The Dead Town -- a Yom Kippur sermon

The great Yiddish writer, I.L. Peretz, wrote a story called “The Dead Town.” As the title implies, it’s about a town in Poland where everyone really … is … dead…

I warn you, at first this story will seem preposterous … then tragic … then all too real.

In this story, our narrator meets a ragged, gaunt traveler and innocently asks: “where are you from?”

The traveler replies: “from a dead town.”

You can imagine, the narrator was … taken aback … and assumed the man was joking!

The traveler insisted, this was no joke … this was a real place, a town that was 100% Jewish. He then went on to explain that it was like any other place … really. They had a learned rabbi who corresponded with other rabbis across the world. They had businessmen, poor and rich people, and that they all lived respectfully, like everyone else.

The man from the dead town went on to describe their beautiful synagogue. Well, it used to be beautiful. There was little left of its former grandeur.

The whole town used to pray together there. As they grew and prospered, their unity faded.

• The tailors soon worshipped elsewhere.
• The rabbis and Talmud scholars stayed in the study hall for prayer.
• Soon other groups formed their own minyanim and found their own places to pray.

The town didn’t start in such disarray! It began with a group of ten men –who didn’t even have permission to build a town. Still, more and more people came. And they thrived … until the people decided it was time to stop bribing authorities and become established for real. They designated the richest and most well-connected man there to go and register everything in his name. Once that was settled, the rich man would sign everything back over to the town.

Wonderful, right? It was, until one of the group absconded with the money and papers and set in motion a dire sequence of events.

Even when the people learned that the town still had no official status -- no problem. They’d ask another one of their rich machers to go to the authorities.

That’s when things got bad. Now they had lots of rich men, and they feuded and fought over who’d get the honor of handling this.

The arguing got so bad, lawsuits abounded, and it looked as if they’d have to sell the cemetery.

Because of the legal ramifications, the bailiff went to check out the cemetery. When the dead heard he was there … and that their cemetery would be sold .. gravestones started to shake violently. Soon corpses were crawling all over the place.

The narrator expressed disbelief. Surely the soul departs from the body at death … corpses have no souls to give them life. They’re dead, how could they get out of their graves?

Here’s how the man from the dead town answered: (lower voice) “But what would you say about the man who has slept away his life, so that he was never really a man, his life was not a life… No one in our town ever really died because no one in our town ever lived …”

No one in our town ever lived…

And so, the dead all went back to their homes as if nothing had happened!

The narrator wondered: No one noticed that dead people had gone back home?

The answer: They were too busy arguing to notice, that’s all they had room in their heads for …

“Before long the dead took over… Who leads the prayers in our synagogue? A corpse! He’s perfectly well-versed though he looks dead and sounds dead …Our most prominent citizens are dead men, every one of them … And me? I’m only half-dead, he said before disappearing into the trees.”

The Dead Town… quite a story..

You see, there is a major difference between mere physical life and a life that is enriched by the soul. How do we know this?

From Creation! That’s the basis of everything. Genesis 2:7: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

We breathe simply because God gave us His own breath. He implanted a soul within each of us.

That soul is what makes us human … with it, we are fully alive.

To ignore that great gift is to diminish our humanity …

The people in the dead town let their anger – their yetzer harah – impulse to selfishness and evil … overtake their good natures and diminish … destroy … their souls.

Yet, we see from the Creation story, our souls are the very reason for our existence…

Note that when the traveler spoke about all the feuding in town, he didn’t give reasons. That’s just what they did … they forgot there were other ways to live.
As we know, habits – good ones or dangerous -- can become ingrained and … eventually … become a way of life.

Such was the case with the dead town.

At first, I didn’t think about the town’s name … or rather, it’s lack. It didn’t even gave a specific location. When asked, the traveler merely said: “You won’t find the place I’m speaking of listed anywhere… Why bother with geography when any coachman can take you there?”
Yes, it’s puzzling … is it a real place or not? If it’s not on a map, how can coachmen get people there? Are the coachmen real or is their job to ferry malach ha’mavet, the angel of death?

… The answer, of course, is simple. Peretz described the human condition as he saw it.

For Peretz, the dead town could be any town.

Now for the most jarring thought … could it be .. us?

Of course … at worst … this doesn’t describe us to the extent that Peretz described “the dead town.”

On the other hand … aren’t there times when all of us sleep through life?

The answer depends on what we consider to be real living.

Dr. Abraham Twerski, in his book Happiness and the Human Spirit, opines that many of us suffer from a disorder that does prevent us from living fully.

The name of the disorder? Spiritual Defiency Syndrome. Twerski states that we often lack the essential nutrients needed to live fully … to be happy.
Twerski warns us that contentment is not the same as happiness, nor is the pursuit of fun the same as the pursuit of happiness.

Contentment and fun-seeking can both lead to a superficial outlook and emotional and spiritual dead-ends. You see, to overcome Spiritual Defiency Syndrome, we must do our best to live up to our full potential.

A cartoon strip, “Close to Home,” illustrates the pitfalls of doing all the “right” things, but giving little thought to how we prioritize our time –
• how we spend it,
• with whom we spend it,
• and finally, do we share with others, or are we locked into narcissism?

In the cartoon, a long line of people are waiting to get into heaven. They’re met by a man garbed in white checking his computer.

The entrance guard says to the first man in line: “ … Commuting to work, 22,321 days of your life; shaving, 979 days; mowing the lawn, 11,271 days; waiting for your wife to get ready to go out, 9,644 days; standing in line, 13,101 days …”

This is NOT and indictment of shaving, mowing the lawn, or waiting for your wife.

However, when the man was shown the sum total of his life, there was a lot of time spent on meaningless activity. There was no joy, no time spent in relationship, nothing to even indicate whether he was a good person or bad or something in between.
In short, our man waiting at the heavenly gate sounded like a citizen of the dead city – and like a man suffering Spiritual Defiency Syndrome.

In Torah, the Kadosh Baruch Hu admonishes us to choose life, not death. This isn’t a choice between physical life and death.

God doesn’t want us to live in the dead town.

He doesn’t want us to deaden our souls.

Hashem wants us to understand that we always have room to grow. Once we stop growing, we are liable to become spiritually dead.

Mind you, this is no easy task.

For instance, Rabbi –Dr.--Twerski described a visit to a young woman suffering from a debilitating form of multiple sclerosis. She had rapidly lost all motor function and was blind. She needed assistance for the simplest of tasks. She asked Twerski: “Rabbi, why am I alive? What purpose is there in my existence?”
The woman in her misery was surely tempted to give up and live in the dead town.

The rabbi told her a Talmudic story about Rabbi Eliezer: Rabbi Eliezer became seriously ill. Naturally, his students visited him. Each one of them thanked the rabbi for his glorious teaching and praised him highly. Yet Rabbi Eliezer didn’t respond to any of them.

Then Rabbi Akiva walked in and said: suffering, too, can be precious.

Rabbi Eliezer asked for help sitting up so that he could better hear Rabbi Akiva.

What did Rabbi Akiva do that merited such a response?

He knew that his revered teacher had no desire to rest on past achievements. Rabbi Twerski explained that: “self-fulfillment is dependent on our capacities at any given point in time. If we can do little, but we can do it wholly, we have a better chance at happiness than the person who can do much, but instead, does little.”

That’s important and so very wise. Let me repeat it: “self-fulfillment is dependent on our capacities at any given point in time. If we can do little, but we can do it wholly, we have a better chance at happiness than the person who can do much, but instead, does little.”

When Dr. Twerski told the story to the young woman with multiple sclerosis, she was still disabled and suffering, but realized she could still do something, add meaning to her life.

We can all add meaning to our lives. Growth is a constant process. It should happen during our good times, and by the same token, this should happen even when we suffer.

It comes down to our choices … and the attitudes we choose.

It also means we don’t seek perfection. Growth is attainable, perfection is not. Such a pursuit is bound to fail and leave us more at a loss than ever.

We must work to overcome Spiritual Defiency Syndrome. After all, God commands in Deuteronomy 30: 16For I command you this day, to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His laws, and His rules, that you may live… 19…: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—”
Choose life! Don’t let yourself become a citizen of the dead town…

Gmar chatimah tovah … may you be written and sealed for good in the book of life.