„In memory of Rabbi Menachem Froman, and following his path — we read…”

The fear of death is the universal illness of man, coming in the wake of sin. Sin created death, and repentance is the one remedy to eradicate it from the world. All of man's labor circles about escaping death, and he will not reach his goal except by enlarging his soul from its inner source. Sinking into the dust of materiality, and emotional excitement in all its forms, only enlarges death, and thereby it adds fear upon its fear. However much a person strives not to fear it, nothing will avail him, since he sinks his whole being into such matters over which death rules, and which it destroys and consumes. How can the heart not shudder at beauty turned to ugliness, and at delight that turns to loathing. When life has no purpose, death must be dreaded, the war against it is in vain, and audacity will avail nothing. The true remedies by which the world is gradually freed from the bondage of death are hidden in the treasury of life, in the soul of the Torah, revealed in all its manifestations, and gradually concealed in the recesses of its might. Foremost of all the remedies is length of days — length of days to the measure sufficient for a person's nature, spiritual and material, personal and familial, universal and civic. When this blessing spreads through the world, the form of death, which imposes dread, gradually passes and is nullified, and in its place comes a form of the vision of existence, worthy of being appraised at its true value. And then it no longer distorts understanding, and comprehension returns to reveal that there is in truth no death at all according to that oppressive, destructive image which dwells in the heart of life to crush it. And they gaze upon the day of death and recite song: "O Lord my God, You are very great; You are clothed in glory and majesty." Length of days comes about through the repair of life in all its senses, and especially in the moral sense, which gradually broadens and deepens along all the paths that branch out from it. The spirit of supreme morality, which measures life according to its worth, lives and dwells in the soul, according to the measure by which life is regarded in its light — and life cannot be viewed in its full light except through knowledge of the living God, the source of wisdom, kindness, and might, unified. Also helpful is the development of the national spirit, in that a person feels the happiness of the general collective with a living inner feeling, and rejoices in the joy of the nation as a limb of its limbs; whereby the fear of death, from the aspect of the vision of one's material demise, is thinned, for the nation endures through its generations, and in it all his hopes are set. But this is not yet the essence of salvation from the fear of death, for in the end the private self is terrified by the abolition of its being. The essential guidance for removing the fear of death must come through habituation to loving life at its true worth. As long as everything is dim, and the reckoning of life comes only in confusion, it is impossible for the moral qualities to be refined. And consequently it is impossible for life to be beloved. The whole matter of loving life comes only through the imaginary fear of death, and it is entirely impossible to speak of removing this fear, which is the salt of life. Yet life need not always stand at this lowly level, where its worth is found not in itself but in the fear of its opposite. Through the sanctity of life in its supreme content, one can arrive at an essential love of life. For this, indeed, the worth of the whole must be revealed in the soul — that is, reality in all its scope, man and his soul, the worth of good will and absolute morality in their eternal character, the worth of spiritual harmony with life and corporeal existence. And this already includes an important part of the content of the wisdom of divinity and its inner realizations. The foundation lies in the elevation of the will and its immersion in the depths of comprehension, its coupling with it and its absolute unification within it. The secret of removing the foreskin is the ascent of the desire for life to the supreme, purposeful measure, until the whole reproductive inclination, and all its spiritual branches connected with it, all the multitude of romance and all its offshoots, all become holy branches of the strength of the desire for life, to the point of bringing it into being out of nonexistence in exalted might and purity of longing — which stamps the pleasantness of love upon all existence. Life, when it is recognized in its good worth, itself removes the cataract from the eyes of comprehension, which had blocked the clarification of the knowledge of spiritual essence and its absolute life-values. Then the spiritual world begins to spread out in all its glorious fullness; it then senses within itself its own self and its freedom, and the life of the soul is revealed — not merely as some remnant of bodily life, which appears to be the full life, but as an essential greatness, of which the life bound to the body and its present conditions is but a spark and a shadow. In this way, when the incidental means also assist — when the economic, familial, and national situation, and the very satisfaction of natural life, come with it — the fear of death departs entirely, and it turns into a source of joy, trust, and refuge: "and in his death the righteous has refuge." And when such a mode of life spreads through the world, liberation from the angel of death comes in its exalted fullness. And a world can be prepared for such a state of life. But not the individual will have the strength for this, but rather the nation — a nation among the nations, a holy, exemplary nation, a chosen nation, the treasure among all the peoples, whose children are children to the Lord their God. They are the ones commanded: "You shall not gash yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead, for you are a holy people to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be His treasured people from among all the peoples on the face of the earth" — and to abolish death, which is a disgrace to a holy people, and all its dread and sorrow, which is the beginning of the founding culture that gives happiness to life in all its functions. To this we are called, and for this we fight, and all the falls we have fallen will not move our feet from the supreme goal borne in our soul. We will surely come to it, through all the stages and through all the tangled paths — but we will surely come to that freedom for which we live.