Bernard Berlow:
CLASS OF 1962
Cleveland Heights High SchoolClass of 1962
Cleveland heights, OH
Ohio State University - MathematicsClass of 1967
Columbus, OH
Bernard's Story
I live in a small town in PA, where we are trying to maintain a synagogue. We also belong to Beit Havurah in Norfolk, Conn and Brith Shalom in Bethlehem. Every Pesach we go to Great Neck where we visit our friends and attend services at two of the many shuls there. My children, (Yossi, Noah, Benji), have all graduated college and have moved away to different states, AND we (Sarina and I) are still waiting for them to become fruitful and multiply. I use to work in the IT world until the dot com bust and now I am semi retired working part time, teaching Yoga and T'ai Chi and still searching for the meaning of life. My next project is to make a movie with a Jewish theme.
Yossi is in Oregon, working on an MD & a PhD, Noah is in California making films, (He did work for the Shoah foundation while it lasted), and Benji is in Wisconsin working for the Hillel organization. (He just announced that he will take a job in California this June. So I will have all my three boys on the west coast.) Sarina works for the JCC in Allentown.
My life has been mostly about my search for meaning.
How and why was the universe created? I find this whole subject of Cosmology fascinating. From the 19th century astronomer, Olber, who noticed that the sky was dark and demonstrated a paradox with simple geometry, to the recent discoveries of "dark energy.¿ I just love it! I don't quite get "string theory" yet, but I just have to read about it.
And then, the questions of "Why the universe?" "Why us?" "Where are we going?" And "what does it all mean?" These have been questions that have plagued my life for as long as I can remember. When I was 15 I tried to meditate, but after an hour I found that it did not work. I was expecting ¿enlightenment.¿ (Maybe I have do it a little bit longer. I have been meditating for about 45 years, now.)
Not that I have "THE answer," but recently I came to an understanding, "a minor satori," where the heavens opened up and I got a glimpse of an answer. (I guess all that meditation did pay off. It took a long time.)
"Now that I am enlightened, I am just as miserable as before." (Do you remember that quote?)
Well for me the answer that came to me has made me happy. V...Expand for more
ery Happy! And yes, I am just as miserable as before.
My insight, or enlightenment, was a vision where I saw the whole evolution of the big bang - matter - stars - life - human beings - and the end product of human beings ¿ ¿the resurrected body¿ or as I like to call it ¿the immortal body.¿
How this came about was triggered by the Rambam's 13th cardinal belief that in the world to come, the body will be resurrected and united with the soul.
Now, I would say that most Jews do not even believe in a soul ¿ But even fewer would believe in a resurrected body. And yet the Rambam said this was a fundamental belief.
I attended a memorial service for a friend who had donated his body to a medical school. Perhaps you already know that this is against halacha, Jewish law. (I suspect this is probably because of the ¿resurrected body¿ problem. My son Yossi had to work on a body in his first year at medical school.)
But where do these bodies come from? Someone has to donate their bodies to medical schools. And in Israel, most of these bodies must be Jewish, like my friend.
In most religions, there is a belief that some people have already attained this immortal body. In Hinduism, every five hundred years some yogi through sadhna, spiritual work, gains the immortal body. Kripalu¿s guru is reported to have been one of them. And Kripalu said that he was working on this ¿immortal body¿ but didn¿t quite make it this lifetime. (I lived in an ashram for about a year and Kripalu said that it would take 26 life times to attain the immortal body. It was beyond my planning horizon.)
In Biology, there is a quirky statement: ¿Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny.¿ This is usually applied to the development of the egg into a fetus and finally into a baby. In a spiritual sense, all human beings go through a process of replicating the development of the spiritual human being including the final phase of the ¿immortal body.¿ So while I have not attained the immortal body and probably will not make it in this lifetime, my mini satori was a vision of that process. While I will die, like everyone else, ¿why-ning in my bier,¿ I have a sense of completion and a happiness that I never had before.
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