From the Rabbi's Desk

To begin with, I would like to thank all of you for your concern and well wishes this past week. I’m much more familiar with the rabbinic side of grief and funerals and mourning rituals than I am as a person being consoled. I’m naturally the consoler and not the consoled. Thank you to one and all who have reached out and to all of you who helped by attending services these past few nights to enable my dad to say Kaddish. We truly are blessed to be members of the OVS community and family.

The עשרת הדברות/Ten Commandments are the prominent text of this week’s Torah portion. The educator in me needs to point out that the Hebrew is not “commandments;” it’s “statements”. This is important because in our division of “Ten”, there are nine commands and one statement. That first statement is an acknowledgment of the Divine and the uniqueness and the oneness of the Divine in our world. Our tradition is that the 10 were written on two tablets, five on each. We often divide the two, with the first five being between us and God and the last five as laws between us and other people. When the two tablets are presented side by side, we find a connection between two of the statements/commandments. They are in pairs: one & six, two & seven, three & eight, four & nine and five & ten. When we examine each of these pairings, we learn a deeper value and story and connection to our lives. The first and sixth are what I would like to examine a bit closer at this time. The first is the statement of a faith in a singular God and the sixth is the commandment to not murder. We can see the connection through the basic Jewish tenant that all are made in the image of God, and thus when we murder, we kill a piece of God and possibly negate the existence of that Divinity in the murdered in the first place.

When a person dies, we sometimes feel the world is a bit less Divine. We might feel a bit more estranged from God as we grieve and long to feel the warmth of that person. For other people, we feel more connected to our faith as it brings us comfort and a framework to our current situation. Regardless, whenever a person dies, a piece of God does die as well. In the Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a, we learn “He who saves a life saves the world.” This is true because each person is in fact a world unto themselves. In fact, the whole quote is “he who destroys a life is as if they destroyed the whole world and likewise he who saves a single life is as if they have saved the whole world.” This is stated as an answer to why God created the world with one human… to teach us that all lives are important and are whole worlds. So when a person dies, a whole world disappears, and with them a piece of God.

The death of my aunt in August, and now my uncle this month, has been a devastating occurrence in our family as our earthly connections have come to an end and their worlds have ended. At the same time, we see the world continue to rotate and we see the world continue to grow. We live in a world where sadness and joy exist side by side. There’s no avoiding this reality. As we grieve, we learn to appreciate what we have and to take less for granted. We each grieve in our own ways and we each need to find a way to continue living with our grieving. As we gather to say Kaddish for our beloved, it’s an acknowledgment that life is still beautiful and that God is still a core part of our existence. Although a piece of God has died with our loved ones, God has not died. We pick up the pieces of our loved ones and carry them with us, and thus that piece of God, and their world, never really fully dies.