“U’vacharta B’Chayyim” - “Get A Life”

Erev First Evening Rosh Hashanah 

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor
September 17th, 2001

 

The Jewish response to the expression "Eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow you die" is "live each day as if it was your last." As we assemble here, as the old year fades into the twilight and we greet the new one of 5762, desperately wanting to be happy, wishing each other a "Shanah Tovah," a good year, it is impossible to escape the overlay of sadness, which permeates our souls. I find it incomprehensible how some communities are gathering tonight. I wonder what my colleagues are saying to their flocks. While I chose the piece that is the center of my remarks some time ago, I could not have chosen anything more appropriate. Years ago I preached a Yizkor sermon whose theme was if you had only a few minutes to live, and if you knew that in advance, how would you change your life. It is impossible to know what was going through so many minds last Tuesday morning as the world crashed down around them. We do know the messages of love from those on the plane, which crashed outside of Pittsburgh. How many of us could focus on our work? How tightly did we hold onto our spouses and children when we saw them next. In reflection, perhaps, we realize how transient some things are, how inconsequential. The Rabbinic dictum encourages us to live each day to the fullest so that we find a full measure of satisfaction. Not that we became the richest or the most famous, or that we owned the biggest house or the fastest car. Rather, we became the most human, loved the most dearly, sang the most sweetly, lived the most completely, honestly and purely.

I presume that the following piece has made the rounds of the Internet though I only saw it recently. Its message sets the tone that must echo in our hearts this Yom Tov. I know that I want to cling to life even more tightly than ever before. I know that I want to hug my children, my mother, my aunt, and my father-in-law, kiss my wife even more dearly. I know that I want another year of life and to see you all here next Rosh Hashanah. I truly want it to be a Shanah Tovah, a good year, for us all.

While the piece has no formal title, I call it: "Get A Life." It is labeled:

Commencement Speech

Made by Anna Quinlen at Villanova

I read it in its entirety.

It's a great honor for me to be the third member of my family to receive an honorary doctorate from this great university. It's an honor to follow my great Uncle Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack, who is a remarkable businessman. Both of them could have told you something important about their professions, about medicine or commerce.

I have no specialized field of interest or expertise, which puts me at a disadvantage talking to you today. I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first. Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for re-election because he had been diagnosed with cancer:"No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office." Don't ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat." Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."

You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul. People don't talk about the soul very much any more. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

Here's my resume:

I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.

So here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast? Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red tailed hawk circles over the water or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tires to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger. Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Get a life in which your are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough. It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned form it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.

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How is life!

How magnificent is this gift!

How thankful we should be to God for it!

How we should enhance it, glorify it, live it!

How much living must we wring from each hour, each minute, and each second.

How we should live each do so completely, as if it was our last.

We just never know.

In the repetition of the Musaf Amidah tomorrow, there is a particular place where the Cantor will pause and allow us to recite a passage before repeating it. It is the following:

"Our Father our King, remember thy mercy and remove pestilence, sword and famine, destruction, captivity, iniquity and plague, all evil occurrences, and every disease, every stumbling block and contention, every kind of punishment, every evil decree and all causeless enmity, form us and from all the children of Thy covenant." It is appropriate to extend that prayer to embrace all people.

I pray that as we reflect upon the truth of the statement "Here today and gone tomorrow" that we will each "Get A Life" and live it fully, up to the brim.

I pray with all my heart that the year ahead will be a "Shanah Tovah," "A Good Year."

Amen.