You Matter: Every Life Is Valuable Through To The End

Hi, everyone. I’m Rabbi Steve Leder. I’m very honored to be with you today, speaking to you from my home here in Los Angeles.

This is an enormously important topic, an enormously important gathering. And so I have decided to approach the whole subject in the form of a sermon. And this, this sermon was really written for you.

My dad died after a 10-year journey through Alzheimer’s disease. Actually, he died twice.

The first death was when he could no longer remember who he was or who my mother, I, my four siblings or his grandchildren were. A different and distant person inhabited the vacuum of his mind. The man who was my father was gone.

He died a second time in the middle of the night, 2,000 miles away from me, when his heart stopped beating.

Every few months for 10 years, I made the trip from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, the land of my youth, to visit my dad in his nursing home. I dreaded the elevator ride from the lobby up to his floor. After my visit, I wept nearly every time on the way back down to the lobby in that same elevator.

The nursing home, among the best I have ever seen, was still so awful. Not only because of the new fault lines in my heart each time I saw my dad, but also because of the others in their wheelchairs and with their walkers, the emptiness in their eyes and their lives, all in the face of the forced smiles of their loved ones.

There was a dark cloud of resignation over and within them and the staff, within me and within so many of us, that this is what the end looks like and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it other than enjoy life until we are old.

I will leave the science of psychedelics to others, but there is a dimension to what psychedelics might be able to do for us at the end of our lives as a spiritual weapon. A weapon in the most important battle of all.

This conference, this research, this pushing of boundaries is a war against our greatest enemy.

That enemy hovered as a dark cloud over my father’s nursing home. It hovers over my mother’s life in assisted living. It hovers over so many places in our country and the world, and sometimes it grasps hold of our hearts.

That enemy can be defined in a single word: fatalism.

Before Abraham rejected his father’s paganism by becoming a monotheist, people didn’t matter. The pagan viewpoint considered existence to be inevitably cyclical.

All humans were part of a cycle that would repeat itself over and over and over again throughout all of time. Each generation was merely a new cast of actors playing out the same roles in the same drama as the generation before and the generations to come.

What Abraham came to tell the world can be summed up in two words: You matter.

You matter.

This is the great insight he brought to humankind, the idea that we matter as individuals, that we can change things, that existence is a linear journey toward what can be more and more a better world.

The idea that we matter was a big, radical, powerful spiritual idea. And it still is.

You matter because you were made by God in a way unlike any other person on Earth. This means you have a unique way of loving and teaching and leading and touching and caring for other people that no one else has ever had or will ever have.

Let me say that again.

You matter because you were made by God in a way unlike any other person on Earth. You are unique. You are powerful. You are beautiful in a way unlike anyone else on Earth.

The most advanced robot in the world cannot begin to approach who you are and what you can bring to others.

And to say to each person, “You matter,” is to say we all matter.

Each one of us, at one time or another, has likely recited the 23rd Psalm. You know it. It’s the one that begins, “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

There’s a verse in that psalm that says, “Thou hast anointed my head with oil. My cup runneth over.”

Do you know what that means, “Thou hast anointed my head with oil”?

It is the psalmist’s way of letting each person who reads that psalm know that he or she is a king or a queen. Anointing was for royalty.

You are royalty.

I wish I could have called that out to each person in that cheerless nursing home, and especially to my dad.

You are a king. You are a queen. You matter.

Why must life include suffering we can knowingly reduce or end? Why must the elderly and the dying be treated as if they are already dead?

We have at our disposal the ability to treat the end of our lives as a next era of life, every bit as ripe with potential for growth and insight and pleasure and transcendence as the past eras of our lives.

And we should.

The Talmud warns us that we will be called to account before the heavenly tribunal, and I quote, “For every permissible pleasure we could have enjoyed on Earth but did not.”

Life, all life, every stage, is meant to be lived with pleasure.

No matter how complicated the legal battles, the science, the public perception, it should all be overcome for the sake of making our lives a blessing from beginning to end and beyond.

Why beyond? Because of my lunch with my friend Craig the other day.

I’ve begun to speak to close friends and the larger community, including all of you, about my lifelong battle with anxiety.

For most of my life, I subordinated the feeling of impending doom through workaholism. I worked nearly all the time. My anxiety was locked in the basement by my ambition, and it could only pound on the ceiling with a broomstick every now and then to annoy me.

But the pandemic unlocked the basement door of my psyche, and soon I was shivering and owned by terrible anxiety.

And I needed help for the first time in my 61 years.

I am now properly medicated and enjoying life in ways I never could before.

I shared this with my childhood friend at lunch last week, and he said, “Let me tell you what I’m doing. I’m microdosing and macrodosing, and it has brought me insight and peace and given me a sense of spirituality for the first time in my life.

“I no longer think of God or the afterlife of the soul as a theoretical concept created by people who are afraid of the dark. Now I sense a real transcendence in life.”

My friend is a hard-nosed businessman who operated at the highest level. He is in his 60s, and he is finding new meaning in his life.

Anxiety is a plague. Pain is a curse. The last stage of life is the poor stepchild of our years.

To soothe the suffering of others, to quell our own inner demons, to enable us to fully enjoy this miracle, this blessing, this gift called life from beginning to end and beyond, is the most noble and sacred of all callings.

From the perspective of my faith, there is no such thing as relative value to life.

Every person, every stage, every age, every life, whether with 10 decades or 10 minutes left to live, is of equal value and potential for purpose.

If you are alive, there is a reason. And your life, like every life, is a treasure of the rarest sort.

The question as it relates to this gathering is whether or not we will use the ancient new tools we have to create a world in which all of us, including the dying, are able to live and die like we matter.

What better conference than this to give Hunter S. Thompson the last word, the battle charge for the war we must wage against the fatalism that imprisons so many?

“Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, dented, broken, smoking, leaking fluids, your tank on empty, totally worn out and shouting, ‘Holy shit, what a ride.’”

In other words, you matter.

Live and die like it.