I put my hand on David's leg. He gazed up at me with a kind of vague recognition, then looked away toward my great aunt. I decided to recite the Sh'ma, with him and for him. It is a statement of belief that is traditionally said on one's deathbed: Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad ("Hear O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one"). David again gazed at me. I'm not certain that he knew who I was, or that he really understood the words I uttered, but in his glance I felt that something was being exchanged between us.

Less than an hour later I received a telephone call from Charlotte at the place I was staying. She informed me that David had died. I told her how sorry I was, how great a man I thought David had been. Charlotte said she was convinced that on some level David grasped the words I had recited, that saying the Sh'ma had helped him to let go, to give up his long fight. To me, however, David was still a warrior. But what I witnessed was a different kind of heroism, the heroism of surrender. David hadn't given up. He had instead chosen to give over his soul to God-on his own terms, and in his own way. I am a firm theist, but I am not a big believer in supernatural phenomena. Yet I couldn't help feeling that, somehow, there was a deep, mysterious link between that prayer and my great uncle's relinquishment of his life. As Jung writes, "'Physical' is not the only criterion of truth: there are also psychic truths which can neither be explained, proved, nor contested in any physical way."

One of the things that most struck me about David's death was that it seemed more an affirmation than a negation of his life. It was not a suicide, a fatal assault on one's own being. David didn't take his life. He gave it. Suicide is a false kind of surrender, a rejection-not a reluctant relinquishment-of the gift of life that is grounded in despair or mental illness. Surrender at its deeper, more spiritual level involves no such negativity. It is a loving attempt to unite with God, and, when death is imminent, to do it in an absolute and purely non-material way. That final exertion requires a detachment from the world of the living.

There may be, as some have noted, a connection between an ecstatic experience of divine unity and a wish for death (to make the temporary merger permanent). This may be more active than passive: Kierkegaard thought that faith necessitated our making a leap into uncertainty and a willingness to adhere to an attitude of infinite resignation about our ability to fathom the radical mystery of God. Erich Fromm, as a psychoanalyst and non-mystic, calls this having the "x attitude." He argues that irrespective of whether there is a God, such an attitude can be of enormous benefit to us, for it produces "a letting go of one's 'ego,' one's greed, and with it, of one's fears; a giving up the wish to hold onto the 'ego' as if it were an indestructible, separate entity; a making oneself empty in order to be able to fill oneself with the world, to respond to it, to become one with it, to love it. To make oneself empty does not express passivity but openness."

Indeed, the theme of surrender is a dominant one in many of the world's religions. An individual who practices Islam (an Arabic word that means surrender or submission) is one who bends his will to God's. Similarly, a committed Jew puts on the "yoke" of God's sovereignty (ol ha-malkhut in Hebrew), while a devoted Christian imitates Jesus by placing the moral weight of the "cross" upon his or her own shoulders. Hindus speak of the erasure of the self; Buddhists of its unreality. In a Western religious context, the transcendence of walls or limitations is contingent on offering a part of ourselves to God-our egos, pride, and false feeling of independence. Spiritual surrender is not about giving up but giving over, about voluntarily relinquishing that which separates us from the divine. To learn from my Uncle David is to learn the Sufi wisdom-teaching that we must "die before we die" - to be fully and radically alive, we must be willing to let go.

In this way, we might understand the counterintuitive teaching that true freedom is not about having the ability to choose between multiple options, but about bringing one's will into alignment with the will of God. It is when we give over, when our goals and desires mesh with and become indistinguishable from those of the divine harmony, that life takes on a more liberating and fulfilling dimension. Letting go of our preoccupation with self can feel like experiencing a small death, and the desires for each may be intertwined, but what we gain in return is better termed a rebirth.

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Niles Elliot Goldstein is the founding rabbi of The New Shul in Greenwich Village and the author or editor of six books, most recently, Lost Souls: Finding Hope in the Heart of Darkness (Crown).

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