Parsha Shoftim, Larry David and the World to Come

It happened again, that Jewish synchronicity convergence that follows me around. First I wandered around a Jewish cemetery, only to watch an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David wandered around a Jewish cemetery.

The past week, similar elements—on a related theme even, it’s the emes! —melded together to lead me to consider matters of (im)mortality.

This all started when I picked up a book from the discard pile at the Katonah Village Library, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife, by Leslie Kean. While I believe that something comes after, the book intrigued me with its stories of in-between states and after-death messages. I continued to read it during the Shabbat of parsha Shoftim. And then I watched the last episode of season 5 of Curb, titled “The End.” This convergence cannot be a coincidence.

With its carefully documented and researched chapters on channeling past lives, near death experiences, mediumships, poltergeists, moving objects and materializations, Kean’s book caught my imagination from the start. The book opens with cases of two boys who from a very early age identified details from past lives, one from a pilot killed in World War II, the other a Hollywood talent agent. She uses real names and photos of the boys, and the men whose lives they channeled.

Other stories, some of them involving Kean and her dead brother, made me think about realms hovering beyond our physical reality. I’ve been skeptical, if I thought about such matters at all, especially regarding psychics and ghost hunters, but her tenacious research and willingness to consider the evidence impressed me. Could the departed talk to us or send us messages that they’re OK? Would country-western singer and philosopher Hank Williams want to revise his classic song “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive“? Could Hank get in touch with somebody in Nashville with his experiences since he got out of this world on January 1, 1953?

In the middle of these musings I headed to shul for Shoftim. The parsha covers aspects of building a civil society, such as appointing judges, identifying true and false prophets, cities of refuge, the laws of war and the closing instruction on how to respond to an unidentified murder victim found in a road.

What jumped out at me in Shoftim appears in chapter 18, verses 9-13:

1. 1. 9. When you have come to the land the Lord, your God, is giving you, you shall not learn to do like the abominations of those nations.
      10. There shall not be found among you anyone who passes his son or daughter through fire, a soothsayer, a diviner of [auspicious] times, one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer,
      11. or a charmer, a pithom sorcerer, a yido’a sorcerer, or a necromancer.
      12. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations, the Lord, your God is driving them out from before you.
      13. Be wholehearted with the Lord, your God.

In a Torah resonant with instruction on what to do and don’t this passage sounded pretty clear on the “don’t” part of dealing with these practices. Shoftim doesn’t say they are fraudulent, just that Jews shouldn’t do them. Other passages testify to their reality, as the passage from I Samuel 28 in which beleaguered King Saul has the Witch of Endor bring a grumpy prophet Samuel back from the dead. In fact, rabbis argued how to interpret what was really going on here, as My Jewish Learning notes:

The problems connected with the story were discussed in the period of the Geonim. Samuel ben Hophni, Gaon of Sura (d.1013), father-in-law of Hai Gaon, was asked whether the story was to be taken literally, and whether the witch actually succeeded in raising Samuel from the dead.

Samuel ben Hophni replies that he finds it impossible to believe that God would have made a witch the instrument of raising Samuel. The true meaning of the story is that the witch, by trickery, persuaded Saul that she had succeeded in bringing up Samuel. The words attributed to Samuel in the narrative are the words the witch put into Samuel’s mouth in order to convince Saul that she had succeeded.

The concept of kosher food came to mind. Nonkosher isn’t bad for you, other people eat all those lobster rolls and pork chops but Jews don’t just . . . because that’s what the Torah says. All those abominable practices of the other countries detract from Jews’ direct relationship with HaShem, so we don’t do them. That’s not to say Judaism is purely rationalistic in its outlook, as I can demonstrate with my hamsa keychain, the tale of the Golem created from clay to protect Jewish communities and the worlds of Kabbalah and the Zohar.

I found useful analysis on the passage in Shoftim. Robert Alter, in his translation and commentary, writes,

The biblical abhorrence of these practices stems not so much from a disbelief in their efficacy as from a sense that they violate God’s prerogatives by establishing a technology [a word Alter likes to use] of the realm of spirits, which is thus assumed to be wholly susceptible to human manipulation. (page 680, The Five Books of Moses)

Kean’s book includes material on what the World to Come holds, as glimpsed in near-death and actual-death experiences. Two stories capture the experiences (page 139):

In the last two to three days before she died she was conscious of a dark roof over her head and a bright light. She moved into a waiting place where beings were talking to her, her grandfather among them. They were there to help her. Everything would be okay, it was not a dream. She moved in and out of this area. (patient’s mother)

Suddenly she looked up at the window and seemed to stare intently up at it. This lasted only minutes but it seemed ages. She suddenly turned to me and said, “Please, Paulie, don’t ever be afraid of dying. I have seen the most beautiful light and I was going toward it. I wanted to go back into that light. It was so peaceful. I really had to fight to come back.” The next day when it was time for me to go home I said, “Bye, Mum. See you tomorrow.” She looked straight at me and said, “I am not worried about tomorrow, and you mustn’t be. Promise me.” Sadly she died the next morning . . . I knew she’d seen something that day which gave her comfort and peace when she only had hours to live. (Patient’s daughter)

It is very difficult to find a unitary mechanistic cause for these experiences.

Was Larry David thinking in these very terms in the finale episode of season 5, “The End”? In the convoluted story, he donates a kidney to comedian Richard Lewis, then months later is dying in a hospital room. His wife, father, friends and a rabbi gather around. As he expires, they start bickering over money owed and other matters. Floating to the ceiling, David shakes his head at the pettiness of it all.

He find himself going through light and clouds to heaven, emerging in white clothes with a full head of hair. Just like in the story recounted above, he has patient robed guides (portrayed by Dustin Hoffman and Sasha Baron Cohen). Bright and light, the World to Come looks ready to meet his needs, with Ben Hogan around to play golf with him, and the news that Marilyn Monroe was a big fan of Seinfeld and is eager to meet him. No need for bathrooms! Then he encounters his querulous mother Adele, played perfectly by Bea Arthur.

But David’s earthly behavior patterns get the better of him. His guides decide he’s not ready for Heaven and, like the patient in the second story above, he slips back into his body even as Marilyn Monroe appears to sigh, “I really love your sense of humor.” The flatlining machines at the hospital whir into beeping, everybody is stunned, and Larry lives to speak his mind in more seasons. While humorous in intent, his foray into and out of the World to Come closely tracks other near-death experiences. Dialogue with his wife Cheryl (played by Cheryl Hines, a/k/a Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) shows the profound impact of travel back from a glimpse of the other side:

Larry: “What a thing, huh?”

Cheryl: “Yeah. How do you feel? Do you feel different after all this?”

Larry: “Yeah, I mean, come on, I’m a changed man. I’m a completely different person.”

[Series spoiler: Not really.]

After thinking about these connections, other parts of Judaism took on new clarity and meaning. I noticed the part of the Aleinu prayer at shul. I like this translation:

It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to acclaim the

greatness of the One who forms all creation. For God did not make us

like the nations of other lands, and did not make us the same as other

families of the Earth. God did not place us in the same situations as others, and

our destiny is not the same as anyone else’s.

The passage forbidding those practices make more sense. Jews have our own sphere of spirituality and practices and ways of approaching realms beyond rationality. Other people, other ways. Would I like to communicate via the methods discussed in Surviving Death with my parents, grandparents, ancestors born 200 years ago, the lengthening list of friends gone too soon? Of course, but I’ll take a pass on the psychic methodologies Kean outlines. If they want to contact me, well, I’ll see them in my dreams.

Anyway, the sphere of Jewish thinking is so broad as to encompass all kinds of beliefs. I once took a Rohr Jewish Learning Institute course that touched on reincarnation. To be honest, I never connected this concept to Judaism, but big-tent Judaism goes in a lot of directions. I found supporting materials for JLI’s teaching in my 30-year old copy of The Weekly Midrash: Tz’enah Ur’enah: The Classic Anthology of Torah Lore and Midrashiic Commentary from ArtScroll. It concerns the final part of parsha Ki Seitzsei, about levirate marriage (“yibum” in Hebrew), when a married man dies and his widow becomes the wife of the man’s brother, so the deceased can have children and continue his name through his brother. The passage states in part:

Another reason for yibum is that a person’s soul is sometimes born into this world three times, as the verse says Lo, all of these things God will do, two, three times, with man; bo bring back his soul from death, to light up with life’s light (Iyov 33: 29-30). God creates a person two, three times, so that he will be saved from Gehinnon, to come to Eden; and to light him with the light of eternal life.

Sefer HaBahir writes that sometimes a righteous man’s life is very difficult, because in another incarnation his soul was that of a wicked man. It must therefore undergo affliction within the righteous man, so that it will be cleansed and will be able to give off light in the World to Come. This is like the analogy of one who plants a tree which does not grow well. He then pulls it out of the earth to replant it in another spot. So, too, when the person is wicked God creates the soul in another body.

My datapoints in Shoftim, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Surviving Death add up to more awareness of the ultimate questions of life, faith and the boundaries of knowledge—and what boundaries of inquiry should not be crossed, no matter how tempting.

Anyway, in the long run, we all get the answers to all the questions. You, me, even Larry David.