Lives Wasted and Well-Lived: David Wolpe on The Death of Ivan Ilyich

What if you did everything right and discovered on your deathbed that you've wasted your life? Rabbi and author David Wolpe talks about Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Weaving Rabbi Wolpe's own brushes with mortality and his years at the bedsides of the dying into Tolstoy's masterpiece, they talk about the lies we tell ourselves about death, our longing for honesty and human touch at the end, and the way that death forces us to take a clear-eyed look at life. They conclude by offering advice on how we can avoid Ivan's regrets.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Today is September 16, 2026, and my guest is author and Rabbi David Wolpe. He is the Max Webb Emeritus Rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, and he's currently Scholar-in-Residence for the Maimonides Fund. Our topic for today is Tolstoy's short story, you could call it a novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. David, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Now, you can't spoil this book because the title kind of gives it away. It opens with Ivan's funeral. He's going to die. And like many great books, the plot's not so compelling. There's nothing dramatic about it. A man has a somewhat seemingly normal life. He gets sick and he dies. And we watch that through Tolstoy's prose. That happens all the time. People die. And yet, there is something deeply haunting and unbearable and painful about this book. So, we're going to share our reactions to the book and talk about, I suppose, we'll

• 1:48Speaker 00

  talk about death a little bit along the way because this book is sort of about death. Of course, it's also about life.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  It is extraordinary how many different conversations you could have in a book that is about 50 pages. And I'll start by saying that Tolstoy makes a really interesting choice. He does not start with Ivan Ilyich dying. He starts with people's reactions to his death.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  And I could just imagine, you know, a modern editor looking at this book and saying, like, you should cut out that first part and just get to the dying. But the truth is that it so parallels not only my experience, but one thing that I want to make sure to say about the beginning is when people hear about the death, their immediate reaction is, what does this mean in terms of my promotion? And there is a beautiful halacha that when you, that is a Jewish law, that when you know someone has died who left you money, you first say the blessing, Hatov HaHaMeTiv, which blesses God who is good and does good.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And then you say, Baruch Dayan HaMet, blessed be the righteous judge. In other words, the blessing that you say about death. Because Judaism is realistic and knows you're going to have a moment of, oh, I get the money. And if you get rid of that in your mind, then you can fully inhabit the space of mourning. And Tolstoy, with his usual acuity, points that out at the very beginning. Because the person who thinks about promotion also has moments of genuine sadness.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  The other thing, of course, these people are feeling, which, it's such a strange book because the first five or so pages are quite comical, despite the subject matter. He's making fun of their human reactions. He says, dead, he's dead, each of them thought, but I'm not.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Which is unfortunately often what human beings feel at a funeral, in the face of death. We think about ourselves as often. And Tolstoy's very clear about that.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  So, I mean, first of all, how often do you read the obituaries, if you read the obituaries and say, oh, well, it's okay, because this person had congenital heart disease? I don't have that.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  So, I'm okay. We separate ourselves from death almost instinctively. And he also captures the performative aspect of it. So, I'll read you this fragment of a sentence. It says, despite the unpleasant awareness of his own and this woman's falsity. That is, you can't, like, when you go into a shiva house, you have to be a certain way, even if you don't feel that way inside. And it reminds me of a great passage from a book that, well, I think I'll mention once or twice in this, Ernest Becker's Denial of Death.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  He has a section where the French writer Alphonse Dode, when he was young, went to a funeral, and he hears a cry, or maybe he hears his own cry, I don't remember, and he thinks, wow, that would be, that would sound great at the theater. Because you're observing yourself even as you're acting. And part of Tolstoy's genius, and it's remarkable how many times in this book he does this, is he reminds you of how you really feel, not how you pretend you feel.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  And the characters are often, the way I think of it, this performative aspect, they're wearing a mask. And, or they're trying to wear a mask. You walk into a shiva house, which is the house of mourning, where a Jew sits, who's lost a loved one, will sit for seven days, and inside the house, and visitors come. And when you enter a shiva house, you do put a mask on. It's not a mask necessarily of disguise, but you put your face in where you think it should look, how it should look. And that's, that's what, what happens numerous times in this book. And in fact, in the non-death scenes, and a serious chunk of the book is

• 6:26Speaker 00

  about Ivan's life and his attitudes and his actions, a life that Tolstoy doesn't think very much of, and that Ivan has to confront in his, on his deathbed. But in those moments of life, Ivan is clearly doing what he thinks people like him should do, whether they're rich or have high status. There's nothing there. His life is so hollow. His essence is so hollow. And so, the people who are, who open the book with their attitudes, their

• 7:07Speaker 00

  public faces versus their private thoughts. The public face is, you know, tut, tut, tsk, tsk. Their private thoughts are, hey, I could get, I could get his job now that he's gone. Or, someone will replace him, and then I could get that job. Or, I'll get this money maybe. Or, maybe this is where I can get that money, says his widow. And she, very quickly after mourning, publicly with a false face, is worried about her own financial stability.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  And, and when you say that his life is hollow, it's important that people know that he is intelligent and decent and successful. And that makes the hollowness of his life that much more pointed. As, one thing that struck me very much in his description of the hollowness of Ivan Ilyich's life, because I have experienced this myself, is he liked to feel that he had power and didn't use it.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  That is, he would be with people. And everyone, I think, who has been in any kind of boss situation feels good about themselves. Like, I could be a mean boss, but I'm not. I'm being nice to this person, and therefore, I'm a nice person. And that's so, Tolstoy says, it's so empty and it's dark in a certain sense.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  So, he's a judge in a good chunk of the book, and he holds power over a lot of people. And he acts as if he does not wield it. But we, as the reader, see him, I think, a little less attractively. He enjoys not just

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Not wielding the power. He enjoys holding it over the people, which is really despicable. Uh, he's a remarkably unlikable husband. Um, he very early in his marriage, which is very quickly a loveless marriage. He sees his wife as a burden and he's maximizes the amount of time he spends at work. So he doesn't have to be with her or the children. Uh, he's a terrible, he's a nonexistent father. Um, but as you say, on the surface, uh, from the outside especially, he has a very successful career. He has a nice living. Uh, he has a, a, a nice wife and children and a beautiful home. And, uh, we see him the way he cannot

• 9:34Speaker 00

  see himself. Uh, we see him honestly and, uh, only toward the end of the book, and we'll of course talk about this, do, does he begin to see that maybe his life wasn't what he thought it was?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  And, and some of this, I think we, we have to zoom out and say that this was written later in Tolstoy's life after he repudiated the writing of novels. I mean, he writes Anna Karenina, which is one of the great masterpieces of world literature, and then says, I, I, he repudiates it and says, I shouldn't have written it. Then he wants to sort of strip down to the bare essence of what it means to be a human being. And he thinks the adornments of the novel are, are superfluous. And yet he can't help himself in a way from writing these incredibly acute observations. And, and at least some people have seen in this,

• 10:29Speaker 01

  uh, something of a portrait of his own marriage, which was famously troubled. And, and he paid attention to some of his kids, but not others. And also, almost offhandedly, it says, and in the course of this, two children died and then another one dies. And in the narration, it's, it's not dealt with at all. It's just like, and, and he took a walk and a kid died. And he, you know, and he had breakfast and a kid died. And that's also Tolstoy lost a number of children. And I think, um, it's, it's just stunning to think how much of life Ivan Ilyich doesn't live.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. And, uh, the wife i- is a minor character, but, uh, I ha- I have to read one quote from her. She's not terribly admirable. Um, this is again, in the very beginning, when someone says, you know, did he suffer terribly? How was it? And she says, I mean, this, you can't, you can barely, uh, read this with a straight face. In fact, I know an old joke, which I won't say about a, uh, that this is parroting. So quote, "He screamed and screamed." This is her, this is the wife talking about Ivan when he's, when he's dying. "He screamed and screamed, not for minutes, but for hours on end. For three whole days, he screamed without stopping. It was unbearable. I honestly don't know

• 11:52Speaker 00

  how I endured it. You could hear him screaming through three closed doors. Oh, the things I was forced to endure." End of quote. So just do a couple of things about that and you give your reaction. First of all, a little self-centered.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  He's suffering and she's complaining about her challenge of trying to endure his screaming. His pain was so horrible, he screamed straight for three, screams for three straight, straight days. But at the very end of the book, when he is going through these three days, we are told by the narrator, by Tolstoy, that it was two closed doors. Should see, it's bad enough that she's pushed herself two closed doors away from her husband without consoling him. But in her retelling, she makes it even worse that, meaning it was so loud that three closed doors weren't sufficient. But of course, we as the reader are thinking, why weren't you comforting him? So?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, that way, which she really doesn't. I mean, there is that moment, if I remember at the very end where, where some sympathy is restored. But, but a lot of this is a sort of sort of Oche power struggle between the husband and the wife, um, and, and until, until he gets beyond it, which is part of what the, the ending of the book is about. Um, but that's why I say, I mean, it really is, which is astonishing considering its brevity. It really is lots of novels in one. It's about illness. It's about death. It's about family. Um, you know, it's about the lies we tell ourselves. It's, it's a

• 13:34Speaker 01

  critique of the, of the kind bourgeois life that, uh, that Tolstoy rejected. And, um, it's, uh, and all of this is contained in these few pages and, and certainly much more. But I, at least for me, and, and I suspect for you, it's really about the difficulty of coming to grips with one's own mortality.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'd say there's two things. That's, that's the overwhelming theme that even though we all know rationally in our brains that death is inevitable, we often don't live our lives that way. And we also often don't want to face that. Uh, and a lot of the book is about that, looking away. Um, uh, Erwin Hallam has a book called, I think it's called Staring at the Sun. The, the sun is death. You, you, you can't look at the sun. It, you, you'd have to turn away. But I think, you know, the other theme of the

• 14:40Speaker 00

  book, and it's below the surface, is what is a good life? And it's clear that this question has never crossed Ivan's mind, crossed his mind. And it's clear that Tolstoy judges him for that.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  I want to read one paragraph that I thought kind of captured this. Um, you know, there are many things that are negative about Ivan that are, we've, we've mentioned, he's not a great husband. He's not a great father. Uh, he's a poser, a, um, he can be cruel implicitly or explicitly in his job. It's very mild, by the way. He's, there's nothing heavy-handed in that. But that, this paragraph I'm going to read, in a certain sense, it's, it's such a mild criticism. But I think it's, um, really gets to the heart of, of the judgment of Tolstoy of, of this style of living that you alluded to

• 15:44Speaker 00

  earlier about the bourgeois existence. Here's the quote, "In essence, of course, what one saw was what one always sees in the homes of not quite rich people, who make an effort to appear rich and in so doing only come to look like one another. Damascus, ebony, flowers, carpets and bronzes, every dark and lustrous thing that all people of a certain kind procure in order to look like all people of a certain kind. Indeed, his home looked so much like every home of its sort that it wouldn't attract the least bit of attention.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  To him, however, it all seemed to be quite exceptional." End of quote. So I think the judgment here is, it is really a, a criticism of, you know, of Rene Girard's idea of mimesis, this idea of imitating instead of living an authentic life. He, he, he lives to live like others rather than living his own life.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  It's, it reminds me of that wonderful, uh, quote from the critic Randall Jarrell about the herd of independent minds, you know? It's, everybody thinks they're being unique, but in fact, they're exactly like everybody else. And, and, and when you said he hasn't asked himself what a good life is, I think if you had approached him on the street and said, what's a good life? He would say exactly what I'm living.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Because he's very pleased with his life for a long time, except at one point where he loses out on an opportunity to advance. But then he gets a better opportunity and advances and everything is sunshine again, because that's really all that it takes for him to be happy or unhappy. And in the meantime, as I said, just to mention it again, two of his children have died. That doesn't seem to make him unhappy, but, but that he's passed over for preferment, that is unbearable to him.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  So, you know, the way Tolstoy summarizes his life, I think more than once is pleasant, which seems like a positive word. Sometimes he calls it decent, uh, or decorous. Um, and it's clearly in Tolstoy's vocabulary, an indictment, not praise.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Right. Yes. I mean, it says, Tolstoy is one of those, um, like Nietzsche in a very different way. He's one of those uncompromising spirits who will not let you rest with what is nice. You know, reminds you, do you know that, that great line from Into the Woods, Sondheim's Into the Woods, "You're not good, you're just nice." You know, and it's the same thing here is Ivan Ilyich is nice, but, but he's never grappled with anything deeper than the everyday of niceness and never been forced to. And when he would be forced

• 18:51Speaker 01

  to, he ignores it. Um, until the day when the onset of his illness is actually hanging up a screen, which I think is also symbolic. It's like, I'm putting up one of those masks, uh, in the house that, and, and he falls and then he starts to get sick.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  And we never learn exactly what's wrong with him. And part of the dark comedy of this book, which there's not a lot of it, but in this case, it is somewhat dark comedy, is that no doctor, no expert can quite diagnose him, which gives his wife the freedom to complain that this is all his fault because, you know, he doesn't take his medicine, or he doesn't sit right, or whatever it is, hasn't followed the doctor's orders. We, of course, know that that has nothing to do with his problem. We know that medicine is flawed in the end of the 19th and early parts of the 20th century, and that he's just dying. And that is uncertain, by the way, for quite a while, other than

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  the fact that we know from the opening that he's going to die. But it's uncertain to him. He's always holding out hope. He's always evading the possibility.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Right. There is also in this, which you bring up, another, another theme of the novel, a novelette, is the way doctors speak to patients and patients want to be spoken to. Because the doctor is talking only about symptoms, and he basically wants to know, he's like, I'm a person here. Am I going to live? Am I going to die? Am I going to suffer? Am I going to? And they're like, well, the tests of the abdomen show, you know, and, and so there's that also, which, again, because human nature hasn't changed, is persists to this day. So there is also that.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and he hates them. And part of the reason he hates them is that eventually they come to remind him of the way he used to interact with supplicants in his court, that it's really all about this, this deceptive non-communication of, that takes place in words, but doesn't help anyone understand what's going on. He keeps saying, is it bad? You know, am I, am I going to die? And they won't answer him. And that, of course, hasn't changed. I wonder if you'd reflect for a minute, having been the rabbi of a congregation for

• 21:17Speaker 00

  26 years, you must have been in a lot of hospital rooms, visiting a lot of sick people. And you must have seen this both charade that takes place, where the patient isn't told the truth, but also sometimes, I'm sure, there were people who demanded the truth and heard it.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I would say, I, I saw three different kinds of dying. And, and, and I'm not sure what the variable was. It did not necessarily seem to be the person's character beforehand. One was the person who dies like the early Ivan Ilyich. That is, they deny, everything's going to be fine till the end. They don't really let in the reality that part of them know. And they pass away without, and everybody says, oh, they were so positive even to the end, but there's a certain falseness to their positivity that you feel. The second are people who confront the fact that they're dying and are crushed by it.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  And I have seen that more than once. And they're crushed for all sorts of different reasons, but we'll get back to that, I suppose, when we get back to, to the actual book, because I have something to say about why that is. And then the third, which are rare and beautiful, are the people who know and confront and accept it, and, and die in a way like Ivan Ilyich does at the very end. I remember one person in particular, who was a doctor, who I, I think probably administered something to himself, because the last, or had it administered to him, because the last

• 23:05Speaker 01

  time I visited him in the hospital, he said, Rabbi, it has been a great pleasure knowing you. I will not be seeing you again. And he said it very calmly, and the next day he was dead. So there are such people who really, they know what's coming and they accept it. But at least in, in this case with Ivan Ilyich, part of his pain is he realizes he hasn't lived his life. And I think that that's very hard. The other piece of this is, if you're going to read, people were making suggestions online about what we should see, one of the Kurosawa movies or so on.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  If you read the incredible, I think, and unbelievably insightful book, Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, he feels that basically Freud was wrong, that the basic drive is not sex, that sex is an aspect of our denial of death. And everything that is bodily reminds us of our mortality. You know, it's like, why does everything other than tears that comes out of you seem either faintly or very disgusting? Why should that be? Because the things that too powerfully remind you of your body, remind you that your body is what decays and dies. Like the French call orgasm le petit mort, the little death. Why?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Because what reminds you more powerfully of your body than sex, and sex and death are so tied. And the reason I bring all this up is because the section of Ivan Ilyich's confrontation with death starts with his remembering the syllogism that he learned from Aristotle.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  About basically that Caius is mortal, Caius is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal. And he never realized it applied to him.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  It was about Caius.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  It was about Caius.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's an incredible passage.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  It is, it, it might be the most remarkable passage in the book, especially because the way he puts it is like, Caius is an abstraction, but then he writes, if I can, he'd always been, he was Vanya, he's talking about himself, with mama, with Papa, with Mitya and Voldya, with toys, the coachman and nanny, with all the joys and grease and delights of childhood. Was it for Caius the smell of the striped leather ball that Vanya loved so much? Or had kissed his mother's hand like that? Was it for Caius the silk folds of his mother's dress that rustled like that? In other words, all the particulars, especially of his childhood, like, that's not supposed to be the person who dies.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  He's only beginning to realize that actually, death is real. He always knew it intellectually, but he's feeling it viscerally. It's different.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, the expression, memento mori, which is, you should remember that you're mortal. This book is an exercise in that. It, it forces you to confront the reality that you're not Caius either, not just Ivan. And I'm, I'm curious, in your experience of having to confront death in those hospital rooms, you know, a doctor has to confront, depending what kind of doctor you are, you have to confront death and see it. A rabbi's a little different, because you're seeing somebody die who's not somebody who showed up in your emergency room, or there's somebody you might have known for a very, very long time.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  And I'm, I'm curious, two things, if that changed you in any way that you can at least, you know, realize or talk about? And whether you're glad that that was part of your life? A rabbi has a lot of challenges and a lot of rewards. I'm curious whether being present in people's last moments, often surrounded by loved ones, I'm sure, is that a plus or a minus for you?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  So I'll tell you, what made it more powerful was, I've had both a brain tumor, I had a seizure and a brain tumor, and then later I had lymphoma. And both times, after the operation for the brain tumor, the surgeon told me 75% chance it was malignant, which is basically, it's basically a death sentence. It turned out not to be malignant. For a long time, by the way, benign was my favorite word in the English language. And, and when I got lymphoma, the same thing. I didn't know if that meant I was going to die. And both of those experiences taught me that thinking you're confronting death is different from actually confronting death.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  It's like your entire system goes into a different mode when you think, death is, after all, the end of everything that you know. It's not just the end of you. I mean, it's the end of, of your loved ones and books. It's, everything disappears. Housman has a great poem about that. It's, good people, do you love your lives and have you ears for sense? Here is a knife like other knives that cost me eighteen pence. I need but put it in my heart, and down will come the sky, and earth's foundations will depart, and all you folk will die. Because when you die yourself, it's like the rest of the world disappears.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  And so that prepared me much more to go into a room and to know what that person was experiencing and to feel the fullness of it. I have to say, before I had the experience myself, I kept a critical distance, almost in the way Ivan Ilyich does. But after those experiences, I know the terror and finality of genuinely confronting death. And, and even though I started off in academics and I was never going to go to a synagogue because I didn't want to do that sort of stuff, I, I think it immeasurably deepened

• 29:27Speaker 01

  my understanding of the human experience, to both go through it and to share it with other people. And by the way, for those of you out there who are rabbis, I can't recommend highly enough, getting very sick and recovering, because, because it's really good.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  When you're rabbin' it. Yeah, and that's, and that's, by the way, I mean, since when we're recording this, we're close to Yom Kippur, that's what Yom Kippur is supposed to do for you. It's supposed to confront you with your own mortality, who will live and who will die. It's supposed to shock you into realizing whether you've lived or not. It's like Ivan Ilyich is a Yom Kippur book.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  In a very powerful way. And so, yeah, I think sitting at the deathbed and talking to people who are going to die is, is an unparalleled way of learning about what life is.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, I remember just recently, and I'm in Jerusalem, and the sirens would go off, meaning there was a missile coming from off in Iran. And my wife would hustle us down the stairs. We don't have our own shelter, so we'd go next door. And I was hurrying. I'm older than my wife. That's part of the reason. There's a lot, maybe a lot of reasons. But I would, I would, I struggled to hurry. And she would reprimand me afterwards, often during, reasonably, by the way, I don't, not proud of it.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  But, but at the time, you know, my attitude was, yeah, I'm 71 years old. I've had a good life. Maybe this will be the end. Maybe, maybe, maybe. And that's okay. Now, that's what I said to myself. But I have a feeling, and I know, because occasionally, there would be an especially loud boom, when a missile either landed or was intercepted, mostly the time intercepted. And I realized that some of that was just false bravado.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, it's just, it's, unless the, the, unless the threat is not theoretical, unless it's really imminent, like a loud boom, you don't get that sort of rush of adrenaline that tells you, oh, I'm, you know, the, the, the animalistic fight or flight that tells you how you really feel. The one analogy that I'll use, and just, is like, I fly all the time. I'm on a plane a couple of times a month. And I don't have any anxiety about flying at all. I'll read, I'll eat, I'll sleep, whatever, on the plane. But let that plane start hitting turbulence.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, I realize underneath it, I do have anxiety about being 30,000 feet in there.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  In a metal tube that shouldn't be suspended in the air. I know. And what my, my experience of that is, a little turbulence is fine. And when it starts to intensify, I, I'm trying to will it to stop. I start by tightening my seatbelt, which reduces the sensory input. But it's, it starts to get, the more it intensifies, the scarier it gets, you know.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  And I always remember, I don't remember which comedian said, that's why they call it terminals.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Oh, hmm. That's dark. You fly twice a month. You can make that joke.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, exactly.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  I want to talk about, let's talk about the ending of the book. Not the literal ending, although we'll talk about that too. But the last, it's, it's the last, almost half of the book is his decline. And the only thing that gives him comfort is his interaction with his servant, whose name is Gerasim.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  And he gets comfort, because Gerasim will often hold his legs up higher than he can hold them himself, propped on a pillow, which we get the impression that doesn't actually reduce the pain. But it's, it's, it's, it's a placebo effect. He gets this psychological benefit of having a connection with another human being, which his whole life has been devoid of. And there's this incredible passage, I'm not going to read the words here, but the direct quote. But he, at one point, when he's suffering, he has a desire to be held like a child, to be comforted, wept over. He talks about, he wishes someone was crying for him. And almost no one, there's some tears shed, but there's

• 34:21Speaker 00

  no sorrow. There's just emotion. And he, he wants to be loved. And you have the realization, he's never been loved as an adult. This hunger for human contact, for kindness, but really just for any kind of connection, is what it's, the reader, I think, feels, is what explains his comfort from this bizarre interaction with, with his servant, who's portrayed as a country bumpkin, as a, some kind of almost a simpleton, but clearly, someone with a good heart, who, when, when giving comfort, or serving Ivan, he, he, he does

• 35:06Speaker 00

  it with a smile. He does it without condescension. He does it without lying. He's in many ways, the only admirable person in the entire book, actually, now that I think about it.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, Tolstoy did idealize the peasants in a certain way, and had that influence, you know, had that influence in his time, even in Israel. Alif Dalit Gordon was a, was a devotee of Tolstoy, working the land, and being a peasant, and so on. And, and, and I think he's, he presents Gerasim as the only person that actually understands what's going on.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Correct. Who's not a liar, who's, who's honest.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yes, he's not a liar. He knows that Ivan Ilyich is dying. And Ivan Ilyich finds, he finds comfort in the fact that the guy's telling the truth about the, that he's dying. And also that he will physically touch him, and hold him, and lift his legs. And I think the implication is that he cleans him bodily.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  So, that's like, you know, that is being taken care of, like you're taking care of when you're a baby. I mean, you imagine, when you wipe a baby's bottom, you lift their legs. That's what you do.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  So, I think that that's, I think that, that he allows himself, maybe because Gerasim is a pet, he allows himself to be taken care of, by someone who he doesn't have to feel shame in front of. And, and there is, and, and Gerasim's attitude is, look, it's going to happen to all of us someday. So why should we, you know, why shouldn't I take care of you? I hope somebody will take care of me. And it's incredibly helpful. And, and I think, I have also seen this, a lot of people, obviously, whom I know, who are old and sick, have caretakers. And many of them have basically the same attitude, which is, this is not, you know,

• 37:02Speaker 01

  it's not disgusting work, or shameful work. It's like sacred, and beautiful. And I'm taking care of this human being who's dying. And I know that. So, we should all be so lucky.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, it reminds me of another aspect of, of Jewish law, which is the taking care of a person after their, after their death. And everything that you do for a person who has passed away, washing their body, accompanying them, keeping watch over them before the funeral, accompanying the body on the way to the funeral. This is called chesed shal emet, the kindness of, of truth, or I would translate as sincere kindness, because it can't be repaid. The person is gone. And the, the figure of Gerasim, doing

• 37:56Speaker 00

  these bodily care, and, and just tending to, to Ivan, is part of the reason he's saintly, is for that reason. There's a, I'm not going to go into it, but you can read, the Christian version of this is a Flaubert short story, which is, it's a wonderful story, called St. Julian, the Hospitaler. And it's, it's about a man who's done something terrible in his youth, and his desperate attempts in his life to redeem himself. And it ultimately ends with him taking care of someone, in, in this very, in a way that we, as the outsiders,

• 38:38Speaker 00

  find difficult to, to observe, because of the, as you say, the disgust we often feel for, for the body and its, and its messiness. Anyway.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Yes. And it, and so finally, we, we come to the, the revelation that is forced by pain and the imminence of death. You know, and that's, I, I mean, in a way, it's,

• 39:09Speaker 01

  It's really working up to this moment that he has to be the only thing that will strip away the falsity of his life is the genuine confrontation with his own mortality. And I don't think he would have gotten there without the pain and the disability and so on that forced him to recognize this is really death. You know, if somebody had said to him, for example, oh, you have a heart condition, you could drop dead at any moment, I don't think we would have gotten the book that we get. It is the suffering, and I've seen this too, suffering and sometimes age and its disabilities

• 39:49Speaker 01

  really bring people to recognize, oh, I'm actually gonna die because it strips away the denial of health to start with. It's like, you know, when you're young, your health is something that you think will never go away. And the gradual disabling of the body as you get older makes you realize, oh, if this can happen, then maybe death could really happen.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, but before we get to the very ending, I want to give one more example of his failure to confront himself. His lack of self-awareness is really, you know, runs through the book until the very, very end. He's, I think he's talking about the doctors and he thinks, he doesn't say it out loud. I don't think he says it out loud. I think it's in his head. Yeah. "Will you really never feel ashamed for lying to my face?"

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Right. Yes.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  It's Tolstoy telling us what Ivan is thinking, but it's also Tolstoy telling us what he's thinking.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Which is, this man has lied his whole life to people's faces about what he feels, what he's doing to them in his role as a judge, and he can't recognize it in himself. He can see it in others. You know, it's a beautiful example of the power of third-person narration that we get to see. In this case, he flips it to first person because we hear the thought in his head. But what he's telling us is, he doesn't really get it.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yes. It's true. Yeah. I mean, the distance that one has from oneself is often, it often comes out in the way in which, you know, you accuse other people of doing what you do. I mean, we know this. This is an old psychological trope that, you know, the Hasidic rabbi said that you should see other people as a mirror. And here, he has spent his whole life not really telling the truth, but acting as the carrier of the common assumptions of the world.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  And the only thing that breaks the common assumptions of the world is that you are highly individual when you're dying. Not everybody is dying, only you are dying. And that's one of the things that he realizes, is that whatever the people around him say or feel or whatever, you're dying alone. It's just you. And that's also a jarring, even if you know it intellectually, when it actually happens. You know, we always say, you're born alone, you die alone, but that doesn't actually...

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Eating loss.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yes, then you feel it, you're actually dying alone. Yeah. It's very powerful.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  And I was gonna say, I've never died, but I have lost people close to me.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  And you have a similar out-of-body experience, which is, your parent, your father, your mother dies, in my case, I've lost both of them now, and your world is shattered, rocked. Everything in front of you that you're seeing is unreal, surreal, and these other people who didn't lose their father seem to be going through their life as if nothing had happened. But my father died. How can you be so not callous, just insensitive?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  And just to go about your normal business. And of course, what we want desperately who have suffered a loss is to go about our business like that. We're not allowed to. Our emotions don't allow it. In the case of Jewish law, we have a whole set of strictures that stop us from having a normal life for at least 11 months. In the case of a parent, we have to say the mourner's kaddish for our parents. And so we're forced, in the case of Jewish law, to not revert to the normal life.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  But we desperately want it because we know what it's like. We had it before.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  And we've watched these insensitive people somehow, and you walk by them and you want to shake them. You want to grab them and say, don't you realize I've lost my father? And you know that...

• 44:31Speaker 01

  I was gonna say that Talmud has a great phrase in a different context to that, "O l'um kamein ha'gono heg," the world just goes on its way. It's like, it's indifferent to your... And I remember, one of the ways rabbis come up against this is, when we're planning a funeral, I have to say to the family, like, your speech can't be too long because people there, you know, they're taking time out of their normal day to go to this funeral and there, you don't want them looking at their watches saying, when do I get back to? And I can see, like, it's jarring because they're feeling like, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me and I have to worry that they need to get back to work?

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Right. I need to process this. I need to get this out of my system. And you're telling me I've got to take their situation into account?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Into account, which is very, very hard. You know, I actually, by the time this comes out, it will have already been published because it'll be published later this week, but I just wrote an article for the Free Press about this, about the unatana tokev, the prayer that says, who shall live and who shall die, and a poem by a woman named Charlotte Delbo, who was in the French Resistance. And she writes this, basically, I won't give you the poem, it's about eight or nine lines, but she says, like, "I saw so much death and so many people died, so you have to do something with your life."

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Like, learn a dance step, she says, like, something. And I think that that's part of what Tolstoy wants the reader to get from the book, is this will happen to you and you don't want to come to this moment of death thinking, I actually just skimmed the surface of life and I never felt anything real. And that's the recognition that he comes to, which is so painful, and also the recognition that you mentioned, which is that no one else will be in the situation that you're in. And that also is just unfathomable.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  And death itself is unfathomable, which is why people will say, oh, I just spoke to him yesterday. As though people who speak yesterday don't die today.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  Every day.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  But they do.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, I have to mention one of my favorite lines, which is, no one on their deathbed ever wished they'd spent more time at the office. And of course, this is what happens to Ivan Ilyich. I want to read it. He's close to death at this point in the story, and here's what Tolstoy says, and I think this is, I mean, it's heartbreaking. "And suddenly it would occur to him, maybe I did not live as I ought to have lived. But then he would say to himself, how could that be if I did everything correctly?

• 47:38Speaker 00

  With that, he would dismiss the one and only solution to the whole riddle of life and death. It is something entirely inconceivable." So, close quote. So Ivan, he's followed all the rules, you know, he's risen in the ranks, he's taken care of his family, whether he's nice to them or not, it's not really relevant. He likes to play bridge, by the way, he enjoys it. That's his highest pleasure, is to play bridge, which is, again, I have nothing against bridge, or the companionship of four people playing bridge, but Tolstoy evidently doesn't think much of it. I think we can say that.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  But he's done everything, quote, "correctly." So he can't figure out why he is bereft at the end of his life. It's impossible. He has done great. He's led an exemplary life, but it's only exemplary by the standards of his superficial society that he's chosen to join and be partners with. So this idea...

• 48:51Speaker 00

  And I'm, you know, I'm reminded of the ending of, of Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day." "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" And Ivan, Eliot has made a choice, and he made the wrong choice in Tolstoy's view.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  It's a great, I mean, it's, it's exactly right. I, and, and he, you know, he says, "I can't believe that I didn't, I didn't really live it." And it's only at the very end that he starts to accept, after those three days of howling that you mentioned earlier, that he comes in some way to the other side. And there is an acceptance and even a joy in that moment. But, um, but I think maybe one of the ways of understanding this is that, you know, I, I once, I once, when I was a rabbinical, I think just after I graduated from rabbinical

• 49:53Speaker 01

  school, um, I was invited to speak at an AA meeting. I had never gone to an AA meeting, and they said, "You'll give a little opening." It was a Jewish Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  Alcoholics Anonymous.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Alcoholics Anonymous. They said, "You'll give a little opening talk, and then you will shut up and you will listen to what goes on there." And I did. And I listened to what went on there. And one person said, and this was 30-some years ago, um, one person said, "I started drinking when I was 18, and I stopped when I was 35. And at 35, I had the maturity of an 18-year-old, because in between, I had felt no pain." And, and I think that that's part of what Tolstoy's saying about Ivan Il... It isn't until he genuinely feels pain, that he doesn't skate through life, but he feels the pain of life with those three days of howling, that he can get to the other side.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Because if you always anesthetize yourself, whether, you know, if not through drink, then through pleasantries and surface and so on, then you...

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Money.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yes, money.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Greed, ambition, whatever.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  You don't see the, the pain of life. And by the way, I think that that's part of what, part of the, the glory and difficulty of Israeli society is, it's very, very, very hard to anesthetize yourself if you live in Israel. It is much, much easier to anesthetize yourself if you live in America.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, there's, um, this episode hasn't aired yet, but it will by the time ours, this one's released, a conversation I had with, um, Megan O'Giblin. And in that conversation, I mentioned, as I often have on the program, that there are four ways to grow up and become a little more self-aware, that you're not the center of the universe. Religion, therapy, meditation, reading literature, great books. And I told her that, and her answer was, uh, her response was, "And suffering." She's something of a, of a religious, she's, her religious journey is complicated, but she's something, has been a Christian, and I don't know what she is now, I'm not sure

• 52:07Speaker 00

  what she'd say she is now, but, um, suffering, and we've had a number of episodes about this, um, uh, with Paul Bloom, for example, the suffering...

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  As long as you don't die...

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Uh, heightens, well, does all kinds of things. I, I was gonna mention this earlier, you know, this, uh, documentary of World War I veterans saying, "I would have missed it for the world." It was horrible. They saw horrible things. They got, they lost feet because of infection and suffered pain. And of course, that's for as long as you don't get killed.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  It heightens your sense of, of life. And Israel, paradoxically, has a very high-measured happiness level, despite all the challenges of, of living here and, and war and terrorism and so on. Um, and some have speculated, it's because it, it heightens your, as long as you don't die, um, your, life is a lot more vivid here. It, it's a lot more intense. People often say to me, "Well, when you moved to Israel five years ago, you didn't expect to go through this," meaning the war and so on. And I always say, "Unfortunately, it's weird. It's like the World War I veteran." I literally say, "I would have missed it for the world. I'm glad I'm here."

• 53:25Speaker 00

  Um, and when I go to the United States, or other places, I'm struck by how calm and pleasant things are, to use a Tolstoyan word, in my translation at least. Um, I, by the way, read the translations. This is a lovely little book called Lives and Deaths: Essential Stories. Uh, it's, uh, Pushkin Press, and it's translated from the Russian by Boris Stralyuk. Uh, it has a wonderful story in it called "Pace Setter: The Story of a Horse." It's a masterpiece. And I should reference the other episode we did on a Tolstoy short story, which was "Master and Man," which also rabbinizes the peasant as the, is the real hero, which,

• 54:09Speaker 00

  but it's an incredible masterpiece. Um, we'll link to all those, we'll link to your story, to your essay when it comes out. Um, I want to make a claim about the ending, but I want you to, give me your understanding first. First, I want to read another quote. Uh, it says, it got very near the end of the book, "But more terrible than his physical suffering was his moral suffering, the source of his greatest torment. His moral suffering stemmed from the question that occurred to him that night, as he looked at Gerasim's sleepy, good-natured face with its high cheekbones. Could my whole life, my whole conscious life, have been wrong?"

• 54:53Speaker 00

  And, and a quote, that's a variation on the earlier statement of that he, he, uh, may not have lived as he ought to have lived. And of course, you know, here at Shalom College, we, we spend a lot of time talking about how one should live. Uh, any serious human being, I believe, should confront that question. And Tolstoy was obsessed with it, obviously. He was, uh, many of his, his fictions, it is fiction, it is nonfiction, um, how should a person live? And, uh, I, I think we get, in my view, it's, it's not obviously correct, but I think

• 55:37Speaker 00

  he gives an answer to the, to that question in the ending, but I'm, first I want to hear your interpretation. How do you understand the ending? The ending's a bit ambiguous.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Right. Before I get to the ending, I just want to make one connection to something that most people will know. He says, "In childhood, there'd been something really pleasant, which one could live with if it came back." Like, he, he has these reversions to childhood towards the very end, and what it reminded me of was Rosebud. Like, in Citizen Kane, Rosebud in my book, it's like when Citizen Kane, in that famous movie, is, uh, and, and now I've ruined it for you if you've never seen it, but, um, but the one thing...

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Spoiler, you can stop listening now if you're very worried about this. Go ahead.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  The one thing that he remembers is the sled of his childhood, because things were innocent and pure and, and just joyous then. And I, and I, the reason I bring that up in part is because I think that the very ending is kind of a reversion to the purity of childhood. It's like, he lets go of all the pretense and all the dross and all the need to perform, and, and he gets to just be himself. There is a stripping away that the agony of those three days of howling does, and you're just, um, you don't have, in a way, the energy to pretend to be that which you're not.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  And also, I think for Tolstoy, there is, uh, although it's never explicit, there is a sort of divine embrace, um, because his last words are, "What a joy."

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree with all that, but I'm gonna put forward a different, a very, uh, an extra theme.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Please, please.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  I think...

• 57:29Speaker 00

  He redeems himself at his death in his mind, whether he does before. Any kind of judgment is a different question. But I think Tolstoy sees him as redeemed, at least. And the reason that happens is that he lets go. And he, he looks, he's looking at these people around him as he's been doing now in his, in his dying months and weeks and nowadays. And he sees how, um, he hates them. He says explicitly, Tolstoy says explicitly that many times that he hates his wife. He hates his children.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  He really hates that his wife is healthy and plump and, and fleshy. And it's really powerful writing. But at the very, very end, he sees that they're upset that he's dying. And in my reading of the ending, he embraces death as a kindness to the people in his life. He sees that they can't handle his dying. So he says goodbye. I mean, I could try to look at the text and see if I could find a little more evidence for that claim. He says, um, uh, the joy is one example. I think his joy comes from that he's actually done something good for the first time in his life.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  He says, uh, um, let's see.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  He felt sorry. His wife came over to him. He looked at her. She was gazing him with despairing expression. He, he felt sorry for her. It's the very end. It's like the last page or so.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  At one point, a little past that, I think, he says, he felt sorry for them and needed to relieve their pain. He needed to free them and to free himself of this suffering. And, and I think, and of course, we can have an interesting conversation about how a person can control their own death without committing suicide. That, that there's a lot of suggestion that people can, can give up and literally, you know, sit, go. And I feel like it's the only kindness that we see him do is his embrace of his fate that bring comfort, comfort ironically to them. Because it's, I mean, that, that's part of the reason I think Tolstoy gives him such

• 59:54Speaker 00

  a horrible ending, that, that his pain is screaming and the, it's obvious. And we have that, you know, comic, semi comic quote from the wife in the beginning, that she had to endure it. And now she doesn't have to anymore. His suffering is over.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yes. And I do think that in some way, people can, I don't know, control is maybe too strong a word, their own death, because I cannot tell you, almost uncountable times, people have told me, I left the room and then they died. And people are upset. And I tell them, this happens all the time. You stay with someone for days and then you go down to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee and that's when they die. And so I think there is something about, like, there is some dynamic in people's death where they understand for themselves, this is the time to let go.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Because it's, it has happened too many times to be pure coincidence. So I think it might be that you have some, if you're on the verge, you have some moment when you actually can let go. But there was also, there is also that, that very suggestive, um, line where it says something about, um, the one, the one who would understand, or the only one who needs to understand, understood.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  That's a bit cryptic. I, I remember that line. It's hard.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  And I don't know if it means God or not.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Who's he referring to?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  It could be God.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  His wife, him, or God?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I don't know. Well, the one, I mean, because I, I was also reminded of the fact, three days of suffering, that's before he dies, you know? I mean, Tolstoy was very Jesus oriented, and that's three days before the resurrection too. So I would not be surprised if there was a, a, a subterranean Jesus theme.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Through Ivan Ilyich's death.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  But, uh.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  I don't think it's so subterranean. That's not a coincidence that he picked three.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. But boy, what, what a remarkable, I mean, honestly, I can't imagine how in 50 pages you could get more, more of life and death. And, and if this isn't a tribute to the extraordinary genius of this writer, I can't imagine what is.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree with you. Let's close. I think, you know, as you get older, you are forced to confront your own mortality. I think most, most of my life, I've been blessed or cursed, I think blessed, to not think about my own mortality. I've been very blessed to be very healthy. And when I talk about my age, it's just a number. But when you pass 70, you start to think that it's not just a number. Uh, you can't help but be aware of what's going on, uh, in, in the real world. And, uh, you might be like Caius, you might be mortal.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  And life, both suffering and, and aging, forces you to be aware of your mortality. And I think people differ in how they deal with that in terms of their, how they allocate their time. Some people spend more time with their family. Uh, I was fortunate to interview Ben Sasse, who knows he's dying and has chosen to talk about his faith, about death, and about the country and, and what America could do to be a better place, what Americans can do to make it a better place. And I'm curious if you have any, let's close on the question of, of what you would encourage to help people think about using their life well.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  You know, I gave my, my, uh, my, my four. The suffering you don't choose usually, but the, you know, to meditate, I think is a healthy thing. To explore religion, I think is a healthy thing. Not everybody is, can have faith, but, so choose therapy or choose meditation then, or read Anna Karenina, um, or the death of Ivan Ilyich. So I'm curious in your, if I came to you and I said, I'm a young person and I said, I don't want to be on my deathbed and think I didn't lead my life the way I should have. Uh, I didn't live as I ought to have lived. What, what would you recommend? What are, what do you think about when that?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  I would recommend, okay, I mean, I probably would recommend lots of things, but I'll start with, I'll recommend two things now. First is, choose people to be close to you who want you to be better. Not, not that they're going to push you every single day, but they want the better version of you. They're not going to relax into your being, um, less than you ought to be. And the second thing that I would say is that you should choose something outside of your work that you love to enhance your life.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  For me, I mean, it's not exactly outside my work, but it was either literature or maybe chess. For others, it can be music. It can be theater. It can be movies. But I mean, you should have a passion that's not about the rest of your life. The obvious things are, obviously, you should spend time with the people you love and have deep relationships. That's the single most important thing. But everybody will tell you that and it's, and it's true. But also make sure that those relationships elevate you and make sure that you explore, life is so incredibly rich. Reach outside the thing you do every day to explore some world.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Because I think that it will enhance your life. And, and also remember, I just want to say one thing about the deathbed. When people say, no one says, as you mentioned earlier, no one says on their deathbed that they would spend more time at the office. I don't know how much we wait the deathbed over the rest of one's life. Because if you gave that person 30 more years, my guess is they would end up spending a lot of time in the office again. And so we, yeah, we have to realize, like, life is full of lots of stuff and, and don't isolate and limit yourself too much. Like, explore the richness of God's world.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  And, and, and I hope you, uh, offer gratitude to God for giving it to us.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  I'd say one follow up to that. I, I think the first thing you said is extremely novel, uh, to surround yourself with people who expect more of you. And a variation on that is really implicit in the story, which is, don't surround yourself with people who care about the superficial and how their curtains look or their screen or whatever it is. And for me, I think the hardest part of, of life, if you want to be better, is remembering, is paying attention, is being aware. And I think being around people who take life seriously helps you remember that it's

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  serious and helps you avoid those problems that you might have later in life of regret. Do you have any thoughts on that, on how to, how to keep it front and center? I think it's so easy to let the years go by and, and float along and be carried by the mores of the people around you to get the promotion or whatever is the thing that they honor and.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  I actually think that this is where, yeah, this is where meditation or prayer or a regular practice of stopping, um, of silence, of forcing yourself not to always be in front of a screen or a book or a person, but actually to take those moments of what the Jewish tradition calls hebo de duh, which is aloneness, to, to evaluate your life and the world so that it doesn't always rush by without your noticing is incredibly important and growthful.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  My guest today has been David Wolpe. David, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.