by Howard Berkowitz, delivered at Minyan M'at

 I have always wanted to stand here  and discuss Moby Dick.  This should not seem odd given that the Torah endorses the power of narrative art.  Deuteronomy largely consists of Moshe formalizing the oral tradition of the Torah as he retells, and even recasts, the chronicle of the leaving of Egypt and the subsequent forty years of wandering for a new generation about to enter Canaan under a new leader.  When Moshe says  (Deut.  11:7) "…that it was you who saw with your own eyes all the marvelous deeds that the L-rd performed" to an assemblage, most of whom had witnessed only some of the marvelous deeds and some of whom had witnessed none of those deeds, who, in a complex metaphorical and metaphysical sense, accept his statements, as we do, then we are witnessing the power and triumph of  narrative art.  The rabbis said that "Job never was and never existed, but is only a parable" and yet  the story of Job was one of the greatest and boldest additions to the Biblical canon, demanding a response from both the religious and secular perspectives, for whom Job was a living presence.  Melville's Moby-Dick or The Whale closes on its final page with an epilogue headed by a quotation from Job, "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."  I wish to consider this Yom Kippur day the titanic figure of Captain Ahab, who is utterly real in the imagination.

Ahab was fifty-eight years of age when he set out on his final voyage.  He was "a grand, ungodly, god-like man" whose father probably died before Ahab was born, and whose mother died when he was but one year old.   It was said that his mother named him Ahab as a "whim" but the old squaw Tistig said that the name would prove prophetic.  Of King Ahab, First Kings tells us: "But there was none like unto Ahab, who did give himself over to do that which was evil in the sight of the L-rd."  King Ahab and his pagan wife, Jezebel, regarded the prophet  Elijah with relentless enmity.  Elijah had prophesied that: "In the  place where dogs licked the blood of Navot shall dogs lick thy blood…"  

Captain Ahab was raised on the Quaker whaling island of Nantucket.  Ahab was very unusual for an islander in having attended college for a time.  He became a harpooneer at age eighteen and then spent a cumulative total of only three of his next forty years on land.  Ahab wedded just three voyages before his final one and had a baby, but it is uncertain as to whether he ever actually saw the child.  Ahab was branded for a special fate having  "…a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish" running from crown to sole, a "birthmark" which Tashtego, the Gay Head Indian, said he had not acquired until he was forty.    

Ahab had lost his leg below the knee to Moby-Dick on his previous voyage when, after his whale boat had been smashed around him, Ahab had dashed at the whale and   relentlessly  sought to kill Moby-Dick with a six-inch blade "…as an Arkansas duelist at his foe."   Afterwards, Ahab had lain "like dead for three days and nights" and then was beset with sharp, shooting pains in the bleeding stump.  Ahab "…at last came to identify with [the whale], not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.   The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living with half a heart and half a lung."  "… all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy  Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick.  He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.."  "Then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad."  

The first mate, Starbuck, contends that the whale is but a dumb creature, but Ahab will have none of it, and he replies:  "All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks.  But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.  If man will strike, strike through the mask!  How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?  To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.  Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.  But 'tis enough.  He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.  That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.  Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

Ahab, correctly, will not allow that his wound signifies nothing.  In his "wild vindictiveness" he insists that the whale is either a malign, sentient creature, or, as he becomes convinced over time, the agent of a malign and arbitrary G-d.  The rabbis of the Talmud also knew to look beneath the veneer of appearances and said, "Be arum-[that is,]cunning  (or naked)-in yireh"   As the Baal Shem Tov elaborated on this statement, the things of this world appear in different garbs, but the person who is able to see what lies behind these garbs finds yireh hashamayim (fear and awe of Heaven).   The very arrogance and pride which cost Ahab his leg cause him to feel mocked by the continued existence of the whale.  Ahab imagines  that by conquering Leviathan he will conquer his torment  over the thwarting of his imperiousness.  The search for the whale across the entire globe is an assault on Heaven akin to that of those building the Tower of Babel.
As the pursuit of the whale proceeds,  Ahab has moments of doubt about the course he has charted for himself.  When told that the oil casks in the hold are leaking, Ahab says: "I'm all aleak myself.  Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life's howling gale?"  Hearing the blacksmith welding an old pike-head  claim he can smooth any seam or dent, Ahab points to his brow and says:  "if thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes."  Ahab tells Starbuck, " I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.  God! God! God! - crack my heart! -  stave my brain…stand close to me Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze  into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God."  Here, in asking G-d to crack his heart, Ahab is echoing Donne's cry in his fourteenth Holy Sonnet in which he asks G-d to batter his heart in order that he be made anew.  

The Besht said, "In the habitation of the King are to be found many rooms…but the master key is the broken heart."  That is , G-d will always consider the plea of the contrite, the broken-hearted,  and Psalm 147 refers to G-d as harofeh lishvuray layv, "…the healer of broken hearts."  But the posture of supplicant does not suit Ahab.  

Ahab asks, "What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening hidden lord and master; and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding,and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?  Is Ahab, Ahab?  Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?"   Ahab has some idea of forces at work that compromise the admiralty of his being, but he is unwilling to accept their origins as internal.  The yetzer hara, the will to evil and self-destruction, becomes an internal emperor and because of it, as Rabbi Danzig phrased it, "We are astonished at ourselves-how was this abomination perpetrated?"   

After quenching in human blood a special barbed harpoon forged to fly straight and true in order to kill the white whale, Ahab baptizes it "in nomine diaboli," in the name of the devil.  Rav Soloveitchik reminds us that the word to sin  (hata) actually means "to miss (le-hahti) the target."  Starbuck had previously told Ahab, "Let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware thyself old man" and not the whale.  Pip, the black cabin boy, who had fallen into the sea, Moby-Dick's world, and nearly drowned returns "having seen G-d's foot on the treadle of the loom and he spoke it."  The  mad Pip serves as an Elijah to Ahab's kingdom of the ship Pequod but is disregarded by Ahab.  Just before the final days' pursuit, a  hawk snatches Ahab's cap off his head,  akin to the birds snatching the bread from the basket atop pharaoh's baker's head in his dream of doom.   

Captain Ahab furiously chases the white whale for three consecutive days of close combat, despite his whale boat having been snapped in half by the whale's jaws on the first day, despite warnings and omens.  Of Balaam's persistence in wanting  to go with Balak's dignitaries to curse Israel, the midrash of Bamidbar Rabbah tells us, that, "From this you learn that G-d lets a man go the way which his heart desires."  Ultimately, Ahab brings his ship, his crew  and himself  to destruction because of his worship of his own defiant nature.  

With the specially forged lance challengingly upraised, Ahab hurls at G-d, "I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me.  In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.  Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights."   In his titanic, unyielding defiance of nature and G-d, Ahab became a literary icon.  But we must confess that the baser part of ourselves thrills to the magnificent unrepentance of the man, and it is this part of ourselves we must address on Yom Kippur.  But can Ahab be asked to contend with his very "earthquake personality"?  Rambam, in Hilchot Teshuvah, insists on the possibility of this saying: "…if there were some force inherent  in his nature that irresistibly drew him to that from which he could not free himself…what place would there be for all of the Torah?"   Are we subject to irresistible impulses or impulses not resisted?

It may be that Ahab was a nautical Acher.  The Gemara tells us of Elisha ben Avuya, a great scholar, who witnessed a boy responding to his father's request to climb a tree and release the mother bird before taking the chicks, as the Torah commands.  The reward for this is to be long life, but the boy fell to his death.  Elisha ben Avuya thereupon denied G-d and abandoned his faith, so that the other Rabbis refered to him as "Acher," that is, "the other."  His disciple, the sage Rabbi Meir, continually visited his rebbe in order to persuade him to return.  Acher replied that he could not because he had heard a bat kol stating, "Return, O wayward children…except for Acher!"  But this must be taken as G-d's discerning of Acher's unreadiness to repent rather than of G-d's unwillingness to pardon.  Rambam, in Moreh Nevuchim (3:36) observed: "If a person believed that he could never rectify his crooked ways he would continue repeating his error, and he might even increase his rebellious acts, as he would have no remedy.  However, our faith  in teshuvah will cause us to improve…"     

Now the manner of Ahab's death is of interest to us.  After Ahab darts his demonic harpoon into Moby-Dick, "…the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;-ran foul.  Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone."  Ahab had followed the advice of Job's wife which Job had rejected; to "curse G-d and die."  After using his voice in cursing and defiance, he dies voicelessly whereas his voice might have been used to fulfill Rambam's statement of the requirements for repentance; namely, to say out loud, in words that one has sinned, that one regrets the sin and that one has resolved in heart not to repeat the sin and also to use that voice to appease a fellow human being whom one has injured.  As Rav Soloveitchik said, "Repentance contemplated and not verbalized is valueless."   Or, as the Zohar puts it, "Nothing is firmly established until it is mentioned aloud and assigned its place." William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote: "For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness."

Towards the very beginning of the novel the narrator, Ishmael, having come to New Bedford, Massachusetts to find work on a whaling vessel finds himself, on his second day in town, in the Whaleman's Chapel listening to Father Mapple deliver a sermon.  Father Mapple is a former whaler who wants to speak to the hearts of his seafaring congregation, so he chooses as his text that of their fellow whaleman, Jonah, which we will read during the Yom Kippur mincha service.  The Rabbis could not find fault with the essence of his sermon when he says, "And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists."    Starbuck agrees when he later says,  "I misdoubt me that I disobey God in obeying  [Ahab]." Ahab, of course, was not present for Father Mapple's sermon.  Ahab would not bend his will but today we will bend, bow and fully prostrate ourselves during the Avodah.
What is the mystery of the whale that proves so alluring?   Melville, paraphrasing from parsha Ki Tissa, wrote: "But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head?  Much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none?  Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.  But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face."  After the episode of the Golden Calf, Moshe asks to behold G-d's presence and G-d says: "…you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live." When G-d allows a semblance of G-d's glory to pass by Moshe, G-d utters the Thirteen Divine Attributes, Ayl rachum v'hanun, which we repeat throughout Yom Kippur.  

And what of the "incantation" of whiteness?   There is frequent reference in Moby-Dick  to being "appalled."  The seamen in Father Mapple's rendering of the Jonah story are appalled at the irresistible tempest and the nearness of G-d, and Starbuck is appalled at Ahab's intransigence and the nearness of the whale: "Starbuck blanched to a corpse's hue with despair."  To be appalled is, literally, to grow white with fear, with awe, with nearness to death and the Divine.  At the burning bush, Moshe's hand turned white, the pall bearers carry the met  enwrapped in the white tachrichim shrouds and many of us here today wear the white kittel as an aid and reminder.

Ironically, Ahab had one distinct advantage over us in that he seemed to have no doubt about his ability to address G-d directly and frequently.  However, the price of his stentorian ravings was that  they deafened Ahab to the presence of G-d  which, as G-d tells Elijah, is not to be found in the wind, nor the earthquake nor the fire, but in "the still small voice" to which the liturgy of Yom Kippur refers.  For those who struggle in attempting  to communicate with G-d via the prayers provided us; who find their spiritual longings complicated by concerns about intellectual integrity, on this day foremost, perhaps this poem by C. S. Lewis, Footnote to All Prayers,  in which he employs a number of Jewish concepts may be of some help:

The one whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping  with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed  unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all - are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense.  Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

The conclusion of the novel hints that Ishmael was the sole survivor of the floating world of the Pequod because of his ceremonial brotherhood and fast friendship with Queequeg, the only true friendship described.   Queequeg, utterly reconciled to his inevitable death, had had a coffin prepared in advance and it is this coffin which serves Ishmael, now alone, as a life-buoy: "It was with the devious-cruising [ship] Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."   

Rav Soloveitchik observes, concerning the Avodah which we will read later today, that "…the acquittal afforded by the scapegoat when the Temple existed was not meant for the individual.  The individual derived no benefit from this sacrifice .  Atonement was for the owner of the offering only, in this case the community as a whole."  He adds: "…as individuals we are capable of descent to the pit of destruction and death, but not when taken as Knesset  Yisrael."  To lessen the fabric of the community is destructive, and to not be part of the community is death. Ahab moaned, speaking of himself, that  "…he stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men  his neighbors!  Cold, cold-I shiver!"  And, in a moment of reflection on the second day of the chase, he adds: "Aye,aye, Starbuck,  'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has."   Shamefully, much harder than approaching G-d with our sins is the obligation to approach the injured other individual, acknowledge misbehavior in words and ask "Slicha oomichila (pardon and forgive)."  

At the conclusion of Yom Kippur we will perform the seven-fold repetition of what the multitude of Israelites uttered when Elijah vanquished four hundred and fifty of King Ahab's prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel: Adoshem Hu HaElokim, The L-rd is G-d.  But before the contest of prophets and deities, Elijah put to the gathering of people a question that remains for us:  "How long halt ye between two opinions?  If the L-rd be G-d, follow the L-rd.; but if Baal, follow him."  How long shall we halt between a better self and a lesser self?  Whose voice shall we hearken to today, and everyday?  

Is it too great a stretch to liken this group of overly bright people to Ahab in skill at self-torment?  The morning Yehee Ratzon prayer ends, in the Bokser translation, with the wish that G-d save us, above all, "from disputes with stubborn and unyielding opponents."  And who is more stubborn and unyielding and exasperating than we, ourselves, wrestling with ourselves year after year?  Perhaps for those who take Yom Kippur seriously and rely on G-d's mercy and on the G-d given ability to choose how one will conduct oneself and who can  believe in the opportunity that Yom Kippur represents, year after year, perhaps the dread drops away and, even for the most convoluted intellectual, the simple promise remains.

In these recent difficult days, we have reacquired appreciation of that greeting to which we became numb, but which is the profoundest wish and greatest blessing: shalom.  We have been reminded of the truth of what the Pequod's cook tells Stubb, the mate: "All angels is nothing more than the shark well governed."  And we must not forget how Psalm 27, which is said daily from the start of Elul, attempts to comfort us:  "False witnesses and men who scheme violence have risen against me.  Ye[t], I am confident that I shall witness the goodness of the L-rd in the land of the living."   An emergency medical technician at the hospital where I work served at the World Trade Center horror.  He recalled seeing bodies falling through the air, as he put it, "like a slow drip."  This he could bear.  What he could not was the recollection of a man and a woman plunging to their deaths holding hands.  Imagine-the remainder of two lives compressed into the time of a fall. Imagine, then, that you have more time.

We all face challenges tomorrow, but G-d has assigned us a task for today. It should not be forgotten, though, that in Temple times, the conclusion of Yom Kippur was a joyous time.  As  Harold Arlen wrote and Judy Garland sang:
Forget  your troubles, come on get happy
You better chase all your cares away
Shout "Hallelujah," come on get happy
Get ready for the Judgment Day
Forget your troubles, come on get happy
Chase all your cares away
Shout "Hallelujah," get happy before the Judgment Day

Another great work,  The Divine Comedy, despite its elaborate meditation on sin and redemption, concludes simply, as Virgil and Dante emerge from Hell, with a very last line of: "And we went out to see the stars again."  Perhaps, if we, all, take the possibilities of this day seriously, we might be enabled, at the conclusion of Neilah, to emerge into the night and see the stars again, for the first time.

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