Rabbi Brian Doesn’t Understand

In the 18th century, in Hannipol, a small district of Khmelnytskyi Oblast, in present-day western Ukraine, there was a rabbi known as Reb Zusya.

Zusya, a pious man, taught about humility and had a strange habit of referring to himself in the third person.

Instead of saying, “I am hungry,” or “I don’t understand,” he would say, “Zusya is hungry,” or “Zusya doesn’t understand.”

One story says that he addressed the ground beneath him:

“Earth, oh earth, you are greater than Zusya. Why, then, is Zusya walking upon you?”

And Zusya supplied the answer:

“Because the day will come when Zusya will lie beneath you.”

Reb Zusya is best known for a story about his time as a goses—a person imminently approaching death.

As he lay dying, Reb Zusya lamented that he had failed because he was neither a teacher like Moses nor a scholar like Rabbi Akiva.

Seeing him so downcast and scared, the story goes, God tells him, “in the world to come, the angel at the gate of the heavens will not ask why you had not been like Moses or Akiva, but instead, the heavenly creature will ask only: “Were you Zusya?”

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A great story.

A great moral—Be true to yourself rather than focusing on trying to be anyone else.

And, I’ve discovered a second great moral.

Let me explain:

Not once, in my countless tellings of this story, has anyone objected to the character of God noticing Zusya’s fear and responding with compassion.

Not once has anyone ever stopped me to explain the true nature of angels or debate me on the existence of heaven having a gate or what is on the entrance exam.

And, in that is the second moral.

We—like the teller of Zusya’s deathbed story—have the right to speak about God and what God’s character might be.

Of course we have as much right as anyone else does.

But.

We give our religious power away to others.

We assume other people’s characterization of the divine or their notion of what life after death entails is somehow more correct than our own.

We quote their certainty while refraining from telling our own experience.

We pretend our thoughts about the nature of God aren’t valid.

We abandon our spiritualigious authority.

Rabbi Brian doesn’t understand.