The irony of the Torah parsha of deaths, which tells of Jacob’s and Joseph’s dying, being called Vayihi, which means “and he lived,” finds an echo in the Zohar’s comment that the illness that befalls Jacob in the parsha didn’t simply happen, but was something Jacob himself prayed for, so that he would have time to take leave of his loved ones.
These ways of looking at illness and death are different from what most of us experience.
The process of therapy often leads to close relationships between a therapist and a client. I practiced for many years, before retiring and moving to Israel; one of my clients – I’ll call him B. – was born with physical deformities and heart problems that required frequent hospital visits, as well as necessitating speech therapy from the time he was a child.
The work we did together led me to a revelation of sorts.
We met when he was thirty years old. He and the woman he loved were happily married. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He often brought cartoons to our therapy sessions. I think he wanted to make my difficult job a little brighter, and together we laughed at the cartoons.
One day, B. told me his mother had asked him how he was able to laugh so much when he had started life with such difficulties and was still dealing with serious medical issues. He told his mother:
“Look, life started out for me, as for every baby, alone, quietly, for nine months. Suddenly, one day, trouble came: I was caught in a flood and thrown all around.
I must have felt as if this was Death. That I was losing my comfortable place in the world after nine months. Instead, I was born! I entered Life, which I could not possibility understand. But, despite my physical problems, look at me now. I have had a wonderful family during my thirty years. As an Orthodox Jew, I believe deeply in God. I found my beshert. I am able to work a little, thanks to my boss’s kindness.
So I’m alive, not dead. Look how wrong I was about being born.”
“Your reply to your mother was wonderful,” I said, adding that as he finished his story, I was struck by a thought that expands upon it:
We experience three S’s in God’s world. The first S is ‘Solitary.’ For about nine months, our lives are solitary. We become who we are going to be, grow organs and bones and skin, develop as male or female, and lay the basis for our personality.
After birth the baby enters a second S stage, the ‘Social’ one. He or she interacts with others, with a happy or unhappy mother and father, other relatives, friends, teachers, employers and so forth. For the rest of our lives we are social beings.
And there is a third S: a ‘Spiritual’ life that God has waiting for us after our earthly death. Of course, many of us believe this. But what struck me as B. described the traumatic experience of birth and said “Look how wrong I was” about it, is that we will eventually separate from our Social lives just as he described the previous separation from our Solitary lives: painfully and without our having a clue about the next stage of life and what it is like.
So, too, when our Social lives end with what we call death, this is actually the same kind of process, this time - of our being born into our Spiritual lives, which are completely unimaginable to us, and will be until we are there. Vayihi – and we live.