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Jan. 26, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
07:07
The Beauty of What Remains with Rabbi Steve Leder
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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.
All right, we'll continue.
I have my own set of questions.
Rabbi Steve Leder.
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