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Jan. 27, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
09:46
Exploring the Ultimate Issue of Death with Rabbi Steve Leder
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Dennis Prager show every Tuesday about some great issue of life.
And if the recent past has not made you keenly aware of how important it is to work out some of the great issues of life, I guess nothing will.
So, on a number of occasions, mostly not, but on a number of occasions I have a guest for the Ultimate Issues Hour.
And I have a risky topic.
Yes, indeed.
Riskier than sex.
The topic is death.
That's the riskiest topic you can address.
People don't want to think about it.
Ever since Ernest Becker's book, The Denial of Death, many years ago, where he made the case that that's what people work hardest at.
Denying death.
But it's a fact of life, and it is best to address it.
And the book is The Beauty of What Remains.
And it is a rabbi, rabbi, Steve Leder.
I know you as Steve, so forgive me.
Is it Leder or Leder?
Steve works just fine.
Thank you.
Leder or Leder?
Steve works just fine.
I know you as Dennis.
That's correct.
Leader.
Leader.
Okay, good.
Yeah.
Well, I've had you on before.
You were a very popular guest.
The book, again, is The Beauty of What Remains.
I was actually pleasantly surprised to see at how well it is doing on Amazon.
People, they do, everybody knows either, they know, everybody knows they'll die.
Everybody knows.
That loved ones will die.
I mean, that is the...
What is it?
Only death and taxes are inevitable.
That's right.
You would think that more would be done.
I was reading your book, and it was fascinating to me that you wrote the most popular High Holy Day sermon you ever gave was the one on death.
Yeah, that's correct.
You know, it was three years ago.
And in a way, the book is, to some degree, an apology for that sermon.
So let me explain.
I gave that sermon about three years ago.
Many of your listeners would not know this, but the holiest night of the year for Jews is constructed, and as is the following day, is constructed in many ways to force us to think about our deaths.
It's almost like a Jewish day for the dead.
For example, We wear white to mimic the burial shroud that traditional Jews are buried in.
We fast because the dead neither eat nor drink.
We begin the service by taking three of our sacred scrolls out and holding them in front of the congregation.
Those three scrolls represent the heavenly tribunal that legend has that we will stand before after we die.
And they're standing in front of the empty ark.
That holds those sacred scrolls, and the Hebrew word for ark is the same as the word for coffin.
So imagine the imagery for people who realize what they're looking at.
You're standing before these three symbolic judges in front of your open casket, dressed in a burial shroud-like garment, and it is all meant to force us to think about our death so that we will change our lives for the better.
Death, in my opinion, and this is after 33 plus years of being up close with it, with a thousand or more families, to me, death is really the ultimate teacher of how and why we should lead more meaningful, more beautiful lives.
Now, what happened with that sermon is I wrote it and delivered it that evening, and then, one year later to the day, Dennis, The morning before Kol Nidre, one year after that sermon, I buried my father in Minnesota.
And that was after a 10-year journey with him through Alzheimer's.
And then I was really encountering my own very personal loss and grief.
In essence, the book also explores this tension between Steve Leder the rabbi and Steve Leder the son.
Which was a dichotomous tension that was sometimes very difficult for me.
And so I wrote the book, in a sense, as I say in the prologue, to bring...
I realized after my dad died that that sermon was just one degree shy of the deepest truth that death comes to teach us about life.
And so I wrote this book to carry us all down to that 1% deeper level of understanding of what death comes to teach us.
Because my father's death caused me to rethink 30 years of experience and teaching for others.
Are you personally, are you frightened of dying?
I am now...
but only because that means I'm not dying.
This is a very helpful, counterintuitive point to people who are anxious about death.
And this is one of the points that every interviewer, without exception, has hit on after reading the book.
In the book, I talk about the fact that I've been, and this is not rabbinic hyperbole, I've been next to the bedside of at least a thousand dying people.
And I ask, and by dying, I mean actively dying, you know, hours or a day away from death.
And I ask, are you afraid?
And every time, the answer is no.
Now, the dying has some fear for the living.
Are the kids going to be okay?
Are they going to take care of mom?
Are they going to stay together?
But for themselves, the dying, when they are actually dying, are entirely fearless.
Because at a certain point, more is not better.
At a certain point, you have been weaned and prepared by a disease.
And at a certain point, death feels like the most natural thing in the world to embrace.
The closest thing I can come to explaining it, having seen it so often, is to me, it's a little bit like having the worst jet lag you have ever had in your life, where you are just zombie-like.
And all you want to do is crawl into bed.
Pull the covers up, snuggle in, and go to sleep.
You're not afraid to go to sleep.
You're not anxious.
You're not depressed.
It's what you want to do.
And that's the closest helpful example I can give.
And as I said earlier, the counterintuitive beauty of this is when people come to me and say, Rabbi, I'm so afraid of death.
I say, well, the fact that you're afraid is proof today is not your day.
Anxiety is for the living.
You're fine.
You know, it's not your day.
Of course, there are outliers.
People do get hit by buses and in car accidents and have massive strokes or sudden heart attacks.
But generally speaking, when death comes, it comes as a friend.
Now, I take it, and I feel funny asking this because you're a rabbi, but in the world in which we live, not all rabbis believe in God.
Do you believe in God?
Absolutely.
Does that help you confront death?
It helps me confront everything because I'm able to ask myself, have I done the godly thing?
Have I done what I believe God would require of me?
And it does help.
And I do believe in a sort of afterlife.
You know, the problem with anyone's afterlife belief is there's only one way to find out if you're right, and you can't really come back to talk about it.
So we can only guess at these things.
In my case, after seeing so many dead bodies, it's abundantly clear, I think to any of us who've seen a dead body, that that is not the person we knew and loved.
That is an empty vessel.
There is so much more to us than our corporeal beings.
We all have that other component that made us who we are.
You can call it a soul.
You can call it a spirit.
You can call it an essence.
You can call it energy.
I don't really care, you know, what your psycholinguistic preference is.
But we all, when we see a dead body, recognize that that's not really the person we knew and loved.
And I don't believe that soul.
I call it a soul.
Dies with the body.
I just don't believe it.
Where it goes, I don't know.
Where was it before we were born?
I don't know.
But there is a realm where I believe it exists.
The book is The Beauty of What Remains.
Rabbi Steve Leder.
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