When the Work Comes Home: Planning for Death Belongs in Every Jewish Institution

While working at a JCC some years ago, I noticed a pattern: families ended up in crisis because they hadn’t planned for the realities of mortality. They needed help to weather the crises… the death of the primary wage earner, the lack of funds to put up a proper headstone. Technically, these were problems that could be solved by raising charitable dollars. But it was clear to me that we were dealing with a potential long-term problem if we just gave out money to solve such crises. Why were people ending up in crisis around end of life, and how might we help them avoid such crises in the future?

Jewish wisdom reminds us of the reality that death will come for us all, whether in old age, or otherwise. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. In Psalm 90, we read, “The span of our life is seventy years, or, given the strength, eighty years… they pass by speedily, and we fly away (die.)”

In Jewish community work, we hear of services provided for all –  “ from cradle to grave.” It is true that synagogues, JCCs, Jewish human service agencies, and the like offer programs from early childhood through older adulthood. But where do end-of-life care and conversations fit into Jewish community life? Spoiler: everywhere. 

Looking around at families facing end of life, it was clear that those who talked about and planned for the realities of mortality were better off when the time came. But why were some families talking about and planning for death, while others weren’t? Centuries of Jewish wisdom can support this work. But too often, we don’t have role models for talking about death in our everyday lives, and we’ve lost the experience of being close to death with the way we live now. We may live at a geographic or emotional remove from our families of origin, and are beholden to broken healthcare systems that don’t support dying at home. 

The problem of not talking about and planning for death isn’t limited to people who don’t know the realities of what old age can look like. In October 2026 at the Shomer Collective annual Convening, Dr. Jessica Zitter, a well-known author, filmmaker, critical care and palliative care physician, was the keynote speaker. Dr. Zitter’s talk, “When the Work Comes Home,” shared the realities she faces in trying to help her own parents talk about and plan for the end of their lives. It built on her recent article in the New York Times, “My Parents Are Old. They Need to Plan for It” in which she expresses frustration at how difficult it is to get her own parents, in their mid- and late-80s, to talk about and plan for the realities they may face in the years ahead. “What’s the solution?” I asked. “Nagging,” she replied. Laughs ensued. But the message was not lost on the audience, a group of more than 600 professionals and lay leaders who work at the intersection of Jewish life and end of life. Nagging, or nudging, as I tried to soften it, is really about having the conversation repeatedly. Advance care planning is not “one and done.” Who we are today is different from who we may be tomorrow, and is almost certainly different from who we were the last time we had the conversation about what matters most to us as we age. 

Talking about death can remind us of the superstitions we may have learned along the way… like the angel of death might hear us. Talking about death can put us in touch with the hard feelings about the fact that we, and the people we love, are not going to live forever. The resistance is real. But the benefit of talking about death, repeatedly, can be great. 

While we as individuals and professionals can continue to nag our own families to have these important conversations, as Dr. Zitter suggested, there is more we can do as a Jewish community to foster the normalization of these conversations. Our rabbis can role model by sharing their own experience from the pulpit, our lay leaders can encourage showing up for shiva, our day schools and educators can hold programs for parents about how to talk to kids about death, our JCCs and Jewish Family Service agencies, and all of our institutions can and should be spaces for talking about life in the face of death. This can look like ongoing Jewish learning programs about end of life, it can include Jewishly-inflected advance care planning, legacy planning, ethical wills workshops, and more. We can and should be connected to our local Jewish funeral homes, cemeteries, senior residences, and hospices before we ‘need’ them. 

At Shomer Collective, where I am Executive Director, we are providing the training and resources to have these conversations everywhere and anywhere. Empowering the professionals and lay leaders of our communities, hundreds of whom came together at the Convening to learn and be inspired to bring this to their community, is how we create change. It is how we have more families avoiding the crises around end of life. One conversation at a time.