Mikaela Shiffrin gave the world a courageous lesson for our times after winning her gold medal in slalom. And we need it right now, since the world has going through an epidemic of death for the better part of an especially traumatic decade. As of 9:30 Friday morning ET,1 8,614,366 people have died in the world this year (and it’s still February), and this following the huge spike during Covid in the first half of this decade. See the spike below:
Given that so many of us have been immersed in grief following a period that included the millions who died of Covid, those brutalized on October 7, and the bloody wars in Ukraine, Gaza and so many other places, along with victims of gun violence other biproducts of a chaotic era that still engulfs us, Shiffrin’s words are especially valuable to those who are grieving (essentially, all of us).
See them here:
Shiffrin had spent 300 days away from skiing after her father’s tragic passing. And then, when she finally came back, her greatest moment of triumph was also the one she most feared, the prospect of moving forward with her life, of imagining a world beyond the grief and without her dad.
She told reporters, “I could imagine doing the skiing, cross the finish line, and to have this moment actually kind of for myself to connect with the people who can’t be here. This was a moment I have dreamed about. I’ve also been very scared of this moment. I don't want to be in life without my dad, and maybe today was the first time that I could actually accept this reality, and instead of thinking I would be going in this moment without him, to take the moment to be silent with him."
She explained that everything that you do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience. “It’s like being born again.”
When we lose someone we love, our instinct is to make time stand still. I felt that way the night my father died. I was just 21 at the time, and I had spent the new year in New York at my rabbinical school apartment, having returned for a party just a couple of days before. My last in person interaction with my dad was a cursory goodbye as he and my mom left my childhood house in Brookline, Mass. to bring a few boxes down to our second home on Cape Cod. They had closed a sale on our primary home just that week and were looking forward to retiring on the Cape.
Here’s how I described the night of my father’s death in my book Mensch-Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi.
You can listen to that full chapter below, taken from the audiobook of Mensch-Marks.
Anderson Cooper has an excellent and timely podcast about grief called All There Is. Recently he interviewed writer Megan Falley, who, mourning the loss of their spouse, poet Andrea Gibson, spoke of how “dying is the opposite of leaving.”
Andrea left this most moving love poem to Megan, which you can read in full on Andrea’s Substack:
I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?”
When a loved one dies, we want to freeze-frame the moment and not allow time to move forward. Mikaela Shiffrin could not imagine experiencing that gold medal without her father being there. Andrea and Megan both could not bear the thought of a permanent breech in their experience of their lives together2. I did not want to enter my home to learn the truth that I already knew full well, that the rest of life, all of my future experiences, would take place without the physical presence of my father.
But I saw my newborn son and that helped heal me, just as Andrea’s poem helped to heal Megan.
Here’s what we need to understand: There are so many people in need of healing right now. Every cry in pain needs to be seen through that prism. Given the increase in the world’s population,3 I think we can safely say that there has never been more death around us than right now.
While it’s true that there never has been a period without grief, I think we are far too willing to deny that the past century has been exponentially more painful to more people who have borne more grief, even as health improvements have expanded life expectancy.
There is a statistic in baseball called W.A.R. It means Wins Above Replacement and places a metric on how many more wins a given player would earn his team, based on his hitting and fielding statistics, than an average replacement player would. I propose that the past half decade would have an extraordinarily high number of D.A.R. - Deaths Above Replacement. Far more grief than expected - or that our 2019 selves could have thought imaginable.
And indeed, a 2023 Boston University study shows that “excess deaths in the United States kept rising even after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1.5 million in 2022 and 2023 that would have been prevented had US death rates matched those of peer countries.”
The data show a continuation of a decades-old trend toward increasing US excess deaths, mainly among working-age adults, largely driven by drug overdoses, gun violence, auto accidents, and preventable cardiometabolic causes, the researchers say.
“The US has been in a protracted health crisis for decades, with health outcomes far worse than other high-income countries,” says lead and corresponding author Jacob Bor, ScD, said in a BU news release. “This longer-run tragedy continued to unfold in the shadows of the COVID-19 pandemic.”4
Heaven knows that with the clowns now in charge of our health department, mortality and disease will continue to be increasingly problematic.
My point here is not simply that more people have been dying, but that more people are grieving. In the US, there have been 1,234,749 confirmed deaths from Covid. Many more millions have been left behind to pick up the pieces from those losses. Do we have a day to memorialize them? We do not. Do we ever talk about that catastrophic period in daily conversation? For the most part, we don’t. Instead, we’ve relegated that recent era to an attic far in our past, an Al Gore-style lock box from which no painful memory might escape.
We are left to our own devices, and the prime device most people use is suppression and denial. This was shown magnificently in the first season of the Emmy winning series, The Pitt, which depicts a big city emergency room where doctors face current challenges while confronting the demons of Covid-PTSD. I know all about what first responders had to endure during that harrowing period and I can see the trauma that never quite goes away. I saw it first-hand at hospitals and cemeteries, and had to bury innumerable friends and relatives, including my mother-in-law, because someone ate a bat half a world away, or some such, and someone running this country at the time was unable to protect us from it.
Even as the memories recede, the pain can’t be suppressed entirely and denial shows its face in the ugliest of ways. Certainly behind the wheel. I can barely recall a time when an hour’s drive on a US interstate wouldn’t feature at least one idiot passing me going at least 90, wagging his middle finger for all to enjoy. We see Covid grief in the coarseness of language that has afflicted our society, and in the lack of decorum and dialogue in the public square.
There’s no excuse for the rudeness. but we need to understand where it’s all coming from.
Each of us should carry a trauma-o-meter to measure the degree of grief-driven stress that crazy co-worker or meshugenah relative is feeling right now, and where all the excessive indignation is coming from.
It’s about a dog lover being triggered by stories of Kristi Noem’s marksmanship.
It’s how people like me with intellectually challenged loved ones who want to punch out anyone who uses the R-word.
It’s about how someone born in Haiti wants to spit on anyone spreading rumors about the immigrants in Springfield eating the dogs and cats. Or someone from Somalia - or St. Paul - watching ICE atrocities unfolding on Minneapolis’s streets.
It’s about someone whose great uncle died in a measles epidemic who wants to send RFK Jr. to a leper colony.
It’s about an American who values the sanctity of human life hearing that our own government is enabling a Russian dictator’s unprovoked onslaught on Ukrainian civilians.
It’s about Holocaust survivors - and their still traumatized children and grandchildren - hearing that the Jewish state is being accused of genocide. A group of Jewish leaders, all moderates whom I respect greatly, has circulated an open letter pleading for academics, politicians and journalists to cease using the term “genocide” in regard to Israel’s actions in Gaza.5 The point of this letter, in my mind, is to lower the temperature and to avoid the most triggering language imaginable. To be clear, I do think Hamas had genocidal intent when it raped, murdered and captured innocent people on October 7. Those actions come much closer to fitting the initial definition of genocide as it was applied to Nazi crimes6 then anything Israel did as a country, though statements of intent made by some of its more notoriously racist ministers are extremely problematic. There’s no doubt that Israel’s leaders are going to have to answer for their malice toward innocent populations, including likely war crimes, as well as their neglect of their own people’s security.
And it’s about lying, conniving leaders who ignore the grief of survivors and should just step aside. Prime Minister Netanyahu, for political reasons, is now insisting in Orwellian fashion that there was no “massacre” on October 7. His entire country is grieving and yet he resorts to alternative facts, and with his friend Donald, who also wishes to ignore the traumas of survivors (those of the Epstein variety), will probably attack Iran just to change the subject. 7
The data show a continuation of a decades-old trend toward increasing US excess deaths, mainly among working-age adults, largely driven by drug overdoses, gun violence, auto accidents, and preventable cardiometabolic causes, the researchers say.
And face it, I recognize my own anger, my own unresolved grief. I cannot escape the conclusion that Donald Trump killed my mother-in-law in how he handled Covid. And it fuels my rage. Without either forgiving or forgetting, I need to find more constructive ways to memorialize the departed. We all do.
Ours is a world immersed in grief right now, much more grief than one would expect in an era when we’ve overcome so many diseases. To overcome this cycle of death and despair, we need to listen to the advice of courageous people like Mikaela Shiffrin and listen to podcasts like Anderson Cooper’s. And we need to understand that with grief, whether for an individual or for a community, nation of tribe, there is no “whataboutism.” My grief cannot be measured against yours. Grief is deeply personal and when you are in it, it feels infinite.
Megan Falley compares answering the question, “How are you?” to being a thimble at the mouth of a river. “That’s how small it is trying to catch something so big and rushing and vibrant and not static. And it just really falls short.”
We need to move forward. Somehow. Desperately. Before our sadness consumes us and our entire world.
And the best way is to reach out and help others do that too. The degree of suffering within and around us is too great to bear alone.
World population today:
Andrea wrote this:
World Population:
The Genocide Letter, followed by my notes:
Stop the Libel of Genocide
We the undersigned are outraged and sickened by the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people: the lie that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza. We reject this accusation with contempt.
There is a vigorous debate within the Jewish community over aspects of how this war was fought, and that is a sign of moral health. So is our pain over every innocent life lost. But we must unite in repudiating the lie of genocide.
The unprecedented combat conditions of the war – hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, thousands of boobytrapped homes – the conflating of combatants with “journalists” and “human rights workers,” the ratio of civilian-to-terrorist casualties, considered low for asymmetrical urban warfare, the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe, the warnings given to civilians before attack: All these factors were erased in the eagerness to indict Israel for genocide.
A crucial difference between war as tragedy and war as genocide is intent. In this war, only one side intended to commit genocide, and that is Hamas.
To accuse Israel of genocide, the massacre of October 7 has been systematically downplayed, while Israeli actions have been distorted and amplified. Israel went to war on October 8 not out of vengeance, as its detractors claim, but to break the Iranian-led siege of terror enclaves on its borders, and to restore its deterrence, without which it cannot survive in the long term in the Middle East. Thousands of rockets and missiles were fired at Israel in the weeks following the massacre, while Hamas starved and tortured 250 Israelis, some of whom were murdered in captivity.
The classic definition of genocide has been changed to apply only to the Gaza war – just as anti-Israel NGOs changed the definition of apartheid and colonialism to apply only to Israel.
Already on October 8, as Israel was still fighting terrorists within its border communities and hadn’t yet begun burying its dead, anti-Zionists began raising the cry of “genocide.” In fact, Israel’s enemies have been accusing it of genocide for decades.
The accusation of genocide has become a pretext for excluding, attacking and even murdering Jews around the world. Its purpose is to delegitimize Jewish self-determination and to turn the only Jewish state into the world’s arch criminal and pariah.
The bitter irony is that Israel, home to half the world’s Jews, is the only country to face a sustained war of attempted genocide – from its inception in 1948 until today.
We note with astonishment but not surprise the overwhelming silence of Israel’s defamers in the face of the atrocities of Iran – perhaps 30,000 civilians murdered in two days, one of the great crimes of our time. Anti-Zionism is not the defender of conscience but its betrayer.
We urge our fellow Jews and our non-Jewish friends to treat the accusation of genocide with revulsion – as the latest in a long history of lies about the Jewish people. “A lie has no legs,” notes the ancient Hebrew proverb. We will not allow this lie to stand.
Signed by:
Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg
Yossi Klein Halevi, author, journalist
Professor Jonathan Karp, Binghamton University
Rabbi Micha Odenheimer, Tevel b’Tzedek
Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, Uri L’Tzedek
Rabbi Yaakov Nagen, Blickle Interfaith Institute
Ari Ingel, Creative Community for Peace
It was a just war, given the need for deterrence following Hamas’s October 7 atrocities and the siezing of hostages. Many of Israel’s actions have crossed red lines and might be construed as war crimes. Despite my disgust at many of the actions of this Israeli government, particularly in the latter stages of the war, I cannot accept such a libel being applied to the enire country, which by extension applies to the Jewish people as a whole.
I signed that letter because I could feel the pain of that Holocaust survivor, who is still grieving, seeing that word, which was invented in order to indict Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust, now being applied - often with vengeful spite and astounding flippancy - by people who have no idea what genocide really is. Some people want to own the libs. Others, even some Jews, want to own the Jews.
But most of all, I feel the pain of one of the signers, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, a personal mentor and teacher, who has done more to bring the Holocaust to the consciousness of Americans than just about anyone. He was founding director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust and Chair of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and he is, in my mind, the greatest Jewish theologian of the post-Holocaust generation. And I know how personally he is taking this genocide libel. How do I know? In 2020, I wrote a book of post-Holocaust theology. I called it Embracing Auschwitz: Forging a Vibrant, Life-Affirming Judaism that Takes the Holocaust Seriously. Yitz loved the book…but he hated the title. He gave a recommendation that was both glowing and excruciating, insisting that I include his critique if I wanted to use it, which I did.
Yitz Greenberg’s blurb:
“I hate the title of this book and there are tens of passages which make me wince and grit my teeth in order to go on. Yet this is an important book and should be read by every Jew who cares about Judaism—because its central point is true and it offers wisdom to guide us into the Jewish future. Hammerman’s fundamental thesis is that the Holocaust must be incorporated into the fabric of Jewish religion. Our understanding of every tradition and ethical commandment must be reshaped by its light. This book shows how to do this. Thankfully, he makes clear that the correct application of this concept is not to magnify death and the feeling of victimization. Rather it is to respond with greater intensity of human responsibility and to savor life even more for its fragility and vulnerability. This is not to mention other exciting challenges in the book. Take his bold proposal—for the sake of creating an indissoluble bond—to grant every Jew in the world a vote in Israel. I don’t agree but this is a proposal that makes waves and is worth fighting over. In short, damn the torpedoes and wrecks along the way. Full speed ahead. Read this book. Criticize its faults. Absorb its truths. The life you inspire may well be your own.”
—Rabbi Dr. Irving “Yitz” Greenberg,
founding director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust,
Chair of the Holocaust Memorial Museum
founding President of the Jewish Life Network
From the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
See this Substack commentary from Daniel Gordis and see below this response to Netanyahu’s outrageous removal of the term “massacre” in describing Ocvtober 7. from the Times of Israel’s editor David Horovitz:
