This, of course is also the central message of these holidays

The Lessons that Death can Teach Yizkor 2010 Some years ago, I saw an unusual film entitled: My Dinner with Andre. If you have seen it, you know that it is almost entirely devoid of action. Instead, it mainly consists of a conversation between the actor and playwrite Wallace Shawn and the theatre director Andre Gregory over dinner at the Russian Tea Room in NY. What I remember most clearly from the film is a story that Gregory tells Shawn about a transformative experience he had while participating in a workshop on an estate out in Montauk. He recounts that he was awakened in the middle of the night and taken to the basement of a burned down house in the woods where he was given pencil and paper and asked to write out his last wishes. He was then led to a small shed where was told to take off all of his clothes. After that, Gregory was washed, wrapped in a sheet and carried blindfolded through the woods to a clearing where a freshly dug grave lay waiting. He was lowered into it, covered with a layer of earth and left there for about a half hour until they brought him out again. Andre Gregory said that the symbolic experience of his death fundamentally changed his life. Why do I tell you this today? I do it because, in a strange way, the High Holidays are meant to accomplish something very similar. Traditionally, Jews dress in a kittle, which is actually a burial shroud, for services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We go to the cemetery ...