Every Life, A Universe
This is the Torah I shared last night at DC’s "Every Life, A Universe” gathering.
This event is called “every life, a universe.” The name comes from the Mishnah, the second-century compendium of early rabbinic interpretations of Torah texts that is the basis of all Jewish legal interpretation that comes after it. In Tractate Sanhedrin, the Mishnah teaches:
“Adam, the first person, was created singularly, as an individual, to teach that anyone who destroys one soul, it is viewed as if they destroyed an entire world. And anyone who sustains one soul, it is as though they have sustained an entire world.”
In other words, God created humanity first as one individual person, to demonstrate the infinite preciousness of every single soul. But this idea from the Mishnah has a more complex history.
The Mishnah was originally an oral text, but has existed in written versions for millennia now, and some manuscripts have a different version than the one I just read to you:
Some versions say: anyone who destroys one soul FROM THE JEWISH PEOPLE, or sustains one soul FROM THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
Scholars theorize that originally, this change was made just to clarify the Mishnah in its context, where it is talking about internal Jewish communal court proceedings. But I can imagine that for all of us here today, this change lands hard.
Because that is what it has felt like is at stake in so many of our communities, in so many of our conversations, at so many of our actions: when we talk about the infinite sacredness of life, who are we talking about? Who is within that halo of protection? Who is grievable?
Some of us have wished that politically aligned comrades would see the infinite preciousness of the lives of our Jewish beloveds. Some of us have wished that the Jewish communities where we are rooted could stretch and see the infinite preciousness of lives that are not Jewish. And some of us have felt both of these longings, pulled in so many painful directions.
But the history of the text does not end with the addition of “from the Jewish people” to the radical statement of each soul’s unimaginable sanctity. Because the history of the Jewish community and our Torah, our holy texts, is suffused by external violence.
Some later editions of the Mishnah again return to the “original” version, one that does not specify that it is a soul from the Jewish people, but rather speaks about every soul. But what makes that change? A reaction to censorship from the forces of empire that have done violence to our Jewish ancestors, a need to shift away from specific love within our Jewish community not because of our commitment to the value of all souls but because of a fear of persecution.
So here we find ourselves, the inheritors of this text, which has gone back and forth between God’s infinite and unfathomable love for each life and our embeddedness and inevitable connection with others in our Jewish community. Cycles of violence entering and disrupting and changing our relationships. What are we to do?
A year and a half ago, six months before October 7th and what followed, a dear childhood friend of mine was killed in a terrorist attack in the West Bank. I have spent the time since grappling with a kind of grief I had never known was possible, an emotion that was not a bigger form of sadness but instead an entirely new kind of undone-ness.
Among the most painful pieces of this experience has been the feeling that those who knew and loved him, who played together with us in preschool or watched us grow up, are not the same people as the people who are able to see the relationship between my love and grief and my deep commitment to the value of every life, my conviction that there can be no more bombs if we are to live in the world as God wants us to. The push and pull between deep intimacy and an ungraspable infinite value of each life.
Judith Butler, in their book “Precarious Life,” writes that “What grief displays…is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. “
They continue, “Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.”
My own experience of grief has left me so very undone. This is true for all of us – we are unable to hold ourselves together alone, nor should we. And there is so much fear in allowing ourselves to become open in this way. If I have felt so unmanageably undone, so often lying on the floor and trying to breathe between sobs and like I cannot continue my day when a Facebook memory knocks me over – how can I make room for more, how can I let myself feel beyond this one soul?
So I return to the image of God creating the first person. The Mishnah, in depicting God creating a singular person, imagines God investing infinite love and care into this person. And somehow, God does not stop there. God creates more people, and more, and more. And the Mishnah asks us to trust that God is able to see and love each one with that same unfathomably great care.
If I feel this way, if you feel this way, if we feel this way, experiencing these horrors and this grief, how must God feel? If I am undone by the loss of one loved one, if our community is torn apart by the deaths of October 7th, how can God bear it?
We must bear it with God. God, too, cannot bear this alone. We must mourn and comfort each other – and we must allow our experience of being undone to undo the way the world is working, too.
We must turn our unfathomable grief into a future of unimaginable and infinite love.