The Knowable and the Unknowable

Yom Kippur 5759 (1998)

I. Introduction
We are surrounded by books on this day. Each of us has a mahzor in our hands (there are over a thousand of them in the room), and we are also thinking about books throughout the day. After all, we repeatedly pray (as we do toward the end of the Amidah) that we be inscribed in various books: The Book of Life, the Book of Blessing, the Book of Peace, and the Book of Sustenance.

Nonetheless, there is one book that is generally out of our sight on this day, a book that we’re probably not even thinking about. That book is our appointment book. On weekdays, it is hard to function without it, but today, a day on which we focus on truly long-range planning, an appointment book isn’t of much use.

There is a passage in the Talmud which speaks of three appointments that we can anticipate, but which we will never see in our appointment books. [The passage occurs in several places in rabbinic literature: Bereshit Rabba 65, Kohelet Rabbah ll:5, Mechilta Beshalach (Vayassah) 5 and b.Pesachim 54b. The versions differ slightly.]

II. Three Unknowns
A. The first appointment is our personal Yom HaDin. [The phrase in the text is "Omek HaDin."] When will our personal moment of truth, our personal Yom HaDin (Day of Judgment) arrive, the day on which we will be tested, on the basis of which we will ultimately be called to account?

It doesn’t seem fair, but none of us knows when that day will come. Every day we get the chance to do mitzvot -- and the chance to lie, cheat, gossip, and do all sorts of things that we know are wrong. On what day will our ultimate test take place? We don't know.

I am reminded of a man, a simple farmer, who was an inhabitant of the French town of Le Chambon, France, a town that sheltered five thousand Jews from the Nazis during World War II. This man protected many Jews, at great risk to his life. I remember him being interviewed on videotape [entitled, "The Weapons of the Spirit"] by the son of one of those whom he saved. "Why did you do it?" the young man asked. "How did you muster up the courage to defy the Nazis?"

The man seemed puzzled by the question: "I didn’t behave any differently from the way I had behaved before the War. I just did what I had always done. People were in need, so I helped. How could I do otherwise?"

This was a man who was ready to be tested.

B. The second day which will never appear on our appointment books is Yom ha-Mitah, the Day of Death. This is obvious, yet we rarely think about it. What should our response be to this uncertainty?

A book by the name of Tuesdays with Morrie was recently published. It chronicles a series of visits that the author, Mitch Albom, made to his former professor at Brandeis, Dr. Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of Lou Gehrig's desease. Every Tuesday, Mitch would fly into Boston from Detroit, and spend the day shmoozing with Morrie.

Mitch was continually surprised to learn that, despite his painful and debilitating illness, Morrie managed to consider each and every day a miraculous gift. Life went on, as Mitch put it, "one precious day at a time."

One of the subjects they discussed, quite understandably, was death. "Everybody knows they’re going to die," Morrie said, "but nobody believes it. There’s a better approach," Morrie continued. "To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time."

"How can you ever be prepared to die?" Mitch asked.

"Do what the Buddhists do," Morrie told him. "Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, "Is today the day? Am I ready?"

The book goes on to quote Mahatma Gandhi (p.129): "Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn."

As I read this passage, I felt a smile of recognition. Our siddur says the same thing!

In the evening, we recite the Hashkiveinu, in which we pray that God will "cause us to lie down toward peace, and awaken us again unto life." We implicitly recognize that we may die that very night.

And in the morning, we explicitly acknowledge our return unto life. One of the first prayers we recite is Modeh Ani: "Modeh ani lifanecha, melech hai v’kayam, she-he-khezartah bi nishmati b’hemlah, rabah emunatecha." "I am grateful to you, O Lord, for compassionately restoring to me my soul."

Appreciating each and every day as a gift can help us live with the uncertainty our mortality implies.

C. The third unknown is Yom Ha-Nechama, the Day of Consolation. When we suffer a loss, we don’t know when we will be consoled. Some are consoled rather quickly; others not for many years.

For some this is unbearable, to suffer pain without knowing how long it will last. People sometimes ask me after a funeral, "When will I no longer feel this way?"

Tuesdays with Morrie was written after Morrie’s death. It was one way for the author to keep Morrie’s memory alive, a way of reaching out for nechama. All of us can reach out after a loss. We can try to establish connections with sources of strength which can sustain us: our families, our communities, our tradition, and God. But we live with the knowledge that grieving takes time. And no one knows how much.

You know, when a death occurs, it is easy to determine when shiva is supposed to be over. That you can put on a calendar. And you can figure out when shloshim, the thirty day period following a loss, comes to an end. You can tell when the yahrzeit will be observed. But you can’t put Yom HaNechamah on the calendar. No one can say when nechama will come.

III. That Talmudic passage speaks of three things we don't know. But there are also things that we can know, that we do know if we think deeply enough about them.

In the Talmudic tractate Pirke Avot [3:1], Akaviah ben Mehal'lel tells us to reflect on three things:

Know from whence you came,

where you are going,

and before whom you will be called to render an account.

There is a symmetry to the first two of these questions and Akaviah’s own answers are worth considering.

Where do we come from? We come from the womb.

And where are we going? We are headed for the grave.

We are human beings. We are mortal. This we know, and from this there is much we can learn.

There is another way, though, to address these questions.

"Where do we come from?" can be understood to mean, "What are the values which ground us, which give our lives meaning?" The more we understand ourselves and what we stand for, the better we'll be able to live lives of meaning and purpose.

Morrie Schwartz once said the following: "The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."

Morrie Schwartz had strength because he knew his core values.

But what about that second question, "Where are we going?"

Too often, we know where we want to go, but it isn’t where we are headed.

After listening one day to Morrie tell him how to get meaning into his life, Mitch said, "I knew he was right. Not that I did anything about it."

We not only have to know our values, we have to know what to do with them; we have to incorporate them into our lives, and determine to live by them, in order to achieve our goals.

Finally, we get to the third question:

"Know before whom you will be called to render din v’heshbon, ‘an account’, ‘a report.’"

Now, the idea of a report that presents personal behavior in complete and excrutiating detail is a particularly alarming one this High Holiday season.

But this of course is not a report to be distributed instantaneously around the globe; it is a report to God. And it’s not a report written by someone specially hired to do so. We write it ourselves.

Not only do we write it, but we sign it with our very own signatures. As the Unetaneh Tokef puts it, "hotam yad kol adam bo," "every one of us signs it with our deeds." There should therefore be no surprises in these reports, because they contain the records of our lives, which we know quite well.

We are about to recite Yizkor. As we remember our loved ones who are no longer in the land of the living, let us focus on Akaviah’s questions and let us resolve to answer them. Let us contemplate where we come from, where we are going, and let us take pains that the report we will one day present will be one that we can be proud of.

Amen.