Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  The doctrine of the Church is that we cannot be for active euthanasia. But passive euthanasia, allowing somebody to die without having any kinds of extraordinary means, that’s certainly acceptable. You can pull the plug.

  One night I was coming home. This was about twenty-one, twenty-two years ago while I was still in my cups and I was driving home. I took my car flying off a bridge. I went down thirty feet. The car was so crushed that they had to take it away on a flatbed. [Laughs] I walked away with just a scratch. My little toe and my one finger, that was all. I was hardly hurt. As this is happening, I was thinking to myself, I am not going to die, I’m not going to die, I’m not going to die. I remember thinking that.

  They took me to the hospital. A friend drove me back to my rectory, and I remember going past the scene of the accident and cars were backed up for about two miles and I thought, O my God, I’m so sorry. I’ll never be able to make amends to those people, you know, for doing that . . . But I also remember thinking, I’m not going to die. That’s the closest near-death experience I’ve had.

  When I was a boy, I remember diving into the lake at Rainbow Beach. And I came within just inches of hitting rocks. I guess, as I’m thinking about it out loud, death has not been a stranger to me. I believe that I’m in the right vocation. I really believe that I was meant to be a priest—and part of being a priest is dealing with this, to give people hope that death is not the end but a new beginning of sorts.

  I’m not God, but I know that when I’m acting in a good way for justice I’m acting God-like. I believe that same power that brought me here, that brought everything else here, will continue afterwards. I don’t believe that all these bonds we’ve had, all these life experiences with people end with death. It continues, if nothing more than the memory.

  I can find understanding but I don’t agree with suicide. It hurts other people. I think that what the Church teaches is that the presumption that suicides are not in their right mind, either because of their depression or because of their anger . . . I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. In the past, it was the sin of despair, so they couldn’t be buried in the Church. Now it’s a much more compassionate way. A very sick alcoholic drug addict who married a friend of mine left a real nasty, bitter note. It was to his family. I didn’t read the note publicly, I just burned it. I wasn’t going to lay that trip on people who loved him. He wanted to hurt them, yeah . . . I wasn’t going to let him do that. I had a kid from the parish who went to the bedroom and shot himself. His mother—she’d had a hard life and she sacrificed for him. The kid was so nasty and he took his own life, and it made me so angry. I like the image of the caterpillar for life, death, transition, always—and I use it every single Easter. The caterpillar is this creature who crawls around on the ground or up in trees and eats leaves. At a certain point it spins a silken cocoon. If you look at that, you’d think it was dead. It hangs there in this cocoon. After a certain amount of time, instead of dying, it’s being transformed. It opens up that cocoon and out of it comes the butterfly that can now soar. Instead of eating leaves, it can drink nectar. I think that death is that process when we are transformed from one state into another. I find that it’s a simple image, but it touches something deep in me. It summarizes a lot of what I believe.

  Rabbi Robert Marx

  He is rabbi of a Jewish Reform congregation: Hakafa (a Circle). It is in Glencoe, an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. He is, as well, a founder of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, devoted to work in the have-not communities in the city.

  I LISTEN TO the voice of the prophets. Amos speaks to me. And Isaiah. When Isaiah spoke of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, he understood that you can’t fast without doing righteousness, without doing justice. Without thinking about the orphan and the widow and the disinherited of the earth. In my rabbinate, I have tried to teach people what Judaism has to say about justice, whether it’s economic or social or political.

  Martin Luther King quoted them very often. He studied the prophets when he was in divinity school and knew that they had some important things to say in the civil rights struggle. I don’t think you can fight that battle without being aware of the message of the prophets, and of how difficult it was for them to enunciate a message in which they were seen as attacking the power structures of their times. They were attacking the priests, they were attacking the kings, they were attacking secular rule—and, above all, they were attacking an unequal distribution of wealth. Amos, for instance, in a beautiful passage, says, “They lie on beds of ivory,” criticizing those people who had conspicuous consumption as their motto, who didn’t think of those who were poor, who didn’t take care of those who were unjustly treated by their society. They’re very modern.

  I was one who my teachers thought would have been the least likely person to be a rabbi. At an early age I was expelled from religious school because of disrespectful behavior toward my elders. In the midst of that time in my life, something happened to me, and I decided—it was as if a voice came to me and said, “You will be a rabbi.” I had some grandiose visions in those early days. I thought I could save the world. Now I’ve come to understand there’s very little I can save, but I can add my voice to those who would try to make this world a little bit better place in which to live.

  Silence is not inaction. It is doing something: silence is acquiescence. When you acquiesce to injustice, you are contributing to it. The hardest thing in the world is to help people find the courage. In that process, finding it yourself is not always an easy task. You have to say that I’m willing to be inconvenienced, I’m willing to march in that parade, I’m willing to sign that petition. I am willing to go down to a prison and visit somebody who has been wrongly imprisoned. I am willing to have rocks thrown at me, as has happened.

  I have a congregation called Hakafa. It means “a circle.” We have a group of people who study a great deal, who are not content with just using the external trappings of religion. We are unusual in that we have no building. We want our resources to be used toward taking care of people, in running social projects, in doing things that will make life a little more pleasant for the world. Our congregation is made up of all kinds of people, from social workers, to doctors, to attorneys, to writers, to people who take care of homes.

  We are Reform Judaism. We don’t regard ourselves as being in a process that has been completed, so it is Reform. There is also Orthodox Judaism—and Conservative Judaism, which stands between the liberalism of Reform synagogues and the traditionalism of Orthodox synagogues. In an Orthodox synagogue, most of the service would be conducted in Hebrew. Men and women sit separately. In a Reform service, much of the service now is in Hebrew, but there’s also a great deal in English. Men and women sit together. From a traditional point of view, the Torah, the entire law, was given to Moses at Mount Sinai. For most Reform synagogues, the law is a process of progressive evolution, of an insight that was given to Moses and is constantly unfolding before us.

  My father was an attorney in Cleveland. I admired his strength, I admired his moral courage—I wanted to be an attorney. One day, I was talking to my father about this and the thought came into my mind that there were other professions. I mockingly said, “Suppose I were to become a rabbi?” And I laughed. In the midst of the laughter came the existential ah-ha! . . . that’s what I wanted to do. Nothing in my background had really prepared me for that. I knew very little Hebrew. Tradition was not part of our family. My father, though not a Hebrew-speaking or even -knowing Jew, was a deeply pious Jew. Used to say a silent prayer at our dinner table every night. Went to our Reform synagogue every Sunday morning and ushered in his frock coat, because in that particular congregation things were very formal. It happened very quickly with me. This sounds self-aggrandizing, but I wanted to help people to think about changing some of the attitudes they had. I liked to talk. So I became a rabbi.

  I was fifteen years old when I entered college, Western Reserve in Cleveland. I wouldn’t c
all myself precocious, I simply worked hard. I became a very young student at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio—and studied for many years at the seminary. Then took a PhD degree at Yale University in philosophy. That’s what put into shape some of my social action ideas that I was able to express through creating the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs here in Chicago. I get very emotional about it . . .

  The Council provides help to community groups, usually of the poor, in the city of Chicago. We never do anything unless we’re asked by a community. We are different from so many city organizations in that we have no answers. We don’t come in and say, “This is what you ought to do.” We provide help to groups that want to help themselves—the people who are fighting slum landlords, people who are seeking to prevent urban renewal from destroying their community, we provide staff for them to do it. We’re doing pretty much what Amos and Isaiah were talking about. About life.

  Death to me is the antithesis of everything I’ve given my life to achieve. From the very moment that we begin to mature, we human beings become aware that death is what lies before us. We meet death by doing a variety of things. People make a big mistake by avoiding thinking about it, by avoiding understanding it. As a rabbi, I’m seeing most people are afraid of death—they think it’s an enemy. They’re terribly, terribly fearful of what looms before them. I, when I understand a commitment to life, have to also understand that I’m fated to death, and that death lies before me.

  Judaism, my faith, has always been ambivalent about death. Judaism in a sense simply says: Death is a reality. There are ceremonies that we deal with in terms of death. We say the Kaddish prayer when somebody has died. Yet Judaism has always been leery of defining too sharply what happens to us when we die. There’s a difference between what my religion allows me to think about death or how often it allows me to think about death and my own thoughts about death. Judaism does have an idea of Heaven, it does have an idea of life after death—that is very clear.

  Again, there are differences between Reform and Orthodox Jews. We all tend to say we believe in the immortality of the soul—something of us lives on. We don’t die. Orthodox Jews tend to say there will be a Messiah come someday; and with the coming of the Messiah, the dead will be resurrected. I’d like to believe in resurrection—I find that hard, though. But I do believe that life goes on, that there’s something that happens to us after we die. I believe that very strongly.

  I lost a son many years ago. He died after a long illness. I go to a cemetery and visit his grave. At the grave I stand there as if I’m going to call him up to me. He will come forward and be with me. I often feel that he’s in some holy spot, with God, and that I will see him someday—and we will be together. The thing that troubles me is that when I think of Heaven, I think of a place that lacks the one thing I feel is more important than anything else, and that is free will. So when I think of my son, I think of him lately as being able to do the things that he wants to do. I’m standing at his grave and it’s as if some bureaucratic official far away is calling him forward and saying, “David, come from whatever you’re doing”—and it takes him a long time to leave what he’s doing and join me in spirit as I stand at his grave. I know this sounds surrealistic, and I also know that I can’t defend what I’m saying rationally, but I believe it. I believe that David is somewhere and that someday I will be united with my son. We will be together, and we will talk, and David will lay his hands on my forehead, as he once did when I had a headache, and he said, “I’m so sorry you have that headache. I’m so sorry . . .” When I think about death, I don’t think about something abstract, because that defies all logic. I think of the concrete people I know, and of the possibilities for me someday being united with them in some way that transcends anything that I can possibly imagine.

  I think the most beautiful things in my life are things I can’t prove. I can’t prove why I feel being a rabbi is important to me. I can’t prove why I believe in God. In my rational moments, I’ve tried to do a taxonomy: a classification of God so people can know how many different ideas of God they’re really talking about. When somebody says to me, “I don’t believe in God,” I always say, “What do you mean by God?” They talk to me, and I don’t believe in that kind of a God either—but I do believe in God.

  I’m a variety of pantheist: I’m a panentheist. I believe—and this is very personal—I believe that God is in everything, that in this moment God is here. When we talk, when we meet. In each of us there’s a little bit of God. I also believe that there is an element of God that is outside of us. That explains why I can pray. If I were God, or if you were God, there’d be no sense in prayer. But if there is a part of God that is outside of us, then we can reach out and say: “Let me do the best that I can do. Let me be the holiest and noblest I can be.” I do not believe this God is all-powerful. I don’t believe that I’m going to be punished by this God, or that I’m going to be rewarded. Here’s where traditional theologians disagree with me: I take away omnipotence from this idea of God, though I do say that there is something that is there, that is outside of me, to which I can turn and find strength.

  I think Hell is within us. I don’t see a physical Hell any more than I see a physical Heaven. My Heaven is metaphysical. It is a place where spirits are. I know this is so illogical, but I accept the discontinuity. I believe in some sort of ideal Heavenly time frame in which the people I love exist eternally. I don’t believe in a place of punishment. I believe Hell is what we make of our own lives by the selfishness or by the corruption that we tolerate or foster in our own world—in the relationships which we destroy through our thoughtlessness and carelessness, through the love that we shatter. That’s Hell. We don’t need another place. I believe that there’s also Heaven in us, too, but I believe there’s Heaven that transcends us. That’s where my panentheism again finds expression. I’m talking about what we do on Earth. I’m also talking about something that takes place in us and through us after our life is ended. I think we need a completion: our lives are not complete. We are preceded in life by our mothers and fathers, and I think we, in turn, give something, even in our death, to those people who come after us. There’s a wonderful Hebrew tradition about the Kaddish, that the Kaddish is a way not only of saying a prayer in which we remember those who have gone before us, the memorial prayer, but it’s also a way of redeeming our parents and those we love. There’s a connection between the living and the dead. What we do in our lives is make a disconnect between the living and the dead—we separate. I think that’s a very dangerous thing. Our fears make us separate like that. I don’t think we need to be afraid of death. I see a continuity, and I see life is something that includes death.

  I talk to my son very, very often. I capture him as he was at the age of fourteen. In my conversations with David, he is eternally fourteen. We talk, and his memory is a humanizing blessing to me. It teaches me to understand the pain of other people who have lost. I feel their pain as I think of my son.

  That was in 1973 that he died, almost twenty-eight years ago. He died on a Jewish holy day. He died on the Festival of Purim. It is a day in which things are reversed. I’m just having an insight now that I’ve never had before. In Purim, people dress up and they are the opposite of what they seem. In Purim, they wear masks. It is a festive day—it commemorates the deliverance of the Jews. It’s the Book of Esther in the Bible, in which Jews were delivered from the king’s adviser, Hamen. For the first time I see that, as we dress up and change things around on Purim, the day of his death may be the day for me of his life.

  For many years I led a group of parents who had lost a child. There were moments when I envied the Catholics who were in the group—because they could say, “My child is with God,” and they believed that with absolute certainty. Other members of the group were uncertain about what they could believe. Their uncertainty led them to feel alone in their time of solace. I’m not for a moment suggesting somebody should accept a belief that they cannot re
ally, really understand or believe in. But I am saying there’s a function that we have tended to ignore—the role of solace that an organized community provides. That’s very important for people to have.

  Pastor Tom Kok

  It is a beautiful June afternoon. We’re seated in the rectory of the Peace Christian Reform Church in South Holland, a suburb of Chicago. He, the pastor, is forty years old.

  My wife and I have three children. The eldest, Tom, is thirteen, named after his dad. The second one, Jedidiah, is eleven—it’s the name God gave to Solomon. My little girl, Amanda, is going to be ten soon. They mean a lot to me, and I spend a lot of time with them, enjoying their company.

  The people of the Christian Reform Church actually came over to the United States in the early 1800s, and originally joined with the Dutch Reform Church. There was a difference over a few issues, so we broke away from the Dutch Reform people in 1857. Basically, our tenets are the same.

  The community of South Holland has a rich heritage. The motto of the town is “Faith, Family and Future.” The people who founded this town have really worked hard on making their faith part of their life. We take what we believe and weave it into our daily lives.

  It is a changing community. A number of the traditional Dutch folks have moved out to other areas, and we have new people moving in of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. But, still, for the most part, South Holland is a churchgoing community, definitely conservative. The people of Harvey and Dolton, next door, are probably a majority African-American.