Presented by Judaism Unbound: The UnYeshiva taught by Rabbi Melanie Levav

Wednesdays, September 7th, 14th, and 21st, 2022

12:00PM to 1:15PM ET - 9:00AM to 10:15AM PT

One way that Jews have thought about Yom Kippur over the past thousand years is as a dress rehearsal for death. Through fasting – a 25-hour refrain from eating, drinking, and washing – it is a temporary pause of pleasurable, life-giving acts. We wear white, evoking the imagery of angels dressed in shrouds. On this one day, we explicitly contemplate our mortality so that we enter the new Jewish year with the potential to refocus ourselves on what is most important in our lives. In our contemporary society, we may not contemplate death enough — our own deaths, or the deaths of our loved ones, and as a result, we are often unprepared to face death when it arrives. If we experienced “a little death” once a year, how might that change the way we think about and talk about death during the rest of the year?

In this 3-part series, we will begin the work of preparing for Yom Kippur’s annual dress rehearsal for death by studying Jewish wisdom supporting the value of contemplating mortality, encouraging a journey of spiritual reflection focused on life and death during the month of Elul.