Rosh Hashanah 5783

I had an unfortunate encounter with a jellyfish in the ocean off Rockaway Beach when I was about eleven years old. I was there with my parents. (I was still too young to understand just how totally uncool it is to go to the beach with your parents.) The day was hot. The sky was blue. And the late-August Atlantic was lovely: salty, briny, and cold. I was in deep-enough water to swim and was focused on trying to do the crawl the way we had been taught at camp when I suddenly felt this intense stingy sensation on my calf. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but then I saw a whole school of jellyfish—or whatever the right word is for a crowd of them—in the water nearby and heard people on the beach yelling to people in the water to get out. I didn’t need to be told twice. In the end, nothing too bad happened. My calf swelled up and was sore and painful for a few days. Eventually the swelling went down and my leg stopped hurting. I did not go back into the ocean that season. So the episode concluded not badly, but I was left with what by now surely qualifies as a life-long aversion to jellyfish. When we heard on the radio that about twenty billion meduzot were headed for the waters off of Israel’s Mediterranean beaches last summer, we just turned the car around and headed back to Jerusalem to swim in the lovely municipal pool in East Talpiyot that day instead. Problem solved!

So why, as Rosh Hashanah is almost upon us, am I reminiscing about my childhood encounter with a jellyfish? You may be surprised. Or maybe not: it might depend on how diligently you read the Science Times section of the paper that comes out each Tuesday, because last week that section of the Times featured a story that was truly remarkable to consider as we approach the High Holiday season. And it’s about, of all things, jellyfish.

And, at that, not even a full-sized model, but a miniature version correctly called Turritopsis dohrnii. And they really are tiny, each one about the size of a lentil. Mostly, they behave like the larger models. They float around and use their dainty tentacles to bring even tinier sea creatures like plankton to their tiny mouths. But these teensy-weensy creatures can do something that, apparently, no other known living thing can do: when they become old and brittle, or when their bodies become damaged, they have the almost unbelievable ability to morph back into their adolescent selves. They lose their tentacles, then somehow attach themselves to an underwater rock (or something) and begin to develop. When they’re ready, they start out life again as youthful jellyfish. And although they are not invulnerable or indestructible, they do seem to be able never to die of old age.

I wrote to you about Turritopsis dohrnii a full decade ago (click here) when these apparently immortal creatures were first identified. But now, ten years on, scientists have finally decoded enough of the creature’s genome to begin to understand how this minuscule blob of whatever it is jellyfish are made of can possibly be the sole creature on earth that need never succumb to old age. Scientists at Kyoto University in Japan, for example, have managed to create a whole colony of these creatures and to extract enough genetic material to begin to map out their genetic backstory. (For a hysterical look at the lead scientist dressed up as a jellyfish and performing a song he wrote about his immortal jelly-friends, turn up your volume and click here.) Parallel research teams are at work in Spain at the Universidad de Oviedo and here in the U.S. at Texas A&M University in Galveston. The obvious point of all this interest in these tiny things can be summed up in one single and simple question: can we learn how to rework the human genome so as to mimic T. dornhii and thus make it possible for human beings too to skip the whole senescent frailty thing and just hit reset instead? Now how cool would that be?

Even better than Hollywood-style time travel that magically turns people back into the seventeen-year-olds they once were, altering the human genome in the manner that beckons to the scientists mentioned above would permit us to rejuvenate with our memory banks intact, thus offering us the best of both worlds: the bodies of healthy young people combined with the wisdom acquired over the decades we’ve all spent since we were actual teenagers. It’s hard to imagine a more desirable combination!

Or would life absent its awful brevity be something entirely different, something less good, less desirable, less precious? Does the prospect of growing old terrify or ennoble, unsettle or energize? If we knew we could turn back the clock again and again, thus living in our personal versions of the movie Groundhog Day—would that stimulate or paralyze us as we made our way through the years? My first inclination is to say that I would love to shed my current body and turn back into my nineteen-year-old self…and particularly if I was able to hold onto all I’ve learned since I was that age. But there’s another part of me that thinks otherwise, even that knows otherwise. It’s the passage of time that, above all else, stimulates us to action, reminds us to get to work, frames the whole concept of purposeful enterprise. (This is what Andie McDowell inspires Bill Murray to understand in the movie.) Knowing that we don’t have forever is what gets us to make peace with people we’ve wronged or who have wronged us…and it’s also what stimulates the urge to create and to do good in the world.

If we are fortunate enough to grow wiser as we grow older, we can then hope to gain the sure footing we all truly need to be ourselves in the world and to do the good we were meant all along to do. I used to fear the whole concept of growing older. But now I feel at peace with my age, with my stage, with who I’ve become. And part of that acquiescence has to do with also being at peace with the aging process. I don’t wish I were a jellyfish, not even an immortal one. (And for so many different reasons!) But I’ve made my peace with my own mortality and feel driven into the future by the fact that, unlike T. dohrnii, the time I’ve got is the time I’ve got and there ain’t no more. I am therefore impelled—even inspired—to do with it what I can! No more, perhaps. But also no less.

And that is the message I wish to share as Rosh Hashanah approaches. None of us relishes the thought of being evaluated in the heavenly tribunal by Judge God and found either worthy or wanting. And, equally surely, no one wants to take too seriously the notion that we shall all be written up in God’s great book in the course of the coming weeks. But regardless of whether we focus on that model of divine judgment or not, the bottom line is that the years slip by like dreams through sleep and none can halt the flow. (T. dohrnii is surely meant to be the exception that proves the rule.) As we prepare for the High Holiday season, therefore, the idea is not to be weighed down, let alone paralyzed, by remorse or regret regarding the past, but to be energized by the brevity of life to seize the time we do have on this earth to do good, to be kind, to seek justice, and to mend the tears in the fabric of society as best we can. None of us has forever. Therefore, best to get to work!