Immortality Is a Stupid Goal

Originally published on Gimme Some Torah by Rabbi Eli Garfinkel on October 9, 2026.

Liquid nitrogen tanks for the preservation of human bodies at Kriorus in Russia. (photo link)

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Shanah tovah, and g’mar Hatimah tovah, may we all be sealed for a joyful year.

A few months ago, there was a news story that made a bit of a splash in the 24 hour news cycle, but then it disappeared. China’s president, Xi Jinping, was having a chat with Russian president Vladimir Putin through their respective translators.

Someone didn’t realize that their microphones were still on, so we got to hear the two dictators having a pretty interesting conversation about the possibility of living much, much longer than is currently possible.

President Xi started off the conversation by saying, “In the past, it was rare for people to live past 70. These days, people say that at 70 you’re still a child.”

Putin answered, “As biotechnology develops, organs can be transplanted repeatedly. People could grow younger and younger, perhaps even become immortal.”

Xi then said, “Some predict that, in this century, people may live to 150.” Then their microphones were turned off.

The media quickly forgot about this hot-mike incident, but I didn’t. If you think about it, their dreams of living until 150 or even becoming immortal are totally on brand for two authoritarians.

Authoritarian leaders like Xi and Putin fancy themselves as the most powerful people in the world. It makes sense that they would want to take the next step and conquer death itself. I mean, why stop with Ukraine and Taiwan when you can have dominion over the one thing that we all have in common, which is our mortality?

They are hardly the only ones to think this way. In fact, those two buddies were just spitballing and having a chat. There are billionaire tech bros who are actually putting a gobsmacking amount of money into a war against death.

Seeing that we are about to recite Yizkor, when we remember the dead, it’s an appropriate time to talk about what a terrible idea this race for immortality is. Brains and money do not add up to wisdom, and the ideas under discussion are deeply unwise.

Take, for instance, Bryan Johnson. You’ve probably never heard of him, but you’ve certainly heard of his brainchild, a little payment program called Venmo.

Mr. Johnson says that he will make humans immortal by 2039, and that he just has to work out some bugs with his therapies that are accidentally causing cancer.

He follows an insane daily routine. If this is what it takes to be immortal, please, do not sign me up. He wakes up at 4:30 am each day and starts working out in a series of 35 exercises.

Every day, he takes 61 pills and eats three meals within 5 hours. He eats his last meal of the day at 11:00 am, and his bedtime is 8:30 pm. His diet consists of vegetables and nut pudding. He eats 70 pounds of vegetables per month. He took plasma from his 17 year old son, but later admitted it did nothing for him.

Mr. Johnson has designed an algorithm that makes all of his choices for him. He says, “My brain no longer decides anything. It observes.” Oh, and by the way, he was recently diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, which means his body is giving him abdominal pain. Could it possibly be that eating all those vegetables is not good for you and that he should try an occasional donut?

If I may be so bold, what Bryan Johnson is doing is not living. Life has to be about more than living longer. What about helping other people? He says that he will help other people by making them immortal, but what about all the poor people who can’t afford his crazy lifestyle? Hobbies? I don’t think this man has hobbies, and I’m sorry, making money is not a hobby.

And then there’s Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. He plans for his brain to be perfectly preserved somehow and then, when the technology exists, he will have a digital copy of his brain uploaded to the cloud. My question is what if everyone forgets where they put his password?

Another example from this Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of Insanity is Peter Thiel. Yes, that Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal. His plan for immortality is to be cryogenically frozen in liquid nitrogen. When science has advanced to the point that whatever killed him can be cured, they’ll defrost him, restart his heart, and give him a new life.

This idea makes me shiver, and not just because it’s so cold. This is an attempt to press pause on a machine that has no pause button, and that machine is the universe. And let’s say that they unfreeze him in 200 years. He will awaken and instantly become the most out-of-touch person on the planet. The world will have passed him by.

There is a story in the Talmud (B. Taanit 23a) that illustrates this very point. You’ve certainly heard it if you’ve ever been to a Jewish National Fund event:

There was a miracle worker named Honi Hameagel, Honi the Circle Drawer. He once saw a man planting a carob tree and asked him, why do you plant a tree that won’t bear fruit for 70 years, you won’t be around to eat it.

The man said, “People planted carob trees for my generation, so I’m planting this one for my children and grandchildren.” Then Honi sits down in a rock alcove to eat a meal. Fatigued and very full, he falls into a deep sleep and nobody sees him because he’s hidden away in this rocky crag.

He wakes up 70 years later, and he sees a man gathering fruit from the carob tree that he saw planted. Honi asks the man if he is the one who planted the tree, and the man says, “No, that was my grandfather.”

Realizing that he’s been asleep for 70 years, he goes looking for his son, but his son already died. His grandchildren were running the Talmudic academy, but they had never met him. He explained who he was, but nobody believed him. Honi realized then that he was totally alone in the world. It’s at that point that Honi prayed for mercy and died. His last words were, “Give me either friendship or death,” או חברותא או מיתותא

The moral of the story is that we’re given a certain amount of time to do good things in this world, and there are no extensions beyond responsible living. When your time’s up, your time’s up.

There are many reasons why the search for it is a wrong-headed mistake. There are the practical reasons, such as overpopulation, or the need for dystopian laws that would ban bringing children into the world.

But the more basic issue is that death is what makes our lives meaningful. Nobody cares about something that is abundant. We have more corn than we know what to do with, and that’s why the Wall Street price for a bushel, about ten pounds of cobless kernels, is just five bucks.

If we had as much time as wanted, who would do anything? If there’s always a tomorrow, then there’s never a today. Urgency is what has driven our species for the past 300,000 years. Necessity is the mother of invention.

I learned another reason to oppose the effort to live forever from none other than Elon Musk. Unlike his fellow tech bros, Elon is highly skeptical of this effort. I know that he doesn’t exactly have a perfect record on good ideas, but he happens to be right on this one.

He says that we need death in order for new ideas to take shape. Each generation comes with its baggage and its set of preconceived ideas and truths. If there is no changing of the guard, then we would find ourselves stuck in a stagnant society.

Moreover, he points out, it’s good when really bad people die. In a world where the greatest scientists can live forever, the cruelest, most despotic tyrants can also look forward to never dying. Death is what releases the world from our terrible ideas.

The most serious reason why we must not chase after physical immortality is that living forever would destroy God’s special gift of memory. Memory is a precious thing that God gives us. Sometimes, our memories comfort us. Sometimes, they cause us pain. But either way, we learn from our memories of those who have passed on.

If we live forever, there is nobody to remember. There would be no past tense, no chance to mourn or reflect on what a loved on did for us.

Memory allows us not only to connect with departed loved ones but to connect with humanity itself. These immortality chasers seem to be all very lonely men who are disconnected from what it means to be a human being. And what is that meaning? We can learn it from a story told by Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, one of the most beloved of all the Hasidic rebbeim.

He told a story about a rabbi who wanted to live forever. A pious Hasidic man was granted a rare and extraordinary reward by Heaven: he was told that whatever he asked for would be fulfilled. Without hesitation, the man requested physical immortality. He wanted to live forever so that he could study Torah and perform God’s commandments without the interruption of death. His request was granted, and the Angel of Death was forbidden from ever approaching him.

Centuries passed. The man watched his children, grandchildren, and entire generations of his family age and pass away. Entire empires crumbled, and the world changed around him. Because he could not die, he spent all his days sitting in the synagogue, deeply immersed in prayer and study.

Eventually, he realized a painful truth. While he was accumulating thousands of years of Torah study, he had become completely detached from the human experience. He felt no urgency, because he had infinite time. He felt no deep joy, because nothing was rare or fleeting. He was entirely alone.

He didn’t even feel a need for Shabbos. The Holy Shabbos is meant as a sacred pause in the lives of those who have limited time. It is meant to be a taste of the world to come. But for those who will never taste of it, it loses its meaning.

One day, he looked out the window of the study hall and saw a poor, ragged traveler collapse in the mud from hunger and exhaustion. No one was around to help the traveler. The immortal man looked at the scene, and for the first time in centuries, something stirred in his heart. He realized that if he did not go out to save this man’s life, the traveler would die.

The immortal man rushed outside, pulled the traveler from the mud, took him to his home, fed him, and nursed him back to health. As he watched the traveler revive and smile, the immortal man felt an overwhelming, ecstatic rush of holiness—a closeness to God that he hadn’t felt in hundreds of years of endless prayer.

In that moment, the man wept and lifted his eyes to Heaven. He prayed and asked God to revoke his immortality. The Angel of Death returned, and the man passed away with absolute peace, understanding that true eternity is achieved not by escaping death, but by infusing our limited time with acts of kindness.

It was the power of the man’s memories that saved the traveler. He was able to reconnect with a single memory that had survived his immortality.

Let us now recite the Yizkor out of gratitude that we have been given the gift of memory. In that sense, we all receive immortality so long as there are people to remember us.

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