Q:
The Torah prohibits suicide. Why can’t we control our day of death?
A:
And the answer is the Torah teaches us that the body is only given to us on loan. The body is like a beautiful car, an expensive car, that’s rented out to you. Now let’s say you’re out on a jaunt with the car. You rented a car, you rented let’s say a Cadillac, and now you’re someplace in the country, and somebody says, “Let’s go for a trip, climbing in the mountains.”
So you say, “What should I do with the car?”
“Leave the car behind,” he says.
“But it might be stolen, it might be vandalized.”
“Oh, who cares?”
Who cares?! The car is not yours. It was only rented out to you; you are responsible to return it. It’s wickedness, if you’re going to allow a car like that to go lost.
We are riding around in this life in a borrowed car. It’s a beautiful car, very expensive. There’s nothing like a human body! But it’s not ours. And no matter how uncomfortable it is to maintain the car it’s our job to keep on watching it and preserving it until the time comes when the Owner Himself will come to reclaim His car.
And if anybody commits suicide, he is killing a human being who doesn’t belong to him. He’s a murderer! With one difference—he’s worse than somebody who murders somebody else. If you murder somebody else, it’s a great wickedness. But to murder yourself is a greater wickedness, because on yourself you should have more compassion.
But whatever it is, all these ideas are based on godlessness. When a person realizes that the Creator made a world and only the Creator gave us our bodies, then we realize nobody but Hakadosh Baruch Hu has anything to say about what to do with the human body.
June 23, 1977
