Rest In Peace, RBG

As I suspect it did all Americans, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death took me by surprise. I knew she wasn’t in good health, of course: that much was public knowledge. But I didn’t understand how close to the end she was; perhaps she herself also didn’t. But regardless of who knew what and when they knew it, her passing constitutes a major loss for the Court and for the nation. In many ways, she exemplified the Jewish ideal of a life devoted fully and wholly to the pursuit of justice. For Jewish Americans, therefore, her loss was, if not more consequential than for other citizens, then at least more personal.

I will say, however, that I was surprised by the announcement that Justice Ginsburg’s body would lie in state at not one but two locations: for two days at the Supreme Court itself and then for a third day at the U.S. Capitol (where she will become the first woman ever to be awarded that posthumous honor).

Obviously, these are both huge honors that not everybody gets. And that’s really to say the very least: since 1852, for example, when Senator Henry Clay’s body was put on display in the Capitol, the honor of lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda has only been accorded to thirty-six individuals, including twelve U.S. Presidents and four Unknown Soldiers. (The honor is automatically offered to deceased Presidents and former Presidents, but has to be accepted by the family of the deceased—which is why the bodies neither of Harry S. Truman nor of Richard Nixon lay in state in the Rotunda.) Otherwise, the honor is on offer solely by congressional resolution or, if that is not practically possible, then by unanimous approval by the congressional leadership. And then there is also the slightly lesser honor of “lying in honor,” as opposed to “lying in state,” a distinction with, as far as I can see, only two specific differences other than in name: the bodies of people who lie in state are guarded by an honor guard of five, each representing a specific branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, while the bodies of people who lie in honor are guarded by officers of the U.S. Capitol Police Force; and those who lie in state, like Justice Ginsburg, are laid out upon a catafalque originally constructed for the funeral of Abraham Lincoln, while those who lie in honor are set out on alternate biers. For the record, Justice Ginsburg will not be the first woman at all to have her body on display in the Capitol; that honor already went to Rosa Parks. But Rosa Parks lay in honor, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg will lie in state. In any event, Justice Ginsburg will certainly be the first Jewish American to lie in state at the Capitol. And she will only be the second Supreme Court Justice offered that posthumous tribute, the other being William Howard Taft who was also a former President when he died in 1930. (She will therefore be the only Supreme Court Justice who wasn’t also a former President to be awarded the honor.)

The whole idea of delaying burial by putting the body of a deceased individual (even inside a casket) on display for days and days could not run more counter to Jewish tradition, which calls for a speedy burial followed by a week of mourning. And how much the more so when Yom Kippur, which will end the shiva week no matter how much or little of it has happened, is only days away. When the actual burial will take place has not been made public, only that Justice Ginsburg will be interred “next week” at Arlington National Cemetery next to her husband Martin, an Army veteran. (She will thus become the fourteenth Supreme Court justice to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, joining, among others, Earl Warren, William Rehnquist, President Taft, and Warren Burger.)

That she personally chose not to be buried in a Jewish cemetery didn’t surprise me—that die was cast when Justice Ginsburg’s late husband was buried there in 2010—but also stirred up some strange feelings in me, which have now installed themselves next to my feelings about the whole “lying in state” thing. Of course, these matters are themselves screen-issues that serve merely as the outer face of the inner question they mask: the degree to which the Jews of the United States are essentially Jewish Americans (whose bodies lie in state if they earn the right and who should more than reasonably agree if they earn the great honor of burial at Arlington) or American Jews (whose funerals should be scheduled for as soon as possible after they die and who should then be laid to rest in Jewish cemeteries among the other men and women of the House of Israel).

Is there a level of public service at which the good individuals do somehow frees them from the obligation to bow to the traditions of their own people? Queen Esther agreed to spend her days—and all of them, not just the ones told about in the book that bears her name—she agreed to spend her life as the wife of a Persian emperor and we endlessly valorize her courage, her daring, and her decisive pluck in the face of a looming catastrophe that she herself could possibly have avoided entirely but which would have surely resulted in the annihilation of Persian Jewry. Surely, we’re not going to carp about whether or not she had a kosher kitchen installed in the palace or a mikveh! But is the analogy truly apt? Justice Ginsburg was not, after all, set in place by kismet to rescue the Jews of America from some latter-day Haman! Still, she did find her remarkable way onto the nation’s highest court, where she devoted her entire career to the pursuit of justice, equity, and fairness. And she brought only renown to the Jewish community, who looked on her as an example of someone who rose to her position of great power not by hiding her Jewishness or dissembling in its regard, let alone by denying it, but by speaking openly and proudly of herself as a Jewish woman. She wasn’t exactly an American Esther, but in her own way she paved the path forward for American Jews—and particularly for American Jewish women—to think of no level of public service as beyond their station or beyond their grasp.

Back in 1988, I admired Joseph Lieberman intensely for his refusal to campaign on Shabbat when campaigning to represent Connecticut in the Senate. But when he himself moved away from that position in 2000 to become Al Gore’s running mate, I found myself unable to respect him less. Sometimes, you can control the moment and sometimes the moment controls you!

I suppose the expected response for a rabbi would be to decry the fact that Justice Ginsburg’s body will be put on public display for three long days until she is finally laid to rest in a place that is, at the same time, our nation’s most revered cemetery and a non-Jewish place of burial. And, at least on some level, I do feel that way and wish that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s final appearance in this world had been in keeping with the very Jewish tradition regarding which she so often spoke warmly and, no doubt, wholly sincerely. But I am also—and I say this fully aware of the paradox in my feelings—I also feel enormously proud to think of her casket resting on the Lincoln catafalque in the most august setting America has on offer and, yes, to think of her finding her final resting place among the greatest political, juridical, and military leaders of our nation.

One of the prices we pay for maintaining the integrity of our beliefs is having to endure the discrepancy, illogic, and paradox that come from sincerely holding beliefs that do not fit at all well together. Are there people the various components of whose worldviews are so well integrated that they simply harbor no mutually-contradictory or -incompatible beliefs? I suppose there might be, but I myself am not among them. And so, at the same time I am repulsed by the whole notion of delaying a Jewish person’s burial so that his or her remains can be put on display for admirers to admire and for viewers to view, I am also filled with pride at the various posthumous honors paid to Justice Ginsburg and I find myself able to mourn her passing without any ambivalence at all. She was a giant of the law and, at the same time, a Jewish American who exemplified the finest American and Jewish values. May her memory be a blessing for us all. And may she rest in peace.

Rosh Hashanah 5781

 King Sisyphus lives on in most people’s minds because of the punishment in Hell he was condemned endlessly to endure, but there’s also a back story worth considering. Sisyphus was king of Corinth (in his day called Ephyra), but he was not a very worthy regent. Stingy and dishonest, Homer features him incurring Zeus’s wrath particularly by inviting guests to his palace and then robbing and killing them. He also plotted to kill his own brother, which plot involved the seduction of his own niece. You get the picture. Not a nice guy! But the best part of the story, at least in my opinion, features Sisyphus in a hand-to-hand struggle with Death—personified in the myth as the god Thanatos—whom he actually vanquishes so completely that no one on earth can die for as long as Thanatos is under his control. For the Olympians, that is the last straw. And so we finally see Sisyphus sent by Zeus to Tartarus, the Greeks’ version of Hell, where he is condemned to spend all eternity rolling a huge bolder up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom just before he gets to the crest. Over and over. Forever. And not only never succeeding, but—in my opinion, far worse—knowing full well he won’t ever succeed. I’ll paste in a picture of Sisyphus and his rock from an ancient Greek urn to help you get the picture even more clearly.

And so King Sisyphus became famous as the patron saint of pointless endeavor, of interminable striving to achieve an unattainable goal, of unending, permanent frustration. I remember reading Albert Camus’ book, The Myth of Sisyphus, back in college—and finding the author’s suggestion that we are all Sisyphus as we spend the days of our lives trying, to speak in Camus’ own terms, trying to find a way around the absurdity that inheres in all human endeavor. I didn’t much like Camus’ book back then and I suspect I’d like it even less now. (I don’t think I’ve ever actually enjoyed anything of Camus’ that I’ve read, The Stranger and The Plague most definitely included.) But there is something about Sisyphus and his horrible fate that even to this day frames the way I think about the High Holidays and particularly Rosh Hashanah.

It would be easy to describe the work of the holiday season as essentially Sisyphean in nature. We live out our lives against the annual return of these penitential Days of Awe when we are bidden to seek God’s forgiveness for our moral missteps and ethical errors. We do our best, obviously. Yet we never get it quite right, never behave quite as we ourselves think decent and right. As a result, there’s something of Sisyphus’s fate in the way we approach the holiday season and its endless prayers for forgiveness from sin but without ever quite finding the inner strength to obviate the necessary to seek God’s mercy at all by comporting ourselves well in the first place. To speak in Sisyphean terms, we push and we push our personal boulders up to the top of our personal hills…but then Elul comes around the following year and we’re suddenly back at the bottom of the hill. With the boulder. I follow the logic in that line of thinking. But it’s never seemed that way to me.

Life is full of uncompleted and uncompletable tasks. We read the Torah in our synagogues according to an annual lectionary cycle that never ends: when we get to the end of Deuteronomy, we simple roll the scroll back to Genesis and start reading again. The liturgy we recite daily alters slightly as we make our way through the year, but not too dramatically or even all that noticeably; we say our prayers morning after morning and wrap up at the end of the book, but then we when we return to synagogue the morning after that and open the book to the same opening set of benedictions that opened the service the previous day. I remember someone once telling me that cleaning up the house before your kids move out is like shoveling the driveway while it’s still snowing: a pointless undertaking you’re going have to redo anyway and might as well not bother with until then anyway. But this isn’t like that at all, not really. Eventually, it does stop snowing. Eventually, your kids really do strike out on their own. But no matter how much energy you expend studying Torah, you don’t ever get to the end. You’re never done. You learn more and more, but all you really learn—presuming your own intellectual integrity—is how much more you have to learn and how very little you’ve actually accomplished. For some reason, though, that aspect of Torah study inspires me more than it depresses me. And so it is with these holidays now almost upon us. It would be simple to find it frustrating, bordering on pointless, to recite this year the same prayers for forgiveness and divine clemency we’ve recited for all the years of our lives, none of us having successfully obviated the need to bother with all that praying by actually living lives free of transgression, misstep, or sin.

I know how Sisyphus must have felt. And yet…I can’t quite bring myself to consider the High Holiday season as the Jewish version of Tartarus. Every time I open the Torah, even after all these years, I find new insights, new lessons I hadn’t noticed before, new puzzles I hadn’t noticed before and find myself eager to solve. Daily prayer makes me feel vigorous and refreshed, not bored or cynical. And coming to shul on Rosh Hashanah to begin the whole penitential season again does not make me feel failed or doomed, but alive with the possibility of growth, of insight, and of transformation. In other words, to describe our annual festivals as Sisyphean because we’re still pushing the same boulder up the same hill is to miss a crucial point here: that the specific experience of pushing our specific Jewish boulder up our specific Jewish hill is itself far more satisfying than frustrating. (To say the same thing in other words, these holidays are far more process- than goal-oriented.) For me personally, and I suspect for many others, the holiday season reminds us of our potential for growth, even late in life, as it invites us to contemplate the possibility of growing into a finer iteration of ourselves no matter how many holiday seasons we’ve all lived through.

No one would tell an athlete that it’s pointless to run around the same track day after day because the track will still be there the next day. Indeed, the point of exercise is not that the track be ran around or that the weights be lifted, but that the person running the laps or lifting the weights become stronger and healthier through the process. And that too is how I think of our holidays: as an opportunity to become morally and spiritually stronger through the set of ancient rituals about to be undertaken by Jewish people across the world, not as an endless series of tasks that never get done despite our best efforts.

So, the short answer is that, no, I don’t find our holiday labors Sisyphean, stultifying, or absurd. Just the opposite, actually: as a human being ever eager to grow intellectually, morally, spiritually, and ethically, I welcome the chance to push my boulder up to the top of the peak once again fully aware that the point is not that the boulder be moved through my efforts, but that I myself be moved…to a new place, to a new set of personal goals, to a new set of possibilities. Sisyphus lives on as the symbol of tedium; in my life, the High Holiday season lives on, year after year, as the embodiment of the possibility of growth. And I don’t find that tedious at all. Nor should anyone!

 

 

What Lies Beneath Our Feet

 At a dig about four or five blocks from our apartment in Jerusalem, archeologists have unearthed the remains of a First Temple-period palace that appears to have been built shortly after the Assyrian siege of the city in the time of King Hezekiah, which is to say about 2,700 years ago. (For the full Times of Israel story, click here.)  In some ways, this is something that happens all the time in Israel, where archeologists are constantly finding traces of the past buried deep in the earth. I’ve written about some of those discoveries in this space several times, in fact. (To review some of what I’ve had to say in that regard, click here and here.) But in the context of Elul, the month of the Jewish year devoted to an entirely different kind of archeology (see below), I found this remarkable discovery not only to be interesting, but moving and meaningful on a spiritual level as well. It’s that latter lesson I’d like to share with you all this week.

The interesting part is easy to explain. Our Jerusalem home is a normal apartment in a regular building surrounded by other buildings and a huge garden promenade. Because it is, after all, Jerusalem, everybody knows—at least passively—that the piece of land our building occupies has been home to countless generations of Jerusalemites before us. But then a discovery like this comes along—and, really, the site is not even a ten minute walk from our home—to remind us that there were Jewish people living in our neighborhood, not just a hundred or even several hundred years ago, but twenty-seven centuries ago. And, of course, that thought brings on its own set of questions. What did my ancient neighbors look like? How did they dress? What did they eat? Would I be able to understand their Hebrew? Did they travel to the Temple by descending into the huge valley that separates our neighborhood, called Arnona, from the Old City and then climbing up on the ridge on the other side? Or did they follow the route the no. 78 bus still takes along the western side of the valley into the city center? Would these people have recognized me as one of them? And, more to the point, how would they even have understood that question?

For Americans, of course, the 8^th century BCE is almost unfathomably far back in the past. (In New York, we award landmark status to buildings built in the 18^th century and somehow still standing.) Nor is the story of the Assyrian assault against the capital of Hezekiah’s kingdom one of those biblical stories that has retained some measure of currency among educated, literate Americans. But for Jerusalemites, the year the neighbors down the block built their huge house overlooking the Old City is the year of a siege that everybody—not nobody—recalls at least having once learned about in school. As noted, the biblical story has a lot of holes in it, and not least of all because it remains unclear why the Assyrians ultimately chose to withdraw rather than moving on to seize the city. Did Sennacharib simply need his troops more urgently elsewhere? Or did the huge ransom Hezekiah paid—three (or eight) hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold, a talent being about 130 lbs.—did the ransom do the trick? And then there’s a third explanation in the biblical account of how God spared the city by sending an angel to finish off 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one single evening. The truth presumably lies somewhere between all those ideas and theories, but the bottom line is that King Hezekiah died in his early fifties in about 687 BCE without ever having to relinquish control of his capital city or his palace.

So the reason the siege was lifted is unclear. But that Jerusalem was besieged until the siege somehow lifted seems incontrovertible. And that siege seems to have been the context for someone—some wealthy citizen, perhaps even a member of the royal house—choosing to resettle outside the walls of the city and build a home on a verdant ridge that then as now looks over the valley directly at the Temple Mount and which now is about where our Jerusalem synagogue gathers on Tisha Be’av to chant the Book of Lamentations on the anniversary of the day about 120 years after the Assyrians went home on which the city actually was destroyed and its temple razed. And that is only appropriate since the same archeologists who found the remnants of the house are convinced that it was during that final siege of the city by the Babylonians (who in the meantime had taken over the role of dominant force in the Middle East from the Assyrians) that this palatial structure was finally destroyed.

I’ll paste in here a picture of one of the capitals they found, but what speaks the most directly to me is the thought that this palace—bearing mute testimony to the precise era in which the earliest version of Judaism was developed—that this magnificent home was there just beneath the surface of land along which Joan and I have walked countless times without knowing what lay just beneath our feet.

As I’ve written many times before, Elul is our month of introspection and self-analysis. For some reason, I always start by thinking about the past and wondering where it could possibly have gone to. The young tree is somewhere inside the mature one, its inmost rings deriving from the earliest stages of its existence. But is that how it works on the level of individual human beings as well? Or on the broader level of national identity? The palace from the time of King Hezekiah was there all along, supporting the present from beneath—but without making its own presence known, without intruding on the present, without forcing itself on the generation now occupying the space its original builders chose to build on. For two and a half millennia, it was just there.  But now that we’ve found it, how much the richer we are! Knowing that in the time of the kings of Judah, there were building crews putting up palatial homes in our neighborhood reminds me that the past does not have to be remain buried, that knowing what lies beneath the surface can lead to an enriched sense of one’s place in the world, to an intensified understanding of one’s identity, possibly even to an enhanced sense of destiny as the contemplation of the formerly unknown past suggests the possibility of a heretofore unimagined future as well.

As I make my way forward through Elul, I find myself wondering what lies beneath my feet. What part of my past is providing me with my place in the world without making its presence known or felt. What version of the younger me is resting just behind the visible surface of my life and influencing decisions I feel that I’m making independent of outside influences.  What historical relic known to none and whose presence is not even sensed by myself…what relic of my past or my family’s is there nonetheless. And how much richer my sense of self would be—and how much more focused and balanced—if I could only find the courage to dig beneath my own feet to see what lies beneath the soil upon which I stand as I move forward through the days of my life. The palace was there all along, of course. But now that archeologists have found it…now follows the possibility of listening to what it has to say and allowing ourselves to grow through that specific encounter with the past. I wish that for myself in these waning weeks of Elul. And I wish it for all of you as well!