Rabbi Stephen Weiss
Shemini Atzeret 2014
When the holiday of Sukkot is completed, I put aside my lulav for six months. I use it to help burn the hametz on Erev Pesach after we have searched for it the previous night. In this way there is a tie between one holiday and the next, and the physical nature of the mitzvot are bound one to another.
Author Deborah Wechsler comments on the use of the lulav on Pesach as an example of using physical objects to engage God’s mitzvot. Since they still contain some trace of the sacred, even after they are used for a special ritual, it is customary to retain them for another task.
But I think there is another reason that we hold in to the lulav. We march around the synagogue with our lulav each day of Sukkot. The rabbis compare the lulav with the king’s scepter. When the king desires to show favor to one of his subjects, say the rabbis, he gives them his scepter. Whoever holds the kings scepter holds his power. All who see someone holding the scepter know he is beloved of the King. So we march with God’s scepter so to speak in our hands to show that God loves us and will save us.
We don’t often talk about that idea that God will save us. Salvation is one of those ideas that sounds very Christian to our ears. But that’s exactly what we pray for when we march around with the lulav. Hosha na. Hoshia na. Save us. Grant us salvation. For us, unlike for Christians, salvation means to save us from troubles in this world. But for us, as for Christians it also means to grant us salvation in the next world. We pray that God should forgive all our sins, purify us, draw us close and grant us eternal life.
As Jews, we affirm that there is eternal life. This life we know is only one small part of our greater existence. Our souls live before they enter this world and live on long after the leave it. The body is merely a temporary dwelling for the soul, but it is the soul which is the essence of who we are. That soul, according to Jewish teaching, is part of God’s spirit. It is like a little finger of the divine flow of energy that fills the universe that extends down inside us, but is not limited by us.
What happens to that soul when we die? Jewish tradition teaches that the soul is held in the body by our Tzelem – or aura – an energy field that surrounds us. As death approaches and our body weakens, so does the tzelem. In its weakened state it can no longer hold the soul inside us. Freed, the soul, comes and goes from the body, making journeys to the next world to prepare the way.
When we die our loved ones come to escort us to that next world.
There is a beautiful teaching that when we die, we go though a process of purification and cleansing before we reach heaven. Some sources describe this as a temporary period of punishment. Others a s a more gentle process of refinement of our souls, restoring them to their original state as pure spirit of God. One kabbalistic source I love tells how two angels take our soul and immerse it in river of Gods light to loosen all the baggage of our lives that is encrusted around it. All our sins, our burdens and sorrows. Then the two angels play a gentle game of catch, tossing our soul two and fro, like parents playing lovingly with their child, until all that baggage is shaken loose and falls away. Whatever the process is, Jewish tradition teaches that it takes our soul up to twelve months to complete that process and ascend to its final place of blessing in heaven.
This is why we recite kaddish for eleven months. Each time you recite kaddish for a loved one, God counts it as you testifying to their worthiness, and so speeds up the process and moves their soul closer to heaven. This is called an ilui – elevation. By our actions we elevate our loved one’s soul to its place in heaven. But God forbid we should assume our loved one needs a maximum time of twelve months to get there. That’s why we stop at eleven months rather than say kaddish the whole year.
Our sages also teach that in the next world our souls still can communicate with us, through our heart. They can hear and see us, know what we are doing. They also act as our guardians and our advocates before the heavenly throne, beseeching God to be kind and forgiving to us and to bless us.
We have all joked at times that we cannot know if there is life after death because no one has been there and come back to tell us. Yet that is not actually true. Despite the popular atheistic literature by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and the like, today we have a great deal of compelling evidence of life after life. We have on record tens of thousands of stories of people with near-death experiences who were pronounced clinically dead and then experienced hovering over their bodies and being drawn towards an intense light and finding deceased relatives greeting them and then they were told they had to go back. These individuals can often describe exactly who was in the room, what they did and said while they were lying flatlined on the table. Their testimony is form the other side and buttresses the belief that there is in fact a life beyond this one.
What is the next world like? The sages discuss many fanciful images. They suggest for example that everyone sits in a circle with God in the center teaching them Torah. The El Malay prayer describes our souls resting under the protection of the God’s divine wings. Other sources describe it as basking in God’s light. Hassidim believe in reincarnation – that we return this world in another body again and again, until our soul resolves all its issues and reaches perfection. Mainstream Judaism believes each soul is unique and goes straight to the next world The truth is we do not claim to know. There is no dogma about what life after death looks like, only the assertion that it is real.
One thing Judaism does assert. Whatever life in the next world is, it is salvation. That is, in the next world we are saved from all sorrow and trouble. The next world is all blessing. It’s all sweetness and love.
It’s like the story of an elderly woman who asked her preacher to come to her home. Given her advanced age, she wanted to discuss her funeral arrangements. After describing the nature of the service she wanted, she told the pastor that during the viewing she wanted everyone to see her laid out in her best church dress with a fork in her hand.
“Why a fork?” asked the stunned preacher.
“Because of something that happened when I 1st joined the church. I attended the church supper on a Sunday, not really knowing a soul. I was seated next to a very nice gentleman who introduced me to some other folk at the table. After we finished the main course they came to collect our plates and silverware.”
“Hold on to your fork,” he told me.
“But why?”
“You’ll see, there’s something sweet still to come.”
“And sure enough, the servers came around with big, gooey, wonderfully sweet pieces of chocolate cake. Since then I always kept my fork at each church dinner. After I die my friends might be saddened by my demise thinking that this is really the end. The fork will show them that I believe that there is still sweetness to come.”
Of all the ritual objects we use during this Sukkot season, we might not think of a fork as falling in the same category as the Lulav, Etrog and Sukkah. Yet, in many ways the dessert fork is a perfect symbol for this day and this Yizkor hour.
How many Jews rush out of shul after the shofar is blown at the end of Yom Kippur and never experience the sweetness of Sukkot? Or for that matter, how many of us here today will leave after this Yizkor and not come back for the sweet dancing of Simchat Torah tonight or tomorrow?
How many of us felt that all of life’s sweetness was gone when someone whose memory we’ll recall in a few moments 1st passed away? Or did we hold on to our fork so that we might again try to dig in to that which life has to offer.
When we recite Yizkor it is fitting for us to shed a tear for those who have gone before. But on this Shemini Atzeret, as we are about to leave the Holy Day season, it is equally fitting to recall the sweetness of their lives, to hold on to our “forks” so that we might share in that sweetness that is still to come.
And we should also find joy in knowing our loved ones still live on.
When I die, you can bury me with my lulav, because I believe with all my heart, there is sweetness yet to come.