In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.

The second question God asks is this:
Asakta b’priya u’reviyah?
Did you devote yourself to family?
If engaging in Torah is a way of reaching both forwards and backwards in time and of pulling both into our worlds, how much more so is the family the touchstone of our immortality. We inherit so much from our parents and from their parents – not only physical looks and inherited tendencies, not only gestures and ways of being in the world. We inherit all sorts of other things – second and third generation groups will speak of the damage that can be passed through families. Dynasties of musicians or scientists demonstrate the intangibles that get passed on. Social workers can speak of the cycles of abuse or neglect; community rabbis can testify to the many non Jews who come to them to convert to Judaism – because they feel Jewish, because on further research a Jewish grand parent or great grandparent has been discovered, because they just know they have a Jewish soul.
Our liturgy speaks of a Book of Life in which all our actions are recorded. It is a powerful image, a metaphor for the truth that nothing we do – neither good nor bad – is ever really lost in this world, even if we forget. The book of Life exists in a number of ways, it exists within our own souls, but we also write it upon the souls of our family – our children, our parents, our partners, our family relations and the friends who act as our family in this modern more fractured world.
In particular, the book of our life is inscribed upon our children. They take on our pain and they internalise our experiences. They pay for many of our mistakes, and they struggle not to take on our lives and our expectations instead of their own.
The question we are asked after we die will not be did we love our family, or did we leave them well provided for. It is more subtle and complex than that. Rather like the first question it is about how we set our priorities in our life more than the actual acts we did or did not do. So, did we set aside time for Torah means did we engage in Jewish activity and covenant, but it also asks – did we control our time in such a way that we were able to make the choices we wanted to make? Did we fritter away our time or give away the control of our lives to someone else and abdicate from the responsibilities of our freedom? Asakta b’priyah uv’riyah? Means did we busy ourselves with our families, did we devote our energy and our thoughts to them, did we make their needs our preoccupation?
It is a truism that when we look back in our lives, what we regret tends not to be the things we did, but the things we didn’t do. All community rabbis will tell you that no-one regrets not spending more time in the office, but many people regret not spending more time with their families. So here is the question – asakta b’priyah uv’riyah? – did you engage with and invest in your family? Did you make time for them and be with them? Because when you look over your life, you will see that your family provide your structure, your history and your future. You will live on in them and with them; they are the ropes of life into which your soul is bound.

The first question can be found in yesterday’s post