Published: Good Men Project (June 6, 2015)
Exactly 18 years ago on this day, I nearly died. A somewhat morbid reflection on everything that has happened since.
As I’ve discussed in an earlier article, I was the victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime when I was twelve, one that nearly cost me my life. When I realized that the 18th anniversary of that event would fall on the day of my prescheduled Saturday op-ed, I began to contemplate whether I should write anything about it.
Plenty of people have had brushes with death that could have snipped out their brief opportunity to spend time on this Earth – to make a difference and have some fun… It’s just that some of us never find out about it and others experience it in a very immediate way.
The number 18 has a certain amount of symbolic significance in Jewish spiritual tradition. Unlike English and other languages that combine the Latin alphabet and Arabic numeral system, Hebrew uses the same system of characters for letters and numbers. The letter Chet is also the number 8; the number 10 is also the letter Yud; and when you combine Chet and Yud, it spells Chai, which means “Living” or “Life.” Hence the famous Jewish toast: L’Chaim – i.e., to life.
That’s when I realized that the important story today isn’t how I nearly died, but what it means to me that I lived. After all, you could make a strong case that ever since June 6, 1997, I’ve been living on a very special timeline. I’m not going to say that it’s borrowed time, per se, since I can’t say whether I believe a higher power was responsible for my survival. Without question, though, my personal narrative has a fork that can be affixed at that date: Go down one prong and you get an eighteen year stretch from spanning from that event to this day; trace the other, and my story ends before I even became a teenager.
In this sense, I think the lesson that happens to have been reinforced for me today applies to everyone. Plenty of people have had brushes with death that could have snipped out their brief opportunity to spend time on this Earth – to make a difference and have some fun. In fact, though I can’t prove it, I suspect this is true for everybody. It’s just that some of us never find out about it and others experience it in a very immediate way.
One famous example of someone who falls into this category is Seth MacFarlane, the creator of hit TV shows like Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show. Although he was scheduled to take one of the flights that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, he was fortunate enough to miss that flight. Had he been on that plane, virtually everything for which he is known today would have never been produced, save for several of the earliest seasons of Family Guy.
Does this faze him? As he explained on an interview with TVShowsonDVD.com:
“The only reason it hasn’t really affected me as it maybe could have is I didn’t really know that I was in any danger until after it was over, so I never had that panic moment. After the fact, it was sobering, but people have a lot of close calls; you’re crossing the street and you almost get hit by a car… this one just happened to be related to something massive. I really can’t let it affect me because I’m a comedy writer. I have to put that in the back of my head.”
I think that sums up a very important and healthy way of looking at these experiences, although I don’t believe it’s specific only to comedy writers. You have to put these negative experiences in the back of your head, the knowledge of your own mortality in some deep state of denial, in order to be able to enjoy life to the best of your ability. To do otherwise is to waste your gift of life on worrying over losing it.
You have to put these negative experiences in the back of your head, the knowledge of your own mortality in some deep state of denial, in order to be able to enjoy life to the best of your ability. To do otherwise is to waste your gift of life on worrying over losing it.
At the same time, I am fortunate to have met so many people – been in love, developed friendships, engaged in creative partnerships with incredibly talented people, and spent time with my family – and know that I’ve had the privilege of positively influencing their lives, in whatever ways I can (sometimes inadvertently), over the past eighteen years. To appreciate this means, however, also means having to always make sure that those occasions when my effect has not been so positive aren’t for nothing. I be honest about things I’ve done wrong to others so I won’t do them again in the future.
On that note: L’Chaim!