Oh, Death!

By Andrew Ratner
George Washington University

I’m now reading a novel by Don DeLillo called White Noise. It is, according to my teacher, the archetypical post-modern novel (I highly recommend it, for those of you who haven’t heard of it – very funny and chilling at the same time). The reason I mention this is because throughout the novel there is an undercurrent of fear of Death. It’s small, but pervasive, and interrupts the chapters every once and again. It’s true, actually. Fear of Death interrupts our lives, we just don’t want to think about it. But we do. We live in it. We watch it, a million miles away on our TV. We know the loss that goes directly with it.

We think about death all of the time. It’s an undercurrent, barely there. But above all (no pun intended), the afterlife is an even smaller thought for us. Judaism, if I’m right, has mitzvot (commandments) not because (or only because) it wants us to have a sweet and moral life, but also a sweet life in  Olam HaBah, the World to Come. We don’t think about it enough, I guess. We have too much to think about, anyway: college, tests, work, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, life in general. The afterlife is harder to grasp than Death. You can’t blame people for not thinking about it, for not being to explain it as well as they can. It’s existential, transcendental, ethereal and all those other words academics use to describe things beyond us.

One of my favorite quotes that I’ve only seen, though not actually read in the Terry Pratchet book from which it comes, is "But you read a lot of books, I'm thinking. Hard to have faith, ain't it, when you've read too many books?" It sums up some of my greatest "existential crises." Those times when I feel I can’t quite find God anywhere; I’m desperately seeking something to grasp. I think most of us are at this very point in our lives. The quote amuses me because it sums up a lot of reasons for having a crisis in the first place: disillusionment from and by my own people. I’ve got no place to look in the literature I love for a faith that is, in my opinion, on the wane. I feel like a lot of Jews my age are going through this.

What’s this got to do with the afterlife? A few things. Existentialism is about the human ability to transcend and make ourselves feel real through action. Here is the problem: we, the Chosen People, the people whose neuroses and sexual repression and beautiful taste in music and religious fervor and secular fervor and mixed messages, are at a point of crisis. We’ve read too many books, our faith is waning and we are dying. Not by the numbers, not like the Holocaust, but of old age and cancer and AIDS and avian flu. We are dying, and we don’t know what to do with that. Judaism has taught us many things about the afterlife. If Yom Kippur isn’t an example of that, I don’t know what is. But as Jews in the secular world, as Jews trying to come to grips with a religion that might not match up with the way we lead our "normal" lives, we may not remember everything Judaism has to teach us. So, we are at a crisis.

What’s the solution? If Post-Structuralism is any answer, it will say that there is no answer and that everything is a meaningless state of repeating signals in the air. That seems boring to me. As Jews, we like to cling to what’s real. Two different answers: the neurotic and the religious. Sometimes we cling to both. Sometimes the religious has a bit of the neurotic, sometimes vice versa. Answer A: life is just going to be one case after another of crazy Jewish madness, nothing we can do about it. Answer B: we live our lives the best we can so that we can merit the afterlife. I’d like to say I have a modified version of Answer B: Jews live to search. It doesn’t matter if it’s for a secular life outside of religion or a religious life inside the secular, we live to search. This is living our lives the best we can to prepare for the afterlife. Searching is more important in our lives, because that is what we are meant to do. Especially Jews.

The Torah isn’t just some text. We have to search through it to find out what it means to us: if it angers us because of all the wars and bitter rivalries, or pleases us because of the beautiful language of the stories of ours fathers, mothers and cousins. Searching is making sense of the life around us. I realize that Judaism places a huge emphasis on this life because searching is what it wants us to do. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have any idea what to do with ourselves and our Jewish identity. Still, my modified Answer B is this: live life as best you can, which translates to search all the time. Only that will prepare you for what’s to come.

To sum up, the afterlife is important. Tangentially. To focus on the life we lead is to prepare for that soft murmur in our head: that worry about what’s to come. Our fear of death leaves when we focus on the more rational fear: life. When we have that down pat, then things get just a bit better. I’m not saying this is a cure-all, and I’m not saying that this is easy, and I’m not saying that even I can practice what I preach. Just don’t focus on it. Live life, search a little. It’s good for you. I promise.

[Posted 11/28/05]