Now I know the answer

Regular readers of Avot Today will recall that I have written many times on the teaching of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus at Avot 2:15:

שׁוּב יוֹם אֶחָד לִפְנֵי מִיתָתָךְ

Repent one day before your death.

For the benefit of newcomers to this Group, or to Pirkei Avot itself, the point is that, since we don’t know the date of our death, we should make a point of repenting on a daily basis since tomorrow we might die.

I write these words in my apartment in Jerusalem where, like so many other residents of Israel, I am keeping an ear out for the sound of the sirens that will herald an expected, indeed promised, attack from Iran. If I am fortunate, I will run for the relative safety of the bomb shelter that services our building, and will later emerge alive. If I am not so fortunate—and we fear that there will be many fatalities when the rockets fall—then this will be my final post.

Today is not the easiest of days for repentance.  In the Hebrew calendar it is Rosh Chodesh Av—the first day of the new month and a day on which we allow ourselves a modicum of rejoicing, reciting the happy psalms of praise that make up Hallel in place of the usual pleas for forgiveness we know as Tachanun. But repentance is still perfectly possible even on days when Tachanun is not recited, and every day offers a chance to be at peace, or to make peace, with not just God but with those around us.

I have sometimes asked other people what they would do if they knew they would die the next day, and their answers were not always uplifting (see “A sad reflection on human nature”, here). But at least today I know how I would choose to spend my last day: I’m spending it the same way as I spend every other weekday. A bit of prayer, a bit of Torah learning, a bit of socialising with family and friends, a bit of writing—and a very great deal of being grateful for the fact these things are available to me.

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For some positive suggestions on this topic, see “What to do the day before you die”, here.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

Eat, drink or repent -- for tomorrow we die!

In the lead-up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, repentance is in the air. Jews all around the world talk about it, write about it and sometimes even think about it -- but the object of the exercise is to do it.

Some people like to save up all their repentance for Yom Kippur and make it special. There's no need to do this, though. In Avot 2:15 Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus reminds us: "Repent one day before your death". His students are puzzled by this, for who knows when they will die? And that is precisely the point: every day is ripe for repentance, so why put it off till the Big Day? The standard Jewish Amidah prayer, ideally recited three times every weekday, has been drafted in order to facilitate exactly this objective.

Curiously, not knowing the day of one's forthcoming death is also the trigger for a spot of self-indulgence, hence the popular motto “Eat, drink, and be merry—for tomorrow we die!” The message of the motto is clear: you may as well enjoy yourself and live for the minute, since each minute might be your last and, once you die, the story of your life comes to an abrupt end: there’s nothing left but oblivion and the loss of any capacity for personal enjoyment.

This message is plainly at odds with the teaching of Rabbi Eliezer, a man who would certainly have shared with his fellow Sages a deep belief that there was a better life ahead in the World to Come, a life for which repentance provided an important element of preparation and was certainly more efficacious than a pre-mortem spree.

Some people assume that “Eat, drink, and be merry—for tomorrow we die!” is a Biblical verse. This is not the case, though it is unsurprising that the verse has a Biblical ring to it because it is a conflation of two genuine Biblical sayings. The first, from Ecclesiastes 8:15, is part of a soliloquy on the apparent futility of life when the righteous suffer and the evil are treated as being righteous:

Then I commended enjoyment, because a man has no better objective under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry ….

The second, from the prophecies of Isaiah, (at 22:13) puts words into the mouths of the inhabitants of Jerusalem who, when called upon to repent, failed to get the message, responding:

Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.

We don't know our future, but repentance is about relating our present to our past. Right now, while we are still alive and kicking, we can ask ourselves some pertinent questions about whether we are truly the sort of people we believe we should be, and how best we can step back from past failings, build on our experiences and make ourselves the best folk we can be, Meanwhile, bon appetit!

A sad reflection on human nature

 As we enter the Hebrew month of Elul, with the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur in our sights, we find ourselves in the time-zone for serious reflection ahead of the Days of Awe. What sort of people are we? Are we the best we can be? How can we improve ourselves for the coming year -- and how can Pirkei Avot help? This, the first of a series of Elul posts on the subject of teshuvah (repentance) and self-improvement, is based on Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus' advice (Avot 2:15) to repent one day before one's death.

Over the years I have often asked friends and acquaintances what they would choose to do with their time if they knew for certain that they were embarking on the final day of their lives. The people I asked were drawn from different nationalities, cultures and backgrounds; some were at least nominally religious, while others were not. Their answers however were on the whole quite similar. Typical responses involved eating one or more favorite meal in the company of friends or loved ones, getting drunk to the point of oblivion, visiting a specific beauty spot or (in the case of males only) engaging in as much sexual activity as could be crammed into the closing hours of one’s life on Earth.

To my recollection, none of those asked made any mention of repentance, asking forgiveness of those whom they had upset or wronged, or doing any good deeds for the benefit of others. Why was this so? Probably because their preoccupation with their imminent departure from this World quite overshadowed their thoughts of what might be required in order to expedite their entry to the next one. Quite possibly, if it had been a Heavenly Voice that had asked the same question and not a relative stranger, the answers might be been otherwise. Notwithstanding this, one can see the wisdom of Rabbi Eliezer’s call to repent: while clearing one’s conscience and making peace with one’s Creator is of critical importance to anyone who possesses a religious soul, it’s not the first thing one thinks of when it comes to the crunch.