Why Didn't God Just Let Me Die?

May 8, 1996

I've been in Israel for the past few months. It was all part of a community service project sponsored by a Rabbi back in Wisconsin. We help fix schools, paint buildings, that sort of thing. We also get to spend a lot of time hiking.

We had been hiking across Israel for the last two days. This was the last hike before the program was going to end. I still didn't have a clue what I was going to do when it was over. I had an offer to go work for an archaelogical dig company owned by some other people from the States, but was starting to miss the freedoms of living in the U.S. Driving my car. Mountain biking. Playing golf. I just didn't know what I wanted to do.

The trail was pretty easy to follow until we got to this one section on the side of a mountain where the path got a little narrow. I was the second person to get to this point. There was a small gap that we needed to cross over. I saw a rock over head that I figured I could grab onto. I could hold my weight on that as I swung my legs across. I grabbed the rock, but as soon as I put my weight onto it, it came off in my hand. I started to fall straight back, rolling down the mountain.

“This is it,” I thought to myself. “It’s finally over. I get to die, and nobody can get mad at me. It was just an accident. That's what they will tell my family. Just an accident."

After falling about fifteen feet down the mountain, my feet got caught in some rocks and I stopped moving. Another fifteen feet, and it all would have been over. All of the pain. The depression. The addiction. All of it would have stopped right then and there.

“You didn’t scream,” somebody said. “How could you not scream?”

“You are so lucky to be alive,” another one in the group remarked.

That was the last thing that I was feeling. I had my head in my hands and started to cry. Not out of gratitude, or happiness, but out of anger.

How could God do this to me? Why couldn’t I have just kept falling? This was my out! Why didn’t he just let me die?

I had been raised as a Conservative Jew. We went to temple on the really important Jewish Holidays. To me it was really just a social religion. My brother and I were in the Jewish youth groups. My parent's friends were all Jewish. But it wasn’t about having a relationship with God. When we did go to services, it was just 300 people all sitting around listening to one guy speaking Hebrew for three hours, without having a clue what he was saying to us. Our parents told us that we were only allowed to date Jewish girls (which meant that I didn’t date a whole lot).

I had been depressed for such a long time. From the time I was in third grade, I didn’t want to live. I also didn’t want to hurt my family, so I just suffered through the pain. Once I got into college, I started using drugs to help dull the pain. Then when we had gone to Israel as a family, I felt a sense of belonging. I thought maybe this was a place that could give me the desire to want to live. Maybe even let myself fall in love. So I found a way to get back there. This community service project was my way back.

Once we got down from the mountain, I knew that it was time for me to leave Israel. I had been looking for answers. Instead that fall made me realize that I still wanted to die. If I wasn’t going to find the answers here, I might as well head back home. At least there I could go for bike rides, play golf and have a bit of fun with my friends. It was also a lot easier to find the drugs that I needed to keep numb enough to the pain so that I could make it through another day.