“Whether we choose it or no, we will live on after we die. The question really is one of quality and character. How shall we affect tomorrow by our lives, for affect it we must.”

Today’s sermon, delivered October 23, 1966, finds Rabbi Olan in a philosophical mood, contemplating the meaning of life in the face of death.  The awareness of our own death can make us pessimistic, as it did King David toward the end of his life, when he prayed: “For we are strangers and sojourners before Thee as were all our fathers.  Our days on earth are as a shadow, and there is no abiding.”

The answer for Olan is not the immortality of heaven but the immortality of our choices here on earth.  As Einstein wrote, “A hundred times every day, I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labor of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.”

*Written by Joshua F. Hirsch.*