Today, I’m going to speak much more personally, more personally than I have ever done in a High Holiday sermon. I want to share with you some reflections about what happened to me over the last year, a year which turned out to be so different from what I expected, and so different from what I prayed for last High Holidays when I, like all of us I assume, prayed for good health for myself and my family.
I’m motivated to speak personally today because the life-changing experiences that I had this year have raised for me some spiritual questions about life and about death and about what it means to be a human being, that I believe to be relevant for us all. These are the kinds of issues that we are meant to think about on Yom Kippur, when we gather as a community to acknowledge our failures, and repent for our failings, but also to acknowledge on this holy day just how terrifying it is as mortals to not know what our fate, or that of our loved ones, will be in the coming year.
While I of course have always known that human beings live in bodies which sometimes fail, this year that fact was driven home to me much more concretely than ever before. Briefly, as many of you know, but not all, I went through a health crisis this past year that involved a difficult surgery right after the High Holidays followed by some severe post-surgical complications requiring repeated trips to the ER and re-admissions to the hospital in great discomfort and pain. As difficult as that was, in the midst of my own illness, my beloved wife Linda was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We were both in and out of the hospital at the same time. Linda died, less than five weeks after her diagnosis. I’ve thankfully recovered. In my anguish, I have wondered: What am I to make of this whole experience? What am I supposed to learn from it?
During this difficult period, my mind sometimes took me to Megillat Eichah, the Book of Lamentations. Lamentations is a collection of five poems which lament the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The book opens with the question Eichah, How? How could this have happened to us? How could God have allowed our enemies to destroy our once thriving city, leaving it a desolate waste, most of its people dead or carried off into exile after tremendous suffering?
In the wake of everything that happened to me this year, I also wondered, Eichah? How could all this have happened to me? Everything seemed to be going fine. Linda and I took a nice trip in the north of England last summer. We did lots of hiking. Saw lots of sheep. We came back to the happy news that we’d be expecting our first grandchild! The High Holidays went well. We hosted our annual open sukkah for the congregation. My 25th anniversary book Putting Worlds into Words, incorporating a collection of my writings and my sermons from my quarter century with the Narayever, was on track to publication.
And then, everything changed. Eichah? How could all this have happened? One verse from the book really stood out for me. 
“Look and see, is there any agony like mine, which was dealt out to me?” (Eichah 1:12). The poet who wrote Eichah cries out to the universe with bitterness, proclaiming from the depths of his heart the unparalleled nature of his suffering.
At the times when I was in my greatest pain and wasn’t sure whether I was going to make it or not, and at the times when first my worry and then my grief for Linda was most acute, I fell into the place of despair evoked in that verse—in which I was sure that no one’s suffering could be like mine. This horrible combination of circumstances that befell me and my family so suddenly last fall, felt not just terrible but uniquely terrible.
Even as I spent time in that dark place, however, I knew that on another level it just wasn’t true. Yes, I was sick, but so many people, including many of you here today, have experienced terrible illness or afflictions. And likewise, so many of you have experienced loss—of a beloved spouse like I did, or someone else who has been so central to your life that you just couldn’t imagine your life without that person in it. I did have a particular confluence of horrible circumstances this past year, but actually nothing that happened to me was unique.
. There is pain like my pain. I know that, in the depths of my soul. Because of my work, I have accompanied many of you on the paths of illness or bereavement over the last 26 years since I came to our congregation. If anyone should know that my suffering was actually not at all unique, it’s me. But perhaps also because of my work, I came to assume that my job was to take care of other people who were suffering in one way or another, and my self-image did not include being the one who needed to be taken care of. So this whole experience came as quite a shock. Like the author of Lamentations, in my darkest hours I felt emotionally that God or the universe was afflicting me in some unique way, and though I have prayed with and for so many of you, I felt that all my own prayers were being shut out.
Rabbi Elazar knew about the feeling that prayers were being shut out. In the Babylonian Talmud (Berachot 32b), he is quoted as saying 
—“Since the day the Temple was destroyed, the gates of prayer have been locked.” Think of what an audacious statement this is, coming not from the mouth of some modern skeptic but rather from the lips of a first-century Talmudic rabbi. Using the same metaphor of gates that is so central to the neilah service that we’re going to be praying in just a few hours time to close Yom Kippur, Rabbi Elazar said the gates of prayer are locked. Our prayers can’t get past the gate. As contemporary scholar Rabbi Akiva Mattenson visualizes it, “Our prayers accumulate on God’s doorstep, piled outside like an unimaginably tall stack of letters.”
Every year at this time that stack gets even higher, as Jews all over the world gather to welcome the new year and observe the Day of Atonement, with the recitation of the formal prayers of the machzor, and with the prayers welling up in our heart, and with the individual expressions of good wishes to other members of the community at this season. Whether we think our prayers are answered or not, on these days we pray. What did it mean for Rabbi Elazar to pray with the consciousness that the gates of prayer are locked, and what does it mean for us to pray knowing that however fervently we may pray and however righteous we may have been in the last year, still our prayers may not be answered?
In my privileged life, I had never before faced serious illness. And while I had grieved the loss of my elderly parents, I don’t think I need to explain to you all how this experience of grief was different. My prayer journey during my difficult year took some different twists and turns. At first I was praying a lot, for myself and for Linda, adding many prayers to that stack outside God’s gate, hoping at least some would get through.
And then, when I was sickest, I found that I just couldn’t pray. I asked my kids to bring me my siddur in the hospital, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. It was partly because of a lack of physical strength for sure, but also, I felt a lack of spiritual strength. I wondered if my faith had deserted me, and if so what that said about the faith that I had thought I had, and that I had been teaching and promoting in my rabbinic work for more than three decades, if it couldn’t withstand this test. Was mine the kind of faith that only held during the good times? I was walking in the 
, the valley of the shadow of death, but I wasn’t finding that God’s rod or staff were comforting me. I lifted my eyes to the mountains, but I couldn’t perceive any help coming. So many hundreds of times in my rabbinic career I’ve quoted these psalms to comfort others, but now when I needed the comfort, they weren’t connecting for me. So many times I’ve quoted Heschel when he said “Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.” It’s a very wise perspective on prayer, but I found that I wanted the broken bridge to be mended; I wanted a miracle, and it didn’t seem to be coming.
Sitting with these doubts, I stopped praying—for the first time in many, many years. The feeling wasn’t there, the energy wasn’t there, the faith wasn’t there.
It was really only after Linda died that the obligation to pray as part of the Jewish rituals of mourning overcame whatever had been preventing me from praying. Even if Rabbi Elazar was right and the gates of prayer were locked, I knew I needed to move past what was blocking me and pray. This was one important way for me to honour Linda, and in the face of this terrible loss, I just had to do it, even over the phone after I was re-hospitalized during the shiva. Let my prayers be added to the vast pile outside the gate, it didn’t matter to me. I needed to pray, especially of course to recite kaddish. I can’t tell you that I was able to move directly into a state of genuine gratitude to Hashem at that time, but the obligation to recite the traditional prayers at least brought me back into a prayer space.
It was the very presence of community which helped me to come out of myself and eventually realize how understandable and how very authentic, yet how very wrong, that Lamentations quote was. When you’re with community, you know that, while the particulars of your medical or bereavement journey might be unique, there actually is pain like your pain. And the knowledge that other people are suffering too, however sad, means that you’re not alone. It’s not that “misery loves company;” it’s the hizuk, the strengthening one gets from the realization that one’s own journey is part of something much bigger, whether that be family, community, God—being part of something bigger helps to situate yourself when you are feeling lost. Being part of something bigger doesn’t diminish us as individuals, instead it carries us when we need to be carried, and it ennobles us. In my case, I received an overwhelming outpouring of love from the congregation during those difficult days, and it sustained me and continues to sustain me and lift me up in my grief. For that I am immensely grateful. I know that not everybody has such an amazing support system, but I hope that everyone who is part of a community comes to feel that they are not alone.
Of course it didn’t make my suffering go away. As our friends the Buddhists cheerfully remind us, suffering is inevitable in life. It is in fact life’s first noble truth. As Rabbi Alan Lew taught in his book This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, suffering is endemic to the experience of being alive and Yom Kippur is the day when we Jews acknowledge the truth of this. We acknowledge that we have fallen short, and we acknowledge that life has fallen short of our expectations as well. There’s only one capacity that actually increases with age, and that, Rabbi Lew teaches, is wisdom.
He sees this wisdom in the story of Jacob, the first person in the Torah who is described as experiencing illness. Jacob summons his son Joseph to his deathbed and he tells him two things: First, “El Shaddai appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan and He blessed me” (Genesis 48:3), and second, “When I was returning from Paddan, [my wife, your mother] Rachel died, to my sorrow, and I buried her on the road to Efrat” (Genesis 48:7). At the end of his life Yaakov was able to see clearly that these were the two most important events that had shaped him: the first time he had felt God’s presence in his life, and the loss of his beloved wife Rachel. Being able to look back on one’s life with such clarity—that’s wisdom. I feel an overwhelming sense of connection to Yaakov as I think back on the course of my own life, both the faith that began to grow in me as a young man which shaped almost everything about my life, since it brought me to the rabbinate, to Canada, to Linda—everything. And like Yaakov, the recent loss of my own wife has certainly been life-changing after 35 years together and has set me on a path to a very different future than I had imagined, whose contours I don’t yet know.
Generations after Yaakov Avinu, Moshe Rabbeinu attained such wisdom at the very end of his life, in the material that we’re reading right now in the weekly Torah cycle. According to the rabbis, Moses uttered 1500 prayers that he be allowed to live, and drew a circle around himself proclaiming, “I will not move from this spot until the judgment against me is suspended.” Finally, however, he accepted the divine decree, and there is tremendous wisdom in that. We can’t win the fight against death. We can fight valiantly, we can rage against the dying of the light, but in the end, one way or another, we all lose that particular fight.
In our own time, Ian Brown has been writing about aging and death in a way that I find very wise. Longing for the life you had, wished you’d had, didn’t have, isn’t only regret, he writes: It is life itself, the full range of up and down. No one gets out alive or blameless, and no one gets it completely right. The imperfections will make it more plangent and sweeter and its loss easier to bear. Brown says he is no longer afraid of dying: “I feel like I am at the beginning of the fourth quarter, but of a game that could still go either way, and maybe even to multiple overtime periods—and it is the championship game, the game for all the marbles, the game you can never forget.”
If our capacity for wisdom does increase as we age, even as our other capacities decline, these are all examples of it. I like to think my experiences this year will bestow on me some wisdom as well.
Last year at this time, I had no idea that a freight train was around the bend, heading right for me. Last year, Linda was sitting right there, smiling at me, sending encouraging vibes my way as she always did during the 35 years of High Holidays that we had the good fortune to spend together. Last year at this time, we looked forward to a year of blessing. It didn’t turn out as we expected. The grandchild did come, baruch Hashem, and a blessing she certainly is, keininehora. But instead of being enveloped in her Bubbie’s arms, she carries her name, a tribute to someone she’ll never meet.
As for me, I am healed, but humbled. I have found joy and gratitude, even as I continue to grieve. I am able to say Shehecheyanu, giving thanks to God for keeping me alive and enabling me to celebrate another new year, even though Linda and so many others did not. In time, I have come to accept that there are so many fundamental things about my life that are out of my control, and that’s a very tough lesson to learn. I could have said that before this year, but I think it was pretty abstract to me and I don’t think I really got it until now. I’ve never particularly liked the Yiddish proverb “Man tracht un Gott lacht” “Man plans and God laughs,” because I don’t picture God laughing when His children are suffering from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I imagine instead God weeping with us. But I do understand the sentiment behind the proverb. We have to plan; we can’t live our lives any other way, but it is humbling to know that all our plans may come to nought.
I regained my ability to pray, both the formal prescribed prayer of our liturgy and the prayers in my heart, even though I know like Rabbi Elazar that prayers aren’t necessarily answered. Faith to me means that whatever our fate in the coming year, we continue to knock on the gate, continue to add our prayers to that very tall pile, not giving up on God because He doesn’t come to the door as quickly as we may like. After all, a locked gate is not a wall. Locked gates at least have the potential to be opened, from the inside or the outside, if one has the right key. And Rabbi Elazar did say that even if the gates of prayer are locked, the gates of tears are never closed. Tears don’t come easily to me, but when they do they are a gift.
Looking back, I’m relieved that one place that I didn’t go in my spiritual journey was to think that all this happened because we were somehow sealed in the Book of Death last Yom Kippur because of our deeds. Not that we were perfect, far from it. But whatever that metaphor of the Books of Life and Death means, I’ve never believed that everyone who gets cancer, for example, is being punished by God for their transgressions. God may sometimes feel far away, we may find ourselves lacking in the spiritual or physical energy to pray, and the gates of prayer may be locked, but I don’t believe that God is actively afflicting us. L’heifech, quite the opposite; I believe in the phrase from the Book of Psalms 
(Psalm 91:15): God is with us in our suffering and our sorrow. Sometimes simply that awareness can help us come back. So much has been written over the centuries trying to solve the problem of why bad things happen to good people. I’m not going to solve that riddle today, but even without the theology all worked out, I am comforted by my restored faith in God’s presence with me, with us.
One final thought: We live in bodies. If there’s any day of the year that we know that, it’s on a fast day. We may pretend that we don’t have bodily needs by refraining on this day, but our hunger and our thirst actually make us feel our bodily needs more acutely than on any other day. And our mortality is forefronted on Yom Kippur: The kittel worn by the officiants and some congregants is like a burial shroud, reminding us of the fate that inevitably awaits us. This is the day we recite Yizkor, evoking the memory of our loved ones, sharing the experience of loss with so many others.
Having bodies means not just that we get hungry, but that we can get sick, and sometimes we recover from that sickness but not always, and ultimately we all die, sometimes in a ripe old age but sometimes long before we or our loved ones are ready. And however painful that is, I believe our mortality is essential to being human. Which is why I hope that we don’t end up in a world where people are uploading their consciousness to the cloud in order to live forever. I know some people in our time are working on that goal. Some call the new reality that awaits us being “post-human.”
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I’m not looking to become post-human. I believe that as human beings, we have amazing, godlike capacities to think, and to be creative, and to laugh, and to cry, and to feel empathy, and to heal, and to gain wisdom, and to make the world a better place, and to ask forgiveness for our misdeeds and our transgressions. And at the same time, we are frail and vulnerable and when the time comes, our bodies, like those of all the other animals, will give out, and then we trust that God will be 
: that God will keep faith with us after we die, whatever that means.
It’s that combination that makes us human. The godlike capacities, and the animal-like limitations of our bodies. As painful as grief can be, and as terribly as we may miss our loved ones who are gone, and as frightening as the fact of our own mortality and that of our loved ones may be, this is what it means to be human. Our mortality, however painful, is not a bug but a feature of who we are; it’s a necessary component of what it is to be a human being. This is something for us to think about as the AI revolution prompts serious consideration of where humanity is going and just what it means to be human and what it will mean to share the world with intelligence that does not live in bodies and doesn’t die.
At various points over the last year, I’ve fantasized that I could press “Undo” or “Backspace delete” on the year 5786. But as much as I would gain, I would also be giving up a tremendous amount if I did so. In the end, I’m glad that as a human being I don’t have the option. I just have to keep going. We all just have to keep going—kadimah.
The book of Eichah concludes on a note of comfort.
Turn us to You O God and we will turn. Renew our days as of old.
Whatever that phrase means, it doesn’t mean that our renewed days will be just like our old days. They can’t be; too many important people are missing. Maybe it’s a prayer that however much time we have left, may God help us and may we help each other to find appreciation and spiritual renewal and wisdom in 5787.
So many people have inquired as to how I’m doing. I’m pleased to report that my health is good—pooh pooh pooh. And my ability to pray has returned. Grieving of course continues. I miss my Linda terribly. Even the happy moments, and I’m grateful that there have been many of those, with a new baby, and an engagement, and many moments of familial closeness, and healing for myself, all have a little asterisk now because we all wish that Linda were here to share them. Still, on we go, as we must. Choosing life.
I still don’t know exactly what I’m meant to learn from my experiences over the past year. Figuring that out might be a lifelong project. But I know I appreciate the opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you today. If my reflections stir some reflection in you, as you consider your own suffering or your own grief, or your own mortality, or your own prayer life, or your own humanity, I will be gratified.