.” This sounded plausible to the disciples . . . but, as always seems to happen in stories like this, something new presented itself to the disciples in his response. Another law governing the susceptibility of vessels to contamination with impurity is that a vessel of any sort, including clothing or footwear—cannot become contaminated with impurity unless it is a finished prod- uct. That seems simple enough—a clay pot still being shaped on the potter’s wheel cannot become contaminated, but the same clay pot cooled out of the kiln can. But what, it suddenly struck at least one of Rabbi Eliezer’s visitors, would be the case of a new shoe not yet taken from the shoemaker’s last? Is it done enough to qualify, or is the simple fact that it is still on the last, presumably to permit some last minute tin- kering by the shoemaker, mean that it is unfinished . . . because the definitive act of finishing its creation is precisely its removal from the shoemaker’s form? It’s a good question. It’s actually a very good question. And the fact that its only connection to the larger context of this story is that shoemaker’s lasts were generally stuffed with hair and, as such, were reasonably included in the previous question only makes it a better one. Not because it was germane to any matter at

61 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI hand, but merely because, by being posed, it suggested to Rabbi Eliezer that he was not (A version of the first blessing of the Amidah that includes merely being patronized, but actually engaged the names of the matriarchs of Israel may be found on page 120.) in the kind of free-wheeling, open-ended debate that is the hallmark of true Torah study unfettered by extraneous, mostly irrelevant, guide- lines and rules. He took the question seriously. And he knew the answer: tahor. Pure. Insusceptible to contamination. And it was precisely as he said the word tahor, the Hebrew word for “pure,” that he died. Upon realizing that Rabbi Eliezer was dead, Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah jumped to his feet and pronounced the ban lifted. Big deal! Of course, it was lifted—the man was dead! And, yet, there was something important in Rabbi Joshua’s pronouncement: by formally lifting the ban of excommunication, he spared Rabbi Eliez- er the final indignity of having a huge stone placed on his casket as it was to be borne to his grave. So at least that! Of course, moderns reading this story will wonder what took Rabbi Joshua so long. If he was prepared to lift the ban, why did he hold off until Rabbi Eliezer was dead . . . especially since he was one of the rabbis gathered at his bedside to learn Torah from him as though the ban itself hadn’t ever really existed? By doing what he did, but by acting too late for his clemency to have any effect on the self-conception of the individual to whom he was showing that clemency, Rabbi Joshua pass- es into history as the living embodiment of the well-meaning soul who dithers so long that he denies himself the opportunity to do the good he truly wishes to do. It is true that he spared Rabbi Eliezer a posthumous indignity he presumably would not have wished to experience. Is this vitiated by the fact that Rabbi Eliezer died expecting this ultimate insult to be visited upon him? I suppose it would depend on whether you asked Rabbi Joshua or Rabbi Eliezer! After the end of the Sabbath the following day, Rabbi Akiba came across the funerary procession bearing Rabbi Eliezer’s body from Cae- sarea to Lod. This part of the story has its own riddles, however. The Hebrew says that Rabbi Akiba “chanced” across the procession. How could that have been? Did the disciples scatter as soon as Rabbi Eliezer died and go, each of them, to his own home for Shabbat? Why then was Rabbi Akiba out walking in the dark after Shabbat on the road between Lod and Cae- sarea? And why wasn’t Rabbi Akiba at the funeral itself? Why wasn’t he one of the pall-

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 62 bearers, for that matter? Had he run away? The Evening Amidah And, if he had run away, then from whom had he run away—from Rabbi Eliezer, whom he (A version of the first blessing of the Amidah that includes feared in death more than he had previously the names of the matriarchs of Israel may be found on page 120.) feared him in life, or from himself . . . and what he would have had to think of himself for having failed to exert himself maximally to reinstate his teacher’s reputation before his death and to restore him to his former authority? At any rate, the end of the story is more than dramatic. Rabbi Akiba comes across the Adonai, funeral. This is not, the Talmud reveals subtly, a matter of his body being removed from Cae- sarea to Lod for the funeral the next day, but the actual funeral procession, attended by throngs of mourners—the people, we are left to assume of Caesarea and Lod to whom Rabbi part my lips Eliezer was a revered teacher and spiritual guide, and for whom the rabbis’ ban meant, apparently, nothing or next to nothing. Rabbi Akiba now sees what is going on. The bier of a respected rabbi is being borne to his eternal resting place by a huge crowd of mourners. They have formed the traditional lines on so that either side of the casket in token of their willingness formally to be counted among the mourning throng. And now Rabbi Akiba suddenly con- fronts his own role in the story. He was Eliezer’s greatest pupil . . . which is why his teacher had decreed that Akiba’s own death would be that my mouth much worse than the others. He was the most influential rabbi of his generation, yet he failed to release his teacher from the ban . . . which his colleague, Rabbi Joshua, only found the courage to do once their teacher could no longer know or care what they did. He had the might praise power to insist that Rabbi Eliezer be re-instated, but he preferred to visit him quietly, almost sur- reptitiously, and to learn Torah from him pri- vately despite the ban he failed to challenge publicly. And now, as all these truths visited him, You. Rabbi Akiba could at first find no words at all to say, preferring to beat himself so harshly that he actually punctured his skin and blood poured out onto the ground. Then, having gotten the attention of the crowd, he finally spoke up. “My father! My father! Chariot of Israel and its horseman,” he began, using the words Elisha used to mourn the death of Elijah the Prophet and which King Jehoash of Israel then later used to mourn for the almost-dead Elisha. “I have all the coins in the world,” he continued, “but I have no banker to change them into local currency.”

63 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI What Akiba meant by his remark is clear enough. He was, in fact, speaking simply, comparing his personal situation to that of a traveler who comes home with a huge amount of foreign currency and who is, therefore, wealthy . . . but who cannot actually buy anything with all that money until he finds a banker willing to accept the foreign coins and change them into local currency. Similarly, Rabbi Akiba meant to say of himself that he had a huge amount of Torah knowledge, but was yet in need of a teacher of Rabbi Eliezer’s breadth of experience and depth of learning to help him translate all his raw knowledge into practical information he could actually process in the pursuit of an ever deeper understanding of the Torah. The analogy is a little obscure—for one thing, you really can’t spend Swiss francs in Australia, no matter how many of them you have in your possession, but Rabbi Akiba could certainly derive some benefit from his own learning without filtering it through Rabbi Eliezer’s erudition—but the basic concept is easy to grasp: his personal wealth— his learning, his wisdom, his scholarship, his immense grasp of all areas of Torah learning— meant nothing to him without the spiritual and intellectual guidance of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos, the man whose funeral procession he had had the nerve previously not to have joined and which, now that happenstance—or do I mean, Providence—had brought him to the right spot at precisely the right moment, he now joined as a humble, and humbled, mourner.

T here’s a lot to learn here because the story of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos’ death is about a lot of different things at the same time. In one sense, it’s about making peace while there’s still time. In my work as a rabbi, I can’t count the times people have expressed to me regret—sometimes, amazingly, couched as mild irritation with the deceased—that someone died before it was possible for the speaker to resolve some issue that loomed between them and made it impossible for them to relate to each other, other than in its shadow. Sometimes, these issues have been present not for years but for decades . . . which only makes anger over the sudden realization that the time to seek the resolution of this specific conflict has gone forever stranger and less explicable, not really

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 64 any less forceful or real. Did the person now Blessed are You, A, our God and God of our ancestors, God of left among the living really expect the person now deceased to live forever? Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob, great and mighty God In the case of Rabbi Eliezer, the issue that Most High, source of endless mercy, Creator of all, God ever will- had occasioned the ban was a minor point of ing to remember the good deeds of ancestors, God Who will lov- law that no one, not then and surely not now, could imagine worth destroying the ingly send a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of career of one of the greatest Jewish scholars the divine name . . . of his day. But once the ban was pronounced, it acquired its own life, and it began to exist independently of the dispute Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: that brought about its initiation in the first Remember us for life, O sovereign God Who desires that we merit life, place. So that is the first lesson to learn from and inscribe us in the Book of Life for Your own sake, O living God. this story: that hostility comes into being for a reason, but then transcends that reason ...O sovereign God,our divine Helper, Savior and Protector. and can exist—and probably does usually exist—without further reference to it. It is, therefore, futile to imagine that the tension Blessed are You, A, between individuals, even elderly individuals, will eventually die down and vanish as the Protector of Abraham. issues that occasioned it slip ever further into the past. If anything, just the opposite is true: relationships between people, even unhappy You are forever mighty, Adonai, O God capable of bestowing life ones suffused with regret, guilt, and anger, anew upon the dead, our never-ending source of salvation . . . become solidified with the passage of time, and made more rigid and far less supple. Between Shemini Atzeret and Passover, say: Eventually, they not only transcend the original issues out of which they developed, but God, Who makes the wind to blow and the rain to fall exist totally independent from them. Some- times, the original issue may even be entirely forgotten. ...God,Who mercifully sustains the living and Who compas- The motif of elderly siblings who are sionately grants life anew to the dead, Who supports the fallen enraged with each other to the point of and Who heals the sick, Who frees the imprisoned and Who will being wholly estranged, but without either being able to remember what made them so never break faith with those who lie in the dust. Who is like You, angry in the first place, has become a staple Author of mighty deeds? And who can be compared to You, O of situation comedies. But although this aspect of family life is usually held up for the Sovereign Who decrees death, then grants life anew, and Who will viewing public as a funny thing, it isn’t really surely bring about our salvation? very funny in real life at all. And, indeed, the ability of intrapersonal difficulties to tran- Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: scend their original settings and exist without reference to their own pre-history is far more Who is like You,O Author of compassion, Who remembers tragic than funny when encountered in the Your creations and mercifully judges them worthy of life? context of real siblings, and can only be made into the stuff of comedy by describing the individuals in question as cardboard char- Indeed, You are certain to grant life anew to the dead. acters and then depicted them in a vulgar tableau devoid of real emotion or emotional Blessed are You, , sensitivity. A The story of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos’ demise is a good example of how this works Who grants life anew to the dead. in real life. The disciples—Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Joshua foremost among them, but all of the others as well—have to be supposed not

65 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI really to care even slightly about the whole issue of the oven that occasioned the dispute in the first place that led to Rabbi Eliezer’s excommunication. It’s even possible they did- n’t remember what it had been, or, if they did, that they no longer even remembered what had been so contentious about it. The ban—here not a mentally held grudge, but a legal writ of excommunication none could sidestep merely by wishing for the right to do so—existed as an impediment to Rabbi Eliez- er’s reinstatement that could not be dealt with merely by wishing it out of existence. It must have seemed insurmountable to all concerned . . . until Rabbi Eliezer finally did die and, amazingly, Rabbi Joshua suddenly found himself more than capable of setting it aside. We are left to wonder if it could have been set aside in Rabbi Eliezer’s lifetime and to conclude that, surely, it could have been. Yet it was not. Not because it would have been impossible, but simply because it felt that way. Even Rabbi Akiba did not realize that he had the power to make peace with his master. But later, when he did come to that realization, his remorse and self-directed anger was so overpowering that he actually struck himself so hard as to draw blood. Where were the other disciples while Rabbi Akiba was prowling the road from Cae- sarea to Lod, hoping (and also, of course, dreading) coming across the nighttime funeral procession that would bear his teacher’s body to its grave? Wherever they were, they were not joining the cortege with Rabbi Akiba . . . or, at least, they were not visibly present. Had they yet to come to the lesson that Rabbi Akiba had learned on his own in the course of the long Sabbath that stretched out between Rabbi Eliezer’s death and the evening he joined the funeral procession to Lod? Or did they learn the same truth, but simply lacked the courage to join the procession? They are invisible in the story after the rabbi dies . . . thus leaving us to wonder if they are invisible to us because we are watching the night road from Caesarea to Lod through the filter of a Talmudic story written in words, not pictures, or if they were invisible as well to themselves as they failed to see themselves where they needed to be and surely ought to have known they should have been? The second lesson of this story has to do with the specific way the disciples, and Rabbi

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 66 Akiba foremost among them, chose to bring Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: comfort to their teacher. I have seen well- meaning people attempt to serve the best interests of the terminally ill by depriving them of any daily chores or tasks that might Yo u possibly frustrate them, but which might also serve to make them feel useful. This is usually are holy and Your name is holy and the holy ones undertaken out of kindness—as though the last thing anyone would want to worry about on high sing Your praises every day, selah. Blessed in a limited amount of time left on earth are You, , holy God. would be anything as banal as paying bills, A emptying a dish washer, looking after a client’s accounts or washing one’s own socks. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: I see this all the time. And, to a certain You are holy and Your name is holy and the holy ones on high sing extent, it makes sense: I too would hardly want to spend my last day on earth washing Your praises every day, selah. Blessed are You, A, holy Sovereign. out my socks. Besides, when would I wear them? But there is a distinct—and profound—difference between irritating chores and gratify- Except on Saturday evenings, continue here: ing, purposeful work. The disciples did exactly the right thing to grant meaning and Yo u satisfaction to their teacher by asking him not about his health or about his hopes for a have granted intelligence to humanity, and have decent portion in the World to Come, but about the shoemaker’s last and the leather provided each individual with understanding. ball stuffed with cotton batting. These were the subjects of Rabbi Eliezer’s lifework—the Graciously grant each of us, therefore, intelli- endless refinement of his understanding of gence, understanding and wisdom. Blessed are divine law through the ongoing elucidation of even the most picayune points of the text You, , Who grants intelligence to humanity. of the Torah regarding the most mundane A matters imaginable. By asking such interesting, basic questions of their teacher, they On Saturday evenings, say this paragraph: were granting him simultaneously the two You have granted intelligence to humanity, and have provided each individ- things that make life bearable: love (in this ual with understanding. case, by showing the love of students for their master) and work (in this case, by show- You have granted us understanding of the laws of Your Torah, and suffi- ing regard and ongoing respect for their cient insight to obey Your laws correctly, and have Yourself, A, distin- master’s work of a lifetime). This was not only guished between holy and profane, between light and darkness, between a worthy thing to do with Rabbi Eliezer’s last hour of life, but a profoundly kind, sensitive Israel and the nations, and between the seventh day, our holy Sabbath, and thing to do as well. Indeed, by allowing him the other six weekdays. to end his life engaged in his life’s work, the Avinu Malkeinu, decree that the coming week be made up of peaceful comfort the disciples must have brought days in which we are safe from sin, untempted by iniquity, and wholly their teacher would have been not only palpable, but profoundly real and deeply satisfy- devoted to the great goal of embodying the awe and respect due You in our ing. To die with one’s boots on, with one’s daily activities. wits intact, involved in sacred work, in mean- Graciously grant each of us, therefore, intelligence, understanding and ingful work, in work that matters and that will live on after you—these are the greatest wisdom. gifts anyone could ever bring the dying indi- Blessed are You, A, Who grants intelligence to humanity. vidual. For moderns dealing with their terminally ill parents or relations of other sorts, this will

67 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI have its parallel not in arranging things so as to deny the individual facing his or her end any purposeful work, but, just to the contrary, in arranging for a person’s life work to go on just a bit longer. For an author to finish a final chapter. For a school teacher, to teach a final class. For a tailor to leave all clients with their alterations made and their hems firmly sewn in place. For a doctor to feel that his patients are all recovering from their ail- ments and referred to new, equally skilled physicians. For a rabbi to feel his congregants well looked after, and possessed of the essential teachings of his own version of Judaism, of his own torah. Nothing makes the end of life more horrific than having to face it in an atmosphere of unnecessary, unwanted idleness. Feeling gainfully and meaningfully occupied up until the end, feeling one’s brain and one’s body still being exercised and, even in the last week of life, stretched to new levels of insight and understanding—these are the greatest of life’s blessings that a terminally ill individual could have. Not everybody gets this blessing, of course. There are those whose slide into the grave takes years and years and is occasioned by long months of intellectual incapacitude, emotional disconnectedness and physical frailty. But for those unimpeded intellectually, emotionally or physically, the greatest gift the healthy can offer the dying are the same two gifts that make all life worth living, and worth treasuring: the gift of love and the gift of work. Either will provide some level of solace . . . but having both together is the great ideal. Rabbi Eliezer got both. His wife, the redoubtable Imma Shalom (who was also the sister of Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh, whom she also survived), stayed with him to the end. He had children—the Talmud mentions that his sons were exceedingly handsome— and he had disciples who, even if they were respectful of the ban against him, in the end did not stay away and insisted on learning Torah with him to the very end. And so, this story is not only of tragedy, but of survival . . . and of a death of the kind most of us can only hope for some day. Rabbi Eliezer died at work, in his own home, surrounded by his students . . . and with his wife and sons not far away. He died connected to his world and that, paradoxically, must have granted him the strength to leave life to the

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 68 living and depart for the World of Truth. I dare say he died happy. I hope he did. And I Bring hope the same for all my readers—that death come some day at the end of very long, us back to Your Torah, O divine Parent, bring us happy, productive lives, surrounded by love, still engaged by purposeful, meaningful, and to Your service, O holy Sovereign, and help us satisfying work. That, I believe, is the best any of us can hope for. It is what I hope for all of fully to repent all our misdeeds before You. you . . . and it is what I hope for myself as Blessed are You, Who desires the repen- well. A tance of sinners.

Rabbi Jeremiah ben Abba, usually called only Rabbi Jeremiah, was one of the greatest scholars of the fourth century C.E. Originally from Iraq, he came to the Land of Israel to study at Caesarea, but then eventually settled in Forgive Tiberias, where he became the master of rab- us, O divine Parent, for we have sinned. Pardon binic studies in that place and the head of a large circle of disciples. He is said to have had a us, O holy Sovereign, for we have transgressed. difficult personality, specifically one overly prone to pointing out the flaws in other people’s rea- Do this, for You are by nature ever willing to par- soning, and this hypersensitivity to other people’s errors got him into trouble repeatedly. Yet, don, ever ready to forgive. in the end, he is remembered not for his lack of interpersonal skills, but for his vast erudition, for Blessed are You, A, our gracious God ever his life-long devotion to scholarship and to pub- ready to grant forgiveness. lic service, and for the fine pupils he trained in the study of Torah. So the man was a little iras- cible! The story of his actual death is not told, nor is it known. But the instructions he gave to his disciples regarding the disposition of his mortal remains were recorded in several places and they constitute a profound part of his legacy to Take moderns. His instructions were few and they were note of our suffering, defend us and redeem us brief. “I wish to be buried,” he said, “wearing speedily for the sake of Your holy name, for You white hemmed shrouds. Furthermore, I wish to be placed in my grave wearing socks and san- are a powerful Redeemer. dals, and with my walking stick in my hands. And bury me by a road, so that when I am Blessed are You, A, Redeemer of Israel. summoned, I can respond easily.”

T hat’s all there is. The man clearly had a sense that the grave was not to be his final resting place, but only a temporary one. Why else would he have cared if his shrouds were nicely hemmed? And what could he have possibly wanted with his walking stick? Was he planning to go walking? The socks and

69 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI sandals also sound as if he was intending to go somewhere . . . but where? And, of course, the biggest question of all also begs to be asked: summoned . . . by whom exactly? The question of what happens to people after they die was once, and continues to be, the great question at the heart of most people’s deepest religious hopes and most fervently recited prayers. Furthermore, despite the fact that moderns are generally predis- posed to label unkindly anyone who devotes serious, thoughtful time to pondering the question of life beyond death, the reality is that the sages of Jewish antiquity do not seem to have felt anything like the same kind of reticence about this kind of discussion. Just to the contrary, they found faith in an afterlife to be one of the simplest and most basic parts of their concept of God’s role in the lives of human beings and, by extension, the role of human beings in God’s world. Nor were they possessed of some sort of vague conviction that there must be “something” that happens when life ends, but were rather quite secure in their belief regarding what they felt Scripture taught clearly, if often obliquely, about the fate of the living after Between the first intermediate day of Passover and December 4, say: their time on earth comes to its natural or unnatural end. Rabbi Jeremiah was blessed with that kind of faith in his own posthumous future. He wished to be buried by the side of the road so that, when the messiah—the anointed prince of Israel who will herald the redemption of the Jewish people and, indeed, of all humanity—arrives and announces the imminent resurrection of the dead, he would be in a convenient position to rise up, apparently literally, from his grave and proceed to judgment. That he wanted to be buried wearing socks and sandals will make sense to anyone who has ever tried to go on a serious hike wearing sandals without socks. In a certain sense, it is surely a banal request. (And, yes, it is also true that, generally speaking, Jewish people are not buried wearing shoes at all. But either that was not the case in Rabbi Jeremiah’s day, or else it was specifically upon that custom that the rabbi was trying to improve.) But there is far more here than meets the eye at first, and the lesson we can learn from this story is itself anything but banal. Rabbi Jeremiah was not troubled by his faith in God’s omnipotence. But it is that very

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 70 idea—that God is truly and absolutely all- powerful (and thus capable of acting in the Heal us, world of men and women without regard to what human beings do or do not consider A, and we shall be healed. possible or likely) that lies at the heart of the matter. The prophets of Israel, possessed of Save us and we shall be saved, for You are the the conviction that they could find in eloquence a suitable context in which to object of our never-ending hymns of praise. describe the experience of communion with Send a full and utter healing for all out afflictions, God, spoke in many different speeches and passages about the fate of the dead at the for You are sovereign God, our faithful and com- end of time. These passages, however, do not all fit well together. As a result, it is often diffi- passionate source of healing. cult to decide if a given prophet was speaking about some sort of redemptive experi- Blessed are You, A, Who sends healing to the ence that awaits each human being after death ends that individual’s life on earth, or ill of Israel, the holy people of God. whether he meant his listeners to suppose that the dead gather in some sort of posthumous, yet pre-redeemed, state in some specific place—called Sheol and Paradise and by another dozen names in the literature, not Bless least tantalizingly “the bond of life everlasting”—in which they wait, as do their earthly this year and all its crops for us, A, our God . . . counterparts, for human history to run its Between the first intermediate day of Passover and December 4, say: natural course, for the anointed prince of Israel to re-establish the sovereignty of the and grant blessed prosperity House of David on earth in accordance with God’s ancient promise to King David, and for Between December 5 and Passover, say: the dead to join the then-living in a single, huge experience of divine judgment that will and grant blessed rain and dew determine which of the still- and once-alive merit continued existence in the World to ...on the face of the earth. Come. The ancients were slightly reticent about Make us fully satisfied with Your goodness and expressing themselves totally clearly, but the notion that Almighty God possesses the abili- make this year as blessed for us as the best of years. ty to grant life anew to the dead was not something they found beyond the scope of Blessed are You, A, Who blesses the years. reasonability. Indeed, taking divine omnipotence as a given, they found it possible to consider the Torah itself to be so filled with discernible references to the notion of the resurrection of the dead at the end of time that they went so far as to say, with only a hint of hyperbole, that any who insist that the concept of posthumous resurrection is absent from the Torah will be punished for their dogmatic perfidy by being denied a portion in the very post-historical World to Come to which they failed to find Scriptural reference in the columns of the Torah. And they did not merely insist on saying they believed it when formally asked. Indeed,

71 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI one of the six benedictions that is invariable, or almost invariable, in the silent Amidah prayer (the devotion recited thrice daily by the faithful every day of the year) in every single one of its many liturgical and calendrical permutations, reads as follows in its most basic form:

You are forever mighty, Adonai, O God capable of bestowing life anew upon the dead, our never ending source of salvation, God, Who mercifully sustains the living and Who compassionately grants life anew to the dead, Who supports the fallen and Who heals the sick, Who frees the imprisoned and Who will never break faith with those who lie in the dust. Who is like You, Author of mighty deeds? And who can be compared to You, O Sovereign Who decrees death, then grants life anew, and Who will surely bring about our salvation? Indeed, You are certain to grant life anew to the dead. Blessed are You, dedi, Who grants life anew to the dead.

This ancient prayer has something deep and meaningful to say to moderns, but it is not the simplest of lessons to accept: that it does not make any real sense to speak of God as being capable of freeing those among us who are incarcerated in human prisons or as being able to support those who have fallen or as having the Self-granted capacity to heal the sick, but to balk at carrying the concept of divine omnipotence to its logical next step by asserting, with the same fervor people generally bring to bear when praying, that those stricken with illness be granted a return to good health, that God surely also possesses the ability to grant life anew to those who sleep in their earthen graves as they await the final redemption with the same, if simply more passive, fervor that the still living bring to their own prayers for the very same thing. It will probably seem to most moderns that this prayer, for all its great antiquity and unimpeachable liturgical cachet, was surely meant as poetry, not prose. And, indeed, there is something distinctly poetical in its cadences (especially in the original Hebrew) and flowery language. But moderns do themselves a serious disservice by supposing that the use of sonorous or resonant language is invariably meant to point to ideas that are not meant to be taken literally. (Even if that is the case in other literary

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 72 contexts, it is surely not the case liturgically.) The prayer cited above is cast in language that Sound will resonate deeply within any poetic soul, but it was also meant as a statement of principles a blast for our freedom on a great shofar, raise a no less correct literally than romantically. It is not a popular idea among moderns. banner to gather together our far-flung exiles and Indeed, when the notion of liturgical reform swept the non-Orthodox Jewish world in the gather us together from the four corners of the nineteenth century, the blessing cited above earth. was among the first to be excised, either partially or wholly, from the prayer book. To this Blessed are You, A, Who will surely gather the day, it is more absent than present in the prayer books generally in use in Reform temples or dispersed remnants of Israel. Reconstructionist synagogues. Even in the liturgical world of the Conservative movement, where the Hebrew text has always been presented in its traditional formulation, the challenge of believing in its basic idea—that the dead will yet again live in God’s world—was Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: met not by altering the text but simply by trans- lating it vaguely to suggest not that God will grant life to the dead, but that God is the great Establish Author and Ender of human life, the Sovereign our judges as in olden times and grant us able of Being and Beinglessness, the Granter of Exis- tence and its eventual Taker-Back as well. None counselors like those from whose sage advice we of this is wrong, of course. But none of these ideas comes even close to saying what the tra- once profited. Remove sadness and misery from ditional liturgy asserts blithely, almost simply, and wholly unselfconsciously, in words that sug- our midst and rule over us with mercy and com- gest untroubled faith in a principle the liturgist found either wholly self-evident, or, at least, passion as our sole Sovereign, A, and grant that easy to accept without paralyzing internal we live under the rule of righteous justice. dithering. When confronted with this sort of placid cer- Blessed are You, A, O Sovereign Who loves tainty in a principle that merely takes an idea all claim able to accept to its natural limit, most righteousness and justice. moderns respond with a kind of theological hauteur that is unbecoming to people of faith. Indeed, insisting that the ancients could not Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur say: possibly have meant to say what they say clear- Establish our judges as in olden times and grant us able coun- ly and simply is to filter the liturgical traditions selors like those from whose sage advice we once profited. of antiquity through a filter of modern arro- gance and thus to make oneself incapable of Remove sadness and misery from our midst and rule over us with communing with the ancients through the con- mercy and compassion as our sole Sovereign, A, and grant that templation of their literary works. It would behoove moderns—and would also we live under the rule of righteous justice. be far more productive—not to waste time Blessed are You, A, O just Sovereign. attempting to determine what the ancients did or did not mean by their plainly-put prayers, but to consider the prayers in question to be challenges waiting to be met. The questions that line up to demand answers are, after all, daunting. Is God all-powerful? Is divine omnipotence wholly without limit? If it is, then why do moderns find it so troubling to accept that the

73 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI dead might live again? If it is not, then in what sense is divine omnipotence an actual quality of God and not a mere construct invented by human beings to explain this or that phenomenon in the world but without it actually being able to bear its own weight independent of the context in which it was first called into being? If we believe, as we claim to, that God is the Author of Life and the final Arbiter of Death, then why should we not broaden our understanding of God by affirming God also to be the Arbiter of Death and then the Author of Life renewed and re-invented? Why should death follow birth any more logically than birth, or rebirth, follow death? Why should the development of the human being from a microscopic zygote—in which implausible idea we all believe wholeheartedly—be more reasonable as an article of faith than the redevelopment of a human being from the remains of a former chapter of that individual’s existence? Layered over all this theorizing about rebirth are questions related more to the nature of the human soul. Is reincarnation beyond the limits of divine ability? That would seem to be a logical impossibility, yet how does the concept of a durable soul fit in with the notion of posthumous redemptive resurrection? Can the same inner self animate two different people in two different eras? If our faith requires us to imagine God capable of restoring life to the dead at the end of time, then why not also before the messianic moment as well? And part of the discussion, inevitably, will also be the question of what the human being actually is: surely not bones and blood only, but what exactly does constitute the animate aspect of any person? Is it soul or psyche? Spirit or self? Character or personality? And, on the supposition that resurrection would merely be the reanimation of a reconstituted body with the same soul that once inhabited it, does not the whole issue turn on what we truly believe the soul to be? All these questions are related, some intimately and some in a more extended way, to the reason Rabbi Jeremiah wanted to be buried with his socks on. The job of moderns, therefore, is not to second guess the rabbi’s wishes, but to allow the supposition resting just behind their simple language to animate our own introspective thinking about the nature of life. Inevitably, this will lead us to consider, or to reconsider, our thinking about the nature of death. And from the matrix of ideas any faithful Jewish individual will bring to bear in the con-

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 74 text of those deliberations will come the spiritual and intellectual energy necessary to begin to May develop a cogent theory of what awaits us all beyond the grave. Surely, none of us will know there be no hope for those who slander us, may with certainty before we are there ourselves. But that fact does not have to paralyze us. Just to all evil immediately vanish from our midst and the contrary, it can animate us and energize us as it challenges us to read and reread the sec- may all Your enemies be destroyed. Indeed, may ond blessing of the Amidah, to consider its You uproot, vanquish, annihilate and defeat all ancient cadences and to find in them—and in the simple faith in God’s ability to grant life that the wicked of the earth and may You do so quick- they evince—a framework for coming to terms with the brevity of our human lives. ly and within our own day. That Rabbi Jeremiah was able to suggest as much by asking for a (posthumous) seat on the Blessed are You, A, Destroyer of our enemies aisle, a walking stick and a pair of socks attests to the ability of the wise to teach even the most and Vanquisher of the wicked. complex truths simply and in a way that anyone can understand easily. That, all these centuries later, moderns continue to struggle with the specific way the notions of resurrection and redemption dance around each other in the May ruminative consciousness of Jews hoping to find solace in the face of loss, however, attests to a the fullness of Your compassionate judgment be different ability: the ability of ancient ideas to applied, , our God, to the righteous and the generate sufficient energy to propel moderns A forward toward God, and toward faith in God. pious, to the elders of Your people Israel and to Therein lies their great value and also their ongoing spiritual usefulness. Through the their surviving sages, to righteous converts to our focused contemplation of ideas bequeathed to us by former generations not so much as wealth faith and, not least of all, to the rest of us. May You to horde, but, far more seductively, as riddles worth spending a lifetime attempting to solve, grant a just reward to all who faithfully trust in we can find in our spiritual heritage the tools Your name and may You set a place for us among necessary to construct a road that can lead us to the center of the human heart, to the place them so that we never come to shame because of where God’s name continues to dwell in a real, potent way for all who would seek communion our confident trust in You. with the divine, to Jerusalem. Blessed are You, A, Who is our protective support and a secure haven for the righteous.

When Rabban Gamliel’s servant, the redoubtable Tabi, died, the former permitted others to offer him formal words of condolence on his great loss, thus behaving as though he had suffered the loss of someone as close to him as a brother or a son. His students, slightly amazed, said to him, “Rabbeinu, our revered master, did not you yourself teach us that it is not proper to permit others to offer formal words of condolence upon the death of a servant?” Rabban Gamliel considered this, then responded thoughtfully, “My servant, Tabi, was

75 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI hardly just a servant. Indeed, he was a fine man.”

T abi, the Aramaic version of the Hebrew name Tzvi, was not just the name of Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh’s servant, but was the name used by all servants of that famous family’s house. (The female servants were called Tabitha. How that worked exactly, or why the practice was put into place, is not explained. It sounds confusing to me, but I suppose they must have had some sort of system worked out to distinguish them all from each other.) This particular man, however, the servant of the second Rabban Gam- liel (the sage sometimes called Rabban Gam- liel of Yavneh to distinguish him from his grandfather, Rabban Gamliel the Elder), was known as a man of particular learning and piety. For example, he put on tefillin daily, although, generally speaking, Jewish servants were exempt from this obligation in ancient times. And he was celebrated by his master as a true talmid chakham, using the term generally reserved for a disciple of the wise worthy of the reverence of others on account of great learning and erudition. Tabi clearly had a very close relationship with his master. Indeed, there is a famous story about the time that Rabban Gamliel accidentally blinded him in one eye, then rejoiced (presumably once everybody had calmed down) in the thought that, in so doing, he had involuntarily obliged himself to free Tabi. Although it later turned out that this would only have been the case had there been witnesses (testimony from involved parties is not considered in a rabbinic court), the original sentiment is what makes the story noteworthy: here was a master who loved, admired and respected his servant, and who found himself pleased rather than irritated when he felt obliged, unexpectedly, to grant his servant his freedom. When Tabi died, Rabban Gamliel allowed others to offer him formal words of condolence, just as would have been the case had he lost a close relative. His students, well aware that this was outside the boundaries of normative behavior, felt the need—or perhaps even the obligation—to call their master’s deviation from the halakhic norm to his attention. But, as the story goes, it turned out

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 76 that Rabban Gamliel was not at all unaware that he was behaving unusually. Just to the May contrary: he had apparently made a con- scious decision to relate to Tabi’s death just as You return with compassion to Jerusalem, Your he would have related to the death of the closest relative and that surely involved allow- holy city, and May You come to dwell there as You ing others to condole with him formally by using the traditional words of comfort gener- once promised You would. May You build it up ally only spoken aloud to true mourners quickly and permanently within our day and may according to the strict legal definition of the term, not merely to those grieving over the You quickly establish the throne of a monarch of death of people they knew, liked or admired. This was not the norm. Indeed, the Tal- the House of David within its walls. mud decrees specifically that one should not engage in the formal rituals of mourning Blessed are You, A, Restorer of Jerusalem. when a servant, even a beloved one, dies. And to illustrate just that point, the Talmud tells a slightly funny story about Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos, the same sage whose story is May told in detail above. (Rabbi Eliezer was mar- You quickly bring forth a descendant of David, ried to Rabban Gamliel’s sister, Imma Shalom. The difference in the way the two brothers- Your servant, into our midst and may his horn be in-law dealt with the death of beloved servants is meant to be understood, I suppose, raised up as a sign of his salvation in You, for it is against the background of their own relationship.) At any rate, it seems that Rabbi Eliezer precisely that sign of Your imminent salvation had a very faithful servant, a woman, who eventually died. Upon hearing of her death, that we await daily. his students—apparently having learned Blessed are You, , Who will surely bring forth something from watching Rabban Gamliel’s A behavior after Tabi died—came formally to a descendant of David to lead us to salvation. offer their condolences and ended up chas- ing their master through his own house. When they arrived, he fled upstairs to the attic. When they followed him, he ran into Hear the foyer. When they followed him to the foyer, he ran into the dining room . . . and our prayers, A, our God, and take pity and have there, they finally had him cornered. Rabbi Eliezer was neither pleased nor impressed, mercy upon us. Accept our prayers willingly and and he certainly had no interest in behaving innovatively based on his brother-in-law’s with compassion, for You are a God fully able and conduct in a similar situation. “I thought willing to listen carefully to prayer and supplica- maybe lukewarm water would be enough to scald your hands,” he said, referring to his tion. May You not turn us away empty-handed, non-verbal rebuke of their insistent behavior, “but apparently even boiling hot water isn’t O sovereign God, for You are a God ever able and quite hot enough to get your attention.” In other words: I was trying to teach you some- willing to listen compassionately to the prayers of thing subtly, but that is apparently not going to work with unsubtle people such as your- Your people Israel. Blessed are You, A, Who will selves. So let me say it out loud: get lost and ever listen to heartfelt prayer. stop behaving as though a servant is a close relative. She worked for me. She was a nice lady and a faithful worker. But she wasn’t one of the relations for whom Scripture requires

77 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI On days other than Rosh Chodesh, say: the faithful to mourn. And so I’ll content myself with missing her without the trappings of formal mourning. Was she closer than a grandmother or a beloved aunt? I don’t think so! The rest of the story is less important, but the rabbi’s message was completely clear: he had hoped they would take a hint and leave him be, but apparently they required their master to say to them in so many unvar- nished words that it is inappropriate to mourn formally for a servant as though he or she were a real member of the family. That was the rule. It was a rule that everybody knew, or ought to have known. And it was this rule that Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh had chosen consciously to break when his learned servant Tabi passed away. (I’m just guessing about the chronological order. It’s really just as possible that Rabbi Eliezer’s servant died first and that Rabban Gamliel’s disciples were responding to their master’s behavior based on his brother-in-law’s comments upon his own servant’s death. It’s hard to say. But, in On Rosh Chodesh, say: the end, it is not an important point. What is important is learning something from contemplating the stories at hand and how they differ.) The legal background of both stories is worth considering. The law considers only seven categories of relations formally to be mourners when someone dies: parents, children, siblings, and spouse. (These are tradi- tionally counted as seven because one can have a mother and a father, a sister and a brother, or a son and a daughter, but only a husband or a wife.) This comes as a bit of a surprise when a family member to whom someone has been intimately attached for years dies and the survivor in question is told by a rabbi that he or she is not formally considered a mourner . . . despite the fact that some dissolute, estranged sibling of the deceased automatically is accorded that status (which is invariably, at least in this context, now considered an honor capriciously award- ed to an undeserving party in favor of an entirely worthy one). And the surprise, at least in my own experience, often leads to shock, and shock to anger, and anger to defiance. “You can’t stop me from saying Kaddish,” the rabbi is often told. And, indeed, the rabbi cannot stop anyone from doing anything. But the reasoning behind the law is clear, and I personally find it cogent: the whole point of

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 78 restricting the status of mourner to the closest On days other than Rosh Chodesh, say: of blood relatives, and to spouses, is that the extended family—people who had no iron- clad obligation to serve, or even to like, the Take deceased, but who did so anyway out of a sense of responsibility borne of affection pleasure, A, our God, in Your people Israel and rather than innate, blood-borne obligation—is in their prayers. And restore the ancient worship thus freed of the restrictions that limit the mourners precisely so as to be able to serve service to the sanctuary of Your great Temple and the deceased and his or her “formal” mourners not out of any innate formal obligation to accept the offerings and the prayers of Israel will- do so, but rather out of a sense of obligation rooted in feelings of affection, fondness, and ingly and lovingly, so that the worship of Your friendship for the deceased. In my experience, however, this often plays people Israel will ever find favor before You. May out less than ideally in real life. For example, our eyes see Your compassionate return to Zion! when a distant brother who hadn’t seen his sister in twenty years is formally invited Blessed are You, A, Who surely will return the to rip his shirt as an act of mourning or to tear a mourner’s ribbon—and thus be acknowl- Shechinah, the divine presence, to Zion. edged as one of her formal mourners—while the wholly devoted niece who visited the On Rosh Chodesh, say: deceased daily, who assisted her with her personal hygiene as she became weaker, who Take pleasure, A, our God, in Your people Israel and in their prayers. And bathed her and helped her dress, and who restore the ancient worship service to the sanctuary of Your great Temple came to her aunt’s home daily after work to and accept the prayers of Israel willingly and lovingly, so that the worship of prepare a meal and spend some time before continuing on home to attend to her own Your people Israel will ever find favor before You. Our God and God of our family’s needs—when such a devoted niece is ancestors, may Your recollection of us, and Your abiding interest in us, come left standing in the outer circle while an to the fore forcefully and effectively and noticeably and distinctly and con- estranged brother is invited formally to tear his shirt, it rarely seems fair or reasonable to the spicuously and markedly . . . and not only Your recollection of us and our unbiased observer. But it is precisely to address needs, but also Your recollection of our ancestors and Your servant, the Mes- the feelings such a situation naturally engen- siah, son of David, whom we await, and Your recollection of Jerusalem, Your ders that Rabban Gamliel’s lesson applies. holy city, and Your recollection of all Your people Israel and our need for Rabban Gamliel was entirely aware that he had no obligation formally to mourn for Tabi sanctuary, for prosperity, for mercy, grace, compassion, life and peace on this when he died. He held him in great esteem. Rosh Chodesh day. He clearly liked him personally. He even spoke in the academy occasionally of the halakhic lessons he had personally learned Remember us, A, our God, on this day for goodness and visit us with from his erudite servant. But they had no blessing. Save us and grant us prolonged life and be kind and gracious with consanguine relationship and, indeed, they respect to Your ancient promise of salvation. Judge us with compassion and had no family relationship with each other at all. Surely, Rabban Gamliel knew that he was save us, for it is to You that we ever look for salvation because You are sover- under no obligation of any sort to mourn foreign God, gracious and just. May our eyes see Your compassionate return to mally for his servant, yet he also knew that Zion. Blessed are You, A, Who surely will re-establish the Shechinah, the the heart has its own rules . . . and that there divine presence, in Zion. are losses that weigh so heavily on those left behind that the need to acknowledge them formally cannot simply be set aside because it says in some book that one is supposed to do so. And so, as much a man of emotional as intellectual integrity, Rabban Gamliel made an appropriate exception and permitted him-

79 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI self to mourn for a man he loved and admired, and whose loss left him feeling no less bereft than the loss of a brother or a son would have. There are other examples of Rabban Gam- liel making the law suit the circumstance. When his wife died, the Mishnah reports, he permitted himself to bathe on the first night of the mourning week, even though this was normally forbidden mourners on their first, Torah-based day of bereavement. His students, presumably the same ones who were so amazed to see him receiving formal expressions of condolence when Tabi died, hastened to remind him that he himself had taught them that mourners are forbidden to bathe on the first day of the mourning week, but he answered them, entirely seriously, that he was possessed of a delicate nature and that he simply could not endure the thought of letting a single day pass without washing properly. That was enough for him! In other words, it was inconceivable that the law could require what an individual cannot abide and, so, if one is truly too fastidious not to bathe on that first day of the mourning week, then, presumably, Rabban Gamliel believed that one could set the rule aside and do what was necessary to feel human. Apparently, the same line of reasoning pre- vailed when Tabi died. Rabban Gamliel knew he did not need to mourn. He probably even knew that it was a mistake to set a misleading example for his disciples by accepting formal condolences as though he were a true mourner when Tabi died. But the heart has its own rules! And, apparently, Rabban Gamliel’s feelings for his beloved servant could not be turned off by reading rules in a book: his heart was filled with grief and that grief demanded that it be addressed in the traditional way, not denied or demeaned or marginalized. There were a million reasons not to mourn for Tabi and only one reason to do so, but the need to acknowledge devastating loss won out. And it Continue on the top of page 88. won out not because there was some satisfying legal basis to the decision to let it win out, but simply because the heart is the body’s strongest muscle . . . and it simply cannot be ordered to behave in any specific way merely because of information broadcast to it by one’s brain, even as grand and impressive a brain as Rabban Gamliel’s. Moderns contemplating the brief story of Tabi’s death and Rabban Gamliel’s response

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 80 to his death can feel enheartened by the les- Other than on Purim, Chanukah, or Israel Independence Day say: son lurking just behind the narrative. Yes, the high road to communion with God lies in allegiance and obedience to divine law. Yes, We the nobility inherent in the larger concept of affirm our faith in You. You are and always shall be , seeking God in the details derives specifically A from the fact that, eventually, every pious our God and the God of our ancestors, the rock of our individual will find him or herself emotionally at odds with the law and its requirements . . . lives and the shield behind which we nurture our hope and it is also true that the energy undertaken of redemption in every generation. All this we affirm to obey the law despite one’s personal pro- clivities to the contrary can be enough to freely to You as we recount the praises due You for the propel one forward toward redemption, security and safety of our lives, both of which we toward salvation, toward one’s personal Jerusalem. It’s all true . . . but Rabban Gamliel acknowledge are in Your hands, and for our souls, which knew that, lonely hunter or not, the heart truly does play by its own rulebook. He loved are wholly dependent on You, and also for the miracles Tabi and, when Tabi died, he mourned for that You perform daily for us, a never-ending series of him. Rules or no rules . . . the greater sin, he must have thought, would have been in wonders and kindnesses from which we benefit morn- abandoning emotional and spiritual integrity ing, afternoon and evening every day of our lives. O God for the sake of adherence to a rule that, at least in this one case, made no real sense. of goodness, Whose compassion never fails, O God of And that, more than anything, must be his legacy for moderns. compassion, Whose mercies never end, it is ever in You We often face the loss of people for whom that we place our trust. And so, for all these things, may we are not obliged formally to mourn. Friends, partners, relations by marriage, blood Your name be blessed and exalted for always and for all relations less closely related to us than the time, O sovereign God.... seven “official” relatives for whom we must mourn, step-siblings, step-parents, and step- children—all of these relationships fall beyond Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, add these words: the purview of traditional mourning obliga- and may You inscribe for a good life tions. Yet, in the end, the burden of grief can- all those bound to you in sacred covenant not be shucked off with reference to a rule in a book. Grief—and Rabban Gamliel surely knew this as well—can never be shucked off— . . . for then shall all living creatures give thanks to You, selah, and not real grief, at any rate—but can only be worked through. Slowly. Methodically. Mean- render sincere praise to Your name, O God of our salvation, our ingfully. Painfully. Moreover, it must be ever-present help, selah. worked through in a manner befitting the degree to which one’s personal world has been altered, perhaps even irrevocably, by the loss of the individual whose death one is not Blessed are You, A, Whose name is required formally to mourn, but whose demise changed everything even for someone goodness itself and Who is thus wholly excluded by the traditional mourning norms from the need for formal expressions of deserving of all gratitude. bereavement. Rabban Gamliel’s example speaks directly to the heart. A man of uncompromised and Continue on the top of page 89. uncompromising allegiance to the Torah and its laws, Rabban Gamliel also knew that religion absent emotional integrity is worthless . . . and that real spiritual accomplishment

81 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI will always exist at the confluence of the heart and the mind. Therefore, when faced with devastating loss, he mourned for his servant despite the fact that he had no such particular obligation. In the end, it comes down to a few basic truths. Permitting oneself to do what is forbidden by the law because one finds it possible to justify one’s sin with reference to the integrity of the desire prompting oneself to act is just so much self-serving rhetoric. But ignoring the permission of the law to avoid obligation when one feels the obligation in question so forcefully and so profoundly that ignoring it would be an offense against the integrity of the spirit— that is another proposition entirely. And it was to make that distinction perfectly clear that tradition preserved the story of the death of Tabi, Rabban Gamliel’s faithful servant, and the rabbi’s willingness to turn away from the permission to behave in a way that he knew, in his heart, would be at odds with the integrity of his own spirit, his own intellect and, finally, his own heart.

When Rabbi Meir, one of the greatest rabbis of the mishnaic period, sensed that he was enter- ing the very last stages of his long, productive life, he was traveling in Asia Minor. Grasping the seriousness of his situation, he took two measures immediately before he sensed his end was upon him. To his many students and disciples in the Land of Israel, he sent word that the responsibility for seeing to it that he was ultimately buried in the Jewish homeland rested with them. But to the people in whose company he found himself in the diaspora as he prepared to breathe his last, he gave more practical instructions. “Bury me by the seashore,” he said, “as it is written in the Book of Psalms regarding the Land of Israel, “God has founded it by the shore of the sea / it is set upon a net- work of subterranean rivers (Psalm 24:2).”

W e cannot always control what happens to us after we die. We know what we want—or at least most of us do—and, for most of us, that is to be buried in a dignified Continue on the top of page 88. way near the graves of our parents and

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 82 grandparents, near the final resting place of a On Chanukah, say: beloved spouse, near the burial plots in We affirm our faith in You, for You are and always shall be , our God and which rest our siblings and friends, in which A are buried people we held in esteem during the God of our ancestors, the rock of our lives and the shield behind which our lifetimes and who exemplified in their we nurture our hope of redemption in every generation. All this we affirm lives the values we ourselves cherished and freely to You as we recount the praises due You for the security and safety of held dear in our own. We wish to rest in sacred ground and for our graves to be tend- our lives, both of which are in Your hands, and for our souls, which are ed by our children, and then by our more wholly dependent on You, and also for the miracles that You perform daily distant descendants, with care and devotion. for us, a never-ending series of wonders and kindnesses from which we ben- We wish a lot of things . . . but many peo- efit morning, afternoon and evening every day of our lives. O God of good- ple feel hesitant to leave precise instructions for those who survive them. We don’t want ness, Whose compassion never fails, O God of compassion, Whose mercies to be a burden. We don’t want to pressure never end, it is ever in You that we place our trust. We are grateful for the our children into spending money they miracles, for the victory, for the acts of might, for the military triumphs, and might otherwise be able to spend on themselves. We don’t want to appear overbearing the successes in battle You wrought for our ancestors at this season of the or demanding, even posthumously, and it year in ancient times. In the days of the High Priest, Mattathias ben doesn’t accord well with our sense of our- Yochanan the Hasmonean, and his sons, when the wicked Seleucid kingdom selves to leave instructions that can neither be debated or even discussed once we are rose up against Your people Israel to attempt to force them to forget Your beyond the reach of human discourse. Torah and to disobey its laws so reflective of Your sacred will, You,prompted Rabbi Meir—one of the greatest of Rabbi by Your unending mercy, stood by them in their time of trouble and helped Akiba’s pupils—appears to have suffered from them fight their battles. You helped them feel justified in their fight and You no such reticence. He wished to be buried in Israel, his homeland and his home. He wrought vengeance upon those who deserved it. You helped the weak to wished to be buried, no doubt, in the vicinity vanquish the mighty, the few to vanquish the many, the pure to vanquish the of the graves of his teachers and, perhaps, for impure, the righteous to vanquish the wicked, and those who remained his disciples eventually to find their final resting places near his own. Presumably, he also faithful to the words of Your Torah to vanquish their arrogant enemies. You wished to be buried in Israel for the same rea- made glorious and holy Your own name in this world of Yours when You son people today wish for the same thing: to wrought great deliverance and salvation for Your people Israel at this very be present for the final redemptive moment even before the dead are called forth from season so many centuries ago. Afterwards, Your devoted children came to their graves, to be personally present in the the sanctuary of Your holy Temple. They cleansed the sanctuary of the sym- Land of Israel when the redeemer brings bols of idolatry and purified the Temple, then lit lamps in its holy courtyards redemption to the Jewish people and to the and declared that henceforth the eight days of Chanukah would be a festival world. Apparently unaware that there is merit in devoted to thanksgiving and the praise of Your great name. harboring unexpressed wishes, Rabbi Meir And so, for all these things, may Your name be blessed and exalted for issued instructions that were unequivocal. To always and for all time, O sovereign God, for then shall all living creatures his pupils in the Land of Israel—students of Torah who were wholly devoted to him and give thanks to You, selah, and render sincere praise to Your name, O God of completely indebted to his lessons for their our salvation, our ever-present help, selah. own standing as teachers of Torah and sages in Israel—he issued a demanding, difficult request: that they travel to Asia Minor and Blessed are You, , Whose name is good- retrieve his body, then return with it to the A Land of Israel and bury him there among his ness itself and Who is wholly deserving of all people. And to those people in whose midst he found himself as he prepared to breathe gratitude. his last, he gave equally clear instructions: that he wished provisionally to be buried by the shore of the sea. Continue on the top of page 89.

83 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI Why Rabbi Meir wished to be buried at the seashore is not stated clearly in the text. The verse from the Psalms he quoted, however, hints at his point: if he could not be brought immediately to his final resting place in the Land of Israel, it appealed to him as second best to be buried by the waters of a sea that also laps up against the beaches of the Land of Israel, thus establishing at least a kind of tentative connection between his mortal remains and the Jewish homeland. Perhaps he thought of it on the spot as a romantic notion designed to link him to the land, or perhaps it was an idea he had in mind as he undertook his journey abroad and considered the possibility that he might not live long enough to return home. Perhaps it was even an idea that others before him had previously had. Whatever its origin, however, Rabbi Meir’s example can stand moderns in good stead. It is a great honor, and a mitzvah, to obey the instructions of the dead. And, indeed, that very lesson, that it is a mitzvah to honor the wishes of the deceased, is preserved at several locations in the Talmud in Rabbi Meir’s own name. But the ability to obey the wishes of the deceased is a function of the willingness of those facing death—which includes all the living, at least eventually—to express themselves clearly about their wishes and to say unequivocally what they wish regarding the disposal of the remains, the location of their graves and the specific degree to which they wish those who attend to their burial to remain faithful to the strictures of tradition and Jewish law. If it is a mitzvah to obey the instructions of the dead, then it must also be a mitzvah to reveal one’s wishes to those most likely to occupy themselves with matters once we die. (How else will they know what to do?) It is a mitzvah we should not pass lightly by.

When they heard that Rav Safra had died, the local sages, none of whom had actually been among his disciples or pupils, did not rend their garments in grief. But the great Abaye, one of Continue on the top of page 88. the most celebrated sages of Talmudic antiquity and apparently also a local, pointed out that the law does not solely require that kind of pub-

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 84 lic display of grief for one’s own rabbi or On Purim, say: teacher, but for any great sage . . . including We affirm our faith in You,for You are and always shall be , our those with whom one may not actually have A studied personally. And, he added, it was not God and the God of our ancestors, the rock of our lives and the even all that correct to say that none of the shield behind which we nurture our hope of redemption in every locals had ever studied with Rav Safra, as his comments and explanations on the law were generation. All this we affirm freely to You as we recount the prais- cited and discussed daily in their study hall. In es due You for the security and safety of our lives, both of which other words, even though Rav Safra himself, are in Your hands, and for our souls, which are wholly dependent infirm and retired, was absent and unable to participate in person, one could argue cogently on You, and also for the miracles that You perform daily for us, a that he was still their teacher! never-ending series of wonders and kindnesses from which we The local sages got the point. But, although chastened, they still felt that the moment to do benefit morning, afternoon and evening every day of our lives. O the right thing had passed them by. However, it God of goodness, Whose compassion never fails, O God of com- turned out that they erred in this as well. And, passion, Whose mercies never end, it is ever in You that we place indeed, Abaye, when he heard that his colleagues felt that they could no longer rend their our trust. We are grateful for the miracles, for the victory, for the garments as an expression of grief over Rav acts of might, for the military triumphs and the successes in battle Safra’s death, noted that as long as there are still eulogies to be delivered—in other words, as You wrought for our ancestors at this season of the year in ancient long as the burial itself has not yet taken times. In the days of Mordechai and Esther, it once came to pass in place—it is still permissible for those required by Shushan, the capital of Persia, that the villainous Haman rose up the law to rend their garments in grief to do so. The local sages, still trying to get things right, against the Jewish people and attempted to destroy, annihilate and heard Abaye’s comment, digested its implica- murder all the Jews, men young and old, infants and women, in tions . . . and began to tear their garments in accordance with his instructions. In this too, one single day, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month (which however, they acted wrongly . . . or at least a is the month of Adar) and to plunder all their possessions. But tad precipitously. For a great scholar or sage, You, acting in Your great mercy, ruined his plans and thwarted his Abaye taught, the proper moment to rend one’s garment—that is, the moment deemed to be plot, paying him back in kind for his wicked intentions by having expressive of the greatest honor payable to the Haman and his sons hanged on the very gallows from which they deceased—is at the actual moment the eulogy is being spoken aloud. At that very moment, had planned to hang Mordechai. Abaye taught—in other words, precisely as the And so, for all these things, may Your name be blessed and exalt- sage’s greatest accomplishments are being enu- ed for always and for all time, O sovereign God, for then shall all merated and described—that is the moment to rip one’s garment as an expression of regret, living creatures give thanks to You, selah, and render sincere praise loss and sorrow. And that, we are left to sup- to Your name,O God of our salvation, our ever-present help, selah. pose, is exactly what finally happened. Blessed are You, A, Whose name is good- W hy does Jewish tradition ordain ness itself and Who is wholly deserving of all that clothing be torn as an act of mourning? The standard explanation understands the tearing as a kind of concession to the natural gratitude. desire to express misery through pain. And, interestingly, the Torah is entirely clear that one can go no further than one’s garments: Continue on the top of page 89. Deuteronomy specifically forbids that the faithful slash their flesh as a sign of grief. (Pulling one’s hair out is forbidden in the

85 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI same verse, presumably for the same reason.) In other words, Scripture finds it reasonable to assume that at least some people will respond to loss by wishing to inflict physical pain, even disfigurement, upon themselves as a tangible sign of the misery they feel deep within their hearts. But natural response to bereavement or not, the Torah is completely clear that this kind of self-inflicted physical pain is nonetheless forbidden. But why should it be? Does our Torah not valorize specifically those whose outer demeanor and behavior correspond precisely to their inner world of feeling and emotion? Isn’t it a compliment to note that someone is the same on the outside as the inside? In his comment on that verse in Deuteron- omy, Rashi offers a cogent reason for the Torah’s law by noting that the fact that human beings are created in the divine image means that they bear a concomitant obligation neither to mar nor to mutilate that image, not even in the context of attempting reasonably to vent the most normal or natural emotions. And, indeed, the same verse that forbids self-slashing begins, Rashi notes, by noting that the faithful are to be considered as though they were the very children of God. In turn, then, this poetic restatement of Genesis’ mythological principle that humanity and God share a common shape and image has its own implications for human behavior: along with the divinity in the human form comes the obligation to care for the human body as though it were the most precious of icons, as though it were something by its very nature wholly reflective of the creative spirit of the divine. The mitzvah is called keriah in Hebrew, which literally means “tearing.” The law codes are filled with details: how long the tear must be, whether it must be visible to others, how the tear made for a parent ought to differ from other instances of grief- prompted keriah, whether the tear—and especially such a tear in the garment of a poor individual who may only own one cloak or shirt—may be sewn up later when mourning concludes, whether there is an ongoing Continue on the top of page 88. obligation to tear another garment if one is for some reason unable to continue wearing the original torn garment during the entire mourning week, etc. All these are interesting issues, all points worthy of discussion and

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 86 adjudication by a people anxious not merely On Israel Independence Day, say: to nod to the sanctity of Scripture by learning We affirm our faith in You, for You are and always shall be , our God and its statutes, but actually to live according to A its laws in the real world. the God of our ancestors, the rock of our lives and the shield behind which For most moderns, even those of relatively we nurture our hope of redemption in every generation. All this we affirm modest means, the notion of walking around freely to You as we recount the praises due You for the security and safety of in torn clothing will be an unfamiliar experience. Indeed, we live in a prosperous world our lives, both of which are in Your hands, and for our souls, which are in which it is not solely the wealthy who wear wholly dependent on You, and also for the miracles that You perform daily untorn shirts or blouses to work, but even for us, a never-ending series of wonders and kindnesses from which we ben- regular people possessed of average means efit morning, afternoon and evening every day of our lives. O God of good- and minimal fortunes who come to work daily dressed in tidy, neat outfits. (Even peo- ness, Whose compassion never fails, O God of compassion, Whose mercies ple who work as manual laborers, for exam- never end, it is ever in You that we place our trust. We are grateful for the ple, are still expected—in the world’s happy miracles and the victory, for the acts of might for the military trimphs and and affluent countries—to come to work wearing neat, unripped work clothing.) The the successes in battle You wrought for our people at this season of the year. result is that, for the overwhelming majority When Jewish people undertook a return to their ancestral homeland and of mourners, the notion of choosing to wear began to re-establish themselves as free people living in their own land as in torn clothing for a week will be a wholly new, wholly unpleasant experience. That may well ancient times, entry into the Promised Land was suddenly denied to the very be true, but the point the Torah is trying to refugees who had escaped annihilation elsewhere. But, when our enemies in make clearly and meaningfully by requiring the land and their allies in adjacent countries rose up to destroy Your people one to tear one’s garment has little to do Israel, You, acting in accordance with Your great mercies, came to their with one’s normal predilection for untorn clothing, and everything to do with a lesson defense in their time of most dire trouble and rendered a just judgment on that has the potential to serve as balm for the their behalf. You gave them the courage to rise up and to pry open the gates wounded soul. of the land to grant entry to those who needed it most and to repulse the Life is a gift from God. We are the children of our parents, of course . . . but the Torah enemy armies from the land. You gave the many into the hands of the few also understands each of us to be a child of and the wicked into the hands of the righteous. You made glorious and holy God. And, indeed, it is precisely the verse Your own name in this world of Yours and, for Your people Israel, You from Deuteronomy that forbids slashing one’s flesh as a sign of mourning that also notes wrought great deliverance and salvation on this very day. that the faithful are called upon to think of And so, for all these things, may Your name be blessed and exalted for themselves as children of God. The body, the always and for all time, O sovereign God, for then shall all living creatures case in which this God-given life is presented give thanks to You, selah, and render sincere praise to Your name, O God of to the world and preserved for as long as the individual in question remains alive, must be our salvation, our ever-present help, selah. treated with the greatest respect: it is the visible symbol of the soul that animates the individual and it is, as such, fully worthy of rever- Blessed are You, , Whose name is good- ence. Scripture makes that much clear A enough. But we mostly take our bodies for ness itself and Who is wholly deserving of all granted as we spend the days and years of our lives gathering jewelry, money . . . and gratitude. more and more expensive (and outlandish) toys designed to amuse ourselves and to impress the neighbors. Expensive cars, luxuri- ous homes, the most expensive jewelry . . . all Continue on the top of page 89. of these things function in most people’s lives as the tangible manifestations of what most people actually do consider the greatest of all God’s many gifts: prosperity.

87 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI But Scripture knows a truth as devastat- ingly egalitarian as it is almost painfully simple: that the greatest of God’s gifts is not money, not wealth, not the baubles the rich devote so much time to acquiring and then keeping safe, but life itself. And so, the Torah says, we start with the most basic of all possessions, the clothing on our backs, and, we rip it formally as a way of saying—symbolical- ly, but also clearly—that money means nothing at all in the presence of death . . . and that neither does anything purchased for money, even huge amounts of it. The dead are equal before God. According to Jewish tradition, all the dead are buried wearing the same simple shrouds. The wealthy may not purchase shrouds woven with golden thread, nor may any pious Jew be buried in a casket made of gold or silver. All of this is deemed indicative of a great spiritual truth: that a human life will, at least eventually, be evaluated in terms of that person’s fealty to God, in terms of the nobility of the moral principles that guided that individual’s life, and, last and certainly not least, in terms of the degree to which that person did good in the world and acted kindly and justly during his or her years on earth. And since the final judgment of a human being will be unrelated to his or her level of prosperity or luxury, why should the burial of the wealthy be any different from the burial of the person of the most modest means? This is meant to be a comforting thought. And, indeed, taking it seriously levels the playing field considerably, leaving the living possessed of a great truth only truly available through the contemplation of death. By tearing a shirt or a blouse—or a necktie or, even, one of those little mourning ribbons available in Jewish funeral homes—we are nodding to a great truth, one possessed of the potential truly to comfort: that the whole endless effort to acquire more things and more money is unrelated to the moral worth of the human being who has passed away . . . or to the moral worth, for that matter, of any still among the living. By expressing ourselves simply—and it is hard to imagine a ritual more transparent than tearing one’s shirt— On Saturday evenings, recite the Half Kaddish (as on page 61), then we are saying something that itself is also continue on page 110, except when a festival falls during the coming week truly simple: that the dead are all equal in God’s eyes and that, therefore, it would or when Erev Pesach is the following Friday. On such occasions, behoove us to consider each other in that continue with the Full Kaddish on page 114. unbiased light as often as we can manage to

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 88 see anything at all without being blinded by Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: the desire to acquire even more worthless Grant a great and permanent peace to Your people Israel, for You are the clutter in our homes and in our lives. These are lessons some few can learn intuitively, Sovereign of all peace and we pray that it be good in Your eyes to bless Your perhaps, but which the vast majority of peo- people Israel at every time and in every hour with Your peace. Blessed are ple can only learn by experiencing bereave- You, A, Who will always bless the people Israel with peace. ment . . . and then by seeing for themselves whether there is any way of spending money to lessen the pain. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: The comfort—the true solace—offered to Grant a great and permanent peace to Your people Israel, for You are the Sov- the mourner thus derives directly from the ereign of all peace and we pray that it be good in Your eyes to bless Your peo- insight into the nature of life itself offered by the experience of losing someone. Everybody ple Israel at every time and in every hour with Your peace. May we and all gets one life. Everybody owes one death. members of Your people, the House of Israel, be remembered and entered in Nobody can fend off the Angel of Death for- the Book of Life, Blessing, Peace, and Great Prosperity, for now and for ever. No sane person longs for death, but we all do long to be unburdened of the fantasies always, for a good life and for peace. Blessed are You, A, Maker of peace. that make life as we live it absurd, even inane. And we can be unburdened of those The Prayer of Mar, son of Rabina fantasies, which truth many of us first come to as we stand by the casket of a beloved par- My God, keep my tongue from speaking evil and my lips from uttering slan- ent and make a tear in a garment we are der. May I have the inner strength to remain silent in the face of my enemies’ wearing . . . a tear that we will not sew up taunts and may I have the courage to be indifferent to all who might insult later on and which we intend to keep with or mock me. Open my heart to Your Torah and inspire me to yearn to do us, and then actually do keep with us, as we make our way from funeral to burial, and Your commandments faithfully and properly. And may You quickly annul from burial into the days of the mourning the plans and bring to naught the plots of those who wish me ill. Do this for week, a tear that indicates that, despite all the sake of Your name, for the sake of Your great right hand, for the sake of evidence to the contrary, we truly do understand how things are in this world of decep- Your holiness, and for the sake of Your holy Torah. May Your right hand tive, illusory pleasures. grant salvation as You answer our prayers so that those who love You might be granted relief from their burdens. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable before You, A, my Rock and my Redeemer. And May God Who makes peace on high make peace for us and Rabbi Eleazar bar Zadok lost his father and, for the whole House of Israel. And to that, let us all say, Amen. later, recalled his father’s instructions regarding the precise way he wished for his body posthumously to be treated. “My son,” Rabbi Eleazar’s At the conclusion of the Amidah, we append a prayer father said, “immediately following my death, I for the restoration of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of our holy Temple. wish temporarily to be interred in a shallow grave. Then, after enough time has passed, I May it be Your will, A, our God and God of our ancestors, that the wish for my bones to be gathered up and placed holy Temple be rebuilt quickly and within our days. And may we all in an ossuary. I specifically do not wish you to do have a portion in Your Torah sufficient to guarantee us the merit to this personally, however,” he said clearly and unambiguously, thus ending his dour instruc- serve You in awe in that place, just as in ancient days and bygone tions on a note of kindness and solicitude. And years. May the sweet savor of the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem now Rabbi Eleazar himself takes over the narrative. “I did as my father asked,” he began. be pleasant to You, A, just as in ancient days and bygone years. “Yochanan went to the gravesite and collected the bones, then spread a sheet out over them. On Saturday evenings, recite the Half Kaddish (as on page 61), then Then, when my father’s body was covered, I continue on page 111, except when a festival falls during the coming week came to that place and tore my garment, then scattered dried herbs over the bones. As my or when Erev Pesach is the following Friday. On such occasions, father did for his father, so did I do for mine.” continue with the Full Kaddish on page 115.

89 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI D espite the fact that this story refers to practices in which no Jewish people have engaged for millennia such as gathering up the bones of deceased individuals and inter- ring them in special caskets called ossuaries, the Hebrew words kesheim she’asah le’aviv kakh asiti lo (“As my father did for his father, so did I do for him”) nevertheless encapsulate in just one sentence the general Jewish attitude toward the appropriate way to care for the dead. When faced with decisions regarding the specific way a funeral should be con- ducted, people are sometimes possessed of the conviction that they have no idea what a parent truly would have wanted. This is rarely being feigned: in our society, it is perfectly possible to spend months, even years, attending to the needs of a terminally ill parent without ever seriously feeling called upon, let alone obliged, to discuss the specific way that individual in question wishes posthumously to be treated. Indeed, in our prissy society, it is considered to be in questionable taste—or, at least, to be unpleasantly awkward—to discuss one’s own death . . . and, paradoxically, this is considered even more acutely to be the case when one is speaking to the very people who will end up charged with making the perti- nent decisions after one’s demise. Although this reticence leads almost inevitably to denying the bereaved the satisfaction of having carried out the wishes of the deceased precisely and exactly, it is probably too much to expect people to overcome the natural strictures at work in society precisely when they are, almost by definition, in a distressed, less assertive state than normal. But there is always a way to know precisely what a deceased individual might well have wished for him or herself: by citing Rabbi Eleazar’s words and adapting them to one’s own situation. Almost always, a deceased parent will have already arranged for her or his own parents’ burial years earlier. Losing one’s second parent means that one has already suffered the loss of one’s first parent to die . . . and it will almost always have previously fallen to the parent who has now died Between Passover and Shavuot, continue on page 102 with the Counting to arrange for the burial of the priorly deceased parent. of the Omer. On Purim, continue with the reading of the Megillah. Arranging for the funeral and burial of a On Tisha Be’av, continue with the reading of Eichah. On Chanukah, beloved intimate is one of life’s most painful turn to page 118. experiences. The goal is not to satisfy oneself

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 90 but to satisfy the wishes of the deceased. The Full Kaddish One can always rely on tradition for guidance in terms of the most pressing arrangements. Magnified and sanctified be the great name of God in One can try to guess what someone who has just died would probably have wanted. One this world created according to divine plan, and may can attempt to analyze remarks made by the deceased to glean hints about his or her God’s sovereignty be established speedily and soon dur- wishes. Or one can simply follow Rabbi ing the days of our lives and the lives of all members of Eleazar’s advice and do for one’s parents what they did for their own parents. Or what the House of Israel, and let us say, Amen. one’s surviving parent did for one’s previously deceased parent. In the end, the great goal The congregation joins the cantor or baal tefillah in reciting this line. of following the instructions of the dead sup- poses that such instructions were issued clearly and unambiguously. In the absence of May God’s great name be blessed for- that kind of instruction, however, one can simply act in accordance with personal prece- ever and throughout all eternity. dent and then, when one’s mourning week is over, to find comfort in saying, with the The cantor or baal tefillah continues: ancient rabbi, “What my parents did for their own parents, I did that same thing for them.” May the name of the Holy One, source of all blessing, be Also, one can scruple not to leave one’s own children in a similar situation when one’s own blessed, adored, lauded, praised, extolled, glorified and time comes, not to leave them as uncertain venerated in language . . . what one’s final wishes actually are as they Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: are anxious and eager to carry them out. more exalted Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: entirely more exalted The story of the death of Rabbi Abba bar Aibu, invariably known to Talmudists simply as Rav, is told above. And now we come to an interesting . . . than any blessing, hymn, ode or prayer recited by the story regarding the death of his disciple (and faithful in this world, and let us say, Amen. successor as the principal of the great academy at Sura), Rav Huna. (The Talmudic text does May the prayers and supplications of all Israel be not offer a specific date for Rav Huna’s demise, acceptable before their heavenly Parent, and let us say, but scholars have calculated that he must have died a few years before the beginning of the Amen. fourth century C.E.) Like his master, Rav Huna was one of the greats: his name appears not May we, and all Israel, be blessed with great peace that hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of comes to us directly from heaven, and with life, and let times in the Talmud, and, even after millennia, his name remains known to all students of the us say, Amen. Talmud as one of the true masters of Jewish tra- May God Who brings peace to the heavens grant dition in every one of its many forms and subdi- visions. peace to us and to all Israel, and let us say, Amen. To understand the story of the events that attended his death, however, it is necessary to know something of the story of the death of Between Passover and Shavuot, continue on page 102 with the Counting Hezekiah, king of Judah, who lived a millenni- of the Omer. On Purim, continue with the reading of the Megillah. um earlier and who is remembered only for On Tisha Be’av, continue with the reading of Eichah. On Chanukah, good in Jewish tradition. (The story of how the turn to page 119. king’s ghost came to escort Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai to his eternal reward is told above.

91 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI But this is a different story, unrelated to that one except insofar as it concerns the same historical personality.) When the king died, the rabbis recalled, a Torah scroll was placed on his casket and the people, with one voice, said, “The man whose body is in this box performed every commandment written in this book.” For Jewish people, of course, there could be no finer compliment. And, although it is true that there is some discussion in the Talmud as to whether or not this constituted entirely appropriate behavior—the Torah scroll is generally not used as a prop in the obsequies of even the most important people—and also that the story ends a bit equivo- cally, the more important point is that it was certainly believed widely that this was the great honor accorded King Hezekiah when he died. Consequently, there were those among Rav Huna’s pupils who wished to do precisely the same thing for their teacher when his time came to abandon life to the living and to depart for the world of truth. And so we begin citing the story as it appears in the Talmud. When Rav Huna died, the text relates, there were those who wished to place a Torah scroll on his casket, thus implying the same thing that was once said of King Hezekiah, that the man in this box was wholly faithful to what is written in this book. But before anything could happen, Rav Chisda spoke up, and asked, rhetorically, if it could possibly be right to honor a man in death with a ritual gesture that he himself did not approve of in life. For, indeed, Rav Chisda asked rhetorically, did Rav Tachlifa (or, according to some ver- sions of the story, Rav Chelbo) not relate specifically the story of the time Rav Huna himself was just about to sit down on a divan when he realized that a Torah scroll was lying on it as well? Not willing to sit down on a couch that was also supporting a sacred scroll, Rav Huna took a nearby earthenware jug, turned it upside down and then put the Torah scroll instead on his makeshift end table before being seated. From this tradition, Rav Chisda concluded that we can surely learn that Rav Huna felt it to be forbidden to be seated on a divan upon which a Torah scroll is resting. And how much the more so would he have felt strongly about it not being appropriate to lie down on a bed on which a scroll is lying . . . and is a bier not a kind of bed? (Readers will want to know that Hebrew uses the same word for bier and bed.)

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 92 The story ends here . . . but we may safely Aleinu assume, I think, that the idea was set aside and Rav Huna was carried to his grave without the It is our duty to praise the Author of all existence and to Torah scroll. But the issues that plagued this particular funeral procession were not quite all declare the greatness of the Creator for not making us like resolved . . . and the rest of the story is instruc- the other nations or granting us the spiritual bearing of tive in its own right. When the time came to carry Rav Huna to other clans within the greater human family, and for neither his final resting place, it quickly became clear giving us a portion similar to theirs nor a destiny like that of that the bier upon which he was resting was too wide to fit through the door of the building in their great populations. Instead, we all bend the knee and which he had died. The assembled had the idea kneel down to give thanks before sovereign God Who rules of carrying him up to the roof and then lowering the bier (with Rav Huna’s body on it) from there over even their most powerful royalty, the blessed Holy One to the ground. Rav Chisda, however, was not in Who spread out the heavens and established the earth, favor. “Do we not have a firm tradition,” he asked, no doubt rhetorically, “that the dignity of Whose holy residence is in heaven above, Whose absolute a great sage requires that he be brought forth to power is revealed in the highest celestial realms. The his grave through the doorway,” not lowered off the roof like a load of bricks? Almighty is our God; there is no other. The Sovereign of This point was well taken. A new plan was truth, God is wholly unique, as it is written in God’s Torah: quickly evolved, which was to transfer him to a more narrow bier that could fit through the “And above all else you shall take to heart that A, alone and doorway. To this too, however, Rav Chisda also fully unique, is God in heaven above and on earth below.” objected. “Do we not also have a firm tradition that the dignity of a great sage requires that he Therefore, do we place our trust in You, A, our God, so that be borne to his grave on the first bier upon we may quickly come to see the glory of Your splendid power as it which he is laid,” not transferred from bier to bier like a side of beef in a butcher’s work yard? manifests itself to sweep away and utterly destroy the repulsive This led to a new, new plan, one to which idols that are worshiped on this earth, to establish the sovereignty even Rav Chisda had no objections: they broke of God on earth so that all humanity will come to invoke Your down the walls on either side of the doorway, thus widening it sufficiently for Rav Huna’s bier sacred name, to turn the wicked of the earth toward You in full —the first one on which his body had been laid repentance, so that all who dwell on this planet will recognize and down—to pass through into the street. And so was Rav Huna borne to his final resting place understand fully that it is to You alone that every knee must bend without contravening any laws or traditions of and every tongue pledge loyalty. the type he would never have ignored in his life- It is before You, A, our God, that they will kneel and fall pros- time. The Talmud then turns to other matters, but trate; it is to the glory of Your name that they will all show honor returns, briefly, to an analogous story later on, as they accept upon themselves the yoke of Your sovereignty. perhaps just to provide a brief postscript to the first story. When Rav Chisda himself died, the Tal- Then shall You rule over them, quickly and permanently, for mud relates, there were those, no doubt inspired sovereignty is Yours and so shall You ever rule over us with honor, by the story about King Hezekiah, who thought as it is written in the Torah, “A shall reign forever.” And it would be a fine memorial gesture to place a Torah scroll on Rav Chisda’s casket as it was so also is it is written in the book of Your prophet, “And it shall borne to his final resting place. Rabbi Isaac, how- come to pass that A will be Sovereign over the earth. Indeed, on ever, knew better than to permit such an honor, no matter how well intended. “How,” he asked, that day, the unique nature of A will be acknowledged on earth rhetorically and pointedly, “could it possibly be so totally that even the divine name itself will be ‘One.’” right to honor a man in a way that he personally thought inappropriate to honor his own master?” And, with that, the story concludes.

93 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI T he desire to show honor to the dead is a profound one for survivors. And, indeed, it is a noble sentiment and one very appropriately endorsed by the sages of antiquity, who used the concept of the dignity due the dead as a jumping-off point for the development of any number of laws they enacted and enforced regarding the way the human body must be cared for between death and burial. But conceiving of the vague desire to honor the dead and actually acting in a way that truly does bring honor to the deceased are not always quite the same thing. And, indeed, the urge to honor the dead in a way that the individual doing the honoring imagines he or she would personally find satisfying posthumously to be honored is very strong in most people . . . and more than strong enough to trump what one might know of the actual aesthetic sensitivities and moral values of the deceased person in question. In other words, it is easy to conceive of the desire to show honor to the dead. It is less easy to do so, however, in a way that solely reflects the closest one can come to guessing the way the deceased person in question would have wished to be honored. And it is least easy of all to feel confident that one is acting solely out of reverence for the departed . . . and not at all out of the desire to be thought of as the kind of person who holds nothing back, including especially no expense, when it comes to honoring the dead. The case of Rav Huna is a good example. The old story about King Hezekiah is famous. And, indeed, the words kiyyeim zeh mah shekatuv bazeh (“The man whose body is in this box performed every commandment written in this book”) are also famous. The sentiment, surely, is both noble and touch- ing. And, indeed, which pious Jew would not find it satisfying to think of others saying precisely that of him or her—that he or she was the kind of person who exemplified fealty and devotion to the Torah in every aspect of his or her personal life? Surely, saying those words of a departed individual would constitute the highest kind of praise, the celebra- tion of an entire lifetime devoted to Torah and mitzvot, to the study of God’s law and to one’s personal willingness to subjugate all of one’s personal desires to the performance of the commandments. And, taking the matter

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 94 just one step further, what could express that The Mourner’s Kaddish same sentiment more clearly than actually taking a Torah scroll and placing it on the (The text in translation may be found on page 43.) chest of the person one wishes to designate as having lived a life that was wholly devoted Yitgadal veyitkadash shmei rabba be‘alma di vra chirutei to the requirements of the law? The gesture veyamlich malchutei bechayeichon uvyomeichon itself is perfect: solemn, deeply meaningful, respectful and, in terms of its symbolism, uvechayei dekhol beit yisrael, ba‘agala uvizman kariv, entirely transparent even to the least learned onlooker. ve’imru amen. It was, in short, the perfect tribute to a revered teacher. The only problem is that it The congregation joins the mourners in reciting this line. would definitely have not been something of which Rav Huna himself would have approved. Rav Chisda recalled that old story Yehei shmei rabba mevorach that Rav Tachlifa (or was it Rabbi Chelbo?) used to tell, the one about Rav Huna sitting down on a sofa, then noticing—apparently to le‘alam ule‘almei almaya. his horror—that a Torah scroll was lying on The mourners continues: the other end of the same couch. He leapt to his feet, turned a pitcher over—it must have Yitbarach veyishtabach, veyitpa’ar veyitromam been a huge amphora or some such thing— veyitnasei veyithadar veyit‘aleh veyithalal shmei and set the scroll down on his improvised table. Clearly, this was not a man who found dekudsha brich hu it respectful to be seated on the same surface upon which lay a scroll of God’s law! Whether this was reasonable or not is not the point. Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: Nor is the point whether the law itself can tol- le‘eila min kol erate an individual sitting on the same couch as rests a Sefer Torah. The point is that Rav Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: Huna, for whatever reason, found such casual familiarity with a sacred Torah scroll to be le‘eila le‘eila mikol intolerable. He wouldn’t do it. Whether he found it distasteful or truly forbidden is hard birchata veshirata, tushbechata venechemata to say . . . but, for whatever reason, he still wouldn’t do it. And Rav Chisda is surely right da’amiran be‘alma, ve’imru amen. that a man who would not sit in life on a surface he would be sharing with a Torah scroll would surely not have approved of laying a Yehei shlama rabba min shmaya, vechayim, aleinu Torah scroll down on the top of his casket. ve‘al kol yisrael, ve’imru amen. What specific issue motivated Rav Huna to feel so strongly about the matter is beside the point here. The issue is that the rabbi himself Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya‘aseh shalom aleinu would not have done it, not to honor others and, presumably, also not to honor himself. ve‘al kol yisrael, ve’imru amen. That, and only that, was Rav Chisda’s point. And it was, and is, a point well taken. We are often moved to do for the dead what we convince ourselves they would have wanted . . . but what we, at the same time, know in our hearts is far more precisely what we imagine we would like to have done for ourselves when our time comes. A beloved father says that he wishes to be buried in a plain pine box, but his children choose an

95 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI ostentatious casket of mahogany and brass Psalm 27 because that is what they themselves would prefer. A mother asks to be buried in simple white shrouds, but her family overrides her wishes, telling themselves that they know what she really wanted, that what she said she wanted was somehow less expressive of her real wishes than what they themselves feel certain she must have wanted. A husband indicates clearly—but without any legally binding force—that he wishes that his organs be donated to benefit people who will die if they do not receive a kidney or a lung or a heart, but his wife declines to allow the procedure, insisting that she knows that he didn’t really mean it . . . despite the fact that he was clear in expressing the very wish she insists he can’t really have harbored. All these are instances of people overriding the plainly expressed wishes of the dead for the sake of doing what the living wish the dead had wanted instead of what they actually did want, what they specifically said they wanted. And, for all their certainty that they are acting kindly and generously, none of these people is acting with compassion or showing real dignity to the dead. When Rav Chisda died, there was some discussion of placing a Torah scroll on his casket as well, but the matter died quickly: Rabbi Isaac observed that he himself had vetoed the idea when it came to paying similar tribute to Rav Huna, his own revered teacher. How then could he possibly have wished posthumously to be honored in the same way he himself had acted decisively to keep from being done for his master? The issue is exactly the same. Again, we see people attempting to act in accordance with wishes they think the deceased ought to have had, despite the clear evidence that he did not wish for that thing at all. And the lesson is the same as well: to honor the dead, one must honor their clearly enunciated wishes, not what one imagines they ought to have wished for or how one feels they ought to have felt. The other part of the story is the slightly funny incident involving the bier that pro- truded too far out on either side to permit Rav Huna to be carried to his grave in a dignified way. There were alternative suggestions, one less dignified than the next: that he be lowered off the roof like a piano, or that he be transferred to a narrower bier. Finally, the only logical course of action was

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 96 adopted and the doorway itself was widened. Psalm 27 The moral here is clear: the honor due the During the weeks between Rosh Chodesh Elul and Hoshana Rabba, dead trumps the expense and bother of having some workmen come in the day after the we read the twenty-seventh psalm at the end of the Evening Service. funeral, repair the wall, and restore the doorway to its original width. And the story, (A psalm) of David. therefore, fits in well with the stories that pre- cede and follow it. Those stories are about If A is my light and my salvation, whom need I fear? If A is the the honor and the dignity due the dead and stronghold of my life, of whom then should I be frightened? about the fact that nothing is more important than showing respect to the dead in the When evildoers draw near to me to devour my flesh, when my only ways that truly count: by listening enemies and foes approach, they stumble and fall. Should an army posthumously to their wishes, by letting their array against me, my heart shall not know fear; should war be pious instructions be taken as sacred instructions (and not as mere suggestions), and by declared against me, even then shall I remain confirmed in my refraining from letting monetary considera- faith. tions count for much in determining how to show respect to the dead. Indeed, by equat- One favor have I asked of A and I request it now anew: that I ing the twin obligations to honor the dead be permitted to dwell in the House of A all the days of my life, appropriately and not to worry about the so that I might gaze on the beauty of and tarry forever in the expense involved, the Talmud is suggesting A that the obligation to show respect to the divine sanctuary. For God will surely conceal me in the Temple— dead supersedes monetary loss, that it super- the divine sukkah—on a day of evil, hiding me in that protective sedes the aesthetic sensitivities of the mourners, that, by its very nature, it supersedes tent, lifting me up onto a rock. Indeed, as I offer up the kind of more or less every other consideration that sacrifice attended by trumpet blasts in God’s tent, I can see my might conceivably come to mind. head lifted up higher than any of the enemies who surround me; I shall sing and chant hymns to A. Hear my voice, A, when I cry out; be gracious unto me and When Rabbi Meir died, there were none left to answer me. I heard my heart say, “Seek me” to You, but surely it is speak in parables. When Ben Azai died, there I who need to seek out Your face, A. That being the case, hide were none left who displayed true diligence in study. When Ben Zoma died, there were no not Your presence from me. Turn not from Your servant in anger, truly great preachers left in the world. When for You are my help; neither forsake nor leave me, O God of my Rabbi Akiba died, so did the glory of the Torah. salvation. For although my father and my mother have left me, When Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa died, that was the end of men of good deeds in the world. A shall care for me. Teach me Your way, A, and guide me on When Rabbi Yossi Ketanta died, there were no the level path in order to confound my oppressors. Give me not truly pious people left in the world (and he was called Ketanta, that is, the Little, because he into the hand of my enemies, for false witnesses out to inspire vio- had been the least pious of his generation, not lence have risen up against me. Perhaps they would have already the most!) When Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai vanquished me, had I not believed it to be my lot to look died, the splendor of wisdom vanished from the world. When Rabban Gamliel the Elder died, upon the goodness of A in the land of the living. Hope in A! the glory of the Torah was gone from the world Be strong and may your heart be of good courage; hope in A! and purity and self-discipline were dead as well. When Rabbi Ishmael ben Favi died, the splendor of the priesthood was gone from the world. When Rabbi (that is, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch) died, that was the end of modesty and the fear of sin in the world. When Rabbi Eliezer died, the Sefer Torah itself became hidden from its admirers. When

97 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI Rabbi Joshua died, that marked the end of good advice and insightful thinking in the world . . . and when Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah died, the crowns of wisdom vanished from the world, and this was a true tragedy, for the crown of wisdom is the wealth of the wise...

W e have all felt this way. Someone we love, someone we trust, someone on whom we rely—perhaps even someone on whom we rely totally and absolutely—dies. Our mental state is, at least at first, a soup of seething, somewhat contradictory, emotions—anger (at being abandoned by the one now gone from the world), grief (over the unbearable pain of loss itself), confusion (about the direction we are to take into the future), self-pity (generated by the sense the bereaved so often have of being helpless in the world, now that the source of years, even decades, of succor, counsel and helpful guidance is suddenly absent from the scene), and loneliness (because, in the end, the single most important aspect of grieving is coming to terms with being bereft of the company of the departed and all the implications and ramifications of that fact as they apply to the life of the survivor). But then, as days, then weeks, pass, we slowly begin to come to terms with the loss we have suffered. The anger abates. The grief subsides. The confusion resolves, at least mostly. The self-pity slowly retreats. And, if one is lucky enough and strong enough, the loneliness eventually yields to the need to re- invent oneself and to find a context in which to live on not solely as a bereaved person who used to be whole, but as a person who is not merely not dead, but who is very much alive and willing to live on in the world and to strive to become whole again. More than anything, we feel amazed by death . . . and amazed that the world has changed so totally and absolutely, yet without anyone other than ourselves and our closest relations and friends appearing to have noticed. This experience, everybody has. You remain home for shiva, observing the rituals of the mourning week carefully and scrupulously. You say Kaddish morning and night. You wear your ripped garment or, at least, your mourning ribbon, for the entire seven days. You don’t look after your appear-

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 98 ance in the normal way—men don’t shave In a house of mourning, the forty-ninth psalm is read aloud and women don’t wear make-up or per- at the end of the Evening Service. fume—and you avoid mirrors, lest you be tempted to attend to your appearance dur- For the conductor, a psalm of the sons of Korach. ing a period of time it would be peculiar, perhaps even disrespectful to the dead, to do so. Hear this all nations! Give ear all residents of earth, children of Adam, all Slowly, you come to terms with the fact that humanity, wealthy and poor alike! you have lost someone so close and so dear My mouth shall speak words of wisdom; the thoughts of my heart that I that it is as though a part of you personally am about to express will be possessed of deep insight. I shall incline my ear has died. You don’t know how you will live through the week, but somehow you do live to hear a parable developing in my thoughts; I shall open my riddle-song through it . . . and then, almost when you with a flourish of the lyre. expect it the least, it is over. As the rabbi sug- Why should I know fear in times of trouble, merely because the iniquity gested would be proper, you go out to walk around the block on the morning of the last of my pursuers surrounds me? They, after all, are the ones who place their day, hoping thus to re-enter the atmosphere trust in their riches, praising themselves because of the extent of their of the living and, if it only proves possible, to wealth. But no one can redeem a brother from divine punishment. Indeed, take a first, tentative, step back towards life among the living. it is because the redemption of the souls of sinners is so very precious that I did this twice in my life, following the one cannot effect it merely by paying a ransom to God; the punishment for deaths of both my parents. It was the same sin is that one simply ceases to exist forever. block, too! And, although the two walks in Shall a human being live forever, then, and never see the grave? question took place twenty years apart, I remember having the same thoughts both One can see, after all, that even sages die; together with fools and boors times as I walked along the same streets in they perish and leave their possessions to others. my parents’ old neighborhood. More than Their graves become their permanent homes, their residences from gen- anything, I remember being amazed, almost shocked . . . but not by the degree of discon- eration to generation and the earthly addresses by which they are known; tinuity and disorientation I felt as I walked human beings, similar in this to the beasts whose mortality they share, can- around in the sunlight for the first time in a not live forever because of their earthly wealth. week. Or perhaps that too, but more than that—far more than that—I felt a sense of Such is the fate of all who cannot accept their own mortality: foolishness real amazement that no one seemed to real- belongs to them and, afterwards, to those who find their words pleasing, ize that the world had changed dramatically selah. while I had been hidden away on my mourn- They are marked for descent to Sheol like slaughtered sheep, Death serv- er’s stool drinking coffee and listening to my mother’s friends, and then, two decades ing as their shepherd and the righteous ruling over them in the morning. later, my father’s, talk about her or him and, Indeed, such people so regularly make God, their rock, punish them with in so doing, to seek comfort for themselves death that Sheol can no longer serve as the sole residence of the dead. Yet and, I’m sure they also hoped, for me. The lines cited above come from the God will redeem my soul from the grasp of Sheol by bringing me forth, Mishnah and the Talmud. Strictly speaking, selah. none was precisely true. There were pious Be not in awe when an individual waxes wealthy or when the honor of people in the world after Yossi Ketanta died. (He was, after all, the least devout among the that person’s house grows great. When such a person dies, he will not take it pious of his day, not the most.) There were all with him. His glorious possessions will not descend to Sheol after him preachers in the world after Ben Zoma died. because he blessed his own soul during his lifetime; instead, he ought to There were diligent, deeply committed stu- have thanked You when things went well for him. His soul shall join the dents of Torah in the world even after Ben Azai died. But the correct way to relate to ranks of his ancestors who shall never again see light, for human these statements is neither as mere hyperbole beings, similar in this to the beasts whose mortality they share, are more intended to impress through exaggeration than capable of loving earthly wealth without understanding its highly nor as examples of flowery prose intended to convey the misery of the bereaved poetically transient nature. or metaphorically. And, indeed, there is

99 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI something in them that will be very resonant with any who have loved and lost, with any who have stood by the open grave of someone one truly loved and listened to the clods of earth banging up against the lid of the casket as it disappears slowly, and permanently, from view. The emotion that seizes most people at that precise moment is exactly the same: it is the sense that life as it has been is now all over, that life itself has changed . . . and not at all for the better. Depending on one’s relationship to the deceased, this emotion expresses itself in different terms. Some- times, it is the sense that, henceforth, one will never know real, unconditional love again. Other times, it is the sense that one will never know the security that comes from sleeping up against the warm body of someone one loves truly and absolutely. Or that one will never again know financial security, or real freedom from worry. Or that one will never again hear advice one knows without the slightest hesitation one can count on completely to be sound and intelligent. But despite the specific way these thoughts frame themselves, they all herald a moment of inner collapse and hopelessness. And, indeed, most people are possessed of the bleakest of feelings about the future as the grave finally becomes filled with soil and the time comes to leave the site between the lines those in attendance form so that the mourners can leave the gravesite between them and be comforted by the presence of caring friends and relations. When the grave is finally filled in, the mourners put down the shovels and listen to a final prayer. And then they turn to leave. As they turn, it strikes almost everybody that they are not only turning their back on the grave, but on life as they have known it, and that the future, whatever it brings, is going to be wholly different from the past. It is to that precise moment that the texts from the Mishnah and the Talmud cited just above speak. As already noted, none of these texts was precisely true. And the parallel thought isn’t precisely true either for moderns turning from their parents’ graves to walk between the two lines of comforters. The Torah was still studied in Israel even after the death of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos. And there were clever, intelligent people capable of offering sage counsel even after Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah died. Similarly, people

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 100 somehow do again know love after losing a spouse, even one loved absolutely, truly, and unconditionally during years, even during many decades, of happy marriage. And people who have always relied on their parents’ support and advice somehow do persevere in God’s world and find new sources of support, and new places to seek counsel when unsure how best to proceed. If these statements, then, are not precisely correct, why does the Mishnah cite them as though they were truths? And why does the Talmud add to them, thus endorsing even those not revisited or revised as reasonable? Are they merely rhetorical flourishes intended to convey the depth of loss the Jews of ancient times felt as their greatest sages passed away from them and walked no longer in their midst? Or are they pointing to a deeper truth, one from which moderns can profitably learn? I think the latter . . . and I think the lesson is clearly that, for all it feels like the world itself has fallen away when we suffer the loss of someone we have truly felt indispensable to our ability to function in the world, it isn’t really so. It feels that way, but, in the end, we have the capability to live on . . . and, even, to embody in ourselves the very same values we so respected and admired in the individuals we have lost along the way personally from cradle to grave. Somehow, within the warp and woof of loss exists, always, the potential for renewal. Within the context of the relentless, paralyzing loneliness that comes from facing death, there also exists the possibility of self-reinven- tion, of resurrection, of return to the ranks of the living . . . and the loving . . . and the loved. When we are faced with the stark reality of death, it is easy to feel that the world has ended. And, indeed, there is some truth to that thought: in that each of us lives in a private universe of emotion, perception, and capability, each of us experiences the dissolu- tion of a full world when faced with the permanent removal of a player whose role was essential to the cogency of the whole. But that is only in a certain sense. Speaking more realistically, we don’t really all inhabit private universes. Indeed, we all inhabit precisely the same universe, precisely the same world. The world only feels like it is ending when we stand at the edge of a mother’s grave and peer into the darkness, afraid to look and

101 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI afraid not to look. The contemplation of death, therefore, need not destroy us. Just to the contrary, the death of life can point us toward the future, toward the eventual death of death, toward the reality that death can lose its sting in the contemplation of the durable soul granted by God, the Author of life and death and the ultimate Arbiter of both.

It once happened that Rav Nachman hired some workmen to dig on his property. (The Talmud omits to say why. Perhaps he was contemplating building there and needed to prepare the ground for the foundation of the new building. Maybe he was putting in a new patio behind an existing house.) The workmen began to dig but, shortly after beginning, they came across a man buried on the property: it was Rabbi Achai bar Josiah, and he was not at all pleased to have his final resting place disturbed. To express his dis- pleasure, he snorted at them without actually saying a single word. The men, understandably unnerved, ran to Rav Nachman and told him what had happened. “A man, whose previously buried body we ourselves unearthed while we were digging, snorted right at us!” Rav Nachman was neither terrified nor especially impressed by this report, and so took himself to the disturbed burial site to conduct his own investigation. And there, he found the disturbed decedent waiting for him. “And you are . . . who?” he asked. The man, apparently unwilling to snort at a man of Rav Nachman’s piety and learning, said his name and nothing more. “Rabbi Achai bar Josiah.” Rav Nachman, pleased (at least) to have disturbed someone with whom he presumably expected to have a common language in which to discuss the situation, began with a reference to tradition. “Did Rav Mari not say that even the most righteous among the living are destined to turn to dust in their graves?” In other words: why are you still in your pre-decomposed state? Surely God’s ability to grant life to the dead at the end of time is not dependent on the dead not decomposing. Even the saints decompose! Rav Achai bar Josiah was unimpressed. “Rav Mari?” he asked. “Sorry, never heard of him.” Sorry, I’m not impressed. And I’m certainly not interested in turning into dust based on a tradi-

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 102 tion related by someone I’ve never even heard of. Who would be? Would you? Rav Nachman refused to become irritated, not even after hearing a saintly and righteous colleague such as Rav Mari spoken of with such apparent disrespect. And so, taking a softer tone, he pointed out that the doctrine which he cited in Rav Mari’s name is actually already found clearly enunciated in Scripture. “It’s a verse from the Bible too,” he said. “Is it not written in Kohelet that the dust—the mortal remains of any human being—shall eventually return to the earth, thus returning to its original state before God Almighty breathed life into it and granted it existence in the world?” Rav Achai was unimpressed. “Kohelet, you may have studied,” he granted, the rising tone at the end of his sentence making it abundantly clear that he was not done speaking. “But Proverbs, you apparently didn’t study at all.” Or at least, not as diligently as you worked through the hoary wisdom of Solomon in his literary role as Kohelet, king of Jerusalem. “In Proverbs, does it not say clearly, ‘It is envy that leads to bone rot,’ from which obscurely phrased thought we may deduce a profound lesson, to wit, that the bones of all those who die with envy and jealousy in their hearts will rot and turn to dust. And what then of the corollary to that thought—that those who die with neither envy nor jealousy in their hearts will presumably not suffer that same fate and their bones, by contrast, will not rot away at all?” And, incidentally, here I am! Rav Nachman was uncertain what to do. The lesson sounded cogent. And Rav Achai bar Josiah, who Rav Nachman knew to be long dead, appeared actually to be standing before him. He reached out to touch his interlocutor, to see if he was perhaps really a ghost, not an actual deceased individual who simply had not turned to dust in his grave. He felt a real man before him, not a specter, not a spirit, not a ghost at all. “Look,” he began, not at all sure where he was going, “I’m sorry I doubted you. Why don’t you come over to my place and we can discuss this there.” Rav Achai bar Josiah must have been satisfied . . . not because he had coaxed an invitation from Rav Nachman, but because he now had him exactly where he wanted him. “Not a good plan,” he began. “Not a good plan at all! And since we’re comparing levels of Scriptural knowledge, haven’t you ever studied the books

103 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI of the prophets? Because, if you had, then you would surely recall the verse from the Book of Ezekiel that says unequivocally, ‘And you shall know that I am God when I open your graves.’ Surely that should make it clear that you can’t release a deceased person from his grave merely by inviting him over for tea! Only God can call the dead from their graves!” Or is there some other way to understand a verse set in the simplest Hebrew imaginable? Rav Nachman was offended. But he was also slightly unsure how to defend his honor . . . and his knowledge of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. He chose to offer one final verse, one he hoped would prove decisive. And he chose not to cite a verse from some obscure corner of Scripture, but one of the most famous verses from the Torah itself, the fountainhead of divine wisdom in the sublunary world. “Well,” he began gingerly, “does it not say in the Torah, ‘For you are dust and to dust you shall return?” Those were God’s own words to Adam, part of the specific series of punishments and curses meted out to him in consequence of his great sin. Surely that trumps any other Scriptural reference! Rav Achai bar Josiah listened carefully. Unwilling to contradict the sacred word of the Torah, yet also anxious to make his point clearly, he waited just for a moment before speaking, then delivered what the Talmud clearly considers to be the coup de grace in this particular, and peculiar, debate. “Yes, it’s so,” he conceded easily. “But that will only happen once . . . and that one time will occur a single hour before the dead are resurrected for judgment at the end of time.” So there!

S o much for their bodies . . . but what of the souls of the righteous. What is their fate? That too, it turns out was a matter of debate in Talmudic times. Rabbi Eliezer, for example, taught that the souls of the righteous are stored beneath the divine throne of Glory, the great heavenly seat upon which the Almighty sits to govern the world. This, the rabbi learned from a verse from the First Book of Samuel, an obscure remark that Abi- gail, wife of the churlish Nabal, made to David in which she contrasted the souls of the righteous (clearly counting David among them) and the wicked. The righteous, Abigail noted, are destined to be bound up in the

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 104 bond of life everlasting . . . and this, Rabbi Eliezer interpreted as referring to a permanent storage facility of some sort beneath God’s holy throne in which the souls of the righteous are kept safe until the great day comes in which the dead are resurrected and the messianic age of peace begins on earth. And what of the wicked? Abigail’s words in their regard are also a bit unclear and seem to indicate that their destiny, the opposite of the fate of the righteous, is for their souls to rattle around endlessly in the world like so much unwanted trash on a windy street. For his part, Rabbi Eliezer takes the reference and runs with it, supposing that there must be an angel stationed at one end of the universe and another stationed at the other end, and that these two angels spend their days aim- lessly batting the souls of the wicked back and forth in some ghastly, ghostly game of soul tennis. This opinion, however, was not without its detractors. And, indeed, the Talmud relates the story of an apostate who approached Rabbi Abahu, one of the great Talmudic teachers who lived in Caesarea at the end of the third and beginning of the fourth centuries C.E. The apostate approached Rabbi Abahu and put his question to him bluntly, almost rudely. “Do you really want to say that the souls of the righteous are stored up beneath the Throne of Glory on which the Almighty sits to rule the world?” he asked, clearly having more in mind than posing a simple query. “Because,” he continued, “if that is the case, then how exactly do you explain the famous story of King Saul and the sorceress of Ein Dor, a story in which it is related how the sorceress summoned up the prophet Samuel from the grave and spoke to his ghost?” Surely Samuel was among the righteous—he was one of the greatest prophets of all time and, to boot, a judge of all Israel—yet the story as told in Scripture has him approaching from below, not above: “And the sorceress asked Saul, ‘Who shall I cause to rise up to you?’ and Saul answered, ‘Cause Samuel to rise up to me.’” So if the souls of the righteous are kept beneath God’s glorious throne in heaven . . . then why did the sorceress—who would presumably have known all about such things—not have asked whom Saul wished her to draw down to him from above, not whom he wished her to raise up into his presence from below?

105 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI Rabbi Abahu was not the kind of man to be defeated that easily, much less by an apostate who had turned his back on the holy traditions of Israel. And he had a good answer ready. “It is,” he explained patiently, “all a matter of scheduling. Samuel had only been dead at that point for less than a year, you see. And we have a tradition of unimpeachable authority that teaches clearly that the status of the soul changes after twelve months have passed. For the first year after death, the body is still at least slightly present in the world and the soul attends it, now ascending on high to heaven, now returning to the earth to visit its former earthly home. After twelve months, however, the body no longer exists—or, at least, no longer exists in a real enough way to require the further min- istration of the soul—and the soul, now formally freed of its final earthly obligation, soars up to heaven and there it remains.” Taken all together, a slightly confused picture appears. The dead return to dust. But not all of them. And not immediately. And not all according to the same schedule. The souls of the righteous do ascend to heaven, at least eventually, but the souls of the wicked are in their own sphere of posthumous activity, not basking in the light of God’s beneficent presence at all, but rather being used as vaporous, animate shuttlecocks batted endlessly from one end of the universe to the other. When someone in our world dies, it is almost inevitable that the survivors eventually begin to wonder about the fate of the soul after death. Is the soul truly durable? Does it live on . . . and, if so, then where does it do so? (It sounds almost fatuous to ask the question so baldly, but it is not really such a bad question at all. In a world in which all physically existent things must exist in some specific place, then why cannot the absence of physical location not be used to demonstrate that something does not truly exist in the physical, or even metaphysical, sense? Or, to ask the question from the other direction, what can it possibly mean for the soul to exist, but not to exist in any specific place? And if the answer is that it does not actually make any sense to claim that the soul exists, but not in some specific, nameable, place, then it is only reasonable to ask where that place is and what its name is.)

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 106 When the soul goes to wherever it goes, can it return? The prophet Samuel was drawn back from . . . wherever . . . to the world of the living, and he did not appear too pleased at all by the experience. (“And Samuel said unto Saul, ‘Why have you angered me so severely by summoning me into your earthly presence?”) Would that be the case for all people? Is it possible that, more than anything, the dead wish to be left in peace? That much seems clear from the words of Samuel . . . but could they also be true for people that we ourselves would be so incredibly, indescribably, happy to see one more time, to have the opportunity to speak with just for another minute or two? Surely they would feel the same way . . . or is it true that death changes everything, that death is more of a portal than a threshold, that those who enter Sheol are not merely housed there until the time of the Messiah, but altered, possibly even irrevocably, by the experience of abandoning life to the living and moving on personally to the World of Truth? All these thoughts assail the living as they make their way through the various stages of grief. Sometimes, the thought that the dead live on in some posthumous guise as souls or ghosts or specters is comforting. Sometimes, that same thought, however, seems spooky and weird, unpleasant and disorienting. Indeed, the very thought that the dead are only dead to us, but not wholly dead to themselves, is one of those thoughts capable of inspiring and confusing and distressing, all at the same time. And the huge selection of books written by people who, judging from the copy on their book jackets, appear to know with complete certainty that the souls of the dead are not only fully existent, but fully available (to those happy few who know where to look and precisely how to call out to them) only confuses the issue for most people. In the end, most people don’t really know what to think. On the one hand, the wish for the dead to Continue with Aleinu on page 92. be alive somewhere is profound. We harbor that thought, now deriding it as a silly fantasy, now embracing it as part of self-evident reality, for all the long months and years it takes us fully to come to terms with the loss of someone truly loved. And then, after the grief finally does subside and life resumes something of normalcy, the fantasy becomes

107 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI folded into our worldview, always present, always there somewhere, always part of how we think of life and death (and of the dead themselves), sometimes making us feel gullible and naïve, but mostly offering us the solace and comfort of hope even long after we feel ourselves past the grief that loss inevitably entails. For most people, these emotions constitute a huge puzzle. Are they merely the self- serving fantasies of people who can’t let go? But what of the sorceress’ success in calling up the spirit of Samuel? Or is it our disinclina- baal tefillah tion to believe that constitutes the fantastic part of our approach to life by valorizing our endlessly cynical inability to embrace the most tangible evidence there is of God’s endless goodness: the continued, perceptible, baal tefillah fully real existence of the durable human soul after death? But what then of the abject fail- ure of science to prove categorically and undeniably that the sole rational way to explain the ghostly, posthumous appearances on earth of deceased persons is with reference to the simple reality of those persons’ posthumously existent souls? In the end, belief in the ongoing reality of the durable soul is a personal decision. None of us can say with certainty what happens after death, or even what death itself ultimately is, whether it is a road or a wall, a door or a tunnel, a fence or a gate in a fence. No one who has crossed that threshold has returned, not unequivocally, not fully verifi- ably, not in a way that is not by its very nature open to conflicting interpretations. None among the living can say with certainty what awaits us after we fill our lungs with air one final time and our hearts gently come to rest. We all wish it were otherwise. But, in the end, the only thing we human beings truly do all have in common is our shared existence in the cloud of unknowing that is our life in the world of dust and mud. I’ve already alluded to a parable rabbis are fond of quoting that likens the human being facing death to an unborn child, a fully formed, but as-yet-unborn, fetus facing imminent birth. Surely, as the walls of the uterus begin to contract, as the waters suddenly withdraw, as the journey begins to an unfathomable new stage of existence . . . surely the fetus must imagine that it is dying, that life is ending, that all it has known is

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 108 about to be taken away and replaced by . . . The Half Kaddish nothing at all. The baby, the as-yet-still-unborn baby Magnified and sanctified be the great name must surely think all those things—to the extent that such nearly-borns can think at all, of God in this world created according to of course—but the point is that, however they frame those thoughts, they are wrong. divine plan, and may God’s sovereignty be And not merely wrong, but utterly and completely wrong. Life is beginning, not ending. established speedily and soon during the What awaits at the other end of the birth canal is not oblivion, but life itself with all its days of our lives and the lives of all mem- sensory, intellectual and emotive delights, with all its valleys and peaks, with all its suc- bers of the House of Israel, and let us say, cesses and failures, with all that it brings both to those who live life fully and to those who Amen. do not. The light the baby must begin to per- ceive somewhere along the way in the The congregation joins the cantor or baal tefillah in reciting this line. process of birth is not the light of some eerie netherworld, but the light of the world, the May God’s great name be blessed for- light of life itself, the light of a room filled with supportive, helpful medical personnel, and a father and, even absent a father, a ever and throughout all eternity. mother into whose arms and warm, loving The cantor or baal tefillah continues: bosom the baby will come to rest only sec- onds after exiting from the corridor that leads May the name of the Holy One, source of to life. Is death for the fully grown the same as all blessing, be blessed, adored, lauded, birth for the almost born? Rabbis who quote the parable cited above invariably do so in praised, extolled, glorified and venerated in order to suggest that such is precisely our human situation: we think of death as death, language . . . but we are no less wrong than the baby in the birth canal who thinks it is dying, but Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: who is totally and absolutely wrong, whose appraisal of its situation is not only incorrect, more exalted but precisely the opposite of correct. Accord- ing to this interpretation, the baby is wrong Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: because it lacks the full picture. It can’t see through the uterine walls, can’t imagine that entirely more exalted there is anything at all behind and beyond the perimeters of the only world it has ever . . . than any blessing, hymn, ode or prayer recited known. The baby’s response to the onset of labor, therefore, is not illogical, only totally by the faithful in this world, and let us say, Amen. incorrect. And that, the theory goes, is our situation as well. Hemmed in by the givens of the physical world we all inhabit, we too find it impossible even to begin to imagine what could possibly lie beyond the edges of the universe, the boundaries of being as we have come to understand them during the course of our years here on earth. According to this theory, we are not stupid or dense, only incapable of imagining life outside of life, a world beyond

109 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI the world, a universe of existence unrelated to the relentless physics of the world we now inhabit. But that doesn’t mean there is no such thing . . . any more than the inability of a pre-born infant to imagine the world has anything much to do with the way things are in the world into which that same baby is about to be born. There is something incredibly satisfying about this parable. I’ve cited it myself dozens of times in an effort to provide people in the depths of misery with something to comfort them, with an idea that possibly might sus- tain them through the grim reality of a long week of mourning. Is it true? It could be! But, of course, it also might not be. The fetus in the story is completely wrong. But that does- n’t mean, obviously, that everything anyone deduces based on one’s experience of the world in which one lives is necessarily also wrong. That truth certainly constitutes a kind of flaw in the logic that drives the parable forward to its natural conclusion, but most will prefer to ignore it. And, indeed, just because it may not reflect reality, it surely does not follow that it could not reflect how things truly are. Maybe the months and years of our lives are nothing more than a journey down a long, labyrinthine birth canal that leads from the womb—the real womb in which we were developed as embryos—through this world and its sorrows and frustrations to the true life that awaits us all at the other end of the tunnel. Is it true? I hope so! The goal, however, is not to embrace things that can neither be proven nor demonstrated as dogmatic truths, but to embrace them as the focus of prayer and of hope about the future. Not to insist that things are true because one really, really wishes them to be true, but to embrace the concept as something that, almost by its very nature, can generate the kind of spiritual energy capable of propelling people forward Ve’atah Kadosh toward faith in God, and toward faith in the ongoing beneficence of God’s rule over the world. The idea is not to stamp our feet up and down like spoiled children who want something they simply cannot have, but to accept the limits of knowledge and then, chastened and humbled by the limits of intelligence, to seek comfort in faith in God, the Wisdom of the world and its heart, its soul, and its source of spiritual energy. Is there a life that awaits us just past the grave? Eventu-

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 110 ally, we will all know. In the meantime, we On Saturday evening, continue here: can only hope for the best and, in focusing May the beauty of Adonai, our God, be upon us. And may God establish our hopes on the God acclaimed in Scripture as the Hope of Israel, find a release from grief for us the work of our hands; the work of our hands, may God establish it. and the comfort that can only come from faith in God’s enduring goodness. Psalm 91 Whosoever resides in the secret place of the Most High, abides in the shadow of Almighty God. This I say to A: “You are my haven and my fortress, my God in Who I trust, the God Who saves peo- On the same day Rabbi Akiba died, Rabbi Judah ple from traps before they spring and from infectious scheming, the Patriarch was born. When Rabbi Judah the Patriarch died, Rav Yehudah was born. When the God Who grants people refuge beneath the divine wings by Rav Yehudah died, Rava was born. When Rava covering them with a divine pinion, the God Whose truth is both died, Rav Ashi was born. And this amazing con- shield and armor.” catenation of births and deaths comes to teach us something specific: that it never happens And this I say to the faithful: “Fear neither nighttime terror nor that a truly righteous individual—a tzaddik— arrows that fly freely in the daytime, neither contagion that creeps dies and leaves the world until a similarly righteous individual—a tzaddik of the same level of along in the darkness nor pestilence that prowls forward in the decency and goodness—is born. And this is afternoon light. A thousand will fall by your side, perhaps even what is meant in the Book of Kohelet, where the ten thousand at your right side, but the plague shall not touch you verse famously notes that the sun daily rises and then sets, only to rise again the following at all. Indeed, this is precisely what you shall see when you inspect morning. Surely, this is a commonplace obser- the situation carefully: the wicked getting their due.” vation, not one worthy of inclusion in a book of wisdom! But the real meaning of the verse is For You, A, are my haven; You have fashioned Your residence on suggested by the story of the birth of the high. And I say this to the faithful as well: “Evil shall not harm you, prophet Samuel, whose sun began to shine nor shall sickness approach your tent, for God will appoint angels to before the sun of Eli, his predecessor, finally set for good . . . guard you in all your paths; they, the angels of God, shall carry you on their hands lest your feet be smitten by stones. You shall tread on lions and asps with impunity, on lion cubs and serpents with no fear In the end, the Jewish people is eternal of harm, for thus says God: “I shall save whoever desires Me; I shall not because individual Jewish men and exalt whoever knows My name. When that person calls upon Me, I women live forever, but because it has always been the case that people have stepped up shall answer him; I shall be with him in times of trouble. I to the plate and taken the places of those shall grant him relief and honor him. I shall satisfy him with length who have spent their lives standing in for those who came before them, and whose of days and I shall show him salvation in Me.” time has now come to vanish from the earth and to allow others to do for them what they Ve’atah Kadosh themselves did for others. That is how it And You are holy, O God enthroned upon the praises of Israel. And so did works, this permanence, this durability, this Isaiah have a vision in which he saw the angels calling out to each other on air of eternity. No one lives forever. No one high, saying, “Holy, holy, holy is of hosts; the whole world is filled with manages to elude the Angel of Death perma- A nently. No one gets out alive. But there are divine glory.” By this, the prophet meant to allude to a great secret: that, as always others to take our place on earth, to they hear the word “holy” repeated, they offer a different response each time finish our unfinished work . . . and to begin the word is repeated: “Holy unto the highest heaven is the holy Temple!”, work that they themselves will either finish or leave unfinished for others to look after. In then “Holy on earth is the God Who does wonders!”, then “Holy forever turn, those people will also undertake all sorts and for all time is A, the God of hosts. The whole earth is filled with the of projects they will not live to bring to splendor of divine grandeur.”And so did Your prophet Ezekiel say, fruition . . .

111 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI Depending on your mood, this whole line of thinking is either going to be comforting or distressing (and dismally so). On the one hand, there is something intensely satisfying about feeling oneself to be part of something big, of something eternal and permanent. On the other hand, it is less satisfying, and distinctly less encouraging, to feel that our major contribution to the world is to accept as our own the unfinished work of previous generations and, eventually, to bequeath our own unfinished tasks to generations to come. But, in the end, the vertical interconnectedness of the generations of Israel in time is as much a part of Jewish reality as is the hori- zontal interconnectedness of all contemporary Jewish communities—and, indeed, of all contemporary Jewish people independent of their communal affiliations—in space. Together, this sense of intense connection, this renunciation of differentiation for the sake of unity, is meant to reflect the oneness of God and the unique nature of the divine. And it is in faith in the one God that the fear of death finally and definitively dissolves, for the fear of nothingness loses meaning in the supposition that there is no place, not in space and not in time, that is devoid of God. Embracing faith in the one God as the original Author of life therefore inevitably must also entail faith in the same God as the Ender and the Restorer of life. And it is in the matrix of ideas that come from just this kind of focused, mindful thinking about the nature of God in the world of humankind that comes the power to face loss and to stare down grief . . . and to find pleasure in memory, and also courage . . . the courage to live on, to re- invent oneself, to survive, and to believe the dead not to be annihilated, but merely trans- formed, by death.

The Angel of Death knew that the time had come for Rav Chiyya, one of the greatest sages of ancient times, to depart this world for the next. The only problem was that he could not approach him. (The man was always involved in some holy activity that effectively prevented his death: either study or prayer or some combination of both. And the Angel of Death is forbidden to interrupt either, let alone both, merely to end the life of someone whose time on earth

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 112 has come to its final moments.) Finally, frustrat- “And a great wind lifted me up and I heard a great noise behind me. Blessed ed by his own inability to perform the task for be the splendor of from the dwelling place of all divine splendor.” The which he was created, the Angel came up with A a plan he felt likely to work. prophet was speaking plainly and not in poetic metaphor: he meant literally Donning the guise of a penniless beggar, he that a great wind lifted him high and, as he was aloft, he heard a great noise approached Rav Chiyya’s home and, knocking behind them: the sound of the angelic hosts praising God with the sacred politely on the door, called out, “Won’t someone offer a poor man some bread?” Of course, words, “Blessed be the splendor of God as it originates in the sacred resi- bread was brought out to him immediately. dence of the Shechinah on high.” And Moses too had a prophetic experi- This was not quite good enough, however. ence of God at the Sea of Reeds, whereupon he included in his great song The Angel, therefore, had no choice but to con- these words: “ shall reign forever and always.” Indeed, he meant to say tinue the ruse. “Are you not a man who shows A compassion to the poor personally?” he asked that the sovereignty of A would surely exist for all time. craftily, calling inside and hoping Rav Chiyya A, God of our forebears Abraham, Isaac and Israel, keep ever in mind himself would hear the question and rise to the the wayward tendencies of Your people Israel and guide their hearts to Your challenge. “Why, then, will you not behave kindly toward me?” service. For God, compassionate and forgiving of sin, will never destroy the The lesson must have stung. Rav Chiyya, a Jewish people. Indeed, God will ever be charitable and kind, declining to master of rabbinic tradition, knew all too well embrace anger as a response to waywardness or let the full force of divine that one’s obligations to the poor have only partially to do with giving donations of charity rage be known, for You are Adonai, good, forgiving and suffused with lov- funds or goods, and that they extend well ing-kindness to all those who call out to You. Your righteousness is rooted beyond gift-giving to the more complex require- in eternal justice and Your Torah is truth itself. You granted truth to Jacob ment also personally to behave kindly, gener- and mercy to Abraham, just as You have consistently promised since earliest ously and considerately towards those in need. The ruse worked. Rav Chiyya got up from his times. Blessed be Adonai, Who day by day bears our burden and Who is the study table and, duly chastened by the beggar’s God of our salvation, selah. A, God of all heavens, is with us; the God of words, came out into the street to exchange a Jacob is our refuge, selah. , God of all heavens, happy is the individual few friendly words with a poor man before A sending him on his way with gifts of charity. In who trusts in You. A, save us! May sovereign God answer us on the day we this way, he must have hoped he would fulfill call out. both aspects of his obligation to the man who Blessed be our God, who created us to reflect the splendor of the divine, had come to his home for assistance. As Rav Chiyya appeared in his own doorway, separating us from those who err in their assessment of God, granting us a however, the Angel of Death threw off his dis- Torah of truth, and planting the potential for eternal life in our midst. God guise and showed him his whip made wholly of will open our hearts to the Torah and, in so doing, inspire love and awe of fire. That did it. Recognizing the Angel’s trade- the Divine in our hearts so that we may do God’s will and serve the mark accoutrement and knowing resistance to be pointless (and wholly so), Rav Chiyya knew Almighty with unconflicted hearts, thus ensuring that we will not be toiling his time was up and, declining to argue or for naught or become enmeshed in pointless, fruitless endeavors. resist, he gave up his soul and peacefully May it be Your will, , our God and God of our ancestors, that we be accepted his fate. A inspired to keep Your laws in this world so that we merit to live long enough to see and inherit goodness and blessing in the days of the Messiah and life in the World to Come. May all this come to pass so that my soul be hen you have to go, you have to W inspired to sing out to You and not be silent. A, my God, I shall declare go. Everybody has one life. And everybody owes one death. No one hurries to pay. No my gratitude to You forever. Blessed be the individual who places his trust one especially wants to pay. No one would always in A, thus making A into his safe haven in times of trouble. Trust not opt out of the whole system . . . were it in for all time, for , , is the rock of all ages. only possible to do so. But it is not possible to A B A opt out and, therefore, eventually everybody Therefore do those who know Your name trust in You, for You will steps out into the street to behave kindly never abandon any who seek You, A. A is well pleased for the sake of toward a poor person, only to realize that the divine righteousness; God will magnify the Torah and make it glorious. person one has come out to behave kindly

113 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI toward is none other than the Angel of Death and that one’s time on this sorry earth has apparently come to an end. The Angel of Death comes to us wearing many different disguises. Sometimes, he is easily recognizable. Other times, he is less easy to discern. Still other times, the disguise is so excellently made that no one recognizes his arrival until it is far too late to respond effectively. And, at least sometimes, there is baal tefillah no time even to respond at all! In the end, however, these are all details, all parts of a story that has a million beginnings, but only one end. Rav Chiyya was one of the greatest sages of Talmudic antiquity. One of the greatest baal tefillah students of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch and the teacher of Rav (the same Rabbi Abba ben Aibu, called Rav, the story of whose death is told above), Rav Chiyya personally served as one of the bridge figures that linked the age of the Mishnah, the so-called tannaitic period (because the technical name for a sage or teacher whose lessons were included in the Mishnah is tanna), with the age of the Tal- mud itself, the so-called amoraic period (because the technical name for a rabbi whose words are included in the Talmud is an amora), and he is recalled as being one of the truly great scholars of both ages. He was a personal paradigm of piety, a master preacher, an expert in law and lore, in halakhah and aggadah, a leader of the Jewish community both in the Land of Israel and the diaspora . . . and even his time eventually came. It took a bit of subterfuge on the part of the Angel of Death to get things rolling, but, in the end, even Rav Chiyya had to pay his one death . . . just as all his contemporaries did, and just as do we all. The way we relate to this aspect of human reality will depend on the way we think about life itself. For those lucky enough to have embraced a worldview imbued with gratitude to God for the gift of life, death will lose a considerable amount of its sting. For those foreign to faith to whom life is not a gift, but a right—and, at that, the most basic of all human rights—the thought that it must Between Passover and Shavuot, turn back to page 100 to count the Omer. come to an end will feel as much like oppres- On the Saturday evening during Chanukah, turn forward to page 118 sion as happenstance . . . and as an intolerable intrusion into what would otherwise be a and kindle the Chanukah lights. Then conclude the service with Havdalah pleasant and endless sojourn in the land of (page 116), Aleinu (page 92), and the Mourner’s Kaddish (page 94). the living.

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 114 The soul is a gift from God, one that, The Full Kaddish given, can also be taken. Indeed, inherent in the loan agreement is the unavoidable obli- Magnified and sanctified be the great name of God in gation to yield up the soul when the agreement runs its course and the time has come this world created according to divine plan, and may for the soul to return unto the same God Who gave it in the first place. No one wants God’s sovereignty be established speedily and soon dur- to pay . . . but there is a time for everything ing the days of our lives and the lives of all members of under the sun, a time to live and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to reap, a time the House of Israel, and let us say, Amen. to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to gather The congregation joins the cantor or baal tefillah in reciting this line. up stones and a time to let them all roll back to wherever it is stones roll to when no one May God’s great name be blessed holds them together and makes of them a man-made mound of what would otherwise forever and throughout all eternity. be disparate pebbles. When you have to go, you have to go. The cantor or baal tefillah continues: The challenge is to find the golden mean between stoic acceptance of the way things May the name of the Holy One, source of all blessing, be are in the world (and how life works, and blessed, adored, lauded, praised, extolled, glorified and how death), and the grief even the most philosophically oriented among us feels venerated in language . . . when faced with devastating loss. No one buries a mother—or a wife or a husband, or Except between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: a father or a sibling, let alone a child— more exalted stoically. No one stands by an open grave thinking about the angel’s ruse and how Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, say: even a man as holy and learned as Rav Chiyya eventually fell prey to his sinister entirely more exalted machinations. No one hears those first clods of earth banging up against the lid of a cas- . . . than any blessing, hymn, ode or prayer recited by the ket and feels the comfort that comes from recalling that life offers us times to mourn, faithful in this world, and let us say, Amen. but also times to dance, times to weep, but May the prayers and supplications of all Israel be also times to laugh. Those thoughts only come later, when the whole experience is set acceptable before their heavenly Parent, and let us say, a bit into perspective and the reality of how Amen. death works takes its place in the context of the reality of how life itself works. And they May we, and all Israel, be blessed with great peace that do come, eventually, to all who experience loss. The trick, therefore, is not so much to comes to us directly from heaven, and with life, and let be wise, but patient. And to accept that with us say, Amen. patience will also come comfort and, with comfort, peace. May God Who brings peace to the heavens grant peace to us and to all Israel, and let us say, Amen. Between Passover and Shavuot, turn back to page 100 to count the Omer. On the Saturday evening during Chanukah, turn forward to page 119 n ancient times, all who came to the Tem- I and kindle the Chanukah lights. Then conclude the service with Havdalah ple Mount in Jerusalem were bidden by tradition to enter on the right side of the great (page 117), Aleinu (page 93), and the Mourner’s Kaddish (page 95). gate leading into the complex, then walk

115 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI around the complex by moving in a counter- clockwise direction and then leave by passing On Saturday evening, light a Havdalah candle and, holding a cup of wine, through the left side of that same portal. The tradition, for those in mourning, however, was the reverse: such people would enter on the left side of the gate and move around the Temple mount in a clockwise direction, then leave by passing through the right side of the portal. The reason for this reversal was simple: it was to stimulate the notice of others and to prompt words of condolence. And, indeed, tradition records that, when someone on the Temple Mount would notice an individual walking in the opposite direction from the norm, it was considered customary and kind to ask what had prompted that individual to walk in that unexpected direction. There were several plausible answers and each had its traditional response. But if the answer was, “Because I am in mourning,” then the response of the questioner was as simple as it was elegant and kind. “May the One Who dwells in this Temple grant you comfort,” the questioner would respond simply, leaving the individual in mourning to take comfort in a simple prayer. The response was not that death is inevitable, that there is a time to mourn as well as time to dance, that none can avoid the Angel of Death forever. All those thoughts are entirely correct, but they are truths that an individual who has suffered loss has to come to personally, if only eventually. We therefore can close this long treatise on loss and recovery neither by stressing the inevitability of demise nor by philosophizing about the ephemeral nature of life. Instead, we close by saying the ancient words cited above: hashokhein babayit hazeh yinachamekhah: May the God Who dwells in this Temple—and in this world without a Temple, in this world in which each of us is bidden to make of his or her life a temple to the glory of God—may the same God Whose living spirit dwelt in the Temple in ancient times and Whose spirit lives on today in the hearts of the faithful, may that same God grant you comfort. May you all have long lives! And may you never again know loss or sadness, only happiness and good tidings, only the satisfaction that comes from embracing life to the fullest and in accepting the solace that can only come from deep and abiding faith in God, the Author of life.

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 116 Bibliographical Notes Havdalah King Solomon’s reference to the rope of three On Saturday evening, light a Havdalah candle and, holding a cup of wine, strands is found in the Bible at Kohelet 4:12. recite the following prayer at least forty-two minutes after sundown. The story about the disciples of Rav dining along the banks of the River Danak after the depar- At the conclusion of weekday festivals, recite only the blessing over the wine ture of his funeral cortege comes from the Tal- and the concluding blessing. mud, Tractate Berakhot, pages 42b and 43a. Behold, I trust in God, source of my salvation, and I have no fear, for A, The account of the death of Rabbi Judah the Patri- arch, called Rabbi, is preserved in the Talmud B, is my strength and my song, and he will be my salvation, for “you will in Tractate Ketubbot on page 104a. The story draw water in gladness from the springs of salvation.” For, as salvation of Rabbi lifting his ten fingers aloft as he lay comes from A, so may your blessing come to Your people, selah. A, God dying is told on the same page of the Talmud. of all heavens, is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge, selah. ,God of The stories about Moses and Samuel insisting A that they received no personal gain from their all heavens, happy is the individual who trusts in You. A, save us! May efforts on behalf of Israel are found, respec- Sovereign God answer us on the day we call out. And just as the Jews had tively, at Numbers 16:15 and 1 Samuel 12:3. light and joy and happiness and dignity in ancient times, so may it be for The story of Rabbi Akiba’s death is told in the Tal- mud in Tractate Berakhot on page 61b. The us! And so do I lift the cup of salvation and call out in the name of A. verses cited from the seventeenth psalm are Psalm 17:13–14. The mishnah from Tractate Blessed are You, A, our God, Sovereign of the universe, Sanhedrin that promises all Israel a portion in the World to Come is found at the beginning Creator of the fruit of the vine. of the tenth chapter of that work. How many children Rabbi Akiba and Rachel had is not Lift up the spice box and say this blessing known, but a daughter (who later married the before savoring the scent of the spice. sage Ben Azzai) is mentioned in the Talmud in Tractate Ketubot on page 63a. Blessed are You, A, our God, Sovereign of the universe, The story of the death of Rabbi Joshua ben Chana- niah is told in the Talmud in Tractate Chagi- Creator of diverse varieties of spice. gah on page 5b. The reference to Rabbi Joshua serving in the Temple as a singer is Recite this blessing, then contemplate the glow preserved in the Talmud in Tractate Arakhin of the candle’s flames reflected in your fingernails. on page 11b. The citation from Jeremiah is Jeremiah 49:7, here translated wholly idiosyn- Blessed are You, A our God, Sovereign of the universe, cratically. The verse from Genesis mentioned Creator of flame and fire. is Genesis 33:12. The story of the death of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrka- Conclude with this blessing: nos is told in the Talmud in Tractate Berakhot on page 28b. The pillars called Yachin and Blessed are You, , our God, Sovereign of the Boaz are named at 1 Kings 7:21. A The collection of stories about the Angel of Death Universe, Who distinguishes between the holy featuring Rav Ashi and other rabbinic person- alities is found in the Talmud in Tractate Moed and the profane, between light and darkness, Katan on page 28a. (The slightly cryptic comment regarding Rav Ashi’s relationship to the between Israel and the nations, and between the editing of the Talmud is recorded in Tractate Bava Metzia on page 86a. Ravina, more pre- seventh day and the six days of creation. Blessed cisely Rav Avina, was his colleague and his are You, , Who distinguishes between the holy contemporary.) The Scriptural basis of giving A a grain tax called terumah to the kohanim is and the profane. found at Numbers 18:11–13 and Deuterono- my 18:4, cf. Nehemiah 13:5. For the require- ment that terumah be eaten in a state of puri-

117 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI ty, cf. the comments of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Terumot, chapter 7. The verse to which Rabbi Eleazar ben Shamua makes allusion in his remarks to the Angel of Death is Numbers 18:11. The story of Rav Chisda’s death is told in the Talmud in Trac- tate Moed Katan on page 28a and in Tractate Makkot on page 10a. The story of King David’s death is told in the Talmud in Tractate Shabbat on page 30b. A similar, more complicated, story is told about the sage Rab- bah bar Nachmani in the Talmud in Tractate Bava Metzia on page 86a. The stories about Rava and his brother, Rav Seorim, and about Rav Nachman and Rava, are found in adjacent passages in the Talmud in Tractate Moed Katan, page 28a. In the former story, the phrase “Since my name appeared on his list” is a paraphrase of the original, not a trans- On the first night, recite this paragraph: lation. The stories about Zeiri and the father of Samuel are found in the Talmud in Tractate Berakhot on page 18b. The story about the death of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos is told in the Talmud in Tractate San- hedrin on page 68a. My translation is untradi- tional in that I have assigned the line about Hyrkanos and his mother, left formally unat- tributed in the text, to Rabbi Eliezer himself instead of to Rabbi Akiba. The text works either way, but I prefer the heightened drama in my retelling. In the original, Rabbi Eliezer likens his arms to two Torah scrolls, but I think he must have been thinking of the two rollers of a single scroll that is closed tight, thus unread from, and I have translated according- ly. The custom of placing a stone on the casket of a deceased individual who dies under a ban is mentioned in the Mishnah in Tractate Eduy- ot, chapter 5, mishnah 6. Elisha’s cry of misery at Elijah’s death is recorded at 2 Kings 2:12. The use of those same words by King Jehoash to express his grief over the prospect of Elisha dying is recorded at 2 Kings 13:14. The reference to Rabbi Eliezer and Imma Shalom’s sons being exceedingly handsome is in the Talmud in Tractate Nedarim on page 20a. Rabbi Jeremiah’s deathbed instructions regarding the disposition of his body are preserved in Genesis Rabbah 100:2 and at several places in the Yerushalmi, e.g., in Tractate Kilayim 9:2, page 32b. The Mishnah that declares that those who deny that the Torah contains references to the posthumous resurrection of the dead will themselves be denied a portion in the

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 118 World to Come is found in Tractate Sanhedrin Lighting the Chanukah Lights in the first mishnah in the tenth chapter. The story of the death of Tabi, the servant of Rab- On the first night of Chanukah, recite all three blessings before lighting ban Gamliel is told in the Mishnah in Tractate the Chanukah candles. On subsequent nights, recite only the first two. Berakhot in the seventh mishnah in chapter two. The details regarding the laws of mourn- The candles are increased evening by evening from right to left, but we light ing as they do or do not apply to servants them from left to right, lighting the “new” candle first each evening. appear in the Talmud in Tractate Berakhot on page 16b. The detail about all the servants of Blessed are You, A, our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Who, the House of Gamliel being called by the sanctifying us with divine commandments, commanded us to same names is preserved in the Talmud Yerushalmi in Tractate Niddah 1:5, page 49b. kindle the Chanukah lamp. The reference to Tabi as a talmid chakham is in the Mishnah in Tractate Sukkah, in the first Blessed are You, A, our God, Sovereign of the Universe, mishnah in chapter two. The story about the Who wrought miracles for our ancestors in ancient days incident involving Rabban Gamliel putting out one of Tabi’s eyes is told in the Talmud at at this season of the year. Tractate Bava Kama, page 74b. The story regarding the death of Rabbi Eliezer’s female On the first night, recite this blessing: servant is told in the Talmud in Tractate Blessed are You, A, our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Who, Berakhot on page 16b. granting us vitality and strength, brought us to this season. The story of Rabbi Meir’s death is told in the Pales- tinian Talmud at the end of Tractate Kilayim. After lighting the candles, recite this paragraph. (The precise reference is Tractate Kilayim 9:4, page 32c.) The Talmudic reference to Rabbi These Chanukah lights that we now kindle are in honor of the Meir’s lesson that it is always a mitzvah to acts of salvation, the miracles and the wonders that You wrought honor the wishes of the dead is found in Trac- in ancient times for our ancestors through Your holy priests. All tate Taanit on page 21a, in Tractate Ketubot on page 70a, and in Tractate Gittin on pages eight days of Chanukah, these lights are sacred and we are thus 14b–15a and 40a. forbidden to use them in any way other than merely to gaze upon The passage detailing the behavior of the sages following the death of Rav Safra is found in the them in thanksgiving to Your name for the aforementioned won- Talmud in Tractate Moed Katan, pages 25a–b. ders, miracles and acts of deliverance. The prohibition of slashing oneself as a sign of grief is found at Deuteronomy 14:1. Rambam Maoz Tzur valorizes the individual who is the same inside and out in the Mishneh Torah at Hilkhot Dei’ot My God, my Rock, my Savior bold, Eternal, praise deserving, 2:6, using a rabbinic expression found in the Restore the Temple’s days of old, as when the priests were serving. Talmud in Tractate Berakhot on page 28a, From destiny unswerving, our victory not unnerving. and in several other settings as well. To You,I sing, my Sovereign, Your heritage preserving. The story of the death of Rabbi Eleazar ben Zadok’s father is preserved in the twelfth chapter of The enemies of the Maccabees tried our faith to spoil, the extra-Talmudic tractate properly entitled Eivel Rabbati (“The Great Tractate Regarding Their devotees, they knew to seize the Temple’s holy oil. Mourning Practices”), but more popularly But Judah’s brothers, roiled, knew well their plot to foil. known as Tractate Semachot. (The Hebrew As eight days turned, the oil burned and faith grew in that soil. word semachot literally means “periods of rejoicing” and is used euphemistically to refer to periods of great sorrow such as are occasioned by death and bereavement.) The translation here presented follows the interpretation of Dov Zlotnick in his Yale University Press edition (New Haven and London, 1966), p. 82. The identity of the man named Yochanan mentioned by Rabbi Eleazar is not known.

119 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI The story of the death of Rav Huna is found in Trac- tate Moed Katan, on page 25a. The reference to the funeral of King Hezekiah is found in the Talmud in Tractate Bava Kamma on page 17a. The observations concerning the deaths of Rabbi Meir, Ben Azai, Ben Zoma, Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa, Rabbi Yossi Ketanta, Yochanan ben Zakai, Rabban Gamliel the Elder, Ishmael ben Favi, and Rabbi Judah the Patriarch are found in the Mishnah in Tractate Sotah 9:15. The parallel remarks about the deaths of Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, and Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah are found in that same tractate in the Talmud on page 49b. I have combined these texts, but omitted some material relating to people named in both places. The story of Rabbi Ahai bar Josiah and Rav Nach- man is found in the Talmud in Tractate Shab- bat, on page 152b. The verse cited from Kohelet is Kohelet 12:7. The verse from Proverbs is Proverbs 14:30. The verse cited from the Book of Ezekiel is Ezekiel 37:13. The verse from the Torah is Genesis 3:19. The reference to Abigail and her analysis of the fates of the souls of the righteous and the wicked is found at 1 Samuel 25:29. Rabbi Eliezer’s analysis of that verse is found on the same page of Talmud mentioned above from Trac- tate Shabbat. The exchange between King Saul and the sorceress of Ein Dor is recorded at 1 Samuel 28:11. In the printed edition of the Talmud we have today, Rabbi Abahu’s opponent is described as a Sadducee, but there are Talmudic manuscripts that describe him as an apostate and that seems to make more sense in this context (given that the Sadducees were long gone by Rabbi Abahu’s day). The prophet Samuel’s question to King Saul (“Why have you angered me?”) is found at 1 Samuel 28:15. God is acclaimed as the Hope of Israel in the Bible at Jeremiah 14:5 and 17:13. The story about the baby being born is attributed to the late Y.M. Tuckachin- sky by Maurice Lamm in his book, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (New York, 1969), p. 222. The text noting that Rabbi Judah the Patriarch was born when Rabbi Akiba died, that Rabbi Judah (bar Ilai) was born when Rabbi Judah the Patriarch died, that Rava was born when Rabbi Judah (bar Ilai) died and that Samuel was born before Eli died is taken from the Tal- mud, where in appears in Tractate Kiddushin on page 72b.

SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning 120 The story of Rav Chiyya and the Angel of Death is found in the Talmud in Tractate Moed Katan This book is a publication of the on page 28a. Shelter Rock Jewish Center The tradition regarding the directions from which average citizens and those in unusual situa- of Roslyn, New York. tions entered the Temple Mount is found in the Mishnah in Tractate Middot, chapter 2, mishnah 2. To purchase additional copies, or for permission to reprint any material contained herein, please phone (516) 741-4305 or contact us at [email protected].

121 A Prayer Book for the House of Mourning SEFER ZOT NECHAMATI