I looked them over and complimented the intricacy of his designs.
“And now that we’ve covered all this terrain”—the rabbi stood tall—“I’m wondering if you can help me as well?”
“I would be glad to,” I responded, curious how a goy like me might possibly be of assistance.
“At Celestial Chariots, we’ve got design and imagery covered. But we need a little help with the writing.”
“Writing what?”
“To be more precise, I would appreciate it if you could help me write a letter to the actress Angelina Jolie. She works for good, and I think she would connect with our clothes. I’d like to make her want to be a part of our project—in a very polite, gentle way, of course.”
“Well, I could try.” I laughed tentatively. “What exactly would you want to say?”
“You’re the writer. . . .”
“Yes, but what do you—”
“Something about how we hope that she’ll wear it. ‘We are contacting you because we know that you are very into positivity’—you know, like that.”
I told him I’d be happy to do it.
“Perfect. I’d very much appreciate it. And once it’s done, I’d like to invite you and whoever else you want to Shabbat dinner at my house.”
* * *
That week, an old friend named Himo Martin returned from a three-month trip to Morocco and came to crash in my spare room while apartment hunting. Himo, a Quebecois jewelry designer, had been interested to hear about Rabbi Sherrf’s silver mezuzahs. He’d be the perfect dinner companion.
On the bus ride over, Himo told me about an experience of immortality he’d had on an Indian reserve, about five years earlier. “Some friends and I went out to an island. You have to take a canoe to get there. We stayed in a cabin next to a waterfall. That evening, after the moon rose, I walked out alone and lay down at the tip of the island. You couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began. I closed my eyes, listened to the loons and the fireflies in the silence, and then it happened.”
A dreamy look came over his face.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It’s hard to describe.” He shook his head. “It felt like there was a haze over everything. The sounds, the smells, the wind—everything had been united into this one thing. Although my eyes were closed, I began envisioning the stars. I started seeing sparks of light inside my eyes. They were in motion. And I was in motion, too. I was part of the movement. And all of a sudden, I fell.”
“You fell down?”
“Well, not physically, not in reality, but I felt the sensation of falling through the lights into water. It was like plunging into a pool, and being surrounded by a glow of liquid. Every piece of my body felt embraced by water, completely enveloped. All sounds were very far away, the way they are when you’re underwater.”
“Could you see anything?”
“Yes, all the specks of light I’d been seeing formed themselves into a pattern. The spaces between the lights moved apart, and within each of the spaces were more specks of light. At first it seemed as though they were mirroring themselves, but then I realized they were duplicating, or replicating. Every heartbeart brought exponentially more shining points of light. And I was a coordinate on that grid, a radiant dot that kept falling through dimensions. Things were getting smaller and smaller and bigger and bigger, infinitely so. It was infinity.”
“Wow. You saw the mesh of reality. Were you on drugs?”
“No. Nothing. When I opened my eyes, I saw a candle, lit, on the table back at the cabin.” He paused again. “Vibrations of heat emanated off the candle. I could see heat waves interacting with the space around it. Like fractions of light. Everything became pixelated. In those pixels, I saw how everything is connected to everything else. I realized that I am but a pixel, that this body is a vessel. Every body, every thing, contains an inner pixel. Whenever something dies—a tree, an animal, us—its form is taken up by something else. Transformation is the law of nature. I saw energy become matter.”
“How were you feeling at this point?”
“I was almost hyperventilating, but I tried to just keep breathing. I felt I was dying, but I wasn’t scared of dying. The experience was so beautiful. Whatever happened, I knew it would be okay. Even if my body died, its vessel would be consumed by nature. Its energy would be released and new forms would arise. I knew that we have a larger interaction with the unknown beyond life and death. I all of a sudden understood. Death is an interaction with the unknown. The unknown is the beauty of the interaction.”
* * *
Twenty minutes before the 7:00 p.m. start time, Himo and I walked into the Quality Hotel around the corner from Rabbi Sherrf’s home in Côte Saint-Luc. My girlfriend had helped me begin the letter to Angelina Jolie, but it remained unfinished. I figured I’d be able to complete it and print it out in the hotel’s business center. Luckily, the bored front-desk receptionist gave me permission to use a computer—with a printer attached—in the lobby.
“Dear Angelina Jolie,” I started typing. “I hope this letter finds you well. As a rabbi who strives for positivity in all facets of life . . .”
A minute later, Rabbi Sherrf strolled into the hotel lobby. I leapt up, amazed to see him. Sherrf smiled calmly. He, too, was accompanied by a friend, a deeply tanned, fortysomething Moroccan guy with a kippah and a bright, toothy grin. “What a coincidence!” I laughed. “I’m just printing the letter to Angelina now.”
“Don’t worry about that, it’s no problem,” Sherrf said, a mildly pained expression on his face.
“It’s no worry at all, it’ll just take another moment,” I reassured him.
“No, really, there’s no need to do that now, so don’t bother,” he insisted. “Let me just find out about the guests we’re meeting here.”
He walked over to the front desk, leaving us with the tanned Moroccan man. While Sherrf wore dark, baggy clothes, his friend had on boot-cut designer jeans with long, white, square-tipped dress shoes. His shiny shirt, buttoned low, exposed a gold chain nestled in thickets of chest hair.
“So,” Himo attempted, genially, “how do you two know each other?”
“Me and Haim? We’re brothers from another mother, man!”
Himo chuckled tentatively, unsure about the expression’s meaning.
The man noticed and clarified it. “Meaning we go way back. And you?”
I explained about the interview I’d done with Sherrf, and about Himo’s recent trip to Morocco, and about the letter to Angelina, which I just needed to print up.
“Hey, bro,” he spoke up, nigh antagonistically, as I sat back down to the keyboard. “It’s Shabbes, stop working on the computer.”
“I’m not working,” I clarified, taken aback by the tone.
“Yeah, but it’s not done. Not now.”
“Oh, I see—you’re not supposed to work on Shabbat. But I’m not Jewish, actually. And I’m just printing up a document Haim asked me to write for him.”
“Well, you shouldn’t. You’re disrespecting Haim by doing that.”
“Wait; I don’t mean any disrespect here.”
“Then get off the machine.”
Apologizing, I moved away from the computer terminal. “No offense intended.”
Across the lobby, Haim stood greeting a pretty young woman. Although she lived in Montreal, she’d booked a room because she didn’t want to drive home after the dinner. It seemed as though she’d come to meet the tanned man, as they behaved effervescently around each other. Another friend of hers was still getting her makeup on in the room above, so we stood around making small talk for several minutes. The topic turned to a Chabad conference taking place the next day. When Sherrf disclosed that they have great food at the conference buffet, I blurted out a joke about buffets and shrimp cocktails, not realizing that shellfish are trayf.
The woman frowned. “Ummmm, we don’t eat shrimp.”
“No, no, there won’t be any shrimp,” the
Moroccan man said, soothingly.
“Oh, of course not,” I muttered, mortified. First the computer insult, now a crustacean-joke misfire.
“Actually, they do make excellent mock-shrimp,” Sherrf, unflappable, added. “Which I’m sure is what our friend Adam here is referring to.”
“Yes, of course!” I managed.
“Aha,” sighed the man and the woman, looking at each other, relieved.
“Good!” Sherrf clapped his hands together. “But now it’s getting late, so why don’t Adam, Himo, and I walk back to my place together to get things under way, and you two can wait for her friend.”
“As soon as she’s ready, we’ll walk over, too,” agreed the woman.
The three of us crossed a parking lot, where Himo attempted friendly banter. “So I gather you two are brothers from another father?”
“‘Brothers from another father,’” the rabbi repeated, considering it. “No. Nope, that isn’t possible.”
“But that’s what your friend said inside,” Himo protested.
“Well, I’m not sure what he meant, but for him to be my brother—from another father—would mean that my mother was impregnated by another man, which I assure you wasn’t the case.”
“Wait, I think what Himo meant,” I leapt in, trying to salvage the situation, “is ‘brother from another mother.’ It’s an expression meaning very tight-knit. Because Himo is Francophone, he just misunderstood the meaning, right?”
“Mmm,” Sherrf mused. “Brother from another mother. Yes, that makes sense.”
* * *
Inside Sherrf’s home, three dining tables had been pushed together in a long row connecting two separate rooms. Around sixteen Orthodox kids were running around, half of them the rabbi’s own offspring. Another dozen adults were clustered throughout the living room and the kitchen. Even though Himo and I were outsiders, obviously clueless about their ways, we felt welcomed.
Sherrf’s pretty, young-looking wife oversaw the food preparation, pausing only when her husband began the proceedings with blessings and a recital of kiddush. They clearly loved each other very much. We all washed our hands by filling a cup and pouring the water over our hands in a prescribed manner. Then Haim cut into some loaves of challah bread, his wife and children brought out platters of Middle Eastern food, and everyone feasted.
A young Sherrf boy seated next to me asked me why I’d come, and I told him about my research into the idea of immortality. As I spoke, he poured me a small glass of purple grape cola, which he then diluted with seltzer until it was a pale lilac-lavender. “There! That’s the color of immortality,” he announced triumphantly.
I looked at him in astonishment.
“It’s true.” He smiled, genuinely.
“So you’re writing about immortality?” the man opposite me said. He had a receding hairline and a yarmulke. “Want to know what I think? All religions are crap.”
“Honey!” cried his wife, looking around. Fortunately, Rabbi Sherrf was deep in conversation with the two women who’d just arrived from the hotel.
“No, I mean it,” persisted the man, a lawyer in his forties. “Religions are set up to keep us further away from God rather than bring us closer. Rabbis preach about our connectivity with the beyond, but what they really do is put a buffer between us and God—and they’re the buffer.”
“Could you please keep your voice down?” his wife pleaded.
But there was no stopping him now. “God is within us, he’s in everything, not just in religious leaders. If you want to feel God, all you need to do is lift your arms to the sky and you’ll feel it.”
“But not everybody is like you,” the wife added.
“Have you felt God in that way?” I checked.
“Yes, for sure. If you align yourself with what’s above, you allow God’s energy to flow in. When I feel anxious or upset, I do it. It’s like a medication of sorts. And I experience its benefits.”
“That’s very interesting,” the boy next to me said, “but if you think all religions are ‘crap,’ then why are you here tonight?”
“I’m here tonight because I’m strongly Jewish,” the lawyer retorted, smiling. “I grew up with a Sephardic Jewish education. I want my kids to have the same upbringing I did. And we all need to belong to something, so this is my community. I know it sounds strange, but I’m anti-organized-religions while also being religious.”
“Beliefs are often paradoxical,” I suggested.
“The sages and rabbis have always told me ‘do and then you’ll hear,’ naaseh v’nishma. It means ‘follow the precepts, and then you’ll understand.’”
“Or ‘believe, and then you’ll know’?” I asked.
“Precisely. I guess it’s like a math problem. You really need to get into the crux of things and apply the formulas. But I’ve never been ready to make that leap of faith. Why is Moses’s death written about in the tablets that ‘God’ gave to Moses? It makes no sense. We’re not wired to have all the answers. I don’t think we’ll ever have the answer to why we’re here until we die—and even then, I’m not sure. We’re so limited; God is illimited. How could we ever understand?”
“When we don’t understand, we believe,” I said.
“I suppose so. I mean, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know if I’m right or wrong or if I’m stupid or going to hell. I’m not an authority, but I don’t think anyone is. I don’t even know what I believe. Nobody knows the Truth. Whoever professes to know is lying.”
“Okay, so in the context of what I’m working on—different attitudes toward immortality—may I ask how your family spoke of the afterlife when you were a child?”
“In my family, there wasn’t much talk of death,” he answered, testily. “We were much more about life. My father, a religious man, believed that there’s nothing after death, and that’s how he raised us. ‘When you die, that’s it,’ he told me. That’s where it stops. You disintegrate back into the earth; from dust to dust. Death is just the end of your span, like what happens when a flower dies.”
“So your family, devoutly Jewish, didn’t believe in an afterlife.”
“Not at all. But we were spiritual. I’ve always felt that, if you want to see God, you just need to look at a tree.”
“That’s for sure,” added the boy sitting beside me.
“Even better”—here the lawyer picked up an orange—“peel an orange. Quarter it, and then pull off the pith and the white skin, and gaze at that flesh, at its extraordinary color, at the intricacy of all its compartments.”
“It’s interesting that you bring up trees, fruits, and flowers when speaking about God and death,” I said. “You mentioned our end being akin to that of a dead flower. But when a pollinated flower dies, it becomes a fruit.”
“Really?” He looked at his wife, doing her best to ignore us. “I had no idea.”
“Yes, petals wilt and fall and die, but the flower’s pollinated carpel grows into a fruit. And all trees come from dead fruits whose seeds fall into the ground. I really think that our species’ ideas about the afterlife came from observing those cycles in nature. If a seed goes into the earth and grows into a tree that gives flowers and fruits, we must have thought, then what happens when we go into the earth?”
“The same thing happens with water,” chimed in the young boy next to me. “It evaporates up into the air, fills the clouds, and then falls down as rain, over and over again. Just look at water: it never really dies.”
7
Technical Interlude: Writ in Water
The sea is back there, back in the reservoir of memory. The sea is a myth. There never was a sea. But there was a sea!
—John Fante, Ask the Dust
So, something you can only speak by saying you can’t speak it. And when you did try to speak it . . . you found yourself talking water—it was the obvious metaphor—abundant, flowing, crashing water, ultimate antidote to thought.
—Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still
<
br /> ALL RELIGIONS are based on a relationship with immortality. A religion is a consolidated system of thought regarding mysteries such as the world’s origins and the individual’s death. Eschatology is the branch of a religion that concerns itself with the soul’s final state. No religion is eschatologically unified, as different denominations posit their own interpretations of the end point, but all religions seek to illuminate the end. And they often use water when doing so.
From a Taoist perspective, each of us came from Tao, is a manifestation of Tao, and returns to Tao upon death. The way of the Tao is li, the path of liquidity, the watercourse way. The Sikh soul is like a water droplet that merges back into the ocean of God. The Celts spoke of Tír na nÓg, an island of eternal life beyond the western waters. Souls in the Islamic afterlife of al-Jannah, the Garden, are anointed with the water of life; those in al-Nar, or Jahannam, face an eternity of flame. Christianity promises an eternity in heaven or hell, with baptized souls floating up to the pearly gates in rapture, or lying in state until Armageddon, or awaiting the Savior’s return, at which point the Kingdom occurs right here on earth. Judaism is primarily focused on terrestrial existence, but it, too, tells of resurrection, of life continuing after death, whether in purgatorial Sheol, or Gan Eden, a paradise for purified souls, or Gehenna, as Haim explained. Other Kabbalistic traditions tell of souls transmigrating through different vessels, a phenomenon called Gilgul.
Mormon weddings aren’t just a simple, temporary exchange of vows: they are called sealings because each soul agrees to be fused with the other for eternity. In Jainism, the soul freed from karma savors the four infinities. Metempsychosis, a soul’s cyclical journey from life to death to incarnation in a new body, is taken for granted in Hinduism, but also appears in gnosticism, druidism, Manichaeism, Orphism, and also Buddhism, notably Tibetan. (Each Dalai Lama, or “ocean teacher,” is the reincarnation of a bodhisattva called Chenrezig. When a Dalai Lama dies, the High Lamas search for a new embodiment of Chenrezig’s mindstream based on oracular visions at a lake called Lhamo La-tso.) In Japanese Shintoism, everything contains a spiritual essence called the kami, with the human kami sometimes compared to a fireball that becomes visible following death as it blazes its way toward eternity. Some Shintoists consider water to be capable of bringing us into direct contact with gods.
Book of Immortality Page 12
