Rabbi Shalom Carmy
Tradition Journal 2007
Late August for my mother, in the last decade of her life, was a
time of sadness. Inevitably the day would arrive when I could no
longer put off telling her that next week the university would
have “meetings.” She understood that preliminary meetings were a
euphemism for the inescapable advent of a new term, when I would not
be as available to her as I had been during the all too short months of
summer. By the last couple of years even the end of shorter breaks was
hard. In my recollection of these scenes, I make the announcement
standing over her—as if standing rather than sitting would make the
news more casual and therefore less unwelcome. Invariably, she would
look up at me and say: “Already? So soon?”
Last spring, as her strength dwindled, and her ability to function on
her own became less predictable, the inexorable end of summer portended
the dread awareness that this time my return to full-time teaching
would require engaging full time care by strangers in my absence.
Her funeral took place on the Wednesday we read Parashat Balak—
“May my death be the death of the righteous and my end like his.”
Overcome by grief, I was at the same time overwhelmed and overawed
by the circumstances of my mother’s last weeks and months. She left
this world in a manner so perfectly suited to the way she had conducted
her life—her mind intact and giving until the last breath, still able, on
the days she could totter around, of presiding proudly over her kitchen,
in her own home, her last moments conscious and not solitary. Her
final indelible cry—“Shulem, Shulem, Shulem,” uttered in a firm,
serene tone of voice, as if she either required some particular assistance or deemed it important to have my attention—echoed that day and for
many days after, along with my helplessly hopeful response to silent eyes
that saw only what mortals cannot: “What do you want? What do you
want me to do?” This final exchange filled my ears like the concluding
chord of an imposing musical composition.
As weeks passed and sheloshim approached, the dying call and the
eyes that stared past this world were joined in memory by the plaintive
question and the living gaze that asked “So soon?” Too soon would the
sheloshim come to their appointed end. I would become merely one
among many mourners living through the eleven months of Kaddish.
My hair would be cut. Life would be one step closer to routine. Yet the
phrase “so soon,” in my mother’s voice and gaze was not only a commentary
on the process of avelut and the strange alchemy that transforms
shock and desolation into commemoration and consolation.
Literally, hearing it meant that with the passage of time my mother’s
departure had become to me, in some inexplicable manner, premature.
When people die young, suddenly, unprepared, it seems natural to
think of death as happening too soon. What did it mean to say “so
soon” about the death of a woman almost 95 years of age, who had left
her affairs in exemplary order, who, not knowing the exact date of her
demise, had lived each week as if it were her last, and with that end in
mind, had conducted memorable and meaningful conversations with all
the people who mattered to her, whose last words were not “Nurse”
but “Shulem, Shulem, Shulem?” However much she continues to be
missed, would the right time to die have been months or years later,
eyesight progressively diminished, hearing no better, even intellect
liable (unthinkably) to decline, unable to be of use to herself or to others,
forsaken to the attentions of strangers? She had prayed not to be
abandoned in her old age, and the prayer had been answered as well as
anyone might hope for.
Precisely because my mother died so full of years and full of sanity,
giving of herself though her body was entirely, irrevocably spent, she
posed the paradox of death in its purest philosophical form. How is it
that even the most fortunate death, approximating so closely what the
dying person and those who cared for her and about her would wish
for, is nevertheless a tragic, shattering event that casts a dark shadow
over what follows?
When I rose from shiva to rejoin the world of the living, I was also
returning to the world of Torah study. After the visitors had dispersed, a
talmid stayed behind and led me by the hand, like a convalescent taking
his first unsteady steps, back into the world where other people had
claims on me, and back into the world of Talmud Torah. In the following
weeks, others performed the same service for me.
It was thus that
on Shabbat Parashat Re’eh, in the room adjacent to the bedroom where
my mother breathed her last, we sat down to discuss Nahmanides’
(Ramban’s) commentary on Deuteronomy 14:1-2: “You are children of
God; do not cut yourselves (lo titgodedu) or make any baldness between
your eyes for the dead. For you are a holy people unto God.”
According to Ramban, the prohibition is connected with our belief
in immortality. Because we are a holy people, we should not abandon
our self-control in the face of death and mutilate ourselves, even when a
person dies young. But if we are to take comfort in the hope for life
after death, why then does the Torah allow and even encourage the gestures
of mourning?
Ramban responds:
Scripture does not forbid weeping, for nature arouses weeping at the
parting of lovers and their separation even in life.
It is possible to interpret this natural weeping as a purely physiological
reaction to loss, not really different in kind from the tears caused by
exposure to the juice of raw onions or acrid smoke. There are Stoic
philosophers, who judge emotion irrational, and dismiss such immediate
uncontrolled symptoms as “first motions,” reflexes of no significance
to the person exhibiting them or as a regrettable weakness to
which flesh and blood is vulnerable. Elsewhere, however (in the preface
to Torat ha-Adam), Ramban is scathingly critical of philosophers who
harden their hearts and deny the reality of suffering, and he is correspondingly
attuned to the halakhic norms that mandate appropriate
grief at the termination of human life.
Hence the implication of Ramban’s words is that weeping is an
appropriate response, not an excessive one, to the human experience of
separation. Even if death is not the end for us, our withdrawal from the
world and from those we love is poignant, says Ramban, the way even
temporary parting is painful and sadness inducing.
It is impossible to read this passage of Ramban without thinking of
Samuel Johnson’s reflection on the secret horror of endings in the last
paper of his Idler series. Here are some of Johnson’s famous lines:
There are few things not purely evil, of which we can say, without some
emotion of uneasiness, this is the last. Those who never could agree
together, shed tears when mutual discontent has determined them to
final separation; of a place which has been frequently visited, though
without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart. . . .
This secret horror of the last is inseparable from a thinking being
whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful. We always make a
secret comparison between a part and the whole; the termination of
any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination;
when we have done any thing for the last time, we involuntarily reflect
that a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more is past there
is less remaining.
At first glance, Johnson is reminiscent of Ramban because both explore
the link between death and other endings. In truth, they are moving in
opposite directions. For Johnson, as a profound psychologist, the sadness
of endings is puzzling, especially when we were not very attached
to the person or thing or activity that is coming to its end. The horror
of death, by contrast, is self-evident. The last look inspires heaviness of
heart because it puts us in mind of the ultimate finality of death.
Ramban, as a theological moralist, inquires why the Torah condones
mourning and its characteristic behavior, and replies that death is comparable
to the parting of lovers, that engenders not only the involuntary
feelings of sadness and distress that haunt Johnson, but also religiously
meaningful behavior like weeping. His response implies that partings,
even temporary ones, leave us with a sense of very real loss, one that
even anticipated reunion cannot put entirely in the shade.
One reason, perhaps the primary one, that Johnson found death so
horrifying, was the fear of what comes after—the prospect of being sent
to hell and its punishments. So strong was this fear that he doubted the
sincerity of those who denied feeling it. Absent this fear, our culture
often associates traditional religion with the welcoming of death, when
we pass on to a better place, liberated from the burdens of mortal existence.
This, despite the fact that religious believers, even when they are
not terrified by the fear of hell, seem to take death, mourning and their attendant rituals, much more gravely than typical secularists do. Perhaps
that is because, as a rule, they take life more seriously too. Perhaps it is
because we revere our progenitors and invest enormous hope in our
progeny, so that the loss of one soul is equivalent to the loss of an entire
world. Biblical religion, in any event, unlike the popular optimistic image
of religion, views death negatively: “In Sheol who confesses God?”
Those of you familiar with R. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man know
how strenuously he stressed Halakha’s distaste for death. In the Rav’s
version of Biblical doctrine, death brings to naught all human activity
and thus renders meaningless the human vocation. Ramban’s attempt
to balance our reliance on God who “wipes the tears from every face”
and the sadness and grief that brings those tears to our eyes, is very
much of a piece with this vision of the human condition.
Often we define valuable human activity as achievement and conquest,
measured in worldly categories, or as the maximized fulfillment
of ritual mitsvot. The 95 year-old woman who began her last day on
earth by eating, and complimenting the breakfast her son had cooked
for her, and regretting that her condition prevented him from delivering
a scheduled lecture knew, without ever having opened a Musar sefer,
R. Dessler’s division of humanity into two groups, those who give and
those who take. She grasped thoroughly R. Dessler’s insight that the
givers continue to give, even when they take, and that the takers take
even when they appear to be giving. And so she gave her son the pleasure
of enjoying the nourishment he gave her and gave him a last opportunity
to acknowledge the honor and privilege that had been his in trying
to see to her needs.
In only a few hours the call “Shulem, Shulem, Shulem” would irretrievably
close the century long epic in which our entire family had
taken part and in which I had played an increasingly crucial subordinate
role. There would be many times ahead for our family and friends when
my mother would be missed, happy events that would have been
enhanced by her enjoyment, trivial news or significant occurrences
where her comments or advice would have been sought and appreciated,
visitors (some talmidim in particular) who would feel acutely the
emptiness where once a human being had existed magnificently.
There are typical experiences we replay in recollection. Then there
are encounters that cannot be anticipated, often with people who
remain unknown. Ten years ago, in the rehab facility where my mother,
following hip surgery in her late ‘80s, was making the fateful transition
from being an elderly woman with some health problems to being a crippled old woman with the same problems, she was dedicated to her
therapy and uninterested in the surroundings she strongly wanted to be
temporary. A woman in the dining room hung her head to one side,
and wept, and did not eat. I pretended not to notice and the next day
steered my mother to a faraway table—she had her own troubles, which
did not need to be reinforced by another’s dejection. The third day my
mother asked to be wheeled to that woman’s table, and she, who rarely
intruded or imposed herself on others, immediately laid down the law
to the other. Did she not know that being on this floor meant that your
doctors had determined that you could regain many of your skills and
go home? Did she not appreciate the window of opportunity, measured
in weeks, during which one could make progress? Did she not understand
that this required a positive, forward-looking attitude?
And the anonymous woman listened and began to eat! Where is she
now? Is she still alive? Was her benefit from my mother’s sermon lasting?
If this episode is vivid in my mind, because I was there, what of the
innumerable human gestures that define each day in the company of
strangers and friends and flesh and blood, and in the solitude we share
only with God?
As Ramban taught, death is sad like parting. As he could have
explained further, death is not like a single act of parting; it is more like
innumerable partings, life withdrawing from every detail on every side.
Earlier I compared one strand in my experience of my mother’s
death to the final chord of a symphony. In retrospect it seems as if the
whole long story, the life she made of her situation—from Polish childhood
and escape from Europe, the murder of so many family members
and the survival of others, through the decades of marriage and the
longer period of widowhood, the many disappointments of life, the
heroic years devoted to others, and the moments of achievement and
satisfaction, her own and those of others, that sustained her pride and
provided her pleasure—it is as if that epic history was meant to culminate
in the weeks and months when, her soul composed for death, she
lay in wait for its coming. It is as if, like the audience of a rare and
astonishing musical masterpiece, one were to leap to one’s feet, hoping
for an encore, only to be brought roughly back to the hard realization
that human life is a one-time affair. The protagonist has only one
chance to get it right, and when the last chord resounds and a splendid
success is assured, she has moved on swiftly without savoring her
accomplishment, leaving the summing up to others.
1912-2007.
So soon. . . .
My mother, when the subject came up, claimed not to fear death,
and her conduct did not betray her words. Neither did she care to dwell
on the prospect of existence beyond the grave. If to Johnson, in his
more doleful moods, death spells the threat of extinction and punishment,
and if death, for Ramban, is a portal leading to eternal life, for
my mother, death was one final task of giving to be endured and
accomplished with dignity and gracefulness.
“May my death be the death of the righteous and my end like hers.”
