The other day The New York Times ran an inspirational piece on Rabbi Kenneth Berger and his now infamous sermon “Five Minutes to Live.” Thirty years ago, Rabbi Berger delivered a Yom Kipper speech that focused on a recent event – the Challenger explosion.  Months after the horrific accident, there was a revelation that the seven astronauts remained alive for the 65,000-foot fall to the ocean.  Rabbi Berger asked his congregants to consider what they would do if they found themselves in similar circumstances and what would go through each of their minds.

Less than three years later, Rabbi Berger found himself in the exact hypothetical he had posed.  He was returning from a family vacation with his wife and children on a flight to Chicago from Denver when the plane’s tail engine exploded.  For the next 40 minutes, the passengers prepared for a crash landing.  Both Rabbi Berger and his wife Aviva, along with 110 other people, were killed.  Their daughter Avigail survived.

His sermon and its message lives on.  The New York Times describes Rabbi Berger’s message:

He touched on the ordinary ways that people forget to express love for their families, blithely assuming there will always be another day. He recounted the story of a Jewish father, facing imminent death during the Holocaust, who bestowed a final kiss on the young son he was sending away to safety.

“That scene still haunts me,” Rabbi Berger said as the sermon closed, returning to the Challenger. “The explosion and then five minutes. If only I… If only I… And then the capsule hits the water, it’s all over. Then you realize it’s all the same — five minutes, five days, 50 years. It’s all the same, for it’s over before we realize.

“‘If only I knew’ — yes, my friends, it may be the last time. ‘If only I realized’ — yes, stop, appreciate the blessings you have. ‘If only I could’ — you still can, you’ve got today.”

Snippets from his sermon (available here online) are timeless:

In our old age, Lying in bed, with our family gathered around us, having told everyone we needed to tell, our words of love and concern, free of pain, free of guilt, at peace with God and with our fellow man. That’s our dream.

But that’s not the way it seems to happen in our time. Therefore, death frightens us, death is our greatest enemy. Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote in his new work, “When all you’ve ever wanted isn’t enough (required reading for all) that perhaps, it is not really death that frightens us.

Listen to his words: I believe that it is not dying that people are afraid of. Something else. Something more unsettling and more tragic than dying frightens us. We are afraid of never having lived, of coming to the end of our days, with the sense, that we were never really alive, that we never figured out what life was for.

I recall the concluding scene of an old film where honeymooners are about to depart on a cruise and they tell each other how much they love each other, how much their lives have been enhanced by having known each other. That even if they were both to die, those months they had known, love together had made their lives worthwhile. There were no regrets. They get on the ocean liner, and as it leaves port, the name of the ship is revealed. The Titanic. {It is not how long we live; I suppose, for the most part, it is how we live each moment, each hour, each day.}

A particularly powerful metaphor Rabbi Berger uses is from The Kiss by Yaffa Eliach describing the last time a Jewish father kissed his son during the Holocaust:

I had a foreign passport from a South American country. It was a passport for myself. My rebbetzin, of blessed memory, and for a young child…. Upon receiving the passport, I realized that I had the opportunity to save two Jewish souls, a middle-aged women and a young child. When this became known, about forty children were brought to me by their parents. Little boys crying and begging to be saved. They promised to be good and not to be a burden to me. How could I choose? I told the Jewish leaders that I was returning to my apartment and that they should bring me a child. Two days later a father came with a small son, aged six, “I am Perlberger”, he introduced himself. Then he went on: “Rebbe, I am giving you my child. God should help you so that you should be able to save my son.” He bent down, kissed the child on his head and said, “Shraga, from this moment on, this Jew standing here next to you is your father.” That kiss I can’t forget. Wherever I go, that kiss follows me all my life. Before he shut the door behind him, the father took one more lingering look at his son. Then I heard the echo of his painful steps as he descended the stairs. God helped us. The boy and I managed to survive Bergen-Belsen together. Despite many difficulties, I studied with him every single day in camp, with God’s help, we were liberated by the American Army on a death train on Rosh Chodesh Iyar, April 13, 1945.

The Rebbe concludes his story by saying “All the time, the echo of that kiss that little Shraga received on his forehead resounds in my ears.” I see before my eyes a father bending and kissing his beloved son and pointing to me and saying “From now on this man is your father”.

The last line in the story was: This last kiss of a father to his son, follows me all of my life. My friends, the father knew this was the last kiss. Can you imagine the love, the warmth, the tenderness that went into that last kiss. Maybe in a way he was lucky. He knew.

The astronauts could not have known, if only, if only they knew. In a very real sense, none of us know the time of our last kiss. My kids come in and kiss me before they leave for school. I kiss Aviva before I leave for the Shul. Who knows what lies ahead, what tomorrow will bring? That one kiss, each kiss, must be with as much love and concern as possible.

Rabbi Berger concludes the sermon by encouraging everyone to stop and appreciate the every day blessings.  Tell people you love them and truly mean it every time.  Because you have no idea whether it will be the last time.