Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  “How are you, Mr. Cheskie?” I asked.

  “Thanks God,” he responded, as he always does. Finishing up with the customer, he indicated for me to follow him into the back room. I walked through a doorway to the other side, where employees were braiding tresses of challah bread. A choral wash of male voices chanting nigunim streamed from a CD player. “Nice music,” I commented sincerely.

  He scurried into his office and emerged with a copy of the CD. Before I could protest, he said, “Take it, please, I have many. It’s for those who appreciate.”

  “Wow. Are you sure?”

  “Yes, yes, and also, thank you for your advice.”

  A couple of months earlier, Cheskie had asked for some guidance on a media request. The biggest francophone daily newspaper in Montreal wanted a journalist to spend a few days working as a bakery employee. They planned on running a feature about the writer’s experience. Wary about their motives, Cheskie wondered whether I thought he should accept. He normally avoided publicity, but we both knew the story might help bridge the divide between Quebecois and Hasidim.

  “If you allow them to do it,” I counseled him at the time, “something positive could possibly come of it. There’s always a chance that the report could be negative, but it’s unlikely. If you refuse, however, nothing positive—or negative—will come of it.” He’d decided to take the risk. The result was in the morning edition, which he handed me. “It’s okay, right?” Cheskie asked.

  “Seems like it,” I said, scanning the text. “Inclusive. Even-handed. All positive.”

  “All positive.” He shrugged.

  “Speaking of which,” I ventured, handing the paper back, “remember when I asked you about Hasidic beliefs in God, and you said you could refer me to an expert? I’d really appreciate it if you could put me in touch with someone who could tell me about the idea of immortality for Hasidim.”

  “Imm . . .?” he responded blankly. “Imm—what?”

  “Immortality.”

  “What is that word? What does it mean?”

  “Well, that’s actually what I want to speak to someone about: the meaning of immortality in the Old Testament. It’s a word that has many interpretations—”

  “Oh, a morality! I know what morality is.”

  “No, not morality—immortality,” I clarified. “Think of mortality, which means dying. Immortality means not dying.”

  “Oh, well, if you mean heaven and hell”—here his face lit up, and he became cheerful—“for sure I believe in it that it’s real.”

  “That’s wonderful.” I nodded.

  “Is that what you mean by imma”—he scrunched his face up—“immortality?”

  “Yes, well, every religion has an approach to what happens when we die. And I’m trying to learn more about that spectrum of ideas. For example, some scientists today say they have the technology to make us not die.”

  He recoiled and grew serious. “For me, God made everything the way it is. And if God intended for humans to die, then that’s how it is. Listen, I’m a Jew who thinks the world is 5,771 years old. In my world, the Torah is everything. For Jews like myself, whatever isn’t in the Bible isn’t true. So when scientists say that there are dinosaurs that are twenty thousand years old, I don’t believe it. For us, dinosaurs are creatures who didn’t get onto Noah’s ark during the flood. When people say that a guy named Jesus came around two thousand years ago—well, for us it doesn’t mean anything. But it’s hard to talk about this because it’s touchy and becomes an argument so quickly.”

  “I know it’s a sensitive topic, but maybe you know someone I could speak with?”

  He twirled his hair and looked at the floor, deep in thought. “Someone who has knowledge, yes . . . someone open-minded.”

  * * *

  A few days later, I arrived at a three-story strip mall in the Sri Lankan/Filipino part of town. Walking into a dingy foyer, I double-checked my voice mail; yes, Cheskie definitely provided this precise address for Rabbi Haim Sherrf. One section of the stairwell’s beige walls was overlaid with white roller strokes from a long-abandoned repainting attempt. I walked down a corridor of closed office doors on the second floor. One, ajar, had an ornate silver mezuzah on its frame. I peered in.

  Two yarmulke-wearing men at the far side of the room looked up. One waved me in, then lifted an index finger, indicating for me to wait while they finished their business. I’d never been inside a rabbinical chamber before, but whatever I may have expected, this wasn’t it. Instead of some burnished-wood, leather-bound, soundproofed enclave of midrashic contemplation, I found myself in the colorful clutter of an artist’s atelier—a mess of easels and palettes, stacks of paintings, cardboard boxes filled with T-shirts, Styrofoam coffee cups, and plastic utensils. The bookshelves were lined, haphazardly, with monographs by Dutch masters, as well as Jewish encyclopedias and Israeli travel guides. Tambourines hung on hooks. An acoustic guitar idled in its stand. Some pots demarcated a kitchen area, complete with hot plate and toaster. The place needed a serious dusting, but its warmth and color were immediately inviting.

  As the two men spoke, I perused the works on display, from depictions of shtetl fiddlers to scenes of the Red Sea parting. One surrealistic painting caught my eye, of a stone cube hurtling through space, a cosmic rock-box engraved with Hebraic letters. In the background, satellites drifted through the spiraling Milky Way.

  “The tablet,” intoned one of the two men, walking over. He was big and tall, in his late fifties, strong, bearish. Wizardly. A Samson type. His chest-length, frizzy gray beard hung over a massive, regal, purple shirt.

  “‘The tablet’?” I parroted.

  “The Commandments given to Moses.” Under his bushy eyebrows, he had sharp, powder-blue eyes.

  I looked back at the intergalactic block. “The famous ones, on Mount Sinai?”

  He nodded, subtly arching those thick eyebrows.

  “Wasn’t that a piece of stone with a rounded top?” I asked.

  “It’s very clear that the tablets were square,” he answered, peacefully yet forcefully. “Moses wasn’t holding them; they were holding themselves. They were divine, after all. The text inscribed into the rock passed through and through, on all four sides, meaning no matter which side you looked at, the letters were the same, yet each side’s letters miraculously penetrated through the rock to the other side.”

  I let the awesomeness of his description sink in.

  “Welcome, Mr. Adam!” Rabbi Sherrf said, shaking my hand firmly and slowly. He had a calm, powerful presence, a contained intensity. “In this particular painting”—he picked up a paintbrush—“I wanted to show that the teachings are current, not old, that they are rejuvenated every day, so you see the satellite there.” I watched him dab a bit of space-blue pigment onto a chipped corner of the painting as he spoke rhythmically about the laws bestowed to Moses.

  I made an aside about the miraculousness of letters on the stone.

  “You want letters?” He told me how a book of psalms called the Tehillim came to King David as a harp next to him played itself. Letters floated up from the strings, arranging themselves into words that David transcribed. The Tehillim’s text is so powerful, Sherrf continued, that it can actually lure souls back into bodies in near-death situations. As a soul rises away from a newly deceased body, the letters of the Tehillim, if spoken by someone close by, can swirl into the air, attach themselves to the soul, and pull it back down into the body. “That’s a true story,” he said, leading me across the room. “There are many like it.”

  We sat near his object-strewn, paper-covered desk, through which he rummaged briefly, emerging with a piece of foolscap decorated with Hebrew letters as well as other, unfamiliar letters. He held it up. “This is the key to the language of angels,” he said seriously. People occasionally ask him to intercede between themselves and angels such as Gabriel, Rafael, Machiel, or Nuriel. Sherrf uses this Rosetta stone to help him translate and transmit messages. Before I could l
ook at it for too long, he filed it away. “It’s almost dangerous to know this language,” he added. “It’s like giving a knife to a murderer. You give a knife to a chef and you get a nice meal; you give it to a killer and he kills.”

  Sherrf continued by outlining the history of Hasidism, started by an eighteenth-century Polish rabbi called Baal Shem Tov. The essence of Tov’s teaching, Sherrf explained, is that God resides in all things. He viewed everything in the universe, down to the smallest caraway seed, as a manifestation of the divine, as a form in which God reveals Himself.

  I told Sherrf that was what I’d asked Cheskie about a couple of years earlier, and that I’d ended up here after trying to speak with him about Hasidic immortality beliefs.

  “Of course, Cheskie will give you a nice piece of cake, but for the rest, for questions of ‘belief’ . . .” Sherrf shrugged, then fixed me with lupine eyes. “And you, you have Jewish ancestry?”

  “Yes, way back, hundreds of years ago.”

  “On your mother’s side?” He leaned forward.

  “No, actually she’s Irish,” I apologized.

  The rabbi let out a sigh and then recounted his own backstory. A Sephardic Moroccan born in Israel, he became a Lubavitch Chabadnik after being in the air force and working as an Israeli intelligence officer. “I’ve heard bullets whistling in my ear, so God could have taken me long ago,” he told me. “But he had other plans in store for me.” Aged twenty-two, fresh from the military, Sherrf visited Salvador Dalí, who encouraged him to paint. He’d achieved success with his art. “Even Madonna owns one of my paintings,” he said proudly. He also made mezuzahs, designed clothes, and balanced creative pursuits with rabbinical work, doing chaplaincy in jails and servicing the Jewish Eldercare Center. “I’m a loving husband, and my wife and I have eight beautiful kids,” he added. “My name—Haim—means ‘life,’ in Hebrew. Definitely that’s me: I embrace life in every way. Mind you, I’m not afraid of death at all. I’ve done good and I know the process.”

  As we spoke, two ladies walked in, looking to buy a painting. Sherrf went to help them, and I struck up a conversation with the man Sherrf had been speaking to when I arrived. He introduced himself as Albert Hakim, owner of a gallery in the space next door. The art that will touch your soul, read his card. He gave me a tour of his gallery, explaining that he sells primarily to an Orthodox clientele.

  “Interesting topic for your research,” he mentioned, as we walked back over to Sherrf’s side. “If you don’t mind me asking, what do you think about death?”

  I stammered a few syllables before he followed up with another, more pointed question: “Do you think you just come here to earth and then die and that’s it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, that’s understandable. But I’ll tell you what Judaism thinks about death. This life is a hallway before getting into the big room. This is a passage for improving yourself. We’re all souls that were here before as other people. And we’re all here to repair our soul. But there are so many temptations, it’s easy to derail. I used to live a very open life, très flyée. I now know the truth: we come here to repair things. Man has to work on himself to become better and better—or worse and worse.”

  He drew me a little picture about how we’re on a straight and obvious line to heaven, but that somehow we take detours and that our work is to get back to that main road by rectifying the wrongs we’ve committed. The whole point of the Torah is to help orient people toward the broad highway to heaven. When I asked him which specific passages in the Torah describe this road, Hakim shook his head and drew a distinction between reading and learning. “If you read the Torah as a book, you won’t understand any of it,” he assured me. “But if you learn it, then you can know God.”

  Sherrf, having concluded the sale, came over and joined us. “Where are we at?”

  “We’re on the path,” answered Hakim.

  “Beliefs,” I added.

  “Beliefs?” Sherrf sounded dubious. “You can believe in anything, but then there’s what’s true—facts. For example, we know the world is 5,771 years old. Fact.”

  “Just last night I saw someone on TV saying that mountains are millions of years old,” Hakim recounted, incredulously. “How do they know?”

  Sherrf shook his head. “How can you calculate time? Who are they? They must be out of their mind.”

  “To be more specific,” I sidestepped, “we were talking about the afterlife.”

  “We definitely believe in life after death, if that’s what you mean,” Hakim said.

  “Yes, Judaism clearly states that righteous people start living after they’re dead,” Haim chimed in. “‘The righteous in death are called alive.’”

  “So you believe in the soul?” I asked.

  “More than ‘believe,’” Sherrf clarified. “Know.”

  “You know?”

  “Absolutely. The body is confined, limited. If you are well connected to God, you have the ability to go outside of your body to God, even when living. At the end of life, you are no longer limited by the body. You don’t simply continue; you can become a full servant of God.”

  The Lubavitch movement places more of an emphasis on the afterlife than other Jewish denominations. Because the Torah does not clearly discuss specific details of postmortem states, Judaism incorporates a variety of attitudes toward the soul’s fate. Many mainstream Jews feel that what happens after death isn’t important. Some believe in Gan Eden, a post–Last Judgment paradise; others don’t. At the End of Days, when the Messiah appears, will all purified souls end up resurrected in a perfected realm? Depends on your perspective, or not. One of my Jewish acquaintances keeps a packed suitcase under his bed for the moment it’ll happen. But bringing a carry-on into the beyond isn’t an agreed-upon convention among modern Jewry.

  In Sherrf’s view, which is in keeping with much Orthodox Judaic belief, a soul’s duty on earth is to purify itself from sins and temptations. He calls this “the process.” (Hakim termed it “the path.”) The basic point is that each soul assigned to a body is on a mission to perfect itself. When elements are lacking in a soul’s perfection, it has work to do on earth before it can return to its source in God. A soul can make mistakes—or it can attain beatitude. “It depends on our struggles,” Sherrf explained. “If we overcome them, we fulfill what we were meant to achieve. If a person fails in their temptations and falls into a place where they don’t believe in God, then the soul starts to drift to places it shouldn’t be. It needs to come back.”

  If it doesn’t get back to the right track before death, Sherrf noted, it ends up in Gehenom—“a washing machine that puts the soul through a spin cycle, reconditions it, leaves in the good parts, and then sends it back into another body. A soul has three chances. Three times it can come back into a human body on earth in order to perfect itself. This is our version of reincarnation.”

  “Is this what’s called Gilgul?” I asked.

  “Exactly. The soul is given tools to perfect itself because it has a challenge to complete. Whether you’re rich or poor, God ensures that each soul has the correct situation in which to go through its requirements. What happens next depends on what happened here on earth.”

  Every soul leaving a corpse ends up in a purgatorial waiting zone where it goes through a process of judgment and ordeals, contending with what Sherrf described as “armies of angels, millions of angels, some of whom can be very harmful.” Those souls deemed good and perfected move on to the infinite light; those flunking angelic cross-examination are sent to Gehenom for a refurbishing. Gehenom isn’t a bad place, Sherrf reiterated. It’s a place of cleansing, of purification. “There are far worse places to be,” he added, solemnly, which is where souls that strike out three times end up.

  Surviving family members can help a loved one’s soul as it deals with celestial border guards and immigration-agent angels. Reciting Psalms of Ascent assist with aliyah, the soul’s upward trajectory. “The process of a soul det
aching itself from a body is very painful,” Sherrf avowed. “To alleviate its tribulations, mourners say the kaddish. The newly departed soul is hungry, but cannot eat. The only thing that can satisfy and soothe it is the words of the Torah. Every kaddish said ensures one and a half hours of safety for the soul. Saying sixteen kaddishes protects the soul for twenty-four hours. If you keep going, and do it properly, you can protect a soul for the full period of return.”

  As the soul, or the God-Breath, journeys from this life space toward the One Source, it gets inhaled back into the Breath of the Divine Breather. But this process is fraught. Souls crossing the Sea of Finality can get stuck in raging waters, pulled under the dark waves into chaos. Meddlesome angels can wreak havoc, which is why the kaddish must be recited in Aramaic. “Angels do not speak Aramaic,” Sherrf confided, “so they can’t interfere with Aramaic prayers on their way to heaven. In Aramaic, there’s no filter between the praying person and God.”

  Sherrf then walked me across the room to pick up a T-shirt from one of the cardboard boxes. He’d designed a fashion line, called Celestial Chariots, based on kabbalistic imagery such as the ten heavenly realms surrounding this world. The shirts looked exactly like Ed Hardy’s clothes, which I mentioned.

  “Yes, but I think everything Ed Hardy does is morbid, violent, and negative,” Sherrf said. “And the kids think it’s so cool. One of his shirts says ‘Love kills’—can you imagine? There are always guns and knives and bleeding skulls in the designs. So I created my own line of Ed Hardy–inspired clothes, but filled with very positive messages. It’s all divine and kabbalah. The clothes are an extension of my rabbinical work.”