Please read the two texts and discuss in chevrutah:
1. What comes up for you when you contemplate death and dying?
2. In what ways do you avoid, resist, or deny your own mortality?
3. Why is it so hard to have these conversations?
Rava, while seated at the bedside of Rabbi Nachman, saw that he was dying. Rava said, "Promise me that you will show yourself to me in a dream after you die." He did so. Rava Asked him, "Did you suffer much while you died?" Rabbi Nachman replied, "as little as when you remove a hair from milk. But if the Holy One were to say to me, 'Go to that world and be as you were before,' I would not wish to do so because the fear of death is so great."
- Talmud, Mo'ed Katan 28a
God seals the decree against Moses and swears by the Ineffable Name that Moses will not enter the Promised Land.
Moses then utters more than fifteen hundred prayers. He draws a circle around himself and stands at the center and proclaims, “I will not move from this spot until the judgment against me is suspended.” God promptly orders every gate in heaven locked, lest Moses’ prayers find an opening.
The prayers are fruitless in the end, and when Moses sees this, he begs heaven and earth, the sun and the moon, the stars and the planets, the mountains and the rivers, and finally the sea itself to intercede for him, to no avail.
Finally God asks: “Why are you so aggrieved at your impending death?” And Moses answers: “I am afraid of the sword of the Angel of” “Death—of the pain of death itself.” God replies: “If that’s the reason, then don’t worry; I won’t deliver you to the Angel of Death.” But Moses still clings desperately to life. A few hours before his death, God says to him: “How long will you endeavor in vain to avert your death? You have only three hours to live. Make better use of them.” But Moses bargains on furiously. “Let me live on the wrong side of the Jordan,” he begs. “Let me live someplace else altogether. Let me live on as a beast of the field or a bird in the sky.” “Now you have only one hour,” God says. “Now you have only a few minutes.”
- "This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared," By Alan Lew