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As is the case with much of life, one can serve as a rabbi for years and years and still constantly face fresh dilemmas. While I was working on this sermon, for example, I faced a conundrum that I bet is new in the entire history of rabbi-dom, namely, if you speak about cows on Rosh Hashanah, what do you do on Yom Kippur? I tried this and that without success, and, if not for the persevering example of cattle, I might have given up. But cows brought to mind trees, which, like Rabbis Abraham Joshua Heschel and Kahn, proclaim wonder. Aha, that was it, a look at the wonder of life. Not from the perspective of a PBS special or a National Geographic layout or even Heschel, but through the lens of the phrase you just heard from the Torah, one of the most quoted — and misquoted -- lines in the Bible — u’vcharta bachayim. "Choose life, that you and your descendants might live."

Choose life. Every imaginable cause, and more than a few that even I couldn’t imagine have used the phrase as a slogan. Those who call themselves the pro-life movement look at the last word and say, see, we’re right, while those who call themselves the pro-choice movement look at the first word and say, choice, you see, we’re right. In the aftermath of yet another mass shooting, both gun control lobbies have believe it or not, used it and the NRA, which insisted that a Texan’s right to carry concealed firearms into sanctuaries has saved lives. In my work with the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, I’ve heard it quoted all the time, to support reducing environmental health hazards to children, or addressing climate change, or preserving endangered species. Any phrase that could actually mean all those things to all those people would, in some sense, be meaningless. Is choose life just an empty slogan? Or can we still find meaning in it?

So, I began an exploration into choosing life, starting with rabbinic commentaries on the verse. A few, like the minor collection S’fatai Hachamim, take the most simplistic view. They see this as a simple case of reward and punishment— do good; live, do bad, die. But even the authors of Deuteronomy, let alone later commentators, rejected that, for they could see that, frankly, the world just doesn’t work that way. Rashi, the great French commentator who studied in Maintz, portrays this as a game with a fix — like, he says, a father saying to his son, choose the choicest portion of my land. The father then goes to stand in the choicest portion and says, "Am I making myself clear?" But if that’s the case, why not just give the child the best part of the land? And if what Rashi is saying is that God is here teaching us that life is the best choice, well, the rabbis have a term for that too--psheeta, literally, plain, which means, the Bible doesn’t bother to teach that which is already plain, or, in more modern terms, duh.

 

Then, I turned to Sforno, the Renaissance Italian commentator. He starts out by directly negating reward and punishment theories. Don’t, he says, serve God like a worker who only labors to earn a salary. Rather, "Choose what is life in truth." But exactly what is life in truth? Sforno gives no indications. So finally, I turned to a rabbi from the beginning of this century, Abraham Isaac Kook, the first modern chief rabbi of Israel and a great religious Zionist thinker and activist. He wrote, "Woe to those who wish to rob life of the splendid poetry that inheres in it. They destroy life’s inwardness, its strength, its truth." (The Israeli Thought) At last. Choosing true life, Kook seems to be saying, means to seek out, to live out, the poetry of life.

So, the exploration took a sharp turn, from ancient commentaries to living poetry and thus, to poets. Through the help of these poets, I moved from a systematic search to a three step dance toward life in truth, three steps like the three letters in the Hebrew word for truth, Emet. Aleph for beginnings — seeing life as it is. Mem for middles--embracing the life you find. And Tof, the final letter in the Hebrew alphabet, for the final, the critical step--making choices. As I take you through this dance of exploration, this path toward choosing life in truth, I want to share a few of the many poems that guided me along the way, poems by Jewish poets in Israel and the US, well-known and obscure. Poets, who, like us, seek truth, seek life.

Aleph. Ar-eh--to look at life squarely and fully. Those of you, who, like me, are old enough to remember when that revolution in sound technology, 8 track tapes, came along, probably remember the song, "I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden." For those who don’t, its basic point was "Sorry, life ain’t always easy, which in fact, means that life is like a rose garden, at least in DC. Here, roses die when it’s too hot. They need to be protected from the heaviest frosts or, again, they will die. They are subject to mildew, to Japanese beetles, to underfeeding, to overfeeding. And then there are those thorns. But when they flower, ah, the beauty, the perfume, the vibrant, overflowing colors. That’s life. Except for when it’s better. Or worse.

We have on our refrigerator a little drawing with faces and a movable magnet that says, "Today I feel…" The faces are labeled: angry, bored, confident, ecstatic, exhausted, and so on. And there have been times, sometimes even within an hour or a minute, when I have felt every one of those. As has been the case with the roller coaster known as adoption. This May, we stood and watched, with tears of joy, the miracle of birth and then were handed that baby whose private miracle we just watched, held him as our son for 24 brief hours. But then we stood and watched again, with tears of loss and rage, as he was taken back. That too is life, except for when it’s worse, or better.

People in this congregation have recovered from illnesses that were supposed to be fatal. They have buried children under a month old. They have been happily married for over half a century. Those they loved best have betrayed them. They have seen the wonder of life--and its sheer horror. Together, we have experienced enough tragedy to deny God to the most certain believer--and enough love to prove God to the most hardened cynic.

Which perhaps means that our typical picture of God is neither big nor complex enough to encompass all of life in truth. So, we might look to the teachings of Hannah Rachel of Ludomir. She taught: God is One, the ocean that covers all. The ocean sweeps in currents, it rolls in waves, it floods and storms. Who would blame the ocean for its waves? God does not cause, or intend, or even tolerate misery. God’s heart breaks, and yet God is present in it all. In the mid 1800s, Hannah Rachel served the Chasidic community of Ludomir as their rebbe. 150 years ago, a female Chasidic rebbe. Now that’s a surprise.

But no more surprising and unpredictable than life in truth. Show me a movie and, nine times out of ten, I can predict what will happen next, an irritating behavior for those in nearby seats. But in life in truth, no one can make fully accurate predictions. That scares us so much sometimes that we try to censor life, to deny its true fullness. Yehuda Amichai, perhaps Israel’s best know living poet, put it this way:

From the Book of Esther, I filtered the sediment
Of vulgar joy, and from the book of Jeremiah,
The howl of pain in the guts. And from
The Song of Songs the endless
Search for love, and from Genesis the dreams
And Cain, and from Ecclesiastes,
The despair, and from the Book of Job, Job.
And with what was left, I pasted myself a new bible.
Now I live censored and cut and pasted and limited and in peace.

The Hebrew has an added zing, for "in peace" is a phrase used, as with the English rest in peace, for the dead. Which, if one followed the soul-censorship recipe in that poem, one’s spirit surely would be.

Thank God our Bible is rich with contradictions, extravagant with both joy and pain. Its heroes, far from being sanitized Honest Abes, are like Abraham, who sleeps with his handmaiden, waffles before his wife, and sets up jealousy, even enmity between his sons. Biblical heroes are imperfect. They fail often, and, occasionally, they triumph greatly. They witness miracles, not just in fiery bushes or split seas, but in the unpredictable unfolding of life. Indeed, our faith calls us, as the daily prayer says, to see the miracles that unfold around us day by day. Tet Carmi, better known as a collector and translator of Hebrew poetry but also a talented poet in his own right, put it this way.

I enter the dark kitchen
And press the switch.
Lights!

I sit upon the sofa
Near the dog.
He turns onto his back
Raises his paws, yawns.

In the bedroom
I bend down to my wife.
She smiles in her sleep
Murmurs, dreams again.

Don’t they understand?
Beings of fire are uttering
The Angel of Death is in the city
The altar is crying

And I go from room to room,
Night after night
Counting miracles.

Life remains, despite our attempts to censor and tame it, miraculous, wild and beautiful and terrible, awesome and awful. When we look life in the eye, with neither rose-colored glasses nor with unappreciative blank stares, it becomes obvious why life in Hebrew is eternally plural, chayyim, because it is so multitudinous, multifarious, multivalent.

Which brings us to Mem, michabayk, to embrace life, to dive in and participate in all its richness. But that takes a lot of effort, and there are times when we treat life like a spectator sport, when we stand not before God, but at the sidelines, or outside the stadium altogether. Times when, out of fear, or exhaustion, or emptiness, we make a virtual reality out of life in truth. Times when we want to shut down our feelings because we know the first thing we’d feel would be overwhelming pain. Times when we don’t think it’s better to have loved and lost, but rather that it would have been better to have stayed hidden. Times like those described in the poem "At the shores of the sea."

There are times
when it doesn't seem real
I live a facsimile of life
smeary ink
flimsy paper curling up around me
the curves and loops of someone's hand
reduced to a series of dots
masquerading as a line
no shades
black and white
I am become
flat enough to fit
between the rollers without a protest
bloodless
no connections without wires
no cover sheet
no reply requested

Oh God,
this isn't even Your world
Can a prayer from here reach You?
from a tongue too empty even to be hollow
Redeem us
Blow Your wind back into our souls
Redeem us

When we stand outside the sweeps of the currents of the ocean of life in truth, we are in need of redemption. But as the Midrash about the standing at the shores of the Red Sea teaches, we need to take the first step into the waters ourselves in order to begin the terrifying, wondrous process of redemption.

Yehuda Amichai describes this terror-wonder in his poem, "True Love."

To start love like this: with a cannon shot
Like Ramadan.
That’s a religion! Or with the sounding of shofar
On the cusp of the New Year, to drive out sins.
That’s a religion! That’s love.

Souls — to the front!
To the firing line of eyes.
No hiding back in the white neck. Emotions
Outside, out from the fat belly, forward
Emotions, out for face-to-face combat.

Or as Hannah Rachel of Ludomir taught, "Sometimes when your heart is so pained that it feels as if it must burst, let it burst."

Hearts bursting, getting ready for combat--it’s easy to see the attractions of standing at the sidelines if these are what we get when we embrace life in truth. And there are more challenges yet, more barriers to leap over before we can dive in. For example, do we really want to embrace all of life? Even violence, hatred, oppression? Don’t we have a choice about what we embrace?

Which brings us at last to Tof, to Tivchor, to choosing life in truth. Which is even harder. Because not only do we face the challenge Rabbi Kahn pointed out on Rosh Hashanah of sticking to the direction our moral compass points out. But we also face the often more difficult challenge of figuring out what is right in the first place. Sometimes, it is not at all clear which choice will bring blessings and which curses, which is good and which evil. How then do we make good choices? The passage we just read from Isaiah sets out some helpful principles:

"If you remove lawlessness from your midst, the pointing finger, the malicious word, if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall shine in the darkness." But reasonable, good people can disagree about how best to remove lawlessness or to give themselves to the hungry. Can we be sure which approach will bring more blessings?

The sentence in Deuteronomy following the phrase "choose life" also has some pointers: "Love Adonai your God, hear God’s voice, and cling to God." But in the name of loving God, people have, with complete sincerity, done terrible things. How can we be sure our loving God will lead to righteousness and not self-righteousness?

Or look to that key theme of Rosh Hashanah, freedom to change. We could make that into a guiding principle: anything that limits someone’s freedom to grow, to improve, is anti-life. Poverty that keeps a body from growing, lack of education that keeps a mind from growing, prejudice that keeps a soul from growing, should all be eliminated. But this too is not foolproof. Hitler, after all, asked that Germany be given lebensraum, the freedom to grow.

Yes, our choices can and should be guided by the wisdom of our friends and family. They can and should be guided by the collective wisdom of our people throughout the ages, through the constant unfolding of Torah’s tapestry. They can and should be guided by our own attempts to find and understand that still small voice of the divine that yet utters forth each moment. But our friends and family are humans, prone to error. Our ancestors failed time after time. And try as we might, we will never perfectly hear the word or will of God. Our choices don’t come with life-back guarantees. Yet, in the end, despite the inherent imperfections of the process, each of us must still choose.

So this is where, after all our explorations, we end up. The heavens, storm-clouded or star sparkled, rise above us. The earth, bountiful and beautiful and treacherous and torn asunder, lies below us. And each of us, individually, stands on our own page in the book of life in truth, a page completely, and yet of course not perfectly, blank. We can splash ink on our page, tear it, even burn it. We can scribble hate-filled rantings across it. Or we can live up to the divine image implanted within each of us, become the poets each of us can be, and instead inscribe a poem with our very life, filled with the splendid poetry that inheres in life.

As Leah Goldberg wrote in what is, at least for now, my favorite Hebrew poem,

Will days, indeed, yet come in forgiveness and grace
When you will walk in the field, will walk like a simple-hearted wayfarer.
With clover stroking your bare feet
With the stubble sweetly singing?

Or rain overtake you with its throngs of drops
Beating on your shoulders, chest, neck, your fragrant head
And you will walk in the wet field, repose expanding in you
Like light in the fringes of a cloud?

And you will breathe in the smell of the furrow, breathe and be calmed
And you will see the sun in the golden mirror of a rain-pool--
All things simple, and alive, and you may touch them,
And you may, you may love.

Alive, touching, dancing, we may love life in truth. If we choose life. So choose life, that you and your descendants might live. Choose life. Choose life.

 

For further reading: The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, ed. T. Carmi; At the Stone of Losses, T. Carmi; Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, eds. Chana Bloch, Selphen Mitchell.

Daniel Swartz is the Executive Director of the Childrens' Enviromental Health Network (CEHN). He lives with his wife Roya and their daughter in Takoma Park, MD.

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