Er… Death. And Maybe Some Jewish Stuff

We seem to have a strong intuition that part of what makes us human is our ability to die. Witness the countless stories in which the villains’ goal is to live forever, or in which a character demonstrates his or her essential humanity by giving up the opportunity to do so: J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (natch), Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, Susan Cooper’s Silver on the Tree, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Disney’s Hercules, Natalie Babbit’s Tuck Everlasting, and even Cinar’s The Smoggies.

(Arguably, we could also include stories like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, where the main characters choose to remain ordinary humans at the expense of eternal youth.)

In the story that got me thinking about this, Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man”, the main character literally cannot be seen as human until he chooses to die. Despite his many other accomplishments – creativity, contribution to humanity, the saving of lives, the formation of relationships – humanity refuses to acknowledge him as one of their own until he shows that he has the weaknesses of flesh as well as its strengths.

Why should death be this way in fiction? It seems like some of the rationale behind villains like Voldemort, the Sanderson sisters, and Frankenstein’s monster is this: dying is “natural”, and only a fool fights nature. Even if he or she succeeds (e. g. Count Dracula), it can be only at the cost of his or her “naturalness” – which is mirrored in the willingness of such a villain to use human beings without “natural” moral compunction at causing another person harm.

I wonder if these villains would make sense in a world where immortality was possible. Imagine, for instance, a medical vaccination against death became a reality: nobody would have to die, but everyone would be able to. I think a lot of us would have second thoughts about becoming immortal and worries that it might cause some political, health, and social troubles, but I can’t see anything morally wrong about it unless we already have the idea of what’s “natural” and “right” – in other words, if we believe, maybe deep down, that human beings were intended by someone or something to die.

It seems to me that what Voldemort et al. really represent is the selfishness of focusing one’s time and energy on avoiding death in a world where death is inevitable; that’s why, in most fantasy worlds, becoming immortal isn’t just saying a spell or a neutral but complicated process like baking a souffle: it more often involves the explicit sacrifice of life (other people’s, naturally) or, at the very least, self-mutilation and destruction. The only way to live forever, some authors seem to be saying, is to kill the parts of you that make life worthwhile – your compassion, your empathy, your ability to love. However, they also seem to be implying, the only reason why you’d embark on such a mission in the first place is because you’re already lacking in those areas.

But suppose people could live forever just by pressing a button. Or suppose (like Andrew Martin, the protagonist of the Asimov story mentioned above), that you are immortal by virtue of the way you came into existence. Would a villain like the above work then? We seem to have two contrary intuitions about how death and being human are related: on one hand, we have a suspicion that nothing that lives forever can ever really be human, and anything that claims to be both human and immortal must be lying on one of those counts. On the other, it seems like we want to say the very things that make us human do last forever: if you’re religious, your eternal soul. If you’re not, concepts like love, freedom, and curiosity. A great novel is one that has “stood the test of time”. A great person is one whose story has been passed down through history or whose contributions can still be felt today.

What these contradictory attitudes seem to be saying is that our attitude toward death and immortality is really our attitude toward the naturalness of things. It is a proud and noble thing to ease into death when it is “your time to go”; contrariwise, it’s an awful, evil thing to extend someone’s lifetime past what was “intended”. Souls and human nature and such things are the good kind of immortal because they’re “supposed” to live forever. Bodies and people and individuals are the bad kind because they’re “supposed” to die.

I’m not really sure what to make of this, mostly because there are so many different ways to look at it. But I guess, coming from a Jewish background as I do, I was taught that life should be valued infinitely more than death. Your life is a gift from G-d, and, furthermore, you must treasure it, because it’s only in this realm that you can serve G-d and help others. The Judaic emphasis is on continual moral living and struggle for self-betterment rather than single, important festivals or deeds. (For instance, the rules for the holiest holiday, Yom Kippur, the one day in the year when the High Priest of Temple times was allowed to go into the Holiest of Holies, can be overruled by those of the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest, because the everyday is more important than the special. We don’t blow the shofar on Yom Kippur when it falls on a Saturday out of respect for the Sabbath laws.)

In Judaism, then, while it is noble to sacrifice one’s life for some higher cause, it is noblest of all to live for that cause. So, whereas some other traditions consider martyrdom – and hence, acceptance of death – to be the ultimate good (e.g. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”), in Judaism, some consider life to be the ultimate good – as in, yes, if you happen to be in such circumstances that you must choose either to die or to have something unthinkable happen to those you love, it’s a moral and good thing to choose death – but dying doesn’t somehow max out the “goodness” scale. In other words, it is possible to be the most extreme kind of good there is and still choose life.

What does this have to do with the way I began this blog entry? To tell you the truth, I’m working on figuring that out. I just sort of went where my thoughts led me. But, seriously, what the Jewish tradition says to me there is that there is no special value on dying, and no moral deficiency in avoiding death. There can be moral deficiency in one’s motives for avoiding death – hubris (“I am like a DEITY!!!”), fear (“I think I should choose to die now, but I’m too scared”), or selfishness (“If I died, then who would use all this money?”), but the fact of possessing immortality shouldn’t make one more or less human.

So many things once thought to be part of the definition of humanity have now become simply more fodder for manipulation. We thought we had to live at the mercy of the weather – now we have meteorology and irrigation, chemical fertilizers and genetically modified crops. We thought we were at the centre of the universe, a cosmic nucleus – but now we know we’re only only a tiny blip in a giant, multifaceted universe. We thought that nature was made especially for us – but now we see that there are so many other perspectives to which we’re blind, whether because of scale (quantum mechanics on an atomic level; the dance of galaxies), lack of appropriate senses (bees’ ultraviolet vision; the electrical sensors of some fish); or just evolutionary history (the way we perceive time and movement; our tendency to attribute a mind to things that move or see faces in inanimate objects). We thought we alone were created as thinking, sentient, rational beings – but now we know that we have monkeys in our family tree. Heck, we often think we’re alone in our ability to love, to think, to speak, but new studies with animals confound these definitions each day. Why couldn’t our perspective on death as a defining attribute of humanity turn out to be similarly flawed?