Good Life Project - Rabbi Steve Leder | How to Live What Matters

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

With everything going on in the world recently, we've likely all thought to ourselves at some point, "Is humanity lost?" You are not alone if the news makes you feel like everything is hopeless, and it's fair to wonder if collective and individual hope in empathy, compassion, and humanity will ever be restored. As we move forward past the darkest days of the COVID-19 outbreak, many people are still searching for hope, inspiration, and answers to some big questions like: How do you regain access to empathy? Or what truly matters in life in the end? And I can't think of a better person to explore these questions with than my guest today, Rabbi Steve Leder. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and was ordained at Hebrew Union College, and he currently serves as the Senior Rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. He's also a writer and the author of several critically acclaimed books, including his best-seller, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us, and his latest book, For You When I'm Gone: 12 Essential Questions to Tell a Life Story. His compassionate voice and words of wisdom have earned Rabbi Leder recognition as one of Newsweek Magazine's ten most influential rabbis in America — twice. In this revealing conversation, we explore his views on humanity, death, religion, and what makes a good life well-lived.Rabbi Leder shares his interesting thoughts on why people leave the church, what he believes to be the true single source of evil, and how we can all get back to living in alignment with our values and also how to create a powerful curation of beliefs and stories to share with others he calls your ethical will. There are so many good nuggets to take away from this conversation, so I hope you're in a position to jot down Rabbi Leder's words of wisdom today.You can find Rabbi Steve at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode you'll also love the conversations we had with Bishop Michael Curry about the role of love in faith and life.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book Sparked | My New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Am I living in alignment with all these things I say I believe in and that I say are important? Are my professed values and my lived values the same? So with everything going on in the world recently, we have likely all thought to ourselves at some point, is humanity just lost? You're not alone if the news makes you feel everything is a bit hopeless. And it's fair to wonder if collective and individual hope and empathy, compassion and humanity will ever be restored. And as we move forward past the darkest days of COVID-19, many people are still searching for that hope and inspiration and answers to some big questions like how do you gain

access to empathy or what truly matters in life in the end? And I can't think of a better person to explore these questions with than my guest today, Rabbi Steve Leder. He's a graduate of Northwestern University, was ordained at Hebrew Union College, and currently serves as the senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. He's also a writer and the author of several critically acclaimed books, including his bestseller, More Beautiful Than Before, How Suffering Transforms Us, and his latest book, For You When I'm Gone, 12 Essential Questions to Tell a Life Story. And his compassionate voice and words of wisdom have

earned Rabbi Leder recognition as one of Newsweek Magazine's 10 most influential rabbis in America, twice by the way, in this revealing conversation. We explore his views on humanity, on death, on religion, and what makes a good life well lived. people leave church and really all forms of traditional faith these days, what he believes to be the true single source of evil and how we can all get back to living in alignment with our values, and also how to create a powerful curation of beliefs and stories to share with others he calls an ethical will. There are so many good nuggets to take away from this conversation, so I hope you're in a position to jot down Rabbi Leder's words of wisdom today. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him them y'all need a pilot flight risk i'm curious what your experience has been like have you had any change in sort of a sense of home over the last couple years i've had a deeper appreciation for home right um i'm a guy who really never got to spend as much time at home as he would have liked, you know, someone in my position with a synagogue, the size of mine, you know, I've worked other than being on vacation. I've worked every weekend of my adult life.

And including when I was newly married, including when I had young children. And I always longed to be home, you know, because the truth is I'm a fairly public person. I have a public persona, but I'm actually a very private person with a very tight little family, you know, because outside of that, everyone that I am friends with, socialize with, et cetera, they're also members of my synagogue or community. And so there's a degree of intimacy that can never be achieved. So we have this tight little family and I appreciated it even more. I appreciated literally my physical home even more. This very seat I'm sitting in, I've spent two and a half years right here. And it means a lot to me. I just planted my flower garden last weekend. So I'm working as much or more than I ever have, but I'm home. And even just being able to step out of my study door and see my wife for five minutes in between one thing and the next is, it's a big change for me. And also this might

sound odd, but just dressing comfortably is a new phenomenon for me. Not shaving every day. This is an aspect of home that I rarely got to enjoy. You know, I have a kind of a nice shirt on today. By the way, no disrespect, but it wasn't for you. Because I had to go. I went to the hospital today to visit a young woman who's dying. But generally speaking, no one cares anymore. And it's much more human and humane. There's an intimacy in seeing people's homes, where they live, what they look without their hair dyed and all of that. So for me,

it's been a deeper sense of gratitude for home and all that home means. Our son moved in with us when the pandemic started. He's going to be 33 next month. And we never would have had that. I mean, we had dinner with our 31-year-old then son almost every night for two years. And his girlfriend was here four or five nights a week. And so we got to know her better in a couple of years than I think we would have in a decade under normal circumstances. So, look, a lot of people feel guilty talking about the upside of this terrible downside. I don't, because, you know, I often say, if you have to

go through hell, don't come out empty handed. And there's, you know, and I intend not to come out of this thing empty handed. Yeah. You know, it's such an interesting point because I've heard that also, whether, you know, it's a little passing moment of joy, whether it's this enduring change where they've started to wake up to so much of what's good or right around them that maybe they've been checked out of. There's a sense of shared, wow, there is something here that allows me access to joy. But at the same time, there tends to be this sense of, but should I be feeling this at this moment? There's almost a latent shame that people have shared with me where they don't want to talk about it publicly because they feel like they shouldn't be feeling that. There's some spectator's guilt in all of this.

Because we do witness, I've, by the way, for a living, as you know, from my books, I witness suffering all the time. So I've had to learn how to integrate that sort of spectator guilt and reframe it as gratitude. But a lot of people don't even realize what they're feeling is what I call spectator's guilt. I don't know if that's a real term or not, but it should be. I think we all feel it with Ukraine right now. And so, you know, there's a lot to be said for it if it enables you to count your blessings. And you know, if you want to get wonky for a second. Let's do it. So there's this theological concept called via negationis, by way of the negative. It's a Middle Ages theology, a way of understanding God by determining what God is not. That by way of the negative, by removing, you actually reveal something. So that was always there. So for example, the way to think about this most simply is if you think about any beautiful marble statue you've ever seen in any museum. It began as a solid block of marble, and it took a skilled artist, chip by chip by chip, removing everything that wasn't beautiful, everything that wasn't that statue,

to reveal that beauty that was always within that marble, but could only be revealed by taking away. And the pandemic, the lockdown, in the taking away of being in traffic, wearing a suit and tie, caring so much about how you look, driving and shopping, driving and shopping, driving and shopping, right? Eating out, eating out, eating out, reservation, valet parking, where are we going to... When all of that got stripped away, it created a very beautiful kind of essentialism about our lives. Assuming, of course... Now, by the way, I am in no way, Jonathan, saying that any of this beauty was worth the cost, right? A million dead in our country, and for every person who died, nine people intimately affected by that death.

So I'm not saying it's worth it, but I am saying neither is it worthless. So this stripping away, this taking away, and death does this too for those of us who grieve, and that's all of us. It creates a kind of essentialism in our life that's very beautiful, despite the pain and despite the very expensive education required to see the world in that way. Yeah, so powerful. As you were sharing, I wasn't familiar with that notion of sort of like exploring, defining God through the negatives. But what immediately came to mind as you were sharing that was the more Eastern-based tradition, the notion of a jivanmukti, like Sanskrit, which translates roughly to liberated being.

And it's not transformed being. It works on the assumption that who we aspire to become, like our truest self, we don't turn into that. We reveal it. It's appealing away to see the essence rather than something that's out there or that we change into. I feel like there's a relationship between those two ideas. picture of food as if this external material reality is an internal life. It's not a sin, it's a mistake, like trying to eat a picture of food, like trying to eat the menu, right? And it's really the non-material that nourishes us. And of course, we all have to work for a living and I didn't take a vow of poverty. I like money as much as the next guy. I'm not disparaging wealth in favor of asceticism, but what I'm saying is that

the most valuable things you really can't buy with money. Yeah. I always feel like it's the feeling that we're going after, not the thing, but we confuse the object with the experience. It's really idolatry. It's mistaking the symbol for, for the value, right? It's like people who say, you know, flag burning should be a crime. Well, then you don't, then you have idolized, you've turned the flag and the flag into an idol. You, you don't really know what the, what the flag stands for, which is free speech and freedom, including freedom to burn the flag. Right. And I'm not a flag burner, but this is a very stark example, I think, that makes it pretty clear that you've confused the symbol for what it represents.

Yeah. And when we center that and we make it a part of our identity and definition of success, then we end up devoting so many of our lives, so much of it, just to attaining the symbol and then wondering why we don't feel the way we want to feel. Yeah. And you know what else? I obviously spend a lot of time in cemeteries. One of the things that never ceases to impress me and align me and center me is that despite the fact that we are all unique individuals and we lead unique lives, if you walk through a cemetery and you look at the headstones, there's a remarkable uniformity of inscription. They almost all say the very same thing. I mean, there are some outliers,

some of them funny, but generally speaking, what do they all say? Because when you have to distill a person's life, a purpose, essence down to 15 characters per line and four lines total, again, you're engaged in this stripping away. What didn't matter? What did not define her? What did not really matter to her? You're again doing this via negationis. And what do they all say? Loving wife, mother, grandmother, friend. Not your zip code, not your net worth, not your grandchildren's GPAs, nothing. Not your resume, nothing. It just comes down to that tiny handful. And do any of us really have more

than a handful of relationships that matter? And of course, the tragedy is that so many people live out of alignment with that. I did myself. Yeah. I would imagine the vast majority of us do, you know, unless and until something happens. That's right. And that's a powerful part of death. Right. That is the thing. We're such an interesting moment as we have this conversation. You know, like these are not new issues. These are not new curiosities.

These have been with us for time immortal. But as we have this conversation, we're in a moment in history, a moment in time where these are deeply human questions and they require us to see the humanity both in ourselves and in others. And yet I feel like there is so much struggle. We're in this moment where so many of us have seemed to have lost the ability to see the humanity both in ourselves and in others. And then we wonder why we're all suffering so much. If you were to ask me, what is the single source of evil, real evil? It is the objectification of the other. You know, I don't know when this episode is going to air, but I do know when we're recording

it, which is in the middle of Passover. And most of your listeners know the story, the narrative, the liberation narrative of the Bible, and about the 10 plagues, the ninth of which was the plague of darkness. And the sages of the Talmud ask a really interesting question, which is, how dark was it? What is the nature? What was the nature of that darkness? Was it just a 24-hour night or was it something else? And the answer they give is it was so dark that the ancient Israelites and the Egyptians could no longer see the humanity in each other. And then the Hebrew is mitachtav, that they couldn't get up from their own place. They couldn't empathize. They couldn't see the world through another's eyes. And I thought of this again when George Floyd was murdered in

Minneapolis, which is where I grew up. He was murdered about three blocks from my father's business. And the cafe where I had breakfast every Saturday morning with my dad during my childhood, because I went to work with him on Saturdays, was burned to the ground. And then the riots broke out. And I will tell you the moment, the moment for me that proved power of empathy and the danger of objectification was there was a riot in Flint, Michigan. There was a line of protesters pushing ever closer to a line of police officers. And you could feel that this is going to be very ugly. And one of the police officers, all of them dressed in full riot gear, took off his helmet and face shield and all of that armor and looked at the

protesters and said, what do you want? And then they got down and held hands and prayed together. And it was the moment he removed that helmet and they saw each other as human beings, when they could no longer objectify each other, the barometric pressure of the moment changed completely. Yeah, so powerful. sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later

required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlbergberg you know what the difference between me and you is you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk yeah and the word you keep surfacing is this word empathy which is an interesting word because it is

at the center of this. And yet so many conversations I've had, I would imagine you in some form or shape or another, people are asking the question, how do I, I feel like I've lost the empathy. How do I regain access to empathy? How do I rekindle empathy when my perception is that will take substantial effort. And I am just so empty already. Like I don't have it to give even if I want to. And I often wonder in response, I'm curious what your thoughts are. I wonder in response, I often want to hear something that or when I hear myself thinking that to myself, you know, but what about the energy that I'm giving to creating a shield that separates me from that? Like,

what if we just reallocated that? Yeah. I think that empathy is a much more gratifying experience ultimately than objectification and isolation. I'll tell you how I do it because I have people with problems in front of me all day long. So the way that I do this, and I have people who mistreat me, like we all do, the talking to I give myself is, first of all, where is this flaw in me? When have I been in that other person's shoes one way or another? When have I used words to wound? When have I been out of alignment with my professed values? When have I been afraid? When have I been anxious? So I first start with, where is all of this in me? Because there is a great commonality to the human experience. We are all 99.8% genetically identical. If you prick us, we all bleed. So that's my first question. It's a question of myself before I get so judgmental and walled off and where am I in all of this? all meet people in the second chapter of their lives. We don't know what happened in the first

chapter. And we don't know what will happen in the third chapter. And there's always something in that first chapter that explains a person's more difficult or negative traits. But we don't know what it is. And we all have a first chapter in our own lives, of course. And these two things, which I guess in a way are tricks I play on myself or motivational thoughts I force myself to embrace, they really help. I'll give you another one. I learned this from a hospital chaplain 35 years ago. He said when he goes into the room in the hospital of an elderly patient, He looks at them and tries to imagine what they looked like when they were 25, 30 years old, dancing at their wedding, long hair flowing, right? Live, beautiful. Then he relates. Yeah, it's so powerful. It's interesting. I

just had this wonderful conversation with Sabine Selassie, the Buddhist insight meditation teacher. And we were talking about something very similar. And she shared how there's a common practice in that tradition, metta, or loving kindness, where you're offering to essentially to pray for, you're offering love and kindness and well wishes for a progression of people that starts with you and then moves eventually to somebody who you find deeply offensive or is very estranged from you, may even be causing you harm. And it's a very similar process. And she was describing to me, like there was a window where she was just really, really upset by a particular person who was high profile in politics. And she went through a similar process saying, well, let me place myself in that person's body and life when they were five years old. And then like, at this point, would I have been any different?

Chapter one. Had I gone through all of those identical experiences and all that conditioning? She also shared this wonderful quote from Krishnamurti. You think you're thinking your thoughts, you're not. You're thinking the culture's thoughts, which? We're so immersed in our own realities that we're really unaware of our own realities. And this is where I think the idea of loss and pain comes in as the great teacher, because when does a fish discover water? When it's yanked out of it at the end of a hook, it's thrashing and wiggling and gasping for air on the shore. That's when a fish discovers water, the preciousness of it, the sustenance of it, the beauty of it. And it requires, unfortunately, some kind of disruption to wake us up. When you think about, you know, we're talking about big questions. We're talking about big questions. We're talking about hard questions.

We're talking about the types of things that very often for generations, people have turned to some form of spirituality or faith to help understand, to help answer, to be in community as they grapple with. And yet over the last generation, we've seen this large scale fleeing of faith. And it seems like, because I also see so much overlap in so many different traditions when you really strip them down to their essence and you sort of like take a lot of the ego interpretation out of them, like the fundamentals, you know, you've got beautiful ethics and teachings. You've got a teacher, hopefully, who's similarly ethically oriented in the community. And the language is different in every tradition, but those three elements are always there and they're so helpful, but people are running from

it. And a sense of oneness, of homeless. So here's my curiosity. At a moment like this, and in the last decade or two decades of our history, do you have a sense for why people would be walking away from these ideas when it seems like there was so much wisdom contained within them? I do. And neither you nor I are going to be proud of what I'm about to say. For me, in my opinion, the great enemy of organized religion, let's call it that. When people say to me, I'm spiritual, but I don't believe in organized religion. My answer is, well, what would you prefer? Disorganized religion?

You know, would you prefer I don't return your phone call and the doors are locked when you show up? I mean, what does that even mean? You know, and religion has been framed as a divider rather than a uniter. You know, and people say, well, religion is the cause of evil. Not really. Extremism is the problem. And extremist Judaism, extremist Islam, extremist Christianity is not Judaism. It is not Islam and it is not Christianity. It is its own religion called extremism.

And it's bloody and it's dangerous. But it is not consistent with our faith. Now, all of that being said, all the ways that religion gets a bad rap. By the way, if you think about the three most murderous regimes of the 20th century, they were the three that outlawed religion. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, each of whom murdered upwards of 20 million people. So don't tell me that religion is the problem, right? If you were walking down a dark alley in the middle of the night and you saw three people coming at you, you'd be afraid. But if you knew they had just left Bible study and

were walking towards you, you wouldn't be afraid. So this argument that religion is violent, etc., it doesn't hold water. But what does? What is the problem? Boredom. Boredom is the enemy of religion in America because people show up and very often the official representative of that faith has little or nothing to say. They regurgitate the news. They pretend you can't read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or watch CNN or Fox all by yourself. You can. And they don't inspire. I've been to so many churches and synagogues and sat there and said to myself, I'd rather be in a spin class right now.

That's the real problem. The seminaries are failing in their mission. And my Christian friends and my one friend who is the head of a Muslim seminary, we all talk about this. The seminaries are failing. They're failing to recruit the right people. They're failing to develop the right people. And what you have then are people who don't come back twice because the first experience wasn't very good. It's the same reason we changed the channel when we're watching television. And that's a problem, big problem. And I can only speak for the Jewish seminaries. And part of the problem also is our acceptance in America. Like smart Jewish kids now, they can run hedge funds, they can make movies, they can get into any law school or medical school. That wasn't true 100 years ago. And so the world is wide open, which is beautiful, but also a challenge. But generally speaking, the great enemy is boredom.

Yeah, not what I was expecting you might offer. But interesting. I mean, really interesting to think about. It also occurs to me that where people let in line that you offered up, I'm spiritual but not religious or not attracted to traditional religion. is Eastern traditions, the more contemplative traditions, the more meditative traditions that, interestingly enough, in my experience, offer fewer answers, fewer sort of like codified rules to live by. And so it's interesting to me that in a time where normally you would think people would move to a tradition which says things are hard, but I'm going to give you the rules to walk through each day and have

some level of baseline certainty so you can breathe. People are moving to traditions that actually have far less structure, which is fascinating to me. And I've tried to wrap my head around that. Well, first, there are a lot of reasons for this. First of all, the big critique of Judaism was always that it was a religion of deed, not creed. I think that's accurate. I just don't think it's a negative. I think it's a positive. Look, behave this way and then you will understand. This is a very non-Western way of thinking. You know, we all want to read the contract before we sign it. And Judaism says, sign the contract, live by these rules, and then you will understand. I can't give you a book to explain the joy of the Sabbath and the peace it brings. Celebrate the Sabbath four, five, six weeks in a row.

Then you'll understand. So it's a kind of counterintuitive approach in modern society, certainly in modern American society. And the crazy thing is everyone, I mean, who liked their first beer really? Or who enjoyed their first game of tennis? You know, things really are an acquired taste. Things take time. They're not easy. And we want easy. And I agree with you that these rules, which we call Meets Vote, are so important, especially now. Why? Because, look, I could loosen my grip a little and say, okay, we can rely on American values to perpetuate the best of Western civilization. If we lived in the America of, you know, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln, you name it, right?

But we don't. Our symbolic exemplars today are the Kardashians. It's not enough. But again, I think if we're, I know I sound like sort of a grumpy old man right now, but I really do believe that virtually every noble idea in Western civilization is in the Bible. People just don't know it. And, you know, love your neighbor as yourself. Welcome the stranger. Protect the widow, the orphan, the poor. Honor your parents. You know, visit the sick. Give back. It's not an option. Justice, justice you shall pursue, right? Observe the Sabbath because if you work seven days a week your whole life, you're just a rich slave.

You know, all of these things are rooted in Bible, but you wouldn't know it stepping into most synagogues and churches. You just get yelled at or you get the news regurgitated. And that's a real problem. And it's heartbreaking because it's all there. It's like standing knee deep in a river and just dying of thirst. It's all there. And all I can do, there's this Buddhist teaching, which I love, which is tend the part of the garden you can reach. My decision through all of this for myself, my career, my point of view is to just tend the part of the garden I can reach. I'm trying to create the most beautiful community I can create. I can't fix the seminaries. I certainly can't fix non-Jewish seminaries.

I can write, I can preach, I can teach, and I can comfort. And that's a lot. That's the part of the garden that I can read. Yeah. I mean, also, what a powerful idea for those who are also just sitting in their homes, looking at the state of the world and thinking to themselves, this is so big. It's so upsetting. It's so distressing.

It's horrifying. But it's so big, I cannot conceive of me being able to in any way, shape or form make a dent in that universe. So I'm just going to kind of sit here paralyzed rather than saying, well, what, what is the garden I contend? Exactly. And otherwise your other alternative is spectator's guilt. Right. And then, and that's, that's not any way to live. You know, we should never remain indifferent. And, you know, never again. It doesn't really mean that we can prevent evil people from doing evil things. It means let's not just stand there and watch it happen again.

That's what it means, right? These sins of omission are important to think about. And you know, the other thing that occurred to me while we were just talking is a lot of people who say, well, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious, et cetera, or I don't believe in God. What they're really saying is more of a psycholinguistic challenge than a spiritual challenge. Because I always ask such a person, I don't care if it's a 12-year-old who doesn't want to have his bar mitzvah or a 50-year-old whose husband just died. When they say, I don't believe in God, I say, well, what do you believe in? And every time, Jonathan, every time they go on to describe a very deeply held spiritual perspective, what they're uncomfortable with is the language around God. Because, and this is particularly difficult for Jews, because when we talk about God in English, we feel like we sound

like evangelical Christians. If I say God is love in Hebrew, I mean, everybody's going, oh, that's so beautiful. Yes, rabbi. If I got up there one Saturday morning and said, started my sermon with brothers and sisters, let us pray, or God love. People would cringe. What's happened to the rabbi? Born again. So I don't care what words you use. Get rid of the word God, because what do people say? Well, I believe in humanity or I thesis on Einstein and the way part of it was the way in which his unified field theory was similar to monotheism. That all is one, that there's a single unifying principle to all of existence. I don't care if you call that God or the unified field theory or that we're all 99.8% identical genetically. I don't care what you call it. I don't care if you call this a cup or a mug or a vessel or a coffee cup. We're all talking about the same thing.

And I think once we can get people to that realization, it opens a lot of doors. Yeah, it's such an interesting reframe. And if it's a reframe that invites more people into the conversation, more the better. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. that invites more people into the conversation. More the better. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Among the various traditions is something that you focused in in this new book of yours. And it's been interesting because the last few books that you have committed to have really been focusing a lot on what happens towards the end. You know,

how do we step into that? How do people process it when somebody, when they're the survivors and discussing this, which most people run from, like they have no interest in having that conversation. And yet it's, it is the one guarantee we're all made from the time we arrive. This new book introduces something that I had not been familiar with, but that's deeply interesting to me. And God willing, I have a lot of time ahead of me. But the questions that are part of it are questions that I'm visiting in my own life on a pretty regular basis. Talk to me about this notion of the ethical will. What is it and where does the idea actually come from? The book is called For You When I Am Gone, 12 Essential Questions to Tell a Life Story.

So almost everyone at a certain age has an estate plan, has a will, has something that bequeaths their stuff to their loved ones for after they're gone. Their money, their paperweight collection, their ballpoint, their, you know, ink pen collection, whatever the hell people amass in life. We've all done that and we should. But what I have found in sitting with well over a thousand families to talk about their loved one, to prepare them for the funeral and to prepare myself to talk about their loved one, to prepare them for the funeral and to prepare myself to write a eulogy, to tell the story, is that it's not a person's stuff that matters. It's not what people need. It's not what they miss. It's not what they want. So Jews since the 11th century have been creating a parallel document to their estate plan or material

will called an ethical will. Now, this originally started in 11th century Italy and France. It originally began as a letter written from father to son, telling his son the life lessons the father had learned and bequeathing to the son the values and beliefs the father hoped the son would inherit from him. Some people call this a legacy letter. Jews have always called it an ethical will. It's a little confusing because you think about, oh, he must mean a material will done ethically so everybody gets a fair share or whatever, but that's not it at all. So what I did was I came up with 12 questions, and I'll tell you how in a moment, that each of us should ask ourselves and answer honestly. And at the end of doing that, each of us will have all the raw material we need to create that ethical will for our loved ones when we're gone. So I came up, I sent these

questions in the book proposal to my editor, and she said, how long did it take you to come up with these questions? I said, about 15 minutes. She was like, what? I said, I've been asking these questions in this order for 35 years when I'm trying to understand the truth of a person's life in order to create the eulogy. I used to teach homiletics in the seminary here in Los Angeles. Homiletics is a fancy word for sermons, wedding addresses, and eulogies. Preaching a homily. When we got to writing eulogies, the first thing I would teach these young seminarians was an obituary tells you the facts of a person's life.

A eulogy tells you the facts of a person's life. A eulogy tells you the truths of a person's life. And the truth of our lives is much more important than the facts of our lives. The fact that I was born on June 3rd, 1960, it doesn't tell you that much about me. But when you ask what was his biggest, most regretful mistake and how did he move past it? What did love mean to her? Did she ever have to cut anyone out of her life? Who was it and why? What brought him joy? These kinds of things start to reveal the truth of a person's life and enable us to articulate and pass those truths on to the people we love. I can tell you, I don't miss a single material thing about my dad.

But boy, do I miss his wisdom and his laughter. And it goes right back to what we were saying, you know, about headstones, this essentialism. So the book has these 12 questions. I write an essay about each of them. And then I invited about 40 other people to do the same and then curated their responses. And by the way, an amazing spectrum of humanity, young, old, wealthy, middle class, working class, poor, Asian, black, white, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, you name it, celebrities and people who clean up adult diapers in a nursing home. So I wanted that array, straight, gay, bi, were all in this book, answering these questions about the truths of our life.

And it was a very powerful experience for me to write it. And I'll tell you what's interesting too, is my previous book, The Beauty of What Remains, I published my ethical will to my children in that book. And almost every single non-Jewish podcast host, TV host, journalist, they all asked about it. Like you just did. I'd never heard of this. What is this? I want to do that. And that's really what led me to the idea to make this the next book.

Because it seems to be news to a lot of people, even though for some of us, it's been around for a thousand years. And it did evolve from father to son letters to women being involved in it and beyond just immediate family and children. So it's a pretty, pretty powerful experience. And now, is this for our loved ones when we're gone? Yes. But what else is it for? When you ask yourself these questions and you write the answers, you then have an opportunity to ask the most important question we can ask of ourselves while living, which is, am I living in alignment with all these things I say I believe in and that

I say are important? Are my professed values and my lived values the same? And if not, I need to make an adjustment because living out of alignment, that dissonance is very painful. Yeah. I mean, that dissonance goes straight to, well, actually the first question, the first prompt that you tee up, the first of the 12, which focuses in on the notion of regret. That's right. You know, and I would imagine that so much of the things that in our last days we regret are those profound misalignments between what matters deeply to us and the choices we made and lived on a daily basis. And the choices we didn't make.

I have found that most people at the end of life don't regret as deeply the things they did as much as the things they didn't do, the things they didn't say, the opportunities they didn't grasp. Most of us learn to forgive ourselves for our mistakes, but it's hard to let go of a missed opportunity that you can never have back.

It's hard. I have a friend who said to me once, I've given up all go of a missed opportunity that you can never have back. It's hard. You know, I have a friend who sent to me once, I've given up all hope of a better past, right? And that's hard to wrestle with. And better to wrestle with it now than to die with these regrets. Yeah. You share this startling piece of data. Actually, in that particular part of the book, 3,000 or so people were interviewed and asked the question, what do you have to live for? And something like, what was the number? 94% were waiting for something to happen. Right. Yeah. Waiting for the kids to grow up, waiting to pay off the mortgage,

you know, waiting to retire. 94% of us waiting while life flies by. Yeah. When you think about this and when you think about going deep into these ideas and these questions, these prompts, as you said, while the initial idea of an ethical will is like, this is the thing that I'm going to leave behind. These are my truths beyond the facts. There's a certain aspiration towards immortality baked into that as well. Well, I would argue the opposite. Tell me more. us to face the simple, profound truth that we are going to die. I actually believe, and I can speak for myself only, but I think it extends further, the decision to create an ethical will for your loved ones when you're gone is not the denial of death, quite the opposite. It is the recognition of finitude. And look,

part of the reason that I wrote this book is that, this is still really hard for me to talk about, I didn't know that my last conversation with my dad was my last conversation with my dad. And I'm in the midst of a lot of people's losses. You really, really never know. So I think this exercise is actually the facing of that truth rather than the denial of it. I'm not going to be here forever. And here are my hopes for you. Here are my dreams for you. Here are the mistakes I've made that I hope you can avoid.

Here's what it means to forgive. Here's what it means you can avoid. Here's what it means to forgive. Here's what it means to be humble. Here's what love means. You know, one of the questions is, what is love? So I see it, frankly, the other way. It's a reckoning with the fact that we're going to die. I think we're actually saying the same thing, but using different language. That's very rabbinic, Jonathan.

Right. You want to hear a quick joke about that? Yeah, of course. You can edit it out later, right? So these two business partners are having a dispute and they decide to go to the rabbi and let the rabbi settle it. So the first partner goes in, tells the rabbi his story, and the rabbi says, you know something? You're right. And the guy leaves very satisfied. And then his partner comes in. He explains his side of the story to the rabbi. And the rabbi looks at him and says, you know something? You're right. And

he leaves. And then the rabbi's assistant comes in and says, rabbi, you told the first guy he was right. You told the second guy he was right. They can't both be right. Rabbi looks at it and says, you know something? You're right. That's fantastic. Yeah. So we are saying the same thing. But I don't see the arrogance in it or the hubris in it. I don't. But you do, and that's okay. And that actually wasn't my intention.

The intention was more to say, similar to you, we acknowledge our own impermanence, and yet we want the essence of what we've discovered and who we are to live beyond that. We all, this is, yes, we are in agreement. Because one of the things I say in the book is, we all want our story to be told. Muriel Rockhiser, the poet said, the world is not made up of atoms. It's made up of stories. And that's so true. And if you don't tell your story, it very likely won't be told. And if we embrace this work earlier, how much more opportunity do we potentially create to step into each day? Closing that gap

between what we claim to hold dear and the behavior that we manifest in our lives. Yeah. And I've written two ethical wills to my kids. One when I was in my forties and one in, you know, I'm 61. One recently. In some ways, they're similar. And in some ways, they're very different. And they're both true reflections of my story at that moment. So I think it's also, that's an interesting exercise. Yeah. I'm curious now, what was, in your mind, the biggest difference? The first one that comes to mind, and I would have to put them up on the screen to compare and contrast,

but the first one that comes to mind is my will to my kids in my 40s definitely had a component to it of, you know, make peace. You can always find a way. My current ethical will to my kids says, you know, if there's someone in your life who's toxic, you don't need to put up with that. Cut them out like the cancer they are. I wouldn't have said that in my forties. I didn't understand it. I hadn't had enough life experience. And that's the first difference that comes to mind. Yeah. I'm curious, you've been curating these questions for some 30 plus years and distilled it down to these 12 based on so many conversations and so many years and really getting at what really matters.

What was the 13th question? God, that's such a good question. There were originally 17 of them, but it just didn matter? Isn't that what we all yearn to hear? You matter. for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So as we have this deep dive in this container of a good life project, if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? It's not original, but it is the truth. To love and be loved, to hold and be held. Because you know that so much loss has taught me

and COVID taught us all that no matter how many times we say I love you and no matter how many times we hold and are held by the people we love, it's never enough. Never. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation we had with Bishop Michael Curry about the role of love in faith and life. You'll find a link to Bishop Curry's episode

in the show notes. Good Life Project is a part of the ACAST Creator Network. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the

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