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Jewish World Review August 21, 2008 / 20 Menachem-Av 5768 Lessons from the Beyond
By
Jonathan Rosenblum
We owe Randy Pausch (of the "Last lecture" fame) and long-time JWR contributor Tony Snow an immense debt of gratitude for their courage, eloquence, and examples of how living well is the best preparation for death. For Jews, the debt will be even greater if they spur us to examine our own tradition concerning death and dying
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Never have the boundaries between the private and public been so blurred.
Agonizing deaths from cancer used to occur off-stage. No longer.
In some cases, at least, that blurring of lines has been salutary. Three
million viewers have watched Randy Pausch's appropriately named, "The Last
Lecture" delivered to a packed auditorium at Carnegie-Mellon University,
after the 47-year-old professor (and everyone in the audience) knew that he
had only a few months to live. One watches transfixed by the knowledge that
someone so alive, so exuberant will soon be dead. Not once in the nearly
hour and a half lecture does he lapse, even momentarily, into anything
resembling self-pity.
He convinces us that he would not trade his life, no matter how truncated,
for any other. With the exception of playing in the NFL, he has realized
every one of his childhood dreams — winning lots of stuffed animals in
amusement parks, meeting Captain Kirk of Star Trek, being an Imagineer at
Disney World. (After The Last Lecture became famous, he even got to
scrimmage with the Pittsburgh Steelers.)
He will not live to see his greatest contribution to mankind — software
programs that will allow millions to learn difficult material in such a fun
manner that they will not even know they they are learning — in mass
production. But he is cool with that: Like Moses, he offers, he can see the
promised land, even if he will not enter it.
In the Jewish tradition, we wish ourselves and others "length of days and
years." The former refers to the amount of living packed into each day. And
by that standard, Randy Pausch lived a very long life.
Religious faith is one of the subjects that Pausch explicitly excluded from
The Last Lecture. The only deathbed conversion to which he would admit was
to Macintosh. Much of what he has to impart, of course, would make good
sermon material. The biggest thrill of a popular ten-year course, in which
student teams create virtual realities was helping students experience the
joy of making others happy. If he could give one piece of advice, it would
be: Tell the truth — at all times." His summary of his life lessons: If you
do the right thing, good things have a way of happening (though not
necessarily in the way you expect).
UNLIKE PAUSCH, Tony Snow Jr., President Bush's former press secretary and long time JWR contributor, who
passed away recently from colon cancer at 53, left no final speech. But he
did address the "unique gift" of a life-threatening illness several times in
his syndicated column — and from the point of view of a man of faith.
Winston Churchill once observed that there is nothing that quite sharpens
one's perceptions so much as being shot at without effect. The heightened
perception of a bullet whizzing past one's head is momentary; that of
cancer, however, lasts at least five years until remission is assured. In
the meantime, Snow wrote, "The mere thought of death somehow makes every
blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense."
He relished the clarity he had been granted, "the field of vision others
don't have [about] the mystical power of love, . . . the gravitational pull
of faith, . . . the power of hope and limits of fear, [and] a firm set of
convictions about what really matters and what does not." He came to see the
prospect of death as an opportunity to "fight for the things that give life
its richness, meaning and joy."
As they confronted death, Pausch and Snow both felt a strong need to share
some of the lessons they had gleaned from the process of dying. Pausch
confided that the theme of his talk "realizing your dreams" was really an
example of what he called "head fake" learning. His real subject: How to
live your life. For his part, Snow rejoiced in the "street credibility" he
had gained when it comes to counseling cancer patients. He wrote of his
obligation to share the insights he had gained with others, "the most
important of which is: There are things far worse than illness — for
instance, soullessness."
While the approach of death might be expected to increase self-involvement,
the lesson both men drew was the opposite. "Focus on others," said Pausch;
"Life does not revolve around us. It envelopes us," wrote Snow. They were
clear about the immense amount of good that lies within most people. Snow
discovered in sickness how much "people want to do good for others; they
just need excuses." And one of Pausch's cardinal rules was: "Wait long
enough, and people will both surprise and impress you."
Both achieved much in the short span of years allotted to them, but in the
end it was the relationships made that counted most — friends, mentors, and,
above all, family. Pausch concluded his lecture by revealing his second
"head fake" — "This wasn't for you; it was for my kids" — as the names of
his three children appeared on a blackened overhead screen.
"We count our hardships, but not our blessings, Snow wrote in one column.
And chief among those was the love of his wife and children.
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Tony Snow's reflections on dying through William
Kristol's eulogy in The New York Times. The Christian Snow had caused the
Jewish Kristol to question his life-time assumption that melancholy and
existential angst are the hallmarks of intellectual depth. "Could it be that
a stance of faith-based optimism is in fact superior to one of worldly
pessimism or sophisticated fatalism?" Kristol wondered.
And I wondered, with sadness, whether Kristol had ever been exposed to the
riches of his own tradition on the challenges faced by Randy Pausch and Tony
Snow — what the Rabbis called "accepting afflictions with love."
Had he read Making Sense of Suffering , a book version of classes given by
Rabbi Yitzchak Kirzner, after he had "earned" the right to speak on the
subject by being diagnosed with terminal cancer in his early '40s? Could he
imagine a young woman who did not even know she was Jewish until her early
'20s, but who as she lay dying, surrounded by her husband and young
children, less than twenty years later could say, "I have to really work on
my Fear of G-d because I'm so overwhelmed by His love"? Had we witnessed the
quiet strength of someone stricken with the dread disease still struggling
to make it to the early morning minyan on time, while hiding his plight from
others?
A woman once told Rabbi Noach Weinberg, the founder of Aish Hatorah, about a
new group for strengthening the family. One of their main ideas was a day
every week, in which the family spent time together, cut off from external
distractions like TV, cellphones, and internet. Another was regular periods
of sexual abstinence between husbands and wives to keep the fires of passion
stoked, while forcing the couple to relate on other levels as well. "Why
couldn't Judaism have something like that?" she asked the dumbfounded rabbi.
We owe Randy Pausch and Tony Snow an immense debt of gratitude for their
courage, eloquence, and examples of how living well is the best preparation
for death. The debt will be even greater if they spur Jews to examine their
own tradition concerning death and dying.
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JWR contributor Jonathan Rosenblum is founder of Jewish Media Resources and a widely-read columnist for the Jerusalem Post's domestic and international editions and for the Hebrew daily Maariv. He is also a respected commentator on Israeli politics, society, culture and the Israeli legal system, who speaks frequently on these topics in the United States, Europe, and Israel. His articles appear regularly in numerous Jewish periodicals in the United States and Israel. Rosenblum is the author of seven biographies of major modern Jewish figures. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School. Rosenblum lives in Jerusalem with his wife and eight children.
© 2008, Jonathan Rosenblum | ||||||||||
