A Death Museum

In Brooklyn, the new Morbid Anatomy Museum is certainly morbid but also revealing. Its culturally Jewish but not religious owner says:

“A lot of Americans don’t want to feel deep, painful feelings,” said [Joanna] Ebenstein. “The idea of death is that the world as we know it could end at any moment. Jews aren’t able to keep that distant from their minds because the world did end” — with the Holocaust. “This idea that the sun will rise and everything will be okay, this American denial of death, is a luxury, and Jews have never had that luxury,” she said.

It isn’t exactly a luxury. You’re going to die and it’s best for you and those you love that you think deeply about what that means. What is the luxury for believing Christians (as it is for observant Jews) is that we can think about death with hope. It’s a bad thing but its badness is not the final thing.