Imu Shalev:  Hi, Imu here again. Welcome to this special bonus episode of A Book Like No Other. If you’re itching to know where the tree shows up next, sorry, you still have to wait. But if going deeper into some of the ideas from our last episode sounds fun to you, then keep listening. So, after we recorded the last episode something was really bothering me. Rabbi Fohrman was saying that the Tree of Life could grant immortality, but the real gift of the tree was enhanced quality of life. Which is a beautiful idea. But what was bothering me was how does that map on to Torah? Torah does promise us long life,  arichut yamim, for following certain commandments.. Why are we getting promised the very thing that God was exiling us from the garden for wanting? After thinking about this a bit I had a budding theory, which I shared with Rabbi Fohrman: 

Rabbi David Fohrman:  Hi, everybody. This is Rabbi David Fohrman. I am back with Imu Shalev. Imu, are you there?

Imu:  Yeah, -- I was musing with the implication of, you know, it seems pretty clear, just factually in the Torah, that if you ate from this tree, you would live forever, and G-d doesn't let that happen. That's actually a bad consequence and so he kicks man out. But if we talk about the Torah as being an eitz chayim hee lamachazikim ba (a tree of life for those who grasp it) ; and so you had asked me this question weeks ago you said, Imu, why is it that we who have this Torah, this eitz chayim, we don't live forever. We learn Torah, but we don't live forever. Now we're kind of at this place where you have an answer which is well, we're not eating it. We're not eating the Torah, we're holding to it, we're learning it, we're taking it within us to some extent, but we're not eating it. That's a mechanical answer and it sort of works and I get it, yet it didn't feel like it fully clicked for me because the Torah actually does talk about lengthening days all the time. If you follow the precepts of the Torah, it guarantees you extended days.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Let me just say that sometimes it's clear that arichut yamim, extended days, is a promise of actuality you will live longer, like for example in shiluach haken, arachta yamim, right? But sometimes it actually doesn't even sound like we're being promised a long life. For example, in Deuteronomy 30, when Moshe says I'm giving you the Torah and you know why it's valuable? One of the things he says is ki hu chayecha v'orech yamecha al ha'dama - because it is your life and it is your length of days on the land that God has given you. What a strange way of saying i!. He didn't say because it's going to make you live a long time or because it will lengthen your days on the land. It says do you want to know why Torah is valuable? Because it is your life and it is your length of days on the land. What's that even supposed to mean?

Imu:  Right.  So the thought that I had here is that lengthening of days doesn't mean that you get days added on at the end of your life; that you were going to live, you know, 1,624 days, you did this and so now you're going to get 10 days tacked on at the end. But perhaps,  means an extension of the days that you have, where the days that you have will actually feel longer. The Tree of Life perspective on the world is a timeless world. It's a world where time sort of seems to collapse. G-d's name, Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei is past, present and future --

Rabbi Fohrman:  That's fascinating.

Imu:  -- all together.  

Rabbi Fohrman:  . That's interesting. I hadn't thought of that. That something endemic to what it means to be Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei is that sure, I'll live with you in time, but there's this timelessness within time. That's interesting when we associate that with potency. If you remember, we talked in our course about suffering 

Imu:  Rabbi Fohrman is referring to our course Grappling with Loss. Link is in the description, back to the conversation. 

Rabbi Fohrman: We talked about what it means to suffer in a world of time and what it means to compress your life; imagine that you could live a life with time factored out. What would it be like if all of who you ever were, you experienced at once, all past, present and future parts of yourself; all the vacations you ever had, all the experiences you ever had somehow could be experienced without reference to time, which would be so much more of a potent way of living. That's what you're saying; factor time out and any given day is so much richer. 

Imu:  Sure. And I'll give you a really simple way of cognizing it before we get even more philosophical, but just for those of you who celebrate Shabbat, the number of hours that it feels like is in a Shabbat is so much more than is a Tuesday. It's actually the same number of hours, but if you think back to your experience of Shabbat, it is a day without doing. It is a day of being, and it just feels like it has so much more in it. You have that feeling of arichut yamim, of the extension of the day, on Shabbat.

Rabbi Fohrman:  That's what the tree was meant to give. It wasn't meant to make you live forever quantitatively, it was actually meant to enrich your quality of any given day.

Imu:  Exactly, and it's very funny because I think we have a difficult time grasping that promise of the extending of days because we're in such a world one Tree of Knowledge way of looking at it, such a quantitative utilitarian way of looking at it is just more, more, more, more; oh, I'm going to get more days for this, more. And the world two way of looking at it is --

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right, because if all I want to do is do, the more days you give me, the more I can do. So give me more days, I want to live forever; and G-d is like sure, if you really chop down the tree, I guess you could live forever, but that wasn't how the tree was meant to be accessed. What if you just breathed in the tree and connected with it, then it could be ki hu chayecha v'orech yamecha, then it's this is your life and this is your length of days and any day you live, your life is so much longer and richer. It's like it has the potency of all days within any given day that you live.

Imu:  I wonder, to some extent, there's famous laws that promise lengthening days which are honoring your parents as well as sending away the mother bird, which seems to also be about honoring parents and the idea of parenthood;

Imu:  Hey, I’m referencing another Aleph Beta course that makes this argument. This link is in the description too. 

- Which seem to be perhaps if you appreciate the gift of life that you've been given by parenthood, if you appreciate source, you really hold onto the gift that is your life, then your life is richer and maybe you experience a sort of glimpse of the infinite of your life. There's a famous Gemara that asks about a guy who was honoring their parents by listening to their parents' command to send away the mother bird and then they fell off the ladder and died. They're trying to deal with the fact that the Torah promises long life and that person, following that command of a parent, did two of these and then died. I wonder if there's an approach here in dealing with that.

Rabbi Fohrman:  So the Gemara, I believe, says l'yom shekulo aruch, that somehow the promise of life is really an enrichment of life in the next world. You and I speculated upon this, again, in our suffering course --

Imu:  By the way, think even in just what you said; the way the next world was described as l'yom.

Rabbi Fohrman:  L'yom shekulo aruch. So the one day that is as long as can be imagined, i.e. to take all potency of all possible life and making it in one day, which is how we understand the next world.

Imu:  But they're playing with arichut yamim, right?

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yes, they are, sure, and they're saying l'yom shekulo aruch, right. So the idea is, is that what life in the next world is, really is a kind of condensed version of our life. Not so much that it lasts forever, as the quality of it is so much more vivid because it's all of your days compressed into a single day. I think the idea that you suggested is a beautiful idea. I mean, I will say personally, that maybe what it's saying is, is that if you want to have the quality of the lengthening of days in your life, if you want to feel that richness in your potency of life, then one of the things you need to do is relate to the source of your life more; somehow getting back to your source -- because when you think about it --

Imu:  It's like your own tree.

Rabbi Fohrman:  In other words, let me put it to you this way. The challenge is that we can't get back to our source and right,  it's a journey that we all crave, but we can't. You can't crawl back into the womb. As much as we might want to connect to our mothers -- that whole idea of the Oedipal complex is that it's this impossible dream. You can't just be one with your mother, even though you were once one with her. Life ceases, we would die, if we went back into this pre-creation state. The drive to get back to our source and relate to it is a drive that ends with death, but as strange as that is, the more that you can connect to source without dying, the richer your life is.

Maybe there's this idea that if you can understand the holiness of your source, if you can really understand the holiness of what motherhood is really about, and honoring your parents,  don't try and get back to the womb. live your life, but live your life in connection with your source in such a way that the respect and love that you have for your mother influences the way you live all days. And that it's not just your mother but it's all mothers and it's all life and it's even the mother bird that I send away because I understand that her maternal instincts are sanctified and I can't use them against her to take her while she guards her chicks. to live that kind of life, I wonder if it is that is a life of our lengthening of days. That's a life where every day is so much more vivid because you're connected to your source. You're not crawling back into the womb. You don't have that mysterious oneness with your mother., but you're carrying that with you in life by virtue of your stance towards motherhood 

Imu:  Yeah, that's really beautiful. I think there's also just a really practical level of that as well. A common pastime for many people is complaining about your parents; my parents were terrible, here's the ways they screwed me up. My dad is like this, my mom is like that. What you're essentially doing is judging your parents when, instead of that, you can do nechmad lemareh, you can appreciate your parents for who they are and for who you are. My parents were the children of Holocaust survivors. They didn't get a whole lot of love from their parents, so they did the best they could, and I appreciate them for that. 

Then doesn't everything get a lot lighter? You can say they did the best they can and I'm going to do the best I can too. The same thing, I think, is true in sending away the mother bird.  Are you a person who you're going to get the eggs at all costs; you're going to consume and consume and you're going to do it in front of the mother?

Rabbi Fohrman:  What kind of life is that? Maybe you'll live a little longer with some more protein from those eggs, you can enhance the quantity of your life, but if you want to add to the quality of your life, you want lengthening of days, walk with your head held high when you send away that bird that you could've had, and feel a connection with that bird. That's the bird that you're a soul mate with because you understand the sanctity of her maternal instincts and let her go.

Imu:  A life with extra eggs is a life without beauty. That's what it sounds like you're saying, a life without relationship, without being. Sure, you got a couple of extra eggs, but now everything around you is a floating ingredient, essentially, and that's not exactly a rich, colorful life.

Rabbi Fohrman:  You know, it's interesting, when the Torah almost parenthetically invites us to that sort of cross-species connection with that mother bird as a way of really enlightening our life. You know, there's something about that relationship across species and seeing the commonality of all life and the celebration of all life across species and connection with it, which I wonder if almost the same way that we infuse with the mind of God through learning Torah which is a certain kind of Tree of Life, if there's a certain fusing with other species which is somehow a fusing with life itself as it expresses itself across the pantheon.

My son Moshe who was here in California with me last night and he showed us a documentary which was captivating. It was about a South African fellow who'd go diving off the coast of South Africa, without a wetsuit, in water that was 8-9 degrees Centigrade, which is like hypothermia city water, and he trained himself to be invigorated by that water, to be able to hold his breath even without SCUBA gear and literally to hold his breath while going down into these wild canyons of water and kelp forests. He saw an octopus, and he said what if I went down every single day and every single day somewhere around day 75, the octopus begins to trust him. He puts out his hand and the octopus reaches across with a tentacle and literally grasps his hand and there's this moment, and you see it, where it's like she finally trusts him and it's like okay, I'll give you my hand, I'll give you my tentacle. And then she comes over and cuddles him takes over his hand and he can swim with her and she'll let him grab him. They formed this bond.

 -- the thing that was most captivating, despite the deep sea photography that was all there and the photography was crazy wonderful, but it was just the scenes of the guy talking in his living room and just his connection to this creature and the empathy he had and the sadness at her eventual death. You saw how this man was changed by this relationship. There's just this celebration of life that he sees somehow that reaching across these bonds and it almost feels like in some way, if we can recognize this quality in a mother bird and let her go and see the connection between our own mothers and this mother bird, that's lengthening of days. There's something that you just can't put your finger on it. The quality of life that that change makes in you, your person that’s transformed.

Imu:  Stunning, truly. The adjective stunning here is nechmad lemareh, 

Rabbi Fohrman:  So just getting back to kind of put it with a bow, what I would say is that if you took a Tree of Knowledge only view, a utilitarian view of the Tree of Life, you would say sure, there's this elixir of life, and what could I want more than to live forever? But you know what, there is something that you could want more than to live forever; Imu, what if I gave you this moral dilemma. I would say pick one of two boxes; box number one is Imu gets to live forever, but that's the only thing Imu gets. He doesn't get shielded from harm. He just has this pill and Imu never dies. Or pill number two is that you could have the qualitative version of living forever. You would die, but you would have the richness of immortality during your days, the richness of connection with source, connection with divine source, and that would inform all of your days in a way that there would be this vivid kaleidoscope of life.  You know, with the iPhones, I always think it's so funny, every time Apple has one of these events, they tout their new screen. Year after year it's like and the colors are so vivid. You can imagine the most vivid of colors, that's your life and that's how you experience life and you're just like oh yeah, how did I ever look at my old phone and think that was wonderful? Look at this new phone with these vivid colors. You can imagine living life with colors that are so vivid you couldn’t even imagine -- you know, which of those two lives would you take? I don't know about you, but I think I'd take the second life. I think I'd take a life that ends, that has the quality of vividness of life with the eternal that's a magical thing, 

Imu:  Right. I wonder if this means anything to you. This is eternal life versus timeless life; eternal life is purely utilitarian, but timeless is a quality.

Rabbi Fohrman:  I remember years ago, but I never really quite understood it then, but one of my oldest of teachers, Rabbi Leibowitz from Berkeley talked about this and he said does the Torah really give you eternal life? What does it mean that the Torah is a Tree of Life? He says, well, there's eternal life and there's life with the eternal. What is life with the eternal? Maybe that's what the Tree of Life is. Mortal life with the eternal.  I think what we're suggesting now is a certain wrinkle on that to add subtlety, that life with the eternal is taking the idea of eternality out of quantity and putting it into the realm of quality and saying the eternal is there, but it's expanding the quality of your life. It's bringing vividness and richness to the quality of life rather than the quantity of life

Imu:  Beautiful. That’s it for this conversation. I hope it enriched these ideas for you as much as it did for us. Now, on to the next episode, where the adventure continues and the tree returns. 

Credits

This episode was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and Imu Shalev. It was edited by Tikva Hecht, with additional edits by Evan Weiner. Audio editing was done by Hillary Guttman. A Book Like No Other’s senior editor is Tikva Hecht. Adina Blaustein keeps all the parts moving.