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

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0:36Today is September 16th, 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 EconTalk. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

Opening reactions to Ivan Ilyich

1:04Now, 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

1:35deeply 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 talk about death a little bit along the way because this book is sort of about death. Of course, it's also about life. 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

2:12with Ivan Illich dying. He starts with people's reactions to his death. Yeah. 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

2:43promotion? And there is a beautiful halakha that when you, that is a Jewish law, that when you know someone has died who left you money, you first say the blessing, which blesses God who is good and does good. And then you say, Baruch Dayan Emet, 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

3:15of, 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. 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

3:52human reactions. He says, dead. He's dead, each of them thought, but I'm not. Right. Which is, unfortunately, often what human beings feel at a funeral in the face of death. We think about ourselves as often. And Tolstoy is very clear about that. So, I mean, first of all, how often do you read the obituaries, if you read the obituaries,

4:22and say, oh, well, it's okay because this person had congenital heart disease. I don't have that. 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,

4:52when 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 will, I think I'll mention once or twice in this Ernest Becker's Denial of Death. He has a section where the French writer Alphonse Daudet, 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 sound great at the theater.

5:24Because 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. And the characters are often, the way I think of it, this performative aspect, they're wearing a mask, 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

5:59inside 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 what happens numerous times in this book. And in fact,

The hollowness of a successful life

6:23in the non-death scenes, and a serious chunk of the book is 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 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.

6:58His essence is so hollow. And so the people who open the book with their attitudes, their public faces versus their private thoughts, the public faces, you know, tut, tut, tsk, tsk, their private thoughts are, hey, 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

7:33own financial stability. 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. 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.

8:07That 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, as Tolstoy says, it's so empty, and it's dark in a certain sense. 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

8:39he does not wield it. But we, as the reader, see him, I think, a little less attractively. He enjoys not just not wielding the power. He enjoys holding it over the people, which is really despicable. He's a remarkably unlikable husband. He, very early in his marriage, which is very quickly a loveless marriage. He sees his wife as a burden, and he maximizes the amount of time

9:10he spends at work. So he doesn't have to be with her or the children. He's a terrible, he's a non-existent father. But as you say, on the surface, from the outside especially, he has a very successful career. He has a nice living. He has a nice wife and children and a beautiful home. And we see him the way he cannot see himself. We see him honestly. And only toward the end of the book, and we'll, of course, talk about this, does he begin to see that maybe his life wasn't what he thought it was.

Tolstoy's late worldview and marriage

9:46And some of this, I think 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, he repudiates it and says, I shouldn't have written it. And 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 superfluous. And yet he can't help himself in a way from writing

10:20these incredibly acute observations. And at least some people have seen in this something of a portrait of his own marriage, which was famously troubled. 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 not dealt with at all. It's just

10:50like, and he took a walk, and a kid died. And he had breakfast, and a kid died. And that's also, Tolstoy lost a number of children. And I think it's just stunning to think how much of life Ivan Illich doesn't live. Yeah, of course. And the wife is a minor character, but I have to read one quote from her. She's not terribly admirable. This is, again, in the very beginning, when someone says,

11:26you know, did he suffer terribly? How was it? And she says, I mean, this, you can't, you can barely read this with a straight face. In fact, I know an old joke, which I won't say about that this is parodying. So, quote, he screamed and screamed. This is her, this is the wife talking about Ivan 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 how I endured it. You could hear him screaming through three closed doors. Oh, the things I was forced to endure, end of quote.

12:00So, just do a couple things about that, and then you give your reaction. First of all, a little self-centered. A little bit. He's suffering, and she's complaining about her challenge of trying to endure his screaming. His pain was so horrible, he screams straight for three 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. You see, it's bad enough that she's pushed herself two closed doors

12:33away from her husband without consoling him. But in her retelling, she makes it even worse, meaning it was so loud that three closed doors weren't sufficient. But of course, we as the reader thinking, why weren't you comforting him? Yes. Yeah, which she really doesn't. I mean, there is that moment, if I remember, at the very end where some sympathy is restored. But a lot of this is a sort of sotto voce power struggle between the

13:07husband and the wife until he gets beyond it, which is part of what the ending of the book is about. 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. You know, it's about the lies we tell ourselves. It's a critique of the kind bourgeois life that

13:38Tolstoy rejected. And it's, and all of this is contained in these few pages, and certainly much more. But I, at least for me, and I suspect for you, it's really about the difficulty of coming to grips with one's own mortality.

Mortality and the search for a good life

14:01Yeah, 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. And a lot of the book is about that, looking away. Erwin Yalom has a book called, I think it's called Staring at the Sun. The sun is death. You can't look

14:33at the sun. You have to turn away. But I think, you know, the other theme of the book, and it's below the surface, is what is a good life. And it's clear that this question has never crossed Yvonne's mind, crossed his mind. And it's clear that Tolstoy judges him for that. I'm going to read one paragraph that I thought kind of captured this. You know, there are many things that are negative

15:07about Yvonne that are, we've mentioned, he's not a great husband, he's not a great father. He's a poseur, a, he can be cruel implicitly or explicitly in his job. It's very mild, by the way, there's nothing heavy handed in that. But this paragraph I'm going to read, in a certain sense, it's, it's such a mild criticism. But I think it's really gets to the heart of the judgment of Tolstoy

15:41of this style of living that you alluded to 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. Damasks, ebony, flowers, carpets, and bronzes, every dark and lustrous thing that all people of a certain kind

16:13procure 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. To him, however, it all seemed to be quite exceptional. End of quote. So, I think the judgment here is, it is really a criticism of, you know, of René Girard's idea of mimesis, this idea of imitating, instead of living an authentic life. He, he lives to live like others, rather than living his own life.

16:50It's, it reminds me of that wonderful 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. Yes. Because he's very pleased with his life for a long time, except at

17:26one 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. So, you know, the way Tolstoy summarizes his life, I think more than once is

17:57pleasant, 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. Right. Yes. I mean, this is, 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,

18:30reminds me, do you know that, that great line from into the woods, sometimes into the woods, you're not good. You're just nice, you know, and it's the same thing here is Ivan Illich 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 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

19:04masks, uh, in the house that, and, and he falls and then he starts to get sick.

Illness, doctors, and hospital room reality

19:12And 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. Cause you know, he, 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 this problem. We know that medicine is flawed in the end of the 19th and early parts of the 20th century

19:49and that he's just dying. And that is uncertain by the way, for quite a while, other than 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. Right. There is also in this, uh, which you bring up another, another theme of the novel, uh, novelette is the way doctors speak to patients and patients want to be spoken to. Cause the doctor is, is talking only about symptoms and he basically wants to know,

20:19he'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. 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, uh, that it's really all

20:51about 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, uh, that of course hasn't changed. I wonder if you'd reflect for a minute, having been the rabbi of a congregation for 26 years, um, you've must've been in a lot of hospital

21:23rooms, visiting a lot of sick people. Uh, and you must've seen this both charade that takes place where the patient isn't told the truth, but also, uh, sometimes I'm sure there were people who demanded the truth and heard it. Um, 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

21:53character beforehand. One was the person who dies like the early, early Ivan Illich. That is, they did not, 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. Um, the second are people who confront the fact that they're dying and are crushed by it. And I have seen that

22:25more than once. Um, and they're crushed for all sorts of different reasons, but we'll get back to that moment. I suppose when we get back to, to the actual book, cause 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, um, and, and die in a way like Ivan Illich does at the very end. Uh, I remember one person in particular who was a doctor who, um, I think probably administered something to himself because

23:02the last, or had it administered to him because the last 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. Um, so there are such people who really, they know what's coming and they accept it. Um, but at least in, in this case with Ivan Illich, 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

23:39going to read, um, people were making suggestions online about what we should see, one of the Kurosawa movies are so on. If you read the incredible, I think, and, and unbelievably insightful book, denial of death by Ernest Becker, um, he feels that basically Freud was wrong, that the basic drive is not, um, 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

24:14you 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. Um, like the French call orgasm le petit mort, the little death. Why? 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

Aristotle syllogism and personal mortality

24:41of Ivan Illich's confrontation with death starts with his remembering the syllogism that he learned from Aristotle about basically the Caius is mortal. Caius is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal. And he never realized it applied to him. It was about Caius. That's an incredible passage. It is an, it might be the most remarkable passage in the book, especially because the way he puts it

25:13is like Caius is an abstraction, but then he writes, um, if I can, uh, um, he'd always been, he was Vanya. He's talking about himself with mama, with papa, with Mitya and Volodya, 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 lever ball that Vanya loved so much, who 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

25:49the person who dies. He's only beginning to realize that actually death is real. He always knew it intellectually, but he's feeling it viscerally. Um, it's different. Yeah. Um, you know, the expression memento mori, which is, you should remember that you're mortal. This book is, um, an exercise in that. It, it forces you to confront the reality that you're not Caius either, not just Yvonne. Um, and I'm, I'm curious in your experience of having to confront death in those hospital rooms,

26:26um, you know, a doctor has to confront, depending on what kind of doctor you are, you have to confront death and see it. A rabbi is 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. And, um, I'm curious two things. If that changed you in any way that you can at least, you know, realize or talk about and, uh, whether you're glad that that was part of your

27:01life, um, 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? 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,

27:31the 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. Um, and, and when I got lymphoma, the same thing, I didn't know if that meant I was going to die. Um, and both of those experiences taught me that thinking you're confronting death is different from actually confronting death. It's like your entire system goes into a different

28:05mode 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. Uh, Hausman 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 18 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

28:40you die yourself, it's like the rest of the world disappears. Yeah. 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, um, almost in the way Ivan Illich does. But after those experiences, I know the terror and finality of genuinely confronting

29:11death. 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 think it immeasurably deepened my understanding of the human experience to both go through it and to share it with other people. Um, and by the way, for those of you out there who are rabbis, I can't recommend highly enough, um, getting very sick

29:42and recovering because, because it's really good. Um, 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 Illich is a Yom Kippur book. Yeah. Um, in a very powerful way. And so, yeah, I think sitting at the deathbed

30:16and talking to people who are going to die, um, is, is an unparalleled way of learning about what life is. 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

30:49shelter, so we'd go next door. And, um, I wasn't hurrying. I'm older than my wife. Uh, 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. 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. Um, now that's what I said to myself, but I have a

31:25feeling and I know because occasionally there would be an especially loud boom when a missile either landed or was intercepted, uh, most of the time intercepted. And I realized that some of that was just false bravado. Uh, yeah, I, it's just, it's hot 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, I'm, you know, the, the, the, the animalistic fight or flight

32:03that tells you how you really feel. The one analogy that I'll use and just to 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. Yeah. All of a sudden I realized underneath it, I do have anxiety about being 30,000 feet in a metal tube that shouldn't be suspended in the air. I know what my, my experience of that is a little

32:37turbulence is fine. And when it starts to intensify, I I'm, 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. Yeah. And I always remember, I don't remember which comedian said that's why they call it terminals. Oh, that's dark. You fly twice a month. You can make that change. Yeah. Right. Exactly. I want to talk about, let's talk about the ending of the book,

Comfort from the servant Gerasim

33:13not the literal ending, although we'll talk about that too, but the last, it's, you know, it's the last, almost half of the book is his decline. And the only thing that gives him comfort comfort is his interaction with his servant, whose name is Gerasim. Right. And he gets comfort because Gerasim will often hold his legs up higher than he can hold them himself propped on a pillow,

33:45which 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, 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,

34:20there's some tears shed, but there's 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. Um, 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, uh, interaction with, with his servant who's portrayed

34:52as a country bumpkin as a, as a, some kind of almost a simpleton, but clearly someone with a good heart who, when, when giving comfort or serving Yvonne, he, he, he does it with a smile. He does it without condescension. He does it without lying. He is in many ways the only admirable person in the entire book, actually, now that I think about it. 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, uh,

35:27Israel. Aleph Dalet 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 Gerasin as the only person that actually understands what's going on. Correct. Who's not a liar. Who's, who's honest. Yes. He's not a liar. He knows that Ivan Illich is dying and, and Ivan Illich 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

35:58his legs. And I think the implication is that he cleans him bodily. Oh yeah, for sure. So, um, 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. So I think that that's, uh, I think that, that he allows himself maybe because Gerasin 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

36:33there is, and, and Gerasin'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. Um, and it's incredibly helpful. And, and I think, um, 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, uh, this is not, you know, it's not disgusting work or shameful work. It's like

37:06sacred and beautiful. And I'm taking care of this human being who's dying. And I know that. Um, so we should all be so lucky. Yeah, there's, it reminds me of, um, another aspect of, of Jewish law, which is the taking care of a person after their, after their death, um, and everything that you do for a person who has passed away, washing their body, accompanying them, keeping washer with them before the funeral, accompanying the body on the way to the funeral. This is called

37:41chesed shall emet, uh, 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, the figure of Gerasin doing these, uh, the 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, uh, the Christian

38:12version of this is a Flaubert short story, which is a, it's a wonderful story called St. Julian, the Hospitaller. And it's, it's, uh, 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, uh, in a way that we as the outsiders find difficult to, to observe because of the, as you say, the disgust we often feel for, for the body and it's,

38:47and it's, uh, messiness. Anyway.

Pain, awareness, and moral suffering

38:49Yes. And it's, and, and so finally we, we come to, um, the, the revelation that is forced by pain and the imminence of death, you know, and that's, I, I mean, in, in a way it's, um, 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

39:22own 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, and I've seen this too, suffering and sometimes age and its disabilities really bring people to recognize, oh, I'm actually

39:53going to die because it, 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. Yeah. But before we get to the very ending, I want to give one more example of his failure to confront himself. Um, his lack of,

40:23his lack of self-awareness is really, you know, runs through the book until the very, very end. And 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? Right. Yes. Yes. It's Tolstoy telling us what Yvonne is thinking, but it's also Tolstoy telling us what he's thinking, which is this man has lied his whole life, uh, to people's

40:59faces about what he feels, what, what he's doing to them in, in his, in his role as a judge. And he can't recognize it in himself. He can see it in others. Uh, you know, it's, um, it's, 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, uh, he doesn't

41:30really get it. Yes, it's true. Yeah. I, it's, I mean, the, 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, uh, you know, the Hasidic Rebbe said that you should see other people as a mirror. Um, and, and here he has spent his whole life, not really telling the truth, but, but, um, but acting as the, the carrier of the common

42:10assumptions of the world. Yeah. 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, 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,

42:43but that's, that, that doesn't actually, you know, yes, then you feel it. You're actually dying alone. Um, yeah, it's very powerful. And, uh, I was going to say, I've never died, but, but I have lost people close to me. Yes. And you have a similar out of body experience, which is your parent, your father, your mother, your mother dies. And 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

43:23people who didn't lose their father seem to be going through their life as if nothing had happened. And, but my father died. How can you be so not callous, insensitive, just insensitive? Yes. And, and, 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, we're not allowed to, our, our emotions don't allow it. In the case of Jewish law, we have a whole set of strictures that,

43:56that stop us from having a normal life for at least 11 months. In the case of a parent, we have to say, uh, the mourner's Kaddish for our parents. And so we're forced in Jewish, in the case of Jewish law, to not revert to, to the, to the normal life. But we desperately want it because we know what it's like. We had it before. Yes. And we've watched these sense, insensitive people somehow, and you walk by them and, and you want to shake them. You want to grab them and say, don't you realize I've lost

44:29my father? And you know that. I was going to say that, like, I, the Talmud has a great phrase in a different context for that. Olam Kamin HaGonoheg, the world just goes on its way. It's like, it's indifferent to your, and, and I remember one of the, 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

44:59and they're, you don't want them looking at their watches saying, when do I get back to? Yeah. And, 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. 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? Into account, which is very, very hard. You know, I, I actually, when, 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

45:31article 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. Yeah. Like, learn a dance step, she says, like, something. And, and I think that that's part of what Tolstoy wants the reader to get from the book,

46:08is this will happen to you. And you don't want to come to this moment of, 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, will be in the situation that you're in. And, and that also is just unfathomable. And death itself is unfathomable, which is why people will say,

46:46oh, I just spoke to him yesterday, as though people who speak yesterday don't die today, but they do. Every day. But they do.

Following the rules versus true living

46:55Yeah.

Following the rules versus true living

46:56So, you know, I have to mention one of my favorite lines, which is, no one on their deathbed ever, ever wished they had spent more time at the office. And I, and of course, this is what happens to Ivan Ilyich. I want to read a, 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.

47:37With 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, so Ivan, he's, he's followed all the rules. You know, he's, he's, he's risen in the ranks. He's taking 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, his highest pleasure is to play bridge, which is, again, I have nothing against bridge or the companionship of, of four people playing bridge. But Tolstoy evidently doesn't think much of it. I think we can say that, but, but he's done everything quote correctly.

48:23So 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, that he's chosen to join and be partners with. So this idea, 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 has, Ilyich has made a choice and he made the wrong choice in Tolstoy's view.

49:09It's a great, it's a great, it's, it's exactly right. I, and, and he, you know, he says, like, 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, but, 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 school, I was invited to speak at an AA meeting.

49:57I had never gone to an AA meeting and they said, you'll give a little opening, it was a Jewish Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. This is Alcoholics Anonymous. 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, 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.

50:31And, and I think that that's part of what Tolstoy is saying about Ivan Ill. 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. Because if you always anesthetize yourself, whether, you know, if not through drink, then through pleasantries and surface and so on, then you, yes, money, greed, ambition, whatever. You don't see the pain of life.

51:04And 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. Yeah, there's, there's, this episode hasn't aired yet, but it will by the time ours, this one's released, a conversation I had with 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.

51:43Religion, therapy, meditation, reading literature, great books. And I told her that, and her answer was, 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 what she'd say she is now, but suffering, and we've had a number of episodes about this with Paul Bloom, for example.

52:17The suffering, as long as you don't die, heightens, well, it does all kinds of things. I was going to mention this earlier, you know, this documentary of World War I veterans saying, I wouldn't 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, and of course, that's for as long as you don't get killed. Right. It heightens your sense of life.

52:47And 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. And, and some have speculated it's because it, it heightens your, as long as you don't die, your life is a lot more vivid here. 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.

53:19It's like the World War I veteran. I literally say, I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I'm glad I'm here. 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. I, by the way, read the translation. This is a lovely little book called Lives and Deaths, Essential Stories. It's a Pushkin Press, and it's translated from the Russian by Boris Dreyuk.

53:53It has a wonderful story in it called Pacesetter, 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 romanticizes the peasant as the, as the real hero, which, but it's an incredible masterpiece. We'll link to all those. We'll link to your story, to your essay when it comes out.

54:17I 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. It says, again, 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.

54:47Could my whole life, my whole conscious life have been wrong? And, and a quote, that's a variation on the earlier statement of that he, he may not have lived as he ought to have lived. And of course, you know, here at Shalem College, we, we spend a lot of time talking about how one should live. Uh, any serious human being, uh, any serious human being, I believe, should confront that question. And Tolstoy was obsessed with it, obviously.

55:17Right. He was, uh, many of his, his fictions, his fictions, his nonfiction, um, uh, how should a person live? Um, and, uh, I, I think we get, in my view, it's, it's not obviously correct, but I think he gives an answer to the, to that question in the ending. But I'm, first, I want to hear your interpretation.

Interpreting the ending and redemption

55:42How do you understand the ending? The ending's a bit ambiguous. Right. Before I get to the ending, I just want to make one connection to something that most people will know. So, 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 Cabrera, 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.

56:13But, um, but. Spoiler, you can stop listening now if you're really worried about this. Go ahead. 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.

56:50Um, 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. 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. Um, yeah, I agree with all that, but I'm going to put forward a different, a very, uh, an extra thing.

57:25Please, please. I think 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 now days, and he sees how, um, he hates them.

58:05He says explicitly, Tolstoy says explicitly, many times, that he hates his wife, he hates his children, he really hates that his wife is healthy and plump and, and fleshy, and it's really powerful writing. Um, 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.

58:36He 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. He says, uh, um, let's see. He felt sorry. His wife came over to him. He looked at her. She was gazing at him with despairing expression. He, he felt sorry for her.

59:07It's the very end. It's like the last page or so. 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, you know, of course, we can have an interesting conversation about how a person can control their own death without committing suicide. There's a lot of suggestion that people can, can give up and literally, you know, say go.

59:39And 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 Hostet gives him such 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.

1:00:10His suffering's over. 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.

1:00:41And 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, 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.

1:01:08But there was also, there is also that, that very suggestive line where it says something about the one, the one who would understand, or the only one who needs to understand, understood. That's a bit cryptic, I remember that line, it's hard. And I don't know if it means God or not. Who's he referring to? I could be God, I don't know. His wife, him, or God? I don't know. Well, the one, I mean, because 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.

1:01:47So I would not be surprised if there was a subterranean Jesus theme through Ivan Illich's death. Yeah, I agree. But, uh... I don't think it's so subterranean. That's not a coincidence that he picked three. Yeah, but boy, what a remarkable, I mean, honestly, I can't imagine how, in 50 pages, you could get more, more of life and death. And if this isn't a tribute to the extraordinary genius of this writer, I can't imagine what it is.

1:02:20Yeah, I agree with you. So, um, let's close.

Closing advice on using life well

1:02:27I 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. Um, 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 the real world.

1:03:00And, uh, you might be like Caius. You might be mortal. And life, both suffering 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. 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 what America could do to be a better place.

1:03:38What 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. 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, uh, the death of Ivan Ilyich.

1:04:13So, 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 do you, what do you think about when that? I would recommend, okay, I mean, I, I probably would recommend lots of things, but I'll start with, I'll recommend two things now. So, first is, choose people to be close to you who want you to be better.

1:04:48Not, 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, 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. For me, I mean, it's not exactly outside my work, but it was either literature or maybe chess.

1:05:21Um, for others, it can be music, um, 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. Um, 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.

1:05:57Um, because I think that it will enhance your life. And, and also remember, I just want to say one thing about the deathbed. Um, 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.

1:06:28Well, 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. And, and, and I hope you, uh, offer gratitude to God for giving it to us. I would say one follow-up to that. I think the first thing you said is extremely novel, uh, to surround yourself with people who expect more of you.

1:07:01And 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 serious and helps you avoid those problems that you might have later in life of regret.

1:07:40Do 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. 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,

1:08:13but actually to take those moments of what the Jewish tradition calls, 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. My guest today has been David Wolping. David, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Thank you so much. Thank you.

1:08:43This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, 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 EconTalk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.