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captain laughed, Eizek bowed and re-
turned to Cracow and dug up the treasure.
The treasure is not elsewhere. It is close
to you, in your neighborhood, within your
people, all about you.
It is not far off in the heavens above or
the depths beneath, but in you. "In thy
mouth and in thy heart."
Consider the heart, the soul of life. One
half pound, the size of a closed fist, pump-
ing blood through vessels more than one
hundred thousand miles long, pumping
blood ten thousand times a day. This heart,
now wounded, scarred, occluded,
atrophied, is deliberately stilled, the
patient anaesthetized, marsupialized,
heparinized, intubated, cannulated. The
patient prepared, subject to hypothermia,
cardioplegia, oxygen pumped to allow
skillful courageous hands to sever sternum
bone and muscle, to penetrate the heart
itself so that it can be given life.
Who now dares take life for granted?
Who can yawn in the face of this . . . world-
ly resurrection? Whose tongue can remain
locked, whose lips sealed before such
awesome wonder? Who cannot but offer
benediction before the surgeon and his
team and not declare: Blessed art Thou 0
Lord our God who shares His wisdom with
flesh and blood.
Who can rant against science and
technology, as if they stood in opposition
to faith and religion? Are these marvel-
ously contrived machines not instruments
of divinity? Blessed is the human mind
who can put together fragmented parts,
make strong fragile organs, circumvent
dead parts, and connect life with life. Look
where for miracles? We carry them in our
flesh and blood.
Blessed is the curative wisdom of the
body.
We pray wrong. lb pray is not to pay off
your debt to some celestial creditor. It is
not some unnatural act of piety. To pray is
to notice, to pay attention, to overcome the
apathy of entitlement. I look with new eyes
at the opening prayers of our daily service,
bursting with gratitude for opening the
eyes to the blind, for raising up those
bowed down, for guiding the step, for
strengthening the weary.
I am not the only one who has been af-
flicted by illness, not the only one fright-
ened to death and to life, but I now have
a knowledge different from that drawn
from texts. Knowledge by acquaintance is
different from knowledge by description. It
is one thing to read about it; or to heai
about it from another, and something else
to offer testimony out of your own flesh.
I have come out of this, not with new
revelations, but with the testimony of old
truths renewed.
For Judaism life is holy — not life in
another time or another place, not life in
heaven among angelic forms — but this
one here and now with all its human
agonies and frustrations. There is basic to
Judaism an intense thirst for life.
Life is the major attribute of God — he
is chili ha-olamim, life of the universe. 'lb
desire life is to desire God. '110 destroy life
in oneself or another is to loathe God. We
are bidden to fall in love with life again, to
seize hold of this day and rejoice in its
marvel.
The rabbinic tradition reminds us that
laws and ordinances are for life, "that man
shall live by them and not die by them."
And in one of the major rabbinic codes we
read that whoever asks whether or not it
is permissible to desecrate the Sabbath in
order to save life is "as if he sheds blood,"
and whichever scholar is asked that ques-
tion is reprehensible because diligent
religious teachers should have taught
clearly so that the question would never
have been raised.
A Jewish folk story tells of the miserable
peddler who, alone in the forest, carries his
bundles of sticks against his raw shoulder,
cursing his burden, the state of his health,
the poverty of his household. And in the
midst of his despondent thoughts, a gust
of wind lifts his bundle of sticks and scat-
ters them on the ground. "Ribbono shel
olam," he cries, "Master of the universe,
who needs such a life? Send the malach
hamavet, the angel of death, and let my
misery come to an end." With that, as in
a flash, the angel of death, in his menacing
costume appears. "You called?" he asks the
peddler. "Yes, yes," the startled peddler
stammers. "Could you, dear sir, help me
gather the sticks and mount them on my
shoulders?"
Life is holy and life is plural — as it is
grammatically plural in the Hebrew term
chayim. What a conceit to think of myself
as a self-sufficient bio-system, a portable
set of plumbing, a self bounded by my
outer skin. What a deceit is played upon
us by the false intimacy of "me" or "I."
There is no solitary life. There is no "I"
without "Thou," no "me" without "us." For
our life, we are profoundly dependent upon
each other.
The evidence stares me in the face. A call
went out for blood contributions and was
answered with quiet, anonymous dignity.
But consider, in our biblical tradition,
"blood is life." We are warned not to shed
the other's blood, not to stand idly by the
spilled blood of the victim, and to spill the
blood of the slaughtered animal upon the
ground so as not to drink of its life. But
you are not mandated to transfuse your
blood into another's veins, to pour your
God-given vitality into another. What then
does it mean voluntarily, out of care and
concern and love, to share of your life with
another, save to enact an imitation of God?
I stare at the intravenous vessel. Am I
indeed a solitary, discrete, self-sufficient,
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