The Fate that Awaits Us All

Of all the dark and despairing hours of the Yom Kippur War, rock bottom arrived on day three – Tuesday, October 8, 1973. According to later recollections, it was those twenty-four hours that would be remembered as “a critical, almost hopeless … struggle for physical survival.” (Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War, p. 269ff.) Just a few decades after the Shoah – emboldened, mistakenly so, by the victory of 1967 – Israel now stood on the brink of destruction. In the Sinai, in the Golan, a fighting force caught wholly unaware, its leadership flatfooted and demoralized – and a world that so recently proclaimed “never again,” was apparently letting it happen again.

Nowhere was this sense of desperation more pronounced than among the soldiers of Fort Purkan along the Suez Canal. Fort Purkan was one of a number of Israeli garrisons stationed along the eastern Suez, part of a chain of fortifications known as the Bar-Lev line, intended to defend Israel against any Egyptian assault. In the first hours of the war, it proved to be wholly inadequate, overrun by an Egyptian army who plowed right through and into the Sinai. Some of the garrisons were destroyed immediately, many soldiers were killed or taken prisoner, some contemplated a Masada-like suicide. The thirty-three soldiers of Fort Purkan remained trapped behind enemy lines, separated from any would-be savior. As military histories have subsequently revealed, in those desperate hours Israel’s leadership wrestled with the dreadful prospect of abandoning the men of Fort Purkan to their fate rather than risk even more losses – a prospect more and more likely as the shelling of the attacking Egyptian army grew closer.

Surveying a series of terrible options, Purkan’s garrison commander Major Wiesel decided to lead his men on foot through the Egyptian second army. He radioed to the Israeli Brigade Commander on the other side, speaking in code – Yiddish, actually – just in case the Egyptians were listening in. On the other end was General Ariel Sharon, commander of the Southern Front. “You haven’t got much of a chance,” Sharon said, “we can’t come and help you.” To which Wiesel insisted, “We are leaving anyway.” At nightfall, the thirty-three soldiers set out for a rendezvous point six miles east on the Hamutal Ridge. On the Israeli side, two men – Colonel Amnon Reshef and Lieutenant Colonel Shaul Shalev – volunteered for what could best be described as a suicide mission, manning their two tanks with the hope of rescuing their comrades. As daylight broke, the battle waged fiercely as a vastly outnumbered Reshef and Shalev fought their Egyptian enemies, while the soldiers of Fort Purkan remained pinned down under a relentless Egyptian barrage. Reshef was drawn into a platoon of Egyptian commandos leaving only Shalev to complete the mission at hand. Shalev radioed Wiesel to fire a flare into the air to identity their position. Shalev charged forward in their direction, and reached his comrades’ location. Four wounded soldiers were quickly lowered through the tank’s turret. As for the remaining twenty-nine … well, they grabbed onto whatever piece of tank exterior they could and held on for dear life. Nobody then and nobody since had ever witnessed a spectacle like the sight of Shalev’s tank as it approached the Israeli camp. Through an onslaught of artillery, a remarkable image moving through the desert, Shalev’s tank, covered by the men of the Fort Purkan – not one of them, miraculously, killed on that ride home. (Rabinovich)

According to Abraham Rabinovich’s account of the war, reports of Shalev’s heroism brought a surge of much-needed good news through the front lines in a country standing on the precipice of its own destruction: Thirty-three men facing certain death, and one man – Lt. Colonel Shalev – pulling them back from the brink.

If you want to know how Yom Kippur is supposed to make you feel, the near death experience of Lt. Colonel Shalev and the thirty three men of Fort Purkan is as good a place as any to start. To go toe-to-toe with death and emerge from that experience alive is what this sacred day is all about. That feeling is especially acute on this, the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, the moment when, in the words of the journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, all of Israel was forced to glimpse its collective mortality.

It is a jarring and not altogether comfortable thought, but, if you pause to consider it, the picture that emerges is unmistakable. What is today if not an elaborate ceremony meant to foist upon us the feeling of a near death experience? We fast, we abstain from sexual intimacy, and traditionally we wear white, even a kittel, representing the simple shroud one wears in death. The recitation of the martyrology service, the Yizkor prayers to recall our loved ones, the death-defying service of the High Priest, Jonah’s being swallowed up and then spit out by the whale, the clanging gates of Neilah – all of it is a process meant to ritualize the central question of these holidays: “Who will live and who will die?” The late Rabbi Alan Lew once explained that the journey between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is meant to be, in kabbalistic terms, a kefitzat haderekh, a compressed or contracted journey. Rosh Hashanah representing birth or creation, and today – Yom Kippur – representing death. (This Is Real, p. 214) It is not only that we acknowledge the mortal human condition, rather we are asked today to stare directly into the face of our own death. Like Isaac bound on the altar – a hairsbreadth away, it is our own reflection we see in that glistening blade – we live to tell the tale. That is what today is all about.

Given my line of work, it is rare that I go a single week, if not a single day, without being reminded of the shared and inescapable fate that awaits us all. It strikes me that there are really only two things that can be said about death with absolute surety. First, that it will happen, and second, that we don’t know when. “From the dust you come and to the dust you return.” It doesn’t matter who you are, death is, if nothing else, democratic. As the Italian proverb goes: “After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.” And then, of course, there is the mystery of when. From the very beginning, the midrash explains, God concealed the day of death from all of us. Who will live and who will die? None of us know – that is why it is framed as a question. As Jews we like to bless each other to live until Moses’ ripe old age of 120, but there are no guarantees. You may recall the story of the rabbi making visits at the nursing home just before the holidays. He went to visit Mrs. Cohen, greeted her and asked how old she was. “Eighty,” Mrs. Cohen replied, to which the Rabbi appropriately responded: “Mrs. Cohen, may the next forty years be filled with health and happiness.” He then walked into Mrs. Schwartz’s room. A warm hello, the same question: “And how old are you Mrs. Schwartz?” “One hundred!” To which the Rabbi responded, “Mrs. Schwartz, may the next twenty years be filled with health and happiness.” Finally, he knocks on Mrs. Goldstein’s door. “And how old are you, Mrs. Goldstein?” “Rabbi, today is my birthday! Today I am 120 years old.” To which the Rabbi replies, “Mrs. Goldstein, have a really great day!” When it comes to death, it is not a matter of “if,” only a matter of “when,” a when whose timing is hidden from us all. It is these two indisputable truths, death’s inevitability and unpredictability, that are the working assumptions, the first principles, underlying the human condition.

But there also exists a third truth about our relationship to death, observed across time and traditions, and that is our disinclination to engage with the aforementioned first two truths. We are loath to do so, as if it is somehow untoward, morbid or even worse, will hasten the great foregone conclusion of our lives. You may recall the book published, coincidentally, exactly forty years ago this fall: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Becker was a Jewish American cultural anthropologist, who, as an infantryman in WWII, was present at the liberation of the concentration camps – as close to the face of death as one could be. His Pulitzer Prize winning book studied the consequences of what Freud described as the human tendency to repress death and the very thought of dying. “The idea of death,” Becker wrote, “haunts the human animal like nothing else. It is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” (p. ix). As individuals and as a society, we disguise death – problematically, even pathologically so – with all sorts of euphemisms and avoidance measures, as if to do so will enable us to escape the one most natural, shared and inevitable aspect of what it is to be human: death.

All of which is why today is so very important. Yom Kippur asks of us – or more precisely, demands of us – that we frequent that which we would rather avoid. My colleague and friend Marga Hirsch pointed out to me the fundamental difference between Yom Kippur and every other Jewish holiday, and it has nothing to do with the lack of whitefish. Every other holiday – Passover, Purim, Shavuot – you name it, calls on us to retrieve a past experience – the Exodus, the triumph over Haman, the giving of the Torah – to engage in it retrospectively, and apply its lessons to today. Yom Kippur alone calls on us to imagine the one prospective event we are all assured of; reflect on it, and then move forward that much wiser from the reconnaissance into our own mortality. It is a theological head fake if you will, or better yet, a vaccination – enough to inoculate our character, but not the actual thing itself.

Someday I will teach a class on my favorite non-rabbinic philosopher, the sixteenth century essayist, Michele de Montaigne; God knows, I quote him enough. In the early part of his life, Montaigne was obsessed by the oppressive weight of death. When he was thirty, his best friend died. Five years later, his father died. The following year his brother died in a freak sporting accident, and over time, he and his wife would lose four of their six children. The loss of his loved ones, the frequent and random manner by which they died – Montaigne was hounded by human mortality. But then something really unexpected happened. Montaigne himself almost died, thrown from his horse “like a thunderbolt,” and he very nearly drifted into oblivion. (Bakewell, p. 12-22) But Montaigne did not die – he lived. And not only did he live, but he came to understand his brush with death as an opportunity for a change in outlook, a new lease on life. In his own words:

“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it…We do not know where death awaits us; so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned to be a slave.” (Montaigne, Essays.) 

In the years and writing to follow, Montaigne’s near death experience served as a pivot point to his identity. He realized that in avoiding his mortality, his anxiety had increased, but by confronting it, by “depriving death of its strangeness,” as we do today, we actually affirm what life can be about. As Mark Twain would write years later: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” (Cited in Erica Brown, Happier Endings, p. 161) 

This year, something totally unprecedented happened in my rabbinate, and as I have compared notes with my colleagues, theirs as well. Not infrequently, I am called by a congregational family and asked to recite viddui for a loved one – the confessional prayer we recite both today and on our deathbed, or as is often the case, recited by me on someone’s behalf. The prayer asks that we forgive our loved ones, that they forgive us, so we can move forward into the next chapter with our conscience clean and our accounts balanced. Well, about nine months ago I received a call from the family of one congregant, let’s call him Herb. It was no longer a matter of “if” but “when” and it was time for the rabbi to come down to the hospital for viddui. Sure enough there was Herb, in a scene I have seen more times than I can count: the IV, the morphine drip, the tracheal tube, the ventilator doing the breathing. Everyone understood – the family, the doctors – this was Herb’s time. We gathered the family close, I recited viddui, we sang the sh’ma together and comforted each other into the night. Eventually, I gave the family the number of the funeral director, fully expecting Herb to pass before dawn. Everything was exactly as it should be, with one big exception: It is nine months later and Herb, God bless him, is still swinging. He didn’t die that night. In fact, when I visited him last week, you should have seen his smile as I blew the shofar in his home! He is not out of the woods, not even close, but for the first time in my career, heaven would wait. May my deathbed prayer be equally ineffective for each and every one of you! I can’t stop thinking about it, the theological curveball of having viddui said – and then living! For me, but more importantly, for Herb, it is an altogether delightful turn of events. Wiping the slate clean, having the chance to begin anew, and then, outwitting death. All of which is the theological calculus of today. As the tradition teaches: Mitah v’Yom haKippurim mit’khaprin, “Death and Yom Kippur bring atonement.” To confess and cleanse, atone and forgive, press reset, and take a step forward knowing what we knew before but refused to acknowledge, that we are all on borrowed time and so we need to make the most of it.

For Montaigne, for Herb, for all of us, there can be a lightening of the soul that comes with the knowledge of the precious and precarious nature of our lives. To realize that death is as inevitable as it is unpredictable means that you are wise enough to know that life is not meant to spent holding onto grudges, hatreds and regrets. Rabbi Alan Lew tells the story of the famed Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who arrived in the States as a refugee from Austria, gained fame as a performer, touring widely, and later in life went back to give concerts in Austria and Germany. People would ask him, “How can you go back there and give concerts? Don’t you hate them after what they did to you?” To which Rabbi Carlebach replied, “I only have one soul. If I had two souls, I would gladly devote one of them to hating the Germans full time. But I don’t. I only have one soul, and I am not going to waste it on hating.” (p. 230) Whether we come to shul today seeking to repent or to forgive, today reminds us that tomorrow may be too late. As the sage Rabbi Eliezer taught his students, we should repent one day before we die. His students, understandably, asked: “But does a person know on what day he will die?” Rabbi Eliezer replied: “all the more reason [to repent today] – lest one die tomorrow.” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 153a) Today is the day to let it go and more importantly, be courageous enough, big enough, to let other people do the same.

Yom Kippur’s engagement with death is a clarifying agent, not just in terms of forgiveness, but also as a prompt for us all to recalibrate our priorities. As the Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, once taught, life is like a postcard. We start writing casually in big letters until we find ourselves running out of room, scribbling smaller and smaller around the edges, trying to squeeze it all in. How many of us sit here in shul with that feeling in the pit of our stomach of knowing we are not living the lives of meaning we could be? Today we are asked to put the proverbial blank sheet of paper in front of us and map out what that life looks like. Our family, our careers, our communal and cultural commitments, our Judaism. Nobody has a magic wand, it takes time, it takes a lot of work, and – more often than not – a lot of pain to untangle ourselves from the knots we are presently in. But today is our chance to dream. In a sentence, that is what you are supposed to be doing in shul today! On Yom Kippur we are all akin to Reb Zusya. The Talmud records that on his deathbed Zusya explained to his disciples that what he feared most when he imagined arriving at the heavenly tribunal, was not that he would be asked why he did not live like Moses or Abraham or King David. What he feared most was what that he would be asked why he did not live like Zusya. Today we are more aware than ever of the dissonance between the life we lead and the life we should be leading, but unlike Zusya on his deathbed, we have been given a great gift – the gift of tomorrow.

Yom Kippur’s brush with death is important because it prompts us to mend relationships; it is important because it jolts us into living the lives we should be living. But the most significant part of today’s reconnaissance into death is that what we experience today only as a drill will one day be for real. When that day comes, all that will remain of us is the manner in which we are remembered and the legacy we leave for the future. As you can imagine, Lt. Colonel Shalev’s heroism in the Yom Kippur war resulted in his being the recipient of every commendation you would expect. But what I didn’t tell you is that he would receive those awards only posthumously. Why? Because two hours after he saved those thirty-three soldiers, in a battle totally unrelated to the one I described, Lt. Colonel Shalev was struck down and killed by enemy fire. Yom Kippur is here to remind us that while longevity has its place, none of us actually reach the Promised Land. We must, nevertheless, aspire to live lives worthy of others to emulate. We can plants seeds whose harvest will be reaped well after our term on this earth. This is exactly the thought I had in mind a few months ago as I held Shalev’s grandson – my friend’s son – as he was named at his bris in memory of his heroic grandfather Shaul Shalev of blessed memory. The spark of our humanity, limited in duration as it may be, is divine in that it contains the power to kindle other lives. As Hannah Senesh wrote in 1944 prior to her execution, after having parachuted behind enemy lines on behalf of her people:

Blessed is the match that was consumed but kindled flames.
Blessed is the flame that burned in the secret places of the heart.
Blessed are the hearts that knew how to cease beating honorably.
Blessed is the match that that was consumed but kindled flames.

There is, no question, a singe to the message of Yom Kippur. But it is a singe that reminds us of the obligation, the opportunity and the blessing in knowing that while the matches of our lives never burn as long as we would like, and they only ever burn once, it is within our power to live honorably, wisely, purposefully and yes, joyfully, not for only for ourselves, but also for the generations to follow.

The most beautiful sermon ever delivered at Park Avenue Synagogue was given by one of my predecessors, Rabbi Milton Steinberg of blessed memory. It is called “To Hold with Open Arms,” and he describes the experience of having suffered a massive heart attack and long hospitalization and then leaving the hospital. “I was permitted,” he writes, “for the first time to step out of doors. And, as I crossed the threshold, sunlight greeted me. This is my experience – all there is to it. And yet, so long as I live, I shall never forget that moment.” In that instant, basking in that glorious day, Steinberg remembered how too often in the past he had been indifferent to sunlight, to the laughter of his children, to the love of his wife. Too often he was preoccupied with petty concerns. He returned home wanting to say to husbands, to wives, to his congregants, to all those he met, and – I imagine, knowing as I do that when rabbis preach, they are really only preaching to themselves – to himself: “How precious is your lot in that it is one of love. Do not be, even for a moment casual with your good fortune. Love one another while yet you may.” Love your children, love your country, love your Jewish heritage. Hold and care for these precious things as closely as possible, but not too closely, for one day they will be surrendered to the Almighty. Embrace them, but do so with relaxed hands. Hold them, but with open arms.

Who will live and who will die? “None of us,” wrote Alan Lew, “knows what will happen this year. Most of us will live, but some of us will die, and it might be me and it might be you. But whether we live or we die, we will only have one soul to do it with.” (p. 235) Today may we forgive, may we love, may we nurture, and may we care for those singular and irreplaceable souls – our own, our loved ones’ and those not yet born – holding them close in thought and deed, holding them with open arms.