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Afterlife of Memory
00:07:03
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| My guest is Dr. Doctor, that's funny. | |
| You know, I'll tell the rabbi what that reminds me of. | |
| His rabbi, Steve Leder. | |
| Do you know what it reminds me? | |
| And I was going to say doctor. | |
| I don't know if you heard. | |
| I'm sure you did, but in case you didn't, there's a great line of Milton Himmelfar, a great Jewish thinker of the last generation. | |
| When rabbis became doctors, Jews got sick. | |
| Yes. | |
| Yes, yes, the famous line. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's really great. | |
| Yeah, or Judaism. | |
| That's it. | |
| Yeah, one of the two. | |
| That's right. | |
| I don't remember. | |
| Good point. | |
| Rabbi Leder, Rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, is the author of The Beauty of What Remains, and it's his reflections on death. | |
| And having been with... | |
| By his estimate, a thousand dying people, not to mention how many funerals, etc. | |
| Yes. | |
| Why... | |
| This is a bit... | |
| It's completely related, but it is obviously not the subject of your book, but related. | |
| Why do so many Jews not believe in the afterlife? | |
| Well, Judaism... | |
| Particularly the first wave of Jews to America were heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and pragmatism and rationalism. | |
| And the whole imagination of the Talmud when it comes to the afterlife is pretty non- or even anti-rational. | |
| You know, people being resurrected, bones coming up, taking on flesh. | |
| Rolling in tunnels under the earth to Israel to live in a utopian afterlife that's kind of like studying in a great academy. | |
| It just rubbed up too hard against the ideals and values of the Enlightenment that swept across Europe after Napoleon liberated the Jews. | |
| And I think that it just was too non-rational or anti-rational, and so it got You know, tucked in a drawer for all but the Orthodox community, and we started to embrace other ideas, which are, you know, less specific and therefore easier to embrace if you're a rationalist. | |
| I really think it's that simple. | |
| But I'll tell you, ask any rabbi who has dealt with any significant number of families who are grieving, and that rabbi will have heard. | |
| Far too many stories about things like, you know, butterflies showing up on his birthday every year, or a certain song playing the moment you were thinking about her, or, you know, a memory from a smell or a breeze or a dream, you know? | |
| And we've all heard these stories, and I can tell you I've heard far too many to dismiss them as sheer coincidence or nonsense. | |
| I just don't see it that way. | |
| And in another way, the book is a dual narrative. | |
| It's a field guide for grief and loss and mourning. | |
| But it's also my story of my journey with my father through Alzheimer's and his death and his afterlife. | |
| I feel and encounter my father every single day. | |
| He still makes me laugh. | |
| He still warns me about a potential mistake. | |
| He still humbles me when I, you know, get too haughty. | |
| And he still comforts me. | |
| And he still annoys me. | |
| So, you know, now maybe this is just, people would say, an afterlife of memory. | |
| I say, so what? | |
| It works. | |
| And I appreciate it. | |
| This is part of the reason I called the book The Beauty of What Remains. | |
| Because my relationship with my father is in many ways more beautiful now than it was when he was alive. | |
| And that's a gift. | |
| Do you ever tell parents who've lost a child that they will see them again? | |
| I don't. | |
| I don't, because I can't say that with certainty. | |
| And people who have lost a child are in such a searingly vulnerable emotional state that I would never want to present something to them that I wasn't absolutely certain of. | |
| And I would say that you're going to experience him and feel him for the rest of your lives. | |
| You know, I've dealt, unfortunately, with many, many families who have had to bury a child. | |
| And, you know, it's sort of like a phantom limb. | |
| It's an amputation, but you still feel the limb there, always, you know, for the rest of your life. | |
| And this leads to a nuanced point I make in the book about memory. | |
| This is one of the things from the sermon, Dennis, that I had to change as a result of losing my father. | |
| You know, we have all these platitudes about memory. | |
| May his memory be a blessing. | |
| She'll live on in memory. | |
| Thank God we have memories. | |
| And that's all true. | |
| But there's a duality to memory that we don't fully embrace. | |
| And that duality is that, yes, memory is beautiful. | |
| It really, really hurts. | |
| You know, in the book I say it's like being caressed and spat on at the same time. | |
| That's memory. | |
| And that's what we somehow have to find a way to make peace with. | |
| Just like we have to find a way to make peace with the cognitive dissonance we feel toward our parents in life and in death, right? | |
| We all have this tension in us between things that we're grateful for and that sting us. | |
| So intensely true for the death of a child. | |
| And I'll tell you another thing that I learned because of my father's death and my grief. | |
| I used to say to parents, sitting in the chapel before the service began, to bury their child, I would look them in the eye and I would say, Dennis, the most honest and helpful thing I can say to you right now... | |
| Is it won't always hurt so much. | |
| Then my father died. | |
| And I don't say that anymore. | |
| What I say now is, Dennis, the most honest and helpful thing I can say to you right now is it won't always hurt so often. | |
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Rabbi's Questions
00:00:18
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| All right, we'll continue. | |
| I have my own set of questions. | |
| Rabbi Steve Leder. | |