The Root of Immortality: Death in the Context of Jewish Wisdom

Abstract

In his influential studyThe Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger asserted that “the power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death or, more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.” Berger was not suggesting that religion is primarily a private obsession of the individual with death. Rather his thesis is that religion is a social phenomenon, part of the human enterprise of “world-building” by which we attempt “to impose a meaningful order upon reality.” The significance of death is not an individual matter because “death radically challengesallsocially objectivated definitions of reality—of the world, of others, and of the self. Death radically puts in question the taken-for-granted, ‘business-as-usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life. Here everything in the daytime world of existence in society is massively threatened with ‘irreality’—that is, everything in that world becomes dubious, eventually unreal, other than what one used to think.” In short, death is a threat to the meaningfulness not only of the individual life, but of the common enterprise of society and, indeed, of any attempt, social, religious or philosophical, to perceive reality as a coherent and purposeful order.