Sermon: Ki Tetzei

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 30 August 2020

While I was away this summer, I read a book that I expected would be a distraction, but ended up being a prompt to ask some rather profound questions.

The book was The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Everything appears to have gone wrong in Nora’s life. When she looks back, she sees moments where she could have made different decisions that would transport her into alternative, better realities. As her misfortunes mount upon her, Nora sees no reason to go on – no reason to go on living. She takes an overdose. And then something strange happens.

Suspended between life and death, Nora finds herself in a place called the Midnight Library, a library full of books that recount the endless permutations of her life story. At the centre of the library is the Book of Regrets, which is a heavy tome that details, day by day, her regrets: she regrets not pursuing a career as a swimmer (she could have gone to the Olympics); she regrets quitting the rock band she was in with her brother (when they were on the verge of signing a big record deal); she regrets not marrying her ex-boyfriend, moving to the Oxfordshire countryside with him and pursuing his dream of starting a gastro-pub.

The custodian of the Midnight Library tells Nora that the books that surround her each contain an iteration of her life based on different decisions she might have made. The books stretch on into the distance – there is an infinite number of possibilities.

This idea that lives are like books is a familiar one from Jewish tradition. The medieval Jewish philosopher, Bahya Ibn Pekuda wrote: ‘Days are like scrolls, write on them what you want to be remembered.’ And we will read this in our machzor at Rosh Hashanah.

In the Talmud, we find the great Babylonian sage, Rava, stating that it is a mitzvah for every individual to write themselves a Torah scroll.[1] For Rava and the rabbis of the Talmud, this might well have been taken literally – that everyone is obligated to write a Torah scroll like the ones we have in our ark – while we are hopefully able to take this metaphorically – that everyone has the obligation to write the stories of our lives. And, I would argue, to rewrite it each year, particularly in this season.

When Rabbi Eliezer died, the Talmud tells us that it was as though a Torah scroll had been hidden away, such was the wealth of wisdom Rabbi Eliezer had accumulated over his life.[2] It was a double tragedy, since he had been denied the opportunity to share much of that wisdom with his students because he had been excommunicated by his community.[3]

Our days are scrolls, and we write on them with our deeds. Every moment we are adding to that story – the story of our lives. The month of Elul is a time for taking stock of that story and considering whether the drama is heading in the right direction.

As Nora makes her way through her possible lives, her regrets fade from the pages of the Book of Regrets, as she sees the downsides of the various new life narratives – scenarios in which she pursues her dreams of being an Olympic swimmer but then fails to be with her mother on her death bed, or in which she becomes a rock and roll superstar but her brother has killed himself because of the overwhelming weight of fame, or in which she gets married and pursues the dream of the country pub but discovers that her husband has cheated on her and the business is failing.

The regrets that she once had begin to fade away. They no longer weigh her down. They no longer obscure her view of the possibilities of her life. This obscuring of the possibilities is something that Haig has attributed to depression, and he has become something of an advocate for those who suffer from mental illness.

In another of his books, Reasons to Stay Alive, Haig writes candidly of his own depression: ‘One of the key symptoms of depression is to see no hope. No future.’ ‘Depression lies,’ he tells us (though he quickly clarifies that depression itself is not a lie, but very real), rather ‘depression makes you think that you are wrong’. The lie is that there is no hope, but as the librarian of the Midnight Library points out, for as long as there are pieces on the board, a game of chess still has endless possible future configurations. No matter how terrible our life appears now, there is still the possibility of doing things differently, of making different choices for ourselves.

As I began to settle into the world that Haig had created, there was one aspect of the Midnight Library that didn’t quite sit right with me: that we do not share Nora’s new insights into how life really might have turned out differently. All we have (those of us who do not have a membership card  to the Midnight Library and its endless supply of books) is what we think or hope might have been different had we done things differently in the past. Does Haig expect us to take it on faith that we are in the best possible iteration of our lives? That every decision we regret was in fact the correct decision if only we knew all the bad consequences that would have flowed from it?

Is the role of this time of year (as in the words of Edith Piaf) to set fire to our memories and begin afresh? Or is it a time to acknowledge our past decisions, accept them and move on?

It might be better to conceive of regrets, not at as bad emotions that we have to excise from our narratives, but as alternative paths not followed – as things that we live with, and do not let us deny ourselves the possibilities of the present moment.

Ultimately, Haig revealed that he didn’t really expect us to completely set aside all our regrets.

In the course of the novel, Nora discovers that there is an alternative world in which she can be happy – one in which he has a caring and supportive husband, a daughter she adores, and a career she loves. But she ultimately rejects it because it is not happiness that she has earned and constructed for herself. She decides instead to return to her root life in the knowledge that she has the power to construct a similar future for herself – as long as there are pieces on the board, there are endless possibilities for how it might turn out.

There is a tale of a tzaddik, a great teacher, who saw one of his students hurrying away from class. When he asked him why he was in such a hurry to be off, the student responded, ‘I am leading the service and I must look in the Machzor, and put my prayers in order.’ The tzaddik said to him, ‘The prayer book is the same as it was last year. But it would be better for you to look into your deeds, and put yourself in order.’

Traditionally, Jews conceived of two books being open at this time of year: a book of life and a book of death. In our minds we might see a divine hand entering names into two giant ledgers. We might also take objection to such a theology, which to the modern mind seems to wrongly turn death into a punishment. But we misunderstand the idea of the divine books if we take it literally. I conceive of them as a kind of challenge to us in our writing – which book are we going to choose to write this year through our actions, through our treatment of others and our treatment of ourselves? This month of Elul is an opportunity to tweak our drafts, or to more profoundly restructure the paragraphs of our life story and the direction of its narrative.

May we have the strength to take this one as a our spiritual work over the next month.

 

 

What does it mean to write the book of our lives and what is the story we want to tell about ourselves?

How do I deal with the gap between the story I tell about myself and the story others tell about me (and the story that God reads – which no human can see, because every human comes with own books and their own baggage)?

[1] b.Sanhedrin 21b

[2] b.Sotah 49b

[3] b.Bava Metzia 59a