Finally Heard

Sometimes, I feel so small. Sometimes, I sit on the bench in my local park and stare at the sky, and I feel so incredibly insignificant. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that the Creator takes a real interest in me and my life.
 
Who am I? What am I? A complicated, often confused collection of cells who’s trying her best to get close to G-d. But sometimes, when I realise just how ‘small’ I am, and just how awesomely ‘big’ Hashem is, it seems like the most ridiculous thing in the world to think that I matter; and not just that I matter, but that my actions affect the world in fundamental ways for good and bad.
 
When I was having my ‘minor’ lip surgery, there was a point where I suddenly had a flash of clarity that ‘I’ ‘me’ was actually just a piece of flesh – and it was really shocking.
 
I suddenly realised just how fleeting it all is, that it really is a miracle that I wake up every morning. Not only that, I realised that the ‘thing’ having all these realisations was not my body, or my mind, it was my neshama – my soul.
 
Usually, our neshamas don’t get a look in. They come from a place of such clarity and purity, they usually can’t make themselves heard over all the clamour of our bodies, our evil inclinations, our hundred-and-one daily preoccupations.
 
But lying there watching someone cut my face open, my body suddenly realised just how not in control it really was.
 
I know when people have a general anaesthetic, they ‘go under’ and they have no idea what’s happening to them until it’s all over and they are back up in the ward. I was fully conscious of what was happening – it was only minor surgery on my lip, after all – and that meant I had a full, 500% dose of feeling my own physical futility.
 
On the one hand, it was really horrible. We really are just a bit of meat. On the other hand, it was amazing; for a very rare occasion in my life, my soul was completely in the driving seat.
 
When I finally got out of the clinic, a bit dazed and shocked, but otherwise more or less fine, thank G-d, I pondered other things; like, how can people go through all the surgeries, the pain, the medical procedures, they go through, and not come out of the whole experience completely changed?
 
Even if it’s not something ‘serious’, G-d forbid, how can they not feel their own mortality? How can they not listen to that still, little neshama-voice, which is clearly telling them there is so much more to ‘us’ than just our bodies?
 
I really have no idea.
 
A good friend of mine told me a while ago about her last visit to her grandmother, in hospital. Her grandmother had grown up in an abusive, but ‘frum’ family, and had chucked out her Judaism as soon as she left home.
 
It’s understandable, of course. But at the end of her life, even before she went ‘upstairs’, her decision to raise her children as ‘nothing-very-much’ Jews caused her terrible suffering.
 
Because at the end of her life, while she was lying in the hospital bed with a matter of hours to live, her neshama could finally make itself heard, with devastating effect: she lost half her body weight in less than 24 hours. When my friend came back to visit her the next day, she couldn’t recognise her own grandmother.
 
For the first time in decades, the grandmother had been given clarity about how she’d lived her life, and whether she really had made the right choices – and she was in mental and spiritual agony for the last two days of her life.
 
What could she do then, hooked up to all the ventilators and IV drips and unable to breathe by herself, much less try to make amends for more than 60 wasted years? How was she going to convince her kids then that there really WAS a G-d? A soul? That the path she’d raised them to follow was folly and error; essentially, that she’d made the single biggest mistake of her life?
 
Rav Arush often talks about the ‘illusion’ of happiness and contentment that so many people have, who are not on a path of trying to get closer to Hashem. He stresses time and time again, that even if it doesn’t actively hit them in their lifetimes – when things go sour, G-d forbid, and all of a sudden they are faced with a problem they can’t solve – it will still hit them in that moment of clarity before death.
 
That moment when you suddenly understand that the ‘me’ you always thought was ‘you’ is just a piece of flesh. That unforgettable instant when you realise that your body isn’t coming along for the last part of the ride after all, and that all you have to take with you is your spiritual accomplishments.
 
Imagine, a whole life spent listening to the dictates and whims of the body. A whole life spent oblivious to the fact that we are here for a higher reason than just to keep ourselves happy; or make money; or look good.
 
That was my one consolation, when G-d gave me a glimpse into the utter futility of ‘me’; I knew that ‘me’ was far more than this person having their face cut open; ‘me’ was this small little soul that sometimes sits on a bench, and sometimes marvels at all the miracles I see around me.
 
The real ‘me’ is not ‘me’ at all – it’s really just a spark of the Creator, clothed in a body and walking around trying to make sense of it all. And sometimes, even if it’s only for a split-second, Hashem gives me a clarity that I know is the biggest gift in the world: the knowledge that ‘me’ is temporary; that ‘life’ is temporary; and that I have to make every single second down here count.