Painful and terrible as those days were, they were also holy. I felt as though I were sitting beside a woman in prolonged labor, struggling to bring a child into the world—a child who would rather have remained in the warm safety of its mother’s body. In a similar way, my father was struggling to return his soul to its Creator.

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Perhaps this is the meaning of dying: to give one’s whole self away.” These words of Heschel respond to his earlier formulation of the problem: “The problem is not how to mitigate the fear of death but how to conceive the meaning of death to which the meaning of life is related.”¹ According to tradition, the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) summons the faithful Jew to this very task: to love God with all one’s soul, i.e., even when God takes away one’s soul. In this way, a Jew’s death should express the same truth that his or her life embodied: giving one’s whole self away in grateful love to God.

Only one Jew has ever done this perfectly, but he did it on behalf of all other Jews, and, indeed, on behalf of all created things. In his case even birth involved the same “giving one’s whole self away” that he lived out daily in obedience to the Torah, and that he demonstrated most completely in his death as a martyr.

Because he truly gave his whole self away, without reservation, God raised him up to a new mode of life, and made him the instrument of Israel’s and the world’s future resurrection. But he also made him the one who enables us to live and die as he himself did—giving our whole selves away.

I will never be able to consider death in the same way again. It is not that my idea of death has changed, but that I have seen its face as never before. Its face is now the face of my father, who lived and died as one who gave himself away.

1. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 376-7.