Dennis Prager Show - The Beauty of What Remains with Rabbi Steve Leder
Aired: 2021-01-26
Duration: 07:07


=== Afterlife of Memory (07:03) ===

[00:00:00]  My guest is Dr. Doctor, that's funny.
[00:00:04]  You know, I'll tell the rabbi what that reminds me of.
[00:00:07]  His rabbi, Steve Leder.
[00:00:09]  Do you know what it reminds me?
[00:00:11]  And I was going to say doctor.
[00:00:13]  I don't know if you heard.
[00:00:15]  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.
[00:00:23]  When rabbis became doctors, Jews got sick.
[00:00:28]  Yes.
[00:00:29]  Yes, yes, the famous line.
[00:00:31]  That's right.
[00:00:32]  That's really great.
[00:00:33]  Yeah, or Judaism.
[00:00:35]  That's it.
[00:00:36]  Yeah, one of the two.
[00:00:38]  That's right.
[00:00:39]  I don't remember.
[00:00:40]  Good point.
[00:00:42]  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.
[00:00:53]  And having been with...
[00:00:56]  By his estimate, a thousand dying people, not to mention how many funerals, etc.
[00:01:02]  Yes.
[00:01:03]  Why...
[00:01:04]  This is a bit...
[00:01:06]  It's completely related, but it is obviously not the subject of your book, but related.
[00:01:13]  Why do so many Jews not believe in the afterlife?
[00:01:19]  Well, Judaism...
[00:01:22]  Particularly the first wave of Jews to America were heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and pragmatism and rationalism.
[00:01:32]  And the whole imagination of the Talmud when it comes to the afterlife is pretty non- or even anti-rational.
[00:01:46]  You know, people being resurrected, bones coming up, taking on flesh.
[00:01:50]  Rolling in tunnels under the earth to Israel to live in a utopian afterlife that's kind of like studying in a great academy.
[00:02:00]  It just rubbed up too hard against the ideals and values of the Enlightenment that swept across Europe after Napoleon liberated the Jews.
[00:02:11]  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.
[00:02:32]  I really think it's that simple.
[00:02:34]  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.
[00:02:49]  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?
[00:03:09]  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.
[00:03:19]  I just don't see it that way.
[00:03:20]  And in another way, the book is a dual narrative.
[00:03:25]  It's a field guide for grief and loss and mourning.
[00:03:28]  But it's also my story of my journey with my father through Alzheimer's and his death and his afterlife.
[00:03:37]  I feel and encounter my father every single day.
[00:03:42]  He still makes me laugh.
[00:03:43]  He still warns me about a potential mistake.
[00:03:48]  He still humbles me when I, you know, get too haughty.
[00:03:55]  And he still comforts me.
[00:03:57]  And he still annoys me.
[00:03:58]  So, you know, now maybe this is just, people would say, an afterlife of memory.
[00:04:04]  I say, so what?
[00:04:06]  It works.
[00:04:07]  And I appreciate it.
[00:04:09]  This is part of the reason I called the book The Beauty of What Remains.
[00:04:12]  Because my relationship with my father is in many ways more beautiful now than it was when he was alive.
[00:04:18]  And that's a gift.
[00:04:20]  Do you ever tell parents who've lost a child that they will see them again?
[00:04:28]  I don't.
[00:04:29]  I don't, because I can't say that with certainty.
[00:04:33]  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.
[00:04:47]  And I would say that you're going to experience him and feel him for the rest of your lives.
[00:04:55]  You know, I've dealt, unfortunately, with many, many families who have had to bury a child.
[00:05:02]  And, you know, it's sort of like a phantom limb.
[00:05:06]  It's an amputation, but you still feel the limb there, always, you know, for the rest of your life.
[00:05:13]  And this leads to a nuanced point I make in the book about memory.
[00:05:17]  This is one of the things from the sermon, Dennis, that I had to change as a result of losing my father.
[00:05:23]  You know, we have all these platitudes about memory.
[00:05:27]  May his memory be a blessing.
[00:05:28]  She'll live on in memory.
[00:05:30]  Thank God we have memories.
[00:05:31]  And that's all true.
[00:05:33]  But there's a duality to memory that we don't fully embrace.
[00:05:37]  And that duality is that, yes, memory is beautiful.
[00:05:43]  It really, really hurts.
[00:05:47]  You know, in the book I say it's like being caressed and spat on at the same time.
[00:05:53]  That's memory.
[00:05:54]  And that's what we somehow have to find a way to make peace with.
[00:05:59]  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?
[00:06:05]  We all have this tension in us between things that we're grateful for and that sting us.
[00:06:12]  So intensely true for the death of a child.
[00:06:15]  And I'll tell you another thing that I learned because of my father's death and my grief.
[00:06:22]  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...
[00:06:39]  Is it won't always hurt so much.
[00:06:43]  Then my father died.
[00:06:45]  And I don't say that anymore.
[00:06:47]  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.

=== Rabbi's Questions (00:18) ===

[00:07:00]  All right, we'll continue.
[00:07:02]  I have my own set of questions.
[00:07:05]  Rabbi Steve Leder.