In the shadow of death, we choose kindness

“The earth was confusion and chaos, darkness over the face of the abyss,” we read in Genesis. I used to imagine this abyss as something vast and bottomless and beyond our understanding, as behooves a place that predates the world and language itself. Today I feel as if this primordial abyss is here, right now, yawning open at our feet, a chasm or tear at the very fabric of reality as we know it, a bottomless opening into the void.

The abyss, to me, is the empty space that exists where once there were people. It’s the knowledge that the person we lost is gone forever, never to return. It’s the truth, the awful, awesome truth, of the finality of death, of the impossibility of fixing it. In its presence, the rituals and habits of our life seem meaningless, for none of them are as real as loss.

I stood by this abyss when I sat with people immediately after they lost their loved ones. I felt the truth of it bleaching reality of vitality and joy and meaning. I looked at it, at this place where a person was and now forever wasn’t, and when I looked away and back at life everything seemed faded, as if I stared too long into the sun.

This abyss of loss stole the earth from underneath our feet on October 7th.

It hasn’t stopped opening wide since then.

Today, after we received the bodies of Oded Lifshitz, Ariel Bibas, and Kfir Bibas, the abyss of loss feels very, very real.

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Millennia ago, King David wrote in Psalm 24 “Who is the King of glory?” We usually read it as a rhetorical question, but back in the 16th century, Rabbi Moshe Alshich read it as a serious question, born out of a terrible disaster. When the Jews saw the destruction of the Temple and “foreigner dancing in God’s holly of hollies,” and worse – when God seemingly didn’t protest or respond, they asked themselves “Who is the King of Glory?”

But what they meant was – is there one at all?

Could it be that there isn’t, in fact, such a glorious God, if He can remain silent while His home is violated? Could it be that there is no ”King of glory” and the universe is, after all, but a place of cruelty and senseless happenstance?

These words struck me after October 7th, after we saw our enemies dancing in the holy of hollies of our people – in their private, cherished homes. After we saw our people murdered. After we saw a mother being led out of her home, the place where she should have been safest, holding two precious red-headed children in her arms. Who is the King of Glory, where is He, at this time? The doubts extended to other areas, other authorities. Who is the IDF? Who is the State of Israel? Who are we, if such travesties can violate our homes here, on our land?

These questions reached us from Shiri Bibas’s eyes, from the eyes of too many people we watched disappearing into Gaza. And the finality and totality of death went on staring at us from every loss, through every beloved body that was emptied from the spirit that once animated it. And this absence forced on us, and forces on us again on this difficult day,  the question: how do we go on?

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This week, after four coffins made their way from Gaza into Israel, I joined many fellow Jerusalemites in the hall of the great synagogue for an opportunity to be together in this painful time. Organized by Steve Zussman, whose son Ben fell in battle early in the war, this gathering was titled “Together, Between Hope and Chesed Shel Emet (‘charity of truth’ or ‘the truest loving kindness’)”. I spoke there about the abyss that death opens in the fabric of reality, about the way it represents a truth so final and so terrible that it can bleach our daily life of meaning. And I spoke of the words “chesed shel Emet,” which the Hebrew Bible uses to describe the act of burial, and how maybe, just maybe, they offer us a way to go on living in the shadow of this terrible finality, an ancient guide to embarking on our journey back to finding meaning in our lives.

Burial is a true act of loving kindness, as many commentators explain, because when we help the dead, we cannot expect them to help us in return. I don’t feel like this traditional explanation is sufficient, since the return we get from kindness isn’t always as straightforward as a reciprocal response. As we lived through death after death in the past 504 days I started wondering if this expression represents something deeper, something essential: a roadmap for dealing with the finality of death and how it can affect us, a way to hold space for its horror without sinking into listlessness or despair.

When the Torah demands that we take care of the dead, it tells us how to act when we encounter life’s finality. It doesn’t give us time to sink into shock, into passivity, since it demands we act at once to care for the bodies before us. Neither does it ask us to repress death or to ignore it, since we must act in the very shadow of death itself as we care for the bodies of the ones we lost. And through these actions, through these acts of kindness, chesed, that we perform within the space created by the truth, the emet, of death, we reaffirm that we belong to the realm of the living. We reaffirm that our actions have meaning even in the presence of death. We confront the abyss of loss, in other words, and stay close to it, but choose to invest ourselves in chesed, in loving kindness, in the sort of behavior that is the blood flow of society, humanity, and life.

It is in this crossroad of truth and chesed, where we act with kindness even though the truth of death makes life and its needs seem pale and meaningless and bleached of true importance, that we can start our journey back into the realm of the living. It is there that we can start to slowly rebuild our sense of self.

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I pray that we can embrace the living and stand by the side of all of the fallen, that we can say farewell to them properly, and begin the journey towards healing that is rooted in this chesed shel emet.