By Rabbi Alvin Kass

Recently Broadway was treated to a revival of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Our Town. This immortal classic is a poignant portrait of American life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the play tells the story of George Gibbs and Emily Webb, neighborhood playmates as children who become romantically involved as they mature. After graduating from high school, they get married in the town’s Congregational Church with all their friends and family in attendance. The enduring happiness they hoped to find, however, comes to an abrupt end when Emily dies bearing their second child. George is heartbroken, and Emily is buried in the town cemetery where she is reunited with family and friends who died before her. They do their best to help Emily adjust to this new existence beyond the grave; but Emily yearns to return to earth for just one more day. Although they warn her that she won’t find the world the way she remembered it, Emily insists on returning for a very happy time in her life — her twelfth birthday. When she returns to the Webb home, playing the role of both participant and observer, she quickly perceives the blindness of everyday human existence and longs to go back to the realm of the dead. Emily declares: “I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another...Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute.”  Simon Stimson, the town organist, responds: “That’s what it was to be alive. To move around in a cloud of ignorance! To go up and down, trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years...Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.” Thus, Our Town finds eternal truths in the daily lives of ordinary people doing ordinary things. It’s hard to imagine a cultural creation that more faithfully and reverently affirms the sanctity of life’s ordinary things. Holiness is not an abstruse concept, set apart from our daily lives; rather it is the principle that regulates our normal routine, ensuring that we respect our parents; give to the poor; pay our workers’ wages promptly; conduct our business honestly; love our neighbor; and act warmly toward the stranger. The sages asked why the Ten Commandments are followed in the Bible by a multitude of laws that appear to be so minor that it is hard to believe that God would concern Himself with them. Their answer: to admonish us to be careful about the “little” laws because these come from Sinai in the same way that the Ten Commandments came from Sinai. Great people are not necessarily people who do exceptional things but rather those who do ordinary things in an exceptional way.

Wilder’s play also highlights the bittersweet nature of life. The beautiful love of George and Emily comes to a tragic and premature end. In like manner, so many wonderful events in life such as a wedding, a Bar Mitzvah or a graduation are marred by the absence of a parent or grandparent. When dear ones are missing we have to recognize that this is the way life is. No one is exempt from these inexorable laws of human existence. It is written in the Book of Ecclesiastes that it is “better to attend a house of mourning than a banquet.” Initially, that is a highly unsettling comment; but, the writer is exhorting us to put life into the proper perspective so that we will understand that there is no joy without sorrow, no good without bad, no laughter without tears, no happiness without sadness. Wilder’s masterpiece also makes us cognizant of the fleeting nature of life. Human existence has been likened to “the grass that withers, the flower that fades, the fleeting shadow, the passing cloud, the wind that blows, the floating dust and the dream that vanishes.” Therefore, don’t procrastinate. You can’t be sure what tomorrow will bring. For some of us tomorrow will never come. The Stage Manager of Our Town declares: “You’ve got to love life to have life, and you’ve got to have life to love life.” In other words, more important than physical life is for the mind and heart to be truly and fully alive. You can be biologically healthy but spiritually dead. That is what the Midrash had in mind when it tells us that Nadav and Avihu, the two sons of Aaron, suffered a strange kind of death: “their souls were consumed; their bodies stayed intact.” The greatest blessing that can come to a human being is to live all the days of your life. When you take the time to keep your eyes open and notice what is happening all around you, as Our Town urges us to do, you discover that many of life’s experiences are not what we thought they were. What we believed was going to be a disaster turns out to be a victory; a failure becomes a success, and a sunset proves to be a sunrise. Life is a priceless privilege. Take pleasure in every moment. Never forget how gloriously special getting through the day can be!