We are completing the journey from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. These ten days are a meditation on what we do between birth and death: Rosh Hashanah is yom harat olam, the Day the World Is Born. And Yom Kippur is the day we rehearse our death by abstaining from life-affirming activities, and wearing white to represent a burial shroud. Between these two days, we confront the fragility of our lives – and reexamine how we want to journey across the length of our days.
Read MoreOn a single day last week, we were stunned by news of the Charlie Helbo attack in Paris and a bomb going off at an NAACP office in Colorado. At the same time, this day was no different than any other: our media regularly saturates us with stories of death and violence. In her prophetic book All About Love, bell hooks describes this phenomena as a symptom of America’s death-obsessed culture. She says, “It may very well be that…the constant spectacles of dying we watch on television screens daily, is one way our culture tries to still that fear [of death], to conquer it, to make us comfortable.” Our culture’s efforts to comfort us and conquer our dread depict deaths that are sudden, faceless, and violent. This ultimately deepens our anxiety about death.
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