The Theology of Ben Sasse

I do not know him. We happen to share Nebraska as home, and I have watched his public career from closer than many Americans do, but I cannot claim friendship or even acquaintance. What I can say is that over these past months, listening to him speak about pancreatic cancer, his family, his regrets, and his God, I have found myself moved by him. Not politically. Humanly. And that distinction is where I want to begin, because we have become extraordinarily bad at making it. We want to know how someone votes before deciding whether he deserves our attention. We determine which tribe claims a man and then work backward toward a judgment about his whole character. Judaism should demand more of us than that. A person is not a platform. A soul is not a voting record. And death has a way of making the categories by which we divide one another look very small.

Since announcing that he has metastatic, stage four pancreatic cancer, Sasse has spent much of the time he has left talking publicly, and the subjects have changed. He is not talking about legislation or elections. He is talking about God, his wife, his children, work, regret, and what he calls the strange clarity of no longer being permitted to pretend that time is unlimited. He announced the diagnosis himself, writing plainly that he had been diagnosed with metastasized, stage four pancreatic cancer and was going to die. He has since given a series of interviews to Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, to Ross Douthat for the New York Times, and to Christianity Today that have moved a great many people, Douthat included, to tears.

What he says in those interviews is not vague spiritual comfort. It is doctrine, and I want to take him seriously as a theologian because he is one, whether he intends to or not. Pelley named the tradition directly on air: Sasse is devoted to Reformed Christianity, to Calvinism. And Sasse has been explicit about what that tradition asks him to believe about himself while facing judgment. He has said that when you actually try to do the accounting of a life, the foolishness of your own works becomes obvious, and that Christ fulfilled the whole of the law, yet he himself fulfilled none of it. His hope, he has said more than once, rests entirely outside himself: to live is Christ, and to die is gain. And in an interview about whether he is angry at God, he offered something that stopped me cold. He described his suffering not as punishment but as a winnowing, a process he called sanctifying rather than salvific, clearing out what he named the dross he is filled with. He has said, of the very disease killing him, that he hates it and is grateful for it at once, that it functions as a kind of grace because it forces him to stop lying to himself, the lie being that he is the center of everything, that he has forever, that he can work hard enough to atone for his own brokenness. I can’t, he says. And he means it as gospel.

A rabbi cannot let that sentence pass without comment, because Yom Kippur exists to say something close to the opposite. Our entire liturgical architecture for the Days of Awe assumes that teshuvah, turning, returning, repair, is not a fantasy to be renounced but a real capacity built into the human being, because we are not, in Jewish anthropology, vessels of total depravity waiting for an external righteousness to be credited to our account. We are b’tzelem Elokim, made, however cracked the vessel, in the image of God, and the covenant assumes that image gives us actual moral traction. Vidui, the deathbed confession, is not offered to a God who needs convincing of our worthlessness. It is offered by a person who believes his own words can still do something, right up to his final breath. Un’taneh Tokef does not conclude that there is nothing we can do. It concludes that teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah, turning, prayer, and righteous giving, temper the harshness of the decree, not because we have fulfilled the law perfectly, but because God built repair into the architecture of a broken world and gave us the tools to do it ourselves.

So I cannot follow Sasse to the foot of the cross. But the real encounter with his testimony happens one level below that disagreement, in the language he reaches for almost involuntarily to describe what the disease is doing to him. He said he is filled with dross, and that what is happening to him is a winnowing. That is not incidental Christian vocabulary. That is Malachi, who will refine us like silver and gold. That is Isaiah, who will smelt away our dross as with lye. That is Zechariah’s third who goes through the fire and comes out tested. A man raised Lutheran and now Reformed, citing no rabbi and quoting no sefer, reached instinctively for the refiner’s furnace of the Hebrew prophets to describe what terminal illness was doing to his soul. He did not choose that image. It chose him because it may be one of the only images human language has for suffering; a person refuses to be meaningless.

Our own tradition has argued about this exact claim for two thousand years, and I think we owe Sasse the honesty of admitting we have never resolved it. In the Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan visits his sick colleague and asks him whether his afflictions are dear to him, whether he welcomes them as a gift, the way Sasse welcomes his cancer. The sick man answers plainly: I want neither them nor their reward. And Rabbi Yochanan reaches out his hand and raises him up. That story exists precisely because Judaism will not let the idea of afflictions as love become the official position we hand to someone else. We permit it as a person’s private theology of his own suffering. We forbid it as counsel to give a person still in the middle of theirs. Sasse is doing, publicly and articulately, exactly what the sick man in that story was entitled to do privately, naming his own affliction as a gift, for himself, in his own voice. I would not say it to a congregant in a hospital bed. I am not certain I would say it of myself. But he has earned the right to say it of his own dying, and I am not going to take that from him by mocking the theology that produced it.

What I think belongs to us, distinctly, is what the Psalmist already understood long before any of this. Limnot yameinu ken hoda, v’navi l’vav chochmah. Teach us to number our days, that we may attain a heart of wisdom. I have taught that verse countless times, and I hear it differently when I hear it from a man who has been forced to number his days in a very literal way. Notice what the verse does not ask. It does not ask God for more days. It does not even ask to be told how many remain. It asks only for the wisdom to recognize that the number is finite. There will be a last Shabbat dinner. A last seder. A last ordinary Tuesday when nothing important seems to happen. We will almost certainly not recognize those moments as they arrive, which is the mystery and the cruelty of ordinary life: we live surrounded by things whose value we understand only once they can no longer be repeated. The Psalm insists that this awareness is meant to produce a heart of wisdom, not terror.

Rabbi Eliezer taught his students to repent one day before their death. When they asked, reasonably, how a person could possibly know which day that is, he told them that was the entire point. Repent today, because perhaps tomorrow is the day. Judaism refuses to let a terminal diagnosis become the beginning of spiritual seriousness. We are meant to live with that seriousness before any doctor enters any room. Most of us do not. That is why Sasse’s reflections are so arresting. He has been given something none of us wants and, at the same time, something most of us badly need, which is clarity. Life sorts itself once a person believes his time is limited. The urgent and the important turn out not to have been the same thing after all. The email that felt as though it could not wait, waits. The meeting that seemed indispensable turns out to be dispensable. And dinner with the people we love reveals itself as the sacred act it always was.

Even Moses, who alone in our tradition seems to have known his own date with certainty, standing at the edge of the plains of Moab and saying, ben me’ah v’esrim shanah anochi hayom, I am a hundred and twenty years old today, still could not simply accept it. The midrash counts five hundred and fifteen prayers, Moses bargaining for more time, more land, more life, a man who knew the exact day of his death and still could not make peace with it on the first try. Sasse does not have that certainty. None of us do. Moses also died with the work unfinished. Joshua would lead. Israel would cross the Jordan. The people would enter the land, and Moses would not. Perhaps that is one of Torah’s most important teachings about mortality: a meaningful life is not one in which everything gets finished. There will always be another book, another conversation, another institution that could use our help. The real question is what we have learned was truly ours to do, what could be entrusted to someone else, and what never belonged to us in the first place.

I keep thinking about the image Sasse offers of his old hotel key cards, thousands of them, thrown into a box after years of professional travel. At one time, those keys represented productivity, access, a life in motion. Now they represent something else: nights away from home, meals he did not eat with his wife, dinners he missed with his children. A box full of achievement became, without warning, a box full of absence. That transformation is devastating, and it is an extraordinarily Jewish one. We worry so much about what we will leave our children that we forget one of the most important things we can give them is our presence. The Torah commands v’shinantam l’vanecha, teach these words diligently to your children, and specifies exactly when that teaching happens: b’shivtecha b’veitecha, when you sit in your house. Judaism locates holiness not only at Sinai, not only in the sanctuary, but at the table, in repetition, in simply showing up. One of the great spiritual dangers of meaningful work is that we can become so busy building something for our children that we forget to sit with them. Sasse is not saying his public service was meaningless, and neither would I say that of my own vocation. The question is one of proportion: what deserves the first claim on time we do not actually control.

Judaism answers that question every Friday evening. For six days, we build, create, solve, travel, worry, and accomplish. Then the sun sets, and we stop. The institution survives without us. The unanswered message remains unanswered. We come home, light candles, sit at the table, and look at the people who are there. Shabbat is not simply Judaism’s answer to exhaustion. It is Judaism’s weekly answer to mortality, a rehearsal, once every seven days, of the deepest truth a person will someday have to accept permanently: the world belongs to God, not to us.

So what is there for us, as Jews, to say to a man whose theology I cannot share and whose politics I spent years opposing, beyond the easy comfort of a well wish? I think it is this. We can let him teach us something true about being human before we are forced to learn it the way he has been forced to learn it. He can remind us that accomplishment and meaning are not identical, that the idols worth fearing are often the respectable ones, that unfinished work is not evidence of a failed life, and that the knowledge of death, however it reaches a person, can become a teacher of life. As Elul approaches and we begin our own accounting, the question his dying puts to me is not whether his Christology is correct. It is whether I am doing my own cheshbon hanefesh, my own reckoning of the soul, with anything like the honesty he has managed in public, while I still have the luxury of not knowing the day.