Yom Kippur 5765 - Ykam

So suppose no one feared death. Suppose we all felt serenely confident that we are safe in God’s hands, alive or dead. How would that be? What would be different? The last verse of the Adon Olam confronts the biggest fear, the biggest mystery: death itself. It speaks of handing ourselves over to God when we sleep, in complete trust, whether or not we awaken. It makes reference to how complicated we are; a soul, a mind, a body—or are they separate? It reminds us that we cycle through different kinds of consciousness, asleep, awake, sometimes especially roused to a very alert kind of awake, sometimes entirely unconscious. Sometimes we are aware and in control of ourselves, sometimes our life, our body, our soul is not in our power to control. What do we do with our fears and concerns about getting through the times when we have no power over ourselves? How can we face the biggest unknown of all?

Beyado afkid ruchi -- into his hand I deposit my spirit.
Byado -- into his hand, into his power
Afkid --This is a great complicated word that doesn’t translate in one English word. It means “deposit”, to put something in one expects to retrieve.. But “afkid” means a wide range of other things: to command, call upon, visit, remember. To remember all of a sudden, something forgotten, is “poked”. When God “remembers” Sarah, the promise to her is fulfilled in her pregnancy in old age. God is even sometimes called the Poked Sarah, the Rememberer of Sarah. So it also kind of means, in God’s hands, I remember my spirit, I’m reminded who I really am, when I surrender a false sense of my power over things.
Ruchi -- is the possessive of ruach. MY soul. Ruach can mean wind, air, breath, soul, spirit, mind, or ghost. So into Your hand I deposit, I expect you to remember, my breath, my life, my spirit.
B’et ishan -- at the time when I sleep
V’aira -- and I shall awaken, or, also when I awaken, or, and then I shall awaken, be roused.
V’im ruchi -- and with my spirit
Gviati --my body, or my lifeless body, my corpse
Adonai li v’lo ira -- God is with me, or for me, or mine -- and I will not fear.

These lines make the Adon Olam appropriate as a bedtime prayer. They hint at the ancient belief that sleep was much like death; that God holds your soul when you sleep, and if it is not returned, you die. The poem expresses contentment with this arrangement, a sense that one is not ever abandoned or alone but always held lovingly by God, whatever happens.

Like many early medieval Jews, and in fact like most people on earth in all ages, ibn Gabirol had a belief in an afterlife. His view would have been much like the scheme expressed in the Talmud and in Kabbalah. These sources can be summarized as follows:

We’re told the dying itself is painless and easy, even if the end was a struggle. The Talmud describes a rabbi who recently died, appearing in a dream to a friend, saying that removing the soul from the body is as easy as pulling a hair out of milk. There is mention of a connection between the body and soul that is like a thin silver cord. There is a motion through a dark passageway. The soul encounters a radiant, loving Presence that fills it with joy and comfort. There is a reunion with loved ones who have died. There is an encounter with the consequences of the deeds from the life just ended; a cleansing from the wrongdoing that is transforming and purifying. This is followed by a time of bliss and heightened awareness and rest. And then there is preparation for another life.

Some of you heard my daughter’s bat mitzvah paper last month, where she taught us that Jews in many periods, from as early as we can trace, held various beliefs about the eternity of the soul, the afterlife, and reincarnation. There was a deeply held belief that God would resurrect all the dead when the Messiah came. Now the fact that such beliefs have been common doesn’t make them true, but it does indicate that they are worth exploring with an open mind. Unfortunately, some of the same people who pride themselves on their spirit of openminded scientific inquiry are surprisingly closed minded when it comes to these matters.

Rachel Naomi Remen, a doctor who moved from pediatric oncology into the more spiritual field of healing observes that,

Science has cast a deep shadow over our ideas about life. We may even have allowed science to define life for us, but life is larger than science. Life is process, and process has Mystery woven into it. Things happen that science can’t explain, important things that cannot be measured but can be observed, witnessed, known. These things are not replicable. They are impervious to even the best designed research.

All life has in it the dimension of the Unknown; it is a thing forever unfolding. It seems important to consider the possibility that science may have defined life too small. If we define life too small, we will define ourselves too small as well.

She tells the following story to make the point. In the course of a training with doctors, she asked them to reflect on a time when they experienced something in their professional lives that they could not explain. One of the doctors told this remarkable story:

"It happened a day or two before his sister died, when he was a young man of 20, studying engineering in college. As his sister became sicker, their parents had asked him to come home from school to be with his family. He had been given the job of reading to his sister.

“He had been sitting with her in her bedroom reading. His sister lay in her bed with her eyes closed, breathing with effort. As he read, he would glance up occasionally to find that his sister had not moved. He was not even sure if she was awake but he continued to read, as he did not know what else to do.

“He had been reading aloud for about an hour when he felt his sister’s hand on his arm. Glancing over, he saw that his sister’s eyes were open and shining with excitement. She was staring at a blank wall. ‘Same,” his sister said, ‘Look! There’s someone here! Someone has come! Can you see him Sam?’

So he had closed the book and looked very carefully at the wall. ‘I could not see a thing,’ he told us. But he could feel it. There was something in the room, a presence, deeply loving and infinitely kind. He had never experienced such a thing before. He felt his heart drawn to it as if it were claimed. Deeply moved, he took his sister’s hand. A few seconds passed and he had simply known he was to become a doctor.

…” It's not that I knew that I was supposed to become a doctor,” he told me. “What I knew was that I was a doctor. That I had been born with a doctor’s soul in me. Whatever it was that came for my sister had come for me, too. It felt like a sort of healing, a coming back to my true self.’ He stood looking thoughtful. ‘Perhaps it was that sort of thing for us both.’”

The Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross became famous for her work on the five stages of grief. Later in her work with the dying, she became interested in the many similarities in the near-death experiences some of her patients reported, and devoted herself to researching life after death. She collected and analyzed over 20,000 such stories, and became quite convinced that the soul survives death, and that the process the soul goes through is similar across cultural and religious lines.. As much as she was admired for her earlier research on grief, she was dismissed as unscientific by many doctors for this other effort. However, one of her motivations for pursuing it was the belief that people could be helped to lead better and more meaningful lives if the fear of death were eased.

One of the many common observations of those reporting on near-death experiences is that the place the soul goes is a great joy, and to return to life can be very difficult, and yet it is of great importance that we live out the purpose of our lives. Often, these dramatic near death experiences are similar to that doctor’s spiritual moment—they serve to clarify the purpose, the task, the challenge the soul came to life to experience. They wake people up to live more fearlessly, partly because the fear of death is utterly gone.

No one can say what the meaning of life is for anyone else, but each of us must find our own. Many of us are so frightened of pain and death that we spend a lifetime tying to protect ourselves, and never engage in what it is we were meant to learn or accomplish or attempt. It is very important to put fear aside and do whatever it is you came for. You don’t have to live long and peaceful and rich to fulfill a great purpose. You don’t even have to “believe” or practice religion, although these might be good tools. Think of the people you look to as heros or geniuses or great contributors and teachers. It's true we say Moses lived to 120, but they were years filled with struggle and despair. Look at any of the prophets; they often lived in torment and humiliation, feeling their powerlessness to prevent the people from going desperately astray. Look at artists and poets. Van Gogh went mad and died young, leaving breathtaking visions to stir our hearts. George Gershwin wrote everything you can think of and died at 39. Your new friend Solomon ibn Gabirol was wracked with illness and died in his young 30’s, but his voice still echoes from us. You don’t have to be happy or live long to make a huge difference. We are urged to find our particular mission; and really live, not just avoid trouble.

Martin Buber conveys this in a famous tale of the hasdic master Rabbi Zusya, who said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

When the Adon Olam urges us to put ourselves, body and soul into God’s hands when we sleep, it is also so that we can awaken.

So look what you have in this one precious poem: life, the universe, and everything! How to live a life of joy and commitment, right in the face of upheaval and tragedy, while knowing a profound peace. How to think for yourself and yet be guided and inspired by the wisdom teachings all around you. How to experience wonder and know yourself as a reflection of that same wondrous master energy.

And this is only one page of the siddur. So my message is more than the beauty and insight hidden on that page. It’s a plea that you commit yourself to more learning and more enrichment so that these jewels can be polished and made to gleam again. Reconstructionism is partly about innovation, but also and even more, about recovering what does work, what is meaningful. We can hand the future a wonderful gift of a shining and wise tradition if we devote ourselve to its reconstruction.

Rabbi Alexis Roberts
© September 2004