Here it is, so inspiring! Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, Ph.D. Senior Rabbi Pinhas (Numbers 25:10-30:1) Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, Ph.D. I’ve been to a lot of funerals lately. Over the years I have noticed that they don’t really come in pairs of “threes” as some people think; they seem to come in groups instead. It’s been a challenging month or so helping families deal with deaths of all kinds, from young to old and everything in between. I just came back from the funeral of a woman in her eighties who taught piano in my town for over 50 years. She was married to her husband Marv, her “soul mate,” for over 65 years, had three daughters, sons-in-law, five grandchildren and literally hundreds and hundreds of students. It got me thinking, as funerals usually do, about the impact that we have on the world and the various ways we tend to measure the impact of our lives. We all seem to live within at least two emotional worlds at the same time. The first is a culture that touts money, flash, size over substance, youth over age, success measured by the size of your house, the expense of your car, the size of your business, or the Q-rating of your celebrity status. The second is the real world in which 99 percent of us live, where we really always know that the things that matter most aren’t things but people. In the inner world of our hearts and souls every one of us knows for certain that when the end of our lives comes no one is really going to measure our self-worth by our net worth. No one ever stands at the funeral and touts all the great business deals we made, or holds up the number of stocks in our portfolio or the Rolls Royce in the garage as the true measure of our value as human beings. No, what everyone still talks about, in spite of the overt commercialism of American culture, are the relationships in our lives that mattered and the people whose lives we touched. Today at the funeral for Betty Schaffer I thought of all those hundreds of students over 50 years, of her lovingly holding their hands, both literally and figuratively, as they struggled to find the notes and draw together the melodies of the ages, and I imagined a universe filled with the music she helped create. Offered a full scholarship to Julliard as a teenager, she chose the path of inspiring others rather than personal stardom. I thought of the kind of character it takes to choose to give your gift to others and spend a life dedicated to helping young and old discover the music of their own souls, and shook my head in quiet gratitude for the Bettys of the world without whom the rest of us would surely be spiritually impoverished. I admit I am somewhat of a quiet mystic, so I stood at her funeral today and imagined each piano note floating into space and, once created, existing as the musical accompaniment to our lives forever. Each note is a world unto itself, a gift of the heart, a call to the soul, a link to the music within us all. I remembered the words written in the Zohar, one of the most important books of Jewish mysticism ever written, where it says: “There are halls in the heavens above open only to the voice of song.” That was the gift that Betty gave the world, and that was the reflection of the significance of her life and the thousands of people whose lives she touched through the hundreds of students who sat at her feet (or on her piano stool). In this week’s Torah portion we read about the daughters of Zelophehad, the great, great, great, grandson of Joseph. He died without leaving any sons and his daughters petitioned Moses to allow them to inherit their father’s land. After consulting with God, Moses gives them the right to inherit, one of the first examples in all of history of women standing up for their own rights. I thought of those famous daughters today at Betty’s funeral, because I saw her as a talented, proud, caring, effective, passionate and inspiring woman who directed her own destiny and took her life into her own hands. Not only did she teach and influence so many through her talent, she loved to travel and, with Marv, visited well over 100 countries, fulfilling her passion for adventure and fearlessly exploring the world. Here we are thousands of years after the daughters of Zelophehad stood up for their own rights and challenged the prejudices and authority of the day to assert their own uniqueness and value as human beings. The same challenges still exist and, for those whose lives still stretch into the future, it is the Bettys we know in this world who continue to serve as role models of what it means to live a life of meaning and fulfillment. Ken yehee ratzon – “So may come to pass for us all.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 19:16:25 +0000
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