 Life and death have I placed before you this day; blessing and curse. Choose life. [Devarim 31:19] The choice seems too simple, too obvious. Why would anyone, barring mental and emotional instability, choose death
in this scenario?
But even more troubling is a different question. Is something this fundamental actually just a simple matter of choice? What if a person chooses life but circumstances conspire to deny him his choice? How can the Torah present such a primal choice with such blithe simplicity?
And as long as we’re talking about death, let me add another question. We are taught in Yalkut Reuveni that sheina b’Shabbos taanug – the Shabbos nap is one of the delights of the Shabbat experience. And yet the Talmud tells us that sleep is one-sixtieth of death. How can something so frightfully associated with death be considered as a venue for sabbatical delight?
One last issue – our tradition teaches that in the ultimate future, the Almighty will take the yetzer hara (evil inclination) and slaughter it before our eyes. This does not sound very appealing. While we may have had to curb some of its excesses at times, most of us have grown quite attached to our drives for pleasure and would be bereft over its loss. Indeed, another source tells us that when the Sages temporarily unplugged the world’s drive for lustful encounters, all productivity ceased. The Gemara even suggests in one comment that the yetzer hara is the very purpose of Creation, with the Torah as only an adjunct (I have created the evil drive; I have created the Torah as its condiment – Kiddushin 30b). Why would God want to kill off the yetzer hara?
The Talmud in Masechet Chullin 73b discusses the case of an animal that loses its life while possessing only three intact limbs. Its fourth leg had become dislocated – so badly that it had been hanging from the body only by its skin, any bone and tissue connection having been completely severed – prior to the animal’s demise.
Quoting Rabbi Yochanan, the Gemara declares that limb will be seen differently depending upon how the animal died. If the animal was slaughtered (Shechita), we will view the dangling limb as having been attached to the body, and we will permit its consumption along with the rest of this kosher-slaughtered beast. If the animal died through other means, we will view the leg as having been essentially amputated, or detached, prior to the creature’s death – thus giving the limb an independent status unaffected by the rest of the animal body’s designation as an impure neveilah (carcass).
How is it possible to treat the same item differently contingent on different kinds of death? The animal’s death had nothing to do with the dislocation. It should seem to be axiomatic that a limb dangling from an animal’s body ought to be seen as either attached or detached – regardless of how the animal died. Death is death. Its form seems irrelevant to the question being addressed.
What the Gemara is saying is that “death” is not the singular reality we tend to imagine it is. Indeed, in the context of the “choosing” of life, a phenomenon we will presently explain, even death itself can be seen as nothing more than an alternative expression of genuine life.
What do we mean?
Without context, death is the cessation of the life force and the antithesis of all that is connected with God, the One who is Alive and Permanently Established (chai v’kayam). This is why tum’ah – spiritual impurity – is connected with death and why the Kohen, as representative of God’s Presesnce in this world, must studiously avoid contact with death. But in truth, death cannot possibly equal the cessation of life since no life force actually ever ends. God is the only source of life force possible, and God’s existence is eternal! At most, death can obscure the life force and send it into a transitional phase, but it cannot extinguish it any more than anything can extinguish any part of God’s existence – a theological impossibility!
To prove it, the Talmud gives us the example of kosher slaughter. Slaughtering an animal is not a synonym for killing it. Shechita is a context for killing, one in which the loss of the animal’s life plays a role but does not define the activity. Shechita is a process by which a substance becomes prepared for use, generally of a higher spiritual nature. The word is closely related to the word for play – sechok – where we can also see how guided use of childhood toys and games can serve to prepare the child for more sophisticated uses of his mind when he matures. Within the context of Shechita, the loss of life suffered need be seen as no more traumatic than the loss of one’s baby teeth in preparation for an adult smile or the loss of dead cells in anticipation of newer, healthier skin. So different is death by slaughter from standard death, says the Talmud, that our dislocated leg can have one legal status in the event of the former and an entirely different legal status in the event of the latter.
It is now easy to understand the Talmudic passage about the yetzer hara. God has no plans to “kill off” humanity’s lustful drives. The Talmud simply says He will slaughter our evil inclination. The act of Shechita renders a substance properly prepared for higher use. Slaughtering our evil inclination will make it ready and available for all kinds of advanced and sophisticated uses, uses that will be ably assisted and enhanced by a liberal and comprehensive knowledge of the teachings of the Torah, a superb condiment if there ever was one.
How does this happen? How do we make the jump from seeing death outside of context to seeing it as a mere corollary to acts of higher purposefulness?
We choose.
The Torah in this week’s parsha is telling us that the choice to see a distorted death in its exaggerated autonomy or to see it exclusively within the broader context of life is completely up to us. Indeed, it remains possible to “choose death”, by ignoring the broader realities that surround it. But also, yes, it is that simple – simply make a mental choice to view everything through the prism of Life, and you will see how even death fades into being just one of Life’s myriad subsets.
Now we can explain how sleep can be a Shabbos delight despite the whiff of death it carries during the week. All of our efforts during the working week are activities designed to stave off the onslaught of death. We work in order to make a “living”, keeping alive by earning the bread we need to avoid starvation. Sleep, by keeping us for hours at a time from this fervid task of survival, rightly earns its association with death. On Shabbos, the Jew is referred to in the Zohar as a “Chai” – one who is safely alive, untroubled by the specter of mortality. Keeping Shabbos enables all of us – at least for 24 hours – to be able to see everything in the larger context of Hashem and His Life-giving reality. We don’t really fear death on Shabbos. All our food is already prepared, and if any is not, there is nothing we could do about it anyway. As a consequence, sleeping on Shabbos makes no assault on our security. Sleep on Shabbos is a true delight.
Choose life, and we can live this way all the time. Fearless and secure, we will easily see how every experience in our lives paves the way for a greater experience. Whatever we encounter becomes nothing but another blessing.
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