Nose to the Grindstone / Head to The Stars: Cultivating a Relationship with the Beyond
Kol Nidre 5783
Philadelphia’s own Tariq Trotter, lead MC and singer of the hip hop band, The Roots, one of the more successful musical acts to come out of Philadelphia in recent memory and current house band of The Tonight Show, composed one of my favorite song lyrics. It’s a simple phrase from their song “Sacrifice”, and it goes, “nose to the grindstone/head to the stars.”
It should be no surprise that this particular lyric resonated with me, because it’s an idea that is very Jewish.
Much of Judaism is about holding those two ideas at the same time. There is deep, important work to be done, right in front of us. The world needs our attention, starting with the world inside of us. If tikkun olam, repairing the world, is a deeply Jewish idea, which it is, that includes repairing the worlds inside ourselves—ensuring we are steady vessels, capable of serving as sources of light and good in this world. The world, and the world within ourselves, call out to us to devote ourselves to goodness and truth.
At the same time, there is brokenness, there is suffering in life we will not always be able to alleviate, no matter how pressed our nose is to that grindstone. The illness and loss of a loved one… circumstances beyond our control… we can’t always come to the rescue. We can’t always come to our own rescue.
Nose to the grindstone / head to the stars: part of the Jewish consciousness is about cultivating a relationship to those stars. To the beyond. To mystery. To that which transcends our known experience, and yet imbues all of life with its holiness.
In his now famous piece of High Holiday literature, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Alan Lew cites architect and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller for his selection of the most important figure of the twentieth century. His choice? “Sigmund Freud,” he says. Why? “Because he introduced the single great idea upon which all the significant developments of the twentieth century had rested: the invisible is more important than the visible.”
One of the classic Jewish articulations of the invisible, the mystery, the beyond is the Book of Job. If you’re like me, and you managed to skate through the first part of your life without being intricately exposed to the story of Job, here is a refresh:
Job was a kind and decent man. So much so that in the celestial court, the heavenly court, God asks God’s fellow divine beings (yes there are fellow divine beings in Jewish scripture): “have you noticed my servant Job? There is no one like him on earth. A blameless and upright man who demonstrates awe before God and shuns evil.”
“Yes,” says one of the Divine beings known as ha-satan, the adversary. “But why wouldn’t he be blameless and upright? You protect him. You have blessed his efforts so that his possessions spread out in the land. But take that away from him?” ha-satan, the adversary says, “And let’s see how kind, God-fearing and awe-inspired he remains.”
“Very well,” says God. “Take it all away from him and let’s see how he fares.”
Sure enough, the adversary proceeds to take everything from Job—his possessions, his flocks… his children. A mighty wind comes and devastates his home, killing his children. Job tears his clothes, cuts off his hair, and pours out from his the words we still say at Jewish funerals to this day: Adonai Natan, Adonai Lakakh, yehi shem adonai mevorach. Adonai, the source of being, gives, Adonai takes, blessed be the name of Adonai.
At first Job maintains this stoic approach to loss. “Should we only accept Good from God and not accept evil?” Job says to his wife.
But as time goes on, and his hurt sharpens and lingers, he cries out. “Perish the day on which I was born,” he says. “Why does God allow man to experience suffering in this way?”
His friends try to placate him. And worse, they patronize him. They friendsplain. They try to explain to him the way of the world, which, according to them, is linear: do good, experience good. Do bad, act wickedly, experiencing suffering.
“Think now, what innocent man ever perished; when have the upright been destroyed,” they say?
He is free to draw whatever conclusions he wishes from this, but their implications are essentially that he or his children must have done something wrong to deserve such punishment.
The cruelty of their words is not lost on him. Job rejects this simplistic theology and this callous approach to his suffering, further professing his innocence and, ultimately, turning his fire towards who he perceives as the ultimate source of this suffering—God.
“Your hands shaped and fashioned me,” Job cries to God, “then destroyed every part of me. Consider that You fashioned me like clay; Will You then turn me back into dust?” “Oh that I had someone to give me hearing,” He says, calling out to God. “O that Shaddai, that God would reply to my complaint.”
Finally, after more efforts by his friends to make him see their way of understanding of the universe, that God rewards the good and punishes the bad, God calls out to Job, Min ha’se’ara “ from out of the storm,” the text says. It may or may not have been the response Job was looking for.
אֵיפֹ֣ה הָ֭יִיתָ בְּיׇסְדִי־אָ֑רֶץ
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?” God thunders.
מִי־שָׂ֣ם מְ֭מַדֶּיהָ כִּ֣י תֵדָ֑ע
Do you know who fixed the earth’s dimensions?
Who set its cornerstone
When the morning stars sang together
And all the divine beings shouted for joy?”
God continues:
“Have you ever commanded the day to break,
Assigned the dawn its place,
So that [the dawn] seizes the corners of the earth
And shakes the wicked out of it?
Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea,
Or walked in the recesses of the deep?”
God has more to say:
Have the gates of death been disclosed to you?
Have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
Have you surveyed the expanses of the earth?
If you know of these—tell Me.
Which path leads to where light dwells,
And where is the place of darkness,
That you may take it to its domain
And know the way to its home?
***
On the one hand this may seem like a major brushback of Job’s complaints. “How dare you question my ways,” is one reading of God’s words. “How dare you deem yourself worthy of questioning me.”
On the other hand, the story doesn’t end there.
At the close of God’s response God affirms Job’s understanding, and rejects that of his friends. “I am incensed at you for you have not spoken truth about me as did my servant Job,” God says.
As did my servant Job. All this time, Job’s statement that he had pursued good, that there was a hitch in the linearity of the justice of the universe, that things do not work that straightforwardly, was correct. His friends’ lack of compassion was wrong.
God’s response—where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations—had been less a rejection of Job’s approach, Job’s approach questioning whether it was really true that the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer—than an articulation of the inherent mystery in the universe; that try as we might, there will be some understandings beyond our grasp. That human beings can’t stand in the shoes of God and can’t fully fathom the levers of justice and injustice.
So, God says, pain and suffering are real. And hurt deeply. And deserve compassion from our fellow human beings. God endorses this view when God sides with Job rather than his friends. Suffering is real, and undeserved, and we need to treat it with compassion. Nose to the grindstone.
And mystery lies at the root of it all, Jewish tradition says. We live side by side with mystery. And we’re invited to cultivate a relationship to it. To the divine; to the beyond. Head to the stars.
Head to the stars—that is in some way more possible than ever isn’t it? For a similar articulation of this same ideal from Job—that the universe is so vast, so complex that we can’t possibly imagine that we understand all of its workings; whether or not the world is unjust—a similar articulation taken not from religion, but from the idiom of our day—science—look no further than the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, one of which we’ve included in your Yom Kippur handout. Look to that widely circulated image of a landscape of burnt orange celestial mountains, and midnight blue celestial valleys, speckled with glittering stars, which, as it turns out, is something called a stellar nursery located in the region known as the Carina Nebula.
A stellar nursery. Can you imagine such a concept? Having recently found myself in a different sort of nursery with baby Nina laid alongside fellow universes of light to be tended to and cared for, I can only imagine the celestial version, wherein molecular clouds, accumulations of gas, plasma, and literal stardust, undergo something called gravitational collapse, the clouds breaking into small fragments, which then “condense into rotating spheres of gas that serve as stellar embryos,” or, ultimately, stars. (Thank you, Wikipedia. I will not be taking questions; I’ve now exhausted my knowledge on the subject.)
Head to the stars. This process, reflecting on the vastness of the universe and its mysteries, invites us to put our experiences in perspective, to reflect on whether some of our worries are calibrated properly, or whether they’re out of whack. When the world gets us down, when we stress about our finances or our appearance or our job, is it helpful to consider the stellar nurseries; is it helpful to consider the moment before the earth’s foundations were laid.
As my dad once wrote, “I like to picture the universe without me. It is peaceful.”
For some this is deeply comforting. Putting our experiences in perspective.
Others? They’re going to remind me of that famous teaching by Rabbi Simcha Bunim, who teaches about the slip of paper we should have in each of our two pockets. And yes In one pocket there should be a piece of paper saying, as Abraham did: V’anochi afar v’efer “I am only dust and ashes.” When you’re feeling too prideful, or too self centered, or like the world revolves around you, Rabbi Bunim’s teaching is that you should reach into that pocket, and remind yourself of your place in the vast scope of time and place, and experience the recentering, and the peace that comes from this.
But they’re going to remind me that there is another pocket, with another slip of paper for another moment. A moment where our issue isn’t that we’re feeling too prideful or arrogant or self centered, but in some ways the reverse: in moments where we feel like we don’t matter, like nothing we do makes an impact, like we’re unseen and forgotten and insignificant. In those moments we reach into another pocket and pull out a slip of paper with a quotation from the mishnah: Bishvili nivra ha-olam “For my sake was the world created.” When one is feeling forgotten, unworthy, unseen, like nothing we do matters, we reach into our other pocket and read the teaching from the mishnah which says, “For my sake the world was created.”
Now, how does nose to the grindstone/head to the stars apply here? Where do we find solace when we’re holding onto this perspective, trying to focus on our worthiness, feeling like the stakes do matter, and matter a great deal? What is our relationship to the mystery when we’re not focusing on smallness but rather on our vitality? Where is the relevance of the invisible when the stakes feel high?
Rabbi Shimon Ben Lakish, the famous bandit turned rabbi of the talmud, teaches that when someone is struggling with a decision, struggling to have to have their yetzer hatov, their good instincts, their instincts for the good and the true, win out against their yetzer hara, their instincts towards the base, the superficial, the dark, that there are some tactics one can deploy. First, one should יַעֲסוֹק בַּתּוֹרָה immerse themselves in Torah. This is a third century rabbi, after all—Torah, he suggests, is a powerful means of having our clarity of judgment, our better angels win out.
If this doesn’t work, one should יִקְרָא קְרִיאַת שְׁמַע “he should recite the Shema” the core statement of truth and oneness. This should enable this person to see clearly and pursue the good, he suggests.
Here, still, he acknowledges the possibility of its limited efficacy. He admits that Torah study and reciting the shema, while powerful, might not be strong enough to permit our better instincts, our instincts for the true and the good, to win out.
But he has a final card to play. If you are still unable to see clearly, to act rightly, he teaches, there is one final thing you can do. A person can, he says, יִזְכּוֹר לוֹ יוֹם הַמִּיתָה “recall forward to the day of one’s death”
When we are struggling with our pathway forward, how to do what is right, how to pursue what matters, the talmud teaches us to יִזְכּוֹר לוֹ יוֹם הַמִּיתָה think forward to the day of death.
What does he mean by this? Well, in the spirit of “nose to the grindstone, head to the stars,” Before we go too far down the road of asking about this practice, it’s important that we pair this teaching with a fundamental Jewish understanding that Rabbi Shimon Ben Lakish, who taught this, would have been familiar with, and that teaching can be summed up in a single phrase—olam haba, the world to come.
One of the most taboo subjects in the contemporary Jewish experience is Jewish views of the afterlife. To quote my teacher Rabbi Avi Winokur, the Jewish belief of the afterlife is as follows. You ready? Listen closely. It’s [muffled sound].
I kid and I don’t. As modern Jews our tendency has been to shy away from an engagement with Jewish views of the afterlife, considering the afterlife to be something that is too anti-rationalist, or Christian, or at the very least not Jewish.
I am here to subtly and gently disabuse you of that notion. Judaism has a belief in life after death. Period.
Now, let me clear about I am not saying. I am not saying that if (a) you are jewish and since (b) Judaism has a belief in the afterlife, then (c) to be Jewish you must believe in the afterlife. I am not saying that. Judaism is not a dogmatic religion. It rarely holds that there are sine qua non—essential—theological beliefs within Judaism that you must subscribe to. It doesn’t hold that. It preserves a back and forth dialogue, with multiple questions and beliefs that makes space for heterodoxy. But to be clear, despite what you may have heard to the contrary, those beliefs do include a belief that the soul persists beyond the known. Head to the stars.
Some other important qualifiers. To the extent you have learned or heard that Judaism places more of an emphasis on the here and now, more of an emphasis on this world than the world to come, that is true. There are 37 tractates in the Talmud, on topics ranging from sukkahs to the sabbath, divorce to daily worship. Not a single tractate is devoted to life after death. The main emphasis of traditional Judaism is the mitzvot — how does Hashem.. The Divine… call out to us, here and now, to have us sow seeds of healing, bringing holiness into this world, right now. That’s the main emphasis of Judaism. How do we carry out our duties as Jews and as humans in this world?
Still, traditional Judaism’s emphasis on this worldly deeds is paired with an understanding that there is a beyond this world.
Look no further than one of the preparatory passages Jews utter as part of the traditional daily—every day—morning service. As part of getting ready to pray each morning, the siddur, and the mahzor, the high holiday prayer book, has us begin with a little bit of Torah study. And one of the three core little passages we study is as follows, on p, 36 of your mahzor. You don’t have to follow along, I’m just saying, it’s right there, in every prayer book. It goes
These are the matters, the fruits of which a person enjoys in this world, [while] the principal (an investment metaphor is used), the tree, is preserved for him in the World-to-Come: honoring our parents, [performing] deeds of kindness, eagerly engaging with our studies, providing hospitality to guests, visiting the sick, participating in making a wedding, accompanying the dead [to the grave], concentrating on the meaning of prayers, making peace between our fellows, and between spouses— and the study of Torah, which is equal to them all.
Each of these actions is seen as planting a tree, making an endowment, the fruit of which, the interest, we experience in this world, while also storing away the core of the action, the tree, the principal, in the world to come.
The world to come, Olam habah.That is a part of the traditional articulation of how Jews experience the universe, how we experience life.
Again, I’m not here to be prescriptive about this belief. I don’t know what happens to us when we die, any more than any of you does.
But I do want to share this belief, found pretty strongly within mainstream Jewish tradition, because, a) I encounter a surprising number of modern day jews, maybe some of you among them who don’t know this about Jewish tradition, and b) because, as we suggested, head to the stars—cultivating a relationship with the mystery, with the divine, with the unseen, is a big part of Jewish tradition.
I know it has been for me, even if I haven’t always been conscious of it.
As I have alluded to many times with this congregation, and as I always find myself revisiting around the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, my own father’s sudden death shaped a lot of my understanding of God and of death. As many of you know he was 35 when he died, four years younger than I am now; which is bizarre for me to wrap my head around it; I still can’t quite do it. He left behind a 38 year old wife, my mom, and three kids; I was seven, my sister Sophie was 4 years old; my sister Henya was four weeks.
His teacher and friend Rabbi Art Green wrote a reflection when he died, entitled “A Rabbi Grieves,” which I have saved, and reference often, and which, more than I realized for years, shaped my understanding and relationship to this mystery and to death.
“My friend Dan died a few weeks ago,” he wrote. “A seemingly healthy man of thirty-five, one of the most vital and intensely alive people I have ever known. One minute he was there, the next he was gone, just gone. Cardiac arrest, the doctors called it. They found him lying at the bottom of the staircase. The speculation is that his heart failed, and then he tumbled down the flight of stairs. I like to think that he went up a step on a parallel but unseen staircase. His soul just took one step beyond the limited reality that we call life, and his body alone was left behind.”
This is a Jewish belief.
And Rabbi Green continued his reflections on mystery in the wake of my father’s death. Reflecting on my father’s deep mystical yearnings, pinings, to be one with God, he wondered about whether, when the Hasidic rabbis teach us to quote “cleave not to the fleeting externals but to the true and only source, the only One worthy of our love, is it life or death to which we are being bound?
“Or is it,” he reflects “as the more profound sources would insist—to a force that transcends even that distinction?”
Reflections of this nature no doubt have seeped their way into my consciousness as I navigate my life. Nose to the grindstone head to the stars. Baked into my assumptions as I go about my daily life is that there is more to existence than meets the eye.
What effect does this have?
For me, for better or for worse, it allows me to formulate a relationship with death, that is not laden with terror and trauma. I say for better or worse, because of course we don’t know what happens when we die, and of course there is often tragedy and trauma, upon the loss of a loved one. And as we learned with Job, that tragedy and trauma is real. We are not to brush it off; we are to treat that loss experienced by ourselves or by others, with compassion and care and patience and tenderness.
But as Job teaches, we are also invited to formulate a relationship to mystery, to eternity seeping through the cracks into this world.
Formulating a relationship to the mystery gives us another look at Rabbi Shimon Ben Lakish’s exhortation, when we are struggling with discerning or following the proper pathway forward, to יִזְכּוֹר לוֹ יוֹם הַמִּיתָה, to recall forward to the day of our deaths.
Against the backdrop of mystery, against the backdrop of olam habah, the world to come,Yom Kippur invites us to do this very thing. Yom Kippur, as Rabbi Lew teaches, is in essence, a dress rehearsal for the day of our death. We wear a white shroud, “we refrain from life-affirming activities like eating, drinking and procreating,” and Yom Kippur and our deathbed are the only times in life when we traditionally recite the vidui, the confessional, where we unburden ourselves from everything that is weighing us down.
So, intense as it may be, that’s what we’re called upon to do tonight. We’re invited, with the backdrop of an understanding of the eternal, that our actions both bear fruit now and plant seeds for the world to come, to flash forward to those final moments. To imagine who is there with us, who are the loved ones that surround us? How have we cultivated our relationships with them? To reflect on the choices we’ve made in life, to feel like we’ve invested the time in the ways we’ve wanted to.
Not out of a sense of fear, that some big man is watching in the sky, but out of a sense of love and acceptance.
עַד יוֹם מוֹתוֹ תְּחַכֶּה לוֹ, אִם יָשׁוּב מִיַּד תְּקַבְּלוֹ the mahzor says. O Holy One, You wait until the day of death, and if one returns you accept that person back immediately. You accept us as. As we consider that, as we consider that all that matters is what we do going forward, what clarity do we gain as we imagine those final moments? What understandings do we have about our priorities when we distill ourselves down to our essence like that?
For me right now, it’s my family: my wife and daughters, my mother and sisters and their families, cultivating my relationships with them; it’s this community; it’s showing patience with myself and others; its sewing seeds of goodness, engaging with the world’s problems and not just look the other way; it’s continuing to reflect deeply and to share what I discover—it’s focusing on my gifts and not getting distracted by shiny objects that don’t have ultimate worth for me.
It’s not easy to stay on course, but spiritual practices like yom kippur, like picturing yom mitah, the day of our death when we need to, paired with the Jewish understandings of mystery and holiness and the eternal seeping through cracks in the firmament, help give us the nourishment and the clarity to stay on course, if we would but let them in those practices. Nose to the grindstone head to the stars. G’mar Chatimah Tovah. May you be inscribed in the book of life, for good.
