Hi friends and welcome to the 1840 podcast where each month we explore different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas.

I'm your host, David Bischofkin, and this month

we're exploring loss. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big, juicy, Jewish

ideas. So be sure to check out 1840.org, that's 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y.org, where we have a new website that you can check out that

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emails.

We have spoken a lot about the revolutions that took place as a part of modernity, which is

why we are called 1840 after the calendaric year.

That's normally associated with the advent of the industrial revolution when society began

to change.

There is something else that happened during this period, and that is the emergence of like a new articulation

of what it means and what it feels like to be alive.

As the Enlightenment swept through Europe and the last vestiges of religious authority

within government began to decay and slowly disappear. We were kind of left in a

purely materialistic world. Scientists were now the people who were given and were seen as having

the most authority for how the world works. Religion was seen, broadly speaking, as a relic of the past, and people were left to find

a new pathway, a new approach to how to find meaning in their lives. And it was during this period

where a famous philosopher that I'm sure many of our listeners have heard of named Saurin Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard was a Danish theologian and philosopher that had a big influence on really a lot of

religious thinking because of the way he articulated this very struggle.

He began publishing in the 1840s,

and the reason why I've been thinking about him

...