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The Easter Egg

The secret of death is wrapped in a brightly covered Easter egg. To the Jewish People the egg is a symbol of death used in the Seder of Passover as a remembrance to the death and exile experienced over these last two thousand years. Christian theology is predicated around the idea of overcoming death and Easter is the time of this triumph with their story of resurrection from the dead. A closer examination of the Easter egg reveals layers of philosophical debate about death.  

To the Jewish People eggs are a sign of death because the egg has no "mouth"—no way to speak; before the dead there is nothing to say, so says the Talmud-Book of Law that also states that death is "good." When the Rabbis were asked: where death was created in the story of creation? The Rabbis responded, in the end of the Sixth Day of Creation God says, instead of C'Tov/It is Good, rather, Tov Moad/Very Good—the word Moad/Very was the creation of death.


Death makes things that are good to be very good by means of setting an arbitrary and hidden time to conclude making us work harder each day to achieve the maximum from life; without death life would be pointlessly dull—but though death is good it is not beautiful. Death is full of trauma and pain; some deaths are violent and others are slow and lingering like a disease—but, nothing triumphs over death.

The coming into the world through birth and leaving through death are both filled with anxiety and travail, yet between birth and death is but half the cycle of life; when we leave this physical world we are born into another world of spirit—it is where the soul derives. Being born into one world means dying in another world and while death is the inevitable end of life it is also the transition to another reality.

The Torah is adamant that this is the lowest world and there is no Hell; the pain of the afterlife is one of embarrassment for the way we used our time and the impurity of actions that we committed. One may live a short time in this world and long time in the next, but if we do not finish our work in this world or if, God forbid, suicide then we return after only one year.
 
 Death is good and necessary but death is not beautiful. By painting the egg bright colors presuming triumph over death through resurrection is a complete misunderstanding of what is promised in the future. The future is only a few hundred years away when the buried bones of human remains will grow from the soil bodies that will provide habitation for the soul for a thousand years. Death will no longer be required and will die.

Just as the soul leaves the body so will the human being as one spirit entity abandon this planet and find life elsewhere in a different form. Death is to be feared and respected—not painted bright colors as though glorifying dying by escaping death.