LIVES GO ON

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LOIS TVERBERG: Traditionally, Jewish people have considered the study of the Bible truly living out one’s “eternal life.” A story is told about a rabbi who spent years in study of the Scriptures, and then walked past farmers tilling their land. He remarked, “they have abandoned lasting life (chayei olam) and involve themselves instead with fleeting life (chayei sha’ah).”

MABUHAY

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Plant a Jewish people in a country that comes to a standstill on Yom Kippur; speaks the language of the Bible; moves to the rhythms of the Hebrew calendar; builds cities with the stones of its ancestors; produces Hebrew poetry and literature, Jewish scholarship and learning unmatched anywhere in the world – and you have continuity.

LEONARD CASSUTO

NEIL GILLMAN: If God is truly God, then God must be more powerful than death. There will come a time when death itself will be defeated.

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WAYNE JACKSON: You just got to accept what’s going on now. It’s reality. Some people will just have to mourn in silence, like everybody else around the country right now.

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GIDON ROTHSTEIN: For a man who passes away without children, for whatever reason, God provided a way to have one child. A willing brother—and, colloquially although not Biblically, another relative if no brother is available—can serve as the vehicle for God to arrange the genetics to allow the deceased a descendant to carry on his particular biological legacy.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

DAVID P. GOLDMAN: individual human existence looks forward to the continuation of the culture that nurtures, sustains, and transmits our contribution to future generations. Culture is the stuff out of which we weave the hope of immortality—not merely through genetic transmission but through inter-generational communication.

JONATHAN HENRY SACKS: You achieve immortality by being part of a covenant – a covenant with eternity itself, that is to say, a covenant with God. 

That is what Moses meant when he said, "It is not with you alone that I am making this covenant and oath, but with whoever stands with us here today before the Lord our God as well as those not with us here today" (Deut. 29: 13-14). 

And so Moses, the greatest leader we ever had, became immortal. Not by living forever. Not by building a tomb and temple to his glory. We don’t even know where he is buried. He didn’t even become immortal the way Aaron did, by seeing his children become his successors. He became immortal by making us his disciples.

MICHAEL KNOPF: Community is supposed to be covenantal, not transactional. Communities are made up of people committed to supporting each other and to the infrastructure and systems that facilitate communal well-being. While a member of an organization is primarily interested in what he or she is receiving for him or herself, a participant in a community, while not necessarily sacrificing his or her own needs, is simultaneously interested in the welfare of his or her neighbors and in the success of the community as a whole. 

Synagogues in our era will only flourish if they cease being transactional, service-providing organizations and become true covenantal communities. Changing terminology won’t itself accomplish this task. But then again, recall that when God set about creating the world, God chose to do so through words.

BARBARA JOAN STREISAND

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS: If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

STEPHEN JOSHUA SONDHEIM

HALINA PEABODY: They will do their best to carry our memories. We have given our pictures, our papers. They are there to make people understand what can happen if we are not vigilant. And in my family, the second and third generation is also working very hard to learn our stories. My granddaughter, for instance, says she will make a movie.

GEORGE GITTLEMAN: Judaism is all about memory. We are redeemed when we remember because it is only in memory that we have any clue about who we are and what we are here for. 

For us, memory is the tie that binds the chain of Jewish tradition from Avraham Avinu to the present. Memory is the glue that holds the pieces of our lives together in a meaningful way. 

Jews use our memories to navigate the seas of time. Memory, valuing and cultivating memory is one of our secrets of survival.

Mark Twain mused over how such a small, persecuted people could contribute so much to society and survive the vicissitudes of so much history. God knows the true story. Still, I bet our penchant for memory along with the enduring values embedded in our memories has something to do with why we are still around.

WIKIPEDIA: Banzai [ばんざい] is a traditional Japanese exclamation meaning "ten thousand years" of long life,,,

安倍 晋三

Avodah Zara 5a:13: the Jewish people would have become immortal had they not sinned with the Golden Calf.

DAVID H. AARON: Had Adam and Eve eaten of both trees in the center of the garden they would have been transformed into the equivalent of deities. But since they ate only of the Tree of Knowledge, they were left with but two-thirds of a god's characteristics. That is, we look like the gods (having been created in their image), and we have the ethical discernment of gods as a result of having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. However, having failed to grab the fruit of eternal life before being banished from Eden, we did not acquire immortality. 

Many of these details are shared with stories in other ancient cultures. For instance, Gilgamesh, King of Uruk (ancient Babylon), is also two-thirds god and one-third human (see Tablet I, line 46). Just as in the Genesis story, the missing third is immortality itself.