Death and Renewal

Rav Yitz Greenberg, The Jewish Way

Judaism is a religion of life against death. Death negates redemption; it is the end of growth, of freedom. Death is so contradictory to liberation that a Talmudic sage exempts the mourner preparing for the funeral from the daily requirement of the central act of Jewish memory, remembering the Exodus. "That you remember the day you left Egypt all the days of your life -- on days that you deal with life but not on days when you deal with death." (Jerusalem Talmud 3:1)

In a world growing toward life, death is a "contradiction" to God, who is pure life. In the end, therefore, death must be overcome. "God will destroy death forever. My Lord God will wipe the tears away from every face." (Isaiah 25:8) Judaism's ultimate dream, then, is to vanquish death totally.

Death is treated as the enemy. "Behold, I place before you today life and good, and death and evil...Chose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). In daily ritual, death is set up as the negative pole of contact with God. The human corpse was considered the most intense archetype of ritual impurity.

Rav Yitz Greenberg, The Jewish Way

The one notable exception to the arm's-length treatment of death is the period of the High Holy Days. During this cluster of days, the tradition deliberately concentrates the individuals attention to death.

Human beings cannot be mature until they encompass a sense of their own mortality...In the Jewish calendar, the Yamim Noraim (Days of Awe) structure the imaginative encounter with death in an annual experience in the hope that the experience will recur to liberate life continually.

Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

Walter Benjamin

"The Storyteller"

It has been observable for a number of centuries how in the general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence and vividness. In its last stages this process is accelerated. And in the course of the nineteenth century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide-open doors of the death house. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.

Sigmund Freud

"Reflections on War and Death"

Shall we not admit that in our civilized attitude towards death we have again lived psychologically beyond our means? Shall we not turn around and avow the truth? Were it not better to give death the place to which it is entitled both in reality and in our thoughts and to reveal a little more of our unconscious attitude towards death which up to now we have so carefully suppressed?

Acts 23

6. Then when Paul noticed that part of them were Sadducees and the others Pharisees, he shouted out in the council, “Brothers, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees. I am on trial concerning the hope of the resurrection of the dead!”

7. When he said this, an argument began between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the assembly was divided.

8. (For the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all.)

Martin Buber - Tales of the Hasidim

Rabbi Bunem said: "On New Year's the world begins anew, and before it begins anew, it comes to a close. Just as before dying, all the powers of the body clutch hard at life, so man at the turn of the year ought to clutch at life with all his might and main."