In 83 active and productive years, my father, Dr. David Medved, taught precious life lessons to his friends, professional associates and, most of all, to his four grateful sons. On March 5th, my brother Harry and I traveled from the west coast of the United States to join my brother Jonathan in Jerusalem to celebrate my dad at a festive birthday party with more than a hundred friends and family members. Six days later, in the midst of the raucous and ecstatic Jewish festival of Purim, my dad died suddenly, peacefully and painlessly. Back in Israel for the week of formal mourning, we’ve been focusing on death lessons that shade and supplement everything we learned from my father in his life.

Put Work in Proper Perspective. My father loved his work – as a ground-breaking physicist and high tech entrepreneur – and he continued toiling away at more-than-full-time hours until the last four months of his life, when his advancing lymphoma finally slowed him down. He achieved great things in his career – designing missile guidance systems, teaching physics at some of the world’s finest universities, qualifying as a scientist astronaut for NASA, starting two successful fiber optics companies and writing a challenging, successful book at age 82 (Hidden Light: Science Secrets of the Bible). Nevertheless, the parade of literally hundreds of visitors we’ve received at the house of mourning (my brother’s home in Jerusalem, just blocks away from my dad’s last apartment) seldom mention his business or scientific accomplishments.

Instead, they focus on my father’s infectious sense of fun and adventure, his unquenchable energy, his love of hiking, camping, rock-climbing, water-skiing, snow skiing (despite serious injuries), motorcycle riding (more grievous injuries—in his seventies!), body surfing, classical music, movies (with comprehensive knowledge of cinematic classics), bawdy humor and impassioned political debate. Most of all, he cherished his family, devoting every weekend to ambitious (and often exhausting) outings in the great outdoors, wrestling with his sons on the living room floor (and threatening the survival of my mother’s furniture), and eventually bringing identically mischievous high-spirits to his nine grandchildren. The same way he conspired with his own kids against my mom’s efforts to maintain some sense of decorum and responsibility, so he enlisted our children in his never-ending crusade against any hint of stuffiness or predictability. Everyone who knew him remembers Dave Medved as a big kid, tender-hearted and ebullient and full of wonder at every new adventure or unexpected pleasure.

He brought that same sense of grateful astonishment to the serious religious explorations he began in his fifties, after two of his sons had already found their way to traditional Jewish observance. He viewed a fresh perspective on some obscure Biblical text with the same delight with which he discovered some new mountain trail, and his boyish enthusiasm lit up every Sabbath table or holiday gathering he ever attended. Ten days before he died he took great pride in reading aloud from the Torah scroll in synagogue to mark the seventieth anniversary of his Bar Mitzvah.

For his four sons (all of whom to some extent feel occasionally consumed by work) this realization should convey the same life-affirming message as the Sabbath itself: reminding us to put our jobs, no matter how exciting and satisfying, in proper perspective. The memories of my father make the case beyond contradiction that a life that’s truly well-lived must honor the distinction between the urgent (often work-related) and the important (usually personal connections outside of work). It’s an old lesson, but one powerfully re-conveyed by the reactions to his death.

Miracles Happen. My father began his story as a miracle child – born in America (the ultimate “land of new life”) after his 48-year-old mother arrived from Ukraine and reunited with her 50-year-old husband following a ten year separation (and the death of six of their children during the nightmare years of World War I and the Russian Revolution). My grandmother assumed she was much too old to start over with a new U.S.-born child, but then her name was Sarah and her precocious baby seemed from the beginning destined for magical outcomes. While his immigrant father made scant economic progress in his work as a barrel-maker, my dad won prizes and scholarships and went on (after Navy service) to an Ivy League education (at the University of Pennsylvania) and three graduate degrees. Continued...