Saving Elijah

hands.
    We sat there without talking for another minute or two. Then he told me that the spirits of evil men do live on after death, as ghosts, as demons, wandering the earth with no place to go and no place to hide, never mourned, yet never to see the face of God.
    "But if they're evil," I asked him, "why don't they just go to hell?"
    "There could be many reasons, I suppose. Maybe they haven't had a proper burial. Maybe that soul is so wicked it's simply exiled, denied even the possibility of rest. Maybe the dead are doomed to a punishment appropriate to the life they lived. Maybe they're condemned to wander because no one remembers their name."
    It occurred to me that the young man I had known had made up his name, thinking the name Seth Lucien sounded evil or sinister.
    "Could you do some sort of an exorcism for me!"
    The rabbi sighed. "There are some rabbis who claim to know how to work with such things. But even if I believed these conceptions were real and not just metaphorical, I'm not convinced that's what you need, Dinah."
    He bowed his head for a moment again, then looked at me.
    "The ways of the Lord are mysterious and painful and wonderful, are they not? You know, Dinah, it's interesting to me that you named your boy Elijah. Elijah is the prophet angel, who gives himself completely to humanity, who shows humans the way to reconciliation. With the help of God, Elijah restores and reveals, and ultimately, shows the way to redemption. 'Lo, I will send the Prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the awesome, fearful day of the Lord. He shall reconcile fathers with sons and sons with their fathers.'"
    "And mothers, too?"
    "And mothers, too. I'd like to meet this little boy of yours, Dinah. The little boy who says he sees your ghost. The five-year-old vegetarian. That's kind of interesting, too."
    "How so?"
    "When the Prophet Isaiah imagines the world at its end, he envisions a non-carnivorous world, I think. The leopard lies down with the kid, the cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together, and the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw. The laws of kashrut could have been intended to be an intermediate step on the way to the ideal of vegetarianism. Keeping kosher is away of respecting life, killing the animal without torturing it, respecting the lifeblood of the living being."
    "He's a funny kid," I said.
    "I have a feeling funny doesn't come close to describing it."
    "No. It doesn't."
    "But there is one thing, Dinah."
    "What?"
    "I want to thank you."
    "For what?"
    "For your story."
    I shrugged. "It's my story."
    "Yes," he said, "but our stories are all we have. You needed to tell this one. And I feel privileged to have heard it. And, having heard it, I feel I can give you my opinion, right or wrong. I think you yourself have the power to exorcise this demon. I really do."
    "How?"
    "Spirits have very little power in this world. They have the power to tease the living, and deceive, and confuse. They can tell lies about the future and the past, and worse, they can intermix the truth with lies. And that's all they can do. They certainly don't have the power of life and death that you're ascribing to this one, regarding your son. Only God has that. And we humans do, too, in a way, if we are weak and confused and if we allow ourselves to give in to the yetzer ha ra, the temptation to do evil."
    "You mean, if Elijah had been fated to die, he would have."
    "If the Angel of Death had been looking for Elijah, I suspect it would have found him. At least it seems so to me. Do you think a mere ghost could fool God?"
    I took a deep breath. "And if Elijah had ended up connected to machines? Would I have been taking matters of life and death into my own hands by removing them?"
    The rabbi sighed. "Ah. If machines are serving only as an impediment to inevitable death, prolonging life only in the technical sense without hope of any kind of recovery?"
    "Yes, that's right."
    "Then I think we, as human beings, after careful consideration, after we have looked unflinchingly into our hearts, have the right to remove them. That doesn't mean you would have been able to do it. Or that I would. In that situation, the mother and the father would have to struggle to find the answer. And struggle to keep faith while they're looking. I believe Jewish law would support the removal of life support in the circumstances you feared. There are certainly others in my faith who would interpret the law differently, and in