From the blog of a popular [and rightfully so!] rabbi.
When I receive a call from a congregate to officiate at the funeral of a somewhat estranged relative I know what to expect.
Since the congregant (or the funeral home) is reaching out to me, it’s a clear sign that the deceased had no rabbi and probably no affiliation with Judaism.
After all, why would someone ask me to officiate at the funeral of their relative who lived in a place which is almost 50 miles away from where I live?
Therefore when Phill Gotlieb (name changed) asked me to officiate at his younger brother’s levaya, I realized that his brother was almost certainly another victim of the assimilating effects of American life on the Jewish people.
Phil said, “My brother, Nat, being only 12 years old when our dad died was quite traumatized. It was 1965 and the counterculture movement was going strong. Nat was very disturbed by Dad’s passing. He dropped out of yeshiva and when he was only fourteen moved to San Fransisco. He became a child of the 60s, a hippie. When he finally returned to the east coast, he was thirty, jobless, and with no marketable skills. He had abandoned Torah and he and his wife were never privileged to have children.”
The funeral would be at the graveside the next morning.
I arrived early at the cemetery office to obtain the grave location.
As I turned to leave, the cemetery clerk handed me an envelope and said matter of factly, “Rabbi, take this envelope. The deceased requested it should be buried with him.”
“Did you look to see what’s in the envelope?”
“No of course, not, who cares anyway?” He said with a shrug.
“As long as they pay the bill, what do I care?”
I looked at the pages and screamed, “Wait, hold on a minute!”
I raced outside to Phill’s car and dragged him to the cemetery office.
Phill protested, “Rabbi, what are you doing?!”
I sat him down at a desk, poured out the contents of the envelope out and simply said, “Read!.”
“Rabbi, I don’t understand…”
Suddenly wailing was heard throughout the cemetery office, the likes of which caused the dozen or so attendees of the funeral to race into the office.
“What’s going on?” They asked.
Emotionally Phill spoke, “All my life I looked at my brother as a failure. As a man who abandoned the Torah. A man who floated from place to place. A man who only took and never gave. However, I was wrong. Very wrong. Most of you don’t know this, however, when our father died in 1965 he left us with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. For years, we constantly received eviction notices and we were told by our mother never to answer the phone or door, lest a debt collector is on the other side. This went on for ten years straight. Suddenly in 1975, the notices, the phone calls, mysteriously all ceased. We never knew why and never asked.
But, today the mystery is solved.
I now see that from the age of 12 in 1965 until the age of 22, my brother Nat, slowly but surely repaid every penny our father ever owed.
The last page in the envelope contains a document which states, “All loans and penalties have been paid in full. Gotlieb file is closed”.
All these years, I thought that my brother was nothing. That he lived a wasted and unfulfilled life. Now I realize that he was greater than all of us in so many ways.
Who could have thought that for ten long years, he somehow scrimped and saved and without telling a soul he paid back our father’s debts?”
A few minutes later as we stood by the open grave, Phill lovingly fulfilled his younger brother’s last request and placed the papers on top of the casket.
As I looked on I said, “Nat, when you get to Shomayim, make sure you show them the envelope and what’s inside. All doors will automatically open.”
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A beautiful act of chesed. No denying that.
I just question the last two sentences.
There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Those are a LOT of seconds. And we are held accountable for EACH ONE!!
S-C-A-R-Y!! The responsibility is ENORMOUS. Every word that came out of our mouths. Every thought that went through our minds. Everything. Every bracha we did or didn't make. Every word of Torah we did or didn't learn. Every dollar of tzdaka we did or didn't give.
The Gemara [BK 50] is very clear that Hashem is not a וותרן. He doesn't overlook ANYTHING. If someone messed up and does Teshuva then he is welcomed back with open arms. But in the absence of Teshuva there is no amnesty.
So the notion that a person can live a life completely devoid of spirituality and go straight to Gan Eden because of one huge mitzva without having to account for everything else is dangerous. Chilul Shabbos is כרת. There are 36 כריתות. Every time a person eats an unchecked piece of lettuce, he is probably transgressing dozens of איסורים. Everything is erased because of one mitzva? Not even close.
One might argue that only Hashem can judge, so how do I know??
The answer is that our tradition teaches how we are judged and nowhere does it say that one mitzva can erase a lifetime of עבירות [unless that mitzva happens to be Teshuva...].
