In Judaism, we believe that to save one life is equal to saving the world. We believe that because each person is in the image of God (whatever you believe God is) and is therefore worth the life of the whole world.
After 9/11, National Public Radio, Morning Edition I guess, started doing obituaries every morning in the last few minutes of the hour. They were usually short but meaningful biographies of someone who died in the attacks. Sometimes it was about someone who was in the one of the buildings hit by the planes. Sometimes it was about someone at the pentagon, or a first responder or even someone who died of injuries later.
They ran these stories for a year. In Judaism, we are obligated to mourn the people whom we loved and who died for eleven months. And then we have an “unveiling”, which can be graveside or not, that marks the end of the mourning period. We are obligated to put down our mourning rituals that we have practiced for almost a year and move on with living our lives, not because we are “over” our loss but because we owe it to the person we loved, to the people around us, to be grateful for life. If we are truly grateful, we show it by living fully and with as much joy and passion and commitment as we can. It will be hard, because we still feel sad and hurt and so much loss sometimes it is painful just to breathe. But we have to live and love life, for as long as we have it.
So, every day, for almost a year, I would drive to work and wait in my car until the day’s obituary came on the radio. I would listen to them tell the story of another person’s life and I would cry, for a few minutes, until I could pull myself together and go inside. I cried because every story was about someone who mattered to someone else. There was no one who died who did not make a difference in the life of someone else. Every single person had something unique and wonderful and funny and good to contribute to the world. And even though I was really sad that the person’s life was over, I felt so grateful that they had lived, for as long as they did. They were missed because each person is worth the life of the whole world.
