David Wolpe

Rabbi, author, and educator David Wolpe is the Max Webb Emeritus Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and a Scholar-in-Residence for the Maimonides Fund. He has taught at institutions including Harvard, UCLA, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and has written extensively on faith, Judaism, loss, and mortality.

Ivan Ilyich’s Death Exposes the Cost of Living by Convention

Ivan Ilyich’s terror is not simply that he is dying, but that the respectable life he has built may have been wasted. Rabbi and author David Wolpe and EconTalk’s Russ Roberts argue that Tolstoy’s story shows how living by social convention can keep a person from asking what makes a life good. Drawing on Wolpe’s serious illnesses and his experience visiting people at the bedside, they consider how facing death can expose that failure—and why honest presence and human care matter at the end.

Hoover InstitutionOct 19, 202617 min read