Rock and Roll at the Deathbed - February 2020

At Izzy’s deathbed, I began with “Elecho,” I cry out to you, words from Psalm 30 calling from the depths, hoping for God’s renewed presence. The melody is haunting, pleading as it rises and falls on “Adonai be a help for me.” It hooks the heart, even as it cracks my voice. 

Izzy, it was clear to me, was dying, although it was also clear that Evie, his wife, was still hoping that he would hang on. The signs were there--the wasting limbs, the faded voice, the shallow breath--but she had remarked that he looked so much better than he had at the rehab earlier in the week.

The phone rang. It was a granddaughter, one of the beautiful young women whose portraits crowded the table next to the hospital bed. Evie said, “Our rabbi is here--one of our rabbis, the singing one. He’s brought his guitar and is praying with us. Rabbi, say hello to Ayelet.” Obediently, I took the phone and greeted her., asking where she was studying and letting her know how fond I was of  her grandfather. When I handed the phone back, Evie told her she would call her back when I had left.

What to sing next? My hand turned pages and found “Hard Times,” the Stephen Foster classic I had learned from a Bob Dylan record. A kind of secular prayer, it acknowledges that hard times are indeed upon us, and orders that “Hard times come again no more” and that they should stop “hanging around my cabin door.” But we know that it’s hopeless to insist, that hard times have arrived and are unlikely to pass in this 72-year-long marriage--a marriage that only death could do part. It was a magical love in which Izzy’s only substantive complaint on his deathbed was that the couple had married only in September when the wedding could have been in July: they had wasted two whole months of conjugal bliss. 

Imagine--from my perspective as a person who couldn’t make his marriage last past its twentieth year--that after 72 years of marriage, they wanted more. And given that likely there wouldn’t be more in the future, they were content to imagine that they could have had more even before they did get married. This overwhelming desire for her husband troubled Evie. Her son had admonished her: it’s not fair to ask him to stay any longer, because he can’t. But it was still so hard for her to acknowledge that the end was finally here. She could not accept it. 

“Well, what if both are true?” I suggested. “Perhaps you can tell him that you want him to stay but that you know that it’s impossible.” People so often struggle to hold such contradictory truths in their minds at one time, but Evie’s heart seemed to take over and she knew that both were true. But that was a day later, when he was no longer talking, just breathing, presumably hearing, his mouth open into a jagged rectangle, his unshaven chin bristling in a way I had never seen, even in rehab. The day before, the day with the guitar, he was still communicating. To my chaplain’s eye, he was already actively dying, but the nurse had not yet been there to make that determination. And to communicate it to Evie. Neither of those things falls into my purview.

So after “Hard Times”--”tis the song, the sigh of the weary,” what would I play next? Clearly, the time had come for a prayer--a formal Jewish prayer rather than a secular one. The obvious choice was the vidui, a prayer that offers the dying person an opportunity to acknowledge that they’ve made mistakes--or, in the common parlance of received religion, that they’ve sinned--in their life and that this is a final opportunity to pray for atonement. I sensed that even if Izzy was ready for this prayer, Evie was not, so I hesitated, which allowed her to suggest that I sing the Mi Shebeirakh, the blessing for healing that we so often offer at a sick person’s bedside. Evie, still recovering from a fall that fractured her hip and left her in terrible pain, very much needed a Mi Shebeirakh. She loved in particular the beautiful version by Debbie Friedman that we had sung the week before, when she still hoped that Izzy would bounce back. 

But today Izzy shook his head--did he also wave his arms?--not clear in my memory, but he made amply clear with whispered words and physical gesture that there would be no Mi Shebeirakh. So what to do? I plunged precipitously, perhaps recklessly, “Izzy, would you like the Vidui.” I asked in a pointed way I almost never do, perhaps (as I look back on the moment) because I felt that this might be the last opportunity for him to say the Vidui himself, rather than having a rabbi read it on his behalf, or perhaps because I sensed that this was what his refusal of the Mi Shebeirakh meant. Before he could respond, however, Evie exclaimed, nearly as vociferously as Izzy but louder, “NO!”--the pain of acknowledging that Izzy’s life was now wholly in God’s hands, that he would die within days if not hours, was simply too  much for her to process. 

So an impasse--of my own making? Perhaps, but by offering the vidui, I did lay the blockage out in the open. Evie, with the help of the nurse, of her kids, and of Izzy himself as he became quieter and weaker and eventually stopped talking all together, gradually got there. But that would be tomorrow--what about today, as Evie sat by Izzy’s side, protecting him, guarding him for now from the inevitable conclusion? As we remained in silence, I recalled, in a moment of grace, how often I had seen Evie and Izzy holding hands like the friends and lovers they had been for more than 72 years. And I also recalled how wistful I would become in those moments, as I was reminded that my own estranged wife and I would not be holding hands after 70 years of marriage. And as I write this I also recall how much I loved holding hands with my sons, their paws growing bigger and bigger until they became the size of my own and no longer sought the warmth and safety of my grip. 

So it was The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”--“When I touch you I feel happy inside.” That reality had not changed for Evie and Izzy in 72 years, and those words resonated in Izzy’s face as he mouthed them and feebly squeezed his wife’s hand for the two minutes or so the song lasted. As I sang, Evie’s face glowed with love and suffering.  Time, in that odd way it occasionally does, slowed down, even stopped as the image of the two lovers became fixed in my memory, holding hands in the face of immense loss. And somehow I knew that for this unity to emerge from the disjunctive impasse between his need to die and her need for him to keep living, God--grace, the universe, my own unconscious--had sent me something for them to agree on: when in doubt, hold hands.

How Moses Comes to Terms with Mortality

Parashat Vayelech (Deuteronomy 31:1-30)

Published on Hebrew College's "70 Faces of Torah" Blog on October 2, 2019

In my work as a geriatric chaplain in a Jewish setting, I have found that the story of Moses’s death — and God’s decision to deny him the satisfaction of entering the Promised Land — often resonates with people who are themselves struggling with the reality of their own mortality. One man in particular, a regular attendee of religious services who died recently, would begin raising questions about God’s justice whenever the topic of Moses’s death arose throughout the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. I can only wish that I recognized at the time how clearly his complaints reflected his own fear and rage in the face of his own inescapable demise. If I had, I might have suggested that we read Parashat Vayelech, this week’s Torah portion, together, to see how Moses himself moved from the desperate pleadings of Parashat Vaethanan to the calm reassurance of a man who has come to terms with death.

The first words of the portion, Vayelech Moshe — “Moses went,” hints at this shift. Commentators debate as to where in fact Moses went, but quite possibly the movement in question is psychological rather than physical, especially since his first words to the Israelites here include an acknowledgement that he can no longer function as he once did: “And he said unto them: I am a hundred and twenty years old this day; I can no more go out and come in; and the LORD hath said unto me: Thou shalt not go over this Jordan” (Deut. 31:2)

Rashi suggests that Moses’s invocation of his birthday indicates that his days and his years have filled out — that this day, according to tradition it is 7 Adar, will also be the day of his death. He knows he has reached the end of his life and the end of his leadership (which is how Rashi understands his inability to go out and come in rather than any physical frailty), so he states without bitterness that he will not cross the Jordan. He goes on to assure the Israelites that God, along with his successor Joshua, will cross over with them. He closes his brief address with the words: “Be strong and of good courage,” assuring the Israelites that God will not forsake them.

Turning his attention to Joshua, but still speaking in front of the people, Moses repeats this imperative (now in the singular): “Be strong and of good courage,” giving Joshua his charge to lead the people and to apportion the land among them. As with the Israelites as a whole, God will be with Joshua, and will not forsake him.

In this initial section of the parasha, Moses is occupied not with his own death or his feelings of loss, but with his concern for the people, who will soon face the unknown without him. They can still recall the generation of the spies, their parents who were unable to meet God’s challenge to occupy the land God promised to them. As Moses will point out later (see Deut. 31:27), even in his presence the people struggle to resist the lure of idolatry. What will happen once he, their leader and primary bulwark against God’s towering rage, has passed from the scene? Thus he reassures and encourages his people rather than bemoaning the unfairness of his own fate.

Towards the end of the parasha, Moses, speaking privately to Joshua, again repeats what now feels like a mantra: “And he gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge, and said: ‘Be strong and of good courage; for thou shalt bring the children of Israel into the land which I swore unto them; and I will be with thee’” (Deut. 31:23)

Or is it Moses who speaks these words? Although the clear antecedent of the verb “and he gave…a charge” is Moses, Rashi and other commentators are quick to insist (as are most of my students when we study this passage) that God speaks these words, the first time God has addressed Joshua directly. If that is so, God echoes Moses’s encouragement, repeating the words “be strong and of good courage,” which God will repeat to Joshua three more times in the first chapter of the latter’s eponymous book.

In that first chapter, however, God comes to Joshua, who is described as Moses’s servant, after Moses has died, suggesting that this is the first time God speaks to Joshua directly. Read this way, the earlier statement is Moses speaking on behalf of God (which is not unusual in the Torah or the Prophets). This dual voice gives this statement an additional resonance: not only will God be with Joshua in the Promised Land, but Moses will be there as well — not in any physical way, but spiritually, as the human source of the divine teaching that will guide the Israelites’ path through the challenges that lie ahead.

Significantly, the words of Moses’s refrain, hazak v’ya-ameitz, echo the words of the final verse of Psalm 27, hazak v’ya-ameitz libeka — “be strong and let thy heart take courage”–which Jews read every day from the beginning of the month of Elul to prepare for the High Holidays. Vayelech also helps us prepare for the Yamim Nora’im, since the Torah-reading cycle places it either just before Rosh Hashanah or, as is the case this year, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Every year, we, like the Israelites on the cusp of the Promised Land, like Joshua taking on the mantle of his great predecessor, like Moses himself, facing his own mortality, face the unknown, the awesome realization that we do not and cannot know the future. We know only that it will not be easy; that we, despite our best efforts, will stray from the path; and that we, even if we are healthy, never know when our lives will end. So through liturgy like Unetaneh Tokef and the symbolic death of our Yom Kippur rituals of self-denial, we stare into the abyss of our own mortality. The drama of Moses’s death provides a model for that process. We echo both God and Moses in our exhortation to ourselves and others to be strong and of good courage — that we will survive the ordeal of symbolic death on the high holidays (even as we know that our physical survival is only temporary) and that in leaving our descendants with encouragement and assurances (rather than focusing solely on our fear of own mortality), we ensure our spiritual survival.