Sitting shiva may not seem preferable to attending a family wedding banquet. But according to Ecclesiastes, it’s better to enter a house of mourning than a house of feasting, said Rabbi Amy Eilberg.
While there are times in life for rejoicing, there are also many things to be “learned from contemplating the simple and unchangeable reality that neither we, nor those we love, can live forever,” explained Eilberg, co-founder of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center.
In the new book, “Behoref Hayamim, In the Winter of Life: A Values-Based Jewish Guide for Decision Making at the End of Life,” Eilberg discusses the lessons of death in a chapter she wrote devoted to the benefits of hospice care.
Eilberg, a Palo Alto resident, is one of seven contributors in the text compiled by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College Center for Jewish Ethics. “Behoref Hayamim” is a collection of insight and guidance from physicians, ethicists and experienced chaplains skilled in the application of Jewish moral perspective to end-of-life decision making.
It includes a preface written by Elliot N. Dorff, a professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
Eilberg, one of three rabbis who rotate in writing the Jewish Bulletin’s weekly Torah Thoughts column, described the book as a Jewish guide to the end of life for “intelligent, lay people.”
Although Reconstructionists published the book, Eilberg, the first woman to be ordained as a Conservative rabbi, said she did not believe the book should be bound by any single movement. Instead, she said, it is appropriate for “anyone in whose life death is a presence.”
In her chapter, “A Time to Die: Reflections on Care for the Dying,” Eilberg wrote that it is a mitzvah to help those we care about die through the “holistic and sensitive approach” of hospice care.
“Once it’s fruitless to look for a cure, the focus shifts to providing the best possible care to the person or family, helping them use whatever time they have left in the richest possible way,” she said.
The hospice does not have to be a particular place, with a certain number of doctors or nurses or team of health care providers as much as “a philosophy of care — wherever the bed is, it should take all the patient’s needs into account,” she explained.
And often it becomes an enriching experience for the family of the dying patient.
“When we’re sitting by the bedside of the dying we don’t do it because we expect to get some blessings out of it. But many report that amidst the sadness they find in themselves tremendous holiness and devotion and courage, working itself out to be a tremendous blessing.”
In her experience, Eilberg has found that Jews around the country have had a harder time choosing hospice care than do other religious and ethnic groups. She writes this is because “a remarkable percentage of Jewish families know that Jewish tradition values life above all, and that one must fight for life at all costs.”
Jews, she said, place tremendous importance on survival and continuity and, therefore, they will refuse to see death as anything other than an enemy.
“I have seen many a person struggling in the last days and weeks of life to maintain that fierce determination to defeat death that seems, as it were, to be written in the collective Jewish DNA.”
But Eilberg, who works privately as a pastoral counselor and spiritual director, believes they need to let go — that in Judaism, it is equally as important to accept death as a natural part of life. She said there is evidence in Jewish texts that mortality is a part of God’s creation — an inevitable presence that “no one will escape.”
While “certainly there are times in our life when we’d like to pretend it isn’t so, sooner or later, we’ll have to meet death in the face,” she said.
“A profound sense of preciousness of life naturally arises when the time remaining is short,” added Eilberg. “There is great wisdom to be learned from turning around to face what we most fear.”