Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Sermon for Yom Kippur Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5778

Three weeks from today, we will read פרשת נח, the second of the weekly readings of the Torah.  At the end of that פרשה is a brief story with which everyone is familiar.  But at the risk of sounding unqualified as a rabbi, I must admit that it has taken me a long time to understand it.  It took a rather silly situation comedy on Netflix to explain it to me.  But I will get to that in a moment.

The story is that of the Tower of Babel.  In it we are told that the entire earth was of one language and one purpose.  Rashi tells us that one language was לשון הקודש - the Holy Tongue, that is to say, Hebrew.  The people decide to use their skills at brick making to build a city with a tower whose top would be in the heavens.  They do so to נַעֲשֶׂה־לָּנוּ שֵׁם פֶּן־נָפוּץ עַל־פְּנֵי כָל־הָאָרֶץ: - make for ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of the earth.  God comes down to check on the construction and is appalled.  Says God, הֵן עַם אֶחָד וְשָׂפָה אַחַת לְכֻלָּם וְזֶה הַחִלָּם לַעֲשׂוֹת - Look! They are one people and one language and this is what they begin to do!  God confuses their language so they can no longer understand one another and scatters them across the face of the earth.  Their actions, in other words, are the very cause of the thing they were trying to prevent.

Now the prejudice we bring to any biblical story is that God’s actions are right and good and just.  But I, for one, find it hard to understand why God acts as He does in this case.  Isn’t unity of human purpose something we all pray for?  As we bring tonight’s service to an end, will we not all sing together of our hope for the great day on which, יִהְיֶה יְיָ אֶחָד, וּשְמוֹ אֶחָד God will be one and God’s name one?  In this story, at least, God does not seem to share that hope. 

The rabbis are at pains to explain what great sin was afoot in the building of the tower to warrant such a response from God.  Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eliezer in the Talmud suggests that some of the builders wished to use the tower to wage war against God.  Rabbi Nathan says they were all bent on idolatry.  The 15th Century Portuguese philosopher and commentator Abravanel believed that the process of building the tower incited hatred and envy among the workers as they vied to lay the first brick in each new level.  And his Italian contemporary Ovadia Sforno believed that having but a single language and a single mode of thought would crush dissension and freedom.

But for me there is one explanation of why God did what he did to the builders of the Tower of Babel - and through them to all mankind - that is more compelling then all the rest.  It’s one I have known for a long time, but whose true significance only came to me a few months back while watching the Netflix comedy series Grace & Frankie.

For those of you unfamiliar with this show, Grace & Frankie follows the same premise as that 70’s sit-com, The Odd Couple.  As some of you will remember, that premise was offered in the voice-over to its opening credits: “Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?”  Grace & Frankie asks the equally compelling question, “Can two divorced women share a beach house without driving each other crazy?”  The show’s modern twist is that the two women - played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin - are divorced because their respective ex-husbands have fallen in love with, and have gotten married to each other. 

In one particular episode, a beloved friend has moved back next door after years of traveling through all the world’s most exotic places.  She enlists Frankie’s help in throwing a big party for all her friends, at the end of which she intends to commit suicide.  The cancer is back, she tells Frankie, and it has spread all over.  She wants Frankie to serve her poison laced butterscotch pudding.  After a couple of scenes of soul-searching, Frankie decides she is all-in on the project.  The problem is Grace who says that death is not her friend’s choice to make.  Replies Frankie, “Of course it is.  Her life, her death, her choice.”   But Grace is stubborn:  “Its not right,” she says.  “Only God can make that decision.”  And while I can think of absolutely nothing about either the character Grace or the actress Jane Fonda that is even vaguely Jewish, in this case she is arguing the side of the rabbis.

Many of you have asked me questions that begin with the words “What does Judaism say about …”  To your frustration, my answer, virtually every time, begins with the sentence “That depends on whom you ask.”  The differences are not only among Judaism’s various movements, but just as often within them.   But this is one of those instances where Judaism speaks with one voice: euthanasia, suicide, or assisting another in committing suicide is prohibited under Jewish law.  In many instances, such actions constitute murder.  Quite simply, our bodies do not belong to ourselves but to God - lent to us with the expectation that we will care for and preserve them.  Harming them, let alone destroying them, is not allowed.  Jewish law is absolute on this subject.  Says the Mishnah, והמעמץ עם יציאת נפש. הרי זה שופך דמים - one who closes the eyes of someone at the time his soul is departing from him, this is the spilling of blood - that is to say, murder.   The Talmud tells us that one whose soul is departing is like a guttering candle; the slightest touch will extinguish it.  Nothing should be done to extinguish that life even a moment before God’s time for it.   Every human life, regardless of its condition, is considered in Judaism to be of infinite value.  The last breath of one who is dying and the first breath of a new born are of equal worth.

That said, Judaism is sensitive to the pain that often accompanies our departure from this life.  The Talmud records the final sufferings of Judah Ha-Nasi, known simply in our tradition as Rabbi.  Rabbi’s students gathered around his bed and prayed incessantly that he would stay among them, thus drawing out his suffering.  His maid, seeing the pain he was in, threw a jar from the roof of Rabbis house and it shattered on the ground.  The sound caused Rabbi’s students to cease their prayers momentarily and in that moment he died.

Thus the state of Jewish law on treating the dying as universally accepted throughout the world and across the movements: one may remove impediments to dying - such as the prayers of Rabbi’s students - but one may not take any actions to hasten one’s dying - such as the closing of the eyes.

The active debate in Jewish law is over where the line is drawn between removing obstacles to dying and hastening death.  Can one, for instance, administer pain relieving medicine even to the point that it suppresses heart and respiratory function?  Some say yes, others, no.   Is intravenous nutrition and hydration an impediment to dying?  Some say it is, others, it is not.  All of these decision, however, are reserved for life’s final days.  They are a very far cry from the self-administration of life ending drugs that the various states’ physician assisted suicide laws contemplate.  The workings of those laws is what is depicted in my aforementioned episode of Grace & Frankie.

I watched this episode with no expectation that the characters would honor Jewish law and turn away from this act of self-destruction.  But what troubled me enough to turn it into a sermon was how quickly Grace's objections melt away.  At first she refuses to attend the pre-suicide party.  But ultimately she is convinced that the demands of friendship trump any qualms she might have over the morality of her friend’s behavior.  And indeed we can sympathize with her dilemma.  It cannot be easy to hold to a moral position that might mean physical and emotional pain for another.  She attends the party.  And when Frankie hesitates at serving her friend the poisoned pudding, Grace tells her that Frankie’s own beliefs and her bonds of friendship require her to do so.

What I find so troubling about all of this is the sense that this episode represents - if not where we are as a society with regard to suicide and the sanctity of life - then at least the direction in which we are heading.  We live at a time when palliative and hospice care is more available and better than it has ever been.  Professional counseling and pharmaceutical anti-depressants and anxiety medications offer more options to deal with the emotional pain of life’s end.  New therapies and powerful analgesics precisely administered can deal with much of the physical pain.  You would think the call for suicidal options would be diminishing in such circumstances, but the opposite is occurring.   In the past four years, three states plus the District of Columbia have passed Physician Assisted Suicide laws, bringing the total to six states where this is legal.  Seven more states have considered such legislation in recent years, including Connecticut where the legislature held hearings on the matter in 2013, ‘14 and ‘15.  Grassroots institutions working under the banner of “Death with Dignity” are cropping up all over the country and indeed all over the world.  And in the meantime, shows like Grace & Frankie and even an Israeli film entitled מיתה טובה - mistranslated into English as The Farewell Party - celebrates suicide as the ultimate expression of human autonomy and even a kind of triumph over death.

What all this says to me is that we are in the process of redefining life not as a divinely granted gift, or even as a happy accident of blind nature, but as the canvas of personal utility.  We live our lives for the utility we find in doing so, however we define that.  And whenever we feel we have worn out that utility, we, exercising our autonomy, end them.

Yet there is something very dangerous in defining life by its utility, and the reason why Jewish thinking across the movements is in near total agreement is because all realize that our law is pointing us away from that danger.  In saying that our bodies belong to God, we are saying that there is something inviolable about our lives - inviolable by others, inviolable by the state, even inviolable by ourselves.  In that sense, suicide is not the ultimate expression of human autonomy.  In fact, it destroys that autonomy by taking away its source.  And once that autonomy is gone, and our lives are defined strictly by their utility, well then there is no depredation to which we cannot be subjected.

And this brings me back to the Tower of Babel and to the midrash that has helped me to understand this strange story.  It comes from the possibly eighth century text known as פרקי דרבי אליעזר.  Here it is:

Rabbi Pinchas said, “There were no stones there wherewith to build the city and the tower.  What did they do?  They baked bricks and burnt them like a builder until they had built it seven miles high and it had ascents on its east and west.  The laborers who took up the bricks went up on the eastern ascent and down on the western.  If a man fell and died, they paid no heed to him, but if a brick fell, they sat down and wept and said: ‘Woe is us!  When will another one come in its stead?’”

The midrash speaks of our propensity to turn the work of our hands into our gods.  We take pride in our skill and our accomplishment.  We see in our workmanship a reflection of our own creativity and individuality.  And ultimately, we come prize it beyond all other things.  This is what the tower becomes to its builders.   And this is moment when the value of the individual human becomes measured by the number of bricks she can carry.  This is the moment when life is measured by its utility rather than its God given value.  In the Grace & Frankie episode, it is the moment when the friend announces that if she cannot live life on her own terms, then she will live it not at all.  And it is also the moment when Grace, who senses that life must mean more than this, shrugs her shoulders and says, “who am I to judge.”

Today is the most beautiful day of the year.  Its premise is that life is a gift whose value transcends our understanding of it at any given moment.  Its promise is that, through self-denial, through confrontation with our faults, and through reflection on our deeds, we can change in ways that make us worthy of this gift.  Growing and changing in this way, we can indeed achieve that sense of meaning that tells us that each breath we draw is as precious as the last; and indeed as precious as the first.  For we are not the mere sum of our utility.  We are instead the weakest and most transient of creatures in whose ear God nevertheless whispers the words, “Choose life that you and your children may live.”

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