{"id":63884,"date":"2019-10-03T13:25:19","date_gmt":"2019-10-03T10:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=63884"},"modified":"2019-10-03T13:25:19","modified_gmt":"2019-10-03T10:25:19","slug":"choosing-near-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/choosing-near-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Choosing Near-Death"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Yom Kippur, which occurs ten days after Rosh Hashanah, is when things get very real.<\/p>\n

On this \u201cDay of Atonement,\u201d the Torah tells us, \u201cyou shall practice self-denial . . . you shall do no work . . . It shall be a sabbath of complete rest for you.\u201d The Rabbis established a number of \u201cself-denial\u201d rules: no eating or drinking, no sex, no bathing or wearing makeup, no leather shoes. It also became customary to wear a \u201ckittel,\u201d which is a white robe in which Jews are traditionally buried when they die.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right, on Yom Kippur, we dress like a corpse and refrain from all life-sustaining activities\u2014we act out our own death. We embody the words of Unetaneh Tokef that warn us that we may well die this year. Yom Kippur is Judaism\u2019s annual daylong death meditation.<\/p>\n

A sermon given back in the 1980s by a rabbi named Kenneth Berger vividly highlights this aspect of Yom Kippur. Rabbi Berger delivered this sermon just eight months after the Challenger spaceship had exploded soon after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts on board\u2026<\/p>\n

In his sermon, Rabbi Berger noted that scientists who investigated the crash concluded that the astronauts may not have died when the shuttle exploded midair, but rather, moments later when their capsule smashed into the water below. And he said: “For perhaps as much as five minutes, the astronauts were alive and conscious and yet knew that death was certain . . . Can you imagine knowing that in a few moments death was imminent? What would we think of? If God forbid, you and I were in such circumstances? What would go through our mind? . . . I know it is not pleasant, but I want you to consider on this Yom Kippur, what if? What if I had five minutes to live?”<\/p>\n

This is the point of Yom Kippur: \u201cto bring us to the point of existential crisis,\u201d as Rabbi Lew put it, to remind us that at every moment, we are plummeting to our deaths, whether in five minutes or five decades. Yom Kippur is a wrenching reminder of our own very fragile mortality. As Unetaneh Tokef states: \u201cMan is founded in dust and ends in dust. He is like a broken shard, like grass dried up, like a faded flower, like a fleeting shadow, like a passing cloud, like a breath of wind, like whirling dust, like a dream that slips away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yom Kippur is Judaism\u2019s way of telling us: Do not wait for a nosediving airplane or your final days in hospice to take your life seriously. Have a near-death experience at least once a year (ideally much more frequently) during which your life passes before your eyes, and you ask yourself, \u201cIs this the life I want to have lived? If my life ended five minutes from now, what would I wish I had done differently?\u201d<\/p>\n

Excerpt from Sarah Hurwitz, Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life\u2014in Judaism (after finally<\/u> choosing to look there),<\/em> Random House, 2019, p. 193<\/p>\n","image":{"ID":63589,"id":63589,"title":"Sarah Hurwitz cover","filename":"Sarah-Hurwitz-cover.png","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Sarah-Hurwitz-cover.png","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/discovering-millions-of-pages-and-new-old-ideas\/sarah-hurwitz-cover\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"sarah-hurwitz-cover","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":63586,"date":"2019-09-26 15:33:44","modified":"2019-10-22 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