MAY OTHERS BENEFIT FROM MY DEATH AS I HAVE BENEFITTED FROM THE DEATH OF OTHERS
This sentence is part of my daily prayers. I don’t know if it is inherently Jewish, but my sense of belonging to a tribe and being part of a bigger whole—that is absolutely Jewish. And a rather large part of seeing ourselves as a bigger whole is an emphasis on our connection to our ancestors and to our descendants. We were all at Sinai, as the myth teaches us, those of us who lived on this beautiful earth 3,000 years ago and those of us who, if we humans don’t completely screw it up, will live as Jews 3,000 years from now. I have a complete commitment to the survival of the tribe of which I am part. Not at the cost of others but as part of building a more just world.
Our institutions are focused on issues of what we call continuity. For much of our history continuity was taken care of by our enemies who wouldn’t let us assimilate. They needed a hated other, and we won the lottery. Someone once asked me what my first thought was when I thought of Christians, and in a flash of deep memory and insight I said Christians kill Jews. The teacher said seriously and I let it go because I had no stake in convincing someone else of the rightness of this view. But my ancestral trauma spoke loud and clear. In waking life I get along with Christians, my deceased business partner was Irish Catholic and I’ve lived most of my life in places with vast majorities of Christians, instead of making aliyah to Israel. But for most of our history we were Jews because we could not be.
That’s still true in Israel today. Hamas didn’t care on October 7 if you were observant or not, worked for peace or not, voted for the racist Kahanists or for the left wing. But in America today, even with the rise in anti semitism which is absolutely real, continuity, being a Jew—this is a choice.
Or not. For me, it is no choice. I am a Jew, just as my ancestors many generations removed were, just as I pray that my descendants will be. If I have learned anything in being a Jew, it is that we who are alive right now, are part of a long chain of being. Sometimes that chain feels like it drags us down—it would have been far easier for me ideologically to have inherited a Buddhist theology or better yet a Native American animist viewpoint than Rabbinic monotheism. But mostly it gives me a deep sense of being part of an unfolding story.
I would not be where I am today if it were not for my ancestors. I owe a debt to them and just as they nurtured their successors so that I could be here, so I am committed to nurturing the next generation. It is a sickness in our society that we act as if we will never die. But the right model is to assume that we will and do work so that we have succession plans in place for the next generation to step up and hopefully surpass us. That’s why I pray that others may benefit from my death. That’s why I am committed to taking actions that will create the conditions for that possibility in a conscious way.
To benefit from the death of others before us is to be human. To have one’s literal and metaphoric deaths create opportunities for others should be our goal. Holding on until we can’t anymore is simply immature. And that is why I pray each day that others may benefit from my death as I have benefitted from the death of others.
