Audio Shiur: Parshat Chukat - The Death of Aharon

Audio Shiur:
Parshat Chukat - The Death of Aharon

Chazal convey the pain and beauty in the process of Aharon's death. Why was he punished? And what can we learn from his death about the way that we handle death today? (Trigger warning: Shiur is a bit heavy. It's about death.)

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The Greatest Jewish Generation

I'm not bashful at shiva houses. After years paying shiva calls as a shul rabbi, I no longer beat around the bush. I'm not there to talk about politics or neighborhood issues. So I sit myself down as close as I can to the aveil and simply say, "Tell me about your mother."

And they always want to do exactly that. And sometimes I find myself in awe of what I learn. Take yesterday.

Last week, I received an email from Orot about the passing of Mrs. Sarah Lev, the mother of Mrs. Shoshana Feuer, who works in the office of the President of the College, and I paid a Shiva call yesterday afternoon. Nowadays, when an older Israeli passes away my first question is always, "Was she born in Israel?" (After all, so many were not, which leads to fascinating aliyah stories). So, when Shoshana told me that her mother was born in Europe, I wasn't surprised. But what Shoshana told me next moved me greatly. (I didn't write everything down, so I'm sharing from memory.)

Mrs. Lev grew up in Lodz, Poland. As a child, she studied in a Mizrachi school where she learned Hebrew, and even traveled to the United States as a Mizrachi representative to promote the values of Zionism. (I didn't even know that they sent such missions before the War!) When the Holocaust broke out, her entire family moved east – and continued to move east, until they found themselves in a Russian work camp in Siberia, where they remained until the war ended. After the war, she returned with her family westward, and eventually ended up in a camp in Germany, where she met her future husband.

In Germany, she and her husband began to care for a group of some sixty children who were orphaned during the war, many of whom knew nothing about their families. (Later in life, one refused to marry an Ashkenazi girl, for fear that she might somehow be related to him.) She taught the children Hebrew, and together with her husband became their de-facto parents, accompanying them to Israel when they made Aliyah in 1948. While they didn't remain close to all of them, they did remain quite close with a group of them, and many would bring their future husbands and brides to the Levs before getting engaged. During the shiva Shoshana pointed out an elderly-looking gentleman, about seventy years old now and said, "He made aliyah with my mother." Even now, so many years later, he came to honor and remember the only real mother he had ever had.

Thinking about the stories Shoshana told about her mother, I cannot help but find myself in awe of the tremendous suffering that Mrs. Lev and her generation endured on the one hand, and their amazing fortitude and strength on the other. By and large, they didn't talk about how hard things were (and I'm sure things were no picnic when they got to Israel either). They didn't complain. They did what had to be done. And they – their entire generation, built the country that I am blessed to live in today.

In America, we refer to the generation of Americans who fought in World War II as the "greatest generation" for similar reasons. They fought and suffered and endured, and built the country that the United States is today. The same is true of the heroes that fought Israel's wars and defeated the enemies bent on our destruction.

But we don't talk often enough about a different type of greatness; that of the thousands of Sarah Levs, who gave their strength and dedication to helping others because that's what needed to be done; who accepted their lot in life – the tremendous loss and terrible pain – often with tremendous fortitude, and literally built the country and rebuilt the Jewish people on their backs.

That generation is, inevitably, moving from this world to the World to Come. We must remember them, honor them, and cherish them – and commit ourselves to pass on their shlichut and mesirut nefesh for Klal Yisrael to the next generation who did not have the zechut to know them.

Losing Friends

Ida Kleid passed away last night.
(You can see Ida on the right on the night before a shul event with her daughter Esti and daughter-in-law Jill).
Ida and Henry lived next door to us in Oak Park. They stocked our fridge before we arrived in Oak Park. They walked home with us on Shabbat after davening. They invited us over for their annual Sukkot spectacular (or should I say "meat-tacular" - Ida liked cooking meat in its various forms, and Henry liked eating said meat) on Chol Hamoed. They would collect our mail during East Coast trips, and theirs was the ladder I would borrow without asking when I needed it.
Ida was a doer. She would come in before a shul kiddush to make the cholent (ah, what cholent). She was a driving force behind pivotal shul events, like the Purim Seudah. Make a shul dinner, and there she was in the kitchen, making the kugel. She was a pillar of Yeshivat Akiva, not only working there, but making Akiva part of her lifeblood. She served as an administrator in the school, taking care of so many of the things that you took for granted.
More than anything, though, Ida was a woman of great strength. Not physical strength, but emotional, spiritual strength. Ida suffered from a debilitating disease for much of her adult life. She cared for an ailing mother, suffering from dementia for as long as I lived in Michigan. Her son Dovid, a caring and unique young man, was born with a physical condition that required constant attention and devotion. Frankly, Henry couldn't have been a picnic to live with all those years. (OK, that last one was a joke). But for all the times she was sick; for all the nights she spent in the hospital; for all the personal and physical challenges she faced, I never heard her, not once, complain about herself. Not once.
I spoke to Henry this morning, and told him that chazal teach us that yissurin - suffering - serves as a form of atonement. When a righteous person suffers in this world, he need not endure additional suffering in the World to Come.
I can say with a fair degree of confidence that Ida Kleid went straight to heaven. And, if they got her to make her cholent, they're eating quite well right now.

The Death of End-of-Life Counseling

In the hysteria of "Death Panels" promoted by Sarah Palin and talk-radio, the proposal to fund end-of-life counseling through Medicare has met its untimely demise. Some celebrate this fact, noting that they don't want the government anywhere near the end of their lives. While I understand the sentiment, I strongly disagree. Right now, the government isn't the problem at all. The problem really, is with the doctors, and that's where prior decisions could be extremely useful in determining end of life care.
Judaism has a great deal to say about the decisions that we make as we approach life's end. According to classical Jewish thought, life represents sanctity and holiness. Every moment that a person spends on this earth represents a gift from God and an opportunity to perfect the soul and grow closer to the Divine. For this reason, Judaism will almost always steer a patient towards life.
It's important here to be clear. Judaism does not require a patient to suffer in all circumstances. Judaism does not obligate the suffering patient to choose any and every procedure and medical technique to preserve life, no matter how painful for no matter how short an extension. There is a balance that I think many in the Orthodox community fail to appreciate.
Some people seem to think that Judaism requires you to always do everything possible. I've even seen rabbis insist that families force doctors to perform painful procedures that were clearly against the patient's wishes for this reason. My heart still pulls at me when I remember these poor people, connected to a respirator, unwilling to communicate, but clearly afraid and subject to the decisions of family members who were taking what I consider to be harsh and extreme advice.
The notion that Judaism forces patients to extend life is simply not true. The wishes of the patient are critical. We must take into account his willingness to endure pain and his wishes regarding his illness, and this personal decision carries great weight. So it's not a black-and-white issue. It's a subtle, complicated and difficult issue that requires careful analysis in each specific situation.
America and Western culture don't share this underlying sense of sanctity. Life is more about experience, pleasure and, as the Declaration of Independence states, "the pursuit of happiness." If you're suffering, it's difficult if not impossible to be happy. If you're chained to a hospital bed, how can that be a life worth living? Why would we engage in extraordinary measures to prolong your life, if that will translate into another month of pain, or another week in bed on a respirator? So doctors, armed with their own sense of values, legitimately will steer patients away from a choice of life, towards a choice focusing on comfort and lack of pain at life's end, in essence giving up the fight, and accepting and even welcoming (and in some cases advancing) death.
Despite the challenging balance within Jewish thought about the end of life, the American medical system operates on a completely different set of values, which emphasize comfort, quality of life and productivity, values that Judaism rejects.
All of this makes end of life counseling all the more important. It's nearly impossible to calmly and rationally consider this complicated and rather personal ethical question in the heat of the moment. These questions need to be discussed, considered and addressed long before anyone enters the hospital.
Ideally, I think it's best to talk about these issues with a spiritual leader, and to consider which rabbi (and what type of rabbi) you'd want to help with this type of decision during such a difficult time. I strongly advocate using the RCA's health care proxy, which allows you to designate who has the power to make these important decisions for you during illness and crisis. (I would also add that your child's rabbi might not be the right fit for you. Rabbis from different streams within Orthodoxy view these issues quite differently, with vastly different outcomes. So choose your rabbi, let your children know about your choice, and ask them to honor your wishes should the need ever arise.) The bottom line is, every single Jew should fill out a health care proxy, appointing trusted religious figures to assist in the making of these decisions when the time comes.
And there's the rub. Who wants to talk about death? No one wants to consider what decisions they'd like to make while they're in an ICU, connected to who-knows-how-many machines, unable to speak, unaware of their surroundings. I don't even like going to the dentist. What makes anyone think that they'd voluntarily approach their doctor or rabbi or clergy and say, "Let's sit down and talk about how I'm going to die."
Only, that's precisely what they should be doing.
As a rabbi, I was happy to help people fill out a health care proxy. But the number of people who actually approached me was rather small. And I really didn't feel right calling members of my shul out of the blue and saying, "I'd like you to come in so that we can talk about your death." Maybe that's what I should have done. Probably. But that's not such an easy call to make.
Which is why it's so sad that Congress chickened out on the funding for this type of counseling. It's not that doctors don't discuss these issues with patients. Of course they do. But they discuss these issues when patients are facing a difficult diagnosis or procedure, and it's already late to make a rational, calm decision. Moreover, once again, they present their unique perspective, and not necessarily one aligned with Jewish values.
Funding would have created a small industry. It would have given social workers and part-time rabbis the ability and financial incentive to call people, schedule precisely these types of appointments, and receive compensation for their time and efforts. (Hey, maybe rabbis could have billed Medicare for their counseling. New type of shul fundraiser?)
But without the funding, there's no incentive for people with training to invest the energy in getting the elderly to even have these types of discussions. So they won't have them, because no one wants too.
And then it will be too late. And the pressures of the doctors, the hospital staff, the nurses - are almost overwhelming and impossible to resist.