QUOTE A DAY - December 30, 2014

Greetings fellow quote lovers:

Today we break from a few quotations to quote an entire, short article from the great rabbi, Abraham Joshua Hershel. He died in 1972 and was not just a towering figure in theology, but the civil rights movement. One sentence is as quotable as the next. Enjoy and have a happy and healthy new year!

Best,
JA

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*---- Quote For The Week ----*
If life is a pilgrimage, death is an arrival, a celebration. The last word should be neither craving nor bitterness, but peace, gratitude.

We have been given so much. Why is the outcome of our lives, the sum of our achievements so little? Our embarrassment is like an abyss. Whatever we give away is so much less than what we receive. Perhaps this is the meaning of dying: to give one's whole self away.

Afterlife must be earned while we are here. It does not come out of nothing: it is an ingathering, the harvest of eternal moments achieved while on earth.

Unless we cultivate sensitivity to the glory while here, unless we learn how to experience a foretaste of heaven while on earth, what can there be in store for us in the life to come? The seed of life eternal is planted within us here and now. But a seed is wasted when placed on stone, into souls that die while the body is still alive.

The greatest problem is not how to continue to live forever but how to exalt existence. The cry for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave.

Our greatest problem is not how to continue but how to return. Ma aseev l'Adonai kol tag-mulohee alay. How can I repay unto the Lord all His bountiful dealings with me? asks the Psalmist When life is an answer, death is a homecoming.

This is the meaning of existence: to reconcile liberty with service, the passing with the lasting, to weave the threads of temporality into the fabric of eternity. The deepest wisdom man can attain is to know that his destiny is to aid, to serve. We have to conquer in order to succumb; we have to acquire in order to give away; we have to triumph in order to be overwhelmed. The aspiration is to obtain; the perfection is to dispense. This is the meaning of death: the ultimate self-dedication to the divine. Death so understood will not be distorted by the craving for immortality, for the act of giving away is reciprocity on man's part for God's gift of life. For the pious man, it is a privilege to die.

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