Rosh Hashana and Reviving the Living
By Rebbetzin Tzipporah Heller

Some people walk around as the living dead; others are the most alive when dying.

I was a teenager when Aunt Jeanette became ill and her illness was my first introduction to death and the super-rational power of the survival instinct.

All creatures what to live, but what makes human beings unique is that the source of our survival instinct is not within our bodies, but deep within our souls. We recognize eternity within us, and let it move us beyond the comfort level of the body, and sometimes beyond its finite borders.

Aunt Jeanette was different. She was somehow more alive than the rest of my family. For one thing, Jeanette wore diamonds. When I look at the family portraits that were the inevitable last course at every wedding and bar mitzvah, she sparkled. Her gowns were not only expensive (or at least looked expensive), they were trendy and attractive.

This is why Aunt Jeanette's terminal illness didn't fit in the script. She just was not the type for cancer, or any other non-aesthetic unromantic illness. When she was diagnosed (only after a long period of denial), her anger gave way to depression and passivity.

She was admitted to a hospice, and from that moment onward lost all apparent interest in life. The visitations were futile exercises in compassion. Nothing could break through her apathy.

But when a fire broke out in the hospice, she found the strength not only to get out of bed, but also to literally run away from death, which up until then, we thought she had come to regard as her long-awaited friend.

Several months ago, I saw the will-to-live express itself from an entirely different angle. I saw far more than a last grasp to survive, which is, ultimately, an instinct that every living thing is born with. What I saw was the eloquent concretization of the drive to survive as a human being with everything that makes us eternal and real being chosen over what is transient.

That choice -- to be truly human with an undying soul -- is a choice for life in the most profound sense.

An explosive was thrown at an army checkpoint. The soldiers at the checkpoint had only seconds to make what would inevitably be the most crucial decision that they would ever make. They threw themselves at the bomb, extinguishing its deathly power with their bodies. From the perspective of Torah, they were not choosing death, they were choosing life.

In so doing, they were affirming their essence as human beings, possessors of eternal souls over their identity as possessors of the physical bodies that we share in common with animals. This is the part of them that will live forever, long after the body is no longer remembered. The soldiers died preserving the spark of Divinity that separates man from beast.

PHYSICAL VS. SPIRITUAL DEATH
Physical death is defined as the total absence of any form of movement. Spiritual death takes in forms that are subtler, but far more telling in their result.

Pharaoh, the Egyptian ruler who enslaved the ancient Jews, is the classical example of what the Torah would call spiritual death. The plagues would open the eyes of all but the most moribund, but he refused to move on. His spiritual rigor mortis was self-imposed.

Let us examine why.

Pharaoh started his life like everyone else. He faced the same conflicts that we all do: self vs. others; now vs. later; pleasure vs. decency. Our early conflicts are mind-numbing in their similarity. It is, however, the resolution of these conflicts that is the basis of our identity.

The Maharal, the great 16th century philosopher, tells us that for most of us these conflicts are never completely resolved. Each choice creates a backdrop for the others that come after it.

An example of these phenomena can be seen when looking at the most basic level of conflict: self vs. others.

For a very young child there are no "others." The child is firmly implanted in center state of his or her life. But, at a relatively young age (certainly by age three), most children have made the discovery that will keep them alive the rest of their lives. The discovery is that being is more fun than having, and that the key to being is altruism. Just watch how children love to be the one who gives out the crayons. This does not mean that the two values (self vs. other, being vs. having) will never clash. What it does mean is that the battle will soon be one of equals.

As the child grows, the values of eternity can now spar and win against instinct and physical self-definition. Not every encounter will lead to victory, but for many of us, the victories are more frequent than we realize.

Pharaoh was a loser. By the time he met Moses, he was spiritually dead. How did this happen?

We know little concerning his early years. But one piece of information stands out. The Midrash tells us that he would rise at dawn and go to the Nile where, unseen by others, he would relieve himself. The rest of the day he would deny any natural urge that he felt, pretending to be above normal human functioning. He did this in order to authenticate the fable of his Divinity that he had created.

What this tells us about him is that he had hermetically sealed his life in falsehood. He was morally lifeless; his soul was dead, killed by his unceasing pursuit of validation from others. His ability to live with himself as he brutally enslaved others was the result of his long having ceased to relate to others as humans. For him, people existed only for one purpose: to assuage his unquenchable thirst for self-validation and control.

As with the Pharaoh, I have little information about the early lives of the soldiers who sacrificed their physical lives for others. What is evident from their deed, however, is that they knew the meaning of eternity. They were aware of moral and spiritual choice making. They were, and are, alive in the most authentic and unchanging sense of the word. When Pharaoh was "alive," he was dead. He was stillborn at the stage of development where there is only "self." The only problem was that he didn't know it.

AVOIDING PHARAOH'S MISTAKE
How do we avoid spending decades of going through the motions of life without any real growth or change?

The Maharal presents us with two significant ideas that can literally revive the living dead.

One of the reasons that we stop living is that we develop patterns of response that feel natural. We no longer engage in an inner questioning process, we just respond automatically and think we can't do otherwise. Thus we feel simply stuck.

Of course, it really is much more complicated than that. Many of our deeds are borne of mixed (often subconscious) motivation. We do the wrong things for the right reasons, and the right things for the wrong reasons.

It is not uncommon, for instance, to find that the driving force behind some charitable endeavors is ego and selfishness, though part of the giver's identity yearns for self-transcendence, selflessness and altruism.

Similarly, it is not uncommon to find that some of the most ruthless barracudas of the business world are respectful sons and model parents. The law of the jungle defines part of them, yet another part is defined by their unspoken need for love and meaning.

Most of the time, if we were to see the destination that our chosen path leads to (death) and know that there is another possibility (life) we will choose life. As long as we can acknowledge that we are in conflict, we are alive.

Once we see ourselves as living beings in conflict, there are a slew of new questions that have sudden relevance:

"Where will this take me in the long run"?
"How is a different this year than I was last year?"
"Is this choice the one that the person I really want to be would make, or is it just a choice that I am making through habit?"
These questions don't lend themselves to stock answers. The intellectual and emotional rigor that they force upon us gives us life.

GUILT AS VOICE OF CONSCIENCE
Surprisingly, another important tool that we have to help us in this regard is one that we often try to dismiss: the name of this tool is regret.

Did the Pharaoh feel a twinge of shame when he proclaimed himself god? Almost certainly at the beginning there must have been some discomfort; he must have silenced thousands of voices. But what if he hadn't? Regret could have prevented him from descending into a life of spiritual death. It could have saved him.

There is far more to this much maligned emotion than meets the eye. Guilt is a quality that really does not deserve the terrible rating that it has been given in the last century.

When we have expectations from ourselves, nothing is more natural than to feel uneasy when we fail. The easiest remedy for escape from the feelings which create such awful discomfort is to lower our expectations for ourselves. We are assailed by this message almost as soon as we can read pop-psychology (which is getting more and more simplistic as time goes on), advice such as: "Forget regret. Don't get mired in all those does and don'ts. Be yourself and trust your feelings."

But what about the voice of humanity within us called our conscience, a voice that comes from a higher place in us, a place above "feelings"?

Is this not the voice that the three-year-old hears within herself when she shares her cookie when her friend asks for a bite? Is this not what keeps her alive in the most absolute sense? Would we as parents want our children to always "trust their own feelings" and keep all the cookies for themselves?

And what would our children answer if we asked them the reverse question? Would they want their parents to always "trust their own feelings"? How many parents would feel like getting up every few hours for a newborn, or have an irresistible urge to re-read Doctor Seuss for the twentieth time?

Not only would the children not want parents who don't hear the voice of conscience, it is unlikely that they would survive that sort of parenting intact.

CONSTRUCTIVE DISCOMFORT
Let us look more closely at why guilt is looked upon so negatively when our observations make clear to us that it humanizes us more than any other force can.

The reason that guilt has a bad name is that we feel guilty about the wrong things.

Guilt has a very specific purpose. It is to make us human. When we feel guilty for other reasons, ones that are irrelevant to morality, that guilt is corrupted.

We feel guilty for not being rich enough and thin enough. We feel guilty for not owning the trophies that provide us with status (the perfect spouse or children are part of this picture no less than the perfect house or car). But this kind of guilt is not the voice of conscience.

The voice of conscience distances us from our previous negative moral choices.

The Maharal tells us that the voice of conscience distances us from our previous negative moral choices. When our attachment to the person that we want to be is real, then the shame that we feel for past mistakes is liberating. We can disassociate from previous bad choices and live in the present. The sign that this process is working is, of all things, discomfort. When the discomfort is great, the disassociation is real.

We all want to live. Constructive discomfort, striving, and most of all believing that we are not dead, can make us all miracle workers. This Rosh Hashanah, let's be sure we inscribe ourselves in the Book of Life. We can revive the dead. We can live.

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