The Jewish High Holidays (or High Holy Days) were just celebrated. In the midst of it, on Erev Yom Kippur (eve of the Day of Atonement), I had the good fortune to participate with Noam Chomsky and Azfar Hussain in an event, organized by the Global Center for Advanced Studies, on crucial reflections on the present, “The Most Remarkable Moment in History.” This was followed by my offering this reflection on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year for Jews), presented at Kehilat Chavarim, which is placed here because it may be of interest and use to readers who are also not members of Jewish communities.
I begin with a note of condolence to everyone who has lost someone this year. What many don’t understand about the loss of those we love is their irreplaceability. To love is to see in those we love each day the ongoing possibility of life. To love is to make a decision each day that those we love should exist. In love, we commit ourselves to producing a uniquely shared world. We do so to the point of being unable to entertain the thought of what reaches us at moments of mortality as nothing short of total destruction. To lose those we love is to experience the shattering of our world, which, for some of us, is identical with losing the world.
I join you to speak on loss. Parashat H’aazinu, read during this time of the year, is one of loss as a beginning of life as we arrive, in our collective telling and retelling, at Moses’ death. In seeing the Promised Land from the mountain on which he would die, his end marks the people’s beginning. How do we mark his death? We do so by not making a monument of it, by not making him into stone, but instead through carrying the community’s story, retelling it, and reaching forth each year with those powerful words that continue to produce waves over the flow of time,
“In the beginning….”
Moses’s death inspired so many courageous souls throughout the years. It serves as an allegory for many people who fought for liberation over many millennia. No one of us is G-d; our humanity is there in our limitations and rises above them in struggling for what is always greater than our self.
There are many kinds of loss. We are unaware of most until we experience them. We could reflect on loss in our lives as Jews: whether religious or secular, so much of Jewish life is . . . intimate. Our ritual bread on Shabbat is braided, symbolizing our interwovenness, and we tear and share it from one hand to the other; drinking together, eating together; holding hands; hugging each other; singing together—yes, spraying droplets from each other into a mist of unsanitary but beautiful, shared Jewishness.
But in truth, we would be remiss to focus solely on our Jewishness. We are part of the human family, which means we share the profound threats to the physical and ethical wellbeing of humanity. To fetishize or idolize ourselves as a people—which, unfortunately, some of us have done—would be to lose our ethical gravitas under the weight of conceit and idolatry. Together, we look around, and we bear witness to pandemics of loss—of physical health, of davening, of social wellbeing, of economic livelihood, of political life, of truth, of the embrace of neighbors, of the air we breathe, of the ground on which we stand, of everyday life as everyday life.
At times, it seems that nothing before us stands as a beacon of hope. Yet, like Moses, many of us press on. Facing despair, we continue to act.
One of the hallmarks of tragedy is the ability to act in the midst of the absurd. The innocent suffer; many die; the wicked celebrate and cling to material rewards for their cruelty and inequity. Yet life is paradoxical about loss. Sometimes, so-called “winners” lose; supposed “losers” win. Clinging to what makes one lose sight of life, one becomes trapped in prisons of hubris and idolatry. What we hope to possess ends up possessing us. At times we should, as Simone Weil reflected during times of despair, decreate ourselves. Letting go of our ego is a healthy loss. It opens our heart to others and beyond.
Sometimes opening our hearts is not enough. Many of us spend so much time in the service of others that we find ourselves struck down by affliction. I spent the first quarter of 2020 in the service of so many others that I found myself ill after an errand in New York City in early March. The severity of the illness led to me opening up my death file. Prepared to pass on despite my ongoing battle, I enjoyed visits from deceased loved ones in the midst of my hallucinations from high fevers. Fortunately, I managed to pull through. It wasn’t my time. I now answer some phone calls with my maternal grandmother’s words from her final years:
“Still here.”
Still being here is no easy task. Being one of the “long haulers” of a disease with continued mysterious effects, I face a fact shared by so many across the globe. Life as it was before the disease may be forever lost. Many of us live with no hope of return. We simply try our best to be functional. There continues to be too much to do.
A major condition of ethical life is to take responsibility for it. Those of us who understand this do so to the point of taking on the radical responsibility for responsibility itself. There is another name for this. It is radical love. Its opposite is idolatrous or narcissistic love, which seeks self-image in objects of affection. Radical love seeks the freedom and dignity of others. Understanding loss, from that perspective, requires letting go of loss.
Several months ago, the loss of 700 to a 1000 people in the United States each week was shocking. By August, we have been exceeding those numbers daily. There is something precious that too many people have lost, in addition to loved ones, this year—namely, their capacity for empathy, kindness, and love. That malediction is fortunately not a feature of Kehilat Chaverim (and similar groups across the globe). It was not only the passing of members that moved the community. The suffering of any kind worked its way through to the point of members reaching beyond themselves to the many others in which we each participate. Connected to many diasporic peoples, we experience with regularity the smallness of our planet. This makes our experience of loss global in scope. It increases the probability of receiving the news of many whom we love no longer walking among us. In the midst of all this, the pandemic took away the ability to sit among the aggrieved. For so many, the experience of being quarantined includes being barred from an important experience of loss: The death and suffering of many loved ones occur without being seen. So, too, the process of their internment. Those emails, phone calls, gift baskets, and checking in on families are much appreciated. They are living embodiments of connections to the living through times of loss.
In our perilous times, I cannot help but think about the significance of Ruth Bader Ginburg’s extraordinary devotion to the lives of others even while she was in the process of taking her last breath. She paradoxically lived her death through maintaining her life as Mitzvot. She received the blessed kiss on Rosh Hashanah, which, as we know, is a beginning. In not taking herself too seriously, she understood she was part of something greater than herself; she, like so many others inspired by teachings from a mountain top long ago, lived her commitment. What better message do we receive from people like her than to live, without denial, through loss? What is that but radical love?
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
