Choose Life!
Cheshvan, 2781
See, I set before you this day blessing and curse, life and death,… Choose life therefore, so you and your children may live! Commands the Torah! Why should the Torah have to command this? Don’t we all want to live? Ah, you know as I that we do unskillful things with which harm ourselves and even our children. We can be our own worst, unforgiving critic. Why do we do this to ourselves? Maybe because we hide our true self: truth can be hard to face, when we doubt our true potential and we settle for less than life affirming choices. I myself apparently was an expert in hiding truths from myself, this year, my mother’s illness forced me to face childhood hurts for the first time in my adult life. And , although it’s an ongoing struggle, the honesty and tears helped find my way to forgiveness and acceptance. Jay Michaelson’s book, The Gate of Tears helped. Jay is a Rabbi, meditation teacher and scholar writes that we hide truths to protect ourselves. I came to see that “coming out of the closet” is not just for queer folks but for everyone. I was astonished at how many closets I and other people seem to have. People closet their spirituality, their joys, their life histories, their talents; loves…transgressions… they bury their essential selves, …And of course, their sadness. I think I was afraid of the sadness, the tears. Ironically they were the pathway to heart opening, healing and forgiveness.
Emet, being true to yourself is much harder for some folks. According to the Amer Pediatric Society Among non-binary youth, 41.8 percent of respondents stated that they had attempted suicide at some point in their lives. Many transgender young people experience family rejection, bullying and harassment, or feel unsafe for simply being who they are – But also, Somehow, many of these children choose life in spite of all the negative forces.
In “Through the Door of Life” “Joy Ladin, prof at Yeshiva U. Writes suicide had been my duty as a child; now it was my obligation as an adult. She writes of a failed attempt with a knife, and of the day she chose life. She had packed her car and was leaving her family, and wrote: …Driving away, my Jerusalem stone with its ancient injunction drove with me: And therefore choose life….my life insurance policy’s waiting period on suicide was up in two weeks. At almost the same moment, I had become free to begin or end my life. As I crossed the bridge that separated the region in which I could now walk publicly as myself, from the region in which I had agreed for my wife’s and children’s sake, to shroud myself in maleness, the tears turned into sobs, the sobs into howl, the howls into screaming, shrieking prayers not to survive this act. …I would always be someone who had driven away from those I loved to become myself. My family shrank behind me, shining and distant and fragile as a raindrop on a leaf.. Ahead of me lay nothing – nothing I knew,, Nothing I could imagine, no one I had every really been. I stopped screaming. I stopped crying. I stopped feeling. A friend was flying in to help me learn to live alone was due in a few hours, and, after all the damage had been done.. It wasn’t any life I would have chosen. But I had chosen life. (Gratitude to my children/ my teachers one of whom gave me this book as a gift)
Perhaps G!d is the force that says choose life. Instead of the eye of judgement, self or other, what if we could see with G!d’s eye of rachamim. What if we believed in transformation and the possibility for total change? We could begin with self compassion, embracing our true self.
There is an amazing story of the power of total transformation from the Talmud: Once a gladiator in the arenas of Rome, Reish retired or escaped, I don’t know which, but what do you do after gladiator? Like prisoners today, released with $20 in their pocket, He turned to crime and became a leader of bandits. One day he was walking by the river, and saw a form of striking beauty swimming in the river. Drawn, mesmerized by beauty He put weapons and armor aside and entered the water. Muscled and scarred he swam to the beauty, came near, and his jaw dropped. “you’re a dude” he may have said, in surprise. It was Rabbi Yohanan gone out for a swim, who somehow was not afraid, but looked into Reish’s eyes to see something there. Perhaps he saw the brilliance, or the turning away from intended mischief! “Your strength can be for Torah.” he suggested, opening in Reish’s imagination another path. Yochanan saw the potential for complete teshuvah, transformation.
Reish Lakish didn’t miss a beat, saying that Rabbi Yohanan should devote his beauty to women. In response Yochanan offered an interesting deal to keep the men together: that if Reish were to repent, he could marry R. Yohanan’s sister, who was “even more beautiful than me.” And this was done. Reish Lakish was inspired to give up his old life and devote himself to the pursuit of Torah The transformation was almost immediate. When he tried to go back and collect his weapons, he couldn’t pick them up! The two became brothers-in-law, friends, and study partners. Each brought different point of view to their study. They were sparring partners b’shem shamayim! Until one day they weren’t. There is not a happy ending here. Perhaps the arrangement was not so perfect after all. Once someone has transformed, it is forbidden to remind them of the person they used to be. The argument that caused the breach was over was the law of ritual purity of weapons, the question of when is the raw iron, transformed into a weapon rendered impure. Rabbi Yohanan said when it was first forged. Reish said not until it was hardened and sharpened. Rabbi Yohanan snarkily said that a bandit knows the tools of the trade.
Reish Lakish cried why are you abusing me?!. RY’s response – I’m the only reason you’ve been redeemed from your prior evil life! Worse even than reminding Reish he took the credit for Reish’s Teshuvah
Both Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yohanan were devastated. First Reish died and then, Rabbi Yohanan then became depressed. And soon died a broken man. What does it mean to deny teshuva and forgiveness? it could be the loss of life itself. If there is no hope of transformation how do we go on living? (Gratitude to my teacher R’ David Vaisberg who introduced me to this piece of Talmud)
There was another guy who could not forgive, and who therefore denies life. On Yom kippur we read of the reluctant prophet Jonah who ran away from G!d. But what exactly does it mean to run away from the source of Life, Light and compassion? In fact, under that gourd that withers after Nineveh is forgiven, Jonah asks for death, and citing G!d’s grace love and compassion rejects these, as if to say to G!d “I knew you’d forgive them, you’ve ruined everything”
I think that Jonah was always seeking death, because that’s what it means to run from the source of Life. I wrote this song using the notes of the shofar for the intervals. I thank my teachers this summer who inspired this song: Rav Ruth Gan Kagan, and her amazing class on the Thirteen Middot, and Rabbi David Ingber, in whose class on Reb Tzodok haCohen, reminded us that Jonah went to sleep in the midst of the storm, and the deeper meaning for this sleep. When overwhelmed we close our eyes, R’ David said, and that the Zohar teaches that Jonah’s story is an allegory, we are all travelers in life’s rickety boat .
JONAH (music linked to the title)
What does it mean to run away from, the source of life and light?
How could you go to sleep Jonah in the middle of this storm, this tonight?
Even in the belly of the boat in the pit of despair,
there can be light Jonah, if only you’ll awaken!
Awaken your heart to compassion, open, to feel again
Return to embrace your true essence, commit to healing the land
Choose life
Oh the storm is raging Throw me overboard, And you’ll be safe,
I will find a haven, sleeping in the waves
Even in the belly of the fish, in the pit of despair
there can be love Jonah, a pathway to repair
Chorus
Don’t give up on us Jonah
There’s no part of us beyond reclaim
Grace love and compassion, are the magic of your mission.
Somehow through the tears, we can find connection
To creation and to the space/ the face of G!d!
Adonai, Adonai El rachum v’chanun
Erech apayim v’rav chesed, v’ emet
Notzer chesed laalafim,
Nosseh avon vafesha v’chata v’nakeh
Chorus.
Jonah’s journey to choose life for himself meant the possibility of life for all of Nineveh. We are Nineveh today. A quarter million pounds of carbon dioxide are released to the atmosphere each minute.
Some of our actions bring great harm not only to individuals but to the earth herself, in the pursuit of “greed is good,” we are stealing our children’s future, burning up this beautiful planet, burning up its wondrous creatures. Shechina (G!d’s feminine presence) herself is wounded, crying Wake up! Thinking things will never change, & not forgive ourselves for these actions. is a deadly response. There is a warning in the ten commandments that sins of the parents carry to children so we’d better get it right for them
When we say this problem is too hard to change, aren’t we just being realistic about our limitations? According to a teaching of the Baal Shem Tov we are simply not living up who we are destined to be, ladders between heaven and earth. This of self doubt is a sort of spiritual laziness, keeping us from being agents of transformation. We are being like Jonah, not choosing life. We are failing to recognize our potential, that “what we do matters”. Like Jonah, we’re full of judgment, and we can’t find our way out, we don’t fight for our own lives.
It’s not for himself that Jonah woke up. Giant storm is raging outside, and he climbs into that boat to got to “sleep” like we’re sleeping right now. It’s not for his life, but for the innocent sailors he gets up, and then what does he say?. “throw me overboard” From the moment Jonah has run away from God, he’s already in the belly of despair, suicidal from a place of judgementalism, and “things will never change”
W all despair sometimes. I thought I could not change until I found myself healing from old hurts, I thought our society could never change and then I saw a virus make us stop in our tracks, in order to save life, AND EVERYTHING CHANGED, we are capable of change, and we must, if not to save ourselves, then for the sake of the children.
We, like Jonah can wake up.
Life can be saved.
God is the magnetic field who pulls the world back home, with the force of teshuvah (repentance). Home, our magnetic north Is the chen, chesed, and rachamim – the essences of the 13 middot/ attributes of the Divine. And after the storm grace that returns
So choose life like Joy did, like the young Reish Lakish , and as a reluctant Jonah did with G!d’s help.
Choose life so our children can live!
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