A reflection on Parashot Acharei Mot–Kedoshim

Woody Allen once joked that he suffers from post-partum depression, because since the day he was born, he has been depressed. It is a humorous exaggeration, but it captures something uncomfortably true about the human condition. There is a sense in which “after” is not a stage we enter occasionally, but a state we inhabit almost continuously. This powerfully expressed than in the opening of Parashat Acharei Mot: “And the Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron…” (Leviticus 16:1).

“After death” is not a passing moment. It does not move on. When someone you love dies, every moment that follows becomes, in some sense, “after death”. Life does not return to what it was; it reorganizes itself around an absence. The calendar continues, the routines resume, the world appears intact, and yet something fundamental has shifted. Because when death enters your life, it does not leave when the funeral ends. The “after” is not located in time; it is embedded in consciousness.

This is not only a personal experience; it is also a collective one. There are historical moments that imprint themselves so deeply that they divide time into a “before” and an irreversible “after.” For many of us, October 7th is such a moment. Since then, we have not simply been living our lives, we have been living “after death”. The presence of loss has seeped into the background of our thinking, shaping how we perceive life itself.

Paul Auster offers a powerful articulation of this transformation in- Mr. Vertigo, when he describes the experience of being buried alive as part of a brutal initiation. What is striking in his description is not only the terror of the burial, but what comes afterward. “Once you have been beneath the ground, the world above becomes almost unbearably beautiful, yet at the same time strangely unreal, as though it were a fragile illusion. And from that point on, everything that happens is bound to that buried moment. The experience does not end, it relocates, becoming an internal presence that quietly colors all perception”.

 This is precisely what modern psychology has come to recognize. Encounters with death, do not simply produce grief; they disrupt the very frameworks through which we understand reality. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus captured this transformation long ago, he wrote that one cannot step into the same river twice. It is often explained by pointing to the changing waters, but there is another, perhaps deeper, reading: it is not only the river that changes; it is us. We are no longer the same person who first entered it. Just as we can never encounter a loved one for the first time again, and can never read a beloved book for the first time once more, every return is already a second encounter, shaped by memory, by knowledge, by what has already been lived. In the same way, after we have encountered death, we do not return to life unchanged; we return to it as someone who now carries that knowledge within them. And yet, within that disorientation, something else can emerge. Alongside anxiety and vulnerability, many individuals experience a deepened sense of clarity following encounters with mortality. Priorities shift. Superficial concerns lose their grip. Relationships become more central. Time becomes more tangible, more charged, more meaningful. Life, in a paradoxical way, can become both more fragile and more vivid at the same time.

This is, exactly where the Torah situates us. Because Acharei Mot does not stand alone. It is immediately followed by Kedoshim: “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). The move is neither accidental. The Torah does not resolve the pain of loss, nor does it attempt to erase the rupture. Instead, it places a demand. Holiness, in this context, is not a withdrawal from life but a deeper entry into it. It is, in fact, where the real work begins.

To live after death is to carry an awareness that cannot be undone. The question is not how to return to who we were before because that is no longer possible but how to become, within this altered reality, people who are capable of holding both the weight of loss and the responsibility of life.

Shabbat Shalom.May we learn how to live not despite the “after death,” but through it with greater clarity, presence, and purpose.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)