Omer Day Nine
“All love which depends on some thing, when the thing vanishes, the love also ceases; but if it does not depend on any thing, it will never cease.” (Pirke Avot 5:16)
This is how I feel about God. I don’t depend upon miracles. I don’t expect reward. I have no idea what will happen when I die. But I feel God every day. I know God is there. It is a knowledge that is completely abstract, non-material. God is not “some thing.” When I refrain from prayer, which I do now and then, and then return to the practice, I can almost feel the Not-Some-Thing listening.
What always draws me near, even fascinates me, is the experience of God having never left every time I return.
Obviously I am not a very deep theological thinker. The intellectual exercise of explaining God in philosophical terms has always been secondary to experiencing God through study, prayer and the human encounter.
One of my earliest memories of what I can only describe as consciousness of the Divine was as a young kid — four, five, six years old, laying in bed at night, in the dark, waiting for sleep to fall. I drifted toward sleep by what felt like floating in the air but the air was liquid, not gas. Waves rocked, then lulled, then rippled and then sleep set in. I’d often reach out with my left hand while lying on my back and feel the cool wall as ballast for my descent into darkness. The sensation of being carried, I decided, was proof of God’s presence.
The waves didn’t always transport me into sleep. I was cognizant of them so infrequently that I never came to depend upon them as much as I would simply feel lucky, even privileged, that they appeared. And then I’d remember that they must always be there; they’d never cease.
Omer Day Ten
When I say I have no idea what will happen when I die, I mean it. I don’t really concern myself with it. It works out for me, therefore, that in the main, Judaism really does not emphasize performing mitzvot, doing good deeds, for the sake of a reward. Similarly, I don’t do what I do so that I will be rewarded with an afterlife of reward. And finally, it stands to reason, that I simply don’t find myself yearning for a Messiah to come wipe the slate clean and bring us all back to some original place. I get that we humans yearn to go home again; that in Biblical terms we seek to undo the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and be restored to our innocence, our nakedness and oneness with God for eternity.
But the deed has been done. The cat is out of the bag. The jig is up. There is no going home to the past. There is only forward-going and not undoing but the obligation to repair it all is upon us for the damage done. And yes, the Master of the House if pressing.
The Talmud teaches, “If you are planting a tree by the side of the road and someone comes to tell you the Messiah is coming — finish planting the tree; then go greet the Messiah.” I subscribe to this idea. I am not so arrogant as to deny the possibility of the Messiah. I just don’t think about it very much and quite frankly find millennialist movements to be overly certain, sometimes delusional, and even dangerous.
הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, יָפָה שָׁעָה אַחַת בִּתְשׁוּבָה וּמַעֲשִׂים טוֹבִים בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, מִכָּל חַיֵּי הָעוֹלָם הַבָּא. וְיָפָה שָׁעָה אַחַת שֶׁל קוֹרַת רוּחַ בָּעוֹלָם הַבָּא, מִכָּל חַיֵּי הָעוֹלָם הַזֶּה:
“He used to say: more precious is one hour in repentance and good deeds in this world, than all the life of the world to come; And more precious is one hour of the tranquility of the world to come, than all the life of this world.” (Pirke Avot 4:17)
I subscribe to this idea, too. The call to serve is upon us now, every moment of every day. One hour of service today is more precious than all the hours in the world to come.
Do it now.
If there is a reward for you, it’ll be great! But let it sort itself out in due course.
As a Christian, I've been taught to believe in an "afterlife." As someone who believes in science, I'm led to be skeptical of the notion that anything about "me," apart from the memories of others and the trail I've left in my writings, can survive the deterioration of my brain. I've heard of theories that we are immortal in the rather abstract form of "information." I can't say what I'm sure about, and I know there is much that I cannot know.
BTW, i'm not sure if you saw this: https://link.esquire.com/view/57cb0600566a9492748b456bkzv5x.ifl/af9b473b