Life, Death, and the Evolution of Human Consciousness

There is an old Jewish story in the Midrash in which the question is asked, what has God been doing since creation was completed? The answer given is: God has been busy making marriages. Only marriages? someone asks, and the reply is given: Is there anything more difficult? (Numb. Rabbah 3:6) Yes, I think there is something much more difficult, requiring much more of God’s time and attention: it is bringing the world, bringing us, forward from where we are to where we need to be. We human beings are God’s big project.

The very first commandment in the Torah is: Be fruitful and multiply: p’ru u’r’vu. We can understand being fruitful in our lives as doing much more than having children. Rabbi S. R. Hirsch says that carrying out this first commandment allows us to be able to discharge all the other commandments. This makes sense, and I think there is an additional reason for this commandment. Some of you have heard me speak about the evolution of human consciousness. I explain this to myself with the image of a beach. I am standing on a beach at the water’s edge looking at the horizon. Those born after me: the 12 year old Bar & Bat Mitzvah kids I teach who were born after me, are standing well into the water. They can see a farther horizon than the horizon I can see. Those born before me are standing up the beach. They can’t see as far as the horizon I can see. This image is also useful in that it helps me not to make others who hold different opinions wrong, as the reality they see is different from my reality. So one reason we are to be fruitful and multiply is to bring human consciousness forward.

Each one of us is born with talents and challenges in our personalities. There are things we are good at, things that we are not good at, things we like about ourselves and other things we dislike. There are things we are born knowing. Some people refer to children who seem to know things at an early age, as old souls. There are other things that may take us many years to learn. During my lifetime I may, through learning and my experiences, take a step or two into the water and see just a little farther than I did when I was born. If I am lucky and blessed I may be able to take an extra step or two. There are things I’ll never be able to see, that people 300 years from now will know just by being born at that time.

For example, in the 18th century, the great founder of chassidism called Baal Shem Tov thought he could hasten the coming of the Messiah by bringing all Jews into a state of goodness and purity. 300 years later, not only sages but all of us know that the time of peace and harmony can’t come about until all people on the earth, not just Jewish people, participate in this tremendous change.

The Torah reading for this morning begins by mentioning the death of Aaron’s two sons. God asks Moses to tell his brother Aaron, the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest: Aaron “shall not come at all times into the sanctuary within the curtain in front of the ark cover so that he should not die.” Why is Aaron being cautioned? Perhaps it’s because his job was dangerous. In addition, I think it was so that Aaron could have the time to accomplish the soul work he was given to do in his personality. Aaron allowed the Israelites to build the Golden Calf, and God subsequently put Aaron in a highly structured and ritualized job to give him the opportunity to see that certain things are not acceptable – keeping the peace at any cost after having agreed, in the 10 Commandments, to abandon idol worship is not acceptable. He was to learn a certain kind of moral scrupulousness, a refinement of his integrity which was hard for him, just because he was such a people person with a need to be liked. Similarly, as in the Cain and Abel story, God did not destroy Cain for having killed Abel. God sent Cain off to learn, to give him the time to refine away the selfishness and hatred in his personality.

The Chassidic Masters taught there is nothing but God, which is expressed by the Apter Rebbe, Abraham Joshua Heschl of Apt, who said, “there is only the ever present of God knowing and understanding God’s self.” Earlier than that, a poet in 12th century France took similar ideas from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah and wrote the piyut, the sacred poem I sang last night at the Kol Nidre service: Ki Hineh vachomer: Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are we in your hand.” In a sense, we are on a trip we didn’t plan with people we may not have selected, and with inner baggage we didn’t pack. No wonder we are often bewildered by life.

In today’s Torah reading the 19th Century sage Malbim called attention to the man described as a designated person, the one who was assigned the task of conducting the scapegoat to the wilderness. We too are designated people -- with a task – to accomplish the soul learning we were meant to do. And we experience two contradictory tugs at us: we yearn for union with the Divine, for a deep happiness and contentment: an improvement in our lives and in ourselves-- and -- we are often unwilling to change. Again we can visit Cain and Abel. God told Cain, “surely if you improve yourself you will be forgiven, but if you don’t, sin rests at the door, its desire is toward you yet you can conquer it.” The entire Torah exists to help us accomplish our soul tasks and to show and urge us how to treat each other better; to care more, to find happiness in service and kindness. Yom Kippur actually encourages us in this endeavor in two ways: by helping us to focus on the communal and also in the letting go of the ego-self, what the Chassidic sage S’fat Emet calls negating ourselves before God.

What would negating ourselves and caring more look like? We might have to strive to give up a certain kind of self-centeredness that comes from the way we appear to each other, as if we are all separate and discontinuous beings. We might have to give up that world view for the way the Torah tells us it really is, that there is a deeper connectedness to God and each other than can be seen or apprehended with our five senses. The world can only change for the better if WE go forward. It all depends on us. This puts life and death in a different light. The Torah intimates an afterlife in at least three separate places: where Abraham is buried in one place and it says “he was gathered to his people,” who were buried a thousand miles away, so that being gathered to his people has to mean his soul was gathered to his people. Also, when Rachel died the Torah says “her soul departed,” and in Deuteronomy it says, baruch atah b’voecha u’ varuch atah b’zetcha, blessed are you in our coming and blessed are you in your going out.

If there is an evolution of human consciousness, that can be observed, (which I spoke about from a spiritual perspective in my Rosh Hashanah sermon of September of 2011), and which the Harvard professor Steven Pinker wrote about from a scholarly perspective in his 2011 book, published just after my sermon, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, proving that we are becoming kinder and gentler, then our soul learning is being passed on in some way to the next generations. This means that death can be seen as our giving back to the universe. Death is our gift to life. During our lifetime we are bringing the world forward. Then, in death, we release that soul learning to the Universe.

May we know that by being here on Yom Kippur and participating in this process of atonement, we are helping to accomplish our soul tasks. We are clay, and we are the hands of God, going forward, so the world can go forward toward the Oneness and harmony that existed before creation. May each of us know how vitally important we are in accomplishing the tasks we have been given and may each of us be greatly blessed for a healthy and good life of forward motion in this New Year!