Closing the Book

by Rabbi Dr. Haviva Ner-David

I get teary every time I read this Torah portion – the end of a book, the end of a life. It is the last chapter, the last several verses, of our Torah portion and of the Torah in general, that get me each time.

Moses climbs Mt. Nevo, knowing this will be his final climb. He will die on this mountain. God shows him the land he will not enter, the future he will not experience. He will see it from afar before his death, but he will not enter.

When I was diagnosed at age 16 with FSHD, a form of muscular dystrophy, I was forced to face at a fairly young age my own morbidity and mortality. I began to imagine my own future suffering and eventual death. Yet, that did not mean I was ready to accept either.

FSHD is a life-debilitating disease, and for some even a life-threatening one, depending on the severity of one’s case. The muscle weakness spreads – for some more slowly, for some more rapidly – throughout the body, and when it reaches the diaphragm and/or heart, that is the beginning of the end. Most do not die from the disease, however, but rather live for many years with various degrees of disability; many become dependent on others to perform normal everyday tasks like eating and going to the bathroom.

The day I was diagnosed changed my outlook on life. I went from being a teenager with the normal life questions and rebellious spirit, as would be expected of someone my age, to an angst-filled 85-year-old soul in a 16-year-old body that was already starting to degenerate to catch up with the soul it was housing. I knew my time was limited. I instantly became aware of the ticking clock. I had much I wanted to accomplish. Thus began my race against time.

For years, I fought against the unfairness of life. I became anorexic, trying to control the uncontrollable. I was able to overcome the anorexia but not my emotional longing to control my fate. I found healthier ways to give myself that sense of control: exercise, religion. Until I realized this was still a defense mechanism, still a way to try and control the uncontrollable. Slowly, I began to let go into the mystery. Enough to open the door to death just a crack, but not enough to invite death in.

Then Covid hit. Death did not ask to be invited in; death broke down the door, made itself comfortable, and said it was here to stay. I felt especially vulnerable, as my diaphragm was already showing signs of weakness from my FSHD, but also because Jacob, my life partner for the past thirty-five years, was diagnosed then with Pemphigus Vulgarus, a life-threatening autoimmune skin disease. And because he had been misdiagnosed for so long, he nearly died. If not for a treatment developed only ten years earlier, he would not have made it.

In the summer of 2023, I received an email about an online course in Thanatology (the scientific study of death and the practices associated with it, including the study of the needs of the terminally ill and their families), given by the Art of Dying Institute and One Spirit (where I had studied for interfaith ordination and certification as a spiritual companion). I took this as a personal invitation to sit down with death and have a heart-to-heart conversation. I registered for the course.ֿ

Synchronistically, the course began just a few days after Hamas’ attack on October 7, exactly two years ago on Simchat Torah. I live in the Galilee, in northern Israel; missiles from Hezbollah in Lebanon were being fired daily, causing all those living close to the Israeli border with Lebanon to evacuate their homes. Despite safe rooms and the Iron Dome, it was too dangerous for them to remain. There were too many missiles and too often.

Missiles were reaching our area as well, but not often enough to require evacuation. So we were housing people from further north on our kibbutz and going in and out of our safe rooms. When a siren would sound, we had three minutes to get to the safe room before the missile would hit or be intercepted by the Iron Dome. But even when it was intercepted, debris would fall. So it was advised to get to the safe room as quickly as possible.

Because of my disability, I do not move quickly. So for me, this was especially frightening. A number of times I was far from a safe room when a siren sounded, and since I cannot run, I just sat on the ground, put my head between my legs, and hoped for the best.

I did not know if I would join the opening class of my Art of Dying course in person, as it was being held at 2am Israel time. Most classes were at times when I could participate comfortably, but not the opening class. So I had planned to watch the recording. But a siren went off at around 1am, and by the time we were given the okay to come out of our safe rooms, it was almost 2am. So, I decided to join in real time.

The first presenter opened with a video a former student of this course in an earlier year had created for her capstone project. It was a video of her late partner’s death process. When he was diagnosed with ALS in his mid-seventies, he decided when he was no longer able to feed himself he would stop eating. He wanted to die surrounded by friends, have a home funeral, and be cremated.

His wife honored his requests and documented on video his dying process from that day forward, in the incredibly moving video I was watching on my computer screen just a few days after the October 7th massacre.

This man had the privilege of choosing his death. ALS is a brutal disease, but it is still a natural death, and not a violent one at the hands of humans. And all the details, aside from the ALS, he was able to orchestrate. Moreover, he had lived a long and rich life, had a chance to say goodbye to this world and his loved ones, and was at peace when he left. He was ready to go.

The only victim of the October 7 attack I could say that about at the time was Shlomo Ron, the 85-year-old man who left his wife, daughter, and grandchildren in their safe room when he heard Hamas terrorists approaching his house. He told his family to be silent, sat in his rocking chair, pretending to be an old senile man who lived alone and would die alone. When the terrorists broke into the house and found him there, they assumed he was just that. They murdered him on the spot.

But he did not die alone. He died with love surrounding him and in his heart, and his family survived. He saved them.

Still, his story was the only account of all the approximately 1,200 victims of that day that I had heard where any element of choice was involved. (Later, I would hear of other heroic stories where people chose to put themselves in the line of fire to save others.) This was so painfully unfair, I wanted to scream. But it was 2:30 am, and everyone else in my family had gone back to sleep. So I sat, mesmerized, and held back.

But the faces of the victims I had seen day after day on social and regular media kept appearing to me inside my head, and I lost it. All the sorrow and tears I had held back for days broke through the dam, and I began weeping uncontrollably -- a release of all the sorrow, rage, and shock I had been holding in for days and am still dealing with to this day, as the death toll from this war – now mostly in Gaza – continues to grow to increasingly horrific proportions: civilians, hostages, soldiers.

The timing of this course was serendipitous. Death has been a huge theme of the past two years in my part of the world. Living without death awareness is no longer an option. It is all around us. Denying it would require crawling into a hole or walking around with blinders. But the truth is, death is with us from the moment we are born. It is an integral part of life. It is, actually, the only thing we know for sure we will experience in our lifetime.

Everyone will die. No human gets out of this place alive, as they say. While we cannot think about it every minute of every day, as we would likely become paralyzed, denying the fact that we will die makes us suffer more when our time comes.

Perhaps more importantly, denying our impending death prevents us from living our life to the fullest. The ideal is to live every day as if it’s your last. This came home to me most clearly and poignantly when I saw a documentary about Israeli screenwriter Anat Gov after she was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer in her late fifties. In one of the interviews with her in the film, she says she is not afraid to die because she has no regrets, feels at peace with herself. Although she had more she wanted to accomplish, she lived a rich life up until that point. That is what is most important.

I am a rabbi. My pulpit (aside from writing and peace, solidarity, and human rights activism) is spiritual companioning and mikveh work (and teaching about both). I had chosen to take the Thanatology course to face my own fears around death and help my spiritual companioning clients do so as well, but the experience left me wanting to share what I had learned in a more pro-active and large-scale way. I decided to offer a course on living with death awareness from a Jewish perspective and incorporate this into my writing and my mikveh work.

Judaism is strong on its mourning practices, but living with death awareness, as far as I understood, was, unlike in the Eastern religions, not one of its strong points. But while taking the course, I began noticing things in my own religious tradition’s practices that I had taken for granted or not understood in their full depth until being exposed to the idea of the importance of living with death awareness.

First, I realized that in the Jewish tradition, we start the day with a death-awareness practice. In our morning prayers, we thank God for giving us a soul each time we wake in the morning, with full awareness that God will take that soul from us – from our bodies – at some point in the future.

We also have an annual day, Yom Kippur (which we just celebrated), dedicated to living with full knowledge of our eventual death. We dress in white, like the shrouds in which we will be buried; we don’t eat or drink; we immerse in the mikveh before the day begins (a corpse is washed with mikveh water before burial); and we pray the central liturgy of “Un’taneh Tokef,” whose refrain is: “Prayer, charity, and repentance will lessen the severity of the decree.”

In other words, living life with intention – i.e. with full knowledge that this year could be our last so it better reflect who we want to be in this world – in terms of our relationship with the divine (prayer), our relationships with others (charity), and our relationship with ourselves (repentance), will make death less difficult, will decrease the amount of emotional and spiritual suffering when death arrives.

But my biggest personal revelation and contribution on this subject is the new way I began to see mikveh, a spiritual practice I had been specializing in for decades (my rabbinic aspirations began when running a mikveh in a Conservative synagogue in D.C. in the 90’s, I wrote my doctorate on mikveh at Bar Ilan University, and I am the founding rabbi of Shmaya: A Mikveh for Mind, Body, and Soul, the only mikveh in Israel open to all to immerse as they choose).

One of the two contexts in which the word mikveh appears in the Bible is in Leviticus, around the ancient practices around tumah (ritual impurity) and taharah (ritual purity). My understanding of tumah is that it is caused by coming in contact with death in various forms.

When one contracted tumah, one would take time away from the community, from the public sphere, from worshipping in the Temple. I imagine this could have been a time to contemplate death, to sit with death. Then, after a specified number of days depending on the type of tumah and the degree of separation from death itself, the person would wash in “living waters” to return to a state of taharah and rejoin the community of the living.

I see this re-entering of the public communal sphere as a conscious choice to continue living despite the knowledge of one’s mortality. I see it also as an invitation to choose in what way one wants to live, knowing death is a constant companion waiting for the right moment to tap you on the shoulder and tell you your time is up.

When the Temple was destroyed, this system fell out of practice in mainstream Judaism, since the only ramification of being tameh/t’meah was that one could not worship in the Temple. Except in the case of bleeding from the uterus, where a sexual prohibition is also attached to the status. Thus women continued to practice mikveh, but the death-awareness aspect of it was lost, as the focus became sexuality in marriage. Although it was not lost completely, as some men took on the practice of immersing annually before Yom Kippur.

Still, a practice that was an integral and egalitarian (as it applied to both men and women) part of daily Israelite life (if we take the biblical verses to be describing a practice that was, indeed, practiced) was lost.

 However, this practice was revived in the past 25 years, when mikveh immersion was reclaimed and reframed by the liberal Jewish world as a spiritual practice open to all humans for any life cycle, transition, healing, or spiritually centering practice – in essence for any life-affirming purpose. If one sees life as a series of moments, experiences, and transitions to be marked and given meaning until the final transition into death, using mikveh in this way is aligned with its original meaning in Leviticus.

Marking life’s transitions and meaningful moments through full-body immersion in the living waters is a way to enhance life and live more intentionally. And it is a way to do so with the awareness that each step along the journey of life brings us closer to the end – which is why it is so important to mark, savor, and endow with meaning each of these steps along the way.

The other time the word mikveh is mentioned in the Bible is right at the beginning of the Torah, in the first chapter of Genesis. There we are told that all was water, darkness, and divine spirit, This image evokes for me a womb, God’s womb, a place of wholeness and unity before God starts separating to create our human reality, the world as we know it, and before we are each born from our birth mother’s womb into this broken world of duality and separation.

Mikveh – all gathered water on this planet – is God’s gift to humanity, a reminder of the unity and wholeness that existed, at least on a mythological level, before Creation. The place from which we all emerged into our imperfect world. But it is a place to which we can return, even if only for a few moments, to touch that place of wholeness inside ourselves which connects us to all and everything – to the ONE, the SOURCE – which may also be the place to which we will return when we die.

 No one knows what happens when we die. There is no way for any human to have the answer to that question. It is hubris to think we can ever know for certain.

Perhaps we cease to exist, our brain that creates us and our reality dying along with our physical body. Or perhaps just the physical body dies but something else remains, what we call the soul continuing to exist outside of and separate from the body.

In Hebrew, the word “nefesh” is used both for soul and mind. What does that mean that our soul, our essence, is located in our mind? Do we create reality, or do we tap into it, perceive it, and recreate it in a way only we uniquely can, based on our individual circumstances – this being what we call the soul?

Is the brain, our soul, a vehicle to connect to a greater force into which we return when we die? Is the body a vessel that holds energy from the Universe, communicating with its source through the neurons in our brain and then being freed, or released back into the Universe – back into the elements  – when we die?

In the Spring of 2023, my mother had a minor stroke; a friend lent me the book My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, who is a neuroscientist and had a left-brain stroke in her thirties. In this book, she describes what it was like to live with only a working right brain. The left brain, it seems from her experience, keeps us grounded as humans in this reality, while the right brain connects us to the divine force we call the Universe or God. With no left brain to keep us here in the human realm, we float and begin to dissolve into the greater whole.

This, I understand, is what meditation is about. Breathing into this right brain consciousness, but then coming back to a left brain-right brain balance when we return to our daily tasks. Mikveh immersion is a practice similar to meditation, a way to connect with the ALL through water, which permeates all.

Does our right brain give us a taste of what it will be like to have no brain activity at all? The Jewish concept of Shabbat as a taste of the World to Come resonates for me in this context. If Shabbat is a day akin to meditation, and the World to Come is death, living from our right brain could be a taste of death. After all, many people who experience clinical death for a short time report that feeling of returning to the source.

Or perhaps there is no soul. Perhaps when both sides of the brain stop working, we just die, and that is the end. As we read in Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the earth. For out of it you were taken because you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This verse does not negate the possibility of a soul, but it also leaves open the possibility that we are but the bodies we inhabit and go from dust to dust – leaving us just this one life to live. This is not a heretical approach. Judaism has no monolithic view on what happens when we die.

The Five Books of Moses begin with birth (the birth of the world, or reality as we know it) and end with death (Moses’ death), like each of us will. This is something all humans have in common.

This is why, I think, I am so touched each time I read of Moses climbing that mountain, in full awareness of his own impending death. This is where his story ends, as mine will, too, one day – a day that may be today or tomorrow, or in the next couple of decades, or perhaps even farther off (which would certainly make it easier for me to surrender to death, as I will be quite debilitated by then if there is no treatment found for FSHD soon).

God is frank with Moses, tells it to him straight – you will die, the future does not belong to you.

We are not privy to Moses’ point of view at that moment. We do not get a narrator’s description of his internal thoughts, nor do we get a quote from his mouth to God’s “ears”. We do not know how he feels when he hears this news. Did he accept his death peacefully? Did he have inner peace, like Anat Gov did? Although even in that film, we are not privy to her thoughts on her death bed. She did not want to be filmed at that stage, did not want to be remembered that way.

Perhaps Moses argued with God. Or perhaps the text’s silence is meant to tell us that he surrendered to death with grace. Or perhaps the text leaves this moment a mystery on purpose, because no human can know death before their time comes. We can guess and imagine, but we cannot know. Even someone who has experienced clinical death and returned to life cannot be 100% certain this is what their final passing will be like.

The text, though, I think, is telling us something else as well. Every end is also a beginning – to paraphrase T.S. Elliot – and one feels this strongly at the end of the Five Books of Moses. At least I do. It is the end of the story for Moses, the end of his physical presence in the material world. But, as the text points out, his memory lives on. There will never be another prophet like Moses, we are told. Every human being is unique; when they die, there will never be another like them. But like with Moses, we can feel their energy in this world, even if their physical body is not here.

Moreover, the text tells us Moses’ end is not the end of the story for the Israelites, or the Jewish nation. One person’s death is the end of their life, but it is not the end of humanity. Even the end of humanity or of the Planet Earth would not mean the end of the Universe. This is something I feel strongly when I read this last chapter of the Torah. There is a kind of zoom-out effect, and a feeling of continuity and cyclicity, that somehow gives me comfort as I close the book, knowing I will open it again on Shabbat Bereishit and start again – at the beginning.

This is a song my friend Rabbi Dorothy Richman wrote about Moses climbing the mountain and the death of her friend at a relatively young age. This is the link: https://dorothyrichman.bandcamp.com/track/come-and-kiss-me

Rabbi Dr. Haviva Ner-David is a writer, rabbi, and activist. She is the author of two novels, three memoirs, and the only children's book on mikveh. The founding rabbi of Shmaya: A Mikveh for Mind, Body, and Soul, Rabbi Haviva officiates and creates full body immersion ceremonies and facilitates immersion workshops. She is also a spiritual companion with a wide variety of clients, including many rabbis and rabbinical students. A peace, human rights, and Arab-Jewish solidarity activist, Rabbi Haviva lives in the Galilee and has been very active in the protests against the current Israeli government and the war in Gaza. She lives with a form of muscular dystrophy that has been one of her biggest life challenges and teachers, and has seven children, a dog, and a cat, and a lives with her life partner in the Galilee.

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