Letter #238: Two Deaths, One Life

Chills the body, but not the soul.

Dad,

As a scholar, it’s my job to pop in from time to time and note that absolutely everything has been thought before by someone. Personally, I find this comforting. Most people find it excruciatingly dull. Some people find it infuriating. I like to amuse myself at parties by testing to see which is which!

Let’s play that game now. When you say, “death was part of life from the beginning,” but “in the context of eternity where, even though we die, yet shall we live,” I think—ooh! That’s one of the views discussed by the medieval Rabbi Bachya ben Asher in his long note on Genesis 2:17, “ye shall surely die.” Are we having fun yet?

As I mentioned, that verse contains a classic form of Hebrew wordplay in which the verb is repeated twice: mot ta-mut, “you shall die dyingly,” or “you gonna die real dead,” or, my preferred translation, “you shall die the death.” For those keeping track at home, this is called figura etymologica, and this is when my party guests start to glance longingly at the bar.

But wait! Don’t go! Ben Asher records “a kaballistic approach,” which takes the double death “as the warning of two deaths, a physical death of the body and a spiritual death of the soul.” Oh Bachya, you wild and crazy rogue you! Anyway, one reading here would be that it was always in the body’s nature to die, but not in the soul’s. Before the sin of the Garden, the soul might have endured while the body fell and rose continually in new and ever-blossoming form, like that grain of wheat in Jesus’ parable: it dies, and bears much fruit.

In any case, this is definitely the form of life that Jesus restores to us: the fatal scars of his death become the chief wonders of his resurrected body. His life is all the more glorious because he died. This seems to me, as I suppose it must, like a perfect image of your thesis in Kingdom of Cain: art, like love, takes the churned-up ruins of our death-strewn world and shapes even them into something beautiful.

Last night I heard a performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony, an agonized musical battle between triumph and despair that arose out of the composer’s response to a friend’s death. Its hinge point, the 4th movement, features the traditional German folksong Urlicht: “Primeval Light.” “Oh little red rose,” sings the soloist, “man lies in deepest need! Man lies in deepest pain!” And yet, “the loving God will grant me one small light, / to guide me toward an eternal life of joy.”

One way or another, we will walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Since the fall, we have had to go in blind. But maybe that one small light—the life of the soul—can cut like a beam through even that narrow pass.

Love,
Spencer